“Get into the store, now, and just you try something!” The angry one went so far as to shove me in the back.
The procession of hats really was close by. Stepping inside, I noticed a group of militia restraining a crowd around the corner of the building. I slowly started catching on to what was going on, while by now Martynas was poking me in the side:
“Look!” he hissed, stunned, “Just look! We’re in Sinbad’s cave!”
Again it occurred to me that we were, despite it all, in an inverse Vilnius. The store was the same, but completely different. The shelves were buckling with wildly colorful cans, packages, and jars. Saleswomen who looked like nymphs in bright blue smocks smiled at us; their eyes said they loved us. In the huge room a few buyers wandered about casually, occasionally stopping by the refrigerated shelves or cases.
“It’s fantastic!” Martynas hissed in my ear. “There were narcotics in the cognac, we’re hallucinating. Do you see the canned crab? Do you see three. . no, four kinds of caviar?”
That wasn’t all I saw; there were many more things an inhabitant of Vilnius wouldn’t behold even in his pathetic dreams. The procession of hats advanced right up behind out backs; whether I wanted to or not, I heard the guests’ questions and the guide’s answers.
“It’s a pleasant square,” a hatted voice declared; a strange voice: hoarse, but biting at the same time.
“The inhabitants like it,” the guide spoke Russian with a mild accent that merely emphasized the suggestiveness of his velvety voice. “It’s particularly popular among young mothers. They like to bring their babies here, to meet and chit-chat. The air here is especially clean, and there are a lot of green spaces.”
“It really is a pleasant square.”
I recognized the hoarse voice; it froze my blood. An oppressive foreboding wickedly told me I hadn’t been driven here merely to observe a strange spectacle, that something really evil was about to happen. My foreboding asserted that They had arranged this performance especially for me. Martynas wasn’t choked by any foreboding; he grabbed several colorful cans from the shelves.
“Lobsters!” he whispered resignedly. “I thought I’d die without ever tasting lobster!”
“There aren’t very many people here,” the hoarse one observed.
“Most people are at work. In the evening there’s more. We do avoid lines, however.”
The hats were nearly stepping on our heels. The hoarse voice terrified me, even though I hadn’t the slightest idea why I feared it so, feared it and probably hated it. The women with the baby carriages were still zooming around the square like they’d been wound up. The optimistic young men chatted, waving their hands about with excessive cheer. They depressed me; I so wanted to stop them all. Martynas poked me in the side again. With his glance he caressed cans of Lithuanian game destined only for export. The sides of the cans boasted in fancy type: “Taiga’s Gift.”
“As far as I know,” he observed philosophically, “Lithuanian boar, moose, and deer have never so much as smelled the taiga. A little misunderstanding.”
“It’s a metaphor!” I made an effort to collect my senses and take up Martynas’s tone. “Lithuanians have surely smelled it.”
“Oh, I get it. In the sense that our boars are so tasty because Lithuanians were taken to pasture in Siberia? As clear as mud.”
“We try to always have at least several varieties of meat for sale,” explained the guide. “Some like game. Some — it’s funny, really — have a high opinion of horse meat. It’s probably a fad from the French.”
“It’s not good to chase after foreign fashions,” muttered the hoarse one. “It’s ideologically dangerous. Small things lead to bigger ones.”
Martynas quietly cursed in Russian. If he starts to curse in Russian it means the end of the world is coming. Once more I looked around, once more I wanted to know if everything going on here was for real. I wouldn’t have been the least surprised if that entire preposterous store were to sink into the ground and disappear without a trace. I almost wanted it to, because then the hoarse voice would have disappeared too. But whose was it? Whose?
“The sonofabitches!” Martynas seethed. “And if I were to turn around and explain to them how things really are?”
“We try particularly hard to provide ample fruit,” the guide cooed. “Working people need vitamins.”
I calmed down a bit, perhaps because the hoarse voice was quiet for the time being. I looked over the great performance’s participants. The director’s hand could be felt everywhere, but the actors played their parts badly. Their movements were nervous; they wanted everything, but apparently they had been warned not to take more than a few items. A few women, it seemed, went into shock. Their blank faces stared at some culinary miracle and their lips moved without a sound. Going by, the broad-shouldered men roughly jostled them, awakening them out of their trances.
“Our stores,” the guide explained, “compare favorably with, say, American stores. In ours, people don’t purchase groceries for an entire week. A working man knows he’ll always find what he needs. He buys only enough merchandise for one time.”
