Vilnius Poker

by Ricardas Gavelis

  He walks unsteadily; the brim of his hat has collapsed entirely and covers his ears, from which long gray hairs stick out. Dressed in worn-out clothes, his shoes squelch water and mud. But none of this engenders scorn—it seems this is the only way this ghost of the rain could look. He turns to the dog and politely nods a greeting to him. Did I really summon him? Are his stories interesting to me at the moment?

  “Vhy is it vortvhile to listen to an old Jew? Because Jews are a special people! Every civilizashion only sees vhat it IS, it never plans vat it should turn into. Ja, ja . . . Dey can only long for der past, but Jews long for der future . . . Only Jews invented demselves a future . . . Dey alvays had two great ideas: Messiah and da Promised Land. Look over da history of da vorld and you’ll see dat only Jews long for da FUTURE . . . Only da Jew Marx could tink up communism . . . Listen to an old Jew . . . He sees da vorld differently!”

  He talks and all the while entwines himself further into his many-folded clothes, as if he wanted to disappear into them completely. The mist slowly disperses. Only the river is always the same black; it flows past us apathetically, and probably listens secretly. A river of words—how many words has it swallowed by now? If you stuck your ear into the current, you’d hear them, floating up from forgotten ages.

  “How strange,” says Lolita. “A gloomy river, the fog’s covering everything. We don’t know where we’re going or why . . . And an old Jew rattling on about the Messiah and the Promised Land. It’s all like a dream . . .”

  “But I am a dream!” he confirms willingly. “Don’t be afraid, I vill not interrupt your love.”

  “It’s nice that at least you didn’t call her my daughter.”

  “Am I blind? Am I insane?” His eyes suddenly widen, it seems even his wrinkles smooth out. “Maybe you tink you can tell an old Jew about love? It’s da old Jew can tell you about love.”

  He even got angry; Lolita calms him with a gentle voice:

  “Tell us . . .”

  “About love? You don’t need to talk about love, you need to love it,” he smacks his lips, picking the words. “Everyone asks—vat is da meaning of life. Da meaning of life is to live. And to live is to love. Love drives everyting. Da world moves because tings love one anoter. Fire burns, because da coal falls in love vit da fire. Da river flows, because it loves da sea . . . If der vere no love, da vorld vould stiffen and stop. It’s awful to tink vat vould happen if der was no love left . . . People don’t have a name until dey find der love. If you vant to ask a person’s name, ask him whom he loves. People don’t have oder names, only der love name. Love is everyting . . . Grain vouldn’t sprout, if it didn’t love da sun. Da sun vouldn’t rise, if it didn’t love da eart . . . Everyting is love . . .”

  He falls silent, moving only his lips; tasting the words he’s uttered, it seems. The fog is lifting, crawling back into the water of the river. Something has cleansed my brain—like a school blackboard with a damp sponge. Jews, love, and Marx—everything in its place.

  But Lolita for some reason turned pale; this Ahasuerus of Vilnius drove all the blood from her face.

  “And if you love a person,” she suddenly asks in a weak, barely aud­ible voice, “do you have to tell him everything? Absolutely everything?”

  “Everyting!” he answers and screws up his dark eyeballs again. “If dere’s someting you don’t say—you have to trow it out of yourself too. If you can live vitout dat and be yourself—you don’t have to say it. But if you hide someting deep vitin yourself, if you dream of it at night, if it doesn’t leave you—you have to tell your lover . . . or else love dries up like a poisoned flower . . . Ja, ja . . . like it’s been poisoned . . .”

  He unexpectedly escapes from our midst, turns towards Žvėrynas and in the old-fashioned manner puts his fingers to the sagging brim of his hat:

  “Ja, ja . . . only love!”

  He shuffles off, but I no longer see him. Lolita’s face is in a state I’ve never seen before. Her eyes are bloodshot; her lips compressed, even white. He did something to her! And I didn’t defend her! What will happen now?

  “Let’s go to Teodoras’s studio! We have to! Right now!”

  I automatically swallow my saliva and think I haven’t heard her right. Only after a few seconds do I understand why the old Jew, the soggy Ahasuerus of Vilnius, showed up here. He shoved me into a world that had been closed to me until now and then he disappeared, vanished in the fog again; he was probably wandering the rooftops of Žvėrynas, remembering the fires and the plagues, and the floods, and foreign armies, and the din of church bells . . . Who sent him?

