Vilnius Poker

by Ricardas Gavelis

  Over there Martynas Poška sits shut up in his apartment and pages through brittle sheets of paper. He tries to invent a humane world in an inhuman city. However—oh horror!—he tries to create it on sheets of paper alone. The living don’t concern him; he’s not trying to change anything. He didn’t even change his own son—the one that’s a knuckle-headed athlete, or Communist Youth leader, or a drug-addicted rapist, but that’s not what worries Martynas Poška. With a sarcastic smile, he assembles a paper world. He’s sorely deceiving himself. He convinces himself that his collection is immeasurably important, even though he knows it has no meaning.

  Over there Lolita Banytė-Žilienė dresses to show off in town. This ritual can take an hour or two. She starts with her toes and finishes with the ends of her hair. For a long, long, time, she massages one little muscle in her thigh, driving the fat from it, even though there isn’t any there. She minces in front of the mirror naked, and then covers herself with layer after layer. The heavens could split, or the earth open up, and she would fuss over herself all the same, swaying her thighs, flourishing her chest, carefully choosing that day’s ideal mask. I perfectly understand Vytautas Vargalys’s spontaneous desire to rip off all her clothes, all of her covers, to tear even her divine body to bits—just from the desire to find something inside her.

  And now here they all three come together. Vytautas Vargalys, as straight as a stone pillar; Lolita Banytė-Žilienė, shining with an oppressive beauty; and an unsmiling, crew-cut Martynas Poška. A little game of Vilnius Poker begins. It actually hurts to smell it. Only as a dog do you realize deceit isn’t people’s flaw. It’s their means of existence. It’s impossible to condemn them for it. What madman would scorn people because they eat or breathe? And deceit is even more vital to them than air. I know. After all, I was a human myself. I would sit down at the piano just so I could, for a brief moment, avoid pretense and openly play my despair, my spiritual impotence, and my hatred of myself; so that I could, for at least for a few minutes, be a terrorist who blows it all up.

  So a little game of Vilnius Poker begins. The trio begins torturing one another. Martynas Poška lets ironic witticisms fly, even though he’s not at all happy or funny. Actually, he only envies Vytautas Vargalys his height, his looks, and even his intelligence. He reeks of envy. Most of all, he envies him Lolita Banytė-Žilienė. And it’s not just the scent of French perfume wafting from her—the smell of death wafts from her. She is as cold as Death. It isn’t blood flowing in her veins, but dilute nitrogen. She always wants to win. That’s why she pretends to be a victim who needs comforting and protection. A proud, practically unapproachable victim. That’s the kind that attracts men most. She irresistibly attracts Vytautas Vargalys, so he pretends he’s in love. But he smells only of fear. He doesn’t love anyone, because he’s horribly afraid of love itself. In love, he loses his vigilance, and Vytautas Vargalys is always tense and watchful.

  That’s the way three particularly close people play.

  It’s hard to understand people, even for us. They are born for a single, tiny second, in order to die after it rushes past. But even so, they do their utmost to make it as senseless as possible. They lie, pretend, deceive, get an instant of profit, and rejoice over trifles. They all ignore any responsibility to eternity. They don’t feel any responsibility. A human life is a competition of ingenious idiocies. Everyone desperately tries to exceed the others with the boundlessness of their stupidity. I was by no means a laggard in this contest myself. Sometimes a terrible nostalgia comes over me; I get the urge to get mixed up in a group of people and take up endless little stupidities again. Only a human being manages to act as if he were immortal. We thinking dogs cannot do this. We know too much about the world. That’s why we sometimes get an irresistible urge to turn into a human. You just need to decide, and return to the world as some insect, fly, or a tree, and then patiently wait, turning in the endless circle of change: sooner or later, you’ll turn back into a human. But once you’ve turned into one, you’ll no longer have the experience you gained in the afterlife. Those are the rules here.

  Maybe that’s what I should do? I’m already tired of searching for the truth. No one knows it.

  Believers say that God knows it. Even if I believed in God I wouldn’t take that for granted. The creator of the universe, the most powerful being in it, couldn’t be interested in a poker game dealt by piddling little people, or in some truth of theirs. He wouldn’t have either the time or the desire for it. He’d be worried about entirely different things: the collision of galaxies or the birth of stars. I’m certainly not anyone’s creator, nor am I particularly powerful, but individual people concern me less and less, even my former friends. Then why should God himself be concerned about them?

