Vilnius Poker

  I find it difficult to look at the crowns of trees. They’re too high up.

  We look at trees entirely differently than we once did. Before they were just plants that could provide shade or bestow fruit. We didn’t sense that just about any tree could be one of us. We didn’t sense that every one of us is at least somewhat a tree. Now we sense it; we look at them as one of our own. Nothing happened; it’s just that people became a bit more wooden, or the trees became a bit more human. And in any event . . .

  And in any event—there’s nothing to be seen in the empty autumn road. And the road itself leads nowhere. Don’t drag yourself down it; it doesn’t lead to the secret, to the unknown, not even to ruin. It doesn’t lead anywhere at all, because every road in Vilnius always leads nowhere.

  I can no longer brush my hand over my face. I no longer want to look in a mirror. Vilnius was a city of churches, but now no one prays in them. Vilnius was a city of lindens, but now the lindens have been ravaged by acid rain. Even I cannot bathe in the insatiable waters of the Neris. The really awful thing is that I can’t play the piano. Sometimes I hear jazz pouring out of some window. I want to weep. But I can’t even cry anymore.

  Who am I? I’m called Gediminas Riauba; I was born in 1930 . . . That’s funny; it’s funny and meaningless. I’m not called Gediminas Riauba. I wasn’t born. It’s more like I died.

  We don’t remember our death. That’s natural—after all, we don’t remember our birth, either. The beginning and the end are always covered in fog; that’s why every ending can turn into a new beginning.

  I don’t mourn. And I don’t torment myself. And I’m not glad. All emotions are either similar or completely the same. The truth of it is, we don’t feel emotions—they are, after all, based on the effect of glands. The effect of human glands—and we’re no longer human. We feel only memories of emotions or remember the feelings of emotions. These remarks are no more than a pathetic tautology, but I don’t know how to express it better. The language of humans isn’t suited to our non-world, to our timeless non-life.

  The little bushes by the railroad bed are scraggly, their leaves are miserable, but they’re still alive. Their smell is the smell of the abused. A person would smell the same way if he were secretly splashed with gasoline, fuel oil, and other chemicals. Through all of those odors, a smell of shock, injury, and misery emerges. Perhaps those bushes were once happy and carefree. The people of Vilnius were never carefree and happy, at least I’ve never seen any like that. They’re depressed and upset—most of the time because of trivial concerns. I was exactly the same: I can assess this objectively because I’m dead. To me it’s no longer worth lying. We don’t lie at all, because the truth is always simpler than lies, however complicated it may be. See, the truth already exists, while a lie needs to be invented and constructed without contradictions. So we never resort to lies. The state of the dead has its advantages; it’s just really different. When we’re alive, we don’t at all worry about what we’ll do when we’re dead. That is a huge mistake. The world is extremely deficient in schools about life after death. The paradises of Christians, Muslims, or the other religions that are popular on earth are very funny and absolutely pointless. We are acutely aware of this here.

  While I was still in the world I read about a rat paradise. The scientists constructed it as follows: as much food, drink, and sex as you want. At first, the rats were happy, then they got lethargic—they even stopped reproducing—and in the end they got completely unnerved. The most athletic ones attempted to break out of paradise, but it was surrounded by high tension wires. So the ones who wanted to escape would die. The other rats saw and smelled the corpses, and quickly realized that the white, shiny wires carried death. But they went on trying to escape, even at the price of their lives. The hedonistic rats, those who hadn’t tried to escape, didn’t merely stop breeding, they stopped moving too, and then eating: they calmly and quietly died out. The rat paradise was left vacant. It’s strange that people haven’t been able to think up a paradise in the least bit more sensible than the one even the rats scorned. The best they’ve thought up is to renounce it entirely. To strive to turn into nothing, like the Hindus. Or to believe that there’s nothing after death, like the atheists. The latter really suffer here; they feel insulted. They’ve fin­ally died, and now they’re forced to continue existing. Most of the time, the atheists rush to get back to earth in the form of a fly or a cockroach. Those are the rules here. You can return to earth, but you won’t have a consciousness. You can keep your consciousness, but you won’t turn into a human. Those are the rules here. You can choose the form yourself, but only once. For myself I chose the one that suits Vilnius best.