“You live well,” the hoarse one declared. “And are there ever shortages?”
His voice was driving me out of my mind. I felt I was going to stop at any moment, turn around, and fix my eyes on the procession of hats.
“Unfortunately, it does happen,” the guide reported sadly; you could feel unappeasable pain in his voice. “Unfortunately, sometimes a person comes into the store and can’t buy what he wants.”
“He’s a bit confused,” Martynas interjected between his quiet cursing, “He just now said that you can always find whatever your heart desires.”
“Don’t get excited, in a minute he’ll add that not everything’s been done yet.”
“Of course, not everything’s been done yet. We still have unused resources.”
Martynas snorted and stopped cursing for a moment. It seemed to me that the pseudo-shoppers started going around faster and faster all the time, more and more nervously; the pseudo-mothers outside the window were practically running at a gallop; it seemed the entire mechanism was starting to turn more briskly all the time, that it was no longer possible to control it, that everyone would keep moving faster and faster, get carried away and start breaking the shelves, smashing the jars, and in the end sweep away and trample the procession of hats.
“Pineapple!” Martynas suddenly moaned, “I haven’t seen live pineapple in fifteen years!”
“As it happens, we’ve been carrying out an experiment in this particular store,” the guide lectured. “All of the saleswomen speak only Russian. The results are encouraging: an absolute majority of the inhabitants accept this innovation gladly.”
“That’s a positive sign,” the hoarse voice agreed. “I’ll report this to the Politburo. In other respects you have been dealing with the national question rather slowly.”
At last we both got to the cashier. Martynas, smiling wryly, paid for the lobster and pineapple. I knew I was behaving in a suicidal manner, but I slowly turned around anyway. I could not believe what I saw; I wanted to scream, but a scream wouldn’t have helped.
HE stood a few steps away from me. He had aged considerably: his chin shook a bit, and his unruly hair was quite thin. However, it really was HIM. I swear, for a few seconds my blood stopped. Bitinas’s bald head, stuck on a pike by the cash register, moving its lips scornfully, spat out:
“That’s the dragon. The dragon that’s devouring a hundred innocent virgins a day.”
I no longer grasped what was going on around me. I felt a hysterical movement, the barrels of pistols pointed at me from under jackets. HE stood with an indifferent expression and seemed to be chewing something with a slack jaw. Only now did I grasp what had brought me here, how They had decided to test me. I knew I had to do my duty, to fulfill my destiny. I wasn’t at all afraid of the invisible but fully apparent pistols. I wasn’t afraid of anything at all; it was perhaps the first time in my life I was so pure and empty, so impassive. HE stood right there and finally took notice of me. I felt that my life had to end in just exactly this way: I had to crawl and squirm through hideous swamps especially so I would at last end up in this deceptive store, and HE would be standing in front of me. The last instant had to be like this, a frozen instant: everyone staring at me in shock, with the baby carriages gliding past the windows. Unexpectedly, it cleared up, and the puddles shone in the sunlight. I thought about whether I had ever felt hate for HIM, or if I had thought about HIM at all. Probably not. With surprise, I sensed that in essence, I had never believed HE really existed at all. HE was just a metaphor, the embodiment of the indescribable smell of the camp, of the nameless letters scattered by the night trains, of mother’s darkened, shaven head hanging above grandfather’s altar, of the lame dog by the Narutis, and of Gedis moving his hands and legs like a bug. HE was nothing more than Bitinas’s induced fantasy, an oppressive dream we were all dreaming. But here he stood right next to me and soundlessly moved his lips. The dream came alive. I had to take revenge on him for everything and for everyone, I had to bite through his throat like a wolf, but I just stood there and thought about how his arrival needed an entirely different stage set: that square with the fountain full of laid-out corpses, one next to the other, some of them castrated. The puddles lit up by the sun and surrounded by optimistic high-rises — and the square completely full of corpses, with a procession of every, every, every last one sent to Siberia, and rotting live bodies, and the sweetish stench of the camp. At any moment I’ll jump forward, the faceless broad-shouldered men will press the pistol triggers in unison, and everything will be over. At last HE will no longer be, since I will no longer be. But he insanely wanted to live; I sensed this when he looked at me attentively, and — I could swear! — recognized me. He had never seen me, never heard of me, but he recognized me. I felt it in every nerve, smelled it like a scent, read it like an open book: how weak he was, how afraid. Unexpectedly, he stepped up to me, smiled ingratiatingly, and stretched out his hand. That’s what the fiery dragon’s breath was like.