Vilnius Poker

by Ricardas Gavelis

  But one great thing really is mine; I won’t let anyone take it away from me. Everything else aside, I am still a human. I am alive. For the time being I am still alive. I still have hope.

  This meager hope of mine was aroused by the great kanukai duet—Hitler and Stalin. The two of them were very different. Hitler was somewhat superficial and too open. He would frequently give away his true intentions, and therefore Their operating mechanism as well. Stalin disguised everything masterfully; he was a true kanukish sneak, a global Basilisk. Without a doubt, Stalin felt himself the superior in this duet.

  They fell out over something. The war between Germany and Russia wasn’t Their conflict—after all, it certainly wasn’t kanukai who died in the battles. The war was planned and coordinated between Hitler and Stalin as one of Their spheres of action. (Don’t forget it’s the courageous who are the first to die in battle.) Who would formally beat whom was entirely beside the point. The two of them fell out over something more essential.

  How thoroughly Stalin hid Hitler’s death! He even invented a legend about him running away to Argentina. Why, to what purpose? There can only be one answer: he made a fatal misstep and tried to hide it from Their highest authorities! He could kill off tens and hundreds of millions, but he had no right to touch another kanukai leader. That was Stalin’s fateful mistake, the creature of his ambition.

  War, squabbles, even slaughter, go on in Their midst too. They cheat, plan intrigues, and make mistakes too. That’s what’s most important: They’re neither extraterrestrials, nor machines, nor gods. They are also live beings. Ergo, it’s possible to overcome Them.

  I still have hope.

  I blew off the library and went out into the city streets. Vilnius is the most interesting book there is. By the Lenin monument the girls, their skirts pulled up, were tanning their legs in the sun and smoking cigarettes with hashish. Fat aunties in hideous clothes pulled up slightly wilted flowers and planted new ones—the square must always be full of fresh flowers. “I’m not going to have children for the benefit of this hell,” a deep, hoarse woman’s voice spoke. “Better to strangle them to start with. Why should I wait for someone else to do it?” Curious women crowded around a van in a store’s yard: what have they brought? Deep sighs floated about, one huge Vilnius sigh, wind and rain, I couldn’t tell anymore if I was still myself, perhaps it really was me who said in a unfamiliar man’s voice: “You know, it feels like they’ve trampled on my brains. They’re forcing me to obey: calmly, with restraint, without a fuss. And they just keep squashing and squashing that brain of mine with their feet.”

  At night the confusion of sounds would quiet down; then they’d be heard one by one. At three in the morning a taxi suddenly would start roaring; for maybe a couple of minutes it would approach along the empty street, its tires squealing, before screeching harshly under my windows and finally quieting down. The driver would turn “Radio Liberty” on, full blast, and hang out there—why didn’t anyone complain about him? Then the entire street would growl and rumble, the window panes would rattle, I’d jump out of bed and see a powerful procession of armor-plated army trucks. The procession of death, the spikes of the weapons covered in tarps, would fly howling through the Vilnius night. The silence would not return. It seems Vilnius trusts in me; it presents me with all of its night—right up until the morning bustle of the street sweepers. The workers repairing the trolleybus wires rudely banged their hammers on the iron poles and laughed over dirty jokes at the top of their voices. Tired drunkards would drag themselves home. On a bench between scrawny bushes, a couple who couldn’t find themselves a private spot tortured the silence for a long time with their mysterious whispering. At last, a dress rustled, expressive details stung the ears: the snap of underwear elastic, the damp, sticky sound of the beginning of an act. The young lady quietly moaned in Russian, the young man quieted her in Lithuanian, hurriedly squeaking the bench. On the other side of the street a car bristling with radio antennas stopped, a drunken militiaman quickly jumped out onto the sidewalk and started vomiting into a garbage can. Vilnius thrust and shoved its nightlife at me. And the day would begin with our neighborhood cat, a long-haired, brown bandit with metaphysical leanings. He would wait in the little dug-up plot across from the building, scrutinize me probingly, and then scornfully turn away. He always expected something meaningful from me, and he would always be disappointed. There was nothing I could do to make him happy. Shamed, for a long time I’d look at the cat’s back, turned away in indifference, and his nervously twitching tail. The next morning he would be waiting for me again. He still hoped for something, with a true fanatic’s stubbornness. I was ashamed. Or maybe it wasn’t me—I really didn’t know anymore if I was still myself. It seemed to me that I was everyone. I was those morning drunkards sitting together by the fountain, waiting for eleven o’clock (only at eleven!), when the liquor section would open. That was my red, wrinkled face with bags under the eyes. My hands shook, and my throat convulsively swallowed saliva. I saw frail little old ladies returning from church, live relics of Lithuanian villages. They dressed in dark clothes and tied spotless white scarves on their heads. Their calves were naked; the blue veins and shrunken gray muscles shone through the transparent parchment of their skin. Their faces were no longer of this world. They would walk in twos, arm in arm, supporting one another with their shoulders. (I myself was a little old lady like that, yanked out of the village by my children, quietly moldering away in a windowless little closet.) At intervals, so you wouldn’t forget whom Lithuania belonged to, Russian officers’ wives, with gigantic knots of white, peroxide-bleached hair, would proudly pass by. They never walked alone. They would pass by in twos, in threes, boldly casting glances in all directions, just waiting for someone to harass them. I saw it all. I saw the three lunatics on the loose in our neighborhood; one I took particular note of: he was fat and always wore a military uniform without epaulettes and an empty pistol holster. He hung around the workers who were endlessly digging around in the street and casually followed their progress, at intervals solemnly unbuttoning the pistol holster. Apparently the ancient gene of the camp guard dynasty lay buried within him.

