Vilnius Poker

by Ricardas Gavelis

  I don’t understand these things and never will. But they don’t stop existing on my account. The facts are what matter to me: in the end, after almost killing her, he drove Irena out of his house.

  I visit her from time to time, even though it’s more and more horrifying every time I go. She lives in a crumbling building on Gorky Street, right next to the Narutis. She slaves with a decrepit mother who doesn’t get out of bed, washing and boiling her soiled sheets every day. Her whole world is stinking sheets and memories. And cognac. She buys herself a bottle of cognac every day and downs it all alone. Frequently she falls asleep right at the table. No one has the slightest idea about her real life. Irena is still beautiful. She looks like a suffering Madonna.

  The worst of it is that she talks about VV as if she were talking about God; she absolutely doesn’t blame him, doesn’t even reproach him. Most of all she likes to tell stories about their nights of love, their entire days, even weeks, of love. Those stories are brimming with such divine poetry that even I listen to them as if I were mesmerized. I usually can’t stand any talk of erotica. The fashion inspired by Daddy Freud of undressing in public is disgusting.

  But I listen to Irena as if I were mesmerized. She goes on and on, always slower, always quieter, until finally she falls asleep right on the table. Her mother screeches harshly, chasing away some ghosts or a­nother, and calls me the spawn of the devil.

  That’s the kind of scene left behind whenever the great Vytautas Vargalys goes by. But that fiend enthralls them somehow anyway!

  I have no idea where Irena gets the money. The cognac alone comes to half again as much as her pay. Maybe VV’s father sends it or brings it to her. In the Ass of the Universe, restaurant doormen make good money.

  Stefanija couldn’t be like Irena; she couldn’t outfit VV with a deserted island. However, she did what she could too. She isolated VV from everyday worries.

  If someone thinks that’s not such a big deal, then they’ve never lived in the Ass of the Universe.

  I can’t imagine VV shoving in line for a bite of bread or washing out worn underwear. It was only thanks to Stefa’s efforts that he was bathed, cleanly dressed, nicely outfitted, and tastefully fed, without even suspecting what supernatural efforts this required. She even spent her own money on his needs. Fact: VV would get maybe one hundred fifty per month. In the Ass of the Universe, wages are paid on the assumption that everyone procures another three times that much from the underground economy. Incidentally, a genuine homo lithuanicus isn’t the least concerned about this. Homo lithuanicus, in the depths of his heart, has absolutely no faith in this government, so he doesn’t expect anything from it. However, VV or Stefanija weren’t even associated with the underground economy. Poor souls. Poor, poor souls. It’s really tough for intellectuals in the Ass of the Universe—even economically. They have nothing to pinch from the state.

  It may seem that I’m making a hubbub over nothing, that I’m whining about trifles. Unfortunately, the shortage of absolutely everything and the complete lack of order isn’t just a physical phenomenon. It’s a terrible hindrance to the soul. When you spend hour after hour hunting food and clothing and putting enormous efforts into creating a normal home, you get so tired that you can’t do anything else. All of your thoughts die off like unfledged birds.

  VV’s thoughts were protected from this. VV wasn’t a man of this world. And since he also had no other, he was a person without any world at all.

  He merely attempted, in vain, to construct that world for himself.

  Another thing I don’t understand: Stefa accepted Lolita’s appearance on the scene as if it were her fate. She went on serving VV as home economist and house maid—without getting any wages. In fact, it was quite the opposite; she was always supporting her master. You’ll find that the families of declining Italian princes also operated under this kind of economy.

  VV would bring Lolita home even when Stefanija would be sitting—or rather doing the laundry or scouring the rooms—in his apartment. Earlier, he at least slept with her occasionally, but when he fell in love with Lolita . . .

  Lord knows, if I were a mystic, I’d believe VV has supernatural powers over women. I’m sorry for Stefa. I’m horribly sorry for Irena. On the other hand, they themselves are perfectly happy with their situation.

  I often wonder: maybe a hunger to slave for someone really does lurk somewhere deep inside people? There’s something Dostoyevskian in this desire, and at the same time something horrifying.

