Vilnius Poker

  And my life was determined by that Lithuanian God’s farting.

  I saw this with my own eyes, so once again I have no right to be silent. I ended up next to them quite by accident. Accidents have followed me all of my life. Once, when I had set up my tent next to one of the Ignalina lakes, I saw Lolita with Gediminas in the distance. Any decent person would have moved to the next lake. But I’m not a decent person. I’m as curious as a child and I’m not ashamed of it. Anything left in us from childhood is a good thing. People are born decent, truthful, and natural. All of the awful stuff overruns them later.

  Homo lithuanicus wasn’t created by the Lord God, just by Lithuania’s history and the ROF.

  So I didn’t move my tent an inch. What’s more, I grabbed my binoculars, which I had just happened to bring along. I spied on their hermit-like existence; I even forgot to unpack my fishing rods. I was always interested in what it was that pushed Lolita into Gediminas’s arms. Perhaps Lolita, in her shock, saw a reflection of her husband in his friend. Perhaps Gediminas provoked her; perhaps he deliberately took her to Teodoras’s favorite places and used his sayings. Gediminas Riauba could do that. All his life that hardened bachelor and pervert went after women by means both fair and foul.

  “Gedutis didn’t love me,” Lolita would say, sitting on my rug with her long legs stretched out.

  She always called Riauba Gedutis.

  “He was too immersed in mathematics, in music, but by way of all that—in only himself. To him, the whole world was just part of himself: I was too, and the clouds, and even his beloved dogs. I hated him, and that’s why I lived with him.”

  At the time, I felt very sorry for her. Only much later did it occur to me that men only imagine or pretend to rule women. Actually, the women always lead us by the nose. Even if they really do submit to our will, they do it consciously—they have purposes we cannot grasp. Lolita was like that too. She just played with Gediminas as long as he was of use to her. And poor Gedutis rejoiced that he had supposedly enslaved her.

  In our life, absolute victories always turn into absolute defeats.

  It fell to me to witness the finale of such a defeat at that wretched lake in Ignalina. Towards evening, I suddenly heard a scream. I immediately knew it was Lolita shrieking. She was virtually howling. To this day, I don’t know what he was doing to her, and now I’ll never know. The screaming suddenly stopped. An instant later, a stark-naked Lolita staggered out of the tent, and behind her—a smiling Gediminas. As if nothing were wrong, the two of them kissed affectionately. Then, naked, they climbed into a rowboat and rowed out to the middle of the lake. The shores of Ignalina’s lakes are hardly reminiscent of a deserted island. Some kids on the other shore happily waved their arms and made obscene remarks, but the two of them didn’t pay any attention. The forest ranger in his yard stared at them through binoculars (I saw the sun glint off of its lenses). Finally, he couldn’t stand it anymore, and he got on his bike and pedaled around to our side, apparently prepared to fine them for disturbing the public order. I just threw him a quick glance, and when I turned to the rowboat again, Gediminas was already floundering in the water.

  I spoke with the investigator looking into Gediminas’s sudden death. Lolita had told him she absolutely couldn’t swim, and she hadn’t stretch­ed out the oar because she was in shock. The investigator believed her. I would have believed her too, if I hadn’t seen her face at that moment. She watched Gediminas choking and still floundering in the water, and smiled wryly. Her expression was furious and scornful. It seemed death rays were emanating from her eyes. It wasn’t a human expression; it wasn’t a human smile. I don’t know whose—God’s or the devil’s—but not a human’s. Lolita drowned Gediminas without even touching him. Such are the paradoxes of Vilnius—the great snob Gediminas, with his grand intentions of understanding all sorts of essential things about the world, swam like a rock.

  I remembered that moment’s horror a few years later. Our office is very fond of arranging outings by the Žaliųjų Lakes, with little rowboats, water bicycles, and a modest picnic. Unconsciously, I would keep an eye on Lolita. It seemed she really was afraid of water. She’d wade in up to her thighs, wash herself off and leap back on shore again.

  But once I needed to relieve myself in a hurry. I found myself some out-of-the-way bushes by the shore; what I saw there knocked me off my feet. In a remote backwater, hidden from everybody, I saw Lolita swimming. She swam with firm strokes, without raising any spray. She swam like a fish.

