Vilnius Poker

  “It’s safe in my underground. In the dark it’s always safe. Light is more dangerous.”

  You don’t know what else to say. They won’t listen to you, anyway. Jews only listen to their rabbi. As a child you once snuck into the old synagogue. They sat with their heads covered and read something from the Torah. You didn’t understand any of it, while they all sat motionless and stared at their Jewish infinity.

  ”Why were they chasing you?” you ask, but immediately understand it’s a foolish question. You are a naïve fool, like all gods.

  “Because we’re Jews,” the hunchback answers and gets nervous: “What if they bring dogs?”

  You could answer him that you are the Minotaur, that the dogs won’t smell you, but he doesn’t need an answer. His thoughts grow confused; he speaks again from another angle:

  “We’re from the ghetto. Do you know where the ghetto is?”

  “Where are you running to?”

  “Nowhere. Through the ages we Jews run to the void, because the Promised Land is only in our heads.”

  “Why the Lilliputians?”

  He looks at you in surprise, and then he snaps his fingers as if he were summoning an obedient dog. The Lilliputians separate from the wall—it’s three children, large-eyed little Jews, dirty and disheveled. They are as sickly as the Lithuanian pensive Christ; their eyes gaze defenselessly in the moonlight. There’s no telling whether they’re boys or girls.

  “Save them,” the hunchback says proudly, without begging. “Save them, if nothing else. I won’t go anywhere now, my end was written a long time ago in the books of fate. Remember—every human is an entire universe, and a child is a universe of universes. Save them, my boy, and you’ll save a countless number of worlds.”

  “What do I have to do?”

  “You’re the Lithuanian. In the villages they secretly take in our children. Lead them out of Vilnius. I have faith in you, my boy.”

  You feel that now you are their God. You can read to them from your own Torah; they will listen to you, gazing at your infinity. But what can you do? How are you going to take three little Jews, the most Jewish in the world, through the entire city? It’s no good to have children, you shouldn’t have children.

  “You say that the dark loves you? Hide them in the dark, take them out to a village.”

  “Not today, it’ll be light soon.”

  He no longer has the strength to stand; he suddenly collapses on the stones’ sharp edges. He doesn’t feel the pain, though the sharp edges pierce him in the thigh, into live flesh. Now he looks like Moses in grandfather’s picture. All the old Jews of Vilnius look like Moses on the verge of delivering a great sermon. The three large-eyed children suddenly fall on their knees in front of you. They don’t stretch their arms out to you, they don’t cry, they don’t beg—they kneel as motionless as statues, their eyes have turned to silts of silver in the moonlight.

  “Do this, my boy,” Moses begins his sermon.

  “Let them hide themselves,” you order, “And let them stay here, no matter what happens. Until I return.”

  The Jew says something in his language; the large-eyed children suddenly vanish. You know that they’re here, you even feel their breathing—but they’ve disappeared. They’ve crept into the cracks of the disintegrating walls, blended into the piles of bricks, turned themselves into muddy drops dripping from the ceiling. Hunchback Moses has bewitched them, has turned them into a part of the ruins.

  “I won’t thank you, my boy,” says Moses in a dying voice. “I’ll say just one thing. However many years should go by, wherever you should be, when you meet a Jew, look him straight in the eye. Don’t say anything, don’t ask for anything—just look at him intently, straight in the eye. He’ll understand everything—if he’s a real Jew. He’ll understand and he’ll help you . . . And now lead me out of here. If they find me, they’ll start looking for the children too. Lead me out of here.”

  Without saying anything you lead him through the ruined, wrecked labyrinth. Exiting into the air right by the Dominican Church, you push Moses down a side street where the patrol worms aren’t crawling, and you yourself climb the stairs, proud and happy, until you see that your door is open. Open doors in the Vilnius night can only mean something bad.

  “Listen, Herr Vargalys,” you hear a voice with a horrible German accent, “we’re all Europeans. You Lithuanians are almost Aryans. What are these Slavs to you? You should help us.”

  “But I don’t know anything about the Polish secret service,” grandfather says calmly.

