And how is someone supposed to bear it all alone, seeing the wisdom of millennia going up in flames, hearing the moaning of millions of innocent people?
When I found myself back at the library, Martynas instantly cornered me. He announces himself, without fail, the moment I want to be left alone. A short Vilnius thinker: hair shaved in a crew cut, sharp eyes, and the pale tongue of an invalid. He blocked my way, apparently emerging from the dusky corridor wall. A shabby pale blue couch and a crooked little table protruded from the wall; an ashtray made of bent tin, full of cigarette butts, billowed dust from the table. Tufts of hair and dust dirtied the linoleum floor; distorted, cheerless rays fell inside through the grimy windows. Scattered pieces of boards and little piles of brick dominated the world outside the window. The only thing that drew attention was a lonesome, miserable dog: a horrible mutt with a big, square head, a long rat-like body, and a thick tail dragging on the ground. He was snuffling at the earth; this he did so diligently, so devotedly, that the thought came to me automatically: he’s shamming. He’s sensed that I’m watching him, so he’s acting as if he has nothing to do with anything, that he’s idling about without any purpose. He vaguely reminded me of something — not some other dog, but an object, or an incident, or even a person.
Martynas was the only male in my absurd group of programmers who didn’t have a computer. And the only one to study the humanities. According to someone’s sometime plans, we were supposed to eventually computerize the library catalog. Martynas would have been the one to prepare the index, bibliography, and classifications of literature. Under that pretext, he scurried about writers’ homes, ostensibly for consultations, but really just wanting to meet them and chew the fat. Like all of us, he essentially did nothing. In my eyes, he had no firm answers, but he craved an explanation for absolutely everything. His very life was an attempt to explain something. His apartment, in a cramped room, was stuffed to the gills with the oddest things. He called it his collection. You could sit in that room for hours on end, just staring at those things: vases, clothes, ashtrays, scrubbing brushes, canes, little boxes. It seemed that even they questioned you, that they wanted something explained. But that wasn’t enough for Martynas — he would keep questioning you himself too.
“Listen, Vytautas, hasn’t it ever occurred to you that we have no past?”
I had calmed down by then and caught my breath, so I could answer:
“It depends on what we call the past. On who those ‘we’ are.”
“Me, you, that bowlegged babe outside the window. And that laborer on the scaffolding. . We have no past, we never were. We just ARE, you know? We’ve lost our past and now we’ll never find it. We’re like carrots in a vegetable bed. After all, you wouldn’t say a carrot has a past?”
Martynas’s chin quivered, ever so slightly, with emotion. His own worldly discoveries always shocked him. I was more interested in the dog: he suddenly started wheeling about the yard, sketching a crooked circle in the dust with his tail. As if he were trying to write a giant letter.
“So, what of it?” I growled. “If we don’t have it, we don’t have it.”
Martynas’s little eyes popped out; he gasped for air with his mouth open. I didn’t understand why he was getting so worked up.
“Whoever doesn’t have a past, doesn’t have a future, either. We never were and we never will be, you know? We can’t change anything, because we don’t have a past, you know?. . We’re a faceless porridge, we’re a nothing, a void. . We don’t exist, you know? We don’t exist at all. Absolutely! Someone has stolen our past. But who?”
Martynas even broke out in a sweat. He had fingered the secret’s cloak, crumpled it fearfully in his hands. Had he sniffed out Their scent?
“I keep thinking — who was it?” he murmured breathlessly. “And it’s not just people. . I had this white ashtray. . A featureless mass production. It had no past — like us, you know? And one day it suddenly disintegrated, crumbled into white dust — and that was it. . It didn’t have a past, either. It affects even things, you know?”
I glanced at a tuft of dust and hair that had wound itself up in a corner. It suddenly fluttered, even though there wasn’t the slightest draft in the corridor. It slowly rose up from the floor, as if picked up by a live human, hung in the air, and descended again into the corner. Some invisible being turned that tuft around in its hands and put it back in its place. I quickly glanced out the window: the dog glared at me and shambled off. Carp walked down the path next to the slowly growing brick wall. He tiptoes past our windows several times a day, but every time I see him I get agitated. He is my talisman. I don’t remember his real name; in the camp everyone called him Carp. It’s a terrible thing: when we meet in the street, we don’t greet each other. Many of the camp’s unfortunates don’t let on they know one another when they meet. Maybe we really don’t have a past?
The shagfelted Siberian dogs didn’t chew through the backbone of his spirit. There he is, walleyed Stepanas, nicknamed Carp. He’s pestering the Russkie commies again:
“You’re like those carp! Carp! They’re frying you in a skittle, and you’re writhing and singing a hymn to the chef! It’s Stalin that’s cooking you, Stalin — don’t you understand? Are you as stupid as a carp?”
He raises his arms to heaven and thunders as if he were on stage:
“I’m ashamed that I’m a Russian! Ashamed! I’ll never be a carp!”
You look at him, and it’s easier for you to breathe, easier to bear it, easier to wait for your doom. No incisorfanged Siberian huskies will bite through the backbone of his spirit. To you Carp is beautiful, even his crossed eyes don’t spoil his face. If you have a spirit, you’re beautiful.
Martynas is probably right: I don’t have a past. It’s like a boundless country, one I’m destined to never find myself in. On long winter evenings I fruitlessly attempt to remember my own past. Memory willingly recreates sights and sounds, but those talking pictures aren’t my past. What of it, if those episodes once happened? That jumble of people and things doesn’t change anything in my life, doesn’t explain anything. It cannot become my past. All of that probably happened to someone else, not to me at all. That’s not the way my Vilnius night was, not the way my camp’s fence was barbed, not the way my sweat smelled. The real past couldn’t stay so impassive, it has to be your own: recognizable and tamed. It’s like the nails with which your present is constructed. There are no nails holding mine together. I do not have a past, although there were many things in my life. It seems all I have is a non-past. In the great ALL there are no episodes that once were, and are now past; inside it everything is still happening.