  Whoever or whatever had sent him, I wasn’t prepared to avoid my fate.

  The studio, with its high ceiling, was as surreal as a memory. A tiny fireplace and battered antique chairs, all of them different. Lolita sat in one with her feet outstretched; she was guarded by a mass of beasts, people, plants, clay, and metal Bosch-like phantasmagoria. This room had a soul; these sculptures hadn’t turned into soulless things like Gediminas’s piano. The dead owner could walk inside at any moment—and what would I have done then? And how would Lolita, suddenly forced to choose, behave—maybe she would grab us both? I shouldn’t have come here. I tried to quiet my beating heart; I attentively inspected Kazys Teodoras’s world. On the shelves, on the fireplace, around me, under my feet, above me stood, lay, hung his works—from matchbox to man-size. There was a mass of them—as if Teodoras had wanted to construct an entire world. A five-meter monster rammed against the ceiling crowned everything; it spread invisible proboscises, it wanted to snatch up everything in sight. Me first of all, me and Lolita.

  “That’s the Deformer,” explained Lolita, following my stare. “When I asked Tedis what that meant, he said, after thinking about it: a reformer reforms, and a deformer deforms.”

  Teodoras really did want to build an entire world around himself. He formed it from clay, cut it from stone, poured and polished metal, soldered the most fanciful metal sheets, carved wood, poured glass, and wove all of it into a stunning tangle. By way of this studio I hoped I would find a road to Lolita’s inner world, but some third being lurked here, the secret third one of Vilnius. What was it holding in its possession, what part of Lolita? I was disconcerted by its insolence, by its evil intentions. It seemed to be lying in ambush and looking at me disdainfully. A large red cylinder with green lumps, carelessly thrown into the corner, irritated me the most.

  “That’s the irritator,” Lolita said hollowly. “Tedis explained that every studio has to have something whose sole purpose is to irritate visitors.”

  I tried to imagine this Tedis, a shaggy athlete with sleepy eyes, in the long autumn evenings carefully, lovingly, decorating the red irritator with green lumps.

  “It’s strange that you don’t remember him. Half of Vilnius knew him . . . I don’t know why: he was a quiet guy . . . nothing bohemian about him . . . He raved only in his studio, all alone . . . Others would rather rave in public, and turn impotent in the studio . . . and cast busts of Lenin.”

  I slowly recovered from the studio’s gloomy spell. One way or another, this was still a sculptor’s studio, and not a mausoleum. Apparently Teodoras’s spirit wasn’t getting ready to bother us. But Lolita was afraid all the same. Her uneven face twisted up entirely; her cheekbones protruded. She was still too young; she wasn’t accustomed to keeping company with her dead ones. She glanced around as if she were afraid one of the figures hanging from the ceiling would speak in her former husband’s voice. She turned ugly, horribly ugly; she tormented herself, but I wanted her to tell me about it. I wanted to hear as much as possible. Perhaps I envied even her ghosts, even the dead. I turned into a tiny kanukas, quivering with greed; I wanted to suck everything out of her.

  “I was an eighth or ninth grader, I spent the summer at my grandparents’,” she spoke in a sad voice. “Four of them showed up; they were making some kind of relief or mural for the Cultural Center. Four young artists with patched jeans . . . I was probabl
y fourteen or fifteen: a tall, skinny girl with unexpectedly swollen breasts. To others I already looked almost like a woman, I probably aroused desire, but actually I was as naïve as nature . . . There was too much of something in me too little of something else . . . I was missing a human, or an animal . . . or a thought . . . I was ready for anything. If someone had fixed me up with a child, I probably would have grown up a mother of mothers. If someone had given me a dog, I would have become the biggest dog specialist in the world. Anything suited me . . . But there was nothing in the village, absolutely nothing. Some other summer I wouldn’t even have noticed Tedis. He was about thirty; to me he looked like a retiree. All four of them looked that way—like gray old guys, idiotically trying to act young . . . But all the same I preferred talking to them, rather than to the kids my age from the neighboring farms . . .”

  As she talked, she recovered somewhat; sometimes she would smile at a completely unfunny part and her eyes would turn transparent. It seemed she was enjoying something, only I didn’t understand what.