  “Herr Vargalys, we’ve inspected your old dossier . . . We’re grown adults, we’re professionals. Don’t tell me I’ll have to threaten you? By the way, the Armia Krajowa is opposed to the Lithuanians too.”

  Through the crack you see a German neck and a protruding Adam’s apple. The German smokes a cigarette with a gold-plated cigarette holder and looks at grandfather with inhuman eyes. He doesn’t need to threaten; he’s scary just as he is. He’s like a mummy who’s lain in a pyramid for three thousand years; now it’s arisen and in vengeance wants to put everyone six feet under.

  “We’re both professionals. Who’d believe the Lithuanian secret service’s resident spy in Vilnius doesn’t know anything . . .”

  Yes, grandfather knows everything: about the Polish secret service, the counterintelligence, Mikołajczyk, Sviderski—whatever you want. He’s even told you about some things that aren’t terribly secret. Grandfather knows everything, and in this world, it’s bad to know a lot.

  “How unfortunate that I don’t know anything worthwhile,” grandfather repeats pleasantly.

  “You love the Poles?”

  ”God forbid. I’ve fought them all my life.”

  “Then help us!”

  “Unfortunately, it’s not within my power to do so.”

  “I intentionally came at night, so that no one would see us or know anything. We know how to disguise the sources of our information. No documents, no commitments. Just information. Perhaps you’re afraid of those measly Poles?”

  “I’m not afraid of anything,” grandfather says firmly, and you know he’s not bragging.

  “Then help us!”

  “It’s out of the question!” grandfather smiles gently and pleasantly, like he’s sitting at a diplomatic reception. “I’m so sorry . . .”

  “I thought we would converse like colleagues,” the SS officer says indifferently. “Sorry? It really is too bad. You’re as stupid as a genuine Lithuanian. What do you want, you Lithuanians? What do you expect? You think you’ll recover your independence? . . . That’s just a hallucination. Your destiny is planned out for a thousand years in advance. Don’t tell me you can’t tell the difference between a hallucination and reality? You should act rationally; you need to come to terms with reality. To finally understand that you don’t exist and never will. And what does the lot of you do? . . . Some give lectures that doom the university, and end up at Stutthof themselves. Another sits with his mouth shut and won’t tell us what we need to know. What’s all that for? After all, it’s all so obvious. Where does this superiority complex come from, this thought that you’re somebody? You won’t accomplish anything. We won’t let you accomplish anything! Everything will be the way it is, and only that way, through the ages, through the entire thousand-year Reich . . . No, it’s impossible to understand you. It looks like the boss was right: you’re doomed to extinction.”

  “It’s such a pity, Herr Standartenführer, that we, Europeans, can’t help each other out this time.”

  “It’s a pity,” says the uninvited guest, standing up, “I really wanted to help you . . . Well, others will speak to you. They’ll torture you. And for what—for some Poles. For Slavs!”

  Two cross-eyed SS officers drag grandfather right by you, nearly bumping into you. You flatten yourself against the wall and think about how much grandfather must hate the Germans if he can sacrifice himself like that on account of the detested Poles.

 
Their footsteps echo down the stairs, then it’s quiet. Now you are left entirely alone. (All rulers are lonely.) You don’t need Vilnius anymore. And Vilnius doesn’t need you anymore. However, you still have a house on what was the border between Lithuania and Poland. The Russians haven’t taken it yet; Janė and Julius are still sheltering there. A long journey awaits you tomorrow night. You’ll have to take a lot of food, since you’ll be bringing three pairs of giant Jewish eyes.

  After Carp’s horrifying downfall I couldn’t recover for a long time. They couldn’t buy him, they couldn’t convince him—nicely or not. There was only one explanation: the pupil-less kanukai’s stares had slowly drained him: They had cleaned out his brains. It wasn’t Stepanas Walleye sitting inside the television set, but a nameless kanuked creature. That meant a great deal. That meant that the stare of the void is worse than the barbed wire of the camp, worse than the bonfires of the Inquisition—worse than anything. Unfortunately, like it or not, we have to live in the glare of that stare—there’s nowhere to hide from it. The drab spell of that stare ravages a person more thoroughly than the strongest radiation—you won’t protect yourself from it with a suit of lead; no dosimeter measures its effects. No one knows how many doses of kanukism they’ve gotten by now, or if a fatal dose is still a long way off.

