Vilnius Poker

by Ricardas Gavelis

  For the third day, I haven’t been able to add to my mlog. I haven’t even touched it. The word “touched” sounds funny when you’re talking about a purely metaphysical object, doesn’t it?

  However, the only means of staying alive in the Ass of the Universe is to devoutly believe that the fruits of your imagination are far more real than so-called reality.

  It can’t be otherwise. In the Ass of the Universe, everyone, by definition, is shit. So the only solution to avoid simply fertilizing the earth, is to turn into thinking shit. This is a byproduct of the Ass of the Universe, and its most advanced creation: thinking shit, or homo lithuanicus.

  The abyss gazes at us, or perhaps we’ve long since been gazing at the world from out of the abyss ourselves.

  Everyone keeps asking me about VV. But what can I say? “The man has killed the thing he loved, and so the man must die.” Every Lithuanian, intentionally or not, has murdered an abundance of things he loved. He’s murdered everything he loved.

  Although for some reason, he hasn’t killed himself. Apparently, he never loved himself.

  If even I feel this way, how must VV have felt all his life?

  How must he have felt visiting Lolita’s father, the Colonel Banys we all love and revere?

  After all, Lola’s father wasn’t some abstract monster to him. VV had literally been through Colonel Banys’s hands.

  I know this for a fact. That former KGB agent Mackus showed me the records of VV’s interrogation.

  It follows that Banys and VV were especially old acquaintances. The executioner and his victim.

  Christ Almighty, what’s going on in the Ass of the Universe!? Some things are impossible to comprehend. Impossible to bear. Impossible to even imagine.

  VV had to socialize with Colonel Banys on a family footing!

  Maybe, like that time in the Erfurtas store, he had a gigantic knife inside his jacket? Or maybe Colonel Banys was already sharpening his own knife?

  One way or another, when two such opposing elements collide, the occurrence of a cosmic catastrophe is inevitable.

  I never liked to wander through Vilnius, but now that’s all I do. VV was a true poet of Vilnius, while to me this city always seems to be a soulless mechanism, a vengefully wheezing machine of inexplicable purpose. Even on our madly spinning planet, speedily rolling to its doom, cities of this kind are rare.

  We don’t have our own city. There are Moloch cities and tyrant cities. Museum cities and Tower of Babel cities. Snoozing cat cities and cities of the absurd. But ours is a nothing.

  Like the Jews, we’re eternal exiles, but we don’t even have our own Israel. I’ll add that we don’t even have our own Jerusalem.

  Dammit—why was I fated to be born in a crossroads trampled by whoever gets the urge? Why did I have to be born in the Ass of the Universe, through which every conceivable shit pours?

  The dramatis personae of VV’s life have encircled me. Every day I run into Kovarskis and Šapira. I have something to ask each of them, but the questions still need to be precisely formulated. I’m greeted pleasantly by Giedraitienė carrying rabbit furs, and once I even ran into Julius, the Vargalyses’ former servant. We both sucked down a glass of vodka and parted without saying a word to one another. What’s there to talk about? Everything’s already been said. The circle narrows. If a gigantic fish were to come swimming up the avenue and swallow me, I wouldn’t be at all surprised.

  I’m someone’s skinny little beer-drinking prey.

  I’ll add: every homo lithuanicus is inherently someone’s prey.

  I’m drawn to those horrible suburban gardens, the place of Lolita’s murder. Inexorably attracted, as if I were a murderer unable to resist showing up at the scene of the crime.

  I’m wracked and torn by the desire to tell everything. I can’t stand it anymore. I’m horribly afraid. I have to put this down in my mlog as quickly as possible—for the first time in my life, I wonder if I might not make it.

  I’m just looking for a rationalization. I’m magically drawn to those damn gardens, and that’s all there is to it. I admit: by complete coincidence, I was there the day Lolita was murdered and I saw everything. I saw absolutely everything.

  There! I’ve up and said it. What will happen now?