  For the time being it doesn’t get terribly cold, so I feel all right. True, the drunks and the kids throw glass shards everywhere, so I have to be careful. If I cut up my paws, no angels will lick my wounds. When you choose a form, you get both its advantages and its disadvantages. Those are the rules here. There are quite a few rules here.

  There are rules everywhere, because nothing can exist without any rules at all.

  I frequently ask myself—just what were the rules of Vilnius? I can think freely, I am a thinking dog of Vilnius, and that’s what I’ll be as long as a car doesn’t run me over or a dogcatcher doesn’t finish me off. It’s quite tolerable; it’s just that the general symphony of smells greatly hinders your concentration. Even strangers’ thoughts smell, all of them differently. And then there’s that Stefanija. True, a stench that strong smothers all smells, but it wears on the nerves. It’s like the blinding blue flash from a soldering gun, or the roar of an airplane taking off. And at the same time like a sophisticated porno movie shown to a sixteen-year-old who is bursting with unreleased sperm. We find physiology particularly oppressive. I can’t even masturbate. Nor can I chase after bitches—after all, I have consciousness. The hardest part is food. I’m most certainly not a metaphysical dog. I’m an entirely real Vilnius dog with a human’s intelligence and memory. I could even help someone, save them from misfortune or encourage them to do a good deed, but only with doggish behavior. It’s too bad Vilniutians don’t pay proper attention to dogs. It’s a rare person who goes searching among the dogs for one like me. That’s probably sensible. You could spend your entire life searching, become well-known as a madman, and find absolutely nothing. Better to search for treasure. There are considerably more treasures than there are those like me.

  Maybe I should have turned into the Iron Wolf.

  But it’s too late, I’m a dog; even my thoughts are slowly getting doggy. I’m always afraid I’ll lose my chain of thought. It’s tough for me, I admit it. We don’t know how to lie to ourselves, either. Lying is worthless to us, because any lie at all is temporary by its own nature. A lie hides the truth, but only for a while. Lying is a mute admission of death’s inevitability, practically its anticipation. And here we don’t have anything to anticipate; you won’t die even if you turn into a tree. The majority of Vilnius’s trees are reincarnated Hindus. No theory of Vilnius is possible without accounting for this sad fact.

  But I’m hardly concerned with Hindus who have turned into trees: I’m much more attracted by live Vilniutians. Yesterday, or a month ago, or sometime, I met Vytautas Vargalys next to the fence of Lukiškių Prison. He didn’t recognize me—and I had so hoped for that. Vytautas Vargalys is the only one who could have recognized me. He never considered dogs to be just dogs, or birds just birds. He didn’t even consider himself to be just Vytautas Vargalys. That’s why he was a walking corpse—every excessive knowledge kills by degrees. He didn’t recognize me—well, what of it? One of our biggest advantages is that everything’s absolutely the same to us. We don’t immediately escape from the eternal wheel of fate: at times we feel fear, hate, or ignorance—without them the soul couldn’t exist, and we do have a soul, even though we’re surprised at that ourselves.

  Human language hampers me. In our world there is no “at first” or “later,” and
language can’t get along without words like that. Unfortunately, a language corresponding to what I know would be comprehensible only to me. I suppose this is the way the gods feel: they talk non-stop, but no one understands their language. At the very most single words, or individual sentences. But even complete sentences seems unlikely.

  It’s difficult to get used to a new body. I keep wanting to stroke my mustache. Or knit my fingers together. It’s rather odd to sense my old body, which I’ll never have again. I’m like a soldier; I still feel my amputated legs and arms.

