Time, rushing forward headlong since morning, has really stopped. I still don’t want to believe it; gasping for breath, I go down towards the river and pause by the bridge. . I want to close my eyes, but I can’t. I want to cry, but there are no tears. I want to save Lola, but I don’t know how.
The water of the river stands still, the eddies and whirlpools frozen in place. It resembles a grimy, knotted rug. On the other side of the bridge, I see motionless cars and the small figures of people. Only now do I believe it: All of Vilnius has stopped. I no longer hear my heart; I’m probably no longer breathing. Absentmindedly, I brush my hand against my forehead and rub my eyes. I’m moving.
It’s horrible to move when the rest of the world has stopped.
I’ve ended up in the very center of a boundless torpor. The worst nightmare couldn’t compare to my reality. It’d be better if everything exploded or went up in flames; it’d be better if Vilnius were washed over by a wave of some new deluge or crushed by a cosmic catastrophe. It’d be better if everything crumbled, cracked, and crashed down. But around me stretches a dead landscape; a ringing silence encases the city, and an uncontrollable horror grows within me. What is this, I ask myself. No signs of an apocalypse, no bloody glow. Vilnius had come to a stop in an off-hand and routine way.
The crystal-clear air clouded up like muddy water. Tiny dust motes hung suspended in the air; it seemed the sky was slowly mingling with the earth. And absolutely everything stands stock still. The reflections of the street in the glass of the windows aren’t moving. The cars sit frozen in the middle of the avenue; you can clearly see that a gray Lada jumped into the intersection even though the light was already red. People are as rigid as statues, but don’t resemble them in the least. There is nothing artistic or symbolic in them; they have turned to stone in a single instant, in the most unsuitable poses. At that moment a disheveled, pimply teenager spat; the flow of spit hardened, stuck to his lips. A balding fatso, with a sweaty forehead, twisted backwards, apparently he’d glanced to see if his trolleybus was coming and stumbled on a crack in the sidewalk. He should have fallen, but was frozen instead, still falling, his hands thrown out to the sides. Two women who had paused to chat came to a standstill that way, with their mouths wide open. It’s the inanimate things that look the worst: the leaves of trees standing on end on the sidewalk; petrified streams of water, splashed from under the wheels of a car; a crumpled piece of paper hanging over the opening to a garbage can. It isn’t at all like a photograph or even a stop-motion film — in those there is life; here nonexistence has pervaded everything.
They stopped, dammit, they stopped! The gallery of expressionless faces froze; an inner cold locked the joints of Vilnius’s beast. Is this the end already? Maybe I’m to blame for this? Many times I’ve fought down the urge to shout out loud at them: stop it, quit running around pointlessly, just calm down and think for a second! Freeze!. . Settle down!. . And here they’ve done it.
“Vilnius has stopped,” I say out loud to the transfixed statues, I say to the building cornices and the dried-up lindens, I say to myself — I must drive off the all-piercing silence. “This is how the true Necropolis looks. The Necropolis of the spirit.”
I do not smell any scents — they’re inert too. If I were to eat something, I wouldn’t sense the flavor. Vilnius has become absolutely tasteless and soundless. I can only see. Shivers go down my spine when I realize what I would never have figured out by cold logic: my perceptions have no meaning if there is nothing to smell, touch, or taste. A person can be ideal and perfect, but if the world has no need for it, all perfection will go for naught. What should a person like this do? Without thinking, I lick the sweaty, trembling palm of my hand and feel salt on the tip of my tongue. I can only taste myself. I can smell only my own smell, hear only my own words and the hollow echo of my footsteps. Kneeling, I carefully touch splatters of splashed water. The water runs down, but when it separates from my fingers, the drops hang in the air again. I take one and slowly let it down. That’s how it stays standing, barely touching the shiny street tiles, not even moistening the dust.
Could I perhaps touch people? Animate them?
I almost stretch my hand out to a raw-boned man leaning against a tree, but fear restrains me. I’m afraid the person I touch will crumble like a castle of damp sand dried by the sun. And even more I fear that in touching him I would turn into stone myself. Everything is lifeless, but fear remains — it’s the hardiest. I do not know the rules of this changed world; I fear everything here.
I tear up the stairs to the library at a run. It’s empty in the corridor; no one’s in the common room, and Martynas isn’t sitting at his spot, either. Maybe it’s just the nameless strangers in the street who’ve frozen? Maybe my own are moving, or maybe they’ve disappeared entirely? But no, in Lola’s room I see the women sitting at their work. Marija had leaned over Stefa’s desk, piled her gigantic breasts on top of the papers, and froze with her mouth wide open. It’s enough to make me nauseous; people who you know, stopped dead in their tracks, are particularly hideous. And if I should find Lolita here? I’d probably want to freeze stiff myself. I’m already on my way out, but through a gap I spot a slender figure at the corner of an open cabinet. Trembling, I poke my head inside — thank God, it’s just Beta. She froze with her skirt hitched up high, her thin fingers straining to pull her stocking up. I look at her, fidgeting next to her as if I had forgotten something. Yes, those stockings of hers are always perfectly smooth. And her legs are perfectly straight. And her little head is short-cropped.