Lolita reads my mind: she carefully covers her legs, sinks into a shadow. Her profile is a bit predatory, it’s one that could be a man’s too. Maybe I should dress her in men’s clothes for conversations? No, they would make it even more obvious that she is a woman, a woman of women.
“Talk about something. That’s the only way to drive the ghosts away. Tell me about your mother. You promised.”
It’s true, I promised; I actually thought up a bargain. An eye for an eye, a death for a death. A story for a story.
“And you tell me about your husband. Even though you didn’t promise.”
“I didn’t think you’d be interested,” she says, and falls silent for a long, long time.
I see my mother standing in the intersection of the hallways, not knowing which way to turn. What can I say about her? Would she herself let me? I ask, even though I know it’s all the same to her. Everything’s all the same to her. She would listen to a story about herself as if it were the tale of some stranger. And immediately forget it all.
“She was rich. She married against her family’s will. It’s understandable — there a fattened burgher’s family, and here — a crazed genius with flashing eyes. My mother was very pretty. . or maybe not. . I don’t even know. It probably doesn’t matter. . She relied on father absolutely, that’s what was the worst. No friends, no gatherings, no charity work. Her husband was the entire world to her; she existed only when he was next to her, afterwards she would seem to disappear, and all that was left was waiting until he would show up again. . That’s worse than death. To blindly rely on someone — that’s worse than a slow, painful death. . Without father she lived as if she were in a dream, she would drift up and down the corridors, she didn’t even talk. .”
Mother comes into the room; it seems she badly wants to say something — it always seems she wants to say something important. But she’ll be quiet, she’ll just stretch her slender arms out to me, and drops of blood will drip from her fingertips. She’s killed something again, she’s always killing something; you’d think she wanted to make the world smaller so it wouldn’t be so complicated.
“You rely on someone. .” I say quietly, quietly. “And then that someone spits in your face. . I don’t know why father turned away from her. They didn’t interact at all; they lived in different ends of the house so they wouldn’t, God forbid, meet. . She was suddenly left alone, facing the world she had never tried to understand. Her world was her parents’ family, then her husband and his affairs. . She didn’t know how to live, understand, she didn’t have anything of her own: no goals, no aspirations, no worries. Can you imagine what it means for a forty-year-old woman to begin to get to know the world — like a child, like a naïve teenager?. . And she was utterly determined to understand the world — by herself, independently. . I don’t know how to explain it. . Well — we all know how our day will begin tomorrow, what we will need to do, what we want. . She didn’t know anything.”
“She didn’t adapt?” Lolita asks carefully.
“Not that, no, not that, Lola! She took on the world like. . like a game. . like a miracle. . I don’t know. . She didn’t try to adapt to it, she just as calmly as you please created her own universe with inexplicable, spontaneous laws. Whatever came into her head, that was a law of the universe. She was up to her ears in money; she had the complete freedom that all artists and thinkers in general can only dream about. It was just that she didn’t know what to do with that freedom. She spat on society, family, children, making money, and all rules, and decided to try some kind of experiment. No one could predict what she would think up next. The worst of it was that she didn’t know herself. She could sleep days and stay awake nights. Week after week, from morning till night, cook up fancy meals, and then dump everything out. I mean dump it out, understand — not parcel it out to some villager, or to us, or to some guest, but dump it out. . You’d think she was trying to find the slightest minutiae that could concern her. But to her it was all absolutely the same. Her husband had turned away. . I was of no concern. . no activity concerned her. . religion didn’t attract her. . nor any amusements, either. . And yet she still tried to live. .”
“You sound like you hated her guts,” Lolita says carefully.
“Excuse me,” I try to control my voice, “you’re correct. It’s not right to condemn a person who doesn’t have the strength to pull himself together, to oppose Them. You’d have to condemn all of humanity. Everyone is given the opportunity. . Oh, we’re short of money, we’re short of freedom! It’s all lies!. . If you think it’s the surroundings or other people that are to blame — you’re fooling yourself. Only you are to blame. Only you. You’re amazed at other people’s helplessness, weakness, stupidity? Don’t fool yourself — you’re that way yourself! You’re oppressed by the injustice of the world? Look inside yourself more carefully! The only one you have a right to condemn is yourself!”
“I always dreamed of meeting you,” says Lolita, “you’re a terrible person. Perhaps the worst I’ve ever seen.”
She looks at me with huge brown eyes (it seems I unintentionally said They: I’m losing my guard entirely), but Vilnius looks at me even more reproachfully. After all, by condemning others, I condemn Vilnius too. For what? Better remember one of my prayers. Lord, grant me patience and forgiveness, in order that I might understand everyone and forgive everyone. Do not let me forget they suffer too. Always remind me of my purpose, a thousand times bigger than myself, in order that I may disregard myself. Take anger and disdain away from me, give me the intelligence to always distinguish the victims from the executioners.
Have I calmed down yet?
“I’d like to feel that free,” says Lolita, “to have my own hermetic world. And you. .”
“Don’t wish for it, oh no, don’t. . Maybe you don’t even suspect how much you, me, all of us are protected by the cover of normal behavior, by automatic activities and banal rules. It’s the most powerful of our defenses; it’s our God, to whom we pray despite ourselves, even though we curse him all the time. . You want to create a world? Right away you’ll need both good and evil, and beauty. . and a God, a strange, unique God, who would be God no matter what you call him. .”
“Love,” says Lolita, “You forgot love.”
“And love. Of course, love. . Do you know what love turns into if you throw caution to the wind, if you’re left face to face with the world? Do you know what it turned into for my mother? She bought herself a stud, a gloomy giant, who screwed her. . That illiterate, soulless animal ravaged my mother’s slender, white body and took money for it too. There’s the love of a unique world for you. Mother refused to accept the common world, but didn’t manage to create her own, either. She was short of everything: God, goodness, beauty. . It was horrible to listen to her when she tried, in spite of it all, to speak. She tried, Lord knows she tried. . She wanted to do something, to change something, to exchange things, so nothing would be motionless, nothing would stay in place. And she kept killing all sorts of life: geese, cats, worms. . This is bullshit, and not my mother’s story, isn’t it?”
“That’s the only way you can say something genuine about a person,” Lolita answers calmly, and for that understanding I really do love her.
I love, I love Lolita, she’s the only living thing nearby; only my dead surround me. Grandfather, the great Lithuanian spy in Polish-occupied Vilnius. A hero, bravely fighting with the most windmill-like of windmills. Father, convinced by an unheard voice that the world isn’t worth his efforts. My two forefathers, kanuked so differently. By what means do They inject a healthy brain with their pathologic; with what form of the drab spirochetes are they able to penetrate the joints, the blood, the sperm? How did all of my people fall into a trap they didn’t see in time, which they didn’t guard against? What did Gediminas fail to consider, the all-knowing Gediminas, gloomily leaning over the piano, his hands raised, but still not daring to press the keys? What did I overlook, squeezed for long years between the moldy walls of my wife’s apartment? What unexpectedly wiped my brains clean and opened up the second sight? What do I have to guard my Lolita against? Lolita, my very own Lolita.