Vilnius Poker

by Ricardas Gavelis

  In the camp, he despised those of his partners in misfortune who just didn’t want to see through it. They were an indescribable, absurd, gut-wrenching clan. They founded underground communist cells and tried to persuade others, and themselves, that Papa Stalin didn’t know a thing about the horrible mistreatment that had befallen them. The Father of the People had to show up one day in a shining cloud like the Messiah, announce eternal Justice, and extol the members of the underground communist cells. Stepanas Walleye called those paranoids carps.

  “You’re like those carp,” he’d scream in their faces, “You’re being fried in the pan, and you writhe and sing hosannas to the cannibal chef. You don’t belong to the human race and never will. You’re carp!”

  He called them carp with such fury that the nickname Carp stuck to him.

  He’d sidle up to me and Bolius and to the other Lithuanians, and repeat glumly:

  “I’m ashamed to be a Russian. I’m ashamed! Guys, accept me into your nation.”

  He even learned some Lithuanian and proudly twisted his tongue, muddling the words with a dreadful accent. He’d assert to Bolius and me:

  “I’ll get out of here. I know that I really will get out. And even if I live a thousand years, I’ll never be a carp. I have a brain, whoever it was that gave it to me—God or nature. I’m invincible!”

  He really did leave the camp and settle in Vilnius.

  And now there he is, hanging around on the television screen and singing hosannas to the old and new cannibal chefs.

  Even Carp was vanquished in the end! They took away the brains he was so proud of!

  I could just see all of our zone guards, and the zone boss himself, sitting comfortably in front of their screens and lazily applauding with gloved hands. I can just see a hundred thousand guards sitting in a gigantic open field, so they can see one another, enjoy one another, and feel their combined power. They lazily applaud Stepanas Walleye for his accurate and timely words. Now he was their colleague.

  It was no different than if Giordano Bruno were to take up preparing firewood for the bonfires of the Inquisition. If Thomas Jefferson were to demand that the Bill of Rights be recalled forthwith. If Saint Paul were to start persecuting Christians and profaning Christ by all available means.

  Once upon a time he sat in front of me—his lip split, sucking on the hole left by his knocked-out teeth—and told me about his dream:

  “We’re worse than the Germans . . . Yes, yes, only we’re to blame . . . One mustachioed Georgian couldn’t accomplish anything . . . But the world has already punished the Germans and will continue to punish them, while these will remain righteous for eternity, my child . . . Russia never knew how to admit its own guilt. We love tyrants: Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Stalin . . . We’re afraid of them, but we respect them, we LOVE them, my child! That’s what needs to be burned out of the Russian soul first of all! . . . The love of the whip, as Pushkin, Alexander Sergeyevich said . . . And by the way, I wouldn’t take Pushkin into the new nation. I’d take Dostoevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich . . . And Bulgakov I’d take, with his Heart of a Dog . . . Too many Russians have a dog’s heart, my child . . . Way too many . . . I’ll establish a new church, a genuine Russian church. I must establish it, my child! And I won’t accept a single person who believes in the sacred Russian destiny to rule other nations, to create an eternal empire. Not a single one raving that Moscow is the third Rome . . . I’ll only take those who will understand their guilt, who will understand what they really are, who will want to become real . . . Real humans, my child. Who will fear nothing, bow to no one, but won’t oppress anyone, either . . . That’s how a new Russian nation will be born. A great nation! Perhaps I won’t be in it myself, maybe I’m too lowly for it too ordinary . . .”

  Stepanas was quickly taken on by the zone boss himself, and this meant the end. Our boss was the paranoid demiurge of the camp. You could sense a satanic system in all of his pathological activity; he had some purpose that was comprehensible only to himself. For example, he wouldn’t prevent the carps from gathering, but later he would suddenly add ten years to the sentences of all the members of the communist cells for starting up an illegal organization. There is no communist party of the zeks, he’d like to reason, ergo, they’re illegal. He thought it amusing that the carp, whom the Communist Party had shoved in there, secretly made sacrifices to it, and because of that got extra punishment. He wanted to perceive some kind of paranoiac essence in this, to “understand a person’s liver,” as he himself would say. (The gypsy baron from the neighboring barracks swore that during the annual celebration of the Revolution, the boss ordered him to serve up a human liver.) The majority of people are brainless manure, he liked to repeat, they’ll not only eat others up, that’s too ordinary—no, they’ll eat themselves up.