  I swear: I, Martynas Poška, do not want to slave for anyone.

  I believe it was Goethe who wrote that we must most beware the fancies of our youth. If they aren’t fulfilled in youth, they crash down on you like a ton of bricks when you’re already mature.

  The great love that VV never experienced in the camps crashed down on him when he had already attained his second half-century. Once he took me to a remote bar and confessed his love for Lolita. He thought he was giving away a great secret, but the entire library was already buzzing about it. I listened to that lunatic, considering whether his story suited my collection. He explained his love for Lolita to me.

  “She’s the otherworldly gift of the sunset of my life,” he gloomily disclosed. “It’s like a fairy tale, or a poem. I fell in love with her in a dream, twenty-two years ago.”

  The bar was filthy and reeked of vomit. It was mostly alcoholic teachers and journalists who hung out there: there were two schools and three editorial offices close by. A great place for metaphysical confessions.

  “She’s like a sister to me, or maybe a daughter,” VV complained. “I feel like a King Lear who’s suddenly slept with his daughter.”

  VV is thoroughly poisoned by mythological associations. His erudite abbot, The Professor of the Gulag, stuffed his head full of legendary names and stories.

  “I feel like King Lear,” VV repeated grimly.

  What could I say to King Lear? That he should down his cocktails with more restraint, because we’ll be out of money in a minute? That he’s no king, he’s called Vytautas Vargalys, and he doesn’t have any daughters? It’s horrifying when a person merges with the sullied, stinking walls and becomes a nameless detail of the Ass of the Universe. But it’s even more horrifying when an inhabitant of the Ass of the Universe drowns in cosmic visions.

  Wouldn’t you find it frightening at first, and then simply disgusting, if some worm wriggling through a puddle started discussing Heidegger with you?

  In the meantime, VV, cowering in fear, without looking at me, continued unraveling the worst allusions:

  “Lolita isn’t her real name. She hid one letter. She should be called Lilita: Lilu, Lilitu, or Ardat Lili. She should be hairy and have wings. She shaved the hair off her body and tore off her wings, but only temporarily.”

  Suddenly I remembered how Lolita (or Lilita?) looked at the drowning Gediminas. I should have told VV about that look of hers, but I kept quiet. We’re all no-account sneaks; not a single one of us is worth trusting. If I were to mention it, I’d first have to admit I was there and saw the whole thing.

  “Every day I look for hair on her body,” VV muttered. “Every day I look for scars between her shoulder blades, where the wings used to be . . . The Talmud advises men not to sleep alone in a house, because sooner or later Lilita will fly in to visit them.”

  It really is appropriate to give some thought to a woman whose husband burned alive, whose lover drowned, and whose latest eternal love raves Kabbalistic nonsense. But, as I’ve already said, I’ve grown unaccustomed to thinking a long time ago. I merely gave VV a nudge towards his Lithuanian heritage:

  “Don’t go rummaging through the Holy Scriptures,” I said. “We Lithuanians should be afraid of Lithuanian succubi.”

  “I’m not afraid of her,” VV said in an unexpectedly sober voice, “I’m not afraid, whatever she is. I’m afraid she’ll fly away, that’s why I check to see she’s not hatching new wings.”

  She didn’t fly off a
nywhere; she was slaughtered and disemboweled.

  The investigator prowls around the library sniffing in every corner—it seems any minute he’ll lift his leg and leave his doggy mark. Anything is possible—I’m not so naïve as to suppose a detective’s psychology and physiology are analogous to a human’s.

  I really lucked out: I was summoned for questioning, so I saw VV’s hideaway with my own eyes; I don’t need to rely on legends and rumors. The detective burst into my little room and took me with him. I was flustered at first, because he didn’t explain anything. I supposed they knew everything. But in any case, he led me to the library collections. He deftly marched through labyrinths where even I would get lost. We probably walked several kilometers.

  At first I had no idea where he had brought me. It resembled a night guard’s corner. A broken-down couch, shamelessly supported by books from the shelves, a crooked desk, on it an electric teapot and two ashtrays full of reeking cigarette butts. Both corner walls were covered with drawings and portraits.