  For the time being, nothing. I haven’t been struck by lightning. My pulse didn’t even speed up. That’s it; I’m getting a taxi and going.

  I’ve visited those gardens many times. Several writers have plots here. One lets me live in his pseudo-folk villa during the summer. That’s how I commune with nature. Ha, ha—that’s a joke.

  Today I’m nothing more than a pathetic little spy, the victim of my own dangerous whims, glancing about fearfully. Every homo lithuanicus, whatever he does, glances about fearfully: maybe I’m doing something wrong, maybe someone will get angry.

  That other evening I was also going down this path towards my temporary abode. I didn’t care if I ran into the owner or not—I knew where the bottles were stashed. The owner wasn’t there; with a glass in my hand, I went out on the porch to smoke. The Banys’s garden cottage was right in front of me. The sun was already setting; it shone straight in my eyes.

  But today it’s foggy and windy, the leaves blow along the little road as long as they don’t get stuck in a puddle. I turn into the Banys’s garden as if I knew exactly where I was going and why. I pause at the entrance. Next to me a gray bird, hanging upside down, serenely pecks at the wild grapes.

  It’s unbelievable, but the door to the house isn’t sealed. Any curious passerby could look over the scene of the crime. And I, by the way, am an interested party.

  Interested in what?

  In any event, I cautiously step inside. Inside it smells of decay, of dirty, rotten leaves. Lolita’s flaming blood has soaked into the old floorboards. The marks shine like my spilled school ink once did. This is where Lolita was defiled, chopped into bits.

  Suddenly an insane notion besets me: to find even the tiniest little piece of her body and take it for myself. There must, there has to be more than that congealed blood left here.

  My collection contains everything. All it’s lacking is a little dried piece of Lolita’s body.

  The drone of an engine drew my attention on that other damned day. A black Volga reluctantly crawled up the small hill to the Banys cottage. The two of them got out quietly. I was doubly surprised: the cottage was completely empty all summer, and Lola never rode in her father’s car. For good measure, I downed yet another glass. When I went out onto the veranda again, the Volga was no longer there, but I sensed that Lolita and VV had stayed in the cottage.

  The first question: who brought them here? The father himself? His driver? If they came themselves, who drove the car away?

  An elderly man sat by the cottage next door and smoked greedily. He meant nothing. He was meaningless. A gray-haired, glum little guy, with a beaten dog’s eyes.

  By no means do I think he was meaningless now, because now I know it was Colonel Giedraitis sitting there.

  I’ll have to arrange everything logically later. Divide all the triangles into rhombuses and pentagrams. The triangle: VV, Giedraitienė, and her son. What role did Colonel Giedraitis play in this story? After all, he and VV knew each other since childhood.

  Childhood! . . .

  I had a desperate itch to spy on VV and Lolita. I was somewhat inebriated; a passion for spying seized me. I talked myself out of it, I believe out loud even, but I knew I was going to sneak up to the cottage window and listen to what they were saying anyway. With the purest of intentions: just for my mlog. A person finds rationalizations for just about any amoral action. Only the Marquis de Sade was conceptually amoral—for the sake of amoralism itself.

  That damned night I was downright driven by the devil. I was the devil’s flunky.

  To my astonishment, they were chatting very calmly and idly about Vilnius’s history, Lolita’s grandmother, the village enchantress, about breeds of dogs. Banalities or mysti
c poeticisms. Apparently, that was how they talked all the time. I stood there, my arms scratched by thorns, and swore a bit. I was horribly disappointed in them. It seemed to me that they were surely obliged to speak meaningfully, inhumanly, supernaturally. And there they sat making small talk. Then they leisurely started undressing. Without any heights of rapture, each one separately, very efficiently. How ordinary! VV introduced himself to Colonel Banys, and now rides in his car. Everything’s perfectly ordinary. Banys’s driver brought the two of them to the garden to make a bit of love in the arms of nature. How charming!

  I went nuts. VV’s horrible and lamentable story was taken away from me—no, no, not from me, from Lithuania, from the entire world. He was no more than an ordinary, one-dimensional little figure. And I was no more than an idiot.

