And yet there’s more — in the city of the river of mystery.
Gediminas loved to sit on the bank of the Neris and wordlessly speak with the murky flow. The river names its city, he liked to say; it floats secret knowledge to the city and washes away the dirt of the soul. Now I, too, frequently sit on the bank and stare aimlessly at the wet bushes. The hung-over fishermen of Vilnius offer me fish that stink of tar. Gediminas is right: this river really does absorb words that are spoken in secret. It floats them away, and later, unexpectedly, brings them back from obscurity.
”Look at the Neris,” Gedis would say, “There are rivers of the dead and rivers of oblivion in the world. There are rivers of history and the river of all rivers. . But the Neris is the river of memory. Our spilled blood flows with it, our lost memory. .”
On the banks of the Neris, if you listen carefully, you can hear the names of all of the lost Lithuanians. Those who fell at the hands of the Teutonic Knights six hundred years ago, and those the Russians took to Siberia thirty years ago. It’s the only place the chronicle of Vilnius survives. . The gods only know what it told Gediminas. Only the gods know what Gedis wanted to say with his “Neris Blues,” which was by no means blues. Gedis played only avant-garde jazz — if that really can be called avant-garde jazz. But it was music. I carefully researched how They went about destroying contemporary music; nowadays jazz is perhaps the closest to real music. Real music was always improvised one way or the other; both the East and the West recognized this. You cannot write the human spirit into a musical staff and play it the same way every time. Earlier everyone knew this. Johann Sebastian Bach played swing like a born jazz musician; he felt the pulsation of the spirit. However, They cleverly locked spirit into staffs, measures, and beats. It was no accident They so persecuted the jazz musicians who longed to escape those restrictions. It was no accident so many jazzmen were butchered by persons unknown or went out of their minds. Jazz is enormously dangerous to Them, the ones who thrust the idea on the world that music is the careful repetition of rules and worn-out melodies heard a hundred times, and that to play is to get identical sounds out of identical instruments via identical means. Gedis wanted to play everything, whatever is possible. And even more so whatever is not possible.
But besides jazz he delighted in the strictness of mathematics. More and more often I think he was digging closer to Their pathologic through mathematics. In his mathematical work he was just as unruly and insane as he was playing music. I am almost sure it was in this fashion he attempted to break through the wall of logic and enter the domain of the pathologic. He wanted to grasp the entire mechanism of Their activities. And who knows if he hadn’t succeeded — otherwise why would they have needed to make all of his papers disappear? Some KGB could confiscate the manuscript of a novel, but why steal mathematical work?
I miss Gediminas very much. Vilnius itself misses him, that eternal third one, about whom Gediminas used to say:
“In Vilnius there can never be just the two of you. If you sit with a friend or a woman, Vilnius will, without fail, sneak up on you like some odd third one. You can’t get away from Vilnius. There isn’t another city like it in the world. . America’s blacks know this sensation well. Their Vilnius, that third one, is called the blues. Not a song, not the music. . I don’t know. . a mood, or God fluttering in the air. . In a word — the blues. One old man in Harlem explained it to me this way: when some other old negro talks, and I listen, it ain’t just the two of us, there’s always a third, and his name is the blues. . And our blues is called Vilnius. Horrible, beloved Vilnius.”
Filthy, dazed Vilnius, where you get up every day and think you didn’t go to bed there last night. Where you go to bed, thinking that tomorrow you won’t be getting up there. A soulless blues, of which only a rhythm and a melody are left, even the blue notes don’t sound anymore, because music has irremediably lost its spirit. Blues without a soul is always horrifying — it’s like a dead man walking. Gediminas is the dead soul of Vilnius’s blues.
I cannot go it alone anymore. I never could look at others from on high, I never could turn into a demiurge indifferent to God. I always felt that those others are part of me; their weakness is my weakness, their kanuked brains a reflection of my own dissolving brain. I never tried to stand above others and talk to God about my own private matters. Who knows if it’s worth talking to God at all. It seems to me God has also been kanuked.
