“You’re like those carp,” he’d scream in their faces, “You’re being fried in the pan, and you writhe and sing hosannas to the cannibal chef. You don’t belong to the human race and never will. You’re carp!”
He called them carp with such fury that the nickname Carp stuck to him.
He’d sidle up to me and Bolius and to the other Lithuanians, and repeat glumly:
“I’m ashamed to be a Russian. I’m ashamed! Guys, accept me into your nation.”
He even learned some Lithuanian and proudly twisted his tongue, muddling the words with a dreadful accent. He’d assert to Bolius and me:
“I’ll get out of here. I know that I really will get out. And even if I live a thousand years, I’ll never be a carp. I have a brain, whoever it was that gave it to me — God or nature. I’m invincible!”
He really did leave the camp and settle in Vilnius.
And now there he is, hanging around on the television screen and singing hosannas to the old and new cannibal chefs.
Even Carp was vanquished in the end! They took away the brains he was so proud of!
I could just see all of our zone guards, and the zone boss himself, sitting comfortably in front of their screens and lazily applauding with gloved hands. I can just see a hundred thousand guards sitting in a gigantic open field, so they can see one another, enjoy one another, and feel their combined power. They lazily applaud Stepanas Walleye for his accurate and timely words. Now he was their colleague.
It was no different than if Giordano Bruno were to take up preparing firewood for the bonfires of the Inquisition. If Thomas Jefferson were to demand that the Bill of Rights be recalled forthwith. If Saint Paul were to start persecuting Christians and profaning Christ by all available means.
Once upon a time he sat in front of me — his lip split, sucking on the hole left by his knocked-out teeth — and told me about his dream:
“We’re worse than the Germans. . Yes, yes, only we’re to blame. . One mustachioed Georgian couldn’t accomplish anything. . But the world has already punished the Germans and will continue to punish them, while these will remain righteous for eternity, my child. . Russia never knew how to admit its own guilt. We love tyrants: Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Stalin. . We’re afraid of them, but we respect them, we LOVE them, my child! That’s what needs to be burned out of the Russian soul first of all!. . The love of the whip, as Pushkin, Alexander Sergeyevich said. . And by the way, I wouldn’t take Pushkin into the new nation. I’d take Dostoevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich. . And Bulgakov I’d take, with his Heart of a Dog. . Too many Russians have a dog’s heart, my child. . Way too many. . I’ll establish a new church, a genuine Russian church. I must establish it, my child! And I won’t accept a single person who believes in the sacred Russian destiny to rule other nations, to create an eternal empire. Not a single one raving that Moscow is the third Rome. . I’ll only take those who will understand their guilt, who will understand what they really are, who will want to become real. . Real humans, my child. Who will fear nothing, bow to no one, but won’t oppress anyone, either. . That’s how a new Russian nation will be born. A great nation! Perhaps I won’t be in it myself, maybe I’m too lowly for it too ordinary. .”
Stepanas was quickly taken on by the zone boss himself, and this meant the end. Our boss was the paranoid demiurge of the camp. You could sense a satanic system in all of his pathological activity; he had some purpose that was comprehensible only to himself. For example, he wouldn’t prevent the carps from gathering, but later he would suddenly add ten years to the sentences of all the members of the communist cells for starting up an illegal organization. There is no communist party of the zeks, he’d like to reason, ergo, they’re illegal. He thought it amusing that the carp, whom the Communist Party had shoved in there, secretly made sacrifices to it, and because of that got extra punishment. He wanted to perceive some kind of paranoiac essence in this, to “understand a person’s liver,” as he himself would say. (The gypsy baron from the neighboring barracks swore that during the annual celebration of the Revolution, the boss ordered him to serve up a human liver.) The majority of people are brainless manure, he liked to repeat, they’ll not only eat others up, that’s too ordinary — no, they’ll eat themselves up.
“I need to understand your liver,” he said one day to Stepanas Walleye. “I’ll take you on.”
This meant the end. When the boss would take someone on, nothing would be left of a person, not even that liver of his. The boss had taken on Bolius just before Stepanas.
The last time I saw Walleye in the camp, he was in the pit where we used to dig gravel. There was only the shadow of a shadow left of him. He staggered and repeated:
“Never! Remember, guys, never! I’m invincible!”
That hideous summer at the camp I made an eternal vow to myself to never have children. It’s inadmissible to bring little creatures with souls into the world, souls that They will instantly devour. At least I can’t do that. Millions of people don’t even consider that they’re merely giving birth to sustenance for Their spiritual cannibalism. Millions of mothers don’t even ponder the hideous doom they’re sacrificing their infants to. Not a single child asks his parents to bring him into this world. Not a single father has tried to ask his child this.
That’s a hideous crime — to give birth to a little thinking creature, whose soul will be left untouched for five years at the most.
In Lithuania They start the kanukizing procedures through day-care nannies. In other places perhaps they do it differently.
They need the mass of humanity. They encourage procreation by all means. They aren’t in the least interested in the extinction of humanity. The more brainless beings, the more carriers of the gray spirochetes!
Even if, through some miracle, you hold out against Them during your teens and young adulthood, even if you reach such heights of resistance as Carp did, sooner or later They will grind you up.
For the love of God, don’t make children for Them!
Carp sat on the television screen, praised the Divine Party and condemned the Auschwitz guards as if there had never been any guards in the Gulag. It seemed someone had torn out a piece of my heart, took away my one and only sacred talisman. It seemed I had suddenly found out that my beloved sister was a horrible slut, and that in her free time she manufactured pliers which were designed to rip nails off of fingers. I realized that even Stepanas Walleye needed to be saved. I had to save that tall girl over there on the other side of the street, those children there, who are running like mad to who knows where. I must save the old, abused city outside the window. I must save the calm Swede sitting next to a fireplace in Stockholm and smoking a good pipe. Perhaps I especially needed to save him, because he doesn’t so much as suspect Their existence; he thinks that everything evil will pass by and leave him untouched. Like an aristocrat, he believes that all misfortunes are destined for others. He doesn’t notice the secret sucking stares; he has a sacred trust in his centuries of stability and doesn’t even suspect that his thinking alone shows the kanukai’s proboscises have already touched him, that the pupil-less eyes are already stalking him around every corner, that the drabness already covers both him and his neighbors.