I step into the room and see immediately. She is lying the same way I was lying not so long ago. It’s just that she looks different. I’ve never seen such a sight before. Nowhere. Never. Not even in a dream. I feel absolutely nothing. Not horror, not pain, nothing. I’m not hot and I’m not cold, my brain is working soberly and calmly. Lola is lying on her back, her legs spread unnaturally, because the tendons in her thighs have been cut through. Their whitish ends are clearly visible amid the bloody flesh. The flat belly is unmercifully cleaved, the guts pulled out. As if that weren’t enough, the intestines are sliced into pieces. My brain calmly registers only the strong smell of the sacrificial altar, not the stockyards. I didn’t sacrifice her; I didn’t tear her guts into pieces. I didn’t rip the kidneys out of her belly and cut them into thin, round slices.
Who did this? And why?
Her liver, spleen, and lungs are cut to pieces and thrown about the entire room. Every single one of Lolita’s little pieces is screaming, calling for me. Cursing me for leaving her alone. I go up closer and kneel next to her. Next to her corpse. She is gone, but this I simply cannot grasp. Her breasts are cut crosswise to the very ribs. I search for Lolita’s face, but it’s not there. Her eyes are poked out, her nose and ears cut off. Even the hair, Lolita’s gorgeous hair, is ripped out by the strand and flung around her head — around that which once was her head. I look over her body scattered around the floor, the miserable remains of her body. A single place, for some reason, remains untouched. In the middle of the mad knife’s work protrudes the mound of Venus, and beneath it — the vagina, not a finger laid on it. The knife with the darkened blade lies right there. I touch it with the tip of my finger. The blade is still warm and damp.
They chose the most horrible revenge possible. I look at Lolita’s remains: I want to take them for myself, to carry them off somewhere and hide them. Why didn’t I think of such an end the moment I first met her? A man condemned to death has no right to look for comrades. I bend down to her slashed lips — this kiss is truly the last. I take the knife into my hands. Its handle is still warm. I should probably slit my throat — even wider than Lolita’s throat is cut. The smell of the altar doesn’t fade; I probably look like a prophet lost in thought.
A car engine rumbles outside. It’s a familiar sound — it was just that sound I heard not so long ago. Footsteps stomp outside the door, but I don’t even budge. It’s all the same to me now. One after another, five men sidle inside. I look at them indifferently. What do they want here?
In the light of an invisible flash, I suddenly grasp the entire plot. So it is Their revenge. The absolute worst you could possibly think of. They waited for an opportunity for a long time. I thought I had weighed all the possible scenarios, but no imagination could devise one like this. I literally see how they had waited for me to return to the cottage. Which one was the last to look in through the window? A familiar, a remarkably familiar face. No one, no one in the entire world will believe I’m innocent. No one will believe me, no matter what I say. Not even if I were to speak of Them. Particularly if I were to speak of Them. At last, They’ve swallowed me whole. They couldn’t kanuk me, so they’ve mercilessly devoured me. I sit next to Lolita’s defiled body while one of the arrivals starts snapping a camera. So far they haven’t even touched me. I can look at them calmly. Three round little faces with even rounder eyeballs, set into collars with rounded corners. But the fifth one interests me the most — a gray-haired man with colonel’s epaulets. I try to remember what Giedraitis Junior’s face was like back then, but in vain. I remember nothing, absolutely nothing at all. There never was a Bolius or a prison camp; grandfather’s altar never existed. There was no Gediminas stirring his appendages like a smashed cockroach. And I never was.
“Put on some clothes, will you!” the colonel says angrily.
I dress leisurely; God is watching over me. They are of no concern to me; they do not exist and never did. Father’s drawings never were, nor Madam Giedraitienė in the morning dew. There were no cattle cars strewing little white papers. There was no Irena, no Martynas, no library’s labyrinth. There never was a Camus or a Plato. There was no Lolita. There was no me.
The fat faces lead me to the car and shove me into the back seat. For the first time, I see a tiny little kanukas stronghold from the inside. The greenish curtains and darkened glass. There was no Circe of Old Town, there were no three big-eyed little Jews. There was no Mindaugas, Gediminas, or Vytautas the Great. Lithuania never was.
“Let’s go,” snarls the colonel, sitting down in the front seat.
The engine rumbles. I’m pressed in on both sides by the fleshy fat faces. And inside the car hovers a sweetish smell of rotting fall leaves. A strong, warm smell of rotting leaves.
Suddenly I think that despite it all, there has to be a God on high. There must exist some being who knows I am innocent.
The cottages run by, retreating backwards. And a bit further on, in a deep, deep pit, shine the first lights of exhausted, moribund Vilnius.
There you have it — the end of the Vargalys clan.
PART TWO. FROM THE MLOG
Martynas Poška. October 14–29, 197. .
Everyone keeps asking me about Vytautas Vargalys. But what can I say? “The man has killed the thing he loved, and so the man must die.”
It started raining just after the devastating events at the garden. Vilnius is steeped in mud that reeks of sulfur. It’s as if the devils of hell had spat up everything. Picking linden blossoms in the city’s environs has been forbidden for quite some time now, unless you have an urge to slowly poison yourself. When civilizations die, even nature opposes them. Like it or not, you feel like the chronicler of the dying Lithuanian civilization.
My height — five foot seven and a half inches. I cut my hair in a crew cut. At some point this hairstyle will return, victorious, to Vilnius’s streets, so I’ll instantly become fashionable.
I know, I know, no one is interested in me. No one asks how I’m doing. Everyone just keeps asking about Vytautas Vargalys.
News bulletin: I don’t get myself involved in mysterious and dreadful affairs. I don’t cut people to pieces. I can’t even manage to write a genuine log. I call it the mlog — after my name.
And what should I write in it now?
What can I say about Vytautas Vargalys? Probably very little of the real truth: I don’t know what he was like in his childhood. You can’t really say much about a person if you don’t know what he was like as a child. It’s difficult for me to talk about him. I can only relate facts with certainty. Probably that’s appropriate when writing a log. But writing an mlog?