Vilnius Poker

by Ricardas Gavelis

  Lolita flinches, turns around and freezes; she recognizes that face too. But I’m already running, bursting through the door, rushing through the dry leaves in bare feet, ripping the wild grape vines with my bare shoulder. The long-suppressed fury has erupted like a volcano; I’m not feeling as much as grasping intellectually that I’m stark naked and catching painfully on the branches. I want to finally catch Them, to beat them shitless. Not a trace of fear remains. It never was. I don’t fear anything! I’m Vytautas Vargalys!

  It seems that I see the narrow-eyed watcher’s shadow; I battle with the branches and stumble in the flower beds, but he’s probably more light-footed. The nooks of the garden are misleading; the hunched-over form flashes now here, now there, but too far away—I can’t even say whether it’s a man or a woman. An automobile rumbles somewhere close by; probably the figure has escaped, but I can’t stop anymore. I run and run, until I’m entirely out of breath. At last I realize I’m naked and getting colder by the second. I ought to go back. But the cottages are so identical, and the orchards and gardens between them are identical. Identical currant and gooseberry bushes, and apple trees, and even the chrysanthemums in the flower beds are identical. I wander among the cottages, looking for the only sight that matters to me. An old house in the darkened depths of a garden, entangled in wild grape vines. Yellow unraked leaves that the wind carelessly scatters, even though the twigs of the bushes don’t so much as stir. In that house Lolita waits. I have to hurry; this isn’t the sort of place where you can leave her alone. Perhaps They lured me outside deliberately? I have to find her as soon as possible. It seems I hear the fading throbbing of her heart. It seems I hear gasping breath. But I don’t know where to go. By now I want to shout, but suddenly I sense a faint, enchanting scent, Lolita’s scent today. I go on like a beast, constantly stopping and sniffing carefully. Soon I no longer need to keep stopping, the scent itself draws me closer. The old house is engulfed in the darkness; the leaves are no longer yellow, but rather gray. And there’s no wind anymore. It’s calm around, and calm on my heart. By now a light is burning in the room. I’ll tell Lolita everything about Them. I will no longer be alone; we’ll be together.

  I step into the room and see immediately. She is lying the same way I was lying not so long ago. It’s just that she looks different. I’ve never seen such a sight before. Nowhere. Never. Not even in a dream. I feel absolutely nothing. Not horror, not pain, nothing. I’m not hot and I’m not cold, my brain is working soberly and calmly. Lola is lying on her back, her legs spread unnaturally, because the tendons in her thighs have been cut through. Their whitish ends are clearly visible amid the bloody flesh. The flat belly is unmercifully cleaved, the guts pulled out. As if that weren’t enough, the intestines are sliced into pieces. My brain calmly registers only the strong smell of the sacrificial altar, not the stockyards. I didn’t sacrifice her; I didn’t tear her guts into pieces. I didn’t rip the kidneys out of her belly and cut them into thin, round slices.

  Who did this? And why?

  Her liver, spleen, and lungs are cut to pieces and thrown about the entire room. Every single one of Lolita’s little pieces is screaming, calling for me. Cursing me for leaving her alone. I go up closer and kneel next to her. Next to her corpse. She is gone, but this I simply cannot grasp. Her breasts are cut crosswise to the very ribs. I search for Lolita’s face, but it’s not there. Her eyes are poked out, her nose and ears cut off. Even the hair, Lolita’s gorgeous hair, is ripped out by the strand and flung around her head—around that which once was her head. I look over her body scattered around the floor, the miserable remains of her body. A single place, for some reason, remains untouched. In the middle of the mad knife’s work protrudes the mound of Venus, and beneath it—the vagina, not a finger laid on it. The knife with the darkened blade lies right there. I touch it with the tip of my finger. The blade is still warm and damp.

  They chose the most horrible revenge possible. I look at Lolita’s remains: I want to take them for myself, to carry them off somewhere and hide them. Why didn’t I think of such an end the moment I first met her? A man condemned to death has no right to look for comrades. I bend down to her slashed lips—this kiss is truly the last. I take the knife into my hands. Its handle is still warm. I should probably slit my throat—even wider than Lolita’s throat is cut. The smell of the altar doesn’t fade; I probably look like a prophet lost in thought.