Every seeker needs direction. Their secret lingers everywhere — in the constellations of the stars and in the morning fog of a dream that hasn’t dispersed, in the pavement of every Vilnius side street and inside the most disgusting slut’s vagina. Their secret cannot be coded into any one sign, any one scent, or any one dream. It hides everywhere—like the name of God — you just need to know how to read it. The blond-haired girl slowly going down the evening street carries Their mark within her. If you could understand her completely, you would solve Their secret too. The fissured wall of an old house most certainly conceals Their hieroglyph; perhaps if you overlaid a drawing of those cracks on a map of Vilnius you would see Their secret pathways. But it’s the river that matters most.
The river is paramount. I cannot write anything down on paper (They destroy papers). I cannot encrypt anything (Their pathologic deciphers everything). I cannot carry everything in my head (They will rip my head off). The river is the only place my information can survive. I whisper my secret prayer, every day, only to the river: do not try to name Their purpose, because there are no words for that; do not identify Them with any government, any system, any organization — that’s just what They are waiting for, for you to attack particulars instead of universals.
I have offered the Neris hundreds of my prayers, most often at night. Night and the dark always guard me. In the dark you are invisible; the oppressive stares of the kanukai don’t reach you. The river’s current saved me from the unbearable weight of knowing. The Neris is Vilnius’s ear; it heard me.
Now I walk along the bank and for the hundredth time arrange the secret signs, checking to see that none have gotten lost. The Neris flows in from the unknown, from the depths of the ages — just as They did. No one has yet determined the epoch when Their development turned aside from humanity’s development, no one has researched Their evolution or Their history, although all of that should be tucked away somewhere deep within every person’s memory. In their genetic memory — no wonder They try so hard to change humanity through genetics. Lithuania without Lithuanians! The Crimea without Tatars! Europe without Jews! Vilnius without a memory! The genes of memory hide in the Neris’s current too; there’s extinct nations flowing there, and death factories, and witch hunts. Across from Žirmūnai’s first bend there is a small patch of land dotted with multi-colored stones. Every little stone there has its own hidden meaning. The two giant boulders — they’re the two great geneticists, Hitler and Stalin. I can sit on either one of them. The boulders stand opposite each other. The one on the left, without doubt, is Hitler; I seem to see that famous shock of hair, fallen on his forehead, or maybe the little kanukish eyes, or maybe I hear the hysterical voice. That rock is Hitler. The second sits there more quietly, sunk into the ground; he weaves his plans in secret. When I’m standing here, I’m afraid to turn my back on him. It seems he’ll start moving any moment, deftly crawl over and sink his poisonous teeth into my ankles. I’m still afraid of that rock, of his Georgian mustache, of his sticky fingers. But he is just a rock, both of them are just rocks. Never get distracted by politics and government leaders, they don’t matter as much as the ordinary backyard kanukas who’s devouring everyone with his stare. All politicians are just robots; police intelligence organizations — second-rate robots; government officials — third-rate robots. Don’t look for answers in the system of government. I know Them, believe me. I look over the huge number of little stones rolling under my feet. There must be millions of them lying here. The six million Jews Hitler finished off; Stalin tried to better this number, but he didn’t make it, he didn’t make it. Why Jews (dark gray smooth little stones) in particular? Perhaps they really did transmit secrets no one else knows through the ages? But it’s impossible to look for the logic in Their doings — take that pile of white stones looming over there. Several million Ukrainians, starved to death by Stalin. So it turns out Ukrainians also know something they shouldn’t? And what do the Crimean Tatars have to do with it? Questions without answers. And a continually growing suspicion that it’s all done for no reason whatsoever. Why does a river flow? Because it flows. Sometimes They act with the particular inevitability and senselessness characteristic of inanimate nature. If Hitler’s death factories had reached their planned capacity, they would have destroyed more people in a year than were born in all of Europe. Thanks to Their secret doings the world’s countries have stored up more weapons than are needed to destroy all of humanity.