  “I need to understand your liver,” he said one day to Stepanas Walleye. “I’ll take you on.”

  This meant the end. When the boss would take someone on, nothing would be left of a person, not even that liver of his. The boss had taken on Bolius just before Stepanas.

  The last time I saw Walleye in the camp, he was in the pit where we used to dig gravel. There was only the shadow of a shadow left of him. He staggered and repeated:

  “Never! Remember, guys, never! I’m invincible!”

  That hideous summer at the camp I made an eternal vow to myself to never have children. It’s inadmissible to bring little creatures with souls into the world, souls that They will instantly devour. At least I can’t do that. Millions of people don’t even consider that they’re merely giving birth to sustenance for Their spiritual cannibalism. Millions of mothers don’t even ponder the hideous doom they’re sacrificing their infants to. Not a single child asks his parents to bring him into this world. Not a single father has tried to ask his child this.

  That’s a hideous crime—to give birth to a little thinking creature, whose soul will be left untouched for five years at the most.

  In Lithuania They start the kanukizing procedures through day-care nannies. In other places perhaps they do it differently.

  They need the mass of humanity. They encourage procreation by all means. They aren’t in the least interested in the extinction of humanity. The more brainless beings, the more carriers of the gray spiro­chetes!

  Even if, through some miracle, you hold out against Them during your teens and young adulthood, even if you reach such heights of resistance as Carp did, sooner or later They will grind you up.

  For the love of God, don’t make children for Them!

  Carp sat on the television screen, praised the Divine Party and condemned the Auschwitz guards as if there had never been any guards in the Gulag. It seemed someone had torn out a piece of my heart, took away my one and only sacred talisman. It seemed I had suddenly found out that my beloved sister was a horrible slut, and that in her free time she manufactured pliers which were designed to rip nails off of fingers. I realized that even Stepanas Walleye needed to be saved. I had to save that tall girl over there on the other side of the street, those children there, who are running like mad to who knows where. I must save the old, abused city outside the window. I must save the calm Swede sitting next to a fireplace in Stockholm and smoking a good pipe. Perhaps I especially needed to save him, because he doesn’t so much as suspect Their existence; he thinks that everything evil will pass by and leave him untouched. Like an aristocrat, he believes that all misfortunes are destined for others. He doesn’t notice the secret sucking stares; he has a sacred trust in his centuries of stability and doesn’t even suspect that his thinking alone shows the kanukai’s proboscises have already touched him, that the pupil-less eyes are already stalking him around every corner, that the drabness already covers both him and his neighbors.

  I felt an irrepressible urge to talk things over. I had to try to save Martynas too.

  I talked to him about Stepanas Walleye, told him about his nation, made up of five Russian writers, about the zone boss’s boot
s, which always shone—in whatever weather, at whatever time of year, as if he hadn’t touched the ground, and about the pen where Bolius grazed.

  “The worst of it,” I got naïvely hot-headed, “is that what he says seems like the truth: they, the brownshirts, committed hideous crimes against humanity; they have to suffer retribution. But he condemns those hundred scumbags in hiding, and doesn’t say a thing about the quarter of a million of the same kind of scumbags who continue to live quite peacefully next door to him, and don’t even think of going into hiding. What may be may be, but he knows it! Because of his sufferings in the German camps he can feel like he’s a part of mankind demanding retribution. For his sufferings in the Gulag no one will let him feel a part of humanity, they won’t even let him mention it, and he obediently agrees to that. He’s betrayed us all! He, Stepanas Walleye! The invincible! He himself agreed that he’s a nothing. He did it himself, that’s what matters most.”

