Wilno of the 1990s, my Wilno, Wilno at the end of the second millennium, Vilnius. The Museum of Atheism has been transformed back into a Christian temple. The thick layer of Soviet accretions, laboriously and persistently rubbed off, gets thinner and thinner every year. Czesław Miłosz, with whom I walk through the old city, guesses the name of each street correctly. “I still remember every little corner of Wilno; I could go through this city without looking, thinking about something of my own, and yet I would find everything there”—these words written in America do not belong to Miłosz, although they undoubtedly could. Why would their author, Tomas Venclova, brought up in the postwar Vilnius, insist in his “Dialogue” with Miłosz that Warsaw and Vilnius “were two radically different cities,” and even go so far as to state that Warsaw, “although completely ruined,” changed less?

Meanwhile, something completely different is starting to bother me: it’s lunch time, the master [Miłosz—ed.] is hungry, and here it turns out that all the restaurants close for lunch. After some nervous searches, we sit on the high stools of the “milk bar” and have some Russian dumplings. Happy as a Soviet hero on a Soviet poster.

Lenin is gone from Łukiszki (Pol.)/Lukiškės (Lith.) Square. From Szura’s house, from Krażių alley, where I often lived, where her old father taught himself Hebrew and remembered Yiddish but spoke Russian with his daughter. She would talk to her children only in Lithuanian. Her great command of Polish made me feel embarrassed. Today, she studies Yiddish, her daughter Polish, and her son married a Belarusian woman of Polish descent. Today in Vilnius, you can hear the radio station “Znad Wilii ,” it broadcasts in Lithuanian, Polish and Russian, that is—to quote Joseph Brodsky—in all three native languages of Tomas Venclova.

Not far from Szura's house, for several years after the memorable events of January 1991, concrete barriers meant to defend the Lithuanian Parliament stood. I was once shown one of the leaflets that used to be scattered around in these dramatic days of direct struggle for independence: “The Pilgrim's Prayer” from Mickiewicz's messianic Books of the Polish Nation and Polish Pilgrimage, in which the word “Poland” was replaced with the word “Lithuania.