Vilnius Poker

  “No.”

  “Too bad. Too bad you’ve never sensed that beauty, that your blood is still calm and cold . . . But I feel it, I’m a mouse like that myself . . . What are you after, my God, what are you after? What are you looking for here: don’t you understand yet that everything in these rooms has been changed? Even the books on the shelves aren’t the same anymore, and the papers in the drawers aren’t the same . . .”

  It was all unreal. Outside the window a heavy, black rain was falling, but swirls of dust still spun in the corners of the courtyard. Reflections flashed on the wall, as if the old woman, disgusting old Giedraitienė, was glowing. Even the dust-covered room was impossible, its shapes twisted and corner-less. The paintings had disappeared from their frames; empty, barely painted canvases stared at me. The old woman was like a crumpled, rotten rag, on which someone had fixed a crumpled, rotten, inhuman face. Drool gathered in the corners of her lips; she continually brushed it away with the back of a hand that was covered in age spots.

  I had to squeeze everything, as much possible, out of her. Across from me sat a creature of Their species—for the first time this close. I sensed that without a doubt, the way you sense a familiar smell, or grasp cold or warmth with your fingers. They had erred greatly in sending me Giedraitienė. They make mistakes too. The answer, the live answer, was in front of me; there was only one thing I couldn’t understand: why did the secret smell so bad?

  I don’t very well recall how I grabbed her and shoved her into the armchair, how I squeezed her crackling neck and stared at her protruding eyes with malice; I don’t very well recall what it was I was preparing to get out of her. I looked at her like an executioner waiting for his victim to release his last breath, and I just couldn’t understand what was obstructing me more and more. Only after a few long seconds did I realize she was laughing, choking and suffocating in my grip, laughing soundlessly, and in the protruding eyes there was only a strange fascination and the smirk of a condescending, superior being. I let go, involuntarily wiped my palms on my pants, while she coughed, choked, and laughed, wiping away the tears that gathered in the drooping face’s wrinkles.

  “So you’re still a madman,” she finally choked out. “Why, you’ll strangle me, Vytuk. And where will you put the corpse? You’re still the same; grab someone by the throat and don’t ask a thing . . . Ask first! I’ll answer!”

  “Where did you come from?” I was amazed that my voice was so weak and tired. “What hole did you crawl out of?”

  “From the cheeriest house in Vilnius!” she announced with a strange joy. “Don’t you know it?”

  “No.”

  “Strange, everybody knows it—but not you.” She once more settled herself comfortably in the chair. “It’s the most important and most interesting house in Vilnius . . . It’s the symbol of the city, its core. An infinitely BEAUTIFUL house, you just need to grasp its beauty. In every REAL city there is a house like that—sometimes open, sometimes hidden, sometimes it’s full of people, sometimes it’s empty and forsaken. But it’s definitely always there . . . Come on, think about it, Vytuk, don’t tell me you don’t know? Once the Tsar’s Okhranka was in that house . . . Then the Polish security . . . Then the NKVD office—do you remember it was precisely there we separated? . . . A house of miracles, a house of ghosts: have you noticed how easily entirely new inhabitants keep settling in there? . . . Then the Gestapo was in it, and later still the NKVD again. And now the KGB . . . Some come, some go, but the house still stands . . . How many sounds there are in it—they’re in every brick of the walls. And how many smells! Someone should write a poem about it, a divine poem. But that would require a new Dante . . . Vilnius will fall, but that house will still be standing!”

  “What were you doing there?”

  “What I’m still doing,” she said sharply and again stared at me wryly. “What do you think, what can I do? Always the same thing, Vytuk . . . What works out best for me . . . The very first interrogator talked me into it. He was almost refined; he even undressed me with his eyes politely . . . I thought, two or three times should be enough . . . but even two thousand wasn’t enough . . . There were more and more interrogators all the time . . . They put me into a separate, luxurious room . . . Then they came in twos and threes, at whatever time of the day . . . I didn’t keep track of the hours . . . or even days . . . or the faces . . . or the uniforms . . . I do the same thing over and over again, over and over . . . I didn’t notice when the Germans showed up. Only the uniforms changed . . . You say, the language? It seems to me they all spoke THE SAME language. Not Russian and not German, some language of THEIR OWN. The uniforms kept changing, and I tried; I did this and that, I sensed that in this way I’d accomplish something. They kept wanting more out of me, but I became absolutely necessary to them too . . . More and more necessary . . . By then it wasn’t they who were doing something with me, but I MYSELF started DOING something with them!”