  I’ve thought up a thousand premises, a million fantasies on this subject, but I can’t set them out here. The mlog accepts only indubitable facts. Unfortunately, only facts. Thank God, only facts.

  I’ve come up with a theory explaining why horrible things must always happen in Vilnius. It could be called the balance of passions theory. It occupies a significant place in my general theory called “What is the Ass of the Universe.” I think the universal dullness of Vilnius is terribly lacking in deep human passions. The majority of Vilniutians’ passions boil and bubble in a glass of water. Writers overdose themselves with sleeping pills when they don’t get a new upgraded apartment. Engineers take to drink if they aren’t promoted at work. When there aren’t any truly important objectives, passions flare up over comical trifles that a normal person wouldn’t pay the slightest attention to.

  My theory asserts that the world (even Vilnius) cannot exist without genuine human passions. To keep the world in balance, it must fall upon at least one real human to be an example to a thousand homo lithuanicus. Unfortunately, in order to supplement the passions raging in the glass of water, his own passions have to be inhuman. He rages, laments, and raves enough for us all. He lives enough for us all! That’s why every one in Vilnius who even remotely resembles a real human being burns up alive, is drowned by his own great love, or cuts her into pieces himself.

  I think that Vilnius has reached such a level of general soullessness that a single human can no longer compensate for it by normal, civilized methods. Those who try to climb out of the general manure pile inevitably step over the permissible boundaries.

  From my collection:

  “Oh, Lithuanians . . . what will tear you out of your lethargy? Oh unhappy country, worthy of compassion in these days . . . What do you need? A dangerous revolution, total rearrangement, a terrible shock . . . stagnation can no longer be overcome by civilized methods, fire is necessary in order to burn out the gangrene eating you.”

  That’s a bit of mystification. The text actually starts with “Oh, Italians” and its author is Casanova.

  I intend this quote for the skeptics who think that the theory of the Ass of the Universe and the balance of passions is suited to only one puny object—our poor little Lithuania. This quote proves that theories like this have universal validity too.

  From my collection:

  “Neither the crushing force of the civilized state, nor the teachings of mutual hatred and merciless struggle that come adorned with the attributes of science from obliging philosophers and sociologists, can root out the feeling of human solidarity deeply lodged in man’s consciousness and heart, because this feeling has been nurtured by all of our preceding evolution.”

  The author of this text is Prince Kropotkin, the famous anarchist.

  I’d like to believe, at least in my dreams, that someone will show solidarity with homo lithuanicus and attempt to save him from destruction.

  My citomania has begun to express itself. I swear: no more quotes.

  I wonder if I’ll hold out for long.

  In my thoughts, I always envision Lolita in one of two guises. Sometimes she’s sitting in my room, right on the rug, leaning against the sofa, silent. But much more often, she’s swimming towards me through black waters, propelling herself with impeccable strokes, rudely pushing aside other thoughts of mine afloat in those boundless waters. Swimming and swimming straight at me, with a strange smile on her lips, maybe wanting to drown me too, because I know too m
uch.

  She and VV fell in love like a pair of nineteenth-century teenagers, even though both of them had gone through several circles of hell—each his own—before then.

  I cannot bear religions that intimidate people with a single, common hell. There’s already a hell common to everyone here on earth—that’s the Ass of the Universe.

  Apparently, Satan forced VV to fall in love with just that sort of father’s daughter. Povilas Banys is a particularly famous person. “The Voice of America” or “Radio Liberty” is always reading excerpts from memoirs in which he appears in all his glory. He was an apologist for the total annihilation of the human soul, a spiritual executioner with imagination and fancy. The authors of memoirs remember him with reverent horror. He was so horrible, so consistently satanic, that he even inspired reverence. Povilas Banys was the poet of night interrogations, spiritual sadism, draconian judgments, and the ravaging of innocents. This Lithuanian writer, who died in the United States, recalled with sacred trepidation how Povilas Banys beat him with a wooden hammer on the head in his torture chamber. After thirteen blows (exactly thirteen!), he would order him to write one more sentence of his ostensible confession. “I’m perfecting your style,” he explained tenderly, “You’ll learn the fastest way of expressing the essence.”

  Colonel Povilas Banys, the bearer of government decorations, was Lolita Banytė-Žilienė’s father. That’s the kind of person’s daughter VV fell in love with. Their story couldn’t have ended any other way; their love was doomed from the start.

