And again: do I really love her?
Vilnius, again and again: the old houses, cowering, trying to crawl underground, and the new multi-storied buildings insolently sticking out. The old ones are afraid; this is no place for them, they belong in Bologna, Padua, or Prague. The churches bend their spires down to the ground — they’re afraid to be so different. I go down the street and don’t even try to guess who’s devouring me with their eyes today. No spy intimidates me anymore: neither the men with massive heads, nor the fine-featured women with short-cut hair, nor the straw-haired lumpens with puffy faces and colorless eyes, sullenly staring out of the gateways, out of the doorways, through fly-stained windows. They have all become a customary part of the landscape. The daily routine of the continually siphoned-off and kanuked human being. Getting on the trolleybus, I’m actually amazed if I don’t find a hunched figure somewhere in a corner, glaring at me with the eyes of the meaningless void. I’ve known for a long time that the ones you see don’t matter. The ones that matter hide in secret cracks, like cockroaches. Cockroaches ought to be Their organization’s symbol, Their totem, Their heraldic sign — cockroaches on a greenish, moldy background, on the background of beloved, despised Vilnius — with all of its sounds and smells, which never abandon me. It’s like a beloved woman whose body has been eaten away by syphilis and leprosy. But you love her anyway; that love is eternal, even though nothing is left of her body but ruins, rot, and reeking wounds. You stroke the reeking ulcers, your hand dives into the abscesses, but you see the divine body it once was. Love doesn’t fade, it only grows stronger; you love even the wounds, because you know what that woman (that city) once was, what it could be. What it should be.
Vilnius, again and again: a narrow, little Old Town street, smelling of oblivion and wet leaves. With an uneven arc it turns to the right, no one knows where it ends or where it leads. Probably to nonbeing, to the void. An old wall overgrown with lichens should surround it, and above the paving stones a single light blowing in the wind should dangle. But the wall is evenly painted with bright paints and the lantern, merely pretending to be old, shines calmly and steadily. Everything here is unreal, like in a burned-down theater, and no one worries if you’ll believe the acting. Everything is soaked in cheap pretense — no one knows why, or for whom. (Pretense is Their ploy too. They consider it extremely important that a person pretend to be something other than what he really is. They consider it extremely important that a person should sing about how full and happy he is, even though he’s a half-starved slave. It’s not enough for Them that a person is quiet; they need him to sing merrily. And the worst of it is that people really do sing.) In an ornamented gateway, a trio of teenagers loiter with their fists jammed into their windbreaker pockets. They spit constantly and swear every other word. They glare at me with wolfish glances and turn away: an easier target will show up.
You couldn’t say Vilnius is suffocating in emptiness. It’s full, that is, full of emptiness, the worst form of emptiness. Pure emptiness is an ideal, a type of divinity. They aren’t worried about emptying; what They need most is simply to extract and embalm, and then to stuff the free space with surrogates. That’s the only way to bring in the new order: an ostensible man, a kanukaman. That’s the only way to create a new conglomerate: an ostensible city, a kanukacity. That’s how an ostensible world shows up, a kanukaworld, where God has been exchanged with the Shit of All Shits, time has been turned into eternal stagnation, and space becomes despair. A kanukaman’s virtue turns into the art of pretense, and honor becomes scorn. Even the blackest passions turn into oppressive drivel, while love becomes an erotic hymn of bodies. . I saw it; that scene still stands in front of my eyes, but I do not want to name it or talk about it.
The kanukacity oppresses me; Vilnius annoyingly repeats itself: its sounds and smells, its people and animals. The faces are all the same; it’s rare to come across a more interesting one. Although here’s one that’s really worth noticing: a thin, unshaven little face with cracked round eyeglasses. The face of an exhausted tramp, although the little guy is arrayed like he’s on parade: there’s even a bow-tie with red polka dots tied around his neck. I’ve seen him before; perhaps I’ve seen him many times. He’s like the ghost of Vilnius — a short little Jew, so Jewish it’s quite striking. A Vilnius Jew: not a banker, nor a sharp-eyed cheat, rather a small businessman or a craftsman, but brimming with archaic Jewish wisdom, able to cite from the Torah, the Kabbalah, or Hassidic teachings for hours on end. He slowly totters by, glances at me, and suddenly, quite clearly, says:
“It’s a dangerous road. Oy, a dangerous road!”
Don’t tell me we know one another? Surely he doesn’t know where I’m going? Surprised, I stop, while he totters on unconcerned, easily climbs up the creaking metal stairs, and in an instant is already balancing on the edge of the roof, merrily waving at me from above.
I’m no longer surprised. Anything is possible in Vilnius. I emphasize: absolutely anything is possible here. Perhaps this is Ahasuerus himself, come from the depths of the Polish years or a painting of Chagall’s. The main thing is, he’s right. The Way truly is dangerous. Extremely dangerous — if even a unshaven descendant of Vilnius’s old watchmakers warns me. At least someone spoke the truth. In the worn-down, played-out conversational record of Vilnius you won’t, unfortunately, hear a word about Them, even though everyone, absolutely every person, feels Them. But all of the recitative street monologues and all the anecdotes whispered in smoking rooms repeat the same thing — it’s enough to make your teeth hurt: the shortages, the stupidity of the authorities, the kingdom of universal lies. If those were the only things that mattered, we would be almost happy. How nice it would be, how simple and easy, if we could, even for an instant, identify Them with the authorities, the system, or the machine of compulsion. If that were all Their power would mean. If the threat were concrete and rational. No one even suspects that all the cursing of the government, even jokes told around the table, are dictated by Them, secretly regulated by Them. No one suspects that the most important part of their brain has been excised, the most important words taken out of their speech and the meanings of others deformed. At one time I myself thought Their goal was to suck out everyone with their pupil-less eyes, to wring out their secret powers, to feed on them the way blood-sucking insects feed on their victims’ blood. But I quickly understood it was just the means to attain a totally, completely different goal. They strive to turn us into something else, something not ourselves; they strive to infect us with gray spirochetes. But why? At one time I thought They valued control most. It’s entirely natural to think that way when you live in a world where idiots, having got hold of authority, hang on to it tooth and nail, determined to destroy millions just so they could freely rule the millions that remain. But by no means are They idiots. Power is also nothing more than a means. A mangy KGB agent is no more than a KGB agent; the government mafia is no more than a sullen mafia. It’s just the upper layer disguising the true essence. You can dig in Their direction all your life, but They’ll be hiding there anyway, in the depths. You get infected with Them like the plague and you feel (if you feel it) just the symptoms of the illness. To battle Them sometimes seems just as senseless as the hope of catching disease-causing microbes with your hands.