Vilnius Poker

by Ricardas Gavelis

  I thought the same way myself once. I don’t know why I never found myself in the city garbage dump. I had to die to visit it. You make all of your most important discoveries after death. When you’re alive, you can’t find the time for them. You need to earn your bread, satisfy your ambition and your ego, drive out fear, and pour out hate. And if you live in Vilnius, you have to play that wretched Vilnius Poker too.

  The Bangladeshis dig around in the Fabijoniškės garbage dump like shabby ravens. Real ravens often fly in too. I’m convinced that there are scores of new arrivals among them. From here, almost all of Vilnius is visible—as if it were a giant continuation of the garbage dump. Vilnius is an inside-out city. Other cities give birth to their garbage dumps, while this dump secretly gives birth to Vilnius itself. The view of Vilnius looks like a dream to me: people walk slowly, automobiles drive by slowly, there are no sounds—you have to concentrate hard to hear a vague hum. It was that Vilnius in particular that Vytautas Vargalys worshipped: he predicted the city would stop altogether at some point. In my dreams it doesn’t stop at all; that lethargic world suddenly explodes, really explodes—all of the people crack and split like over-ripe pears, and jellyfish-like gelatin, revolting slime, and warty tentacles that drip poison start gushing out of the cracks, striving to snatch up and entangle everything around them.

  At least I’m trying to get inside my old friends’ heads now, to untangle their deceptive labyrinth of scents. At its center, like a Minotaur, sits the worn-out, sickly dragon of Vilnius. He feeds on people’s dreams, desires, and scents. On scents above all else.

  Vytautas Vargalys arrived on this earth permeated with the smell of misfortune. He was never an infant; he was never a five-year-old bambino. At birth, he was already a nearly six-foot-five young man with gigantic, bottomless eyes. Everything about him was gigantic—his desires and his thoughts, his arms and legs, all of it. In some other place, he would have become a sports star, a great philosopher, or the president of a country. Even now the scents of all those possibilities lurk within him, and scent is never deceptive. But he tied his life to Vilnius. And Vilnius does not give birth to triumphs—this city gives birth only to a boundless, oppressive dreariness, or a fiery hell. I know I’m trying to explain too much, but I want to understand, in death at least, how people manage to live the life of Vilnius, why they’ve surrendered to the dragon, what axis their world revolves around.

  Unfortunately, the people of Vilnius don’t smell of self-love. If they possessed it, they wouldn’t allow themselves to be treated that way. The ignorance of Vilnius doesn’t smell of any hope; it’s a hopeless ignorance. The axis of Vilnius’s world is hate, fear, and a blind, black ignorance. No wheel of the world can turn on such an axis. Vilnius is a wheel of the world that has ground to a halt.

  Vytautas Vargalys sensed this. He discerned many things that are known only to us, the dead. He was always a bit dead. But Lolita Banytė-Žilienė was even too much alive. You wouldn’t even suspect they would become so close. They were people from entirely different worlds. In the great dream of Vilnius, it seemed they couldn’t possibly dream together. Vytautas Vargalys was an aging giant, consistently destroying his own world. And Lolita Banytė-Žilienė was a beauty gushing with youth, for whom one world was too small.

  It’s only here that we finally realize that the world is the way we imagine it to be. Only here do we find out that attempts to change the world are ridiculous. All possible worlds are hiding in the boring—you’d say immutable—flow of life; you just need to come across them. Lolita Banytė-Žilienė truly made a great deal of progress in this quest if she managed to find Vytautas Vargalys.

  I watched their acts of love many times. We don’t think that spying on people or reading their diaries is taboo. That moral standard applies only in human life, where you can use others’ secrets for evil. There’s no benefit in it for us. If the secret is impressive or horrible—that’s great for us. If it’s banal or sentimental—we feel like we’ve wasted our time. For example, Martynas Poška’s life was brimming with secrets, secrets that were as tiny as gnats. I know quite a bit about him. We know a lot in general. But by no means everything. Suffering and ignorance are universal commonalities. The gods people invent, gods who know absolutely everything, couldn’t exist. They would suffocate in cosmic tedium. They’d simply kill themselves. If gods couldn’t commit suicide, what kind of gods would they be—what would remain of their omnipotence?