  So, who knows the real truth?

  I suppose no one does. It’s dangerous to positively assert anything about a human. A human is significantly larger than any proposition. Maybe it would be more appropriate to speak of them only in negatives? Lolita Banytė-Žilienė’s father was not a shoemaker. She was not bald, she wasn’t lame, she was never a boy. You could go on this way indefinitely. But there won’t be any real answers anyway, because only Nobody knows.

  Perhaps the dragon of Vilnius is that Nobody? Or maybe that Nobody is the very air of Vilnius, the gloomy noise of the streets, the misleading labyrinth of the city’s smells?

  Lolita Banytė-Žilienė concerns me less and less: the firm-breasted, big-boobed, or chestless KGB colonel’s, or history professor’s, or not a shoemaker’s daughter, murdered, or a suicide, or maybe dead from a heart attack. She is all sorts of things, but it concerns me less all the time. The same with Vytautas Vargalys and his grandfather, who died or didn’t die, who was buried by Martynas, or Stefanija, or Vytautas Vargalys himself; and his father, the aviation inventor, or artist, or economist, a helpless invalid, or super-sexed athlete, or mystical sorcerer, who had emigrated, or disappeared without a trace, or got a government pension. It no longer matters to me if Vytautas Vargalys wanted children, or didn’t want them, or was impotent; had a wife, or never had one, if she is now the wife of a successful businessman or a lonely alcoholic; if he knew Lolita’s father or not, or if he knew him, then which one—the KGB agent, or the historian, or not a shoemaker. That which I have seen or known doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Nothing means anything, because only the nameless Nobody knows the complete truth. And if you want to get to that Nobody, you need to at least know what Vilnius is.

  A hell, in which only those who light the fires under the cauldrons have it good? A desert, where only lizards and snakes live, and everything else is no more than tiny grains of sand? A city of the dragon, in which all of the princesses are already devoured? I don’t know what Vilnius is.

  Maybe Vilnius knows what I am? Maybe I’m a ghost of the Ged­iminas Riauba who once lived. Or maybe a creature whose name hasn’t been thought up yet. I crawl out of the gateway, splash through the puddles, smell the scents of Vilnius that have been weakened by the damp, and keep doubting everything more and more. Yes, I feel my paws, my restless tail, my ears flopping as I run. They keep flopping over to the sides—then I hear better. Then they lie down next to my head again—immediately I hear worse. I can look at the mirror in some store window and I’ll really see a dog. A monstrous, mutty creature with intelligent eyes. I’m not imaging it: passersby who see me say “dog” about me too. You’d think I really was a dog. But I doubt that more and more. I take food from the half-witted little old men of Old Town, and I’m doubtful. Completely starved, I heroically squeeze my way into filthy little cafeterias and whine pathetically. They always feed me: even the meanest cook, seeing my eyes, suddenly quiets down and throws me an entirely human morsel. They don’t act that way with real dogs. Real dogs aren’t shown such respect.

  I can’t save anyone; I can’t do anything at all. I don’t resemble some supernatural being with miraculous powers in the least. I’m just as miraculous as any other dog. Would life in V
ilnius change in the slightest if all the city’s dogs were intelligent? Not at all. If you want to move the jammed wheel of Vilnius’s existence, a much more terrific effort would be required.

  Lord knows, it would have been best to be reborn as a dragon. Only a more powerful dragon could triumph over the dragon of Vilnius. I should have returned to Vilnius with miraculous powers and proclaimed my laws. But I never wanted to rule. I have no desire for everyone to obey me. And I don’t now, either.

  All I am is a degenerate dog—always soaked through and frozen, always hungry and tired. Apparently I wasn’t destined to become powerful in any life. Apparently, it’s clearly written in the book of fate that I will always be cold, always suffer, and never find the answers. Who knows whether it’s worth dying just to find that out. Apparently no true Vilniutian will find happiness, even after death.