  Her voice softened, her face shone with a bright smile. She was changing in front of my eyes; it seemed something was driving a life force, an inner warmth, into her. She was becoming almost pretty, but she stank unappeasably.

  “They need me, they can’t bear it without me! They can go without food or drink—but they won’t get by without me! . . . I became important, oh, how very important! I’ve spread myself throughout the entire house; I’m everywhere, Vytuk. Year after year I spread roots in all directions . . . They changed, but I stayed the same . . . Together with the house . . . We’re both unchanging; we two are eternal. It’s a pity you won’t understand WHAT I do in the most cheerful house in Vilnius . . . You’re too weak, too primitive . . . Or maybe? Maybe you have a hunch of WHAT your Irena used to do?”

  I’d long since been short of air. I didn’t want to hear anything, to know anything. I was being pulled deep into a horrifying cave; its walls could collapse at any instant and bury me for eternity. I needed to run, but my legs had been taken away.

  “I’m a queen, Vytuk, or maybe even a goddess.” I was no longer surprised to find that her voice had become melodious. “My roots reach everywhere. Our house is no more than a minor detail—they themselves are nothing more than little puny cogs, who don’t know what they do or why . . . After all, the Gestapo or the KGB, Iran’s Savak or Haiti’s Tonton-Macoûte, they don’t concern us, or you. We both understand they’re nothing more than trained monkeys, who aren’t worth wasting time over . . . We both know that only those who invented all of them, who contrived them, can be of concern . . . You can’t even imagine how much I learned during those years upon years, learned without words . . . even without thoughts . . . I suck out their knowledge and secrets; come here, I’ll share it with you, I’ll teach you. Come here, Vytuk!”

  She grabbed me again, the same way she always did, drew me closer; I couldn’t resist the inner strength that emanated from her—together with the hideous stench. She looked at me with her crooked irises and smiled indulgently.

  “You little fool . . . You’re afraid? You’re afraid of wrinkles, afraid of rags, afraid of the stench . . . You see just the surface and you don’t comprehend the essence . . . I told you, after all, that I’m a queen . . .”

  She began leisurely unbuttoning herself. I didn’t even want to imagine what I would see, but I didn’t close my eyes. I had seen the deformed joints and bones of insignificant little kanukai—so what sort of body could this one be! Many layers of clothes hid her body. She’d tear off one, another would turn up under it; she was something like an onion, and the smell wasn’t any less biting. At last she wriggled out of her clothes; I looked at the white body that was revealed and couldn’t pull my eyes away.

  ”Do you recognize me, do you recognize me?” she asked in a soft, trembling voice. “Come here, hurry!”

  I couldn’t not recognize that body. It was my Irena’s body. Not similar, not just alike, but really her body, the body of the woman of the best years of my life. She knew I wouldn’t have the strength to resist. The
re was nothing I wanted—only to drown in it, to touch the rather small breasts and the mole on the belly that was as white as milk, to hear her voice once more. It was as if I were under a spell.

  “You do recognize me,” the voice spoke gently. “Take me, come into me . . . You’ll recognize me right away . . . come inside me, I’m waiting . . .”

