When I’m asked if he could murder someone, and so brutally too, I answer honestly: no, he couldn’t murder anyone.
But I’m quiet about something else: he could have murdered his mania, his past, his menacing ghost. That’s just what he did. But I don’t say this to anyone and I won’t. They wouldn’t understand. They just hunger for bread and circuses. They hunger for blood — someone else’s, of course. To them, Vargalys is nothing more than a live sensation, a monster of Vilnius, stirring up our sleepy anthill for a moment.
I’m not interested in ants. I’m interested in humans. And I haven’t known that many of them. They’re so rare.
I state with conviction: Vytautas Vargalys was a human.
I first laid eyes on him some sixteen or seventeen years ago. I was a student at the university. I hadn’t started my collection yet. I naïvely believed it was possible to search for truth, to honestly seek virtue in this decaying world.
I’m not at all ashamed to repeat the words “virtue,” “truth,” and “honesty,” over and over.
I ran into Vytautas Vargalys on the main boulevard. He looked like a character out of some spectral carnival. An athlete of nearly six-foot-six, dressed in operatic tramp’s rags, with the puffy face of a drunk. Greasy hair down to his shoulders. In those days, men didn’t have long hair; the hippies only showed up some five years later.
In my mind’s eye, Vytautas Vargalys appears in innumerable guises, but mostly I remember him the way he was the first time I saw him. Looking like a bum soaked in cheap wine, with the eyes of a suffering philosopher. He felt my glance immediately, as if he had had eyes in the back of his head. He always did have more than two of them. He turned to me, sullenly looked me over as if he were measuring or weighing, and said in a voice that had been ruined by drink:
“Make a donation of twenty kopecks to the Villon of Vilnius!”
Yes, this was after the monetary reform. He didn’t ask for a ruble in the old currency, but twenty kopecks in the new.
I didn’t give him any kopecks. I don’t support drunks on principle.
Later he told me that if I had given him that handout, the two of us would have never met again. But fate would have it otherwise.
And immediately after me, Lolita went up to him. I can’t be mistaken: I would recognize her anywhere, at any time, in whatever form. I would recognize her even now, even though she’s in the kingdom of the dead.
That long-legged ten-year-old girl walked gracefully by, turned around, and came back. She calmly looked over that monster — he was twice her size — and stretched out a coin that was pressed in her palm. In those days, ten-year-old girls didn’t have elegant wallets and purses.
That really was Lolita. Her path crossed the convoluted route of Vytautas Vargalys’s life over and over again. Wandering the streets of Vilnius separately, they considered themselves independent. But actually one drew nearer the other like hapless electrons in a computer circuit.
I hate computers. They’re perfect idiots: obedient and brainless, but capable of performing their tasks flawlessly. They do not doubt, and they have no opinions. The Ruling Old Folks’ Asylum, during their sleepless nights of drivel, dreams that people could be exactly the same.
The Ruling Old Folks’ Asylum isn’t a concrete government or anything like it — it’s all the elderly mean-eyed guys who crave control over us, who want to dictate their will to us: it’s the head of the apartment cooperative, it’s reserve colonels, it’s sauna directors. This vindictive and evil old folks’ asylum is a unique contemporary phenomenon, something that never existed before, and never will again. It drags us backwards, restrains and impairs us in every way imaginable. Watch out for mean-eyed old folks!
From now on, I shall refer to the Ruling Old Folks’ Asylum simply as ROF. For brevity’s sake. And Vytautas Vargalys I shall call VV.
I already know how an mlog most differs from a log. A log is written for the future. But if there is no future — you don’t have one, he doesn’t have one, no one has a future — you’re stuck writing an mlog. No one will read it. So there’s no need to dissemble, to twist the facts in someone’s favor, the way it’s done in logs. There’s no need to write, for that matter. Or even talk. It’s enough just to think. That’s what I do: I think all the time, but I’m as mute as a fish thrown out on shore.
I wouldn’t be able to write a genuine log. My thoughts never want to fall in a logical order. They’re terribly incoherent and tangled. They’re like pebbles on the seashore: the ones broken from the same rock are lying a long way apart, while nearby lie completely different ones, of different colors, that seem to have nothing in common.
Those pebbles want to reflect or embody the entire boundless sea, but there’s very few of them — too few to encompass those boundless waters.
I put these metaphors and similar beauties into words just for myself, for my mlog. No one would think I have it in me. Everyone considers me a biting ironist, perhaps even a bit of a clown. That doesn’t hurt me and doesn’t get in the way of my life.
But I have never been a clown. Irony isn’t a mask; it’s merely a means of self-defense. Like judo, like karate. Not a circus trick, but a means of defending one’s health, and actually one’s life, from attackers.
It follows that self-irony is a means of defending one’s life from oneself.
It’s all very well for people who can grasp the whole shebang at once, in whose heads everything relates harmoniously. They think as a matter of course; they don’t have to exert themselves on that account.
But I have to collect myself every time. By the time I stammer out the sorriest little thought, I have to recall thoughts I’ve mulled over earlier, and get myself in the right frame of mind. But the time suitable for this, suitable places, and suitable moods are few and far between.
I would say that I write my so-called mlog in fits and starts. In this torn-to-shreds world of ours, even people’s thoughts are tattered. It’s hopeless to search for harmony, grace, or majesty in them.
I spew thoughts the way Vilnius’s gypsy women spit sunflower seed husks. My thoughts are soaked in spittle and chewed up. Still, it’s a good thing; at least there are those spittle-soaked husks.
I know scores of Vilniutians who don’t in the least grasp what a thought is. What are their heads stuffed with? Heaven only knows. Little worries, calculations, banalities, and confusion.
Once a former classmate, well into his cups, opened his heart to me. I wouldn’t know how to think, he explained to me, even if I wanted to. But I don’t want to. I’m told to just repeat someone else’s words and not ask any questions. So, that’s what I do. It’s not hard at all, but one question keeps bothering me: what am I? I’m not a human — obviously, humans are entirely different. But what am I then?
That was probably the first time I thought to myself about what distinguishes a homo lithuanicus from a normal person.
Half the world knows what a homo sovieticus is (excepting homo sovieticus himself). However, no one has studied homo lithuanicus, or even homo Vilnensis. These species matter as much to the future of mankind as to its history.
Mankind should be grateful to the Lithuanians that they exist. But it will never forgive them if they do not describe their experience of existence, if they don’t introduce the entire world to it.
Only a Lithuanian is qualified to write the opus “What is the Ass of the Universe.”
The history of the great nations has been explored backwards and forwards. It’s impossible to learn anything more from them. It’s paradoxical, but humanity knows much more about various archaic tribes than it does about the history of European minorities — that quintessence of injustice, absurdity, and errors. The world may be doomed for the simple reason that no one noticed our plight in time. An ethnologist who diligently researched some Albanians or another would be much more useful than one who had written up hundreds of obscure African tribes.