  A car engine rumbles outside. It’s a familiar sound—it was just that sound I heard not so long ago. Footsteps stomp outside the door, but I don’t even budge. It’s all the same to me now. One after another, five men sidle inside. I look at them indifferently. What do they want here?

  In the light of an invisible flash, I suddenly grasp the entire plot. So it is Their revenge. The absolute worst you could possibly think of. They waited for an opportunity for a long time. I thought I had weighed all the possible scenarios, but no imagination could devise one like this. I literally see how they had waited for me to return to the cottage. Which one was the last to look in through the window? A familiar, a remarkably familiar face. No one, no one in the entire world will believe I’m innocent. No one will believe me, no matter what I say. Not even if I were to speak of Them. Particularly if I were to speak of Them. At last, They’ve swallowed me whole. They couldn’t kanuk me, so they’ve mercilessly devoured me. I sit next to Lolita’s defiled body while one of the arrivals starts snapping a camera. So far they haven’t even touched me. I can look at them calmly. Three round little faces with even rounder eyeballs, set into collars with rounded corners. But the fifth one interests me the most—a gray-haired man with colonel’s epaulets. I try to remember what Giedraitis Junior’s face was like back then, but in vain. I remember nothing, absolutely nothing at all. There never was a Bolius or a prison camp; grandfather’s altar never existed. There was no Gediminas stirring his appendages like a smashed cockroach. And I never was.

  “Put on some clothes, will you!” the colonel says angrily.

  I dress leisurely; God is watching over me. They are of no concern to me; they do not exist and never did. Father’s drawings never were, nor Madam Giedraitienė in the morning dew. There were no cattle cars strewing little white papers. There was no Irena, no Martynas, no library’s labyrinth. There never was a Camus or a Plato. There was no Lolita. There was no me.

  The fat faces lead me to the car and shove me into the back seat. For the first time, I see a tiny little kanukas stronghold from the inside. The greenish curtains and darkened glass. There was no Circe of Old Town, there were no three big-eyed little Jews. There was no Mindaugas, Gediminas, or Vytautas the Great. Lithuania never was.

  “Let’s go,” snarls the colonel, sitting down in the front seat.

  The engine rumbles. I’m pressed in on both sides by the fleshy fat faces. And inside the car hovers a sweetish smell of rotting fall leaves. A strong, warm smell of rotting leaves.

  Suddenly I think that despite it all, there has to be a God on high. There must exist some being who knows I am innocent.

  The cottages run by, retreating backwards. And a bit further on, in a deep, deep pit, shine the first lights of exhausted, moribund Vilnius.

  There you have it—the end of the Vargalys clan.

  PART TWO

  FROM THE MLOG

  Martynas Poška. October 14–29, 197. . .

  Everyone keeps asking me about Vytautas Vargalys. But what can I say? “The man has killed the thing he loved, and so the man must die.”

  It started raining just after the devastating events at the garden. Vilnius is steeped in mud that reeks of sulfur. It’s as if the devils of hell had spat up everything. Picking linden blossoms in the city’s environs has been forbidden for quite some time now, unless you have an urge to slowly poison yourself. When civilizations die, even nature opposes them. Like it or not, you feel like the chronicler of the dying Lithuanian civilization.

  My height—five foot seven and a half inches. I cut my hair in a crew
cut. At some point this hairstyle will return, victorious, to Vilnius’s streets, so I’ll instantly become fashionable.

  I know, I know, no one is interested in me. No one asks how I’m doing. Everyone just keeps asking about Vytautas Vargalys.

  News bulletin: I don’t get myself involved in mysterious and dreadful affairs. I don’t cut people to pieces. I can’t even manage to write a genuine log. I call it the mlog—after my name.

  And what should I write in it now?

  What can I say about Vytautas Vargalys? Probably very little of the real truth: I don’t know what he was like in his childhood. You can’t really say much about a person if you don’t know what he was like as a child. It’s difficult for me to talk about him. I can only relate facts with certainty. Probably that’s appropriate when writing a log. But writing an mlog?