  My fury kept growing. I decided to march over and tell them what I thought of them. Thank God, I didn’t burst in the door; I carefully glanced in through the window.

  And it was then that I saw.

  No ghosts have showed up yet. I crawl over the floor and look for even the tiniest little piece of Lolita’s body. I saw it: there were a lot of them, a whole lot of them; they were practically broken down into molecules. Give me at least one molecule of Lolita’s body!

  At first glance, I saw everything at once; I grasped everything beyond a shadow of a doubt. VV stabbed her with a gigantic knife, just under the right breast, with the accuracy of a professional killer. He went down on his knees, holding up the falling Lolita. She was already dead when she collapsed on him. That was no outburst of insanity; he did everything with precision and a maniacal calm. The worst of it was that in the last moment of her life, Lolita did not fear him; she looked at VV with a lucid gaze and smiled. At first I thought they had agreed to commit suicide together; they had simply been delaying, and that was why they were making small talk. However, VV hadn’t the slightest intention of killing himself. He looked around and turned his gaze straight at me. He instantly jumped up and ran out.

  I knew he would kill me too, but I couldn’t move. It wasn’t that I was paralyzed by fear, but by some kind of all-consuming despair. Suddenly I understood that now nothing would be the same. Neither Lola, nor VV, nor me. However, VV jumped straight into the bushes and ran off like a wild beast, breaking the branches and tearing at the leaves.

  My second thought was this: he killed the devil’s seed; that is, not Lolita, but Colonel Banys’s daughter. Maybe she had told him something? Maybe the father said something to both of them? That’s probably ridiculous. It’s too primitive. People aren’t murdered on that account. However, at that moment, that was exactly what I thought.

  And immediately I saw Colonel Banys himself.

  Just one molecule!

  It was here, she was lying right here!

  She was lying on her back, very naturally, as if waiting around for Colonel Banys to solemnly step inside. Not the slightest little muscle on his face twitched. With difficulty, he kneeled down next to his daughter’s body. He looked at her for a long time, as if choosing a favorite spot. Then he determinedly pulled the knife out of the wound.

  Blood gushed out onto the floor.

  I didn’t see them, but I sensed quiet figures milling about. A pair stood in the bushes beyond the cottage; another figure a bit further, near the road. The black Volga’s darkened headlights stared at me indifferently.

  I didn’t see the first cuts; apparently I must have been looking around at that moment. When I glanced into the cottage again, Lola was already headless. Her father was slowly, methodically slicing her into pieces, at intervals wiping his bloody hand on her belly. For some reason it occurred to me that this certainly wasn’t the first time he had done this kind of work. For a while I watched as if I had been mesmerized, without any horror—it was much too similar to a nightmarish dream. But I could pinch myself as much as I wanted. I could close my eyes and open them again. Nothing helped: it was reality. For another moment yet I saw all the details. Then I felt sick. Thank God, I didn’t scream or run off horrified through the bushes, I just threw up.

  I’m pathetic; I’m the embodiment of homo lithuanicus. I didn’t think of Lola or VV, I thought only of myself. I knew that if someone ran into me here it would be the end of me. I had seen too much. I was the only one to see Colonel Banys’s deed; even all his assistants were some distance away. All I thought of was how to escape unseen. I tried to vomit as quietly as possible.

  That I succeeded in.

  I don’t know how many times I’ve jumped out of bed at night, always seeing the same thing in front of my eyes: Colonel Banys, methodically butchering his dead daughter. That was all I saw, even though in my dreams I probably ought to have seen a more accurate, deeper truth: Colonel Banys butchering VV alive.

  That’s all I know for sure. If someone were to even suspect that I know this . . . It’s awful just to think about it.

  But I know it all the same.

  They say even gods cannot change the past. So then who the hell needs gods like that? I demand that this be changed, erased from my memory! Can’t I demand at least one thing in my life?