  I really did seem to be under a spell. By now I was standing next to her; I was already touching the smooth, cool skin with my fingers, fearing that Irena would suddenly disintegrate. At that moment I needed nothing more, I didn’t want to know anything more. It felt good. For moments like that anyone would give half their life. I missed only Irena’s face; it was in the shadows. I carefully grasped her fluffy hair, with the tips of my fingers caressed the earlobes I had not touched for so long. I gently pulled her head towards me; I tore it from the shadows. Into the vile dusk of the room appeared a wrinkled old woman’s face, greasy gray hair, and a craggy chin. Giedraitienė looked at me greedily and commandingly. I tore away from her hands as if she were hot iron, once again I sensed the boundless stench; it filled the entire room, the entire world. I felt my heart would jump out of my chest at any moment. She really knew what I needed. It’s nothing to defend yourself from exterior enemies. However, it’s almost impossible to resist when you’re attacked from within. It was hideous. It was unjust. They don’t pay attention to any rules; they stick needles into the softest, most defenseless spots. My feet carried me out by themselves. At that instant my running feet were all that was left of me. Behind my back Giedraitienė, the hellish monster with sacred Irena’s body and the disgusting, trembling head of an old woman, laughed hoarsely.

  “Coward! Coward!” she screamed. “You’ll never find out anything that way!”

  At that point I thought it was, one way or another, the end for me. However, for a long time They left me alone—I don’t know why. You’ll never understand what They do or why. This uncertainty is one of Their worst weapons. I could only guess that maybe Giedraitienė snuck over to Gedis’s apartment alone, on her own initiative; that she had confused and deceived even Them—this gave me a slight hope that it was nevertheless possible to deceive Them.

  I had fingered and felt the slimy octopus of Vilnius, the murderous flashing of the eyes of the Basilisk of Vilnius, but I wasn’t able to grasp its meaning. I saw what They did, I saw the dreadful effects of Their work, but I still couldn’t grasp what all of this was for.

  Do I really have to say that an absolute meaninglessness is the great meaning of it all?

  Only one answer could save me: my meaning is to follow Their footsteps to the very end, wherever that should lead. Even if the world itself hungered for destruction, I was obliged to prevent it. I had barely thought of this when, at once, oppressive fetters fell from my brain. It wasn’t worth torturing myself over Their meaninglessness; my own meaning was enough for me. Even if the world itself sought destruction, I was obliged to prevent it.

  I know this for sure: as long as at least one person thinks this way, everything is not yet lost.

  I dragged an old sofa into my hiding place between the library’s bookshelves. I lived between books in the literal sense of the word. Unconsciously, books became everything to me. They smelled like flowers and thundered like storm clouds, caressed me like a woman and hurt me deeply like the vilest of enemies. Every last thing was an open book. A full-breasted beauty, glaring at me in a cafe, was no more than the leather cover of an old book; you could open it, inspect it, and then rudely toss it aside.

  If it were possible for me to write books myself, I would know what to do. Unfortunately, genuine secrets cannot be trusted to either paper or to magnetic disks—as naïve Martynas thinks. The only way is to hold everything in your head, in the worst and most insecure place. It’s the easiest to destroy, but nothing can be stolen from it. What matters is that I know, and if I know, ergo it’s possible to know, ergo, sooner or later someone else will realize it, the one who will come after me. (I left him signs in the river!) That hope is all I live by—that I’m not really alone, that there are others who have studied this even more deeply, who have sensed everything more acutely. There must be. You won’t overcome all of us that easily, even though we’re forced to hide ourselves and to go it alone; we keep accumulating information, the murmurs of the heart, dreams—anything that will save mankind from the cosmic jellyfish, from the colorless pincers of the Vilnius Basilisk, which secretly entangle you, me, that green-eyed beauty there, the lame cat in the dirty courtyard, all of us.