  “So, what more? Milk. Warm, fresh milk. With foam . . . I kneeled on the wet grass and sucked it straight from the pail with a straw . . . Grandmother went off to the left, behind the bushes, to milk the second cow. It was impossible to tie them next to one another, they’d start fighting immediately . . . I drank warm milk, and Ted kneeled down next to me, with a straw too . . . I saw how he looked at me . . . He looked at me like God evaluating his creation. I felt as if he had created me. As if I were his sculpture . . . Probably that summer I really was like a rock waiting to see what would be hewn out of it . . . I don’t know . . . I probably stuck to him myself, with all of a silly girl’s annoyance. And the milk had nothing to do with it. Probably he tried to shake me off . . . But from that moment I became his—and that was it. It wasn’t love at first sight; I came to love him much later. But at that time he literally enchanted me—and that’s it. It seemed all of my quests met within him, it seemed he was just exactly what I was looking for . . . Even when I hated him the most, I never forgot I was His and there was nowhere to escape from him. That’s how it was . . . He became my God. I suddenly felt that’s the only way God could be: a thirty-year-old, shaggy, silent type . . . I am his idea . . . His dream . . . His fantasy . . . At that time my body changed a lot, I frequently stood in front of the mirror and God knows, I BELIEVED it was he who was changing me, making me the way he wanted . . . Not to mention the soul . . . He sculpted me anew, patiently peeled off husk after husk, tore off veil after veil; he entirely remade my childish mind. He cleaned out all of school’s phantasmagorias. It was only thanks to him that I grew up as a HOMO SAPIENS, and not a HOMO SOVIETICUS. I am a SAPIENS, aren’t I?”

  “You didn’t feel any force?”

  “No, no force.” She slowly examined her hands. “See, he even sculpted my hands . . . Just imagine, a Cinderella of the soul, suddenly settled into the Prince’s palace! What force could there be? . . . In place of all the Michurins, Makarenkos, and Brezhnevs I was flooded by an inner stream of Rasselases, Shakespeares, and Coltranes. I’d dream of Camus, Kierkegaard, and even Archbishop Berkeley . . . In my dreams I slept with an entire galaxy of geniuses . . . Ha, I’m probably the only woman in the world Kant raped! . . . My God had no mercy; he gave a woman intelligence. I’m not bragging too much? . . . You have no idea what it means to change from the top student in school to the accessory of a thirty-year-old shaggy-haired intellectual. Imagine you are being BORN and you see yourself being born. Tedis was a guru to me first of all, and not a man. A guru, and not a loved one. A guru, but not a lover . . . A year or two went by, I had time to get used to men looking at me, at night I would sigh, dream about lips swollen from kisses, on the trolleybus I would lean my entire body up next to him ‘accidentally,’ but he stubbornly remained JUST my guru . . . HEAVEN ONLY KNOWS what he wanted to make out of me—just not a lover, and not a wife. A spiritual disciple? Disciples are always men! I never understood him. I’ll never forgive him. He threw me to the wolves. It wasn’t enough that I was entirely his creation, I didn’t even know what it was he had made of me,” she suddenly gazed with a stare that saw nothing, and said angrily: “If I had understood him, I wouldn’t visit here, I wouldn’t sit here nights and talk to the walls. I’d sell this entire morass. They pay well for the dead ones.”

  Her lips were firmly pressed together, she seemed to be speaking without opening her mouth. Suddenly I was afraid of the evil little flickers in her unseeing eyes. She wasn’t talking to me, probably to her God, but I had no desire to be God. I was a man; I had an intense feeling that in a moment I would say something I shouldn’t say. I was afraid of this angry woman with the insane flickers in her pupils, chopping the air with her words. I wanted my Lolita back, but she had disappeared without a trace. All that was left were the tin mobiles hanging from the ceiling, three fat Buddhas with animal heads set on the fireplace, and a bitter foreboding that something horrible was yet to happen.

