Vilnius Poker

  “I’ll flatten his ugly mug!” Martynas muttered in Lithuanian.

  “Don’t babble in that language of yours,” blue eyes said good-naturedly. “You know I don’t understand it. Besides, I can’t understand you even when you’re speaking Russian. Passive disagreement is the stupidest policy. It’s a pipe dream policy! Forget that Europe for once. Did they help you out much when we took you over in the forties? . . . You need to think CORRECTLY, you need to get hold of reality. And you? . . . One burns himself alive in protest, others solder freight cars that are filled with meat and bound for Leningrad to the rails, and still others parade in the streets after a football game singing nationalistic songs . . . I don’t get it. What’s that all about? Come on, it’s nothing but a pipe dream. Come on, it’s all perfectly obvious. You won’t run anywhere, you won’t do anything! We won’t let you do anything!”

  “That’s how Lithuanians differ from you,” Martynas announced furiously. “When they’re frying in the pan, at least they aren’t rejoicing over it.”

  “What does a frying pan have to do with it?” Thickfingers was sincerely surprised. “What frying pan? You just need to be aware of how things are, and always will be. Always! For eternity! We won’t let it be any different! Where does this superiority complex of yours come from, this thought that you are somebody? If we need to, we’ll announce that you don’t even exist, and never did. No one will miss you. The Europe and America you’ve dreamed of won’t so much as peep when you disappear. We’ll arrange it so they’ll have other problems at the time.”

  “So we’ll just disappear?” I couldn’t hold out.

  “Anything can happen, if that’s the way we want it. The one who wins is the one who ACTS. There’s more Czechs than you—and what of it? The West bitched about it for a year or two, but everything stayed the way we wanted!”

  I looked at him carefully and couldn’t get over my astonishment. He was sincerely sad, and there was neither stupidity in his eyes, nor anger—more like compassion. The way a good-hearted person is sad when he runs over a cat or dog with his car.

  “All the same, you’re hopeless specimens,” he said thoughtfully. “You don’t even have anything to say. It’s impossible to understand you. It looks like the boss was right: you’re doomed to extinction.”

  He deftly jumped off the chair, stretched himself almost imperceptibly, like a giant cat, and in a completely different, commanding tone ordered:

  “You are not allowed to go outside! You’ll have to sit here for a while yet.”

  Without staggering a bit, he marched off towards the toilet; halfway there he turned around and wagged his finger in warning. He had barely disappeared from the doorway when we both, without a word, got up and quickly went downstairs.

  “Stinker!” Martynas spat out glumly.

  ”I wouldn’t say so. But it’ll end badly for him sooner or later.”

  “Why?”

  “The rank and file are required to carry out secret policies in silence, without giving it any thought. This one thinks too much and goes on about things that should never be said out loud.”

  “He’s a stinker all the same! WE! Who are those WE?”

  “That’s the most important question in the world.”

  Martynas looked me up and down closely and had already opened his mouth, but at that instant we both stepped outside and stumbled into a strange world that scattered all words in the blink of an eye.

  The square around the fountain with a weathervane, which was always busy and full of people, was totally empty, as if it had been swept by a giant broom—only the autumn wind ruffled the dark water of the puddles. It was completely quiet. No people to be seen anywhere. No trash, no trace of people. They had never lived here at all. It seemed we’d stumbled into a dead zone. A lone puppy, whining, dashed by. He deftly worked his short little legs, scurrying like he’d been wound up: apparently, he was driven by the same force that had eradicated the people. Despite ourselves, we stopped and looked around in horror: we felt as if we had gone out some other door and ended up in some other Vilnius, perhaps the inverse side of Vilnius. The windows of the houses were dead, the leaves on the trees were dead, life had abandoned this inverted city. The two of us, stunned, stared at one another. The urge came upon me to immediately return to the bar, let there be a hundred KGB agents with a hundred pistols perched there. We were already turning back, but the stage set suddenly changed. Two broad-shouldered men with angry faces scurried towards us, furiously waving their arms. They did not look human. They were fake. There couldn’t be real people in this inverted city.

  “What the hell!” Martynas muttered.

