Kovarskis sits down on the corner of the table, chews a cigarette, and looks at me. He looks at my eyes, searching for something in them.
“Once I asked Šapira to bring me someone. Maybe a year ago. He brought you. You’re the first. . No, brother, I’m not looking for a soul. More like a disease. A disease with my name. . Even in my earliest childhood, I was determined to find a disease with my name. Kovarskis’s disease, which no one had discovered yet. That’s my mania, my idée fixe. You’re not a medical man, maybe you don’t quite understand what it means in our times to find a REAL, BIG disease no one has discovered yet. That’s exactly why I cut little bones up into pieces and pull nerves out one at a time. I’ve looked for it everywhere. I am a walking encyclopedia of pathology. . I’ve discovered dozens of specific anomalies, minor deviations, but I needed a DISEASE. A hundred times I completely lost hope. . But God finally enlightened me. If you want to find an essentially HUMAN disease, he said to me once while I was perched on the shitter, research the brain. Because a person is a brain and only a brain. Everything else is a mechanism. . Come here!”
He nimbly jumps off the table and goes over to a refrigerated cabinet. The girl, her head tilted, attentively watches him from behind.
“Do you know why she stares like that?” Kovarskis throws over his shoulder. “Because her brain hasn’t been taken out. You wouldn’t believe how a stiff’s face immediately loses its expression and its gaze as soon as you take out the brain.”
He finally manages to work the locks and opens the heavy door; I see hundreds of brains arranged on shelves: some larger, some smaller, a few with spots, still others with horrible growths.
“There you are,” Kovarskis announces grimly. “Although you don’t see much here.”
“And you? What do you see?”
He suddenly turns to me, burning me with a terrible look, and then unexpectedly stares at his own hands. Without looking, he pulls out a brain and weighs it in his palm. Now he resembles a pagan priest, or more likely a sorcerer.
“Everything. When I look at a brain, I see a human. It grows around that brain; it’s born out of emptiness. At first I see a face and eyes. . Then the neck, shoulders, and arms show up. . The torso and the legs. . The sex shows up last of all. The women slowly grow breasts; a man’s penis shoots up like some kind of sprout. . I see everything. But that’s not what matters most. What matters most is that expression. . That expression. .”
Sunk into thought, he throws the brain back into the cabinet and slams the door. The girl’s left breast suddenly thrashes and slides down.
“Everything goes by the expression,” says Kovarskis as if to himself. “It won’t give me any peace. I dream of it at night. . I hear it in music. I read it between the lines of books. . And I keep meeting people with that expression in the street. . you see, it’s the expression of a stiff with its brains taken out. An indescribable expression! As if all the features had become rounded and distorted. As if the hieroglyph of the face had become hazy, indistinct. . I don’t know how to describe it. . And just imagine — I see that expression on the faces of live people. I saw it first in the hospital, then right in the middle of the city. . I found it, dammit, I FOUND IT!”
He’s nearly screaming, the veins on his neck strain, no sign is left of his Semitic seriousness. Astounded, I watch him stack frozen brains on the table, pile them every which way, hurriedly put them on the girl’s stomach, on her breasts; he’s even panting.
“I have hundreds of examples to prove it! Hundreds!” Kovarskis hisses, “Here, look! You see? See? See?”
He pokes the frozen brains with a finger, but I don’t see anything special — just a gray mass, convoluted wrinkles and the girl’s body. The nipples of her breasts have reddened and distended.
“I don’t see anything.”
This works like a magic charm. He suddenly calms down; taking off his gloves, he rubs his forehead with a finger and smiles for the first time. No, he’s no madman. Let him, when he’s looked at a brain, see an entire person, but I can spot the smile of a madman instantly. No, he’s no madman. Matters are much worse than that.
“Well, now. . well, now. . Look here. Here, here, by the hypothalamus. No, right here. You see that little lump? That barely visible growth that resembles a bug? A bug devouring the brain? Huh?. . And on these brains, do you see? And on these? There you have it — there SHOULDN’T BE a lump like that.” By the triumph and horror in his voice I understand we’re getting to the heart of the matter. “And here’s a good brain. See, no lump. And this one’s good. And this one. . I named this the Vilnius Syndrome.”
“Vilnius? Not Kovarskis?”
“I couldn’t refuse to share the discovery with Vilnius.”
“A syndrome? A syndrome is a particular complex of symptoms.”
“Clever man! Well-educated! And you think a lump like that right by the hypothalamus doesn’t raise, as you say, ‘a particular complex of symptoms’? I found it. It’s Kovarskis’s disease, which gives rise to Vilnius Syndrome.”
He turns away from me and starts quickly piling the brains back into the refrigerator. I clearly see the pained wrinkles by his eyes; I feel the trembling of his hands. He is afraid; he is afraid of what he has found, and even more he fears sharing his suspicions with me.
“I know the human expression of a face,” my voice speaks by itself, it’s not me in control, it’s not me choosing the words. “I know an inhuman expression too. Kovarskis, have you ever sensed stares that suck you out? Have you seen fingers with lumpy joints reaching for you?”
Finally I silence my voice. It’s said too much. Kovarskis sits on the table again and fixes his gaze on me, nervously swinging his legs.
“Old man,” he says in a tired voice, “It’s already been at least a year since not just those stares follow me, but the walls of the room too. You think I asked Šapira to find me somebody because I wanted to brag about my discovery? Why brag — it merely needs to be publicly announced. You see, that expression. . I named it the Vilnius expression. I could show you hundreds, millions of faces like that. Look at the images in the newspaper and you’ll see what I’m talking about. . It’s horrible how MANY people there are with that expression. In Vilnius — from seventy to ninety percent. . There’s too many of them. . Ninety percent, can you imagine? And no one has noticed it until now? Something’s not right here. . No one noticed?. . A person with that expression is most certainly ill with Kovarskis’s disease, understand? That bug sits on his brain. If you look for it, there’s no way to miss it. So why hasn’t anyone noticed?. . You ask, is it just in Vilnius? No, of course not. It’s everywhere. By now I can spot that expression even in pictures of huge crowds. Kovarskis’s disease thrives everywhere. It should have been discovered a long time ago. It has been discovered a long time ago, understand? But why isn’t it described anywhere, not even hinted at?. . The worst of it is that you can’t tear that bug off the brain, you won’t cut it off; it’s joined to the brain’s biochemical circulation. My disease is incurable. . Vilnius Syndrome. . I know all of its symptoms, I could describe even the most minor of them. .”
If an abyss had opened up beneath my feet, if my own brain had been covered with cockroaches, if lightning had struck in that basement — maybe I would have withstood it. But now I want to scream, to howl like a wolf. I know all of it’s true. I’m drowning. I’m somewhere else, running down the streets, shrieking like a madman. But no, I run quietly, spitting out the suffocating air. I’m not running, I’m standing. I’m drowning.