Vilnius Poker. Ricardas Gavelis
themselves so poorly. I don’t know why it’s Vilnius in particular that’s so important. All of that is still a mystery to me.
They overshot, if they think that I’ll study only the books in my own library. I’ve spent quite a bit of time in the University’s manuscript sections. There I came across a manuscript, a transcript of a pre-war dissertation, that shocked me.
During the time of Zygimantas Augustus (the second half of the 16th century), a Basilisk appeared in Vilnius that killed people with its gaze. It was the horrible metamorphosis of a bird; it killed people with the power of its eyes, or sometimes with a deep breath. It hid in the mysterious Didžiosios Street district and had been discovered, but later disappeared. It was possible to temporarily defend yourself from its powers with dry tree leaves—they absorbed the strength of its gaze.
In the dissertation, this unique information was described as if merely in passing, as one of many legends of Vilnius—with the author’s (a woman’s!) perfectly understandable caution. After I read this, I didn’t sleep for several nights. I frantically looked for information about the Vilnius Basilisk—unfortunately, in vain.
Yet one more very important observation: students at Vilnius University used to organize ceremonies celebrating victory over the Basilisk, but later they were forbidden and forgotten.
How much more invaluable information from the past is still hidden in manuscripts!
She talks and talks; she’s been quiet for too long. Even now she’s silent the entire workday and doesn’t even glance at me, while I fume, irritated by blond-fluffed Stefa buzzing around me. At one time I used her in some of my inquiries. Lolita avoids her; she avoids them all, but after work, left alone with me, she bursts out. We spend entire evenings walking around Vilnius; I haven’t roamed through the city this much in a long time. Lola constantly scatters words, sentences, and difficult tirades about. In the narrow little streets, in the grim gateways, next to the old houses, the words she’s spoken pile up in heaps. They are distinctive: smaller or larger, arranged tidily or thrown about any which way. They pretend to be rocks, tree leaves swept together, or even trash.
She talks incessantly.
“Vytas,” is how it most often starts, “Vytas, do you want me to tell you about . . .”
A typical woman’s question. How can I say what I want? But the worst of it is that I do enjoy it when she talks. I enjoy listening to her like music. She improvises as she speaks, returning to the same place (in the story and in the city) a hundred times, or turning in circles, or wandering aimlessly. She starts to talk about her village, about her grandparents, and I know we’ll shortly turn up in Gediminas Square. Mentioning her husband, we’re surely cutting across Vokiečių Street (now it’s Muziejaus). Her jazz of words and routes has become part of me; we’re not just walking through Vilnius, but through my internal streets too.
“I’m drawn to horrible people,” she says with inner fear. This is a favorite theme of hers (down Gedimino Boulevard, then to Tortorių Street, deeper and deeper into the bowels of Vilnius). “I’m fascinated by doomed men, the ones that smell of misfortune from a distance . . .”
Now she’s a bodiless, extinct, paralyzed fairy of Vilnius: a pale shadow on the dark background of a wall, a dark shadow on the background of a bright wall. The charms of Lola’s body have vanished somewhere. I don’t even notice her breasts or the mysterious roundness of her belly; I listen more than I look. I like Lolita’s voice. In it I hear the quiet rustle of an inner fire; the fire there isn’t extinguished yet. Her voice is multifaceted: you can hear her girlish dreams and her desires in it, her favorite music, even her breasts and her long legs wrapped in fluids of beauty.
Now I’m walking beside her; I see her lips, I even see the words themselves—it’s a shame they fall on the sidewalk and roll into the dark portals; they should be collected and saved.
“I’m persecuted by people who are marked with the sign of misfortune,” she repeats seriously. “It sounds silly: marked with the sign of misfortune, like in a Russian ballad . . . We no longer know how to say what we want to say, there are just strangers’ phrases in our heads . . . Although, no, I know: if everyone were to speak their own language, we’d never understand one another. But it would be so beautiful! . . . The sign of misfortune . . . I look for that kind of person myself, that’s the worst. The other kind don’t interest me . . . What is a man, Vytas?”
“A face and sexual organs. To distinguish them from others and to multiply!”
“Jesus and Mary,” she sighs, “You’re a silly, foul-mouthed person. A man is his eyes. Eyes are everything, even if you’re physically blind. And the invisible fiery brand on a person’s forehead.”
She suddenly stops. She frequently comes to a standstill this way, as if she had to hammer in a little stake here, to leave a sign. In just this spot. Here, where she spoke of eyes.
“And me?” I ask, because by now we have turned in the direction of the University and my turn to speak has come. “What’s written on my forehead? Or written on some other spot? What’s written there that’s so significant, that you fell for a dying old man? It isn’t by chance an Electra complex?”
“You’re a pig. And terribly spiteful,” she says, after a long, long silence (all the way to Stiklių Street). “You hate me. This always, always happens to me . . .”
Suddenly she stops on the very corner, and leans against the wall; her face looks up, straight at me. Now she has a body: and eyes, turned in towards herself, and breasts (they furiously press up against me), and the curves of the thighs hidden under her clothing, and her flat goddess’s belly. She suddenly comes to life, her eyes blaze and her fingers angrily pick at the wall.
“And if I were to start needling at you too? We’d go on picking on one another? You’d get mad first. Men are very touchy.”
I follow from behind, hanging back a bit, and wait patiently, because she speaks of intimate things only in Didžiosios Street. (Now she’s in Gorky Street. What a sad, sad absurdity—what does some Gorky, a miserable kanukized servant, have in common with Vilnius?) It’s only in this street, descending downwards, that she talks about what matters most to her. (Climbing up she always asks me about the camp.) It’s probably still quite early, but Vilnius is empty. Vilnius gets emptier by the day—the emptier it gets, the worse the crush in the streets. A dead city, and above it hangs a fog of submissive, disgusting fear. Vilnius, which I love, Vilnius, which is I myself, buried under lava like Pompeii, under the seas like Atlantis. Lolita and I are shadows: the live Vilniutians, that throng of ants, that murky river, don’t wander the evening streets, don’t talk the way we do.
“I can’t stand dead ideas,” she suddenly says. “I can’t stand symbols and metaphors . . . My mother was obsessed with the idea of innocence. The idea of consummate innocence. Do you know what innocence is?”
“This membrane in the vagina. Sometimes very difficult to tear.”
“Vytas, stop it,” she fumes. “You’re making fun of me. I won’t tell you anything . . . Although as it happens, it was exactly with a membrane that everything started . . .”
Agitated, she looks around as if she were searching for ears in the walls, then she cowers and whispers. Even her whisper plays its own music. She doesn’t hiss like others do; you’d think she was uttering secret curses—only genuine fairies know them.
“Whoever walks between these walls can’t be innocent. This damn city wouldn’t put up with innocence . . . But no, I was talking about the past, about my mother . . . At first my maidenly innocence really was what mattered most to her. You can’t imagine how much you can talk about that. How many days, evenings, nights. For years! Mother started when I was about six. I’d run around the yards, mostly with the boys. For some reason I wasn’t attracted to dolls; I liked hideaways, ruins and boys better . . . She immediately started in giving me lectures about innocence. She wanted to explain what innocence is. Abstract innocence—that’s what mattered most to her. It was complete mysticism . . . Later she switched to concrete