I walk slowly through a dream called Vilnius, while the weird sensation that all of this has already been pierces my brain. Once I went down the street in exactly the same way, in exactly the same way I considered what the dream — the yellowish leaves, blown about by the wind, and the old house in the depths of a garden — could mean. . The exact same pair of dazed pigeons have already perched by the announcement post. Lolita has already waited for me in the corridor, rocking her waist back and forth in exactly the same way. . Everything has already been, everything, everything, has already been. I know it’s just déjà vu, but all the same a sense of fear stabs right through me. In exactly the same way Stefa’s hips sway before my eyes, the hips of all the women in the world, Virgilishly leading me ever closer to the secret. . The exact same shabby dog with a huge head and still larger sexual organs and a long body like a rat’s sniffs the ground outside the window. . The coffee break table seems just as unreal as it has seemed many times before.
Why do I come here? Why do I waste the time — I should devote every instant left to me to a single purpose. I don’t understand what my employees are doing here, why they gathered here (or maybe—who gathered them here?) Sometimes it seems they all have a secret purpose here — just as I do. The library is essential to my clandestine investigations. But what do the others find here? Don’t tell me things are as ordinary as they seem at first glance? The majority found a place where it’s possible to do nothing and get some kind of pay. The authorities needed to shove Martynas off into a corner, to dupe him with an abundance of books, to isolate him from the scholarly centers. The communist Elena was introduced to look after everyone. And so on. (It’s not clear to me why Lolita ended up here.) Which of these women are nothing more than silent victims, and which are Their secret agents? Stefa is the only one I don’t suspect — I have carried out certain experiments with her. Which one? Maybe Gražina, the plump petite with the greasy glance? Or Marija, the mustachioed green finch with the burned-out bass? Or Laima — the exhausted fish, constantly blurting out some sort of nonsense? Or maybe the newcomer Beta, blinking goggle-eyed? (Can short hair have some essential meaning here?) They could have picked any one of them, or all of them together. All of them in front of my eyes, all of them sitting at the table, only Lolita stands by the window and follows Carp with her eyes: he’s hobbling by the construction site again. It’s Saint Carp, my talisman, a person who even in the face of death wasn’t afraid to call a tyrant a tyrant and a slave a slave. (Who knows which is more dangerous — probably calling a slave a slave to his face.) Lolita follows him with her eyes and smiles: I’ve told her about Carp. My Lolita. My, my Lolita. But can anything in the world really be mine anymore? Have I ever really had my own woman?
Like it or not, I think about my wife. After all, I had a wife — a loved one, the only one, the true one. I had. . I should call her my savior and the one who opened my eyes (unfortunately, Irena opened my eyes not just to happiness, but to horror too). She showed up when my entire life was distorted into a hideous hallucination. That was the Narutis period; drunkenness, a premonition of insanity and a very real, boundless pain jumbled together in it. I had just been released from the camp. I have no idea where I lived; I have no idea how I scraped together money. I remember, as if though a haze, loading freight cars at night and hunkering down during the day in ground-floor rooms with broken-out windows and doors that wouldn’t close, getting drunk with seedy companions. To me, the morning didn’t differ from the night, and the sun never rose at all; in my Vilnius there was nothing but a lingering, dismal haze. I was drunk all the time. I don’t know how long that lasted, but I do not regret those days, months, years. I was obliged to live through all of that; my path led through the Narutis, through syphilitic dumps, through the very bottom of Vilnius. Every true search is hellish; great discoveries are made on the edge of insanity. I don’t at all regret ending up in the gutter, the same way I don’t regret landing in camp. I had to go through all of the circles of hell, so that I would, in the end, grasp what matters most, so that I would discover Their footprints. My circles of hell were marked by barbed wire, and then by alcohol. Good Lord, the amount I drank! Only my father’s iron genes saved me — according to all the laws of nature I should have gone insane or turned into a wreck. I searched for truth, delving into the very cheapest alcohol. I searched for an answer (already then I searched for an answer) by destroying myself. There’s probably no other way. A person can escape his limits and exceed himself only by sacrificing a part of himself. But I sacrificed too much. Many times I thought I surely won’t find any secret here, between the scattered, reeking clothes, puddles of vomit, and cockroaches crawling up the walls. I realized what direction I was heading in, but I didn’t have the strength to stop. Returning to Vilnius after nine years, ostensibly released to freedom, I couldn’t live just any old way: I no longer knew how to live. I had never been destined to experience freedom. I was the slave of a single, sole idea, and the worst of it was — for a long, long time I didn’t know what idea. I understood just one thing: everyone lives in error, the world doesn’t behave the way it should; once upon a time it erred, and it can’t manage to fix its great mistake. Why did I, even though I had been exonerated, have to wander the garbage dumps like a stray dog, while the person (or dragon?) whom I was once supposed to hunt relished life in the radiance of absolute power? At that time I thought of nothing but him. Now I think about him too.