LITMIR.BIZ

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in, but I didn’t have the strength to stop. Returning to Vilnius after nine years, ostensibly released to freedom, I couldn’t live just any old way: I no longer knew how to live. I had never been destined to experience freedom. I was the slave of a single, sole idea, and the worst of it was—for a long, long time I didn’t know what idea. I understood just one thing: everyone lives in error, the world doesn’t behave the way it should; once upon a time it erred, and it can’t manage to fix its great mistake. Why did I, even though I had been exonerated, have to wander the garbage dumps like a stray dog, while the person (or dragon?) whom I was once supposed to hunt relished life in the radiance of absolute power? At that time I thought of nothing but him. Now I think about him too.

      “Anyone can grab a pistonmachine and spray in every direction,” Bitinas’s long, bare head says softly. “Any fool. That’s not your destiny, my dear Vargalys. You’re destined for the great dragon hunt. Think about him, think only about him. Dream of him, become one with him, my son. Devour him, like he devours Lithuania. Drag him out of his stinking tank . . .”

      Why, to what purpose was I assigned ordeals that made me doubt afterwards whether there is a human in the world at all? I doubted whether humanity is, on the whole, fit to exist. I couldn’t understand who devised that horrible mechanism, or who controls it. The idea of a merciful God is absurd: if God exists, he is a madman and a sadist; he needs to be fought. The Buddhist theory of inescapable pain doesn’t explain anything, it’s merely an observation. The abyss of the Apocalypse is an effective metaphor—but who can get concerned about all the world’s inevitable end? No, the explanation had to be here; I searched for it within myself and without. Nothing else concerned me. Not even myself. Nothing! I wasn’t intimidated by the puffy faces of my drinking partners, the bloody knives that could stab me too, or the grotesque sluts indifferently smearing fetid unguent on hardened chancres in my full view. I was on the other side of everything. And still I drank, Lord of mine, how I drank!

      Probably I approached the secret regardless, approached along the paths of death and insanity, gathering horrible experience grain by grain. It has been said that to kiss a leper all over is a holy sacrifice. It has been said that after long prayer and fasting, the Holy Virgin reveals herself. I sought that in my own way. Who can appreciate the sensation you experience when you watch your penis penetrate the rotten vagina of a syphilitic? Who tells the truth about the revelations that beset you after a week of drinking, when the vodka for sobering up runs short? I realized I was drowning, but I held it sacred that at the very bottom, before releasing the last gasp of air, I would find the answer. And I kept drinking. At the end of the inclined plane a church waited for me, Vilnius’s Basilican Church. I very well remember the torn-down crosses in a corner of the courtyard and the walls sullenly bending in on me, ready to collapse at any moment. The old churches of Vilnius are desecrated in various ways—some as warehouses, some as museums of atheism. A little factory that made the crudest wine had been set up in that one. I came across a breach in the fence and slipped in with the entire gang; I could drink without restraint. Inside, contorted piping branched about, grim vats loomed, and dust reigned. The dust of dust. The drunken guards slept it off right there, on the stone floor, with their greasy faces turned to the vandalized altar. We would sit around a brimming vat like devils and drink to the point of insanity. The wine there was brewed from anything—from rotten fruit, from garbage, even, it seems to me, from the church’s sticky dust. They must obscure everyone’s intellect at whatever cost. I spent my nights right in the church; I wanted to meet my end there. The time and space of Vilnius were deranged. I would sit down on a broken chair in some dump, and I’d end up in the church next to a bucket of garbage wine. Occasionally I would be surrounded by talking animals or the chopped-off heads of people with little legs; sometimes Plato would climb out of the church walls—wearing a dingy cap with a peak and a leather jacket—the harsh commissar of the kanukai. There was only one way to determine what was a hallucination and what was reality—to drink still more, then the hallucinations would usually disappear.

