Even if we’re all destroyed, They will remain. If we turn the earth into a desert poisoned with chemicals and radiation, nothing will be left alive in it. But not entirely! Cockroaches will survive even a nuclear war! Cockroaches are invincible. Let’s think about that. Perhaps we’ll sense how the flow of thoughts brings us closer to grasping Their essence.
Perhaps that’s Their ultimate goal, to leave the world empty but for Them. Even if it’s only in the form of cockroaches. In the end, do the great kanukai commissars — even Stalin — differ that much from cockroaches in their goals or essence? Even their whiskers are practically identical.
This sort of reasoning carries me, floats me through Vilnius; I don’t want to think about anything anymore, I don’t want to smell and hear my city, I don’t want that which is long since dead to haunt me. I go where my feet lead me, and they can only lead me to a single spot. On its own my hand pushes open a familiar door; my feet stumble on the uneven stairs.
The Narutis is exactly the same as always. The same walls, the same faces. Little broken-down tables with crooked legs. Meager snacks, thrown any which way onto metal plates. Men indifferently swigging beer and cheap wine that turns the blood to sand and breeds worms in the liver. (It would be ridiculous to look down on them or condemn them — they don’t destroy and ruin themselves any quicker than those who never touch wine, but voluntarily breed worms in their brains.) There’s a smell lingering here that you can smell only in barracks and railroad stations. Nothing has changed at the Narutis, only I have changed considerably. My fashionably-cut suit and well-rested eyes are improper here. My appearance should irritate everyone. However, the regulars just look me over indifferently and turn away again. I know very well why that is. There is an indelible mark, whose meaning no one knows, pressed onto the face of a person who once haunted the Narutis. You won’t find it looking in a mirror; you won’t figure out what it is that gives you away as a member of the secret Narutis community. I can see that mark on other people’s faces immediately. The oppressive mark of Mackus the Hunchback.
I even flinch: it seems like Mackus the Hunchback will come to the table at any moment and, as always, ask for vodka. Without doubt he will address me as “sir,” he always addresses me that way. Only in the Narutis will you meet an alcoholic wreck who addresses everyone as “sir” or “mister”; he still remembers his associate professorship and his fiery speeches at scholarly councils. Mackus remembers a great deal, although there’s one thing he tries very hard to forget: how, in fifty-three (I still hadn’t been released), with several other trustworthy boys, he took secret KGB files outside the city and burned them, so that no one would even know the names of the people who are gone, and, even more, so that no one would find out that they had not, and could not, have committed any crimes. At that time the authorities were trembling and hiding their work; they desperately needed helpful hunchbacks. Mackus the Hunchback helpfully burned up those musty papers that dispassionately reported the suffering of Lithuanians and the genocide the government had commenced. They were the only documents, and he burned them up — later he vainly tried to forget it. But he unavoidably remembered those thousands of flaming files (probably mine too) — and with each burned file a person’s fate burned as well. Mackus even started imagining that it wasn’t paper he had burned, but rather thousands of live people. In his dreams, the charred pages turned into charred limbs and fried intestines. He desperately wanted to forget it, but after the third drink he would start telling all about it over and over again. I’d always pour him some vodka — and not just to hear about the dreadful bonfire of Vilnius again. I was sorry for Mackus the Hunchback: they didn’t succeed in entirely turning him into a kanukas, a speck of conscience remained in him. Hundreds, or maybe thousands of much more serious criminals don’t remember their crimes for an instant; they don’t feel they’ve committed a crime at all. At least Mackus the Hunchback reproached himself.
“It was all of our memory I burned up,” he would say glumly. “For that I’ll burn in eternal fire myself. I’ll be the first to get thrown into the pool of fire. I destroyed those files so that later anyone who remembered, who was seeking justice, could be cut off by saying: you made all of this up, how are you going to prove it?”
I took a gulp of warm beer and looked around again — after all, it’s not Mackus the Hunchback I’m looking for at all. I came wanting to repeat the unrepeatable, the episode that had once occurred. Or maybe it hadn’t happened at all?
At that time I stood on the edge. Gedis was already gone. The city drained me and ravaged me with its ghostly stares. I felt persecuted, pressed into a corner, but like a crazed beast I went straight for the hunters. I sat around in the Narutis; I frequented Old Town’s dives. I was seeking destruction; I was provoking Them.
Now I sit in the Narutis, nearly gagging from the smell of scorched cabbage, and try to overcome it with vodka. The vodka is warm and disgusting, undoubtedly diluted with tap water; it turns your guts inside out. I sit all alone waiting for my Godot, like the others gathered here. Somewhere else perhaps there is a world, somewhere else rivers flow and winds blow. Somewhere else (Lord please, please!) maybe there are even humans. But here — only bitter, cheap cigarette smoke, the stench of scorched cabbage, and the monotony of time flowing backwards.
I came here looking for something: a thing, an animal, or a person. A thing, an animal, or a person? It’s trivial, it’s all nothing. A mysterious object that means something to me couldn’t turn up here. The only life here is the cockroaches, dazed by the light, crawling out of the cracks. The gray ruler of Old Town’s streets, the short, neckless spiderman, will surely not show up here. So why should I find an answer in this universe of boiled cabbage, vodka, and deformed faces? However, something tells me to wait just precisely here. The memory of the neckless spiderman won’t give me peace. I sit and look at everyone in turn, not putting my hopes on anything, until my glance stumbles upon an unusual, unexpected figure of a man who doesn’t fit in here. I could swear he wasn’t here a second ago. He sprang from the earth; every wrinkle in his face, every fold in his clothes, screams and shouts that he didn’t get here the way everyone else did. He has some sort of secret purpose. And his purpose can only be me. I feel a sharp pang in my chest; my hand pours the rest of the tumbler into my mouth of its own accord. The man looks straight at me. His eyes are brimming with quiet and. . wait, wait. . yes, a sweetish smell of rot. I have already seen his beautiful, elegant hands, so out of place next to the dirty shirt and frayed remains of a jacket. I already know he’s come for me, but I have no idea what he could want from me (I don’t want anything from him).
Don’t tell me he’ll simply take me out to the street and push me under a passing truck? I’m not Gedis, after all. Gedis knew something, and I’m just barely beginning to speculate. Perhaps he came to intimidate me, to break me, to take away my will? The man stands up, rises to his full, gigantic height, and approaches. I look only at him, at his glassy eyes with narrow pupils, and I know him, I know him well.