This novel explores an alternative timeline where the oppressive power of the Soviet Union was never dissolved, and Lithuania remained one of its colonies.
14 June
Hello! It’s me, A.G. You can call me Asta. This is my diary. If you are reading these words, please close it right this second and put it back because everything written here is private.
No, that’s not right. Private will make them want to scheme, read, and seize. Turn one piece of private property into another.
Or even worse – collectivize it.
Please don’t read!
And who am I supposed to address? Myself? Makes no sense. This notebook is nothing but empty pages before I speak. Nothing more than empty palms.
Address the reader? Reader who is not there, put it back. Put it back, ya govoryu! Close it, Vladukas, and get lost.
Scram!
Good day, Mister KGB man! Hello! Hello! Name? A.G., daughter of Baltramiejus. But you can call me Asta. I’m not making this up. It’s my father’s name. Not my fault. What were my grandparents thinking? You should know. Check the basement archives, you fuckers.
Pardon my Ruyan talk, diary.
Four in the morning, wide awake. I put on Fojė, but so quietly that I can hear mice having a feast two floors below. The dorm walls have big ears – radars, more like. Press your ear to them and you’ll hear a hum. People say it’s the death rattle of Soviet plumbing. The testament of the sewers. The last will of shit. The composition of a Lithuanian soul, chisto teoreticheski, can be determined from a sample at the wastewater plant. Things we flush out of our insides! Just pull the little black knob on the porcelain!
In the old days, the nation awakened its silenced truth with ritual murmurs in the kitchen, my father once said.
These days, it happens in the shitter. Alone: no witnesses, protectors, submissive listeners. Truth all by itself, individual and private, stuck to the rust-stained ceramic.
Ah yes, Comrade Lieutenant… Or is it Colonel? Colonel, just in case. I’ll shoot it straight at you like an AK bullet to your skull: girls poop too. Smoke on that!
Ten minutes to five, which means… It’s already late. I keep playing Kitoks Pasaulis on repeat, zanovo, zanovo, zanovo. And again.
I go to bed late.
[…]
29 June
My classmate K. and I went to the Zelionie Ozyory lakes. She was more understanding than E. You should read more advice columns, she said. Try the Kompanion app because it helps, really truly. If you fail to satisfy or to be satisfied, you should fake an orgasm. I didn’t understand why it should be faked. It seemed like faking defecation or loyalty to the party. An orgasm, like party discipline, either exists or it doesn’t. These things can’t be faked.
We were equal in background (daughters of intellectuals) and shared the same social status (philology students), yet I still couldn’t help comparing our bodies in bikinis. Her tummy and hips looked like they were poured from a biscuit baking tray. Her breasts, just as small as mine, filled others with greed. She was the one the volleyball players ogled, not me.
Maybe it was her chocolate tan? Despite roasting myself in the sun back and front, I looked pale like the skin of a boiled chicken. I asked her to rub me with tanning oil. She asked me to do the same.
She lay down on her stomach, unhooked her bikini top.
She turned her face to me. I felt her gaze through the tinted glasses.
And as if sunstruck, I forgot how to breathe.
30 June
I’m looking into the little mirror. I’m fixing my hair. First, I tie it into a bun, then into a ponytail. Then I leave it loose. Hair falling freely over my shoulders hides the flatness of my chin and the size of my nose, softens the thickness of my brows. I detect Jewish features. Maybe I’m a Jew? I have no one to ask how much genetic truth there might be to this assumption. My grandparents are dead. I don’t ask my mother, because anytime she’s asked about family history or origins, she responds with the offended dignity of a Ruyan zhenschina, warning me not to poke around the family bones. In essence, I like myself. Most of the time. And I understand that this moladaya zhenschina in the mirror is of no interest to anyone.
Last summer in Crimea, this young woman gazing back from the mirror met a man from Poland, a gentleman ten years her senior. Unlike the typical imperial type, he began not with breasts and vodka but with wine and literature (though he wasn’t very well-read). It was my first time talking to a foreigner. He stroked my knee, filled my glass, offered treats, hoped for something.
Enchanted, I would either fall silent for a minute like a stone or giggle across the entire restaurant like a fool. The cocktails loosened me. He thanked me for the evening, paid for the wine and… He kissed me on the cheek and left. Nothing happened. The next day I noticed him by the pool with a pretty wife and two children.
I had a shower. The hot stream washed my neck. I stared at the warped shower door, the cracked plastic. I watched the water rushing down into the depths of the pipes, over my too-large toes – one of my many flaws – over the hair on my lower belly, which I had no reason to shave since there was no one around who could, by merit, stroke my lower belly. Through the hot steam, I watched my shins, thighs, loins, and I knew I was all good, hunky-dory, a girl like any other.
The rot was not within me. Something was rotten in the sociokingdom.
[…]
15 August
Got drunk and forgot what I’d written. I’m truly deranged.
But I’ll burn it next time. For now, I must write. If I don’t write it down, I might forget the important things that are happening. Closer… I’m getting closer.
I don’t go to the dorm every day. I sleep either at the manor, or at K.’s, or in my parents’ empty house. When I’m in my parents’ empty house, in my mind I repeat lines from an old book that I absolutely hate, just like all the other memories from school. But the phrases simply fill my head, syllable by syllable:
I fear to confess that this duty
Was not to the party, but to the word.
The word that needed rescuing from death,
That needed to be put in a shape,
So it could testify across the ages
To its own being and perhaps its life.
What does this even mean? Why do I know this passage by heart?
