Coming soon
The Snake in the vodka bottle
Excerpt from the manuscript:
The Dictator Within
If you've ever lived in a post-Soviet country, then you know that in an instant an ordinary day can metamorphose into a nightmare—a piece of lacking information, straying off your beaten path, getting lost, getting accosted, a wrong turn, running into the wrong person, uttering the wrong word, a misplaced cell phone—and you fall down the rabbit hole.
And in the same way you reemerge.
And everything snaps back to normal again.
When I am not in Eastern Europe, it's impossible for me to fathom that a place like Eastern Europe exists. I simply forget about it or repress the memory of it. Just like when I am safe in the reality of the West, there is no possible way to talk out loud about Eastern Europe. And I mean the real West, not the pop TV/mega-mall version we have here in Vilnius, and not the take-a-Ryanair-flight-to-London-or Dublin-to-do-menial-labor-and-sleep-on-a-couch-for-a-few-years-West, but the West of intelligent commentary, subtle relationships, and everyday compassion. My West.
To a short term visitor who doesn't speak Russian or any Eastern European language, a visitor who can get by with that fuzzy nouveau-linguistic concoction, "European English," a city like Vilnius is party heaven—a mix of the modern and the medieval, progressive, artsy, the Prague of the nineties. It is a place where beer is cheap, where half-naked girls dance on the bar in nightclubs and then perch themselves prettily on the bar stool, and proceed to intelligently tell whatever foreign man is close by in good English about her doctoral studies in Philosophy or her Masters thesis on the Napoleonic Wars or the French Revolution or the literature and art of Renaissance Italy. Eastern Europe and Western Europe are so far apart that I often think one serves as a dream for the other Living in Vilnius, you live with an undercurrent—an invisible, underground river that flows beneath the catacombs, under the cobblestone streets, through the many mass graves yet to be uncovered. We all feel it and then we don't feel it. Or we don't want to feel it or if we're too close to it we lose the ability to understand what it is that we are feeling. It's an animal thing. A matter of instinct. Beyond words. Beyond conscious thought. But you know it is there, always, in the back of your mind, as though you were walking past a ticking bomb hidden in a dumpster, waiting for it to pop. And yet there is no bomb and there is no apparent danger.
There is no war. There are no terrorists. Just that feeling of danger. These are the relics of genocide—several genocides—overlapping, inhumane, periods of planned and carefully calculated mass murders. These are the long-reaching shadows of occupation, of exile, of partisan warfare, of betrayal, of genocide, of all the last vestiges of a totalitarian regime. That regime, which lives inside all of us. We are all its dictators and we are all its victims.