“Let’s stop in here, Stefutė, come on,” he waves his arm nervously at the Neringa. “Don’t leave me by myself. I can’t stand looking at those mugs anymore.”
“Mugs”—that’s Lord’s Corner, a little collection of retirees and near-retirees, the last intellectuals of Vilnius’s cafés; in a while even these will be gone, they’ll smoke them out of here — who needs those geezers criticizing the government under their breath — although maybe they won’t touch the old guys.
“Here, Stefutė, here, we’ll sit with our backs to those mugs,” Vargalys’s father shuffles, stirs, runs to order champagne, smiles pathetically from a distance.
I won’t listen to what he says, it’s been a long time since he was a sorcerer, it’s been a long time since he had anything to say and I know how to grouse myself; everyone’s gulping coffee and eating crepes. Vilnius goes on as if nothing has happened; these people don’t burn up, don’t drown, don’t fall off mountains and don’t chop their lovers to bits — that’s what’s most important. I see the old man’s writhing lips, his wrinkling forehead, his tired eyes, how old is he anyway, seventy at least — wasn’t it last year or so that we celebrated Vargalys’s fiftieth? Vargalys’s father will never find out we already met twenty years ago, that day when I finally got up my nerve to visit their decrepit villa, when I stepped inside barefoot, climbed the creaking stairs, opened doors, startling the spiders, rats, and bats, shaking all over, coming across the strangest things: a skull, an opened bottle of wine, the butchered skeleton of a goose. No one had been there for years and years; our folks feared that cursed house like fire, and the Lithuanians had been deported a long time before — Užubaliai had sunk into the earth. A heavy black dust had settled everywhere, it crunched between my toes; little tracks of rat footprints meandered here and there, from time to time some frightened rodent would squeak irritably and get in my way, but I wasn’t afraid of anything anymore, I felt like the owner of the house, that was how Vasilis had taught me. I really did feel like the owner of all of that treasure — nothing had been looted, neither the clothes, nor the dishes, nor the books; now everything belonged to me, because I was the first to dare to step over the forbidden boundary, to go into the cursed house; I came across Vargalys’s father on the second floor, in a big room whose walls were hung with pictures, weird pictures: they were covered by an undisturbed layer of gray dust, they were all equally mute and dead. I thought he was a ghost, because there weren’t any footprints in the dust; he was unbelievably huge, already starting to lose his hair, the dried-up chair creaked beneath him when he waved his hand at me:
“Come closer, little girl. Tell me where my son is. He has disappeared, vanished, but he’s alive, I feel it. Maybe you know? I’ll give you everything: the pictures, the crystal, the silver, even the books. It will all be yours, just find my son.”
Now he sits across from me and grimaces like a clown — what kind of world is this, where sorcerers turn into clowns, heroes into impotents, and geniuses burn up alive? I found his son for him — that’s the weirdest thing — I really was the first to run into Vargalys, I carried out his father’s wish, but where are all those paintings, silver, and books now? You’d think it had all sunk straight down into the earth like the village of Užubaliai; the champagne really is good, my heart doesn’t even feel so heavy anymore, Lord, I understand drunks — you drink, and nothing bothers you, but I don’t have time, I need to pull a fast one on Vargalys’s father, otherwise he’ll get it into his head to come with me; I’ll pretend I’m going to the bathroom, the Neringa’s curtains are heavy, he won’t see: I ran away that time too, even though he kept repeating:
“Don’t go, little girclass="underline" imagine you’re my daughter. Don’t you want to be my daughter? Imagine you’re my daughter and you’re looking for your brother. You must find your brother who’s wandering somewhere in the wide world. Don’t you want to find your brother?”
I ran away, I didn’t want to learn the Vargalyses’ horrible secret, it was whispered by the walls of the Vargalys house, murmured in the webbed wings of the bats, squeaked by the rats, woven into the cobwebs by the spiders, but the Vargalys legend overtook me, merged with me; that evening I turned into part of the Vargalys history myself, it penetrated into me and hasn’t left me yet, it’s always with me, like the Lord God.
What if I really was Vargalys’s sister? After all, I slept with him and even carried his child; as soon as I think of it I want to be a man — like Vargalys’s mother did, that witch with the mannish haircut who did men’s work and practiced jujitsu every day with the giant Julius. She kept saying that Lithuanian men were completely sissified, all that was left was for her to take their place, to turn into a man, or else Lithuania would be doomed; most of all she liked to break in wild horses (where did she get them from?), they say she’d fly into our village on the back of some crazed mustang, driving the border policeman nuts, he was always meaning to arrest her for crossing the border illegally, but he was afraid to even get near her; everyone was scared of her, even our village boys. She would beat them, cruelly and unmercifully, with all of her jujitsu mastery. And the sorcerer Vargalys didn’t pay the slightest attention to people, all he was concerned with was the spiritual and monetary system, they say it was thanks to him alone the litas was so stable; many times people saw him leading the dazed servant girl Janė, his connection with the other world, around the yard. The mother raised Vargalys like a girl, made fun of him and humiliated him, called him a little sissy, little girl, girly-girl, yet one more woman among Lithuania’s womanish men, she would undress him and yank him by that thing, saying it was a fake, a worthless appendage, it would be best to rip it off and throw it away; she hated her son, hated him with a passion; after all, she wanted to be a man, and men can’t give birth, the son would instantly remind her there’s a womb inside her, which had already given birth and could give birth again; probably that’s why such a giant body had such a pathetic, helpless, tiny little thing, I’ve never seen anything like it; it shrank from the mocking and humiliation in his childhood, that’s why Vargalys tried, all his life, to prove to himself and everyone else that he was a real man, a man of all men. I’ve never met such a rude, pompous, snarling person whose insides were so vulnerable and frail, no man ever stroked my hands and cheeks that way, no man ever kissed my feet that way, but only when we were alone — in front of others he would instantly turn coarse, cruel, and unmerciful. He didn’t want to come to terms with aging; he wanted to always stay young and powerful, although he never was powerful, that drooping little thing of his got smaller every day, it kept shrinking — phooey, what am I going on about, he was the only one I never compared to anyone in that respect; he was a Vargalys, that says everything. I want to howl, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to start howling right here, next to the Central Committee building, or better yet, inside — but they won’t let me in; a militiaman with a pistol glances at the passersby suspiciously, even though he’s never had to shoot and never wilclass="underline" everyone’s calm, quiet, and obedient, and dressed alike: I’ve gone down nearly the whole boulevard and I’ve met maybe three ladies with smarts, so what if it’s silly, but it’s smarts all the same; on the face of it, everyone seems to dress differently, but so alike that you can blink as much as you want but you can’t even tell yourself apart; you try and try and all the same you look as alike as peas in a pod; here, take this one: a shabby, nothing coat, a rumpled, nothing hat; oh Lordee, it’s Šapira, it’s not right to talk about Šapira that way, he’s special, you can’t figure him out, you’d think he was trying to look different every day, as if he were an actor on the stage, one day suited up like a gentleman, the next dressed in rags like some bum, he wanders the streets of Vilnius, looks, listens, and knows everything; they say he’s secretly writing a book, the great history of Vilnius: a genuine eccentric, sometimes I get the urge to make fun of him, but you just look at him and you see he’s smarter than you are, he surely knows what he’s doing, even though no one knows what that is.