  “I’d purposely wear dresses with nothing on underneath, I flounced about and showed my charms however I could. He drove me out of my mind; he was impossible to understand, as suits a God. An absolute ruler, who needs to be cruelly punished . . . One of his buddies snatched me up, and in the course of a month he taught me absolutely everything, never even noticing he had taken my virginity. And it was all fine with me, just because he was a close friend of Tedis’s. I took my vengeance; I slept with his friend. While with Teo we would discuss Beckett . . . In the end I did what I had to do: I broke in here and destroyed everything I could. The works prepared for his one and only show. Intimate masterpieces, put away and not shown to anyone. I spoiled his entire world, and when he himself showed up, I nearly killed him with some bas-relief . . . He tore off my dress, tore it into tiny shreds, placed me naked in front of himself, examined me with a professional eye and said he would put me in his show: naked, covered with shit, stuck all over with scraps of newspaper used to wipe yourself in the toilet. And he would name it “Lithuania” . . . And afterwards everything was as strange as a dream and as short as a single day. We got married as soon as I turned eighteen. My mother was hysterical—she was probably hoping to raise a vestal virgin . . . There was just one thing I wanted: to understand Tedis, but I didn’t even manage to see him clearly. I even secretly wrote down his peculiarities. He never brushed his teeth. He wore a beard, but he had bought himself piles of razors and electric shavers. He didn’t eat tomatoes or chocolate. It seemed to me that even those ridiculous details had some secret meaning . . . He was horribly afraid of fire and anything sharp . . . He had a strange way of categorizing every philosopher’s and artist’s work. For him there was a BEFORE and an AFTER. He divided everything that way: Kant BEFORE and Kant AFTER. As if all of them at some moment had caught some dreadful disease . . . He could be unconditionally charmed with some person BEFORE, and abhor the same person AFTER. But it was never the other way around . . . I kept asking, before WHAT and after WHAT? Teo didn’t explain. He didn’t explain anything about himself . . . He would look at me and repeat: you are my best sculpture. Yes, I’m his creation. Made for who knows what purpose. He didn’t create me for himself, for his own good; I just knew that he broke and tortured me for my own good . . . He was saving me from something. But from what? From myself? From hexed Vilnius? Or from those annoying people who kept crowding into his studio? . . . He couldn’t stand to have someone look at him intently. He imagined that it was possible to steal the thoughts right out of your head that way.”

  “What, what?” I asked, feeling my tongue slowly growing numb.

  “I know, it’s funny . . . And then when he was drunk he would sometimes say that people aren’t really people, that on the road of evolution some horrible mistake happened, that the real people are somewhere ELSE . . . and then he was killed . . . And nothing was left . . . Until you showed up.”

  ”He was killed? You didn’t tell me.”

  “I thought you knew. Everyone knows. It’s a famo
us story. He was burned alive.”

  The room tilted. I tried to pull myself together; I clenched my teeth together firmly, chasing away the circles that flashed before my eyes. He was burned alive. He talked about not-human humans, an evolutionary mistake. He couldn’t stand kanukish stares. Shuddering, I looked around: the Deformer? Deformed bodies?

  “It’s a hideous story,” Lolita said hollowly. “He was sitting in a camping trailer. Smoking, drinking, talking . . . with that same buddy, my sexual tutor . . . His friend left to lie down in his own trailer. Tedis was drunk, he fell sound asleep . . . and the trailer started burning like a box of matches.”

  I had to say something. It was imperative that I open my mouth, but my lips stuck together and my tongue wouldn’t obey me. Suddenly I felt I didn’t want to know anything, I felt I was on dangerous territory. Dangerous to my mental health. The premonition turned into conviction; the sculptor’s studio was a trap. Does clay burn?

  “Well, none of that matters anymore. I have to show you what I brought you here for. The thing Tedis told me not to show to anyone. Maybe you’ll make something of it.” Lolita got up and went into a dark corner of the studio. “Teodoras’s testament.”

  I followed behind her like a robot. Stupefied, I watched her carefully take the head off of some animal sculpture. Only after a few seconds did I realize it was the Iron Wolf. It really was iron; on the sides in crooked letters was written the entire legend of Grand Duke Gediminas’s dream. Like an automaton, I fixated on the wavy lines: “and he dreamed an iron wolf howled on the hill . . . establish a city here, Duke, and news of it will spread throughout the world, like the howling of the wolf . . .” Was Teodoras also of the opinion that the secret lay hidden within Vilnius itself?

  “Look,” Lolita nervously lit a cigarette and spread two rolls of canvas in front of me. “These are Tedis’s only paintings. Ordinarily he never painted. He guarded these canvases like the apple of his eye. The Iron Wolf was his safe.”