  That, or something similar, was how I reasoned, attempting to understand something, but I only felt that absolutely everything was covered by a sticky layer, a cosmic jellyfish. I felt that I had to help all the people, before it was too late, while the trees still turn green and you can hope to find something alive beyond the lazy hills, as long as somewhere there still are all kinds of Swiss or Swedes, who at least already know that it’s inadmissible to admit, even for a second, that you are NOTHING. And to save them too is essential, because they have too much faith in themselves, they think there’s no way the fate of Spain in the Middle Ages or Atlantis could happen to them. Those naïve people! . . . They don’t sense the pulsating of the cosmic jellyfish, or, feeling it, they run to a psychoanalyst, thinking it’s just something broken inside of them and everything around them is all right. They must be saved quickly! Gedis’s beloved dogs scampering around Vilnius must be saved, and the warbling birds, and the smell of flowers, and little girls’ smiles, and that part of all humans that’s called . . . that’s called . . . it doesn’t matter what it’s called, but it must be saved!

  It was only then I realized I had been quiet for some time. The brakes engaged without my will; I didn’t say what I had no right to say out loud. Martynas was quiet too; he even turned off the television set despite the basketball game. The two of us were quiet, because that was perhaps the only means to communicate to some extent. Through long centuries humanity lost the habit of speaking straightforwardly, sensing that They could overhear everything. It’s only the voiceless conversation of two minds and four eyes that they cannot invade. The most difficult thing in the world is to communicate somehow. (I feel, I believe, I want to believe, that Lolita and I communicate this way.)

  At last Martynas sighed and insensibly stared at the city outside the window. Then he turned to me and in all seriousness asked:

  “Vytautas, has it ever occurred to you that Vilnius is God’s outhouse? That this is merely where he urinates and empties his bowels? Have you ever thought that we, even you and I, are nothing more than God’s excrement?”

  You’d think Vilnius itself, its gray eyebrows dourly compressed, had asked me that, had asked me what I take it for—a beast or a cosmic jellyfish. Outside the window Vilnius was cloaked in dusk. Buried in a ravine, it seemed to be sinking deeper every minute. Only solitary church towers attempted to escape from under the earth, from out of the drabness. The towers of the churches and the short, stumpy phallus of Vilnius. Vilnius looked at me. Its stumpy, powerless phallus looked at me (looked, because a male sexual organ is an eye, while a vagina is a mirror). Your soul abandons you when Vilnius looks at you that way. You can feel you’re already a dead man if Vilnius starts talking to you.

  I felt tiny, utterly tiny, and horrible—a monstrous dwarf, a midget of the soul, hiding all the horrors of the world within. I felt terrible because I know; I know everything (but at the same time I know nothing). I was physically ill; I was nauseated. Outside the window, Vilnius sank below ground for the night, the toothless children of the camp crowded around me, and there I was in the middle of them—a disgusting midget with no right to live. It’s impossible to live knowing everything; at least the tiniest bit of deceit, a sugary dream of drabness, is imperative. What should I have done? What should I do now? I should have grabbed everything (like those Jewish children) and carried it all away to a safe place. But I, the midget, was pierced through with a numbing premonition that there are no safe places.

  I rushed to the toilet. I threw up green spit and a few gulps of dry wine. My life was like that reeking, vomited wine. I already knew a great deal and sensed a great deal, but I hadn’t saved anyone in my life. I didn’t save mother, or Janė, or Irena. I didn’t save Bolius, Walleye, or Gedis. I didn’t slay the Dragon. I only saved three large-eyed little Jews.

  You’re sitting in ruins that smell of death next to St. John’s Church; the dark, as always, protects you from evil. Everything is evil now: the crooked streets of Vilnius, the murky air, even the bland hum of silence. Even silence itself is evil. Your city has been injured again—who can count all of its injuries, all of the notches left on the old pavement by the boots of foreigners.

  You’re not allowed to sit here; at dusk you can no longer sit anywhere—only at home. But as soon as the clock strikes the commandant’s curfew, you sneak out into the city’s labyrinth. No one misses you. Father is gone. Mother is gone. Grandfather falls asleep right in his armchair.

