The cockroaches in the den VV had set up between the library’s bookshelves. Cockroaches in the brains of the dead. Cockroaches in all of my acquaintances’ apartments—bold, menacing, invincible. The cockroaches of Vilnius are no longer an object of nature, rather a purely metaphysical one. It’s impossible to overcome them. The best poisons from Holland and Germany affect them once and only once. They return after a few days and just get fat on the poison. They’re secretly watching us when we empty our bowels in the toilet or make love to women. There’s even cockroaches in birthing centers. They accompany us from the first moments of life. And accompany us to our very deathbed. Cockroaches breed even inside sealed refrigerators.
I visited VV’s mother’s former nurses anyway. They met me by the gate, as if they had been waiting there for a long time. Little brother seemed enormously suspicious: he demanded I show my documents. The two of them lived on a farm, and where the village of Užubaliai itself was tucked away, I never did find out. Apparently a minimalist artist had decorated the interior of the cottage: a table, chairs, and a shelf. Even the curtains were patternless. The owners looked like ascetics from the Middle Ages: thin, tight-lipped, untalkative.
Like a magician, Julius (that’s how he introduced himself) pulled out a bottle, filled three shot glasses and snapped his fingers:
“We’ll drink the first one on an empty stomach!” he said threateningly.
It was pure grain alcohol. Julius glanced at me more agreeably and poured seconds. Janė (that was his sister’s name) somehow, who knows when, managed to quickly cut up some sausage. Outside the window a red sun was solemnly setting.
“You see, this guy was just here,” Julius said after a silence, “who was pretending to collect material for an encyclopedia. But he gave off a familiar smell.”
That was how I found out that the detective had already managed to make a visit.
“So, what are you collecting?” Julius inquired rudely.
Suddenly I decided I had to tell them about my collection and my mlog. They understood everything immediately.
“Oh, you want to understand the world, for whatever that’s worth,” Julius stated calmly.
We drank grain alcohol all night long, and the two of them kept on talking. They never went to church, so the confessions they had never made had been accumulating for years. They didn’t spare themselves or defend themselves. They really did make confession: they tried to remember all their sins, not hide them.
After the war, the Vargalys house was left without owners. The two of them drank the fine wines that were left behind and paged through incomprehensible books, until the Russian soldiers arrived with some guy who pronounced them Vargalyses.
“So we’re part Vargalys too,” Julius smiled wryly.
“We sat out two months in the can for being Vargalyses.”
“Why didn’t you deny it?” I asked, somewhat drunk already.
“What’s the difference? When they found out who we really are, they sent us to Siberia, anyway.”
“Bullshit,” Janė suddenly interrupted. “We both wanted to somehow atone for our sins against the Vargalyses.”
That’s how their great confession began. Janė and Julius were abandoned as children; they went forth into life from an orphanage. The mythology of orphanages is difficult for those of us with parents to understand. We can’t comprehend the belief penetrating the orphan’s soul that he is, at the very least, a prince kidnapped by fairies.
Orphanage mythology stated that Janė and Julius were left by an expensively dressed lady who swore to come back for them later. Actually, they don’t even know if they really are brother and sister. All their lives they felt a secret attraction for each other, but they lived like brother and sister. The Vargalyses took them in as servants. According to the orphanage mythology, they seemed like they could be Janė and Julius’s parents. And “could be,” to those throwaways meant “probably were.” Slowly it began to mean, “without doubt they are.” This was obvious nonsense for many reasons, but it didn’t seem to matter to Janė and Julius.
They remembered the Vargalyses with sympathy and a strange, pathological love. Telling erotic stories was among Julius’s duties; he had to tell them to VV’s mother while giving her a daily massage. She utterly loved erotic stories, even though she herself, both of them confirmed, didn’t sleep with her husband after VV was born. Janė had to suffer with VV’s father’s illnesses. He was a terrible hypochondriac; he surrounded himself with potions and pills.
“It was Vytie I was sorriest for,” Janė explained. “They would really torture him.”