  The detective asked hoarsely what I thought of all this. I answered quite sincerely that the rules for fire prevention had been maliciously broken.

  “Cut the crap!” the detective bellowed crudely. “I didn’t ask if you knew about this hangout. You didn’t. No one’s been here for a couple of weeks at least. If you’d known about it, you would have been poking around here long ago and left traces. So, what do you think?”

  “So far, nothing.”

  “What are these?” the special collections director asked angrily—he was the second witness.

  I studied the portraits. I recognized a still very young Kafka. Cupid, drawn by VV himself, was aiming at Franz’s heart. Kafka was unshaven, like the drunks at the Narutis. Next to that smirked Camus’s somewhat horsy face. In the engravings, I recognized de Sade and Nietzsche. Higher up hung Baudelaire and Roman Polanski. Only by racking my brains did I recognize, somewhat uncertainly, Jean Genet too.

  ”They’re all writers, poets, one’s a movie director,” I spluttered. “I probably don’t need to comment on the other wall.”

  On the other corner wall, each one larger than the other, paraded Plato, Marx, Lenin, for some reason Tolstoy with Picasso, and Chaplin. The company was crowned by the two great poker players who played for Europe, or maybe the entire world—the immortal Joseph and Adolph. Disdain and satisfaction lurked in their eyes as they looked at their cards. Lord knows I have no idea why VV didn’t draw their cards. After all, he drew Plato with a handlebar mustache.

  “He’s carried a bunch of books from the collection over here,” the special collections director announced sadly, squatting and looking them over. “He stole them, although I don’t know how. Our security . . .”

  “You’d be better off keeping quiet about it.” I felt a certain glee that the detective spoke rudely with his colleague too. “I see that anyone who wants to can read your books. You’ll make a list later.”

  He suddenly turned to me:

  “Come on, give me a hand!”

  Without a doubt, this was an acknowledgement of the worthiness of my intellect: he called on me, not my colleague, to lift up the couch. It would have been better if he’d recruited that flustered gray-eyes.

  At first I thought my head was merely swimming, but then I recoiled in horror. Lord knows, a body chopped into pieces would have frightened me less.

  Under the couch, millions of cockroaches crawled, twitched their antennas, and mated. All of the library’s cockroaches, every last one, had assembled there. Black and brown, the size of a flea and the size of a matchbox, shining and matte, they clambered over one another, crawled in dozens of layers; they were actually leaping up and down and flying around. They were so numerous they could easily have devoured me, chewed me up a single molecule, a single atom, at a time.

  And all of them suddenly rushed off, spread out, hid in the shelves and between the books, crawled into invisible cracks; it seemed they simply dissolved into thin air. After a few seconds not a single one remained—just that where the couch stood earlier there was a myriad of little black spots: the tiny shit-balls of millions upon millions of cockroaches.

  I was shaking all over, while the detective started resembling a philosopher who had suddenly got hold of his idée fixe. He wasn’t surprised; he didn’t recoil, like I had. He just smiled wryly, and his eyes announced that this was just what he had expected.

  In one of my collection’s photographs, Lolita has an expression that looks as if cockroaches or ants were crawling all over her—over her entire body, over the most private and vulnerable spots. She stands there transfixed, because she knows there’s no way to avoid the torture.

  For some reason it’s women like Lolita and men like VV who perish. In the meantime, everyone in our office and all my other acquaintances live on quite serenely; they’re all completely content and satisfied. They don’t fall in love with anyone. They aren’t plagued by oppressive memories. They’ll do their assistant professorships at the institutes, get bored in architectural offices, or paint the same colorful landscapes over and over.

  Maybe if you really want to live, the only thing left is to perish?

  I spend a lot of time with Lithuanian writers under the cover of the demands of my work. Supposedly, I consult with them, as is appropriate for devising a bibliographic index of belles lettres. Actually, I’m just scoping out new material for my collection. Lithuanian writers give me fodder for both the collection and my mlog. Incidentally, they’re constantly asking me if I don’t know of a good plot. There’s only one I’ve come up with.