  I needed an assistant, a person I could depend on. Martynas wasn’t suitable, he was too intelligent and too curious. I was completely sick of Stefa ‘accidentally’ getting under foot all the time, but she had already served her purpose. I needed a person who would help without asking too many questions, whom I could satisfy with vague stories about a dissertation or some scholarly work. Vilnius didn’t want to give me that kind of person. An impossibly damp time had settled in; the city’s red and yellow trolleys crawled through the streets half-blind with their windows fogged over. Even their drawn-out, irritating clattering was muffled. Vilniutians wrapped themselves in their raincoats and huddled, but the city’s damp hands nevertheless penetrated wherever they wanted. I saw clearly how every passerby dragged himself along, pressed by damp, slimy fingers. All of Vilnius coughed and sneezed. The women of the department looked like plucked hens (Lolita wasn’t working with us yet). And suddenly the heavens sent me a rookie by the name of Vaiva. She stung my menagerie to the core. For an entire three days they all came to work in new clothes, carefully made up. On the fourth day Vilnius won out: the collars of the new clothes frayed and their hair-dos came undone. Vilnius always wins.

  The rookie seemed different; she wasn’t entirely ruined yet. Maybe she wasn’t particularly pretty, but she was gushing youth, still looking for something, still hopeful. A short-cut little head of hair, a slender energetic body, and large gray eyes. I carefully examined her intellect. I didn’t need a fool, nor someone who was too intelligent. Vaiva was exactly that, and besides—she wasn’t as irksome as Stefa. She willingly accepted the boss’s attentions, stayed to work evenings, visited me at home a couple of times. She behaved properly: she didn’t act cheap, but she didn’t hide her legs, either. I was truly happy that I had found an assistant; I trusted her with secondary work. I was already thoroughly resolved to include her in an important experiment. I tried to make her like me, if need be I would even have married her—details couldn’t block my essential aims.

  But for the time being, I continued to wander through the library’s collections alone. At night, there between the bookcases, I read Plato’s Republic for the hundredth time. I attempted, to no avail, to comprehend the species of commissars he had originated. A species in which Robespierre and Mussolini shone. A species whose development says a great deal to a sharp-eyed investigator. I kept asking myself: why do you always end up alone in the presence of the commissars? Where do friends and like-minded fellows, in general any agreements with others, disappear to?

  How do They manage, at the fateful moment, to separate everyone, so they’re left alone? That was the question of that fateful evening.

  Otherwise the evening was no different than any other, just that the strangest visions kept raging in my head—fragments of angry sentences, oppressive premonitions—anything you want, just not thoughts. And those that I managed to knit together anyway were alien, not mine. It seemed like someone else was thinking with my brains. It was an indescribable sensation. A ferocious being settled inside of my skull, perturbing my brain, sullying it with disgusting proboscises. I saw it, taken out of my head and set on the floor, stinking and blackened. At intervals it occurred to me that it was stuck all over with fat, pink leeches that quivered with relish. Plato was probably one of them—the very fattest one, full of me, twitching with idle overindulgence.

  I knew quite well that Plato had nothing to do with it, that I was being devoured by a very genuine being; it had made its way inside me and was delighting in my helplessness. I imagined I was beginning to slowly turn into something else. I was fully conscious, not even overly tired, but suddenly I felt as if I had landed inside an oppressive dream. In this dream I was supposed to turn into something at any second. I was still myself, but I had already begun to inexorably change. I didn’t turn into a different person, nor into some other thinking being. They had a different purpose: I was supposed to turn into something sticky, nasty, and soulless. I was threatened by a mortal danger, but there was no way I could defend myself.

  Kafka’s Metamorphosis doesn’t describe change itself. Samsa wakes up already transformed into a gigantic bug. That’s awful, but the metamorphosis itself, even the premonition of changing, is still worse. Kafka knew about it, surely he knew; apparently, in spite of everything, They had destroyed a part of his manuscripts.