The mother taught VV every day—up until he was grown. Two, three hours at a time. Who knows what she would teach him, but she didn’t leave him a free minute. She was a maniac mother: she was afraid that if her son were separated from her for even a minute he would instantly be ruined.
“I’d feed him secretly,” Janė burst out, “The lady was a vegetarian and a dieter, so she forced Vytie to starve too.”
The two of them considered VV their younger brother. God’s ways are mysterious: the two of them loved and protected VV, but began hating his parents more and more. They figured everything this way: the Vargalyses are trying to atone for their guilt; they don’t pile them up with work, pay well, but won’t acknowledge what mattered most: that they are their parents. This paranoid idea slowly took over Janė and Julius’s entire being; they rose and went to bed with a single thought in their heads: how to take revenge on their traitorous parents.
Even now they couldn’t agree as to which one had thought of killing the Vargalyses first.
Julius’s pure alcohol slowly did its dirty work: it all seemed unreal to me, you’d think I’d been listening to some legends. I saw VV’s mother proudly pacing the house’s winding corridors. She wanted to do good for everyone, but didn’t know how. I saw VV’s father: pale, his hands trembling, but able to kill a bull with a single blow of his fist, if need be. I saw the young VV too: frail, downtrodden, frightened of who knows what, pressing up against Janė, who protected her little brother. Suddenly I noticed Giedraitienė’s absence; suddenly I remembered that her tale was completely different.
“Yeah, there was a cow like that around,” Janė confirmed. “She was dying to charm everyone—even the barnyard animals. She’d mince around even in front of our dog. And her boy, they say, was a spy for the stribai.”
“What aunt? What sister?” Julius eyes widened. “Why, she’s a Pole! Her maiden name’s Stefanovič!”
I no longer tried to make any sense of it or understand it; all I did was listen avidly. Janė and Julius related how VV’s mother drowned herself. At that moment, the war was driving exhausted uniformed men through their yard. The first to appear were the Germans.
“Why are you retreating?” Vargalienė asked them all. “Why are you retreating when you have technology like that? What—do the Russians have better?”
“Technology’s useless, ma’am,” explained a polite little Silesian German. “My machine gun jams when it overheats, but they just keep coming and coming. This week I’ve mowed down some thousand Russians, but they just keep coming and coming, sticking out their bare chests. Technology has its limits, but the Russians are limitless. We don’t have that many bullets, ma’am.”
The next morning the Germans moved out, and Vargalienė announced out loud:
“We’ll be overrun by locusts, giant locusts. A single one can bite off a person’s head.”
VV’s father, forgetting his potions, was sipping champagne.
“But they’ve already been here,” he kept saying. “They’re not locusts. At best they’re stinking, starving, dirty little people.”
But Vargalienė didn’t hear anything; she just kept repeating that it’d be better to kill yourself than to wait for the locusts to devour you.
Janė and Julius were still considering how to execute their metaphysical decision. However, VV’s mother beat them to it; she drowned herself li
ke some Ophelia. They pulled her out of the creek themselves; they were the ones who rolled her into the wagon. Vargalys’s pockets were bulging with banknotes. There wasn’t a single soul around. VV had disappeared somewhere; the two of them should have knocked off his father (their father), but they couldn’t do it.
“She was lying on the hay with her head tilted to the side and looking at us with glassy eyes. I kept waiting for her to open her mouth and say: ‘Locusts.’ I forgot everything; all I could do was look at those glassy eyes. I still dream of them.”
“Me too,” Janė echoed.
VV’s father rode off to the west with his wife’s corpse, completely forgetting his son. The wagon creaked off after the setting sun and melted into oblivion. All that was left lying in the yard was a graceful, austere, thousand-pound sterling note.
Only now do I understand why VV hated his father so: he couldn’t forgive him for forgetting him.
Most of all I regretted mentioning my mlog to them. Up until then, no one knew about it. I’ve been jumping up in my sleep with a nightmare for several days now. What the hell got into me?
