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Riauba quickly understood that in this system, you don’t need to be something, you just need to look like it. No one is concerned with who you really are; all that matters is what you pretend to be.
Only a person who has gone through all of the circles of hell can mock everything in the world the way he did.
If you are forced into doing something, you are in all respects a victim of spiritual tyranny. It’s much worse if they give you freedom and you continue to do what you’ve been doing.
Only much later did it occur to me that men only imagine or pretend to rule women. Actually, the women always lead us by the nose. Even if they really do submit to our will, they do it consciously—they have purposes we cannot grasp.
Unfortunately, in order to supplement the passions raging in the glass of water, his own passions have to be inhuman. He rages, laments, and raves enough for us all. He lives enough for us all! That’s why every one in Vilnius who even remotely resembles a real human being burns up alive, is drowned by his own great love, or cuts her into pieces himself.
No Harvard professor would be able to understand that a perfectly serious scholar could, of his own free will, be a complete butcher. No American or Frenchman would understand that the manager of a gas chamber in Hitler’s Germany could have played the piano like a virtuoso and worshipped Chopin. No, they won’t understand it. Those American and French brains aren’t constructed right.
The elder Vytautas Vargalys fought all his life and always lost. He was sufficiently intelligent and skeptical enough to grasp this.
Probably VV was particularly Lithuanian in this symbolic sense alone; the true apotheosis of homo lithuanicus: of gigantic proportions, enormous power, but absolutely infertile.
The saddest thing is that if someone gave them good sausage, perfume and panties, they’d be entirely satisfied with life.
They! It’s a miraculous term, homo lithuanicus’ magic word. It’s always them, not us at all. We’ve nothing to do with it. A genuine homo sovieticus is obliged to say: our revolution, our victory, our government, we did it. A genuine homo lithuanicus says: their revolution, their government, they did it. And we’ve nothing to do with it. By no means is this merely a lexical nuance; it’s a key marker of an inner philosophy. Homo lithuanicus couldn’t even explain who “they” are. They aren’t us. We’ve nothing to do with it. The greatest downfall of the state doesn’t worry him: they fell, but we’ve
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Newspeak isn’t just some ordinary system of lies; it’s a powerful weapon. All those Molotovs understood they wouldn’t succeed in forbidding words. So they didn’t forbid them; they did something much more clever—they stole or deformed the real meaning of words. They left the old words, but gave them their own meaning. A devilish invention: you can talk any way you want, but your words won’t mean what they ought to anymore. Clever Molotovs!
Unfortunately, the shortage of absolutely everything and the complete lack of order isn’t just a physical phenomenon. It’s a terrible hindrance to the soul. When you spend hour after hour hunting food and clothing and putting enormous efforts into creating a normal home, you get so tired that you can’t do anything else. All of your thoughts die off like unfledged birds.
I often wonder: maybe a hunger to slave for someone really does lurk somewhere deep inside people? There’s something Dostoyevskian in this desire, and at the same time something horrifying.
It’s horrifying when a person merges with the sullied, stinking walls and becomes a nameless detail of the Ass of the Universe. But it’s even more horrifying when an inhabitant of the Ass of the Universe drowns in cosmic visions.
Wouldn’t you find it frightening at first, and then simply disgusting, if some worm wriggling through a puddle started discussing Heidegger with you?
You’d think they were walking down completely different streets, through a city they carried within, inside themselves.
They searched for small joys and sometimes found them: a hunched-over, lisping old woman selling the first violets; a bristling little kitten, mewing non-stop, its little pink mouth wide open; a flaming, fancifully formed autumn leaf—unique and different from all others. Say what you will, but it’s miraculous when two worn-out people who have been halfway to hell manage to find such small joys, the way children find fragments of colored glass in a stinking garbage dump.
I’m depressed by the abundance of “less:” face-less, sense-less, soul-less… All that garbage, mold, decay, and paralysis in my head… But I can’t influence anything… That’s the way it is… and will be… for eternity…
An existence like this grows into the blood, even worse—it grows into the genes. You can no longer live any other way and no longer want to.
“What, do you suppose, was VV looking for there?” I asked carefully. “In those brains.” “Cockroaches!” Kovarskis replied, without blinking an eye.
Practically all of the writing in Vilnius’s public toilets is in Russian.
Homo lithuanicus, unfortunately, realized only too well that to lose is very easy and comfortable. Then you can blame everything in the world—just not yourself. Lord knows, it’s really comfortable. And gracefully, elegantly sad. Homo lithuanicus tends to do nothing but feel sorry for himself and bemoan his melancholy end.
We turned into a gloomy side street; he went first. It occurred to me that this detective was ideally faceless. No one could paint his portrait in words. You could describe his walk, his gestures, you could even characterize his smell—but not his face, not his eyes. He had no face; he didn’t even wear a mask. I don’t think he was human at all.
It’s difficult not to be astonished when a hemorrhoid starts pontificating.
The last gasp of an educator’s talent hasn’t left me yet. I’m dying to teach children and grownups. I want to teach cats and dogs. I’m a teaching maniac. If I lived in a normal country, I would found my own sect.