  There was a time when I loved Lolita very much. Even from here, it was a bit sad to watch her giving herself to someone else. We don’t feel envy, but love is a feeling everyone can understand. I loved her, so I wanted her to be happy. But no one can be happy once they’ve taken up with Vytautas Vargalys. I could have told her this, but I didn’t feel I had the right. What would happen if all the aliens started teaching people? The world would fall apart in the blink of an eye—people wouldn’t want to play that wretched poker game anymore, they’d just wait for someone to tell them what cards their opponents were holding.

  We don’t pay much attention to all the others’ secrets, to all our knowledge. We’re already dead. It’s all the same to us now.

  Gediminas Riauba would have saved Lolita. But I’m not Gediminas Riauba. I’m already dead. It’s all the same to me now.

  Sometimes I just can’t manage to remember Lolita’s face; then I crawl into Teodoras Žilys’s studio through a broken window. The children of Old Town stare, amazed, when they see a dog clambering over the rooftops. Lying down comfortably, my tongue hanging out, I stare for a long time at two of her portraits, hung in an old-fashioned vaulted corner of the room. Dust constantly settles on them; I keep licking it off. In her portraits Lolita Banytė-Žilienė is more real than in life. It seems she’s going to step out of the canvas any minute and pet me. I hate being petted. Particularly when children pet me.

  Even now I haven’t completely fathomed Vytautas Vargalys. The first time I saw him with a dog’s eyes, the first time I smelled him, I immediately sensed that he was carrying an important secret. I even imagined he wasn’t playing poker with the others, but rather with the Lord God himself. The paradox is that God doesn’t exist anyway. Even we don’t experience him directly. So who was Vytautas Vargalys playing against? Who is he playing against now, hidden away in the basement whose windows towards the avenue are covered in glass block, smoking cigarette after cigarette? They let him smoke; they even provide him with Winstons. I suppose it’s so the smell of smoke will get in the way of me smelling other, more meaningful smells: “a cover of smoke” is a concept that applies to us thinking dogs too.

  He always carried a great hatred and an even larger fear inside. He was as smart as any devil, but he was never wise. He didn’t know how to stop, or even so much as pause. That ability is essential for a wise man. The wise man doesn’t rush about: he waits patiently until it all comes to him. As far as I remember, Vytautas Vargalys is always running, striving, chasing after that wretched dragon of Vilnius. Or talking about the prison camp. Here we regard all camps, massacres, and tortures much more phlegmatically than on Earth. It’s not the exterior that’s important, nor the barbed wire, nor the guards with bloodthirsty dogs. Nor crematoriums or monthly plans of annihilation. What matters most is the camp that unfurls within. What’s worse is when people spend their entire lives confined inside a gigantic camp without seeing any barbed wire, without smelling the smoke from the crematorium. When they don’t even realize that they are imprisoned. That’s the biggest victory of the prison camp system. It’s practically impossible to fight against a system like that. That’s the very worst of it. We ponder this a great deal. We consider whether people need freedom at all. We look at today’s North Koreans or Vietnamese, who are grateful to their government for allowing them to sleep a bit, eat a bit, and work a great deal. They die almost happy. There’s still a lot of things here that just aren’t clear to us. Maybe it’s best for a person to be a slave? Maybe striving for freedom is no more than
the invention of individual deviants?

  Only Vilnius can answer questions like that. Vytautas Vargalys could explain a great deal. In the prison camp, everything was obvious to him; the confusion started only when he escaped it. Confusion always arises when you have choice. I was able to choose my new form, so for that reason I tormented myself over it for a long time. A person doesn’t get to choose anything; he must be born a human. He is born in a concrete place and at a concrete time. This doesn’t depend on him. Perhaps that’s just the way a person’s entire life should be? No choice, no substitutions, no freedom? You get those wretched poker cards, and your goal from then on is to prove to everyone that your cards are completely different. Not necessarily that they’re better. Merely that they’re different. Those are the rules of poker. Why is this necessary, if death is the only prize?