By the way, don’t you find locusts remarkably similar to cockroaches?
The locusts and cockroaches so affected me that I got interested in all sorts of abominations: Old Town garbage cans, backed-up sewer pipes, and the city’s public toilets. The latter are interesting in a purely semantic sense. The writings on the walls of toilets are the last refuge for free speech in the Ass of the Universe. A person squatting down to make an effort manages to give birth to a crumb of truth together with his excrement. Apparently, the need for it is physiological.
Unfortunately, homo lithuanicus doesn’t even keep a toilet log. Practically all of the writing in Vilnius’s public toilets is in Russian. This isn’t the result of etiquette or upbringing. Homo lithuanicus simply can’t even poop the truth. He can’t even write up toilet walls.
This is an essential characteristic of homo lithuanicus. Muscovites of all sorts still hope it’s possible to say this or that, to change this or that, to wait for something. Homo lithuanicus knows a priori that it’s absolutely impossible to say, expect, or hope for anything. That’s why he doesn’t waste his breath unnecessarily; he’s supposedly saving his spiritual potential. It’s just that no one knows what for.
What do I have in mind? Concrete results. The world knows of some dozen Russian writers. But they don’t know of any Lithuanians, and they won’t, because the Lithuanians don’t waste their breath over anything; they’re supposedly saving their spiritual strength.
Homo lithuanicus, unable to express himself freely, would rather carry his soul to the grave without it ever being put to use. That’s how nations die.
By the way, about the extinction of nations. The Hungarians, Czechs, or Serbians one meets, with a single voice, claim that we should be proud of being Lithuanian. You’ve preserved your language with such a monster next door! You don’t realize yourselves what a heroic deed you’ve accomplished! Even the Irish lost their language!
But that’s meager consolation. The Irish remained Irish all the same, while language . . . Perhaps I’m horribly mistaken, but if a few Lithuanian Joyces would show up, or a Beckett and a half—let them write in Swahili for that matter. But let them at last write, paint, or play music.
But they don’t write, don’t paint, and don’t play music.
There’s something here I don’t understand.
Homo lithuanicus, unfortunately, realized only too well that to lose is very easy and comfortable. Then you can blame everything in the world—just not yourself. Lord knows, it’s really comfortable. And gracefully, elegantly sad. Homo lithuanicus tends to do nothing but feel sorry for himself and bemoan his melancholy end.
I was so affected by my trip to the Vargalyses’ past that I even forgot VV’s most recent exploits. I no longer dreamed of Lolita with her disheveled hair, or that wretched house in the garden. I took up an interest in the past.
I don’t get along with my subconscious. It interferes with writing my mlog. My brain’s probably full of cockroaches. Or maybe it’s simply gotten overgrown with fat. It must be that Lithuania cannot give birth to an mlog genius.
Beset by these kinds of thoughts, I ran into Šapira, an old Jew and VV’s former neighbor. VV called him Ahasuerus. That was irony, apparently. Quite the Eternal Jew—the embodiment of austere elegance and stable business. Šapira’s shoes shine even in the worst slush, his suit never gets wrinkled, and his hair doesn’t get disheveled. He looks half the age he really is. Šapira is a walking calculator, a walking clock, and a walking encyclopedia of the black market. VV used to play chess with him, even though he didn’t otherwise care for chess.
“Such a clever head for playing, and he fritters his time away,” Šapira used to say regretfully when he lost.
He would beat everyone else, so he would invite VV to a duel over and over again.
“Fool,” he would say, losing yet again. “You should honor a gift from God. With that kind of talent, you could be a millionaire.”
I don’t think Šapira was really all that mercenary. He merely thought that if you had an aptitude for that kind of business, you should use it.
Šapira turned out to be virtually the only person in Vilnius who didn’t in the least believe VV could cut a person into bits.
“If I were in the investigator’s shoes, I’d check out all the Narutis thugs,” he mused sadly. “Comrade Vargalys used to like hanging out there, but he turned into a normal person later. I’d think the dregs of Narutis hated him for that. It could have been their revenge.”
