Here’s St. Casimir’s Church. Casimir, I believe, was Lithuania’s guardian saint — as Martis liked to say, saints like that should be relieved of their duties forthwith: some guardian saint, he guarded only too well, maybe it was true, as Martis claimed, that some holy ones secretly joined the Communist Party — but what do you want from poor Casimir, how could he protect all of Lithuania if he couldn’t defend even his own church? Like one Hungarian visitor of Martis’s said, I’ve seen churches turned into a lot of things, but no one’s thought of putting a museum of atheism in a church before; Vargalys told a good story too: they set up a little wine bottling operation in this old Vilnius church courtyard; they’d bring barrels of wine from the south and bottle it in that church — I wonder what that Hungarian would have said, although what could he have seen in his lifetime, except maybe the famous Budapest revolution, but he would have been little then; I was even younger when the forest brothers raged through our area, I remember them vaguely, when they drove them into the swamp and drowned them I was maybe five, but I remember people’s talk welclass="underline" the forest brothers, they said, can’t be caught or surrounded because they weren’t hiding in ordinary bunkers, but rather in the sunken village of Užubaliai, everyone has his own cottage there; we children listened to that talk and then doggedly searched for the burrow to the mysterious underground kingdom. I remember Vargalys’s grandfather too, the great leader of the resistance; he would arrive at the deserted Vargalys villa wearing a long coat that reached to the ground, suck on a bent pipe and be completely nonchalant, our folks would say: the buzzard’s flown in, expect corpses; and then we really would hear about some daring exploit of the forest brothers; once they even took over a town and held it for four days, calmly fending off the NKVD attacks until the army with tanks and artillery was called in, then the forest brothers deftly retreated, not losing a single one of theirs — I just can’t understand why they didn’t lock old Vargalys up, apparently because our folks could betray just about anyone, but they were afraid to even pronounce Vargalys’s name: Vytas Vargalys was nuts too, he walked through the villages and fields without disguising himself, he’d bathe at the same time every day in the creek, and when he was warned by some good-hearted old man, he’d shoot back angrily: what should I be afraid of, why should I hide, I’m in my own country, in my own home, they’re the ones who should be afraid and hide themselves. That’s the way a Lithuanian should be, Vasilis lectured me, it’s just a shame there’s so few of them, but as long as there’s at least one the world isn’t doomed. Maybe there aren’t any left now, although no, there’s at least one — Martis told me, he knew about things like that — there really is one, I don’t remember his name, once they tried him for who knows what, for some literature, he declared he wasn’t going to say anything, he didn’t recognize a court of that sort, refused defense, and then calmly dozed off: while he was sleeping they salted him with ten years or so in the camps. Maybe there still are genuine Lithuanians left; now look, I’ve passed up a pharmacy, when you’re wandering through Vilnius you get completely forgetful, Vilnius stirs up dreams and summons ghosts, it puts you under a spell, carries you off to distant times, to other worlds, but the pharmacy with the swan in the window expects me, and I expect at least one roll of gauze that isn’t here and couldn’t be here; the line aroused a naïve hope, but everyone’s buying one thing or another, there’s not so much as a whiff of gauze, the typical battle for healthcare continues: I want this — we don’t have it; I want that — it’s not to be found in all of Vilnius; I want this other — go to the twenty-eighth pharmacy at the far end of Antakalnis. In the hospitals doctors with degrees sharpen dull needles with files, the patients have to hunt down bandages and gauze themselves, there aren’t any in the hospital, not to mention sheets or other bedding, slippers, robes, hot water in the radiators — that, in sum, is what’s called protecting the public health. There’s a crowd by Polena, I wonder what they’ve put out — of course, French eyeliner, there’s a terrible shortage: that was the only kind Lolka used, although you’d never suspect she wore makeup at all, she really did have subtlety, a peculiar elegance. I don’t know if she would have won Vargalys without my help, but anyone else really wouldn’t have been hard: Vargalys is Vargalys, there are all kinds of people, blacks and Jews, Latinos and Asians, French and Swedes, a zillion of all kinds of variations, and among them all one more — Vargalys, an otherwise undefinable subspecies of human, maybe not even human, maybe there’s really only two different kinds: human and Vargalys. If you close your eyes and think hard, you can imagine anybody, but not Vargalys; you pretty much have an idea of everyone’s inclinations and activities, but what Vargalys was doing on this earth no one knew, not even me, even though I was constantly alongside him. We wandered the library collections together; I brought him books and wrote summaries — so what of it: one time he’d write page after page about tiger hunts, another time about a cave city in Iraq, and then, let’s say, something about Camus’s last days, or a species of wild pigeon: no system, no meaning, and no results. So I never did experience what the whole of Vargalys is, I only got to know a lot of his separate parts. He was as inscrutable as Vilnius itself, I’ve never been able to understand this city either, it mocks my efforts: every day it’s different, intangible, unnameable; even now Vargalys is holed up inside me, he won’t leave me alone, whatever I think about, in essence I think about him, whatever I may say, I say it to him, and what matters most — I almost believe he hears me. I don’t feel wronged on account of his horrible behavior, his complete lack of consideration for me, I understand him: I became a part of his own self, a part of his body, a part of his soul; after