“The man has killed the thing he loved, and so the man must die.” Every Lithuanian, intentionally or not, has murdered an abundance of things he loved. He’s murdered everything he loved. Although for some reason, he hasn’t killed himself. Apparently, he never loved himself.
their house looked like a fairy tale castle where ghosts live, black blood flows down crooked corridors, and at dusk the obscene bird of night chatters.
We’re all such friends that it stinks to high heaven: the Russians hate the Lithuanians, the Lithuanians the Poles, and everyone despises the black Muslims at the market who sell pears, melons, and pomegranates out of season; the Russians hate the Jews who haven’t left yet too, but, most of all, everyone to a man hates the Russians, but I myself don’t know who to hate; I’m a mongrel, so one part of me should hate the others: the Polish part the Russian, and the Lithuanian the Polish, but I don’t know how to divide it up so accurately, I don’t even know what I am—a tuteiša, that’s all, even
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all of the others came true too, just not at all like I had imagined, maybe that’s the worst of it—if they didn’t come true, you can at least hope they still will, the worst is if they do come true, but not in the right way. Tedis grabbed me in the middle of the street and
Let it be rubbish, I myself am a slowly fattening bit of rubbish with rolls of fat on my stomach, a wrinkling face, and I’m running like a broken bloody faucet today too, but it’s an honor to be even the rubbish of Vilnius, particularly if you’re an alien from a stinking swamp, from the kingdom of frozen time;
its growing stench is inviting me, one look at our restroom would be enough for men to lose their sexual drive for three months: toilets covered with poop and bloody balls of gauze on the floor, women pretend and preen their pretty feathers only in front of men, left on their own they get three times as disgusting, so that later they can convincingly blush at men’s filthy talk,
She was always a bright, long-legged little girl with an insolently protruding little fanny, maybe that’s why she died,
You always act first and think about it only afterwards, men do exactly the same, it’s just that afterwards they prove to themselves and everyone else that they’ve done everything correctly and sensibly, while we just torment ourselves—maybe they really do think more, but only afterwards, when everything’s over and done with.
I never considered men an unnecessary appendage of mine, it’s more like I felt that I’m their appendage, I always got involved with the ones who needed me, I could have had ten of them at a time, I don’t begrudge them, I’m generous, Lord knows, generous; I never bother about what use it’ll be to me, what I’ll get out of it,
where would you see all of that if it wasn’t drawn on that tablecloth;
tell me, does the earth feel any kind of pleasure? It’s simply made for a seed to fall into, for a tree to grow out of and bear fruit; the earth is the earth. I’m the earth too, I think like the earth, I feel like the earth, I need them all, and at the same time I don’t need a single one—they’re the ones who need me, they won’t go anywhere; they’ll come to me, I’m the only one who can satisfy them, because I’m like the earth: they’re my children and my lovers at the same time, because everything turns in a circle and returns to the beginning again—the
I stick my nose into the pharmacy even though it’s hopeless; of course, there’s none there and couldn’t be any there, that’s the motto of our lives—if you need it, it surely won’t be there, it’s probably done on purpose, so you’d be looking for some item all the time and that’s why you wouldn’t look for anything else, be it love, or answers, or truth, or freedom.
what kind of world is this, where sorcerers turn into clowns, heroes into impotents, and geniuses burn up alive?
I’ve never met such a rude, pompous, snarling person whose insides were so vulnerable and frail, no man ever stroked my hands and cheeks that way, no man ever kissed my feet that way, but only when we were alone—in front of others he would instantly turn coarse, cruel, and unmerciful.
You know, it really is comfortable not to know anything: when you don’t know anything, you don’t want anything either,
His child, a son of course, fell out of me himself, committed suicide before he was born,
I look down and I’m amazed; that stinking, bleeding cavity is what all men are after, and if that wasn’t enough, everything that’s alive comes out of it, although no one came out of mine and maybe won’t now: cover it up, hide it, squeeze it shut, and suffocate everyone hiding in there. Now it seems to me they’re all holed up in there:
his eyes shone no less than they did when he wanted to rape me,
the open doors to the cottages yawned like eyes that had been poked out,
I’m a human, after all, not the earth—the earth doesn’t bleed and doesn’t go looking for gauze to plug up its little hole.
but he stood up slowly, looking down at the dismembered body with a wooden expression, the way he had looked once before, thirty-five years ago, on the hill next to our village, next to Bezrečjė. Only then did I retreat from the window; I went to the bus stop, just like I’m going down the station platform to the fifth track now; I don’t know anything, I can’t testify to anything, because I’m no longer here, all that remains is a burning rear and a fresh memory of the coming generation;
And the road itself leads nowhere. Don’t drag yourself down it; it doesn’t lead to the secret, to the unknown, not even to ruin.
Lying is a mute admission of death’s inevitability, practically its anticipation.
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.
People sweat to cover up the smell of their emotions. Sweat smells only of physiology; it smothers the perfume of the soul.