  By the way, I don’t particularly torment myself over this. I said I would want to save everyone just to say it. I’m probably lying. I rarely want to find out anything anymore. I’m becoming more and more indifferent. Here, where we are, indifference isn’t considered a flaw. It’s a natural state after death. Those are the rules here. I have felt neither sadness, nor guilt, nor happiness for a long time. My thinking has been nothing but indifferent for a long time. True, here we sense a strange nostalgia. We secretly long for foolish emotions, senseless pain, and even the silliest human errors. Perhaps it’s the errors we long for most. Here, unfortunately, we don’t make errors: we don’t behave either well or badly. We know all too well that it’s absolutely the same no matter how we behave. Whatever happens is absolutely the same. All variations of fate are equal, we realize this; naïve human hope has been taken away from us. That’s why we long for the foolish—but ever so dear—human naïveté, for the belief that it’s possible to change at least a thing or two. We long for tears of helplessness or outbursts of anger. Only we understand how agonizingly beautiful it is to lose irrevocably. Only we know that human despair is really a giant ball of unrealized hopes and possibilities.

  In my human life I had a purpose: to run as far as possible from here, as far as possible from the soullessness of Vilnius, from that moribund city’s despair. It would seem that in dying, you really could end up as far away as it’s possible to get, but it’s the reverse: you dig deeper into the decay of Vilnius. I could choose freely, and that’s why I chose Vilnius anyway, why I picked the dragon that holds everyone in his jaws, or maybe has already swallowed them. Around me, inside of me—Vilnius is everywhere; perhaps the entire world is Vilnius.

  Although Vilnius itself really isn’t the entire world—those empty streets of the night, those corpse-like neon lights, the pale riddle of dusk. I go so far as to terrify myself—maybe the city really is extinct, maybe no one lives here anymore. Maybe even the riddle is no more; it remains only in my memories, in a strange cryptogram of old scenes.

  Over there, Vytautas Vargalys climbs up a ladder, lifts the trapdoor, and finally ends up on a flat roof in Lazdynai. He carefully settles in behind the elevator tower. He smells of exhaustion and senseless deter­mination. He carefully glances down at the square by the shopping center. Militiamen are already gathering there; gloomy figures in markedly civilian clothes stand guard in all of the passages between the buildings. Vytautas Vargalys slowly takes a long case from his shoulder, unbuttons it, and lays it down next to himself. His hands don’t shake; he breathes perhaps just a little harder than usual. He doesn’t smell of fear—only of fulfillment after an endless wait. The figures in the square next to Lazdynai’s weather vane suddenly begin to move. Apparently, the dragon is approaching. Vytautas Vargalys carefully screws on the stock, and then adjusts the telescopic sight; even a fraction of a millimeter is important. He raises the rifle to his shoulder, aims, closes his eyes, and aims again. He carefully lays down the rifle, pulls a small leather sack out of his pocket, and smiles wryly. He unties the knot, sticks a finger inside and rolls out a bullet. The casing’s copper is appreciably darkened, while the bullet is entirely black. This bullet has waited thirty years. It smells of despair, old blood, and sacrificial smoke. Vytautas Vargalys, with a crooked nail, scrapes the bullet; silver sparkles under the blackness. The bullet is silver, as is appropriate. Only one like that can slay a dragon. It has waited thirty years; Vytautas Vargalys has waited just as long. The silver of the bullet blackened, while Vytautas Vargalys’s black hair coated itself in silver. But the hour has arrived nevertheless. Life gives every person at least one lone chance. A patient man will surely live to see it.

  The square is in his power; even a scrawny basement cat couldn’t run through it unseen. Today is Vytautas Vargalys’s day; he instantaneously turns thirty years younger. Now he isn’t fifty, but nineteen. He has gotten Bitinas’s clear instructions, a sacred mission from the nation. The silver bullet will fly straight at the target: the dragon must be destroyed. He carefully sets the bullet in place and checks the safety. The automobile cavalcade is visible by now, guiding and accompanying the beige Volga, their sirens blaring. The dragon unwinds, flashing its brilliant blue eyes and howling. No, he’s no longer nineteen; when he was nineteen the dragon hid day and night, it didn’t howl and didn’t flash its lantern eyes. It even slept inside a tank. Now it only fences itself off with a wall: the square opposite the shopping center is completely empty. Vytautas Vargalys continues to wait until the great visitor climbs out of the car; only when he recognizes him does he raise the rifle to his shoulder. Now he doesn’t smell of anything, he smells of absolutely nothing at all. The old man’s hunched figure is easily seen through the scope. He’s as scrawny as a basement cat: his long coat flutters around him as if it were hung on a pole. Vytautas Vargalys doesn’t hurry; he chooses a spot under the temple, by the ear. He knows he won’t miss, that he’d hit him even with his eyes closed. He gently presses the trigger. The sound of the shot is unexpectedly harsh; it rebounds very loudly. For a few seconds there’s nothing to be seen, but then he sees the hunched-over figure, as healthy as can be, step into the store. Vytautas Vargalys’s face is twisted, and his smell just doesn’t take shape. That’s the way an injured beast smells, a drowning person; that’s the way a recurrent nightmare smells. Vytautas Vargalys doesn’t howl, doesn’t tear out his hair, doesn’t sob. He looks over the rifle’s safety, torn out by the explosion, touches his scorched cheek, and again smiles wryly. The smile of a hired killer doesn’t suit him at all.

