Never forget that we are all, in a certain sense, a bit Albanian. All of us are just a tad Lithuanian. And worst of all — every one of us, in the depths of our hearts, is a Vytautas Vargalys.
It seems to me that I actually know too much about VV. His and Lolita’s stories aren’t enough for me, I’m itching to tell about his father, and about his grandfather, and about her father and mother too.
The two of them were doomed before they ever met. If I were a writer, I would write a book about what the two of them could have been. In my opinion, that would be the only theme of a genuine book about Vilnius: what all of us could have been, if we hadn’t been turned into what we are.
Lolita showed up in our office four years ago, in her last year at college. She immediately attracted everyone’s attention with her quiet insolence and impossibly long legs. Because of these two things, the other women in the office hated her, up to the very end. And she hated all of us and would have been happiest living in a desert. They wouldn’t have hired Lolita at the office at all, but her father made calls to the right places, so everything was instantly straightened out.
By the way, about Lolita’s legs and other body parts. Call her a slut straight out, if you’re more comfortable with that, if you think it’s worth calling a person a slut just because he sells his body and not his soul, as is customary. But you will seem particularly old-fashioned — in these times of greater or lesser sexual freedom, a concept like that has no meaning whatsoever. Besides, she wasn’t a slut at all. She didn’t even look seductive. Maybe that’s why she sought to sleep with every man worth the attention. Furthermore, I wouldn’t say that she liked this change of partners all that much. It seemed to me she expressed her spite and contempt for men that way. She’d seduce them, and then kick them aside. They’d get a taste of what it’s like to be no more than a defenseless puppy, a puppy that’s petted at first, and then roughly driven away. I would say that Lolita squandered only her body, but her spirit remained innocent.
This is how I talk about a woman who led three great men to their deaths!
She latched onto VV like a leech; the first two weren’t enough for her. I actually wanted to warn him off, to deter him, but, unfortunately, VV was always beyond control. He was impelled to rush headlong towards doom. He was a madman.
On the other hand, only madmen can accomplish great things. They put their purpose on one side of the scale, themselves on the other, and the purpose always tips the scales.
By the way, I’m not taking it upon myself to decide. I’m Martynas Poška, a programmer by coercion, a collector of fortunes, the doleful clown of Vilnius. The mlog is not a collection of conclusions. It’s only a collection of facts.
Maybe it’s a good thing that I can only think seriously in fits and starts. You barely sense you’re about to have some time and you start spouting off senselessly. It’d be better to always feel the lack of time — then you’d set down what you really know in a hurry.
Now, post factum, many rush to proclaim VV a monster and a madman. People remember the oddities of his behavior and his ungovernable character. I really hate to philosophize, but I’m forced to declare that every one of our lives could very easily be portrayed as lunacy. All that’s needed is to tidy up a few things, be quiet about a thing or two, add a thing or two — not much; the very least will do.
For this reason, I state officially: VV was a man with an extremely healthy, extremely witty, and extremely well-educated mind.
I’m not by any means defending VV; I only defend the truth. The objective truth. That is the task of the mlog.
At one time, I was taken with intelligence tests. I had amassed a pile of them and bothered all of my acquaintances with them. I discovered that people are panic-stricken by things that could show their inadequacy. But VV took on the problems boldly and playfully. He cracked them like nuts. His IQ was one hundred sixty and still climbing; he made fun of the people who made up the tests and offered new ones of his own. No scale would be large enough to describe his intelligence.
So much is straight fact.
Now — about sexual perversions: if a person with that much intelligence sometimes acts in a way we don’t understand, couldn’t that mean he grasps principles of higher import, ones we cannot perceive?
At times he would be beset by ghosts. He would remember some participant in a long-ago incident and would want to explain something to him or ask him something. It would drive him totally crazy that he couldn’t talk to people who were long since dead. VV liked to say: we should all carry our dead in our pockets like a deck of cards, so if the need arises we could play the decisive game of poker.
In essence, VV was a hardened poker player, even though he never played cards in his life.
He would summon ghosts, but he couldn’t stand live witnesses to the past. When he came across someone he knew from his time in the prison camp, he would run away. Sometimes a neighbor from his childhood years would visit him, this woman named Giedraitienė, an alcoholic with a puffy face. VV would buy her off with a three-ruble note. He didn’t go to his grandfather’s funeral because he couldn’t have avoided meeting his father at the burial.
I’ll never understand his relationship with his father. At some point, VV’s father re-emigrated from Argentina; he works as a doorman at the restaurant in Druskininkai. No big deal — Russian princes used to work as doormen in Paris too, and he’s no prince. Sometimes I visit him and tell him about VV. I can’t imagine what I’ll tell him now.
VV behaved as if his father didn’t exist at all. The strangest thing was that his father submissively went along with this.
VV had a strange view of his past: the dead were more real to him than the living. The latter he simply ignored.
Stealthily, I begin painting the first portraits; apparently I secretly hope to paint the entire gallery. Just that it’s inadmissible to forget the most important of them all — the portrait of Vilnius.
The first draft:
Vilnius is a city of identical little cement boxes. A city of identical little clay figures. A city of identical tears and identical sperm. If some giant were to suddenly mix everything up completely, all the houses, the people, the tears, and the sperm, if he were to switch everything’s place and muddle it all up, absolutely nothing would change.
And that’s what’s the very worst — Vilnius hasn’t been capable of changing for a long time now.
It’s unbelievably difficult to begin VV’s story, so I look for excuses despite myself. Perhaps history can’t exist at all? “Life is a tale, told by an idiot, signifying nothing.” If that’s true, I’d really make a good storyteller. I’m sufficiently idiotic. My entire life proves this. The smart ones build houses and zoom around in Mercedes-Benzes. Or defend dissertations and receive decorations. Or give speeches from podiums and ride in special automobiles to special stores.
But I was, and still remain, an idiot. I had a sacred idea. I was such an idiot that I believed in humanity’s sacred future. After little Nikita censured Mister Joseph’s actions, I thought things in this world could change for the better. I decided the new Soviet society would inevitably need a new kind of human. I resolved to dedicate my life to the education and raising of children. This was my idée fixe. This was my magnum opus. I even had myself a child, whom I swore to teach only by my system. This was to be the first modern human.