  I glanced in the direction where he was staring and saw indistinct figures looming in every other window of the building opposite. They surrounded the entire square, settled in as if it were an amphitheater. The glass of binoculars flashed in some of them. No, this wasn’t a dead zone: I felt as if I had ended up in a giant theater set. Everything’s possible in Vilnius. Everything really is possible in Vilnius. As if emerging from underground, four government ZILs with bulletproof glass lazily rolled up to the sidewalk (how could there be ZILs in Vilnius? Of course, this is an inverted city); elderly men in hats began to clamber out of them. As if responding to an unheard signal, several women with baskets came out of the neighboring houses and began mincing towards the store. A couple of young women with baby carriages followed them out. And they started to rotate around the fountain. One after the other, young men with optimistic expressions marched through the square in all directions. An instant ago it was completely empty, but now an unhealthy crush had formed—everyone moved stiffly, like mannequins. I still didn’t get it. I knew this square and its fountain well. I knew this store well—just like all the others, for the sake of a vision of plenty it was filled with cans of inedible fish, cereal, and cheap candy, and instantly crammed with people if sausages unexpectedly showed up.

  “Who the hell let you in here?” one of the broad-shouldered men, who had at last hurried up to us, snarled in Russian.

  “Yankovsky has gotten plastered again and for a few cocktails let them go take a look,” the other, a likable brunet, replied phlegmatically.

  “I’m going to write up a report about this!” hissed the first one. “I’ll trash him, the damn philosopher!”

  To them, we didn’t exist; they talked over Martynas’s head.

  “They see us,” the brunet calmly observed. “They’re coming this way already.”

  “Get into the store, now, and just you try something!” The angry one went so far as to shove me in the back.

  The procession of hats really was close by. Stepping inside, I noticed a group of militia restraining a crowd around the corner of the building. I slowly started catching on to what was going on, while by now Martynas was poking me in the side:

  “Look!” he hissed, stunned, “Just look! We’re in Sinbad’s cave!”

  Again it occurred to me that we were, despite it all, in an inverse Vilnius. The store was the same, but completely different. The shelves were buckling with wildly colorful cans, packages, and jars. Saleswomen who looked like nymphs in bright blue smocks smiled at us; their eyes said they loved us. In the huge room a few buyers wandered about casually, occasionally stopping by the refrigerated shelves or cases.

  “It’s fantastic!” Martynas hissed in my ear. “There were narcotics in the cognac, we’re hallucinating. Do you see the canned crab? Do you see three . . . no, four kinds of caviar?”

  That wasn’t all I saw; there were many more things an inhabitant of Vilnius wouldn’t behold even in his pathetic dreams. The procession of hats advanced right up behind out backs; whether I wanted to or not, I heard the guests’ questions and the guide’s answers.

  “It’s a pleasant square,” a hatted voice declared; a strange voice: hoarse, but biting at the same time.

  “The inhabitants like it,” the guide spoke Russian with a mild accent that merely emphasized the suggestiveness
of his velvety voice. “It’s particularly popular among young mothers. They like to bring their babies here, to meet and chit-chat. The air here is especially clean, and there are a lot of green spaces.”

  “It really is a pleasant square.”

  I recognized the hoarse voice; it froze my blood. An oppressive foreboding wickedly told me I hadn’t been driven here merely to observe a strange spectacle, that something really evil was about to happen. My foreboding asserted that They had arranged this performance especially for me. Martynas wasn’t choked by any foreboding; he grabbed several colorful cans from the shelves.

  “Lobsters!” he whispered resignedly. “I thought I’d die without ever tasting lobster!”

  “There aren’t very many people here,” the hoarse one observed.

  “Most people are at work. In the evening there’s more. We do avoid lines, however.”

  The hats were nearly stepping on our heels. The hoarse voice terrified me, even though I hadn’t the slightest idea why I feared it so, feared it and probably hated it. The women with the baby carriages were still zooming around the square like they’d been wound up. The optimistic young men chatted, waving their hands about with excessive cheer. They depressed me; I so wanted to stop them all. Martynas poked me in the side again. With his glance he caressed cans of Lithuanian game destined only for export. The sides of the cans boasted in fancy type: “Taiga’s Gift.”

  “As far as I know,” he observed philosophically, “Lithuanian boar, moose, and deer have never so much as smelled the taiga. A little misunderstanding.”