  Incidentally, Povilas Banys was an enormously educated person, a true scholar. But why do I say “was”? He’s still living today, as pretty as you please. He loves avant-garde jazz, Joyce, and Buñuel. He simply adores the latter.

  An American or European would never understand how a person like that could be a poet of spiritual sadism. It’s never fallen to the lot of either Americans or Brits to live in the Ass of the Universe. The corresponding neurological connections don’t exist in their brains. Once I nearly choked with laughter listening to a Harvard professor on the radio defending this Muscovite psychiatrist. The world accused this psychiatrist of stuffing dissidents into secret nuthouses. That’s not true, it can’t be, the Harvard professor railed, that Muscovite is a true scholar; he’s published serious work. I even fell out of my chair laughing. No Harvard professor would be able to understand that a perfectly serious scholar could, of his own free will, be a complete butcher. No American or Frenchman would understand that the manager of a gas chamber in Hitler’s Germany could have played the piano like a virtuoso and worshipped Chopin. No, they won’t understand it. Those American and French brains aren’t constructed right.

  I feel sorry for those Americans and Frenchmen. When the all-powerful Ass of the Universe overtakes them, they’ll die in the prison camps without ever catching on.

  Lord knows, sometimes I’m glad I was born in the Ass of the Universe. There’s a lot I could teach to the English, and the French, and the Italians, and . . . It’s just the Lithuanians I couldn’t teach anything to.

  The inhabitants of the Ass of the Universe figured out paradoxes like that much too well. So well, that they’ve completely reconciled themselves to them. Even I, the great writer of the mlog who’s seen everything, am sometimes astounded by this reconciliation.

  From my collection:

  VV socialized with this Stadniukas, who I believe was one of his former camp guards. Only in the Ass of the Universe can a victim nonchalantly sip cognac with his executioner. They socialized as equals. VV didn’t condemn this Stadniukas openly, and in turn the latter didn’t lick his boots or humiliate himself to atone for his past sins. Lord knows, they acted as if they’d been students together.

  But VV wouldn’t be VV if he hadn’t, sooner or later, blown his top. My theory of the balance of passions was once again indisputably confirmed.

  This Vasilijus Ivanovičius, who showed up from who knows where and then disappeared again, had his finger in it too. VV, in all seriousness, maintained that this Vasilijus lived in the mud of the bog and only emerged to breathe air once every seven years. He looked that way too—as if he had crawled out of the muck. I never got who he was—a former prisoner, or a guard. He downed vodka by the tumbler and spoke in nothing but swear words, and when he got really drunk, in inarticulate sounds. VV explained that this was the language of birds.

  This Vasilijus flew in like a vulture as soon as Stadniukas kicked the bucket. He and VV got it into their heads to bury Stadniukas and beat off the gang of veterans. Who knows how they got hold of a coffin made of rough pine boards. Inside they stuck a half-finished bottle of vodka. They spat on the coffin lid and put their cigarettes out on it. The veterans, sniffing out the funeral anyway, ran off to call the militia; the gravediggers, afraid of trouble, hid themselves. VV and this Vasilijus, as cool as could be, filled up the hole; the militia, hurrying to the scene, found a fresh hillock and an Orthodox priest. It turned out that Stadniukas had managed to convert just before he died, taking communion and the last rites.

  It was all like some preposterous farce.

  VV couldn’t not know who Lolita’s father is. He simply tried not to think about it—the way we don’t think about how we will sooner or later die. Actually, we all behave exactly as if we were immortal.

  Perhaps that disgusting Sunday he and Gediminas intentionally got the better of Lolita, the offspring of an accursed family. But afterwards that accursed offspring turned into a miraculous flower, the center of secret hopes. It wasn’t possible to think of her as her father’s daughter. In VV’s eyes, she was like some kind of orphan, a stray, his ward alone. They both needed to fence themselves off from the entire world—even from their own ancestors. Particularly from their ancestors.

  The two of them had to stand all alone against the entire universe. Unfortunately it was, in any event, the Ass of the Universe they stood against.

