Vilnius Poker

by Ricardas Gavelis

  “Vilnius? Not Kovarskis?”

  “I couldn’t refuse to share the discovery with Vilnius.”

  “A syndrome? A syndrome is a particular complex of symptoms.”

  “Clever man! Well-educated! And you think a lump like that right by the hypothalamus doesn’t raise, as you say, ‘a particular complex of symptoms’? I found it. It’s Kovarskis’s disease, which gives rise to Vilnius Syndrome.”

  He turns away from me and starts quickly piling the brains back into the refrigerator. I clearly see the pained wrinkles by his eyes; I feel the trembling of his hands. He is afraid; he is afraid of what he has found, and even more he fears sharing his suspicions with me.

  “I know the human expression of a face,” my voice speaks by itself, it’s not me in control, it’s not me choosing the words. “I know an inhuman expression too. Kovarskis, have you ever sensed stares that suck you out? Have you seen fingers with lumpy joints reaching for you?”

  Finally I silence my voice. It’s said too much. Kovarskis sits on the table again and fixes his gaze on me, nervously swinging his legs.

  “Old man,” he says in a tired voice, “It’s already been at least a year since not just those stares follow me, but the walls of the room too. You think I asked Šapira to find me somebody because I wanted to brag about my discovery? Why brag—it merely needs to be publicly announced. You see, that expression . . . I named it the Vilnius expression. I could show you hundreds, millions of faces like that. Look at the images in the newspaper and you’ll see what I’m talking about . . . It’s horrible how MANY people there are with that expression. In Vilnius—from seventy to ninety percent . . . There’s too many of them . . . Ninety percent, can you imagine? And no one has noticed it until now? Something’s not right here . . . No one noticed? . . . A person with that expression is most certainly ill with Kovarskis’s disease, understand? That bug sits on his brain. If you look for it, there’s no way to miss it. So why hasn’t anyone noticed? . . . You ask, is it just in Vilnius? No, of course not. It’s everywhere. By now I can spot that expression even in pictures of huge crowds. Kovarskis’s disease thrives everywhere. It should have been discovered a long time ago. It has been discovered a long time ago, understand? But why isn’t it described anywhere, not even hinted at? . . . The worst of it is that you can’t tear that bug off the brain, you won’t cut it off; it’s joined to the brain’s biochemical circulation. My disease is incurable . . . Vilnius Syndrome . . . I know all of its symptoms, I could describe even the most minor of them . . .”

  If an abyss had opened up beneath my feet, if my own brain had been covered with cockroaches, if lightning had struck in that basement—maybe I would have withstood it. But now I want to scream, to howl like a wolf. I know all of it’s true. I’m drowning. I’m somewhere else, running down the streets, shrieking like a madman. But no, I run quietly, spitting out the suffocating air. I’m not running, I’m standing. I’m drowning.

  “What matters most is the dimming of the brain,” Kovarskis lectures in a monotone, rocking back and forth as if he were hypnotizing me. “Constant, continually intensifying, almost blissful . . . As if the thoughts had softened and were becoming streamlined . . . One patient explained it to me this way: my thoughts became soft and warm, I understand, better and better all the time, that it’s all right the way it is, and it doesn’t need to be better. Helplessness isn’t bothersome anymore, you’re not in the least put out if you can’t think of something or if you don’t understand . . .”

  The shadows draw closer to me. I listen to his speech like a curse; unfamiliar faces crowd around me, and my heart grows stiffer and stiffer. Cold penetrates through all the pores of my skin; I am in an icy desert where the sun never shines. They’ve even physically slithered into our brains; it’s irreversible. Horror stuns all my thoughts, all of my feelings. My saliva is bitter, but I cannot for the life of me manage to swallow it.

  “The feeling of love disappears . . . Self-respect . . . Pride . . .” he arranges the words on the butchery table, on the girl’s stomach, on his own knees. “The language changes. Sometimes it seems to me I could instantly recognize someone afflicted by Vilnius syndrome with my eyes closed, just by the way they talk. Expressive words, color, and mood disappear. All that’s left is a bunch of stiff constructions, always the same, meaningless and vacuous . . . At the end, deformation of the body begins. The joints get twisted, strange lumps grow in the most unlikely places, and the eyes are left empty.”

