Vilnius Poker. Ricardas Gavelis
vases, clothes, ashtrays, scrubbing brushes, canes, little boxes. It seemed that even they questioned you, that they wanted something explained. But that wasn’t enough for Martynas—he would keep questioning you himself too.
“Listen, Vytautas, hasn’t it ever occurred to you that we have no past?”
I had calmed down by then and caught my breath, so I could answer:
“It depends on what we call the past. On who those ‘we’ are.”
“Me, you, that bowlegged babe outside the window. And that laborer on the scaffolding . . . We have no past, we never were. We just ARE, you know? We’ve lost our past and now we’ll never find it. We’re like carrots in a vegetable bed. After all, you wouldn’t say a carrot has a past?”
Martynas’s chin quivered, ever so slightly, with emotion. His own worldly discoveries always shocked him. I was more interested in the dog: he suddenly started wheeling about the yard, sketching a crooked circle in the dust with his tail. As if he were trying to write a giant letter.
“So, what of it?” I growled. “If we don’t have it, we don’t have it.”
Martynas’s little eyes popped out; he gasped for air with his mouth open. I didn’t understand why he was getting so worked up.
“Whoever doesn’t have a past, doesn’t have a future, either. We never were and we never will be, you know? We can’t change anything, because we don’t have a past, you know? . . . We’re a faceless porridge, we’re a nothing, a void . . . We don’t exist, you know? We don’t exist at all. Absolutely! Someone has stolen our past. But who?”
Martynas even broke out in a sweat. He had fingered the secret’s cloak, crumpled it fearfully in his hands. Had he sniffed out Their scent?
“I keep thinking—who was it?” he murmured breathlessly. “And it’s not just people . . . I had this white ashtray . . . A featureless mass production. It had no past—like us, you know? And one day it suddenly disintegrated, crumbled into white dust—and that was it . . . It didn’t have a past, either. It affects even things, you know?”
I glanced at a tuft of dust and hair that had wound itself up in a corner. It suddenly fluttered, even though there wasn’t the slightest draft in the corridor. It slowly rose up from the floor, as if picked up by a live human, hung in the air, and descended again into the corner. Some invisible being turned that tuft around in its hands and put it back in its place. I quickly glanced out the window: the dog glared at me and shambled off. Carp walked down the path next to the slowly growing brick wall. He tiptoes past our windows several times a day, but every time I see him I get agitated. He is my talisman. I don’t remember his real name; in the camp everyone called him Carp. It’s a terrible thing: when we meet in the street, we don’t greet each other. Many of the camp’s unfortunates don’t let on they know one another when they meet. Maybe we really don’t have a past?
The shagfelted Siberian dogs didn’t chew through the backbone of his spirit. There he is, walleyed Stepanas, nicknamed Carp. He’s pestering the Russkie commies again:
“You’re like those carp! Carp! They’re frying you in a skittle, and you’re writhing and singing a hymn to the chef! It’s Stalin that’s cooking you, Stalin—don’t you understand? Are you as stupid as a carp?”
He raises his arms to heaven and thunders as if he were on stage:
“I’m ashamed that I’m a Russian! Ashamed! I’ll never be a carp!”
You look at him, and it’s easier for you to breathe, easier to bear it, easier to wait for your doom. No incisorfanged Siberian huskies will bite through the backbone of his spirit. To you Carp is beautiful, even his crossed eyes don’t spoil his face. If you have a spirit, you’re beautiful.
Martynas is probably right: I don’t have a past. It’s like a boundless country, one I’m destined to never find myself in. On long winter evenings I fruitlessly attempt to remember my own past. Memory willingly recreates sights and sounds, but those talking pictures aren’t my past. What of it, if those episodes once happened? That jumble of people and things doesn’t change anything in my life, doesn’t explain anything. It cannot become my past. All of that probably happened to someone else, not to me at all. That’s not the way my Vilnius night was, not the way my camp’s fence was barbed, not the way my sweat smelled. The real past couldn’t stay so impassive, it has to be your own: recognizable and tamed. It’s like the nails with which your present is constructed. There are no nails holding mine together. I do not have a past, although there were many things in my life. It seems all I have is a non-past. In the great ALL there are no episodes that once were, and are now past; inside it everything is still happening.
That’s why I took note of Martynas’s unexpected unveiling and his ideas, though they’ve been heard elsewhere many times before. That’s why the image, yet another vision of my non-past, engraved itself: Martynas, the thin little deity of all those with crew cuts, stands leaning sadly against the wall; cigarette ashes billow indifferently at his feet, and walleyed Carp tiptoes outside the window, stinging my tired non-heart.
It was all too much for me already: the morning’s half-witted pigeons, the Russian Orthodox churches, the girls in cocoa-colored coats, Vilnius’s stray dogs, the flat kanukish faces. That day (if that was one day) had tired me to death. A crushing, stunningly lucid despair came over me. All I wanted was to die on the spot. Nothing in heaven or on earth had the power to drown out that desire.
All there is left to do at moments like that is to wait. To wait for who knows what, because there is no hope whatsoever. It’s as if you were sprawled all alone in a broken-down dinghy with your legs and arms paralyzed, and a mountain stream was quickly carrying you closer to a waterfall; not a soul about—only steep rocky shores and the thunder of water plunging into the nearby abyss. The spray from the waterfall hangs above the foaming rapids, the end is near, and you can’t even roll out of the boat and sink to the bottom with a rock, to finish everything in an instant. You have to suffer until the chasm snatches your body for itself: the stream of the waterfall will smash it against the splinters of sharp rocks, and then cast you, still alive, into the boiling cauldron of the gray vortices. You’re already dead, but you can think; that’s the worst of it: you grasp everything.
Danger hid everywhere, just about anything could determine the outcome: the grim, hunched-over laborer on the scaffolding, the books on the shelves, the smell of linoleum. They watched me all the time, themselves invisible, inaudible, indiscernible. I was absolutely alone, but I couldn’t for a moment be by myself; I couldn’t avoid Their hellish guardianship.
It seemed to me that the office was slowly widening, that the walls were receding from me—or perhaps I was the one cowering and shrinking and growing ever smaller. I knew I was sitting in my office, that the wide dirty window yawned behind me, but the inner vision was stronger: the room slowly turned into a desert, a scorched, sallow expanse where no plants grow and no animals wander. This landscape of gloom was more real than the view of the real office. It was empty inside of me, so the surroundings became empty too. I was suffocating; I was so alone and unhappy that all that remained was to die immediately. I was already on the verge of dying. Some life, even the most miserable desert creature, could have saved me—anything. But the desert was absolutely empty—only a distant thunder reminded me that the thunderlord is also always alone.
It took me a moment to realize that it wasn’t thunder, but just a knock at the door. Somebody’s knuckles ordered me to come to my senses, tapped to a swinging rhythm, one of many of Gediminas’s swinging rhythms. Creaking, the door opened; Lolita stood on the threshold.
“May I come in?”
She carefully closed the door, awkwardly fixed her hair, and smiled guiltily:
“If you only knew how sick I am of those women . . . Is it okay if I sit with you for a bit?”
Somewhat flustered, she settled on the sofa, stretched out her long legs and leaned back, lowering her eyes. She probably expected that her pose, her slender waist, and her loose hair would explain everything