all, you have the right to behave with yourself however you see fit, anyone can hurt or harm himself, pay no attention to himself; I was the one who wanted to completely devote myself to him, no one forced me to, unless it was my own nature, or Vasilis’s great teachings, or my endless loneliness. If there really is a lonely person in the world, it’s me — I’m a stranger in this city, in this world; no matter how much I put on, I’m still stuck in the swamps of my childhood, I still hear the croaking of the frog queen, I still long for Vasilis’s slow and careful caresses. I’m still a tuteiša, nothing more. On the days of your period you’re always drowning in depression, and why is a person so dependent on their body, on that wretched flesh; no wonder Vargalys hated his body so, he really was a strange person, but irredeemably authentic: no deception, no pretense, no desire to look better than he really was; Vargalys reeked of authenticity, it’s hard for people like that, but you can’t not love them: you’re charmed by their daring — it is so hard, after all, to be yourself, to not put on a show, to not pretty yourself up, to not try to sell yourself as best you can. It always seemed to me that he’s the incarnation of Vasilis, he’s the wizard of Vilnius, in exactly the same way that Vasilis was the wizard of our swamps; I was always afraid I’d call him Vasilis, Vargalys wouldn’t have forgiven me for that. I remember an episode, one of his short-term romances with this Vaiva, our intern, she showed up in our office, very pretty and unbelievably proud: Vargalys was instantly taken with her; maybe she was worth it, Vaiva really did have something proud or even queenly about her, but as a woman she didn’t pay the slightest attention to him — Vargalys was old enough to be her father; however, he immediately discovered Vaiva’s soft spot — she liked to feel intelligent and smart — he’d do her work for her, but so cleverly, it would turn out she’d thought it all up herself, and even offered some good ideas to the others. He went at her from all directions at once, he divided himself up into a legion of Vargalyses, each one more elegant and magnanimous than the last; Vaiva melted right before your eyes, and to him it was like some contest or something, he entranced her like a wizard, the poor girl really was under a spell, she didn’t get it at all, but all of a sudden Vargalys slapped her in the face and threw her out of the library; I saw it happen: he was triumphantly squeezing the poor thing right between the library bookshelves, and she accidentally called him by someone else’s name; she said, “don’t Rimutas,” or “not here, Romutis.” Vargalys went nuts, the same way he did once when he found me looking at the pages he’d marked in a book — he smacked her in the face, gave her a black eye, and the next day threw her out without giving her credit for her internship; Elena was crowing: now he’ll get it, a commission will come, but absolutely nothing happened; Vaiva disappeared into thin air, and not a peep. To call Vargalys by someone else’s name wasn’t just a horrible insult, but a bad omen too; to me it seems that without his name Vargalys wouldn’t have been anything at all, his power hid in his family and his name, he was a Vargalys of those Vargalys sorcerers, his grandfather and a host of ancestors stood behind him, he was encased in legends and the respect of the neighborhood, he couldn’t be a Rimutis or Romutis, he couldn’t even be a Vytelis — he was Vargalys, that said it all. Mad Vargalys, glued together out of ridiculously opposing parts, parts that couldn’t have anything in common, the way his grandfather had nothing in common with his father or his father with his mother; the street is rising uphill, it seems I’m climbing the hill next to Bezrečjė, all the important things happened there, apparently something will happen today too. The bonfire of the Great Fire burned on that hill, set by Vargalys’s father, who smelled the Russian tanks advancing on Lithuania’s cities and towns from afar; he decided to meet the tanks the new government was bringing with a huge fire, he burned his entire archive, and he had a ton of paper, papers on Lithuanian finance, Lithuanian politics, and Lithuanian history; Julius kept dragging out more bundles, and Vargalys’s father turned into a sorcerer, the eternal ruler of the flame; he probably burned up all of Lithuania, or its spirit; since he didn’t dare to burn himself up, at least he sacrificed his papers, where all of his essence hid, to the flames; once he’d destroyed them, he couldn’t be a sorcerer anymore. Vargalienė ran around the bonfire and danced an insane dance of victory, only it wasn’t obvious who had won what here, because there were no winners, only losers; today on the hill there’s neither a fire, nor Stadniukas with soldiers, this isn’t the right hill; on the other side of the street are the gates to the market, a remnant of the old city, it’s still possible to buy a thing or two there, even though the market went downhill a long time ago: no one bargains anymore, a lot of the sellers are too lazy to even hawk their wares, they just write the price on a bit of paper like they were in a store. In the pavilions the Uzbeks make an uproar with their melons, at least they’ve retained the spirit of an eastern market, they bawl, praise their wares, grab passersby by the sleeve; Lolka and I liked to stroll through the market, even though we never bought anything, it was just that Lolka always had to swipe something; she had enjoyed stealing at the market since she was a kid, maybe she was a thief by nature, she was always grabbing others’ things: others’ apples, others’ victories, others’ men. All the same you’ll have to admit your great shame, Stefanija, no matter how much you don’t want to, you’ll have to remember your terrible mistake and humiliation: true, Lolka is gone, but you’re still here, and there’s nowhere to hide from yourself — admit it, Stefanija. When Lolka starting weaving her net of long legs, sexy breasts, and bewitching glances around Vargalys, I shuddered; as always, she was shockingly brazen, she even had the nerve to ask me about his favorite things, what his w