  I keep comparing Vytautas Vargalys to the weakened, tormented vegetation of Vilnius. I search for universals in his life. Vytautas Vargalys grew exactly the same way the trees or grasses of Vilnius grow. Or maybe the foliage of Vilnius took over the principles of his growth. First, an unhealthily lively and luxuriant youth, a voluptuous branching. Then a prison camp of gas exhaust and power plant coal dust. All of Vilnius’s trees start out longing to escape to an invigorating freedom. But slowly a gloomy resignation is born: the trees stand there submissively, and their branches are continually clipped and clipped. I know what’s awaiting them, but there’s nothing I can do about it. The biggest mistake our beginners make is to presume it’s possible to fix a lot from the other side. I’m no longer a beginner. By now I know we’re destined only to assess, but not to change. We can record and know, but we cannot condemn. I don’t condemn Vytautas Vargalys, whatever he may have done. One way or another, here we know that death is not annihilation at all, rather just a change of form. So, it’s all quite natural. Lolita was born only to die young.

  Today there are an unusual number of people on the streets. Today Vilnius is unusually dead. A real, true necropolis; a profusion of the dead creep around the narrow little streets. What else is there left for corpses to do?

  Perhaps some other thinking dog once looked at me in exactly the same way. Looked at me and considered me a dead man. Why, for what? I wasn’t a corpse. I was just quiet, because it’s impossible to speak out loud in Vilnius—otherwise you won’t last. Sometimes it seems to me that I’m only allowed to wander freely through the city because I’m always quiet. Probably the power of the dragon of Vilnius reaches our world on the other side too.

  Wandering the dismal little streets, I sink into oblivion more and more often. More and more often Vilnius recedes, disappears into the mists. Earthly matters worry all of us less and less, even though I do my utmost not to forget it. But I have to inhale through my nose for a long, long, time before I sense the city’s smells again. The sad shoes of a sad person slowly approach from the left, pause, and go around me. I smell everything again. The sad person smells of hysterical goodness. From the nearest window drifts the smell of many days of drinking. It’s a bit sad that we dogs can’t get drunk. My pelt is damp from the fog. I nervously shake myself from my ears to the tip of my tail. In the sluggish mists sway all the Vargalyses, Poškas, and Banytės. They don’t scream, struggle, or call for me. More and more often I reflect: are they really all that significant and important? Is their fate really worth my attention? Everything intertwines in the cramped dream of Vilnius; then it seems I wake up and once more feel the bitterness of a truly doggish life, but it hampers me less and less. Sometimes I’m more sorry for the trees of Vilnius than for the humans of Vilnius. And I should be sorry for them both, at least equally.

  Probably solving even a single problem is too much, not just for a person’s life, but for a thinking dog’s life too. We can’t even recognize other aliens. I’ve tried many times to associate with the more dubious of Vilnius’s dogs. I’ve tried giving them signs, but without success. Perhaps they were ordinary dogs. Or maybe they didn’t want to start up with me. You can’t make sense of anything in this world, much less in the other. My non-life crumbled into pieces. There are many pieces of meaningless, aimless trots through Vilnius. Between them, like wandering rocks, float mysterious and doubtlessly particularly meaningful episodes. Sometimes it seems to me that they are different every time, that they change, like dreams seen many times.