  It’s difficult to get used to the new Vilnius too. It’s totally different than the city I remember. I no longer see the rooflines, I no longer see the crowns of the lindens—dogs don’t look upward, only into the distance. I don’t see faces well: around me there are just knees and more knees, girl’s legs, and sometimes dogs happen by too. Children have become strangely close; their faces are the only ones I can get a good look at. But I immediately distinguish every person’s scent; Šapira went by here not so long ago, and here, a bit earlier, maybe even yesterday, stood one of my former students: I recognize his smell, I just don’t remember his name. The scent of Vytautas Vargalys drifts from the basement of the KGB Building, and an impossibly reeking pool of vomit, which never dries out, gathers under the little bench by the statue of Žemaitė. The streets of smells sprawl in an entirely different way than human pathways. The Vilnius of smells is mysterious and poorly researched. When I was a human, it never occurred to me that scent is the only sense that can reveal the past directly. The smells of ancient events and ancient sufferings don’t fade. They slowly settle on the grass, the sidewalks, the walls; they penetrate into the city’s body and remain for the ages—like an everyday, ordinary landscape, the landscape of smells. I am perhaps the only inhabitant of that landscape. Other dogs smell it, but they don’t understand it. People would understand it, but they don’t smell it. No one going by the KGB turns their head like I do, no one pulls the mournful and angry scent of Vytautas Vargalys into their nostrils. He would frequently smell of anger, agitation, and fear. His father is fat and sweats heavily. People sweat to cover up the smell of their emotions. Sweat smells only of physiology; it smothers the perfume of the soul. Love doesn’t smell of roses or the blue of the heavens at all. Love smells of sleepless nights, death, and insanity. When I run down Vasaros Street, it smells as if nothing but Romeos and Juliets, Tristans and Isoldas, Orpheuses and Eurydices were pining away on the hill of madmen. Smells reveal unexpected connections of things and phenomena, confirming those I only suspected before. Smells are an important language of the world, and Vilnius is a city of smells. If people’s sense of smell were like that of dogs’, the world would change radically. Many secret thoughts would immediately become plain, as people’s emotions, and most often their thoughts too, have a distinct smell. You can learn to conceal yourself, to never give yourself away by expression, voice, or movements, but you can’t change your smell. People can’t smell like dogs do, otherwise the world would fall apart. The world is the way it is only because the greater part of people’s thoughts and intentions are unknown and unpredictable to other people. But we, the dogs, can smell all of that. Even the most ordinary mutt smells what his master wants before he even wishes for it himself. The semiotics of scent could be the most profound knowledge in the world.

  My thoughts keep getting more dog-like.

  I am the secret God of Vilnius, but at the same time, I’m the most ordinary of dogs: I reek of dog; I can eat offal; I urinate with my leg raised. It’s harder for me to understand people than it once was, even though I know more about them all the time. More and more all the time. The essence of Vilnius is deceit. If you understand the deceit of Vilnius’s prisoners, you’ll understand the Vilniutians themselves.

  Life in Vilnius is a giant poker game, played by madmen. Everyone hides his cards, raises and raises the bet, grimaces and makes faces, hoping to deceive the others, but no one ever finds out what his cards really are. It’s a madmen’s poker game, there is no logic or sense in it: here they pass with four aces and raise to the skies without any face cards. Here everyone plays jeopardy, but no one wins the jackpot. Our life is an endless game of Vilnius Poker: its cards are shuffled and dealt by a scornfully grimacing death.

  I no longer play: I fell out of the game. Many have fallen out, but Vytautas Vargalys, Ahasuerus Šapira, Levas Kovarskis, and Stefanija Monkevič still sit at the table . . . As long as the game continues, I don’t have the right to reveal the cards in play. And it continues; it will end only when the last one rises from the table. A pointless and meaningless game played by madmen: the last one left at the table won’t by any means win the jackpot. The jackpot will come to nothing, the cards themselves will come to nothing: everyone knows this, but they keep heaping more and more into the jackpot, even though a pile of corpses, sleepless nights, hysterical tears, suicides, and murderers are piled up there already. I suppose Lolita Banytė-Žilienė was a suicide. She smelled like a suicide.

  I don’t understand why all of this worries me so much, what I still want to find out about that wretched Vilnius Poker and its players. What are they to me, what meaning do they have anymore? It’s pointless for us to be interested in the fate of the world: it doesn’t concern us anymore. It’s unproductive to study the world because there’s nowhere to put any new information about it to use. Rummaging around in people’s actions and thoughts is like playing chess with yourself.

  But the dragon of Vilnius won’t give me any peace. Vytautas Vargalys searched for him, Teodoras Žilys molded him out of clay, and Lolita Banytė-Žilienė caressed him and made love to him. Ergo, he really does exist.

