He even got angry; Lolita calms him with a gentle voice:
“Tell us. .”
“About love? You don’t need to talk about love, you need to love it,” he smacks his lips, picking the words. “Everyone asks — vat is da meaning of life. Da meaning of life is to live. And to live is to love. Love drives everyting. Da world moves because tings love one anoter. Fire burns, because da coal falls in love vit da fire. Da river flows, because it loves da sea. . If der vere no love, da vorld vould stiffen and stop. It’s awful to tink vat vould happen if der was no love left. . People don’t have a name until dey find der love. If you vant to ask a person’s name, ask him whom he loves. People don’t have oder names, only der love name. Love is everyting. . Grain vouldn’t sprout, if it didn’t love da sun. Da sun vouldn’t rise, if it didn’t love da eart. . Everyting is love. .”
He falls silent, moving only his lips; tasting the words he’s uttered, it seems. The fog is lifting, crawling back into the water of the river. Something has cleansed my brain — like a school blackboard with a damp sponge. Jews, love, and Marx — everything in its place.
But Lolita for some reason turned pale; this Ahasuerus of Vilnius drove all the blood from her face.
“And if you love a person,” she suddenly asks in a weak, barely audible voice, “do you have to tell him everything? Absolutely everything?”
“Everyting!” he answers and screws up his dark eyeballs again. “If dere’s someting you don’t say — you have to trow it out of yourself too. If you can live vitout dat and be yourself — you don’t have to say it. But if you hide someting deep vitin yourself, if you dream of it at night, if it doesn’t leave you — you have to tell your lover. . or else love dries up like a poisoned flower. . Ja, ja. . like it’s been poisoned. .”
He unexpectedly escapes from our midst, turns towards Žvėrynas and in the old-fashioned manner puts his fingers to the sagging brim of his hat:
“Ja, ja. . only love!”
He shuffles off, but I no longer see him. Lolita’s face is in a state I’ve never seen before. Her eyes are bloodshot; her lips compressed, even white. He did something to her! And I didn’t defend her! What will happen now?
“Let’s go to Teodoras’s studio! We have to! Right now!”
I automatically swallow my saliva and think I haven’t heard her right. Only after a few seconds do I understand why the old Jew, the soggy Ahasuerus of Vilnius, showed up here. He shoved me into a world that had been closed to me until now and then he disappeared, vanished in the fog again; he was probably wandering the rooftops of Žvėrynas, remembering the fires and the plagues, and the floods, and foreign armies, and the din of church bells. . Who sent him?
Whoever or whatever had sent him, I wasn’t prepared to avoid my fate.
The studio, with its high ceiling, was as surreal as a memory. A tiny fireplace and battered antique chairs, all of them different. Lolita sat in one with her feet outstretched; she was guarded by a mass of beasts, people, plants, clay, and metal Bosch-like phantasmagoria. This room had a soul; these sculptures hadn’t turned into soulless things like Gediminas’s piano. The dead owner could walk inside at any moment — and what would I have done then? And how would Lolita, suddenly forced to choose, behave — maybe she would grab us both? I shouldn’t have come here. I tried to quiet my beating heart; I attentively inspected Kazys Teodoras’s world. On the shelves, on the fireplace, around me, under my feet, above me stood, lay, hung his works — from matchbox to man-size. There was a mass of them — as if Teodoras had wanted to construct an entire world. A five-meter monster rammed against the ceiling crowned everything; it spread invisible proboscises, it wanted to snatch up everything in sight. Me first of all, me and Lolita.
“That’s the Deformer,” explained Lolita, following my stare. “When I asked Tedis what that meant, he said, after thinking about it: a reformer reforms, and a deformer deforms.”
Teodoras really did want to build an entire world around himself. He formed it from clay, cut it from stone, poured and polished metal, soldered the most fanciful metal sheets, carved wood, poured glass, and wove all of it into a stunning tangle. By way of this studio I hoped I would find a road to Lolita’s inner world, but some third being lurked here, the secret third one of Vilnius. What was it holding in its possession, what part of Lolita? I was disconcerted by its insolence, by its evil intentions. It seemed to be lying in ambush and looking at me disdainfully. A large red cylinder with green lumps, carelessly thrown into the corner, irritated me the most.
