But one great thing really is mine; I won’t let anyone take it away from me. Everything else aside, I am still a human. I am alive. For the time being I am still alive. I still have hope.
This meager hope of mine was aroused by the great kanukai duet — Hitler and Stalin. The two of them were very different. Hitler was somewhat superficial and too open. He would frequently give away his true intentions, and therefore Their operating mechanism as well. Stalin disguised everything masterfully; he was a true kanukish sneak, a global Basilisk. Without a doubt, Stalin felt himself the superior in this duet.
They fell out over something. The war between Germany and Russia wasn’t Their conflict — after all, it certainly wasn’t kanukai who died in the battles. The war was planned and coordinated between Hitler and Stalin as one of Their spheres of action. (Don’t forget it’s the courageous who are the first to die in battle.) Who would formally beat whom was entirely beside the point. The two of them fell out over something more essential.
How thoroughly Stalin hid Hitler’s death! He even invented a legend about him running away to Argentina. Why, to what purpose? There can only be one answer: he made a fatal misstep and tried to hide it from Their highest authorities! He could kill off tens and hundreds of millions, but he had no right to touch another kanukai leader. That was Stalin’s fateful mistake, the creature of his ambition.
War, squabbles, even slaughter, go on in Their midst too. They cheat, plan intrigues, and make mistakes too. That’s what’s most important: They’re neither extraterrestrials, nor machines, nor gods. They are also live beings. Ergo, it’s possible to overcome Them.
I still have hope.
I blew off the library and went out into the city streets. Vilnius is the most interesting book there is. By the Lenin monument the girls, their skirts pulled up, were tanning their legs in the sun and smoking cigarettes with hashish. Fat aunties in hideous clothes pulled up slightly wilted flowers and planted new ones — the square must always be full of fresh flowers. “I’m not going to have children for the benefit of this hell,” a deep, hoarse woman’s voice spoke. “Better to strangle them to start with. Why should I wait for someone else to do it?” Curious women crowded around a van in a store’s yard: what have they brought? Deep sighs floated about, one huge Vilnius sigh, wind and rain, I couldn’t tell anymore if I was still myself, perhaps it really was me who said in a unfamiliar man’s voice: “You know, it feels like they’ve trampled on my brains. They’re forcing me to obey: calmly, with restraint, without a fuss. And they just keep squashing and squashing that brain of mine with their feet.”
At night the confusion of sounds would quiet down; then they’d be heard one by one. At three in the morning a taxi suddenly would start roaring; for maybe a couple of minutes it would approach along the empty street, its tires squealing, before screeching harshly under my windows and finally quieting down. The driver would turn “Radio Liberty” on, full blast, and hang out there — why didn’t anyone complain about him? Then the entire street would growl and rumble, the window panes would rattle, I’d jump out of bed and see a powerful procession of armor-plated army trucks. The procession of death, the spikes of the weapons covered in tarps, would fly howling through the Vilnius night. The silence would not return. It seems Vilnius trusts in me; it presents me with all of its night — right up until the morning bustle of the street sweepers. The workers repairing the trolleybus wires rudely banged their hammers on the iron poles and laughed over dirty jokes at the top of their voices. Tired drunkards would drag themselves home. On a bench between scrawny bushes, a couple who couldn’t find themselves a private spot tortured the silence for a long time with their mysterious whispering. At last, a dress rustled, expressive details stung the ears: the snap of underwear elastic, the damp, sticky sound of the beginning of an act. The young lady quietly moaned in Russian, the young man quieted her in Lithuanian, hurriedly squeaking the bench. On the other side of the street a car bristling with radio antennas stopped, a drunken militiaman quickly jumped out onto the sidewalk and started vomiting into a garbage can. Vilnius thrust and shoved its nightlife at me. And the day would begin with our neighborhood cat, a long-haired, brown bandit with metaphysical leanings. He would wait in the little dug-up plot across from the building, scrutinize me probingly, and then scornfully turn away. He always expected something meaningful from me, and he would always be disappointed. There was nothing I could do to make him happy. Shamed, for a long time I’d look at the cat’s back, turned away in indifference, and his nervously twitching tail. The next morning he would be waiting for me again. He still hoped for something, with a true fanatic’s stubbornness. I was ashamed. Or maybe it wasn’t me — I really didn’t know anymore if I was still myself. It seemed to me that I was everyone. I was those morning drunkards sitting together by the fountain, waiting for eleven o’clock (only at eleven!), when the liquor section would open. That was my red, wrinkled face with bags under the eyes. My hands shook, and my throat convulsively swallowed saliva. I saw frail little old ladies returning from church, live relics of Lithuanian villages. They dressed in dark clothes and tied spotless white scarves on their heads. Their calves were naked; the blue veins and shrunken gray muscles shone through the transparent parchment of their skin. Their faces were no longer of this world. They would walk in twos, arm in arm, supporting one another with their shoulders. (I myself was a little old lady like that, yanked out of the village by my children, quietly moldering away in a windowless little closet.) At intervals, so you wouldn’t forget whom Lithuania belonged to, Russian officers’ wives, with gigantic knots of white, peroxide-bleached hair, would proudly pass by. They never walked alone. They would pass by in twos, in threes, boldly casting glances in all directions, just waiting for someone to harass them. I saw it all. I saw the three lunatics on the loose in our neighborhood; one I took particular note of: he was fat and always wore a military uniform without epaulettes and an empty pistol holster. He hung around the workers who were endlessly digging around in the street and casually followed their progress, at intervals solemnly unbuttoning the pistol holster. Apparently the ancient gene of the camp guard dynasty lay buried within him.