  I was waiting for this. I was waiting for this, but the blow is crushing all the same. An invisible blade pierces my heart, pliers squeeze at my throat. It’s a strange thing, hope. After all, it was all obvious a long time ago, but I still hoped. I still hope. I look at the light-eyed Semite who’s still talking, and I see that he is not kanuked. I remember Lolita—she can’t be kanuked. Kovarskis himself showed me healthy brains. Returning home, I’ll look in the mirror and see a human face.

  “But I always only get up to a certain point,” Kovarskis speaks with­out stopping, hurrying along, “The deformation of aspirations, the deformation of the body, the deformation of speech . . . But what happens next? I can’t ever track down what happens next! Death? No, Kovarskis’s disease isn’t fatal. All of my stiffs with the syndrome had died of something else . . . Listen, old man, maybe those damned bugs can grow SMALLER after all?”

  He looks at me with such hope, with such infinite pleading, that he could probably melt a rock with that look. But I’m not a rock. I’m a human. I ought to tell him the truth: No, Kovarskis, the bugs don’t get smaller; your patients, overstepping the boundary, turn into kanukai. You’re right, Kovarskis, no one dies from the Vilnius syndrome. It’s much worse than that. You live with the Vilnius syndrome!

  “I can’t announce my discovery, my life’s work.” He’s no longer talking, but hissing. “I cannot unveil the disease with my name, as long as I haven’t found an antidote, or at least the cause. I need to work. Work, work, and work . . . I need to dissect the living, and first of all—THE GOOD ONES. I must find out why they have immunity. I need a genetic laboratory. I need to know if it’s hereditary . . . Help me. Help me, if you can. If you still can.”

  He falls silent and fixes his horrified eyes on me. He stretches out his hand and cold fingers brush against my cheek.

  “If you still can . . .” he whispers, as if it were the greatest secret of all, “because your facial muscles sometimes arrange themselves so oddly . . . Very oddly . . . Do you occasionally get the urge to follow others, to discover their secrets? Does it sometimes start to seem to you that someone’s emptied your brains, that SOMEONE ELSE’S thoughts flutter around in your head? Do you look in the mirror often? And how do you like yourself?”

  You’d think someone had smashed me up the side of my head. He said THAT. A purple mist floods my eyes, the strokes of my pulse hammer into an empty skull. He didn’t really see something, did he? In an instant all my infirmities, all my old pains, flow over me; the most awful suspicions are reborn. I feel a strange ache in the joints of my fingers, then in my knees and the vertebrae of my neck. In horror I feel my neck shorten, my head grow to my shoulders. And my heart overflows with despair, a horrible despair and loneliness, unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. Even without a mirror I see my hair slowly turning the color of straw. I already know that behind my knees, between my thighs, on my sides, soft, quivering mounds of flesh have sprouted. I am slowly turning into a kanukas. I’m probably standing next to the Narutis by now, looking around and sensing how the entire secret world of Old Town obeys me; I sense my neckless, bug-eyed, deformed-finger power. But this merely strangles me with a still deeper despair and loneliness. I understand what I couldn’t understand until now: we, the kanukai, do not give birth to kanukai; we can only reproduce our kind by kanuking healthy people! I’m lonely and sad, as lonely and sad as a single tree, Lord of mine, how I want to kanuk someone! Where am I, where am I? The trembling hand of the imbecile slides down the girl�
��s long thighs, approaching the unseen but inferred secret opening, but the girl, drowned in her dreams, feels nothing. The black-haired woman’s legs, in taut brown stockings, encompass me, I melt like wax, I no longer even hear the Old Town Circe’s enchanting breathing, I sense only the sweetish scent of rotting leaves. Madam Giedraitienė, with a familiar motion, roughly pulls me closer, and blooming breasts reveal themselves underneath the old rags—Irena’s breasts, I recognize the mole under the nipple, I recognize their color and smell; a short-cropped little head of hair watches me, hidden between the library’s dusty bookshelves, the supple body thrashes, struggling out of my hands, but it’s all predetermined, I tear the lacy underpants into shreds and recoil at the sight, because there is nothing between her thighs—just a smooth, empty spot, like a plastic doll’s. Bolius slowly, thoroughly chews on the grass, Jebachik giggles quietly, even choking with it, while Bolius clumsily turns around, attentively inspects his own dung heap, and, bending over, sniffs at it. Even I notice the stench, the disgusting stench of formalin or something else besides, I am all alone in the basement with the girl’s corpse, my head keeps reeling more and more, I have no strength left, I stagger and grab the corner of the table. My fingers are right next to the girl’s now completely softened body, its breasts fallen over to the sides—a palm would easily fit between them. I get such an urge to put it there; I need to get out of here as fast as possible. I gather my strength and inadvertently lean against the girl’s body, realizing too late that it is a magic touch, fingerless hands snatch me, carry me somewhere, stuff me into the dissected girl’s crotch, the world is no more and neither is my body, because I have been completely stuffed into the square space with perfectly straight-edged sides; I’m choking on stinking blood, but I cannot escape, there is nowhere to escape to, there’s no room, I’m returning to the womb, and my last thought, my last question is—what does it mean to return to a corpse’s womb?