“That’s the irritator,” Lolita said hollowly. “Tedis explained that every studio has to have something whose sole purpose is to irritate visitors.”
I tried to imagine this Tedis, a shaggy athlete with sleepy eyes, in the long autumn evenings carefully, lovingly, decorating the red irritator with green lumps.
“It’s strange that you don’t remember him. Half of Vilnius knew him. . I don’t know why: he was a quiet guy. . nothing bohemian about him. . He raved only in his studio, all alone. . Others would rather rave in public, and turn impotent in the studio. . and cast busts of Lenin.”
I slowly recovered from the studio’s gloomy spell. One way or another, this was still a sculptor’s studio, and not a mausoleum. Apparently Teodoras’s spirit wasn’t getting ready to bother us. But Lolita was afraid all the same. Her uneven face twisted up entirely; her cheekbones protruded. She was still too young; she wasn’t accustomed to keeping company with her dead ones. She glanced around as if she were afraid one of the figures hanging from the ceiling would speak in her former husband’s voice. She turned ugly, horribly ugly; she tormented herself, but I wanted her to tell me about it. I wanted to hear as much as possible. Perhaps I envied even her ghosts, even the dead. I turned into a tiny kanukas, quivering with greed; I wanted to suck everything out of her.
“I was an eighth or ninth grader, I spent the summer at my grandparents’,” she spoke in a sad voice. “Four of them showed up; they were making some kind of relief or mural for the Cultural Center. Four young artists with patched jeans. . I was probably fourteen or fifteen: a tall, skinny girl with unexpectedly swollen breasts. To others I already looked almost like a woman, I probably aroused desire, but actually I was as naïve as nature. . There was too much of something in me too little of something else. . I was missing a human, or an animal. . or a thought. . I was ready for anything. If someone had fixed me up with a child, I probably would have grown up a mother of mothers. If someone had given me a dog, I would have become the biggest dog specialist in the world. Anything suited me. . But there was nothing in the village, absolutely nothing. Some other summer I wouldn’t even have noticed Tedis. He was about thirty; to me he looked like a retiree. All four of them looked that way — like gray old guys, idiotically trying to act young. . But all the same I preferred talking to them, rather than to the kids my age from the neighboring farms. .”
As she talked, she recovered somewhat; sometimes she would smile at a completely unfunny part and her eyes would turn transparent. It seemed she was enjoying something, only I didn’t understand what.
“So, what more? Milk. Warm, fresh milk. With foam. . I kneeled on the wet grass and sucked it straight from the pail with a straw. . Grandmother went off to the left, behind the bushes, to milk the second cow. It was impossible to tie them next to one another, they’d start fighting immediately. . I drank warm milk, and Ted kneeled down next to me, with a straw too. . I saw how he looked at me. . He looked at me like God evaluating his creation. I felt as if he had created me. As if I were his sculpture. . Probably that summer I really was like a rock waiting to see what would be hewn out of it. . I don’t know. . I probably stuck to him myself, with all of a silly girl’s annoyance. And the milk had nothing to do with it. Probably he tried to shake me off. . But from that moment I became his — and that was it. It wasn’t love at first sight; I came to love him much later. But at that time he literally enchanted me — and that’s it. It seemed all of my quests met within him, it seemed he was just exactly what I was looking for. . Even when I hated him the most, I never forgot I was His and there was nowhere to escape from him. That’s how it was. . He became my God. I suddenly felt that’s the only way God could be: a thirty-year-old, shaggy, silent type. . I am his idea. . His dream. . His fantasy. . At that time my body changed a lot, I frequently stood in front of the mirror and God knows, I BELIEVED it was he who was changing me, making me the way he wanted. . Not to mention the soul. . He sculpted me anew, patiently peeled off husk after husk, tore off veil after veil; he entirely remade my childish mind. He cleaned out all of school’s phantasmagorias. It was only thanks to him that I grew up as a HOMO SAPIENS, and not a HOMO SOVIETICUS. I am a SAPIENS, aren’t I?”