Vilnius Poker. Ricardas Gavelis
stranger thinks a platoon of soldiers will pile into the room at any moment and drag Martynas off to a penal colony. The old-timers are used to it, even Elena, even though she represents the Communist Party in our company. She interrupts Martynas’s heresies with the monotony of a robot, but she doesn’t even bother to scare him or lecture him.
Laima took advantage of the silence. She resembles a fish, a large cod. I always want to let her back into the ocean. She looks around quite serenely and announces:
“Last night I saw an evening with Marcinkevičius on the television. A very good poet.”
My neighbor Beta’s jaw even dropped: you need to get used to Laima too. She always speaks out of turn. That’s her style. She’s even weirdly secretive, like every fish.
Elena willingly takes up the theme of nationality. She likes to play the knowledgable Lithuanian. The wolf’s satisfied, and the sheep’s healthy too:
“He’s the only true Lithuanian poet.”
Martynas’s eyes bug out horribly:
“Oh, yes, no one else knows how to exclaim with such sad, longing pathos: O sancta Lituanica! I suggest introducing a unit of yearning sadness, let’s say . . . hmm . . . a marcinkena or a marcena. One marcena would be equal to . . .”
“His trilogy is a true Lithuanian epic.” Elena’s knowledge is wide, she reads the newspapers diligently. “The people create a national poet with their own hands.”
”Yes, I see how that nation, its sleeves rolled up, under the careful eye of the KGB and censorship, dripping with sweat, swiftly creates a national poet,” this from me, needlessly of course.
Elena gives me a murderous look, but lets it pass. She’s afraid of me.
“And the national poet doesn’t snooze, either,” Martynas interrupts in a sweet little voice, “I can literally see him, taking heed of strict instructions from the authorities, practicing profound Lithuanian poses in front of the mirror. Do you know what’s the most Lithuanian pose of all?”
“He’s going to say something nasty!” Laima announces with cheerful horror.
But Martynas doesn’t get the chance to say anything nasty. Elena cuts him off angrily:
“You despise your own nation, Comrade Poška. You don’t like Lithuanian art.”
The great Lithuanianist Martynas ought to explode in fury, but he just swallows his saliva three times and says rather calmly:
“Where is it? Where’s the art? Where? Show it to me.” Anxiously, he looks under the table, out the window; he even sticks his nose behind the cabinet. “You know, there is no art. I can’t find it anywhere! Maybe someone took it and carried it off? Where, my dear, is your art?”
The newcomer Beta got truly intrigued, she even leaned forward. I’ve such an urge to stroke her little short-haired head, and then her firm, probably not very large breasts.
“You don’t even know Lithuanian art, Comrade Poška!”
“That’s a lie! I know eighty-five kilometers of Lithuanian writers, I’m an expert! Lithuanian writers are divided into the sad ones and the cheery ones. The latter I refuse to study. And the sad ones’ sadness is of two types: a tearful sadness, measured in marcenas, more typical of poets, and a sighing sadness, more typical of prose writers. They sigh because the censor’s framework is suffocating them. They sigh in an apartment with a custom kitchen, custom bath and custom toilet provided by those setting the censorship framework. It’s particularly important that the Lithuanian writer have a custom toilet. He spends most of his time sitting on the custom toilet and writing nothing. Because his creative freedom is restricted. If he were given freedom, wouldn’t he just write like mad! Now, it’s true, he can’t very well imagine what that ‘like mad’ would be, but that’s secondary. You can’t demand too much of a Lithuanian writer’s imagination.”
Martynas’s high spirits were interrupted by a creak of the door. Fyodorov, a Communist from another section, is making some sort of Communist signs at Elena. Elena, with the proud grace of a hippopotamus cow, sways out to see him.
“Vytautas, what milksops we all are, huh?” Martynas sighs in my ear. “Why aren’t we Irish? The same size country, the same number of inhabitants . . . Even Dublin’s almost the same as Vilnius . . .”
“Only Russia’s not next door.”
”There’s England!” Martynas continues buzzing in my ear like an evil spirit. “They fucked the Irish good too, but they held out.”
“They lost their language.”
“A language spoken by men with no balls is shit!” Now Martynas is hissing like a snake.
“Martis, maybe you really do hate Lithuanians?”
“I’m a hundred percent Lithuanian, and no one’s going to force me to love myself,” Martynas says in a deathly calm, and moans again: “Well, why aren’t we Irish? Where’s our IRA? Where’s our Sinn Fein? Where are the bombs? I want to be a terrorist!”
“Martis, finish about the writers,” Stefa offers lovingly, “the censor’s gone, you can go on.”
Stefanija is mistaken: the biggest censor is still hanging on the wall. A humanistic person, looking at that portrait, would have to feel pity and pain: a broken-down, barely creeping stiff, exhibited by his colleagues for threefold ridicule, like an old buffoon. But he’s staring too, his grim eyeballs are even bulging from the portrait—just that it means nothing to Martynas.
“Yes . . . So, at night he prays to God that no one gives him that freedom, because if he got it, he wouldn’t know what to do with it. Now Lithuanian writers have an ironclad alibi: there’s no freedom. But what would happen then?”
A fog slowly comes over me again. Martynas mouths off soundlessly; all of the women and girls explode in laughter. Only Laima is completely serious. She’ll laugh suddenly, ten minutes later, after she’s returned to her room.
Why exactly did all of these people end up in the library? Why is Lolita hiding out here, why am I sitting here? There is plenty of other work for a good programmer. In our situation, who needs an experimental computerized card index? So someone can find out with blinding speed that he won’t get this or that book, because it’s hidden in a closed special collection? I myself suppose I ended up here of my own accord; I still naïvely believe in my own free will. But after all, only They could have let me in here. Maybe it’s more convenient for Them this way to watch what I’m reading? Or maybe all books are nothing but lies, maybe reading makes Them happy, because it leads me further from The Way? Or maybe They’re too lazy to rummage through books themselves, maybe I’m only supposed to come across the texts that are dangerous to Them? Maybe that’s the only reason I’m kept alive?
Bookshelves, bookshelves, bookshelves. Books, books, books. Narrow passageways—a secret labyrinth where it’s easy to get lost, to turn and turn in circles, never to return again. From all of the bookshelves there drifts an identical, barely noticeable warmth—as if from a raked-up pile of autumn leaves. Who knows what sorts of minotaurs wait in ambush for you in the dimness spreading from the concealed ceiling lights. (The library collection’s lights always spread dimness, not light.)
The soundless picture continues to flicker before my eyes. Martynas has tickled everyone so much they’d laugh if you showed them a finger. Still going on about the writers?
“. . . every seven years a creative fever overcomes him. The symptoms: muses and ghosts torment him. His entire body starts itching. The pain is horrible. The time has come to beg the authorities for a new apartment. There aren’t many apartments, but writers multiply like dogs. That’s when the Shakespearean passions boil over. Sung in tones of the highest spirituality. What eloquence! What depth! You see at once that these are artists. What Greek tragedies! The Soviet writer could kill his brother or sister over a new apartment, or still worse—he could kill himself! I know at least six writers who publicly