  In Vilnius nothing has progressed, in Vilnius everything has merely crumbled and shattered. Perverted old exhibitionist Vilnius doesn’t in the least try to hide its blunt, powerless phallus. My eyes hurt. Vilnius jangled my nerves. My brains were exhausted from impressions.

  “Let’s transform Vilnius into a city of outstanding order!”

  “The Party’s June Plenum resolution—to life!”

  “Everything the Party has planned—we’ll accomplish!”

  I needed someone. I needed someone who could see and hear with me. I couldn’t take it alone anymore. I desperately needed someone, but no one could help in this search. No art, no philosophy advises you how to find someone. Great minds take up great subjects, but no one explains this—the most ordinary, but most important of things.

  How was I supposed to look for someone? Where? By what: scent, shape, words?

  Unfortunately, I don’t have any advice, either. I don’t know how I found Lolita. I found her in parts: first her body, and then—slowly, with enormous difficulty—her soul too. She doesn’t even know that she has to take the place of all of my dead and even of disgusting, beloved Vilnius. She doesn’t know that sometimes she has to take my own place for me. And thank God she doesn’t know. If she knew, she’d probably be frightened at such a horrifying responsibility.

  Now I no longer stand naked in front of the mirror; I don’t keep asking myself what she sees in me. But I still doubt it’s me she really needs. We’ve never become completely intimate; an invisible wall looms between us. Sometimes I want to break it down, to smash it to pieces, but I hardly clench my fist before I suddenly take fright. In this world fulfilled happiness isn’t possible. With all the walls broken down, becoming one with Lolita, I would either have to die, or to kill her. Maybe it’s a good thing that her spirit keeps esc
aping and hiding itself in a cave, like a frightened little animal. From behind that wall she surprises me with the weirdest stories and with her unpredictable behavior.

  “I’d like to be your sister,” she says unexpectedly, looking out the window at the slanting rain. “I’d like to feel we’re part of the same seed . . . Although I’m more to you than a sister . . . We’re doing something forbidden; we’re enjoying spiritual incest. It’d be better if I really were your sister. At least I’d know what it was I’d decided on . . . Now I don’t know anything anymore . . . It’s bad enough that we both are, each of us on our own. But it’s a hundred times worse that we’re together . . . When I touch you, I melt completely. To me it seems like you’re my death . . . We’re doing something God has forbidden. We’re closer than a brother and a sister . . . We shouldn’t be together . . . I know I’ll pay dearly for it, but I want you anyway—more than anything in the world. And at the same time I want to run away from you, run, run, run, as far away as possible . . .”