  Once more, I go over my finger joints, my knees, and the muscles between my thighs. No, I am not a kanukas; I am a human. For the time being I’m still human. Kovarskis lied, intimidated me with his frozen corpses, but for the time being I am still alive.

  I descend from Karoliniškės towards Žvėrynas—so many places and neighborhoods fit into a single day, a day that’s always the same, or maybe the very same day. The air is indescribably clear—even the contours of the forest looming beyond the city aren’t at all hazy. Everything tries to exceed itself, to brighten its features; it desperately wants to convince me it really exists. The filthy pigeons of Vilnius in particular are doing their best. They’re everywhere. They peck at non-existent crumbs on both sides of the road; an enormous flock of them rages above my head. They’re following me. They pretend to eat (at that moment another flock rages above my head), and when I pass by and go off a bit, they quickly take off and fly ahead of me in a large arc, glaring at me with their empty little eyes. I turn in one direction, in another, intentionally stomp around in places where there really is nothing for them to feed on, but they don’t desert me. That gang of atrocities really is following me. It seems as if the dragon of Vilnius himself is slithering from behind, choosing a spot to devour me. I hate pigeons. They’re the most disgusting birds on earth. Any ornithologist will tell you that only a pigeon (like a human) can peck a member of its own species to death. Then what’s there to be said about the pigeons of Vilnius!? They want me to turn into a kanukas regardless. I whip around Žvėrynas’s crooked, unpaved little streets, trying to use the trees as cover, but I cannot get away. Crawl underground if you like. I no longer recognize the misshapen little streets, the passersby here are strange, I’m lonely and uneasy, for some reason I get the urge to knock on the door of one of the squat little houses and shout at the top of my voice: “I’ve gotten lost, save me!” I’m delighted to see the asphalt of a wider street; I rush into it at a trot and breathe a sigh of relief. It’s Vytauto Street; a few dozen steps away looms the closed Russian Orthodox Church. The street is empty as far as you can see, not a single person about, but that’s not what’s most striking. I feel as if instead of meeting a live, active acquaintance, I’ve met a walking corpse. The life on my namesake’s street has vanished somewhere: the leaves on the trees don’t stir, dirty cats don’t slink along the walls, there’s no fluttering of laundry hung out to dry in the courtyards. Even the church seems more inert, more forsaken than usual. I look at the shabby cupolas, the Orthodox cross; I’m already about to lower my head when suddenly I see a sight that could make you go blind. Two pigeons hang in the air next to the highest cross. They don’t flap their wings, they don’t move at all; they hang helplessly, as if they had stumbled into a giant, invisible cobweb. One, apparently, was getting ready to perch on the cross; the other, its wings folded, was probably gliding downwards. And both are transfixed, hanging in the air, neither moving nor falling down, as if time had suddenly stopped.

  Time, rushing forward headlong since morning, has really stopped. I still don’t want to believe it; gasping for breath, I go down towards the river and pause by the bridge . . . I want to close my eyes, but I can’t. I want to cry, but there are no tears. I want to save Lola, but I don’t know how.

  The water of the river stands still, the eddies and whirlpools frozen in place. It resembles a grimy, knotted rug. On the other side of the bridge, I see motionless cars and the small figures of people. Only now do I believe it: All of Vilnius has stopped. I no longer hear my heart; I’m probably no longer breathing. Absentmindedly, I brush my hand against my forehead and rub my eyes. I’m moving.

  It’s horrible to move when the rest of the world has stopped.

