“It’s that hard to find the dragon’s lair?”
“Don’t tell me you have no inkling of how afraid he is? He’s afraid of us. He’s afraid of his staff. He’s afraid of the whole world. He doesn’t show his face anywhere. He sleeps only sealed up in a tank: we got this from a reliable source.”
The bald head lights a cigarette, and you breathe easier: the flame of the match lit up his waist and broad shoulders. There is no pike. Even Bitinas’s sad grimace calms you. Creaking, the cover of the tank stopped by the forest opens, and out of the hatch the dragon’s head emerges. It looks around and, just in case, releases a plume of fire into the nearest bushes.
“What do you think — who established the destroyer units in Lithuania? They didn’t even look for a nicer name. Destroyer units, that’s all. Sonderkommand. What do you think, whose idea was that?
“The dragon’s?”
“You’ve guessed it.” Bitinas smiles grimly, and you are stunned, because his eyes open wide and you see how much he’s suffering: you sense the pain gripping him, him — the iron man with the icy voice. “As you know, after a battle our soldiers’ bodies are gathered and laid out in the village and town squares. Just so that everyone who brushes away a tear while passing by can be seized immediately and sent to Siberia. Whose elegant idea was that, you think?”
“The dragon’s,” I answer firmly now. “The dragon’s.”
You know that you won’t escape from Bitinas’s sticky fingers. It will be your lot to face the dragon barehanded, and no one is promising you a princess or half a kingdom. No one is promising you anything.
“How do you blow up a tank?” you suddenly ask.
The mothers stubbornly drag the children to the front, but the children aren’t in any hurry; they look around. They want to see everything, feel everything, and understand everything — not just that bug-eyed drunk, but the shape of the trees’ branches and the construction of the trolleybus. It’ll be worse when they want to understand themselves. Or that young woman there with the sickly, dark bags under her eyes:
“I can’t stand it anymore! I feel like a caveman. Yesterday they were selling decent pork — two Russian women in the line got into a fight. They drew blood!”
“That’s the way it should be. As long as there’s nothing in your head except a hunger for meat and winter boots, you’re a proper Soviet citizen. What would happen if we had everything in spades? You’d start — God forbid! — to think. You’d become dangerous.”
A thirty-year-old homegrown philosopher with a shock of hair. He glances around to see if anyone hears how brave he is. Every establishment, every café is full of people like that. If all of their words would turn into matter, it would fill the streets and cover the tallest houses: Vilnius would be destroyed by empty words. Besides, that speaker is terribly naïve. If having everything could save you from Them, the world would long since be a different place. A McCarthy suddenly shows up even in the wealthiest societies. Even Hitler can be chosen in a free election. You might think a thriving Englishman immediately rushes off to think about the Universe and the structure of human society. Not at all; one collects neckties, another — diamonds. Each according to his means. Not for God, but for Mammon. They let you have a lot of gold — if you renounce your soul.
At one time I had decided that Their credo is a dictate of pure reason: They merely calculated that a society of kanuked creatures provides the most stability. If an anthill is the most stable way of life, then you need to construct human anthills. There can be no talk of the individual, freedom, or the soul; all of that just gets in the way. Their great commissar Plato described a state of that sort. It’s worth reading — it’s the germ of Their pathologic. Stalin attempted to bring a society like that into being. People aren’t necessary — every member of society is nothing more than a function. He lives by his function alone, thinks only of his function, dreams only of his function. Dzerzhinsky dearly loves children, but his function is to be an executioner, hence he becomes an executioner. Hess adores music, but his function is to kill the Auschwitz Jews, so he murders Jews. (Just thumb through Soviet books, look at the films — how many odes and thunderous apologias there are for people who sacrificed themselves and their inner beings to the functions thrust on them.) Every morning the only newspaper in the country announces what is to be done today, and everyone meekly obeys. Orwell described the life of such an anthill of the kanuked in detail.
But over time my delight with the theory of pure reason faded. It explained a portion of Their pathologic, but did absolutely nothing to reveal the purpose. Who needs all that? Plato proclaims the kingdom of kanukai until he’s hoarse, drives the dreamers and poets out of his state, deceives the throngs without ever feeling a pang of conscience — but why? In whose name, to whose advantage? To the advantage of those who are called “philosophers,” that is, the caste who assert that it’s proper to live in just exactly this way? But what are the criteria for the caste? What binds and unites them? Maybe those “philosophers” are the smartest, or the most handsome, or the tallest, or must be brunettes, or have a mole on the right shoulder blade? There are no criteria; They aren’t united by either government or reason. All I needed was to read Kafka carefully to understand there’s no reason in Their system. Both Kafka’s The Trial and The Castle are a priori senseless and pointless — actually, Their purpose hides beyond the boundaries of ordinary logic. I understood that the germ of Their system, the source of Their gray magic, must be looked for at an extreme depth — beyond logic and reason, beyond the understanding of ethics and beauty, perhaps in the depths of time and mythology. Only there can you find the crossroads where Their development turned in an entirely different direction than human development.
The biological aspect is extremely important here. Their biological origin obscures even racial differences: just look at how similar Brezhnev and Mao Tse-tung became in their kanukish faces. The depths of time must hide a hideous biological branching of species: They and humans. What’s to blame for that? Radiation? Emanations from outer space? The finger of God?
The Arabian Gnostics mention a vague power, Satar, which turned people against the word of God; even though they heard it, they immediately forgot it. Ancient Japanese sources mention a handless god of the plague, a strange plague that killed only certain select people — most often poets and wise men. That’s just where Their roots are hiding. Humanity wasn’t entirely blind; they recorded Their traces on many occasions, and They are not so entirely omnipotent — they didn’t manage to erase all of the traces. But where did They emerge from, when did they weave their cobwebs over Europe and Asia? There are simpler questions too, questions that are closer to me. For example, this one: from where and when did some kind of Lithuanians show up on the shores of the Baltic Sea, speaking a language extremely close to Sanskrit, but without any nomadic traits? Did they hatch out of a cosmic egg rotting in the Lithuanian swamps, or did they at one time, for just an instant, know how to overcome enormous distances, and then forget that knowledge? Did the Lithuanians escape Them this way, or conversely — were they a secret unit, a landing-party thrown into Their expanding sphere? A question from more recent times, connected with the first: by what means did Lithuania in the 13th century become the only state in Europe that wasn’t christened, that didn’t give in to the kanukish dictates of the popes of the Middle Ages? And why did an unappeasable desire arise in that state to penetrate into Russia and attempt to conquer it? Was this Their satanic influence, or did the Lithuanians simply have a sacred mission to get to Their center?