“I can imagine how your parents horrified their neighbors,” she says. “In such a homogenous, commonplace group of people. .”
“Oh, sister, how you’ve overshot! You really don’t get it? The two of them were perfectly pleasant, acceptable people! For the yearly ball at the university mother would order a dress from Paris. . Yes, yes. . You don’t really think that she went around town with her head shaved bare? You don’t really think that father would roll around in a drunken stupor in the company of professors? No, he would talk politics, make witty remarks. . It seemed they returned from a long, long journey, threw off their exotic clothes, and suddenly turned into the most proper bourgeoisie. . Perhaps that amazed me the most. I kept thinking, where are they keeping all of that, what’s really inside of them, what are they hiding from, what are they afraid of? That two- or three-facedness of theirs, that ability to undress themselves, their genuine selves, just like dirty clothes, drove me out of my mind. .”
As I talk I feel a soft lump covering my brain and drowning it in thick silt. Everything recedes into a fog. A wall appears between me and Lolita; I can’t step over it anymore, although I could just a minute ago. I’m slowly turning into something else. It’s a whiff of Them, an attack of Their secret plague. My innards teem and swarm with gray spirochetes too; no one can predict how much longer my spirit will hold out.
“Why did she kill herself?” someone asks out of the fog. “Did she get lost in herself? Look into the abyss too deeply?”
“I loved her.” I’m telling the holy truth, but that’s not what I should be talking about, not at all. “She was the unhappiest of us all. She hung herself decently, while we’re still living. .”
“To me she resembles Lithuania,” someone in the fog suddenly says, “The same senseless despair.”
“Resembles? Maybe in the sense that Lithuania never was ITSELF either, foreigners were always glomming on to her — through force and deceit. . Do you know why she hung herself? She persuaded herself she was going to give birth to a monster — large and hairy. . yes, yes, it had to be hairy. . She convinced all of us, it was all she talked about. . She thought Satan had impregnated her. But not the black one. . And not the one who says non serviam. . The very worst of all — her own private Satan. . How can I put this?. . By the incarnation of the evil of the universe, understand? She found neither love nor beauty in her invented world, but she found evil in it. . If she had given birth, she would have given birth to a monster that would destroy the world. And that monster would be her son, her beloved, even insanely beloved son. .”
“Horrible,” whispers the fog, slowly starting to resemble Lolita.
“No, not horrible. There’s no name for it. We can’t imagine even a thousandth part of her fear, her love, her responsibility to the future of the universe. She hung herself one calm, quiet morning, above grandfather’s Shit of All Shits altar. She got up from the table and went out to hang herself.”
“So she went crazy after all. .”
“I don’t know. Lord knows I don’t. It’s hard to say what ‘crazy’ means. What ‘normal’ or ‘abnormal’ mean. You could say that normal is pragmatism, the ability to adapt to circumstances. Are you abnormal if you understand the circumstances correctly, but still behave in such a way that death inevitably awaits you? If Mandelstam wrote and read his friends poems about Stalin, knowing full well that he would, one way or the other, be killed on account of them, was Mandelstam abnormal? I think it was Stalin who was abnormal. But anyway, this is all theory. . And as for mother. . she knew quite well how to exist in her surroundings. Perfectly well. Nothing threatened her. All of her nightmares were there next to her, understand? It was as if she would go in there, the way an artist goes into his creation, and then she could return. And live on, entirely properly. . That’s the thing. . When she talked about the monster she was going to give birth to, you could understand it as a metaphor, the creation of a poem of horror. That’s the way we all understood it. . The time itself was insane. Russian tanks were rumbling in Kaunas, a handful of collaborators was already rushing to Moscow to sign the papers to join the Soviet Union. . We thought mother was just reacting to everything in her own way. You think no one would have watched out for her if we had believed she could kill herself? We all thought she would keep talking and talking about it. . But she went off somewhere THERE and, completely consciously, didn’t want to return. She up and hanged herself. And what use was there in that? Unless maybe that sometimes I, I myself feel I’m that son of hers, that unborn monster.”
“Stop!” says Lolita. “It’s my fault, I provoked you. Out of curiosity. I really want to know everything about you. Absolutely everything. But it’s just ordinary curiosity. You won’t be angry if I admit it? You’re as white as a sheet.”
I look at her; now I see well. The drab fog has disappeared; once more sounds are no longer hollow. Lolita smells of milk and grass. . and something else sugary. . But I have to ask; I warned her I’d ask, even though I’m sorry for her. I have to ask. It won’t leave me alone. I have to know everything. Practically every strange death is Their work.
“Tell me about your husband.”
“I didn’t think you’d be interested. I thought it might even be unpleasant. Why should I talk about some third person?”
“I’m interested,” I say, as if I wanted to hurt her on purpose. “Five sentences. Who he was and why he’s gone.”
“He was an artist. A sculptor. Probably not a genius.” She puts the words on the table in front of me carefully, one at a time. I clearly see how they tremble, how pained they are. “He died. An unfortunate accident. You haven’t heard about it? It’s a well-known story.”
“Sort of: that he drowned or something.”
“Let’s not talk about him,” Lolita asks. “I don’t know what I could say. . He was. . he’s gone. . It’s sad. .”
I don’t hear the siren of danger; I don’t feel the pang there, deep inside, in the very softest spot. It’s calm everywhere, even too calm. Every unexpected death piques me, but this one didn’t bother me at all. Lolita didn’t say anything stinging anyway, but I do see her eyes, I smell her scent, I even sense her bio-energy fields — I would notice danger at once. I want to sense it, but apparently it isn’t there.
“It really is a sad story,” is all I say.
Outside the window sprawls filthy, messy Vilnius: the new city collapsed on the old one. An inexplicable presentiment suffocates me, perhaps flowing from the future, since there is no stimulus for it from the present or the past. But it’s not frightening, because Lolita is, and in her there is both a body and a spirit. A glass, and a noble drink within. Do I love her because of the way she is, or is she that way because I love her? Does she make me better, or have I already made her so? Is she that way because she knows I love her, or because she doesn’t know how much I love her?