Perhaps the dragon of Vilnius is that Nobody? Or maybe that Nobody is the very air of Vilnius, the gloomy noise of the streets, the misleading labyrinth of the city’s smells?
Lolita Banytė-Žilienė concerns me less and less: the firm-breasted, big-boobed, or chestless KGB colonel’s, or history professor’s, or not a shoemaker’s daughter, murdered, or a suicide, or maybe dead from a heart attack. She is all sorts of things, but it concerns me less all the time. The same with Vytautas Vargalys and his grandfather, who died or didn’t die, who was buried by Martynas, or Stefanija, or Vytautas Vargalys himself; and his father, the aviation inventor, or artist, or economist, a helpless invalid, or super-sexed athlete, or mystical sorcerer, who had emigrated, or disappeared without a trace, or got a government pension. It no longer matters to me if Vytautas Vargalys wanted children, or didn’t want them, or was impotent; had a wife, or never had one, if she is now the wife of a successful businessman or a lonely alcoholic; if he knew Lolita’s father or not, or if he knew him, then which one — the KGB agent, or the historian, or not a shoemaker. That which I have seen or known doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Nothing means anything, because only the nameless Nobody knows the complete truth. And if you want to get to that Nobody, you need to at least know what Vilnius is.
A hell, in which only those who light the fires under the cauldrons have it good? A desert, where only lizards and snakes live, and everything else is no more than tiny grains of sand? A city of the dragon, in which all of the princesses are already devoured? I don’t know what Vilnius is.
Maybe Vilnius knows what I am? Maybe I’m a ghost of the Gediminas Riauba who once lived. Or maybe a creature whose name hasn’t been thought up yet. I crawl out of the gateway, splash through the puddles, smell the scents of Vilnius that have been weakened by the damp, and keep doubting everything more and more. Yes, I feel my paws, my restless tail, my ears flopping as I run. They keep flopping over to the sides — then I hear better. Then they lie down next to my head again — immediately I hear worse. I can look at the mirror in some store window and I’ll really see a dog. A monstrous, mutty creature with intelligent eyes. I’m not imaging it: passersby who see me say “dog” about me too. You’d think I really was a dog. But I doubt that more and more. I take food from the half-witted little old men of Old Town, and I’m doubtful. Completely starved, I heroically squeeze my way into filthy little cafeterias and whine pathetically. They always feed me: even the meanest cook, seeing my eyes, suddenly quiets down and throws me an entirely human morsel. They don’t act that way with real dogs. Real dogs aren’t shown such respect.
I can’t save anyone; I can’t do anything at all. I don’t resemble some supernatural being with miraculous powers in the least. I’m just as miraculous as any other dog. Would life in Vilnius change in the slightest if all the city’s dogs were intelligent? Not at all. If you want to move the jammed wheel of Vilnius’s existence, a much more terrific effort would be required.
Lord knows, it would have been best to be reborn as a dragon. Only a more powerful dragon could triumph over the dragon of Vilnius. I should have returned to Vilnius with miraculous powers and proclaimed my laws. But I never wanted to rule. I have no desire for everyone to obey me. And I don’t now, either.
All I am is a degenerate dog — always soaked through and frozen, always hungry and tired. Apparently I wasn’t destined to become powerful in any life. Apparently, it’s clearly written in the book of fate that I will always be cold, always suffer, and never find the answers. Who knows whether it’s worth dying just to find that out. Apparently no true Vilniutian will find happiness, even after death.
By the way, I don’t particularly torment myself over this. I said I would want to save everyone just to say it. I’m probably lying. I rarely want to find out anything anymore. I’m becoming more and more indifferent. Here, where we are, indifference isn’t considered a flaw. It’s a natural state after death. Those are the rules here. I have felt neither sadness, nor guilt, nor happiness for a long time. My thinking has been nothing but indifferent for a long time. True, here we sense a strange nostalgia. We secretly long for foolish emotions, senseless pain, and even the silliest human errors. Perhaps it’s the errors we long for most. Here, unfortunately, we don’t make errors: we don’t behave either well or badly. We know all too well that it’s absolutely the same no matter how we behave. Whatever happens is absolutely the same. All variations of fate are equal, we realize this; naïve human hope has been taken away from us. That’s why we long for the foolish — but ever so dear — human naïveté, for the belief that it’s possible to change at least a thing or two. We long for tears of helplessness or outbursts of anger. Only we understand how agonizingly beautiful it is to lose irrevocably. Only we know that human despair is really a giant ball of unrealized hopes and possibilities.
In my human life I had a purpose: to run as far as possible from here, as far as possible from the soullessness of Vilnius, from that moribund city’s despair. It would seem that in dying, you really could end up as far away as it’s possible to get, but it’s the reverse: you dig deeper into the decay of Vilnius. I could choose freely, and that’s why I chose Vilnius anyway, why I picked the dragon that holds everyone in his jaws, or maybe has already swallowed them. Around me, inside of me — Vilnius is everywhere; perhaps the entire world is Vilnius.
Although Vilnius itself really isn’t the entire world — those empty streets of the night, those corpse-like neon lights, the pale riddle of dusk. I go so far as to terrify myself — maybe the city really is extinct, maybe no one lives here anymore. Maybe even the riddle is no more; it remains only in my memories, in a strange cryptogram of old scenes.
Over there, Vytautas Vargalys climbs up a ladder, lifts the trapdoor, and finally ends up on a flat roof in Lazdynai. He carefully settles in behind the elevator tower. He smells of exhaustion and senseless determination. He carefully glances down at the square by the shopping center. Militiamen are already gathering there; gloomy figures in markedly civilian clothes stand guard in all of the passages between the buildings. Vytautas Vargalys slowly takes a long case from his shoulder, unbuttons it, and lays it down next to himself. His hands don’t shake; he breathes perhaps just a little harder than usual. He doesn’t smell of fear — only of fulfillment after an endless wait. The figures in the square next to Lazdynai’s weather vane suddenly begin to move. Apparently, the dragon is approaching. Vytautas Vargalys carefully screws on the stock, and then adjusts the telescopic sight; even a fraction of a millimeter is important. He raises the rifle to his shoulder, aims, closes his eyes, and aims again. He carefully lays down the rifle, pulls a small leather sack out of his pocket, and smiles wryly. He unties the knot, sticks a finger inside and rolls out a bullet. The casing’s copper is appreciably darkened, while the bullet is entirely black. This bullet has waited thirty years. It smells of despair, old blood, and sacrificial smoke. Vytautas Vargalys, with a crooked nail, scrapes the bullet; silver sparkles under the blackness. The bullet is silver, as is appropriate. Only one like that can slay a dragon. It has waited thirty years; Vytautas Vargalys has waited just as long. The silver of the bullet blackened, while Vytautas Vargalys’s black hair coated itself in silver. But the hour has arrived nevertheless. Life gives every person at least one lone chance. A patient man will surely live to see it.