A short-cropped little head! I fruitlessly try to remember the expression of Beta’s eyes and the expression of that other’s eyes, the face of that little parasite in the dimness between the bookshelves. It seems to me that Beta sees my hand; could it be her brain isn’t frozen? I shake all over, but I can’t manage to conquer myself. I carefully pull her skirt up even higher, push it entirely to the side. Nothing happens. I carefully stick my fingers behind her underpants and waistband. And nothing happens. I pull the elastic towards me, I wait for Beta to suddenly shriek, or fall over, or crumble into dust, or. . But absolutely nothing happens. She stands there like she’s planted to the spot. I quickly glance downwards — thick hair luxuriates under her panties. Apparently everything is in order, but the devil keeps pushing my hand; I let my fingers in deeper still, slide them between the lips, and grasp a rather large, slippery clitoris.
I pull my hand out like it’s been burned and leap out into the corridor. Only now do I realize my forehead’s covered in sweat, my heart is pounding, and my hands are shaking. And Beta, with her skirt turned to the side and her underpants pulled down, still stands before my eyes. What will she think when she wakes up? If she wakes up at all.
This is better than reading someone’s diary. In a diary you can lie to yourself, but here everything is the way it is. I had to check Beta out, I stubbornly confirm to myself, but my thoughts go in an entirely different direction. I can do whatever I want. I can intrude anywhere. Perhaps I can even come across Their hiding place.
My arms go numb down to my very fingertips; I reel as I walk, as if I had forgotten how to. No objective invites me forward, nor backward, nor to the side. As if in a dream, I step into a darkened stairway. I stumble up the stairs; I rattle the doorknobs one after another. The third or fourth opens up; I end up in a large room that is jammed full of furniture. A sickly young man stands with his hands raised dramatically; the open mouth of his distorted face looks like a doorway to hell. A woman with a frightened face sits next to a round table. She’s considerably older than he is, but she’s too young to be his mother. Her hands are knitted together; the fingers of the right are nearly breaking the fingers of the left. But most expressive of all are her eyes: I plainly hear the horrible, inadmissible words of the sickly man reflected at the bottom of the woman’s eyes, and I also see suffering and contempt. She was horribly frightened at his words, but suddenly her depths flushed with contempt and disgust, that he had dared to say what he had said. A neurotic lover with a mother complex? A disgusting jealous scene? Or maybe a brother who called his sister a slut, or who cursed her for his ruined life, having found the guilty party at last? The frozen instant of a stranger’s time doesn’t want to give anything away; I see only as much as I can wrest from it by force. I won’t guess anything more, even if I were to dawdle here for hours. I quietly close the door and rattle more doorknobs. Yet another unlocked apartment, squalid and decorated with unmatched furniture whose colors clash. The trashed little hallway table is on its last legs; the corners of the shoe rack are battered and greasy papers are scattered on top of it. At the end of the corridor, a first grader with a shaven head is fixed to the keyhole, his thighs pressed together and one foot stepping on the other. A long string of saliva drips from the boy’s protruding tongue, which he has bitten in suspense. I carefully push open the door to the room and nearly cry out, I even recoil. Looking straight at me is a girl’s distorted face, covered in sweat and as pale as if strewn with chalk dust. It’s a corpse’s face — only by gathering all of my strength do I calm myself. She’s alive and isn’t about to die, but she looks like an embalmed corpse. Black circles under the eyes, lips crookedly pressed together, hollow cheeks. She stares at me shamelessly and angrily. The grubby, contemptuous corpse’s face is horribly incongruous with the rest of the scene; for a long time I can’t believe what I’m seeing. She smirks, her head thrown indifferently to the side, while a broad-shouldered, curly-haired, bandit-faced little bull has fallen upon her with his entire body, pressing her into the very corner of the sofa. There are no smells here, but nevertheless I sense how he reeks of vodka. The girl’s bent legs stick out from both the man’s sides — they are pale and bloodless, like some strange growths that don’t belong to her. But it’s her hands, dug into the lover’s neck, that are the most shocking. Nails caked with dirt, black dirty half-moons and peeling pink polish. I move clumsily, catching the head of the young spectator; his skull rings like an empty clay pitcher. His eyes are narrowed in horror and satisfaction; the thread of saliva continues to hang as it was. The girl’s eyes look at me without turning away; she looks like someone who has unexpectedly bit into a peppercorn.
Only out in the street do I remember that I left all the doors open. I cough as if I’m trying to retch. Something stirs in my chest, my ears ring; suddenly I feel drawn to Lolita’s place. I’ve known what I want for a long time. I want to see Lolita rooted to the spot. I’ve always wanted that. I’ve always wanted to secretly observe her from the sidelines. I cannot reconcile myself to the thought that sometimes she is by herself, that she no longer belongs to me. That she can do things I’ll never find out about. I crave, I desperately crave to take her by surprise, the way death takes us by surprise. I want to find Lolita frozen stiff, sprawled under someone’s body. To find her inert, unable to either deceive me or hide herself. I wouldn’t touch her, I wouldn’t do anything to her. I just want to catch her, to see everything in secret, under cover. There’s just one thing I want — to know everything.
If Vilnius isn’t going to move, I’m not going to be able to take it much longer. Frozen Vilnius invites me, begs me, to a festival of insanity. A person never answers for his thoughts, but in this inert Vilnius he begins to no longer answer for his actions, either. I really am dying to visit her and clarify her betrayal. I want her to deceive me. I would be disappointed if she would simply be sitting in an armchair.
But what if she’s moving too?
But no, probably not. I remember her husband’s studio, her strange pose and the pigeon momentarily frozen in flight. She didn’t move then, so she shouldn’t move now, either; she’s the same as the others. I would feel it, if she were moving.
No, nothing moves. On the other side of the avenue is the motionless Conservatory, next to it is Vilnius’s cheeriest house — its doors are flung open; a fat little kanukas with a puffy face got stuck in the doorway. I won’t go inside, really I won’t, I’ll just look at him from close up. The little kanukas looks like an animatrontic doll. I squeeze by his protruding belly, but I stop, afraid again, just inside the door. It’s been a long time since I last visited here. Would I still find my cell? The stairs invite me to climb them, but the offices don’t interest me. The guard by the door, his petrified finger jammed up his nose, isn’t of interest, either.