  If he didn’t exist, I wouldn’t need anything in the gloom-wrapped city of Vilnius. I can remember the past without idling around the crooked little streets of Old Town.

  I listen to old man Vilnius wheezing heavily as he breathes. Cities fall ill too—their illnesses are similar to human illnesses: they suffer from both hypertension and cancer. Cities die in horrible pain as well. But what’s even worse is when cities rot alive. When people peck around in stinking putrefaction, thinking that’s what life is. In my human life, people often asked me why I didn’t defect to some other country. I don’t know the reason myself. I had to die before I finally realized why. I was agonizingly interested—and even now I’m interested—in the people of Vilnius. People like that aren’t found anywhere else. Where else would I have found Vytautas Vargalys, who had traveled through the hell of the prison camps and then through the horrifying hell of the abyss? And who had, in the end, created his own private hell, which even I can’t fathom? Where else would I have met Lolita Banytė-Žilienė, a bird of paradise with a poisonous beak and the claws of a dragon? Or Martynas Poška, the crazy collector and guardian of Vilnius’s rot? In what other country would I have been able to play crushing, meaningless Vilnius Poker?

  It’s a shame I don’t know how I died. One of the crazy players of Vilnius Poker who’s arrived on our side could tell me that, but even that won’t happen. We don’t recognize one another here and we don’t have names. That’s natural: all names apply only in a single lifetime. They change all the time: they mean nothing. I was the mathematician Riauba, now I’m a dog—so what should I call myself? You’re all sorts of things, but you are always you, and your name—every one of your names—means nothing. It only marks one of your many lives. Those are the rules here.

  Hindus frequently turn into the trees of Vilnius. Others travel to Vilnius as mice, pigeons, or cockroaches. Vilnius is crawling and teeming with aliens. They want to fathom the secret. We all want to fathom the secret, each his own. But why is there such a profusion of aliens struggling to get into Vilnius in particular?

  It’s only Vilnius Poker, or its hands, that could answer, but what its cards are is an unknown. Who will answer, who will explain? Maybe Lolita Banytė-Žilienė, whose father was a KGB colonel, or a history professor, or . . . Or what? The strange logic
of humans demands an explicit answer. As if it were possible to find out! For some reason, people yearn to resolve and explain everything, even that which I didn’t find out—what it is Vilnius Poker is hiding. Lolita’s father was neither a KGB colonel, nor a history professor, nor . . . Then what was he? Either one or the other, or nothing—poker is poker, one can only make conjectures in this case. It’s easier for us thinking dogs: Lolita’s father always smells like Lolita’s father, and nothing else is important. People’s strange logic doesn’t apply to us. In general, no logic applies in Vilnius. You won’t find unarguable answers or absolute truths in it. Vilnius is a city of infinite possibilities. Vilniutians sit at the table and get cards you won’t make any poker hands out of. But you have to play anyway. If you fold—you’ll transmigrate into the company of the Bangladeshis. It’s only when you fold that everything becomes obvious. A Bangladeshi is a Bangladeshi. Sometimes I visit them in the giant city garbage dump beyond Fabijoniškės. They sleep in piles of rags, cardboard boxes, or the heating pipes; they dig around in the decay of the dump. They’re the only ones who understand me. They don’t feed me reeking pieces of meat, like others do. They talk to me. One elderly man, who cut off his frostbitten toes last winter with a jackknife, frequently explains his theory to me, and I almost agree with him.

  “Vilnius is a city under a spell, my dear dog,” he likes to explain. “We both know this is true. Vilnius was the ethnic capital of Lithuania, then it belonged to Polonized Lithuania, then Russia, then Poland, and now it belongs to Russifying Lithuania. Where else is there a capital of a country that has belonged to one, another, and a third, a capital that wasn’t a part of Lithuania even when Lithuania was independent? Can you imagine Paris belonging to Spain? No, Vilnius could only be compared perhaps to the Armenians’ Ararat, which isn’t in Armenia. It’s a miraculous mountain too; it was no accident that Noah disembarked there. But Vilnius is ten times as miraculous. To a thinking person it reveals ten times, twenty times as many secrets. That’s why I sit here, in a garbage dump, my dear colleague.”