  However, I was no Samsa, I wasn’t anyone’s fictional character. I was a real person, I was sitting in a real library, and this waking dream was suffocating and choking me. Horrified, I looked around at the identical rows of bookshelves. Something was stalking me in the labyrinth of dusty book spines. Alas, alas, it was not I who was the Minotaur; the real beast was patiently waiting for me, or maybe it had even begun to quietly masticate me, its eternal victim. I didn’t know which direction to turn, where to go look for it. It was identical on every side: defenseless book spines in the drab, spiritless light; turns, nooks and traps. Going one or a dozen steps to the side wouldn’t change the view: once more—an aimless chaos of book spines, a distorted, dusty silence. I asked myself why do I sit here evenings and read tattered books? Why do I look for answers to questions, why do I wrestle with something if no one, absolutely no one, needs it? The soaked, fog-drenched inhabitants of Vilnius need only bread and meat, cushy furniture, and easy work; then there are some who need to whine about a dying Lithuania too—just whining, don’t you dare lift a finger. And what could I give them? Vague premonitions, a quadrille of toothless camp children, a pile of portraits of people who once were? Who needs me? Vilnius, perfectly justifiably, wants to strangle me, the disturber of the peace. I had an urge to set the library on fire, to set all of Vilnius, the entire world, on fire. Even though there was (there always is) a simpler way—set yourself on fire, one way or another. Kalanta burned himself alive in a square in Kaunas for just that reason—whatever purposes and motives others would pin on him. And still simpler and more human—simply calm down. Why the torture? It’s much better to bow your head and to feel a flawless, drab benevolence overtaking you. Let the dead bury their dead. Lord knows, why do I want to open my eyes, what in this godforsaken city is worth fighting for? (Now I’d answer—for Lolita. It’s worth sacrificing a hundred like me for her.)

  I don’t know where these thoughts would have led me, but suddenly I heard a completely extraordinary noise. I didn’t even hear it; I couldn’t hear anything—it was completely quiet around me. I smelled that sound, I felt it with the seventh sense. Through the long evenings and nights I had grown so much a part of the library that I would have sensed even a stranger’s dream there.

  This time no such sensitivity was needed; I felt the hapless intruder’s breathing, his clumsy
movements. He carefully floated in the library’s labyrinth, thinking he was undetectable and inviolable, absolutely trusting in himself, like all of Them. He had no suspicion that I could feel him. Heated blood throbbed at the top of my throat, raising a barely detectable salty taste. In the dusk the bookcases resembled ancient ruins. The variously colored book spines faded, the corners of the bookshelves crossed and changed places, and I was surrounded by all shades of drabness. It seemed I had ended up between the camp’s barracks on an early, murky morning. All of the guards and the zone boss himself tried to turn me into a bug, a slug, a rock. They sat about inside their well-heated little houses and greedily sucked my soul. Everything was over; all that was left for me to do was to surrender. But suddenly I saw a dusky light squeezing under the book shelves; like a madman I rushed towards it, turned a corner, still another, and finally exited into a dead-end corridor at the end of the bookcases. He was covered in a dim light, permeated in a strange, bitter smell. A live creature sat there, my mortal enemy, a sullen octopus that had sucked out my fluids. At last I discovered him.

  The octopus was named Vaiva; it had a short-cropped little head of hair and nervously smoked a cigarette. She stood at the end of the dead-end corridor, turning the pages of a book. Her movements were jerky; her fingers crawled over the pages, devouring the letters. I immediately recognized the place, the corridor, the row of books. She was looking over the books I had selected and put in a safe place the week before. She greedily turned the pages, photographing them with her eyes. I wanted it to not be true, I wanted it to be just a dream. But Vaiva was only too real. She stood leaning her shoulders against a shelf, her sweater kept rising and falling against her chest. A gray miniskirt barely covered her crossed legs. She turned the pages of a French book; I immediately remembered that she hadn’t put down on her job application that she knew French. I quietly slunk closer; some ten steps still separated us. I still hoped that everything would end up as a joke, a small fright and explanations. But I couldn’t deceive myself; the sensation that had brought me here was much too strong and real. She was just exactly the beast who had been stalking me. An impostor, worming her way into my immediate surroundings, knowing what books I read, even writing up summaries for me.