  When did I see this scene? Did I see it at all? I remember my paws burned as they stuck to the hot bitumen of the roof. There wasn’t so much as a hint of a breeze. And it occurred to me that I could, for all it’s worth, change the course of events. I could have jumped up and knocked the rifle out of his hands. But I couldn’t explain anything to him.

  It slowly gets lighter. I’ve sat in the gateway the entire night long. We dogs think very slowly.

  I’m drawn to run to the village, to Stefanija Monkevič. I’m drawn to Lolita Banytė-Žilienė’s grave. I’m drawn to the barred basement window, behind which Vytautas Vargalys sits and smokes. If I were three dogs, I’d run everywhere at once.

  But even alone, I sense, I smell the essence with all of my doggy being. I almost understand what the dragon is doing with my Vilnius.

  The people of Vilnius can’t avoid lying, because Vilnius itself lies.

  Probably all the cities in the world lie sometimes. They want to appear prettier, smarter, or more lovable. That’s a nearly innocent lie. Vilnius lies all the time—consistently and maliciously. Vilnius wants to deceive; perhaps that’s the only purpose of its existence. It lies with people, because people are the city’s words. But it lies with its streets too, and with its houses, and even with its past.

  Today I don’t believe nighttime Vilnius, either. It wants to pretend it’s the same as always. It’s a clever pretender. If St. Anne’s Church were to suddenly disappear, or Gediminas Square were to turn into a swamp, everyone would notice it. Vilnius lies in a much more subtle way; its deceptions are a
lways covered in mist. Only a thinking dog can fathom them.

  First of all, Vilnius dissembles with its smells.

  The city’s smells form in layers: with effort, you can smell out even the very oldest, ones that dispersed once upon a time, in the depths of the ages. Ancient smells don’t air out; it would seem the stench of gasoline ought to cover everything—but no, you sniff and sniff, carefully smell it out, and finally you sense that an Old Town crossroads smells of ancient blood and ripened hatred, Jewish love and Polish honor. The new building crammed in place of an old mansion spreads an abundance of smells, but they don’t conquer the scentscapes of old wine, aurochs roasts and ruinous gold. In the world of scent, the ancient mansions are more genuine than that new building. In the scentscape of Vilnius, the twentieth and the fifteenth century exist side by side. The flow of time doesn’t apply to the smells of Vilnius.

  I’m so accustomed to that city of smells that I keep forgetting people can’t smell. Although I suspect some can; they just don’t reveal themselves to anyone.

  And then I suddenly found out that the city changes its smell. Early in the morning I dashed down to the square next to Symphony Hall; at least a couple of streets run together into a single spot there, like creeks. The smell of river mud and a gloomy craving for freedom always hung around there. That smell was just as familiar to me as the way the square looked. I sensed the new smell from a distance. It was strange and artificial. I couldn’t be mistaken—a dog’s nose doesn’t lie. The square smelled neither of river deposits, nor of a craving for freedom—merely of narcissus and a silly cheerfulness.

  It was unbelievable. The scentscape of Vilnius, the most immutable, eternal part of the city, had suddenly unraveled. It was a bad omen.

  After that morning, I scrambled to examine my map of smells. To my horror I realized it was all constantly changing. The scentscape of Vilnius turned out to be unstable. The smells of the city were playing an incomprehensible game. One morning, the fundamental, centuries-old smells of streets, houses, and rivers would suddenly change. A hundred times I had smelled that right here, in this intersection, there was once a leather workshop, and later, perhaps a century later, someone had murdered all the women and children nearby; one morning I would suddenly discover that none of it had happened. There was no leather workshop; there was no slaughter of women. Suddenly the intersection would smell only of an expensive banquet and Dominican hymns. True, the real scent would return sooner or later, but not always. Sometimes it would be shoved out by yet another, completely unexpected smell. It seemed the city was furiously changing its own self, hiding its true past, its own essence.