  When I’m asked if he could murder someone, and so brutally too, I answer honestly: no, he couldn’t murder anyone.

  But I’m quiet about something else: he could have murdered his mania, his past, his menacing ghost. That’s just what he did. But I don’t say this to anyone and I won’t. They wouldn’t understand. They just hunger for bread and circuses. They hunger for blood—someone else’s, of course. To them, Vargalys is nothing more than a live sensation, a monster of Vilnius, stirring up our sleepy anthill for a moment.

  I’m not interested in ants. I’m interested in humans. And I haven’t known that many of them. They’re so rare.

  I state with conviction: Vytautas Vargalys was a human.

  I first laid eyes on him some sixteen or seventeen years ago. I was a student at the university. I hadn’t started my collection yet. I naïvely believed it was possible to search for truth, to honestly seek virtue in this decaying world.

  I’m not at all ashamed to repeat the words “virtue,” “truth,” and “honesty,” over and over.

  I ran into Vytautas Vargalys on the main boulevard. He looked like a character out of some spectral carnival. An athlete of nearly six-foot-six, dressed in operatic tramp’s rags, with the puffy face of a drunk. Greasy hair down to his shoulders. In those days, men didn’t have long hair; the hippies only showed up some five years later.

  In my mind’s eye, Vytautas Vargalys appears in innumerable guises, but mostly I remember him the way he was the first time I saw him. Looking like a bum soaked in cheap wine, with the eyes of a suffering philosopher. He felt my glance immediately, as if he had had eyes in the back of his head. He always did have more than two of them. He turned to me, sullenly looked me over as if he were measuring or weighing, and said in a voice that had been ruined by drink:

  “Make a donation of twenty kopecks to the Villon of Vilnius!”

  Yes, this was after the monetary reform. He didn’t ask for a ruble in the old currency, but twenty kopecks in the new.

  I didn’t give him any kopecks. I don’t support drunks on principle.

  Later he told me that if I had given him that handout, the two of us would have never met again. But fate would have it otherwise.

  And immediately after me, Lolita went up to him. I can’t be mistaken: I would recognize her anywhere, at any time, in whatever form. I would recognize her even now, even though she’s in the kingdom of the dead.

  That long-legged ten-year-old girl walked gracefully by, turned around, and came back. She calmly looked over that monster—he was twice her size—and stretched out a coin that was pressed in her palm. In those days, ten-year-old girls didn’t have elegant wallets and purses.

  That really was Lolita. Her path crossed the convoluted route of Vytautas Vargalys’s life over and over again. Wandering the streets of Vilnius separately, they considered themselves independent. But actually one drew nearer the other like hapless electrons in a computer circuit.

  I hate computers. They’re perfect idiots: obedient and brainless, but capable of performing their tasks flawlessly. They do not doubt, and they have no opinions. The Ruling Old Folks’ Asylum, during their sleepless nights of drivel, dreams that people could be exactly the same.

  The Ruling Old Folks’ Asylum isn’t a concrete government or anything like it—it’s all the elderly mean-eyed guys who crave control over us, who want to dictate their will to us: it’s the head of the apartment cooperative, it’s reserve colonels, it’s sauna directors. This vindictive and evil old folks’ asylum is a unique contemporary phenomenon, something that never existed before, and never will again. It drags us backwards, restrains and impairs us in every way imaginable. Watch out for mean-eyed old folks!

  From now on, I shall refer to the Ruling Old Folks’ Asylum simply as ROF. For brevity’s sake. And Vytautas Vargalys I shall call VV.

  I already know how an mlog most differs from a log. A log is written for the future. But if there is no future—you don’t have one, he doesn’t have one, no one has a future—you’re stuck writing an mlog. No one will read it. So there’s no need to dissemble, to twist the facts in someone’s favor, the way it’s done in logs. There’s no need to write, for that matter. Or even talk. It’s enough just to think. That’s what I do: I think all the time, but I’m as mute as a fish thrown out on shore.