  Here’s Vytautas Vargalys, walking slowly towards the Narutis and disappearing in an entranceway. Before vanishing, he smelled of pure hate and revenge—that biting smell still burns my nostrils. And just now I saw, right here in the gateway, Vytautas Vargalys’s father; the two of them passed each other as if they didn’t know each other, even though they almost crashed into one another. Vytautas Vargalys’s father smelled of pure hate and of revenge as well. Vytautas’s father—an economist or a physicist, a retiree or a ghost, or the doorman of a Druskininkai restaurant—who is he really? To me that’s not what’s important, there isn’t any “really” for us; he really did smell like Vytautas Vargalys’s father, that’s enough for me. I sit in the gateway and shiver—and not just from the dampness and the cold. I find it horrifying that a son might kill his father, or a father his son. But I haven’t yet managed to gather my senses when I see the third player. I see, and I can’t believe my eyes, because I mostly rely on my nose now. Irena Giedraitienė slowly creeps towards the Narutis. I recognize her smell; I can’t be mistaken. She smells of herself, but she doesn’t at all look like Madam Giedraitienė. She has a completely different appearance. It’s as if she changed into a stranger’s skin. No human would recognize her, but you can’t fool us thinking dogs: she forgot to change her scent, or maybe she couldn’t. What does Madam Giedraitienė, who is seemingly now no longer Madam Giedraitienė, intend to do here? She smells of indolence and erotism—could they all be gathering here to make love? Giedraitienė/not Giedraitienė pauses next to me, rummages around in her purse, and throws me a cold sausage. Then she determinedly sets off behind the Vargalyses. I pant with my tongue hanging out; suddenly breaking out in a sweat, I sniff at the stairs they all climbed, but the scent of their feet isn’t there. It’s unfathomable, everything loses its meaning; if only I could return to the so-called heavens, but from there, I’d hurry back to Vilnius again.

  It’s autumn in Vilnius now. Almost all of the trees have dropped their leaves and an annoying rain often falls. All scents weaken in the fall: because of the dampness in the air, because of the vegetation’s apathy, because of the sad drowsiness of animals and people. Sluggish people smell differently than lively ones. Sleeping people smell different still. They smell of dreams. The intoxicating scents of dreams are not for me. Only house dogs enjoy them. All I can do is smell the dream of some traveler dozing in the railroad station. But even that’s out of bounds. Some drunken militiaman might shoot me. I hide from the rain in the gateway and try to remember everything. To gather the floating islands of the more important episodes into a whole.

  What was Vytautas Vargalys always hiding, and what is he continuing to hide?

  I clearly remember his fear and its numerous forms. I saw it when I was still alive and smelled it as a dog; even thinking back on it, I can actually feel it, literally grasp it.

  Fear is always growing in Vilnius; even the autumn dampness doesn’t cover its scent. I was always afraid myself. I’m afraid even now, as a dog: it’s terrifying that someone might kill me or injure me. In other world cities dogs aren’t so fearful. And what was I afraid of as a human? Fear in Vilnius is multifaceted. You fear the future most of all, because it doesn’t exist.

  I never liked mathematics, but I was a topologist because that was the safest and most convenient thing to be. That’s the reason I always returned to wretched, despicable Vilnius. I was afraid that if I stayed abroad, I’d suddenly realize that I could have, that I should have, been something else entirely, but it was already too late. I was afraid to look about and see my true possibilities, the ones I’d lost. That’s why I kept coming back to Vilniu
s, where the only thing I could be was a mathematician. But in Vilnius an even more intense fear would overtake me: I feared irretrievably losing yet another of my possible futures. But I was afraid to leave Vilnius, because I would instantly come across a profusion of my own long-lost futures, droves of lost possibilities, abroad.

  The other essential Vilniutian attribute is hatred. First of all, you hate yourself, because you are afraid. The worst of it is that love doesn’t compensate for that kind of hatred. You can’t love yourself, because there’s nothing to love yourself for. I couldn’t love myself for the fact that I was a professor and others weren’t. On the contrary—I hated myself, because I made a living by hanging onto a decent mathematician’s position, even though it contradicted my nature. By nature, being a terrorist suited muited me much better. By nature, Vytautas Vargalys was suited to become a prophet, to found and defend some new religion. But all he became was secretive.

  I’m restless. I worry that I won’t find the den of Vilnius’s dragon. I hate the dragon of Vilnius. Hate of myself instantly turns into hate of Vilnius’s dragon, because he is the most to blame for everything.

  Over there a numbed Vytautas Vargalys waits patiently next to the Russian Orthodox Church on Basanavičiaus Street, glancing about fearfully. His eyes are like a madman’s; a horrible fear wafts from him. Now he sees something I can’t perceive. His hands shake; even his protruding lower lip shakes like an old man’s. He cringes and suddenly takes off—I don’t know why, I don’t know where, I don’t know what for. He’s no longer a man; he’s the embodiment of fear. The dragon, the dragon alone, is to blame for this.