I thought the same way myself once. I don’t know why I never found myself in the city garbage dump. I had to die to visit it. You make all of your most important discoveries after death. When you’re alive, you can’t find the time for them. You need to earn your bread, satisfy your ambition and your ego, drive out fear, and pour out hate. And if you live in Vilnius, you have to play that wretched Vilnius Poker too.
The Bangladeshis dig around in the Fabijoniškės garbage dump like shabby ravens. Real ravens often fly in too. I’m convinced that there are scores of new arrivals among them. From here, almost all of Vilnius is visible — as if it were a giant continuation of the garbage dump. Vilnius is an inside-out city. Other cities give birth to their garbage dumps, while this dump secretly gives birth to Vilnius itself. The view of Vilnius looks like a dream to me: people walk slowly, automobiles drive by slowly, there are no sounds — you have to concentrate hard to hear a vague hum. It was that Vilnius in particular that Vytautas Vargalys worshipped: he predicted the city would stop altogether at some point. In my dreams it doesn’t stop at all; that lethargic world suddenly explodes, really explodes — all of the people crack and split like over-ripe pears, and jellyfish-like gelatin, revolting slime, and warty tentacles that drip poison start gushing out of the cracks, striving to snatch up and entangle everything around them.
At least I’m trying to get inside my old friends’ heads now, to untangle their deceptive labyrinth of scents. At its center, like a Minotaur, sits the worn-out, sickly dragon of Vilnius. He feeds on people’s dreams, desires, and scents. On scents above all else.
Vytautas Vargalys arrived on this earth permeated with the smell of misfortune. He was never an infant; he was never a five-year-old bambino. At birth, he was already a nearly six-foot-five young man with gigantic, bottomless eyes. Everything about him was gigantic — his desires and his thoughts, his arms and legs, all of it. In some other place, he would have become a sports star, a great philosopher, or the president of a country. Even now the scents of all those possibilities lurk within him, and scent is never deceptive. But he tied his life to Vilnius. And Vilnius does not give birth to triumphs — this city gives birth only to a boundless, oppressive dreariness, or a fiery hell. I know I’m trying to explain too much, but I want to understand, in death at least, how people manage to live the life of Vilnius, why they’ve surrendered to the dragon, what axis their world revolves around.
Unfortunately, the people of Vilnius don’t smell of self-love. If they possessed it, they wouldn’t allow themselves to be treated that way. The ignorance of Vilnius doesn’t smell of any hope; it’s a hopeless ignorance. The axis of Vilnius’s world is hate, fear, and a blind, black ignorance. No wheel of the world can turn on such an axis. Vilnius is a wheel of the world that has ground to a halt.
Vytautas Vargalys sensed this. He discerned many things that are known only to us, the dead. He was always a bit dead. But Lolita Banytė-Žilienė was even too much alive. You wouldn’t even suspect they would become so close. They were people from entirely different worlds. In the great dream of Vilnius, it seemed they couldn’t possibly dream together. Vytautas Vargalys was an aging giant, consistently destroying his own world. And Lolita Banytė-Žilienė was a beauty gushing with youth, for whom one world was too small.
It’s only here that we finally realize that the world is the way we imagine it to be. Only here do we find out that attempts to change the world are ridiculous. All possible worlds are hiding in the boring — you’d say immutable — flow of life; you just need to come across them. Lolita Banytė-Žilienė truly made a great deal of progress in this quest if she managed to find Vytautas Vargalys.
I watched their acts of love many times. We don’t think that spying on people or reading their diaries is taboo. That moral standard applies only in human life, where you can use others’ secrets for evil. There’s no benefit in it for us. If the secret is impressive or horrible — that’s great for us. If it’s banal or sentimental — we feel like we’ve wasted our time. For example, Martynas Poška’s life was brimming with secrets, secrets that were as tiny as gnats. I know quite a bit about him. We know a lot in general. But by no means everything. Suffering and ignorance are universal commonalities. The gods people invent, gods who know absolutely everything, couldn’t exist. They would suffocate in cosmic tedium. They’d simply kill themselves. If gods couldn’t commit suicide, what kind of gods would they be — what would remain of their omnipotence?
There was a time when I loved Lolita very much. Even from here, it was a bit sad to watch her giving herself to someone else. We don’t feel envy, but love is a feeling everyone can understand. I loved her, so I wanted her to be happy. But no one can be happy once they’ve taken up with Vytautas Vargalys. I could have told her this, but I didn’t feel I had the right. What would happen if all the aliens started teaching people? The world would fall apart in the blink of an eye — people wouldn’t want to play that wretched poker game anymore, they’d just wait for someone to tell them what cards their opponents were holding.
We don’t pay much attention to all the others’ secrets, to all our knowledge. We’re already dead. It’s all the same to us now.
Gediminas Riauba would have saved Lolita. But I’m not Gediminas Riauba. I’m already dead. It’s all the same to me now.
Sometimes I just can’t manage to remember Lolita’s face; then I crawl into Teodoras Žilys’s studio through a broken window. The children of Old Town stare, amazed, when they see a dog clambering over the rooftops. Lying down comfortably, my tongue hanging out, I stare for a long time at two of her portraits, hung in an old-fashioned vaulted corner of the room. Dust constantly settles on them; I keep licking it off. In her portraits Lolita Banytė-Žilienė is more real than in life. It seems she’s going to step out of the canvas any minute and pet me. I hate being petted. Particularly when children pet me.
Even now I haven’t completely fathomed Vytautas Vargalys. The first time I saw him with a dog’s eyes, the first time I smelled him, I immediately sensed that he was carrying an important secret. I even imagined he wasn’t playing poker with the others, but rather with the Lord God himself. The paradox is that God doesn’t exist anyway. Even we don’t experience him directly. So who was Vytautas Vargalys playing against? Who is he playing against now, hidden away in the basement whose windows towards the avenue are covered in glass block, smoking cigarette after cigarette? They let him smoke; they even provide him with Winstons. I suppose it’s so the smell of smoke will get in the way of me smelling other, more meaningful smells: “a cover of smoke” is a concept that applies to us thinking dogs too.
He always carried a great hatred and an even larger fear inside. He was as smart as any devil, but he was never wise. He didn’t know how to stop, or even so much as pause. That ability is essential for a wise man. The wise man doesn’t rush about: he waits patiently until it all comes to him. As far as I remember, Vytautas Vargalys is always running, striving, chasing after that wretched dragon of Vilnius. Or talking about the prison camp. Here we regard all camps, massacres, and tortures much more phlegmatically than on Earth. It’s not the exterior that’s important, nor the barbed wire, nor the guards with bloodthirsty dogs. Nor crematoriums or monthly plans of annihilation. What matters most is the camp that unfurls within. What’s worse is when people spend their entire lives confined inside a gigantic camp without seeing any barbed wire, without smelling the smoke from the crematorium. When they don’t even realize that they are imprisoned. That’s the biggest victory of the prison camp system. It’s practically impossible to fight against a system like that. That’s the very worst of it. We ponder this a great deal. We consider whether people need freedom at all. We look at today’s North Koreans or Vietnamese, who are grateful to their government for allowing them to sleep a bit, eat a bit, and work a great deal. They die almost happy. There’s still a lot of things here that just aren’t clear to us. Maybe it’s best for a person to be a slave? Maybe striving for freedom is no more than the invention of individual deviants?