  I wouldn’t be able to write a genuine log. My thoughts never want to fall in a logical order. They’re terribly incoherent and tangled. They’re like pebbles on the seashore: the ones broken from the same rock are lying a long way apart, while nearby lie completely different ones, of different colors, that seem to have nothing in common.

  Those pebbles want to reflect or embody the entire boundless sea, but there’s very few of them—too few to encompass those boundless waters.

  I put these metaphors and similar beauties into words just for myself, for my mlog. No one would think I have it in me. Everyone considers me a biting ironist, perhaps even a bit of a clown. That doesn’t hurt me and doesn’t get in the way of my life.

  But I have never been a clown. Irony isn’t a mask; it’s merely a means of self-defense. Like judo, like karate. Not a circus trick, but a means of defending one’s health, and actually one’s life, from attackers.

  It follows that self-irony is a means of defending one’s life from oneself.

  It’s all very well for people who can grasp the whole shebang at once, in whose heads everything relates harmoniously. They think as a matter of course; they don’t have to exert themselves on that account.

  But I have to collect myself every time. By the time I stammer out the sorriest little thought, I have to recall thoughts I’ve mulled over earlier, and get myself in the right frame of mind. But the time suitable for this, suitable places, and suitable moods are few and far between.

  I would say that I write my so-called mlog in fits and starts. In this torn-to-shreds world of ours, even people’s thoughts are tattered. It’s hopeless to search for harmony, grace, or majesty in them.

  I spew thoughts the way Vilnius’s gypsy women spit sunflower seed husks. My thoughts are soaked in spittle and chewed up. Still, it’s a good thing; at least there are those spittle-soaked husks.

  I know scores of Vilniutians who don’t in the least grasp what a thought is. What are their heads stuffed with? Heaven only knows. Little worries, calculations, banalities, and confusion.

  Once a former classmate, well into his cups, opened his heart to me. I wouldn’t know how to think, he explained to me, even if I wanted to. But I don’t want to. I’m told to just repeat someone else’s words and not ask any questions. So, that’s what I do. It’s not hard at all, but one question keeps bothering me: what am I? I’m not a human—obviously, humans are entirely different. But what am I then?

  That was probably the first time I thought to myself about what distinguishes a homo lithuanicus from a normal person.

  Half the world knows what a homo sovieticus is (excepting homo sovieticus himself). However, no one has studied homo lithuanicus, or even homo Vilnensis. These species matter as much to the future of mankind as to its history.

  Mankind should be grateful to the Lithu
anians that they exist. But it will never forgive them if they do not describe their experience of existence, if they don’t introduce the entire world to it.

  Only a Lithuanian is qualified to write the opus “What is the Ass of the Universe.”

  The history of the great nations has been explored backwards and forwards. It’s impossible to learn anything more from them. It’s paradoxical, but humanity knows much more about various archaic tribes than it does about the history of European minorities—that quintessence of injustice, absurdity, and errors. The world may be doomed for the simple reason that no one noticed our plight in time. An ethnologist who diligently researched some Albanians or another would be much more useful than one who had written up hundreds of obscure African tribes.

  Never forget that we are all, in a certain sense, a bit Albanian. All of us are just a tad Lithuanian. And worst of all—every one of us, in the depths of our hearts, is a Vytautas Vargalys.

  It seems to me that I actually know too much about VV. His and Lolita’s stories aren’t enough for me, I’m itching to tell about his father, and about his grandfather, and about her father and mother too.

  The two of them were doomed before they ever met. If I were a writer, I would write a book about what the two of them could have been. In my opinion, that would be the only theme of a genuine book about Vilnius: what all of us could have been, if we hadn’t been turned into what we are.

  Lolita showed up in our office four years ago, in her last year at college. She immediately attracted everyone’s attention with her quiet insolence and impossibly long legs. Because of these two things, the other women in the office hated her, up to the very end. And she hated all of us and would have been happiest living in a desert. They wouldn’t have hired Lolita at the office at all, but her father made calls to the right places, so everything was instantly straightened out.