  I’ve ended up in the very center of a boundless torpor. The worst nightmare couldn’t compare to my reality. It’d be better if everything exploded or went up in flames; it’d be better if Vilnius were washed over by a wave of some new deluge or crushed by a cosmic catastrophe. It’d be better if everything crumbled, cracked, and crashed down. But around me stretches a dead landscape; a ringing silence encases the city, and an uncontrollable horror grows within me. What is this, I ask myself. No signs of an apocalypse, no bloody glow. Vilnius had come to a stop in an off-hand and routine way.

  The crystal-clear air clouded up like muddy water. Tiny dust motes hung suspended in the air; it seemed the sky was slowly mingling with the earth. And absolutely everything stands stock still. The reflections of the street in the glass of the windows aren’t moving. The cars sit frozen in the middle of the avenue; you can clearly see that a gray Lada jumped into the intersection even though the light was already red. People are as rigid as statues, but don’t resemble them in the least. There is nothing artistic or symbolic in them; they have turned to stone in a single instant, in the most unsuitable poses. At that moment a disheveled, pimply teenager spat; the flow of spit hardened, stuck to his lips. A balding fatso, with a sweaty forehead, twisted backwards, apparently he’d glanced to see if his trolleybus was coming and stumbled on a crack in the sidewalk. He should have fallen, but was frozen instead, still falling, his hands thrown out to the sides. Two women who had paused to chat came to a standstill that way, with their mouths wide open. It’s the inanimate things that look the worst: the leaves of trees standing on end on the sidewalk; petrified streams of water, splashed from under the wheels of a car; a crumpled piece of paper hanging over the opening to a garbage can. It isn’t at all like a photograph or even a stop-motion film—in those there is life; here nonexistence has pervaded everything.

  They stopped, dammit, they stopped! The gallery of expressionless faces froze; an inner cold locked the joints of Vilnius’s beast. Is this the end already? Maybe I’m to blame for this? Many times I’ve fought down the urge to shout out loud at them: stop it, quit running around pointlessly, just calm down and think for a second! Freeze! . . . Settle down! . . . And here they’ve done it.

  “Vilnius has stopped,” I say out loud to the transfixed statues, I say to the building cornices and the dried-up lindens, I say to my
self—I must drive off the all-piercing silence. “This is how the true Necropolis looks. The Necropolis of the spirit.”

  I do not smell any scents—they’re inert too. If I were to eat something, I wouldn’t sense the flavor. Vilnius has become absolutely tasteless and soundless. I can only see. Shivers go down my spine when I realize what I would never have figured out by cold logic: my perceptions have no meaning if there is nothing to smell, touch, or taste. A person can be ideal and perfect, but if the world has no need for it, all perfection will go for naught. What should a person like this do? Without thinking, I lick the sweaty, trembling palm of my hand and feel salt on the tip of my tongue. I can only taste myself. I can smell only my own smell, hear only my own words and the hollow echo of my footsteps. Kneeling, I carefully touch splatters of splashed water. The water runs down, but when it separates from my fingers, the drops hang in the air again. I take one and slowly let it down. That’s how it stays standing, barely touching the shiny street tiles, not even moistening the dust.

  Could I perhaps touch people? Animate them?

  I almost stretch my hand out to a raw-boned man leaning against a tree, but fear restrains me. I’m afraid the person I touch will crumble like a castle of damp sand dried by the sun. And even more I fear that in touching him I would turn into stone myself. Everything is lifeless, but fear remains—it’s the hardiest. I do not know the rules of this changed world; I fear everything here.

  I tear up the stairs to the library at a run. It’s empty in the corridor; no one’s in the common room, and Martynas isn’t sitting at his spot, either. Maybe it’s just the nameless strangers in the street who’ve frozen? Maybe my own are moving, or maybe they’ve disappeared entirely? But no, in Lola’s room I see the women sitting at their work. Marija had leaned over Stefa’s desk, piled her gigantic breasts on top of the papers, and froze with her mouth wide open. It’s enough to make me nauseous; people who you know, stopped dead in their tracks, are particularly hideous. And if I should find Lolita here? I’d probably want to freeze stiff myself. I’m already on my way out, but through a gap I spot a slender figure at the corner of an open cabinet. Trembling, I poke my head inside—thank God, it’s just Beta. She froze with her skirt hitched up high, her thin fingers straining to pull her stocking up. I look at her, fidgeting next to her as if I had forgotten something. Yes, those stockings of hers are always perfectly smooth. And her legs are perfectly straight. And her little head is short-cropped.