  The emptied city is particularly beautiful; it’s not marred by people’s bodies. That beauty is geometrical and oppressive—as befits a labyrinth. You know you’ll be able to hide in it. This is your city; you sense all of its nooks and crannies the way you sense your arms and legs; you rule this labyrinth. (All rulers are unhappy.) You could be its Minotaur, but you have no need for innocent maidens. To you it’s important to feel the breath of the mute void and the quivering of the pained air; it’s important to feel that this labyrinth, unknown to others, belongs to you. German patrols crawl through its corridors constantly, like worms. They’re aliens here; they wander aimlessly. They’ll never find the center of the labyrinth, where you sit in safety. You hate them, and the city hates them. Who can come to terms with foreign conquerors? Rats, toads, and cockroaches. But you are a human.

  You don’t know what it is you’re seeking of the Vilnius night. Perhaps you simply can’t leave it alone with the Germans, you must suffer along with it. With the two of you together, it’s more comforting and encouraging.

  You sit in the ruins and look at the illuminated street. Light is bad, it’s the kingdom of the German worms, while the ruins and the crooked, pale blue moon protect you. Just now the quiet was ripped like a finger piercing an engraving of ancient Vilnius; you heard shots and shouts of “Halt!” You wait for the runaways to show up in the illuminated corridor of the street; you still don’t know what you’ll do then.

  By now the tromping of heavy boots is close by; you plainly sense the inhabitants of the nearest houses secretly peeking through the windows. You’d think you would have gotten used to people being hunted long ago. By now the runaways are close, any minute they’ll emerge into the dimly-lit street. They must emerge—there’s no other way. You know all of the burrow holes of the labyrinth.

  There they are, they’ve already dashed into the pale lake of light.

  First some kind of hunchback staggers in, barely dragging himself along; at once his retinue shows up too. Hunchback can’t hurry. He’s followed by three Lilliputians; sweating, they work their disgusting, short little legs. He can’t hurry—he looks back, it seems he keeps dragging them along by invisible strings. The traveling circus of Vilnius: the leader and three trained Lilliputians. No Lilliputian tricks will save them now: the street is illuminated; the German worms will detect them. Now you are their lord: you can let them die against your will, but you can save them too.

  However, that’s just the way it looks in your foolish lordly head. You can’t choose anymore, because you’re already standing on the edge of the street, right
under the lantern, you’re already waving to them, never mind that the patrol worms could show up any minute, spitting little leaden pieces of death. You’re risking your life, but in these times life doesn’t matter. You’re used to that by now. Meaning that your own life doesn’t matter, either. You wave to them, beckon them into the ruins; they instantly obey you—the ruler of the Vilnius night. You quickly dive through disintegrated corridors, descend invisible crumbling stairs, step over chunks of stone: anyone would get lost here, but you know where to go. You know all there is to know about night in Vilnius.

  At last you stop; the breathless hunchback stops too, and the three hideous Lilliputians huddle against the damp walls and melt into the darkness. The man’s face is old and wrinkled; glasses hang on his nose and flash eerily in the moonlight. That man is some three times your age and maybe half your size. He catches his breath with difficulty; an unpleasant smell of sweat emanates from him.

  “You’re a Lithuanian!” he says with conviction in a heavy, heavy, Jewish accent. “What are you doing here, my boy? Don’t stand there, lead us on! Let’s run!”

  “These are my ruins, my underground,” you answer firmly. “The Germans will get lost in my labyrinth. They couldn’t explore all of my underground in time for the Day of Judgment.”

  “You’ve read the Revelations, my boy?” the hunchback asks in surprise and his accent gets still thicker, “And you know how to hide from the beast whose number is six hundred sixty and six?”

  That’s the way the Vilnius night is: there you can meet even a hunchback­ed, bespectacled Jew and three degenerate Lilliputians, runaways from death, declaiming about the Revelations of St. John next to St. John’s Church.