While I was still in the world I read about a rat paradise. The scientists constructed it as follows: as much food, drink, and sex as you want. At first, the rats were happy, then they got lethargic — they even stopped reproducing — and in the end they got completely unnerved. The most athletic ones attempted to break out of paradise, but it was surrounded by high tension wires. So the ones who wanted to escape would die. The other rats saw and smelled the corpses, and quickly realized that the white, shiny wires carried death. But they went on trying to escape, even at the price of their lives. The hedonistic rats, those who hadn’t tried to escape, didn’t merely stop breeding, they stopped moving too, and then eating: they calmly and quietly died out. The rat paradise was left vacant. It’s strange that people haven’t been able to think up a paradise in the least bit more sensible than the one even the rats scorned. The best they’ve thought up is to renounce it entirely. To strive to turn into nothing, like the Hindus. Or to believe that there’s nothing after death, like the atheists. The latter really suffer here; they feel insulted. They’ve finally died, and now they’re forced to continue existing. Most of the time, the atheists rush to get back to earth in the form of a fly or a cockroach. Those are the rules here. You can return to earth, but you won’t have a consciousness. You can keep your consciousness, but you won’t turn into a human. Those are the rules here. You can choose the form yourself, but only once. For myself I chose the one that suits Vilnius best.
For the time being it doesn’t get terribly cold, so I feel all right. True, the drunks and the kids throw glass shards everywhere, so I have to be careful. If I cut up my paws, no angels will lick my wounds. When you choose a form, you get both its advantages and its disadvantages. Those are the rules here. There are quite a few rules here.
There are rules everywhere, because nothing can exist without any rules at all.
I frequently ask myself — just what were the rules of Vilnius? I can think freely, I am a thinking dog of Vilnius, and that’s what I’ll be as long as a car doesn’t run me over or a dogcatcher doesn’t finish me off. It’s quite tolerable; it’s just that the general symphony of smells greatly hinders your concentration. Even strangers’ thoughts smell, all of them differently. And then there’s that Stefanija. True, a stench that strong smothers all smells, but it wears on the nerves. It’s like the blinding blue flash from a soldering gun, or the roar of an airplane taking off. And at the same time like a sophisticated porno movie shown to a sixteen-year-old who is bursting with unreleased sperm. We find physiology particularly oppressive. I can’t even masturbate. Nor can I chase after bitches — after all, I have consciousness. The hardest part is food. I’m most certainly not a metaphysical dog. I’m an entirely real Vilnius dog with a human’s intelligence and memory. I could even help someone, save them from misfortune or encourage them to do a good deed, but only with doggish behavior. It’s too bad Vilniutians don’t pay proper attention to dogs. It’s a rare person who goes searching among the dogs for one like me. That’s probably sensible. You could spend your entire life searching, become well-known as a madman, and find absolutely nothing. Better to search for treasure. There are considerably more treasures than there are those like me.
Maybe I should have turned into the Iron Wolf.
But it’s too late, I’m a dog; even my thoughts are slowly getting doggy. I’m always afraid I’ll lose my chain of thought. It’s tough for me, I admit it. We don’t know how to lie to ourselves, either. Lying is worthless to us, because any lie at all is temporary by its own nature. A lie hides the truth, but only for a while. Lying is a mute admission of death’s inevitability, practically its anticipation. And here we don’t have anything to anticipate; you won’t die even if you turn into a tree. The majority of Vilnius’s trees are reincarnated Hindus. No theory of Vilnius is possible without accounting for this sad fact.
But I’m hardly concerned with Hindus who have turned into trees: I’m much more attracted by live Vilniutians. Yesterday, or a month ago, or sometime, I met Vytautas Vargalys next to the fence of Lukiškių Prison. He didn’t recognize me — and I had so hoped for that. Vytautas Vargalys is the only one who could have recognized me. He never considered dogs to be just dogs, or birds just birds. He didn’t even consider himself to be just Vytautas Vargalys. That’s why he was a walking corpse — every excessive knowledge kills by degrees. He didn’t recognize me — well, what of it? One of our biggest advantages is that everything’s absolutely the same to us. We don’t immediately escape from the eternal wheel of fate: at times we feel fear, hate, or ignorance — without them the soul couldn’t exist, and we do have a soul, even though we’re surprised at that ourselves.
Human language hampers me. In our world there is no “at first” or “later,” and language can’t get along without words like that. Unfortunately, a language corresponding to what I know would be comprehensible only to me. I suppose this is the way the gods feeclass="underline" they talk non-stop, but no one understands their language. At the very most single words, or individual sentences. But even complete sentences seems unlikely.
It’s difficult to get used to a new body. I keep wanting to stroke my mustache. Or knit my fingers together. It’s rather odd to sense my old body, which I’ll never have again. I’m like a soldier; I still feel my amputated legs and arms.
It’s difficult to get used to the new Vilnius too. It’s totally different than the city I remember. I no longer see the rooflines, I no longer see the crowns of the lindens — dogs don’t look upward, only into the distance. I don’t see faces welclass="underline" around me there are just knees and more knees, girl’s legs, and sometimes dogs happen by too. Children have become strangely close; their faces are the only ones I can get a good look at. But I immediately distinguish every person’s scent; Šapira went by here not so long ago, and here, a bit earlier, maybe even yesterday, stood one of my former students: I recognize his smell, I just don’t remember his name. The scent of Vytautas Vargalys drifts from the basement of the KGB Building, and an impossibly reeking pool of vomit, which never dries out, gathers under the little bench by the statue of Žemaitė. The streets of smells sprawl in an entirely different way than human pathways. The Vilnius of smells is mysterious and poorly researched. When I was a human, it never occurred to me that scent is the only sense that can reveal the past directly. The smells of ancient events and ancient sufferings don’t fade. They slowly settle on the grass, the sidewalks, the walls; they penetrate into the city’s body and remain for the ages — like an everyday, ordinary landscape, the landscape of smells. I am perhaps the only inhabitant of that landscape. Other dogs smell it, but they don’t understand it. People would understand it, but they don’t smell it. No one going by the KGB turns their head like I do, no one pulls the mournful and angry scent of Vytautas Vargalys into their nostrils. He would frequently smell of anger, agitation, and fear. His father is fat and sweats heavily. People sweat to cover up the smell of their emotions. Sweat smells only of physiology; it smothers the perfume of the soul. Love doesn’t smell of roses or the blue of the heavens at all. Love smells of sleepless nights, death, and insanity. When I run down Vasaros Street, it smells as if nothing but Romeos and Juliets, Tristans and Isoldas, Orpheuses and Eurydices were pining away on the hill of madmen. Smells reveal unexpected connections of things and phenomena, confirming those I only suspected before. Smells are an important language of the world, and Vilnius is a city of smells. If people’s sense of smell were like that of dogs’, the world would change radically. Many secret thoughts would immediately become plain, as people’s emotions, and most often their thoughts too, have a distinct smell. You can learn to conceal yourself, to never give yourself away by expression, voice, or movements, but you can’t change your smell. People can’t smell like dogs do, otherwise the world would fall apart. The world is the way it is only because the greater part of people’s thoughts and intentions are unknown and unpredictable to other people. But we, the dogs, can smell all of that. Even the most ordinary mutt smells what his master wants before he even wishes for it himself. The semiotics of scent could be the most profound knowledge in the world.