  I haven’t been able to shake off the feeling that I am Lolita, sprawled on the garden cottage’s floor and being cut up into little pieces. That’s the way I walk the streets of the city—being cut up, or already cut up. And slowly going out of my mind. The only reason I don’t go entirely out of my mind is because my mind is cut up into little pieces too.

  An awful thing happened today: I was getting ready to write the horrible history of the garden into my secret computer disk and ran into the insolent traces of an intruder. Someone had read my secret records, my entire mlog.

  I won’t explain it in detail; a non-specialist wouldn’t understand anything anyway, but believe me—the record was encrypted four ways. No one could get into it without me. It seemed that way to me. I didn’t appreciate people’s ingenuity.

  But no—I did appreciate it. After all, I had entered one last marker. If the record had, in spite of it all, been read (and that, it seemed, was impossible), I would know it immediately.

  And I did know it immediately. They didn’t appreciate my ingenuity, either.

  So, that’s how things stand. I was saved only because I hadn’t had time to enter the horrible story of the garden. And the records in my brain, I trust, really are impossible to read.

  Why am I convinced of this? If they could, they would have read it a long time ago, ergo, I would have long since been disposed of.

  Devilishly logical.

  Everything else is completely illogical.

  Why, why, did VV murder Lolita? If it were a Shakespearean play, I’d believe everything—Will liked to throw corpses about. But this is life, after all! VV’s, Lolita’s, my life!

  Yes, life has everything: absurdities, horrors, and afflictions. But I still can’t believe that this inexplicable nightmare belongs to my life too.

  I must get closer to VV’s secret, to Lolita’s secret. On stinking Vilnius’s secret. I must understand them all, whatever it may cost me.

  The most metaphysical object in the Universe is our office. Under no circumstances can it chance by so much as a hair’s breadth. I burst straight into the coffee break with all my horrors and questions, and I was charmed.

  “I know for sure that French perfumes are going to go up in price,” Gražina immediately declared, yawning openly. “Good lord, they’re already insanely expensive.”

  What does she need Dior perfume for? Explain this to me, for God’s sake.

  “True, true,” Marija agreed at once. “We’ve decided to change our apartment. You know, the five of us are squeezed into two rooms. We saved up the money, found someone willing to sell . . . and the Executive Committee won’t allow it.”

  “What Executive Committee!?” Gražina declared mercilessly. “It should be called the Exasperation Committee. They do everything just to make things harder.”

  “That’s their purpose,” Beta says en
igmatically.

  “The price of coffee is going up again . . . And cigarettes . . .”

  “Yesterday I went to the studio, I look and . . .”

  “Rimutis says to me: Mommy . . .”

  And so forth, and so on. No one has been chopped into bits. No one is sitting in jail. Everything is the same as it always was, and you, Comrade Poška, are simply hallucinating.

  Ever since that silly telephone conversation during my binge, Elena looks at me gently and benevolently. I answer with a polite smile, however, a holy terror grips me at the thought that she could demand something of me too.

  “Martynas is in a lively mood today,” she chirps, “I’m thinking he’ll run out for a wee bit of cognac. I saw that Tallinn had these tiny little bottles. You could bring back a few . . .”

  Only now do I see the homemade cookies and petit fours on the table. Apparently, it’s someone’s name day. Well, okay, a little cognac is a little cognac. Why just a few bottles—I’ll stuff my pockets full.

  Outside, the dog greets me immediately. He doesn’t come closer; I’d say he follows me respectfully, like an uninvited entourage. Suddenly it occurs to me it would be worth my while to talk to him. Maybe he speaks English? If he follows me the whole way, I’ll talk to him on the way back.

  At the crosswalk, a roaring truck nearly runs me over. That’s weird—trucks aren’t allowed on the avenue. Some special truck. Every Soviet law has so many exceptions that no one person knows them all.

  There was a line by the tiny little bottles. Apparently our office wasn’t the only one that had gotten wind of them. I take five of them; I’ll take the others home. Very handy: you open it up, suck down those four ounces, and there’s none left over; the cognac’s alcohol doesn’t evaporate.