“You didn’t feel any force?”
“No, no force.” She slowly examined her hands. “See, he even sculpted my hands. . Just imagine, a Cinderella of the soul, suddenly settled into the Prince’s palace! What force could there be?. . In place of all the Michurins, Makarenkos, and Brezhnevs I was flooded by an inner stream of Rasselases, Shakespeares, and Coltranes. I’d dream of Camus, Kierkegaard, and even Archbishop Berkeley. . In my dreams I slept with an entire galaxy of geniuses. . Ha, I’m probably the only woman in the world Kant raped!. . My God had no mercy; he gave a woman intelligence. I’m not bragging too much?. . You have no idea what it means to change from the top student in school to the accessory of a thirty-year-old shaggy-haired intellectual. Imagine you are being BORN and you see yourself being born. Tedis was a guru to me first of all, and not a man. A guru, and not a loved one. A guru, but not a lover. . A year or two went by, I had time to get used to men looking at me, at night I would sigh, dream about lips swollen from kisses, on the trolleybus I would lean my entire body up next to him ‘accidentally,’ but he stubbornly remained JUST my guru. . HEAVEN ONLY KNOWS what he wanted to make out of me — just not a lover, and not a wife. A spiritual disciple? Disciples are always men! I never understood him. I’ll never forgive him. He threw me to the wolves. It wasn’t enough that I was entirely his creation, I didn’t even know what it was he had made of me,” she suddenly gazed with a stare that saw nothing, and said angrily: “If I had understood him, I wouldn’t visit here, I wouldn’t sit here nights and talk to the walls. I’d sell this entire morass. They pay well for the dead ones.”
Her lips were firmly pressed together, she seemed to be speaking without opening her mouth. Suddenly I was afraid of the evil little flickers in her unseeing eyes. She wasn’t talking to me, probably to her God, but I had no desire to be God. I was a man; I had an intense feeling that in a moment I would say something I shouldn’t say. I was afraid of this angry woman with the insane flickers in her pupils, chopping the air with her words. I wanted my Lolita back, but she had disappeared without a trace. All that was left were the tin mobiles hanging from the ceiling, three fat Buddhas with animal heads set on the fireplace, and a bitter foreboding that something horrible was yet to happen.
“I’d purposely wear dresses with nothing on underneath, I flounced about and showed my charms however I could. He drove me out of my mind; he was impossible to understand, as suits a God. An absolute ruler, who needs to be cruelly punished. . One of his buddies snatched me up, and in the course of a month he taught me absolutely everything, never even noticing he had taken my virginity. And it was all fine with me, just because he was a close friend of Tedis’s. I took my vengeance; I slept with his friend. While with Teo we would discuss Beckett. . In the end I did what I had to do: I broke in here and destroyed everything I could. The works prepared for his one and only show. Intimate masterpieces, put away and not shown to anyone. I spoiled his entire world, and when he himself showed up, I nearly killed him with some bas-relief. . He tore off my dress, tore it into tiny shreds, placed me naked in front of himself, examined me with a professional eye and said he would put me in his show: naked, covered with shit, stuck all over with scraps of newspaper used to wipe yourself in the toilet. And he would name it “Lithuania”. . And afterwards everything was as strange as a dream and as short as a single day. We got married as soon as I turned eighteen. My mother was hysterical — she was probably hoping to raise a vestal virgin. . There was just one thing I wanted: to understand Tedis, but I didn’t even manage to see him clearly. I even secretly wrote down his peculiarities. He never brushed his teeth. He wore a beard, but he had bought himself piles of razors and electric shavers. He didn’t eat tomatoes or chocolate. It seemed to me that even those ridiculous details had some secret meaning. . He was horribly afraid of fire and anything sharp. . He had a strange way of categorizing every philosopher’s and artist’s work. For him there was a BEFORE and an AFTER. He divided everything that way: Kant BEFORE and Kant AFTER. As if all of them at some moment had caught some dreadful disease. . He could be unconditionally charmed with some person BEFORE, and abhor the same person AFTER. But it was never the other way around. . I kept asking, before WHAT and after WHAT? Teo didn’t explain. He didn’t explain anything about himself. . He would look at me and repeat: you are my best sculpture. Yes, I’m his creation. Made for who knows what purpose. He didn’t create me for himself, for his own good; I just knew that he broke and tortured me for my own good. . He was saving me from something. But from what? From myself? From hexed Vilnius? Or from those annoying people who kept crowding into his studio?. . He couldn’t stand to have someone look at him intently. He imagined that it was possible to steal the thoughts right out of your head that way.”
“What, what?” I asked, feeling my tongue slowly growing numb.
“I know, it’s funny. . And then when he was drunk he would sometimes say that people aren’t really people, that on the road of evolution some horrible mistake happened, that the real people are somewhere ELSE. . and then he was killed. . And nothing was left. . Until you showed up.”
”He was killed? You didn’t tell me.”
“I thought you knew. Everyone knows. It’s a famous story. He was burned alive.”
The room tilted. I tried to pull myself together; I clenched my teeth together firmly, chasing away the circles that flashed before my eyes. He was burned alive. He talked about not-human humans, an evolutionary mistake. He couldn’t stand kanukish stares. Shuddering, I looked around: the Deformer? Deformed bodies?
“It’s a hideous story,” Lolita said hollowly. “He was sitting in a camping trailer. Smoking, drinking, talking. . with that same buddy, my sexual tutor. . His friend left to lie down in his own trailer. Tedis was drunk, he fell sound asleep. . and the trailer started burning like a box of matches.”
I had to say something. It was imperative that I open my mouth, but my lips stuck together and my tongue wouldn’t obey me. Suddenly I felt I didn’t want to know anything, I felt I was on dangerous territory. Dangerous to my mental health. The premonition turned into conviction; the sculptor’s studio was a trap. Does clay burn?
“Well, none of that matters anymore. I have to show you what I brought you here for. The thing Tedis told me not to show to anyone. Maybe you’ll make something of it.” Lolita got up and went into a dark corner of the studio. “Teodoras’s testament.”