      I nevertheless prayed my holy virgin into existence. I don’t know when she presented herself for the first time, there couldn’t be a first time anyway—Vilnius’s time was completely confused. Irena emerged from the fog, gazing at me pitifully. Sometimes she would come arm-in-arm with Plato, half-naked, vulgarly made up. I would seriously ponder why that pederast Plato gave up boys and broke his own famously declared principles. I would down a glass and still another glass, but only Plato would disappear, Irena wouldn’t vanish, and one day I woke up not in a nook of the church, but on a folding bed in her apartment.

      She lived in a decaying room, a former nun’s cell; her window looked straight out at the breach in the wine factory’s fence. To this day I still don’t know why she stopped me on the very edge. I was a drunken scum with puffy eyes. More than once I again fought with headless figures or poisonous white rabbits. More than once I again climbed into the ruinous breach in the fence. But Irena didn’t order me to do anything, didn’t preach, and didn’t scold. She simply opened my eyes. The road of my life was truly unique: I had already almost acquired the second sight, but I didn’t have the first; I had never known the ordinary world that everyone sees. It was only thanks to Irena that I experienced for the first time what a friend is, what a woman is. She was my friend for a long time—that one and only, the true one, a part of your own self. Only Irena forced me to realize that in this world a man means nothing without a woman.

      Up until then I didn’t know what a woman was, I hadn’t had the time to perceive it. Janė wasn’t my woman, she wasn’t anyone’s woman; she was the live embodiment of a vagina, a mystical symbol, the goddess of a teenager’s wet dreams. Madam Giedraitienė wasn’t a woman—merely a voluptuous female, a voracious, sadistic slave driver. I didn’t have the time to know a real woman, and the camp wrecked everything for good. Months upon months, years upon years, I didn’t so much as see them. They slowly turned into mythological beings capable of anything—maybe even of bringing the dead to life. I wasn’t even able to dream of women. I would dream of gigantic birds with breasts swaying to the sides and women’s faces. Those women-birds would surround me, greedily stretching their long necks at me, wanting to peck at me, peck at me, peck out my masculinity . . . Released to freedom, every woman I met seemed miraculous but intimidating at the same time. They were all like unfathomable, unattainable beings from another world. I was afraid to go into the street because they walked there, I feared that fairy-tale world where women walked around as if it were nothing. I didn’t know how to behave, what to do; I didn’t believe it really was that way. It couldn’t be that way. It wasn’t just horrible to touch a woman, even accidentally; it was horrible to speak to her, or even look her in the eyes. Maybe I would have finally ended up in the madhouse that way, but three bitches of the ground floor snatched me in time. I don’t remember why I gave myself up to them, why I didn’t get scared they would feed on me (even they looked miraculous to me). They adroitly cured me: in place of the beings of my dreams, the goddesses of legends, I found a dirty, stinking female who wanted only money and an iron penis. I would find the money somewhere, and my thing suited them too—although it wasn’t made of iron, but rather with a copper end.

      And after all that, after a hundred months of drunkenness, Irena suddenly showed up: tall, slim, agile, with eyes as black as tar. I don’t know if she was pretty. Probably not. Could that have been of consequence? Does it matter how my Irena’s legs, breasts, or her face’s oval looked? If someone had inquired about her figure at the beginning of our life together, I would have knocked him out cold. Who would dare to analyze whether a Madonna’s body is sexy?

      I would tell her everything. That’s a huge thing—the opportunity to tell at least one person absolutely everything (now there’s no such person near). Irena wasn’t afraid of me, even though I threw out all the bile, the blackness, and the pain inside me. She got to see the disgusting wound—teeming with quivering, satiated little worms—inside me. But she didn’t retreat. She was like a spring in which I could wash my soul without polluting it. It was impossible to pollute her. She bravely took on a part of my load, and her narrow little shoulders didn’t so much as tremble. I could trust her completely. She gave birth to me.

      Life was difficult, but we were the happiest people on earth. I remember the banged-up buckets in which I carried water, because the only tap was outside. A Polish tap; grandfather wouldn’t

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