  It’s a story about this Dane, or Dutchman, living with a pretty little wife in a pretty little house in the suburbs, who’s very concerned about a lot of things. Salaries are extremely worrisome to him: they aren’t rising particularly fast. He’s troubled about national problems too: Danish butter (or Dutch cheese) is facing constantly growing competition in the world market. He works whole-heartedly and thoroughly, and in his free time he draws plans for tennis courts in his yard. They have to be special, different from all the other courts in the world. In addition, this Dane (or maybe a Dutchman after all?) signs every imaginable peace manifesto and supports the War on Drug Addiction League. At last, he decides to build his unique courts, but suddenly he sees that an unfamiliar white object has shown up on the spot in the yard that he’s allotted for it.

  This Belgian (or Frenchman) gets very annoyed. He immediately calls the municipality, but no one there answers the phone. Completely furious, he calls the police, but all he hears on the phone is a strange sound, like mumbling, like someone chomping.

  Then that Italian (or Dane) angrily huffs over to the intruder. Getting closer to the white object, his resolution fades, because the object is very large. In front of him protrudes a gigantic ass—roughly the size of a twenty-story building. It’s very clean, and perches there totally satisfied, as if it had been born there.

  A footpath is already trampled up to it, and a sign in large, calligraphic letters announces: “Kiss every day from 4 to 6 p.m.” The Dutch Belgian is absolutely clueless. He hasn’t heard of the Ass of the Universe, or if he did hear about it, he thinks it’s imaginary. He calls the War on Drug Addiction League, the Peace Defense Committee, calls his lawyer, even the Women’s Club—but all he keeps hearing everywhere is the same strange noise: like incoherent mumbling, like some kind of chomping. All there is on the TV is an entirely analogous picture of an ass. This Danish Italian calls every possible number again, getting more and more nervous, until, in a moment of inspiration, he suddenly realizes what he’s hearing all the time on the telephone.

  It’s the satisfied and content farting of that same sublime ass.

  I have also created a story about the love of a prisoner. This prisoner was confined behind barbed wire. Behind what barbed wire, or whether he’s guilty or innocent, is completely irrelevant. At intervals, very infrequently, he’d succeed in seeing a woman from afar. She was so far away that he could
n’t make out her features, so he would invent them himself. He would draw these imaginary women. Sometimes they would re­semble madonnas, sometimes street prostitutes, but that prisoner of mine no longer remembered what either madonnas or prostitutes looked like.

  One day a miracle occurred. A young girl showed up right next to the barbed wire. She came again the next day, and the next. She was the daughter of the prison warden. The prisoner’s life acquired meaning. He could look at that girl. He would steal glances at her or watch her openly—she never noticed him, anyway. But others noticed.

  In stories about convicts, they love to portray how brotherly they all are, how they help one another out. That’s very nice, but in actuality things are completely different. I know this—we’re all convicts, and I’ve never encountered any solidarity. The other prisoners cruelly mocked the young lover, told dirty jokes about the girl, and crudely assessed her attractions and her shortcomings.

  The girl was the daughter of the prison warden. She didn’t consider the prisoners human; she didn’t even consider them animals. Her favorite entertainment was to sic the guard dogs on careless prisoners. She didn’t feel hatred for them; she simply thought that these people were considerably lower than dogs.

  However, my young man didn’t see this; he didn’t want to see it. He loved her, and that was all. He was envious of the shaggy dogs she petted. He was envious even of the bucket she carried out every day. Maybe he would have gone completely out of his mind, but the girl disappeared after a month or so and never appeared again.

  Later, the young man was unexpectedly set free, slowly recovered his strength, and began to live almost normally. It was just that he judged women oddly. Not a one could please him. It seemed there wasn’t a single woman in the world who could attract him. But that wasn’t true. There was one such woman in the world. And my young man (no longer a young man and no longer a prisoner) met her. He recognized her immediately, while she, understandably, didn’t remember him at all.