I murder the days that I don’t record in my diary. If I don’t record them, it’s like I didn’t live through them. Not that there’s much to live through. Summer days are dull and uneventful in the Imperial Sociocapitalist State. They feel shabby, like potato haulms in drought. In winter, things are happening, there are some unexpected side-turns. But in summer… Every day vibrates like a taut string. It doesn’t give a tremble or make anything else tremble. Perhaps this is why the diary is so trivial. And secretive. And the way I had hoped to write! The way I wanted to put things down! Oh, the private matters I shall split open! Mother probably expected a similar effect from the herring pictures she posted, thinking they would give her some of that social sparkle. Fat chance. Shit chance.
If only it would rain…
Last week I was on duty at the manor.
I’m writing it down retroactively: I was on duty at the manor.
I’m writing it down, but I’ll fucking burn it. Tear it up and burn it.
Something is actually happening, so I write: I visited the abandoned manor library. A library is not abandoned as long as it has at least one reader who visits and more than one book. The manor library was alive like a fallen tree, not alive in itself, only as a habitat for insects and fertilizer for the soil.
Some books were painfully familiar. The collected works of Baltušis, Krėvė, Mieželaitis, and so on, literary drudgery, the tar of aesthetics, the stone of the canon (around your neck). I noticed a Geda booklet I hadn’t read, Šliogeris, a few from Aputis. If I wanted to read them all, I’d have to stay here until the next party congress. In the library room, a few boards had come loose from the boarded-up windows, so more light seeped in from outside. I could only study until dark because lighting so much as a candle in the evening meant signing my own sentence, and books are useless without light. The parquet was excellently preserved – it didn’t creak. K. pulled a binder of periodicals from the shelf.
He wiped the dust off the table with his sleeve, and it rolled into small clumps. He opened the binder. It was a collection of newspapers printed on paper yellowed with age: Revival. A whole year fit into one binder.
When the authorities shut down the internet few years ago, decades of memory and current events sank into oblivion. Everything that had happened and was known in the internet era could have been invented, fabricated – there was no way to check. The things K. was always telling me about couldn’t be checked. We used a low-bandwidth substitute for the internet called Syet. Turning on Syet in the shelter would be like dashing down Lenin Avenue naked and hoping no one noticed. We received a normal internet feed from the satellite, but even that wasn’t fully safe.
I remember my father crying when he talked about the periodicals turned to ash. Before, memory lived either in newspapers or online. When they began destroying periodical archives in libraries, the internet had already been shut off. From then on all you could rely on were chance stories passed from mouth to mouth, distorted by the chain of transmission – embellished, breaking apart. Recent history was erased, the events of the twenty-first century drifted into people’s fragmentary and fading recollections. You could only count on today, only the present, only this moment in the abandoned manor library with my dear K., the only one who is real to me.
Listen to one such erased story.
Once upon a time, a Lithuanian leader in exile, Kęstutis Berglundas, went on holiday to Rome. Ruyan spies learned his holiday plans and carried out an operation: they quickly took over the little hotel in Rome, where he had reserved a room and planned to rest. Hitmen and thugs instead of cooks and housemaids. But the spies’ target No. 1 chose a trip to Sicily instead, and the ISB operation flopped. No newspaper or webpage will ever confirm how much of this legend is true.
Now the dusty, yellowed gold treasury of old news unfolded before my eyes. That was K.’s intention – to acquaint me with erased history. He turned the fragile pages: “From yesterday you’ll learn something about today. I don’t have the patience to read so much.” Thus began my era of Revival.
16 August
We finally went to Trakai. A little break from service, team building. At the checkpoint I played the coquette, and it worked: the soldier’s eyes were on my legs, not on the documents. I was wearing a light mid-thigh dress with little poppy dots. Mother would have approved.
K. liked it too. After our swim, we made love. It happened without words and with ease of something nature itself had intended. He turned the Niva onto a narrow road before the cemetery, where fewer holidaymakers went. We walked a kilometer to a small secluded beach in the shade of ash trees.
Across the lake, children splashed in the water, while their broad-shouldered mothers discussed their concerns and the shortages. All working-class women talk to each other about shortages, children, and shortages.
We swam. He remained silent and uneasy. The fine hairs on his slender body were beaded with droplets. He pressed against my back with his cool chest, and a hot shiver swept over my skin from neck to ankles. The children’s chatter on the other shore blended into white noise. I soaked into the shore grass like lake water and watched birch leaves chiming in the wind, shooting off silver sparks of sunlight.
K. drew away from my back and jumped into the water again. My body trembled, and the birch leaves trembled like a million tiny mirrors.
“Won’t you swim anymore?”
I didn’t answer. I kept rustling. For him even the act itself had a Platonic origin – better not to imagine things. I turned toward K., watched him toweling dry, and felt grateful. In the world of duty he gave me lightness and simplicity, and that was far more than any Party woman could hope to receive.
He curled up on the blanket with a smoldering roll-up, sunk in his thoughts, his eyes fixed blankly on the other shore. I looked at his profile.
“You know…”
I searched for words.
“You know, you could have anyone. Every other one, at least. Why do you sleep with me?”
He fell silent.
“Because you’re interesting to talk to.”
He propped himself on his elbows on the blanket and let his gaze dive into the depths of the lake. His wet hair, black as tar, curled around his shoulders like serpents. Then I observed, with plain irony, that we never spoke openly about sex or about Lithuania. As though those two things were self-evident. As if they were meant to happen on their own. Though they certainly were not. So he told me everything. He glanced at the children playing on the far shore, then began.
