Chapter 5
Episode 5papertess office
The morning after I had sorted through the last of the documents—those brittle receipts and faded letters that smelled of attic dust and forgotten decades—I received an email. Not a letter, not a phone call, but a crisp, impersonal notification that my appointment at the municipal registry had been moved to a new address. The subject line read: “Paperless Office – Please Bring No Documents.”
I laughed out loud. For weeks I had been drowning in paper, tracing my family’s footprints through the chaotic archives of Vilnius, and now the final step required nothing but my presence and a charged phone. I read the message twice, half expecting a punchline. There was none. Only a map link and a time: 10:00 AM.
The new office was in a glass-and-steel building near the Neris River, a sleek anomaly among the weathered facades of the Old Town. I nearly walked past it—the entrance was so clean it looked like a mirror, reflecting the sky and the passing trams. I pushed through the automatic doors and into a hush so profound it felt like a held breath. No rustling files, no clacking typewriters, no murmured consultations over carbon copies. The air smelled of ozone and faint lavender, not of ink and glue. Rows of empty desks gleamed under soft LED light, each one bare except for a single monitor and a potted succulent. The employees moved silently, their footsteps muffled by carpet that seemed to swallow sound.
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