The square is in his power; even a scrawny basement cat couldn’t run through it unseen. Today is Vytautas Vargalys’s day; he instantaneously turns thirty years younger. Now he isn’t fifty, but nineteen. He has gotten Bitinas’s clear instructions, a sacred mission from the nation. The silver bullet will fly straight at the target: the dragon must be destroyed. He carefully sets the bullet in place and checks the safety. The automobile cavalcade is visible by now, guiding and accompanying the beige Volga, their sirens blaring. The dragon unwinds, flashing its brilliant blue eyes and howling. No, he’s no longer nineteen; when he was nineteen the dragon hid day and night, it didn’t howl and didn’t flash its lantern eyes. It even slept inside a tank. Now it only fences itself off with a walclass="underline" the square opposite the shopping center is completely empty. Vytautas Vargalys continues to wait until the great visitor climbs out of the car; only when he recognizes him does he raise the rifle to his shoulder. Now he doesn’t smell of anything, he smells of absolutely nothing at all. The old man’s hunched figure is easily seen through the scope. He’s as scrawny as a basement cat: his long coat flutters around him as if it were hung on a pole. Vytautas Vargalys doesn’t hurry; he chooses a spot under the temple, by the ear. He knows he won’t miss, that he’d hit him even with his eyes closed. He gently presses the trigger. The sound of the shot is unexpectedly harsh; it rebounds very loudly. For a few seconds there’s nothing to be seen, but then he sees the hunched-over figure, as healthy as can be, step into the store. Vytautas Vargalys’s face is twisted, and his smell just doesn’t take shape. That’s the way an injured beast smells, a drowning person; that’s the way a recurrent nightmare smells. Vytautas Vargalys doesn’t howl, doesn’t tear out his hair, doesn’t sob. He looks over the rifle’s safety, torn out by the explosion, touches his scorched cheek, and again smiles wryly. The smile of a hired killer doesn’t suit him at all.
When did I see this scene? Did I see it at all? I remember my paws burned as they stuck to the hot bitumen of the roof. There wasn’t so much as a hint of a breeze. And it occurred to me that I could, for all it’s worth, change the course of events. I could have jumped up and knocked the rifle out of his hands. But I couldn’t explain anything to him.
It slowly gets lighter. I’ve sat in the gateway the entire night long. We dogs think very slowly.
I’m drawn to run to the village, to Stefanija Monkevič. I’m drawn to Lolita Banytė-Žilienė’s grave. I’m drawn to the barred basement window, behind which Vytautas Vargalys sits and smokes. If I were three dogs, I’d run everywhere at once.
But even alone, I sense, I smell the essence with all of my doggy being. I almost understand what the dragon is doing with my Vilnius.
The people of Vilnius can’t avoid lying, because Vilnius itself lies.
Probably all the cities in the world lie sometimes. They want to appear prettier, smarter, or more lovable. That’s a nearly innocent lie. Vilnius lies all the time — consistently and maliciously. Vilnius wants to deceive; perhaps that’s the only purpose of its existence. It lies with people, because people are the city’s words. But it lies with its streets too, and with its houses, and even with its past.
Today I don’t believe nighttime Vilnius, either. It wants to pretend it’s the same as always. It’s a clever pretender. If St. Anne’s Church were to suddenly disappear, or Gediminas Square were to turn into a swamp, everyone would notice it. Vilnius lies in a much more subtle way; its deceptions are always covered in mist. Only a thinking dog can fathom them.
First of all, Vilnius dissembles with its smells.
The city’s smells form in layers: with effort, you can smell out even the very oldest, ones that dispersed once upon a time, in the depths of the ages. Ancient smells don’t air out; it would seem the stench of gasoline ought to cover everything — but no, you sniff and sniff, carefully smell it out, and finally you sense that an Old Town crossroads smells of ancient blood and ripened hatred, Jewish love and Polish honor. The new building crammed in place of an old mansion spreads an abundance of smells, but they don’t conquer the scentscapes of old wine, aurochs roasts and ruinous gold. In the world of scent, the ancient mansions are more genuine than that new building. In the scentscape of Vilnius, the twentieth and the fifteenth century exist side by side. The flow of time doesn’t apply to the smells of Vilnius.
I’m so accustomed to that city of smells that I keep forgetting people can’t smell. Although I suspect some can; they just don’t reveal themselves to anyone.
And then I suddenly found out that the city changes its smell. Early in the morning I dashed down to the square next to Symphony Hall; at least a couple of streets run together into a single spot there, like creeks. The smell of river mud and a gloomy craving for freedom always hung around there. That smell was just as familiar to me as the way the square looked. I sensed the new smell from a distance. It was strange and artificial. I couldn’t be mistaken — a dog’s nose doesn’t lie. The square smelled neither of river deposits, nor of a craving for freedom — merely of narcissus and a silly cheerfulness.
It was unbelievable. The scentscape of Vilnius, the most immutable, eternal part of the city, had suddenly unraveled. It was a bad omen.
After that morning, I scrambled to examine my map of smells. To my horror I realized it was all constantly changing. The scentscape of Vilnius turned out to be unstable. The smells of the city were playing an incomprehensible game. One morning, the fundamental, centuries-old smells of streets, houses, and rivers would suddenly change. A hundred times I had smelled that right here, in this intersection, there was once a leather workshop, and later, perhaps a century later, someone had murdered all the women and children nearby; one morning I would suddenly discover that none of it had happened. There was no leather workshop; there was no slaughter of women. Suddenly the intersection would smell only of an expensive banquet and Dominican hymns. True, the real scent would return sooner or later, but not always. Sometimes it would be shoved out by yet another, completely unexpected smell. It seemed the city was furiously changing its own self, hiding its true past, its own essence.
As a former jazzman, it instinctively occurred to me that Vilnius was secretly swinging. That it simply improvises a bit — so it wouldn’t be so boring. There is the basic smell theme, the familiar map of the city’s smells. But that’s only the theme; it can be varied and expanded, returning over and over again to the beginning. That’s exactly what ancient Vilnius took up. I smelled those threatening changes and naïvely judged them to be a game, musicianship without any hidden purpose.
I can’t be angry with myself for that. I was merely a novice. I still didn’t know anything about Vilnius Poker.
I had to run around as a dog for five years before I realized that Vilnius lies intentionally. Little by little, it accustoms its inhabitants to not feel or notice the deceptions. A little at a time, it takes up playing tricks on not just the sense of smell, but other senses as well. The pavement on the cross street above Pilies Street is at one time polished slippery, at another time coarsely rough, and later it turns slippery again. At first, you think you’re only imagining it; later, you don’t even notice it.
Unfortunately, people don’t notice even drastic changes, and Vilnius lies a little bit at a time, very carefully. Some old house will just get a foot or two smaller; a week later by the same amount again; then more and more. Its color slowly changes too. Regardless, a few years later the house is completely different. And Vilniutians don’t even notice this. These changing people are accustomed to a changing city. If you left Vilnius for a long time, on your return you’ll no longer find some cross street: it simply won’t be there anymore. The inhabitants of Vilnius, with perfect equanimity, will say it never was. And they won’t even think they’re lying. Only people like that can live in a lying city.