Chapter 3
Episode 3bertulou ratas karvė neegzistuoja to narcicidtsi Marijampolės kalejime
Pedofilas
The corridor is longer now, or perhaps it is the same corridor, only the light has shifted—sodium orange bleeding through a high window, the kind of light that makes skin look like wax. I have been here before. Not this exact bench, but this exact waiting. The man they wheeled past earlier is gone, replaced by another figure, this one in handcuffs that clink softly against the armrest of a wheelchair. A guard stands behind him, young, bored, chewing something.
The prisoner’s eyes are fixed on the floor tiles. Gray and white, arranged in a pattern that repeats every four squares. I count them. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. The prisoner’s lips move, but no sound comes out. He is counting too, or praying, or reciting something he learned in another life.
They call him pedofilas here. The word hangs in the air like a bad smell. The nurses use it as a shorthand, a diagnosis, a verdict. No one asks about the illness beneath the label. No one registers the fever that burns behind his eyes, the way his hands tremble when he tries to lift them. He is a category, a file, a number in a ledger that will never be audited.
I remember a conversation once, in a kitchen in Vilnius, with a man who said atheism was a kind of sickness, a failure of the soul. I told him that sickness is not a metaphor. He did not understand. He never saw a man like this, strapped to a chair, accused of a crime that cannot be spoken of in polite company, yet still breathing, still blinking, still human in a way that makes you want to look away.
The guard shifts his weight. The prisoner looks up. Our eyes meet for a fraction of a second. In that moment, I see something unregistered—a flicker of recognition, as if he knows me, or knows the shape of my doubt. Then he looks down again, and the corridor is silent except for the hum of a fluorescent tube.
Outside, a siren fades into the distance. The city of Marijampolė is out there, with its prison and its church and its fields of unnamed graves. The cow in the title of this episode—karvė neegzistuoja—does not exist. But the man in the wheelchair does. And that is the only thing that matters, and that is the only thing no one will write down.