  “It’s a metaphor!” I made an effort to collect my senses and take up Martynas’s tone. “Lithuanians have surely smelled it.”

  “Oh, I get it. In the sense that our boars are so tasty because Lithuanians were taken to pasture in Siberia? As clear as mud.”

  “We try to always have at least several varieties of meat for sale,” explained the guide. “Some like game. Some—it’s funny, really—have a high opinion of horse meat. It’s probably a fad from the French.”

  “It’s not good to chase after foreign fashions,” muttered the hoarse one. “It’s ideologically dangerous. Small things lead to bigger ones.”

  Martynas quietly cursed in Russian. If he starts to curse in Russian it means the end of the world is coming. Once more I looked around, once more I wanted to know if everything going on here was for real. I wouldn’t have been the least surprised if that entire preposterous store were to sink into the ground and disappear without a trace. I almost wanted it to, because then the hoarse voice would have disappeared too. But whose was it? Whose?

  “The sonofabitches!” Martynas seethed. “And if I were to turn around and explain to them how things really are?”

  “We try particularly hard to provide ample fruit,” the guide cooed. “Working people need vitamins.”

  I calmed down a bit, perhaps because the hoarse voice was quiet for the time being. I looked over the great performance’s participants. The director’s hand could be felt everywhere, but the actors played their parts badly. Their movements were nervous; they wanted everything, but apparently they had been warned not to take more than a few items. A few women, it seemed, went into shock. Their blank faces stared at some culinary miracle and their lips moved without a sound. Going by, the broad-shouldered men roughly jostled them, awakening them out of their trances.

  “Our stores,” the guide explained, “compare favorably with, say, American stores. In ours, people don’t purchase groceries for an entire week. A working man knows he’ll always find what he needs. He buys only enough merchandise for one time.”

  “You live well,” the hoarse one declared. “And are there ever shortages?”

  His voice was driving me out of my mind. I felt I was going to stop at any moment, turn around, and fix my eyes on the procession of hats.

  “Unfortunately, it does happen,” the guide reported sadly; you could feel unappeasable pain in his voice. “Unfortunately, sometimes a person comes into the store and can’t buy what he wants.”

  “He’s a bit confused,” Martynas interjected between his quiet cursing, “He just now said that you can always find whatever your heart desires.”

  “Don’t get excited, in a minute he’ll add that not everything’s been done yet.”

  “Of course, not everything’s been done yet. We still have unused resources.”

  Martynas snorted and stopped cursing for a moment. It seemed to me that the pseudo-shoppers started going around faster and faster all the time, more and more nervously; the pseudo-mothers outside the window were practically running at a gallop; it seemed the entire mechanism was starting to turn more briskly all the time, that it was no longer possible to control it, that everyone would keep moving faster and faster, get carried away and start breaking the shelves, smashing the jars, and in the end sweep away and trample the procession of hats.

  “Pineapple!” Martynas suddenly moaned, “I haven’t seen live pineapple in fifteen years!”

  “As it happens, we’ve been carrying out an experiment in this particular store,” the guide lectured. “All of the saleswomen speak only Russian. The results are encouraging: an absolute majority of the inhabitants accept this innovation gladly.”

  “That’s a positive sign,” the hoarse voice agreed. “I’ll report this to the Politburo. In other respects you have been dealing with the national question rather slowly.”

  At last we both got to the cashier. Martynas, smiling wryly, paid for the lobster and pineapple. I knew I was behaving in a suicidal manner, but I slowly turned around anyway. I could not believe what I saw; I wanted to scream, but a scream wouldn’t have helped.

  HE stood a few steps away from me. He had aged considerably: his chin shook a bit, and his unruly hair was quite thin. However, it really was HIM. I swear, for a few seconds my blood stopped. Bitinas’s bald head, stuck on a pike by the cash register, moving its lips scornfully, spat out:

  “That’s the dragon. The dragon that’s devouring a hundred innocent virgins a day.”