  She wants to leave me, because I am her love and her death. These enigmatic horrors aren’t even necessary—she could simply leave me for another. That possibility alone drives me out of my mind. Our love itself is insane. Suddenly I want something terrible to happen to Lolita. I long for her to break her legs and spine, for her face to be mutilated, so that no one, absolutely no one, would need her. So that everyone who saw her would feel pity for her, or better yet—revulsion. No one, no one would need her anymore—but I would need her no matter what shape she was in. Only then, when the entire world has turned away from her, will she understand how much I love her. I literally relish the insanity of this desire, before my eyes I see a Lolita who belongs to me alone—inseparable, for ages upon ages. And somewhere, at the very bottom, writhes a disgusting, stinking worm: my insanity calmly confirms that I could do this myself, mutilate her myself. All it would take . . .

  She finally turns from the window and looks at me with her deep brown eyes. My supposed insanity bursts like a soap bubble. A stinking soap, boiled from the corpses of the camp. What right do I have to seize her for myself? What right?

  Can a person want God to belong to him alone?

  “We talk too much,” she says. “We try to be too intelligent . . . Why can’t we do whatever we want and not worry about it? Why do people want to justify their existence so badly, why can’t they simply be, and that’s it?”

  I could tell her what happens when a person longs to simply be. In the labor camp we all wanted to simply be, to simply survive. They are preparing an existence like that for us all. I could tell her why I can’t stand Beckett, the most moral writer of our times. (I can’t stand Beckett, even though picking up a book of his I feel a quiver of respect. He is perhaps the only one who was able to look at man with God’s indifferent eyes. He quite honestly showed the sorry state of the kanuked man the way it really is. He showed that which is, but refused to even hint at why it’s that way, who is to blame for it. He categorically refused to make even vague mentions of Them. He left man on his own, because he looked at him with God’s eyes. You need to look at a human with a human’s eyes!)

  Lolita stands in front of me like a dream come true. I don’t know if I want to pray to her, but I really do want to kiss her feet. How pathetic I am compared to her! She needs someone much more pure, more worthy, more powerful. I’ll find her someone else myself, someone who would be worthy of her. I’ve practically no will of my own anymore. I merely catch at the slightest hint of her desires; I literally no longer am, I want only to please her, to do whatever she may want. I really no longer am—there’s nothing I want for myself anymore; I am nothing but her reflection. I don’t see anything anymore—just her. She takes up the entire world for me, she herself has become the entire world, and Lord knows, that is my good fortune. A dangerous fortune—one person isn’t allowed to take the place of the entire world.

  But we’re already going down the street, so nothing matters—neither the wet sidewalks, nor the rain, nor the long-bodied bow-legged dog, my old acquaintance, sticking to the two of us. Her wet hair shines like blocks of coal; under her raincoat the sturdy hips move furiously. I do not know this woman in her entirety. She doesn’t talk about her former husband. She refuses to move in with me, much less—to marry me. She categorically does not want to have children—best not to even mention it to her. But she won’t explain why. She hides from me.

  Don’t tell me she doesn’t sense what I could do on her account? If she were a miserable leper with rotten fingers, I would kiss those stumps all over one by one, infecting myself with leprosy, knowing full well what I was doing. If she were to turn into a chrysanthemum (she resembles a chrysanthemum), I would be the grave on which she would grow. Whatever she would be, I would recognize her immediately and turn into her shadow. Even if she were to turn into an intangible fabrication of the mind, a mysterious dream, I would be her dreamer.

  We’re going down a neglected path in the park to the foot of the hill, and for the hundredth time I think of how we don’t fit in here. An overaged Romeo and Juliet in the heart of black Vilnius. We don’t fit in with the quietly weeping city, with the spiritless kanukish life. Vilnius doesn’t accept such passions, such thoughts, or such behavior. Soon it will start to hate us (it already hates us). It will laugh at us with a drab, barking laugh. Love is impossible in Vilnius. We are partially digested pieces of flesh—can things like that be allowed to love? Can you imagine Romeo and Juliet suffering their tragedy in a sewer pipe, up to their waists in a stream of excrement, unable to move, armless and legless?