  Once I searched for traces of Their work in books. Now I couldn’t escape them. I found them everywhere. Everything was marked with Their signs. We live in a world where They alone rule. I yearned to find at least one meager historical period, some more significant event, in which people would have arranged everything themselves. I searched for a book in which, having read it, I wouldn’t find any hints about Them. In vain! The whole lot screamed of Them—from the history of the Inquisition to Hitler and Stalin’s duet. Their commissars manifested themselves everywhere, attired in the masks of philosophers or politicians. I searched in vain for a country, a place where They hadn’t encroached. They quietly crept into music, art, and philosophy. I read books and I saw how playfulness, fantasy, and metaphysics disappeared from European literature—the kanukized throngs demanded block-headed descriptions of everyday life. Painful and tragic dreams disappeared; their place was taken up by idiotic realia, a hundred Zolas and Dickenses. The throng was concerned about bread, so literature had to write about bread. The soul slowly disappeared from it, the body came to rule over everything: how some character is dressed, what house he lives in, how much money he has. After Vivaldi, improvisation disappeared from music; music slowly lost its depth of meaning. Hegel, drowning in alcohol, blathered about his trinomial dialectic, and Europe immediately fell behind a thousand years, since even the dialectic of the ancient Chinese I Ching is many times more complex and real. With horror, I followed how They strangled God, and in his place proposed fictions in Their favor: the Progress of Science and Historical Materialism. I saw how the iron Moloch’s hold on man grew ever stronger; the automobile became a hundred times more important than a line of poetry. The idle rich had yachts and heaps of free time, but they didn’t advance either souls or art, like the wealthy of ancient times; they merely competed to see who could internalize the most dolce far niente. They didn’t hurry, but functioned effectually. The soul was irrevocably driven out of people. They intruded everywhere.

  But my most nightmarish discovery was this: They exceed humans in their knowledge. I understood this when I researched my darling Stalin. One way or another, he was the closest to me; his hairy hands had once caressed me too. The strangest thing in the mustachioed Georgian’s work was his implacable appetite to destroy millions, entire nations. Over and over again I researched all sorts of revolutions, the reigns of the cruelest tyrants. A dozen times I looked over the theories of Their great commissar Machiavelli. I sniffed out the logic of Robespierre’s terror. And I kept getting more confused. All tyrants murder thousands; they all destroy real and imagined enemies. I understood almost all of it—thanks to maestro Machiavelli and his impeccable reasoning. But not a single autocrat murdered millions the way my darling did. What was he after? I’d stare at Stalin’s portrait, as if by such mystical contemplation I could revive him and make him speak up. I myself was revived; I suddenly remembered a trusty old rule: if you want to discover the hidden motivation of someone’s work, find out what he is most afraid of.

  The macabre Georgian vigorously devastated the study of genetics. Therefore, he was afraid that it could reveal something. The conclusion was so obvious and simple that at first I didn’t believe it myself. Stalin understood genetics perfectly. He murdered millions particularly consciously and scientifically; he genetically changed the entire human race! Wholesale, he snuffed out anyone who was the least bit bolder, smarter, or more determined—anyone who could get in Their way. T
he Father of Peoples thoroughly changed the genetic code of his empire and lost no time in accomplishing a great deal. The slightest suspicion that a person has a gene for intelligence, courage, or stubbornness dictated a death sentence. If an entire nation was known through the ages for its resiliency and originality—the entire nation needed to be destroyed. (I probably could take pride that the Lithuanians belonged among the nations to be destroyed.) The tyrants of earlier times simply didn’t understand—it wasn’t enough to destroy your true enemies, you needed to burn out the entire genetic field with fire. The worst of it is that Stalin profoundly understood genetics at a time when humanity knew almost nothing about it. They always surpass our science and manage to appropriate the newest ideas first. They make deft use of our caution and laziness. Individual geniuses don’t save humanity; the gray throng snuffs them out. While the throng greedily chews on Their discarded charity, They leisurely smother anyone trudging The Way. Their most popular methods are insanity and incurable illnesses. Earlier They selected tuberculosis or syphilis. They never work crudely; they strive to make their work look as unavoidable as fate, as eternal and unchangeable as the movement of the constellations. Although sometimes they enjoy more macabre methods too. Roman Polanski barely attempted to hint of Their work’s superficial characteristics; he merely created a few films in which Their scent was discernible, but that was enough. No, They won’t drown you, or crush you with an automobile. They’ll send you, say, some sort of Manson, to slice open your pregnant wife’s belly. Everyone, everyone who tried to stand up against Them was destroyed, crushed, sacrificed their life, and didn’t change anything. At least you know about the famous ones, but how many thousands of nameless ones have perished on The Way? I am one of them.