LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

of the hospital room, he moans and rocks his bandaged hand like a baby.

      “Grandfather, can I help?”

      “I can still walk,” say his angry, narrow lips, “look out for yourself.”

      Staggering, he crosses the room; he is followed by perhaps ten pairs of old, feeble eyes. Along the ground hovers an oppressive smell of sweat and carbolic acid. Grandfather is making his way down the narrow corridor by now, bracing himself constantly against the wall.

      “When I was fifty years old, you were born,” says his hunched back, “Now you’re fifty yourself, and who has been born to your son? Where is your son? Where are your grandchildren?”

      The nauseating smell of corpses emanates from the beds lined up in the hall. The eyes of the live corpses next to the wall follow us. The hall is jammed full of patients, they moan and writhe like little worms.

      “Give me a cig,” says grandfather’s trembling chin.

      He blinks frequently from the smoke, but he doesn’t cough. He carefully looks to the sides, leans down over the stair railings, and finally he raises his withered head next to your ear:

      “There are eleven carcasses in my room. At least seven are Poles.”

      He stares at you without blinking, testing if it’s possible to trust you with the great secret.

      “Three of them are pretending to be Lithuanians,” he explains further. “They’ve invented Lithuanian last names for themselves. They don’t speak Polish. But I saw through them: they’re secret Poles. The secret Poles are the worst.”

      He scratches his leg with a scrawny hand, pulls up one leg of his pajamas. Grandfather’s calf is mined with deep scars, something like a rotten tree trunk.

      “You know,” he says with his head hanging, “It’ll turn out they’ve slipped in among the doctors too. They’re giving me the wrong medicine on purpose! . . . They’re not ready to murder me . . . They want me to rot alive . . . They’re taking revenge: I’ve ruined a lot of blood for those Polacks . . . They saw Vilnius like they saw the back of their heads . . .”

      Grandfather giggles foolishly, winks at you, and nods his head, inviting you to come downstairs. He doesn’t manage to wink with one eye; he flaps both eyelids at the same time. You go through the landing below and descend to a door under the stairs. By the time you adjust to the dark, a sickening lump comes up at the back of your throat. It’s an unbelievable hospital latrine, walloping you with soured excrement. The tiles on the wall have been broken out, the floor is fouled, there are puddles stagnating everywhere. Grandfather, giggling, squats by a hideous heap of waste, an entire tower of it. It looms there like a symbol of humanity; it’s the Absolute, the Shit of All Shits, with a puffy, pulpy body. Tongues of fresh waste cover it like a mantle—all colors, from yellowish to black. You feel sick, you want to scream, but the old man just giggles insanely.

      “You know a person by his shit, Vytie!” His hands grub around in the heap of waste, separating them by color. “I’ll get even with those Poles! Let them all devour their own shit . . . See, these pale ones—they’re Vacelis’s. You hear, Vyt, they all gorge themselves without blinking an eye, they’re just surprised: why does that gravy have such a strange scent? A scent, you hear, it’s a scent to them! And they devour it—the more they shit, the more they devour, eh?”

      The black tiles of the boulevard, laid, incidentally, during the Polish period, remain behind my back. I climb the steps to Pamėklių Hill. The Polish years, the German years, before them and after them—the Russian rule. You won’t even remember Vilnius’s Lithuanian years; it flows only in the Neris, with its waters it keeps turning and turning in a circle. I’m almost the only one climbing the stairs, everyone else is headed down. Why are they so ugly? Surely there aren’t people like that walking around in other beautiful cities? Do faceless figures tread the streets of Bologna too? Or Lisbon’s? Do people’s innards spill out so vividly everywhere, does consciousness shape existence so clearly everywhere? I keep asking myself this, even though I know very well that They paint the landscape of both Portuguese and Italian faces. Their system didn’t show up yesterday, nor a century ago. And certainly not in Lithuania. When and where? No one knows. The sphere of the earth, speedily spinning to destruction, doesn’t bother with such metaphysical problems; it’s too busy spinning to destruction.

      I had already raised a leg to take a step, but suddenly I froze. I had expected it, waited for it, but the sight still caught me by surprise: around the corner a black limousine quietly hums; two (or three?) pudgy faces, with large vacuous eyes, stare from inside. The faces of priests who were never ordained.

      “Don’t pay attenshion,” a wheezing voice suddenly says.

      I jerk back, but the speaker has already shuffled off. An old, old Jew—Lord knows, there aren’t any like that left these days. You’d think he’d climbed out of a Chagall painting or a Sholom Aleichem book. Just now he was walking on the roofs, or perhaps even flying; barely a second ago he put away his flea-ridden, dirty wings. His face is nothing but wrinkles and the round glasses with fractured lenses on his nose; his clothes are practically from the last century. A genuine eternal Jew. Maybe he really is Ahasuerus. I’ve seen him somewhere before. He approached and mumbling horribly, said:

      “Don’t pay attenshion!”

      The automobile suddenly roars and screeches, tearing off down the street. Only now do I realize this is the same place, maybe even the same time, the same fear, the same despair. The Russian Orthodox Church sullenly waits for something; on the left darts a girl with a cocoa-colored raincoat. The morning image of the old house I’d never seen before has unlocked the fateful day’s fettered box. Today the birds, grandfather pressing his soiled hands to his cheeks, Lolita’s divine legs, eternal Ahasuerus in the middle of moribund Vilnius, and the pudgy faces of unordained priests were hidden inside it. Now the box is left empty, because I myself am as empty as a dry well. I have arrived at the critical juncture; beyond it is the final stretch. I begin the inevitable race to doom. A race with myself; in it, the faster you run, the more you try to stop. Lord, give me secret powers, give me strength and reason. Strength and cold reason.

      I began on The Way against my will. I had already settled down and forgotten all the quests for meaning. Even chest pains no longer upset me—it was just the first ones that were frightening. I no longer tormented myself if I didn’t feel the slightest desire when I saw an ideally sexy woman. I was forty-three years old.

      I remember the day and the place very well. The same place: across from the Russian Orthodox Church on Basanavičiaus Street. The day was sunny and clear—not just externally, but also on the inside. A brilliant clarity ruled in my soul. On days like that your intellect works smoothly and gracefully; you suddenly understand a number of things you hadn’t even tried to grasp for months. Perhaps it’s only on days like those that you sense you have a soul at all, not just a computer of brains crammed with neurons.

      I made careful note of the date: it was the eighth of October, the height of Indian summer. I sensed that something particularly important was about to happen. My internal clarity allowed me a brief glimpse of the future, to see that which was yet to be. It was probably the first time it occurred to me that there is no past and no future, there is only one great ALL. To the left, a girl in a cocoa-colored raincoat kept darting by. Lazy cobwebs—witch’s hair—floated in the calm sea of the sky. Every single thing was infinitely significant. Every single thing brought the climax closer; it was inevitable. Everything had already been determined before I was born.

      Suddenly I felt a strange stab; it hurt the most tender, delicate places of my being. A keen danger signal flew from the deepest nooks of my soul. I quickly looked around, but all I saw was a grimy cat, furtively crouched by the Orthodox Church’s stairs. The piercing danger signal resounded louder still. I felt brazen proboscises shoving their way into the very core of my being, there, where there is no armor. I automatically looked about for the limp-breasted woman of the dusk, the Circe of Old Town: at that time, I still naïvely believed that only she could have such proboscises.

      Instead I saw that

Скачать книгу