Šapira is always right. I had no right to leave out an object of such significance as the Narutis. VV was always attracted by its characters. He felt like a pig in shit at the Narutis.
What pig, in what shit?
In the old days I used to go there myself, out of curiosity. I would drink some dreadful slop with this ex-security agent Mackus. After Beria was shot, Mackus was responsible for the destruction of NKVD documents. He burned everything he was supposed to, but he kept the files on several acquaintances for his own amusement. He showed me the record of VV’s interrogation. That’s the type that attracted VV to the Narutis.
The Narutis wasn’t a bit changed. The same grotesque figures drinking the same grotesque slop by the tumblerful. I never felt comfortable there. I spat out the last gulp of wine straight into the tumbler and got up, but someone commandingly put a hand on my shoulder. Turning around, I should have gasped, but I just smiled wryly.
“Let’s go for a walk,” the drab detective said hollowly. “It’s not at all far.”
He didn’t explain anything, didn’t ask anything. To tell the truth, it was all obvious to both of us; we were too lazy to pretend. He took me to Teodoras Žilys’s studio.
We turned into a gloomy side street; he went first. It occurred to me that this detective was ideally faceless. No one could paint his portrait in words. You could describe his walk, his gestures, you could even characterize his smell—but not his face, not his eyes. He had no face; he didn’t even wear a mask. I don’t think he was human at all.
He was a bleeding hemorrhoid of the Ass of the Universe.
It’s difficult not to be astonished when a hemorrhoid starts pontificating.
“We’re walking in the same footsteps,” the detective’s back said to me. “God has hitched us both to the same wagon.”
The Old Town pigeons cowered at his words; cats in the gateways arched their backs in fear.
“What are you looking for? What are you looking for, my man?” the hemorrhoid’s back continued. “Was he your friend? Buddy? Lover? What are we looking for in this world, pal? Why are we tracking down these cold leads?”
I followed in his footsteps, even though nothing was forcing me to act that way. I could have spat at the hemorrhoidal back and gone on my way. I could have flown off together with Vilnius’s grimy pigeons. But I followed behind him. Some excited women were shoving by
the shoe store: apparently, something had been delivered.
“Maybe we’re looking for his diary? His notes? A tape recording? A sign?” The detective turned into a gloomy gateway without even glancing to see if I was following. With commanding movements, he marched up some creaking stairs. He spent an instant picking the lock.
”No man’s land,” he announced, finally turning around. “The studio doesn’t really belong to the wife, but no one’s agreed to move into a dead man’s quarters. What are you staring at? Come on in. I’ll use you like litmus paper. Like an indicator.”
Teodoras’s artist’s quarters didn’t look at all forsaken. Obviously, Lola and VV stopped in here. The bunk squeezed between the sculptures was unmade; if you wanted to, you could see the marks of a naked body on it. At the head of the bunk loomed Teodoras’s famous Iron Wolf. I winced when I saw its head had been taken off. The headless symbol of Vilnius. And we are all Vilnius’s headless wolf cubs.
I stared in wonder at the nude drawings of Lola; all the walls were covered with them, from floor to ceiling. It was only Lola here; she reigned supreme. The studio was overflowing with her divine nudity.
“You’ve slept with her yourself?” the detective asked brusquely.
There’s no way I can devote myself to my mlog. Now I’m hindered by a disgusting mortification I simply cannot forget.
Lola was visiting me at the time, like always, sitting with her fabulous legs stretched out. Things were particularly difficult for her: VV had fallen into one of his deep crises, and at those times he wouldn’t spare even Lola. She looked like a mangled bird. I simply felt terribly sorry for her. I kneeled down next to her and stroked her head like a little sister’s; all I wanted by it was to console her. She raised her eyes and fixed her penetrating, hypnotizing gaze on me.
“I understand,” she said after a moment, “I understand everything.”
Slowly, lazily, she stretched out her hand and ran it over my short hair. I never thought a person’s hand could be so soft.
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