  That was exactly why VV rejected his father; that was exactly why he didn’t want to see his grandfather. And after all, the senior Vytautas Vargalys was unique, perhaps the last descendant of the true Lithuanian gods. A heroic spy for Lithuania in Polish-occupied Vilnius. The secret coordinator for the forest brothers. A fearless rescuer of Jews from the Vilnius Ghetto. A man whom at least three governments should have shot no less than thirty times. The elder Vytautas Vargalys fought all his life and always lost. He was sufficiently intelligent and skeptical enough to grasp this.

  I alone, as they say, accompanied him to the other world. He sobbed quietly and called for VV the whole time. He cursed me; the suspicion arose in his deteriorating brain that I was deliberately hiding him from his grandson. At times I would beg the Lithuanian god, bloated from his eternal snoozing, to not let the old man go on suffering, to finish him off quickly. At other times I was overcome with the heart-wrenching feeling that the last descendant of the true Lithuanian gods was leaving this world in front of my eyes—left all to himself, forgotten by everyone, no longer needed, not even by his own grandson. At the time, his son, VV’s father, was lying in a hospital in Druskininkai after his second heart attack. The old man kept wheezing:

  “In my lifetime I had eleven passports of five countries under different names. Lithuanian, Latvian, Polish passports, Soviet passports and even a Swedish passport. Sometimes I’d forget my real name. Sometimes I’d forget my native language. I’d speak Latvian and Polish, German and Yiddish—anything but Lithuanian.”

  Colon cancer was on the verge of consuming him; they kicked him out of the hospital the last few weeks. The usual thing: so he wouldn’t up and die on them and ruin the hospital’s mortality statistics. It just so happened that the clinics were fighting to lower their mortality rating at the time.

  “I’ve found a solution,” mumbled the old man, “A solution for all Lithuanians. It’s too late for me now, but I’ll pass on the secret to Vytelis. He still can . . .”

  It was sad and depressing. Here this all-powerful old man’s entire li
fe didn’t even earn him a nurse at his deathbed! They kicked him out of the hospital so he wouldn’t ruin the mortality rating!

  The Soviet hospital is the most immortal in the world!

  I kept thinking: and what do I have to do with this? Why me in particular? Somewhere I read this thought: one London money lender loved and suffered, stockpiled money and worried, in a word, lived his life, without even suspecting that the only purpose of his life, all of its meaning, was to catch the eye of an alcoholic playwright and to become the prototype for Shylock. More and more, I’ve come to believe the only purpose and meaning of my life is to be the commentator on VV’s fate, to create an epitaph for him, and at the same time for Lithuania; to write my mlog.

  “I’ve found a solution!” the old man wheezed. “Tear off your balls and don’t give birth to any more Lithuanians! Tell Vytelis so he’ll hurry! Don’t let him wait until the end like me! He should hurry! Later it’ll be too late!”

  The old man, his covers pulled off, tugged at his masculinity like he really did want to rip it out. It was the second time in my life I had seen such a bulky sexual organ—the first one like that belonged to VV.

  Things were even more fun at the old man’s wake. The ghosts of Vilnius who gathered there awoke even my exhausted brain. You couldn’t call those people anything else. Nearly hundred-year-old men and women. I never suspected people like that even existed. Some of them wore tuxedos. Greenish mold shone on their lapels. Spittle ran out of their mouths, and one old lady hiccupped nonstop and blew farts continuously. A lively old man most drew my attention. He was completely bald, and kept saying over and over that he’s called Rafalas and is a count. He was the only one who didn’t fall asleep during the night of the wake, but right before morning he peed on himself. With great dignity, he got up from the bench, leaned over and sniffed at the puddle, then sat down again somewhere else. Those ghosts were furiously intrigued by only one thing: would they bury Vargalys with his false teeth, or had they ripped them out? Choosing his moment, the bald Rafalas, with unexpected strength and agility, opened the corpse’s mouth and pensively announced to the gathered crowd that the dentures were in place. The old folks spiritedly discussed this information for some time, and then quieted down again. A few hours later, he got interested again in whether Vargalys would be buried with or without his dentures. Rafalas inspected the corpse’s mouth again. Everyone got lively again and discussed the news—in the exact same words they had used earlier. I thought I would go out of my mind. I was the only vaguely normal person in that company. None of that moldy crew went to the burial. I stood at the graveside all alone. I was soaked by an annoying, murky rain the entire time.