  We approach the river; I feel the sad breath of the water. The secret wall continues to loom between us, a wall of treacherous rain. A cold mist rises from the water; the other shore is barely visible. The mist enshrouds Lolita’s legs, slowly rises to her waist, and caresses her with damp fingers. I envy even that mist. Lolita is mine; no one is permitted to caress her. I can destroy even that mist, even the wind raging between her breasts. I get the urge to burn the books she likes, that she thinks and talks about. I get the urge to destroy the music she listens to alone. I envy everything. Our love is truly insane. I keep remembering how two wolves fought over a bitch with a white neck next to the camp fence. They forgot everything, even their fear of humans. They thrashed and bit each other as if they were alone in the entire world. The old one won, the pretender shamefully limped off, but heaven didn’t take pity on the winner, either. Half the camp witnessed his end. The old gray was angry at the entire world. He scurried after the white-throated bitch and defended her from everything. He showed his fangs and growled at us. He attacked dry twigs and the gigantic Siberian mosquitoes. Sometimes, snapping his teeth, he grabbed at the emptiness, at phantoms no one could see; he’d battle with drops of rain. Perhaps I am that wolf.

  “I’m like that dog,” says Lolita, slowly descending the slope, “I follow you and wag my tail. You see how good you have it: you’ll never need to buy a dog.”

  The river flows slowly and indifferently, like a gigantic vein; the blood of us all flows with it. The river of our forgotten blood. Vilnele, run to the Vilija, and Vilija to the Nemunas. So, say we love freedom more than life. Where is it, that freedom? Where is it, that life? The city swallows the river and poisons it with its sewage. The fish that are still alive stink of tar. And what do we, unable to smell ourselves, stink of? The Shit of All Shits?

  Lolita’s irregular face smiles sadly; wet strands of hair cling to her cheeks. Her body is gone; it’s disappeared under the drenched coat. A dream must be intangible.

  The river emerges straight out of the fog, flows in from who knows where—maybe from hell. Even the dog got depressed, stopped sniffing at the wet grass and stiffened, his long snout turned in the direction of the dumbfounded willows on the shore. What can I say to Lolita? We’ve long since exhausted the permissible subjects, and I don’t have the right to invite her on The Way—for her own good.

  I need an assistant who could tell her w
hat I cannot say myself, things I probably don’t even know myself. A mysterious go-between, maybe some Vasilis, a ruler of the swamps who knows the language of birds. Unfortunately, all of the people who are close to me are far away; all of them are in the other world. I can only hope to summon spirits, but they are, after all, bodiless and speechless.

  But what spirits could I summon? Save perhaps that lonely figure: you’d think he’d emerged right out of the river, a damp being in a crookedly buttoned coat coughing damply. The edges of his hat collapsed from the dampness, streams of water cover his face like cobwebs, there’s no eyes peering out of it—just the shattered lenses of round glasses. Where did he pop up from? Maybe he climbed down from the old roofs of Vilnius?

  “Goot day!” that old Jew sniffles, smiles wryly, tries to pull off his limp hat, throws up his hands, and finally fixes his gaze on me.

  He has eyes all the same; they’re wise and kind.

  “Your face tells an old Jew a great deal. Vhere have I seen you? . . . Maybe in da time of Grand Duke Vytautas or Grand Duke Gedhiminas? Or maybe in Spain in da time of Torkvemada? You invited me?”

  Maybe I really can summon spirits? It’s been a long time since anything surprised me: all things are possible in Vilnius. It’ll turn out I called him here myself. What will he say?

  “I’m an old, old Jew of Vilnius . . . my great-great-grandparents served Gedhiminas and Vytautas. My great-grandparents lent Zygi­mantas money . . . Ja, ja . . . My grandparents suffered under da Russian pogroms, and my parents fooled da Poles . . . Oi, how dey used to fool da Poles! . . . I myself lived and died in da ghetto! Ja, ja! I know every­ting about Vilnius! Ja, ja . . . Listen to me, an old Jew knows everyting. An old Jew knows more dan all da Lituanians . . . but I can say to a Lituanian, Lituanians didn’t hit da Jew, didn’t make pogroms, didn’t drive him into da ghetto . . .”