  I no longer grasped what was going on around me. I felt a hysterical movement, the barrels of pistols pointed at me from under jackets. HE stood with an indifferent expression and seemed to be chewing something with a slack jaw. Only now did I grasp what had brought me here, how They had decided to test me. I knew I had to do my duty, to fulfill my destiny. I wasn’t at all afraid of the invisible but fully apparent pistols. I wasn’t afraid of anything at all; it was perhaps the first time in my life I was so pure and empty, so impassive. HE stood right there and finally took notice of me. I felt that my life had to end in just exactly this way: I had to crawl and squirm through hideous swamps especially so I would at last end up in this deceptive store, and HE would be standing in front of me. The last instant had to be like this, a frozen instant: everyone staring at me in shock, with the baby carriages gliding past the windows. Unexpectedly, it cleared up, and the puddles shone in the sunlight. I thought about whether I had ever felt hate for HIM, or if I had thought about HIM at all. Probably not. With surprise, I sensed that in essence, I had never believed HE really existed at all. HE was just a metaphor, the embodiment of the indescribable smell of the camp, of the nameless letters scattered by the night trains, of mother’s darkened, shaven head hanging above grandfather’s altar, of the lame dog by the Narutis, and of Gedis moving his hands and legs like a bug. HE was nothing more than Bitinas’s induced fantasy, an oppressive dream we were all dreaming. But here he stood right next to me and soundlessly moved his lips. The dream came alive. I had to take revenge on him for everything and for everyone, I had to bite through his throat like a wolf, but I just stood there and thought about how his arrival needed an entirely different stage set: that square with the fountain full of laid-out corpses, one next to the other, some of them castrated. The puddles lit up by the sun and surrounded by optimistic high-rises—and the square completely full of corpses, with a procession of every, every, every last one sent to S
iberia, and rotting live bodies, and the sweetish stench of the camp. At any moment I’ll jump forward, the faceless broad-shouldered men will press the pistol triggers in unison, and everything will be over. At last HE will no longer be, since I will no longer be. But he insanely wanted to live; I sensed this when he looked at me attentively, and—I could swear!—recognized me. He had never seen me, never heard of me, but he recognized me. I felt it in every nerve, smelled it like a scent, read it like an open book: how weak he was, how afraid. Unexpectedly, he stepped up to me, smiled ingratiatingly, and stretched out his hand. That’s what the fiery dragon’s breath was like.

  “Hello,” his raspy voice croaked, “How’s it going? Is there anything you need?”

  In the square the pseudo-mothers with baby carriages came to a stand­still. Everyone stared at me. My heart paused. That was HIS futile attempt to avoid the inevitable, to stop me from doing my duty, to beg a miracle. The attempt was senseless; the dragon couldn’t stop everything forever, all the same someone had to move. Martynas’s lips moved first:

  “It’s a wonderful life!” he said clearly. “The only thing missing is bird’s milk.”

  “Ha, ha!” the guide laughed gently. “We manufacture this candy that everyone likes, called ‘Bird’s Milk.’ Apparently, we ran out of it today.”

  HE continued to stand right there, I could stretch out my hand and strangle him, but I stood there unmoving and did nothing. I could have said something, I could have spat on him at least, but I did nothing. It was all pointless. He stood right there, and I did nothing. Next to us it reeked of the camp’s vomit, next to us crawled Bolius with his shaved head, next to us glared the straw-haired men’s kanukish eyes. My hands were free, I definitely knew what I should do, but at the same time I knew that no actual retribution would encompass even a millionth part of his guilt. Or perhaps—like a genuine Lithuanian—I literally stood there and waited for everything to slowly resolve itself on its own. And everything did resolve itself: he felt he was free, tipped his hat and slowly swayed off past the cash register. Martynas poked me with the pineapple and snorted. The broad-shouldered men bustled around us, the handles of their pistols finally released. The mechanism moved again; I was its only motionless detail. Fate had given me a single chance, and I did nothing. The procession crawled along the square, dissolved among the sun’s reflections in the puddles, climbed back into the black ZILs, and sailed off. Martynas and I already stood outside. The optimistic young men quickly parted, the young women abandoned the baby carriages, the broad-shouldered men collected them and slung them into a covered truck. Others, after locking the doors to the store, set about unloading the colorful boxes and cans from the shelves. The militia at the cordon lit cigarettes and released the real Vilnius crowd into the square. People rushed headlong to the door of the store and pressed up against the window, trying to discern, from a distance at least, the miraculous cans disappearing in front of their eyes, and stood there, disappointed.