Vilnius Poker. Ricardas Gavelis
desire come from, when a person is up to their neck in shit, to use all his strength to drown another who’s still trying to scramble out? How could censorship, whose sole purpose is to hide the truth, exist in a human society that hasn’t been kanuked?
Why doesn’t a single theory answer these simple questions? Why do all the great philosophical systems, all the Hegels and Kants together, fail to explain these basic things? Why?
Maybe that’s the way, and just that way, that man unavoidably is? Maybe all of these horrifying things aren’t the province of theory, but rather axioms that you’ll neither prove nor disprove? Maybe a soulless doom is programmed into all of us from the start? Every nation has the kind of government it deserves, and so on?
I cannot bear assumptions like that, assumptions that acrimoniously belittle people. I can’t bear them! But an investigator must be calm and objective, he must rely only on facts.
Children deny those revolting assumptions. The very existence of children. A foolish boy who tries to boss the neighborhood kids around will be ridiculed immediately. There is no silent gray majority in the world of children. You could arrest a thousand, a million children, but as long as at least one remains alive and free, there will be a child’s view of justice in the world, there will be someone to shout that the king is naked. An unspoiled child tries to be more like the stronger or smarter ones, not to pull them down. No, no, a human isn’t born a kanukas!
The ruination takes over later, when children are taught to rat on others, when they learn it’s not worth ridiculing the kid with pretensions to be a little king, since he’s the boss’s son. When someone convinces them (convinces without presenting any arguments) that it’s imperative to participate in the idiotic play of life, even knowing it’s idiotic. Convinces them there is no choice—either float in the ship of fools, or drown.
How can you explain all of this, supposing They don’t exist?
ERGO: THEY EXIST.
Thank God, even Their system isn’t omnipotent. Not everyone gives in to being kanuked. Some people have an incomprehensible metaphysical power (frequently not even suspecting it themselves) to elude the thickest of Their nets. Alas, there’s very few of them, terribly, tragically, few.
At that time I hadn’t comprehended Their abnormal logic (Their patho-logic). I didn’t know even a hundredth part of their methods, but I had already started to grasp what sort of threat hung over all of us. Gedis was the first victim to die in my presence. To this day I’m not sure he knew about Them. Without a doubt, Gediminas was better, smarter, more energetic than I am. Unfortunately, it’s by no means a given that every good and intelligent person will come across Their system. You must experience a great deal of evil in your life, real evil; you must thoroughly scrutinize its pupil-less eyes. Besides, you must have a seed of real evil in yourself. It’s awful, but that’s the way it is: if you don’t have evil within yourself, you won’t be able to recognize and comprehend the evil in the world. So I cannot be sure that Gedis knew. He was only the first victim I recognized—who can count how many of them I had seen just in the Stalinist camps, without even suspecting they were Their victims. I have no doubts about the reasons for Gedis’s death. I hastened to find regularities of a more general nature. I searched gropingly: I tried to remember all mathematicians, all musicians, all car crashes. At last, I turned up a significant car crash in my memory. I remembered how Albert Camus died. That was how my research moved into a completely new sphere.
The entire story of Camus’s life always seemed somewhat strange to me. Hidden in the sands of Algeria, he could, of course, come across more essential things than the inhabitants of large metropolitan centers can. In a center of culture and science, in the hum of people, They feel safe; They blend into the throng, into the profusion of words and opinions. They always dictate intellectual fashions, by this method concealing things that are troublesome to Them. Inhabitants of obscure places have far more time to delve into the essence of the world, but also far fewer chances for their ideas to reach humanity. Camus successfully reconciled the qualities of a hermit and Europe’s darling.
His spiritual activity was twofold. Some of his writings, let’s say, The Myth of Sisyphus, seem to indicate that Camus was practically an apologist for Their activities. This is confirmed in part by his Nobel Prize (almost always it’s Their emissaries who determine the awarding of official prizes: I emphasize—neither Joyce, nor Kafka, nor Genet received any prizes).
On the other hand, The Plague or The Stranger brazenly intrude into Their inviolable domain. The portrayal of the plague is strongly reminiscent of an allegory of Their system, while Meursault is one of the most influential portraits of a kanuked being. There’s no sense delving into Camus’s actual activities—the most significant things won’t be found in the tangle of his biography. But his death is worth pondering. Perhaps at first Camus was an obedient (let’s say an inadvertent) servant of Theirs, and later he saw through things. Maybe he was cleverly feigning all the time, secretly damaging Them. We can only speculate. One way or another, he slowly began behaving in an unacceptable manner; maybe he even did things to Them that we are forbidden to talk about (even to think about them is dangerous). Retribution was quick. The fatalistic death, the lost manuscripts—all of that’s in an all-too-familiar style. Gediminas’s letters also disappeared without a trace.
Camus’s precedent was the first I wrote into the great list of Their victims.
The fact that you won’t find straightforward information about Them in books ultimately proves They exist. It would be easy to fight with a concrete societal or political organization that everyone knows or has at least come across. An identified enemy is almost a conquered enemy. Everyone would have risen up against Them a long time ago; They would have been destroyed at some point. Unfortunately, Their race exists and works harmoniously. This proves that they’re hidden, undiscovered, uninvestigated. But whether They want to or not, they leave traces behind. All of Their victims are indelible footprints. Let’s take the story of Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate. Anyone who’s seen Polanski’s films will understand that he should have shut his trap (or more precisely—broken his film camera). Both his vampires and Rosemary’s Baby slowly, but unavoidably, lead to Their lair. True, Satan Manson (his leaders!) miscalculated something, Polanski was left unharmed, his wife died (or maybe that was just exactly Their patho-logical plan). However, the time will come yet when some barb-eyed Circe of the Hollywood villas will do him in. It’s silly to talk about a shortage of footprints. There are plenty of prints—it’s even horrifying how many there are, those most often bloody footprints of Theirs.
Sometimes it’s almost suspicious how far individual researchers manage to get. I’m not even talking about Kafka. There’s another one who particularly astounded me. He’s from Buenos Aires, by the name of Ernesto Sabato. I was simply horrified when I read his book. I couldn’t believe my eyes: Sabato openly described some of Their methods—although it’s true, he didn’t mention anything at all about Their goals. In addition, he persistently associated them with the powers of hell. That aroused my suspicions. Strangest of all, he wrote about the blind, and they, after all, don’t have a gaze. At first I just couldn’t understand this inversion. It sufficed to scrutinize two words—AKLAS and AKYLAS: AK(Y)LAS, the words for blind and sharp-sighted. Perhaps the particularly archaic Lithuanian language has preserved even more secret connections, connections which They have managed to eliminate from other languages?
However, this discovery didn’t solve the problem of Ernesto Sabato, and it didn’t dispel my suspicions. It wasn’t plausible that an Argentinean would know Lithuanian. Unfortunately, I’ll never travel to Argentina, I’ll never speak to him nor track him down. However, his picture fell into my hands in the nick of time.
A man with a pudgy little face and small eyes looked out of the photograph, a man who looked sufficiently satisfied with himself. Not at all like a man condemned to death, a man who knows the secrets of The Way. Besides, he’s too well-known, at least in Argentina. Argentina—where a good number of Hitler’s toadies hid! All of these facts opened my eyes. Sabato’s book is merely a clever attempt to turn the search in an erroneous direction. They set quite a few traps like that. I was saved by my native language and vigilance. They didn’t succeed