Vilnius Poker. Ricardas Gavelis
of them did it. One with tablets from America; the second used a really awful method. He categorically refused alcohol! His death was inevitable.”
“Martis, tell us about creativity, something about creativity,” Marija begs through her tears.
“My dear, it really is true creativity! The applications to get an apartment are great pearls of poetry! In it you’ll find living pain, true torture. True passion. I’ll devote the rest of my life to the publication of a collection of writers’ applications for their apartments. Otherwise history won’t forgive me.”
“That’s enough!” Laima declares, unexpectedly as usual. “It’s time to go to work. The boss is already frowning.”
The boss—that’s me. I thought about Martynas and frowned despite myself. I listen to his mockery and sarcasm, more often I listen to his serious conversation, occasionally I visit his strange collection. All of it leads somewhere, unfortunately, not where The Way leads; Martynas has turned down a side path. Even people who aren’t at all stupid frequently turn down them. Almost all do.
Most likely he thinks, as the majority do, that everything is determined by two elements; the battle between good and evil, black and white, light and dark. The great contradiction: we are light, while the others—darkness, underground vaults, bats, obscene birds of the night. Heaven and hell, God and Satan.
No one, almost no one draws the obvious conclusion: the battle between light and dark is always won by grayness and twilight. As long as the essential elements, black and white, God and Satan, exist—all is not yet lost. The end comes when everything mixes into a unbroken sugary fog, when nothing no longer differs from anything else.
It is this fog that is the eternal gaze that lurks even in our dreams. It is the Vilnius Basilisk’s gaze, piercing me every morning, a morning that begins with the overcrowded trolleybus, the crush of figures, the journey from non-existence into non-existence: from the drabness of dreamless sleep to the unthinking work machine. It’s only by Their will that the tired figures with puffy eyes cram into iron boxes with fly-covered windows and slowly creak towards their daily bondage. The day begins with smells: the stink of rancid sweat and cheap soap, the stench of last night’s drinking, and a whiff of nightmares.
But most important of all—the birds have disappeared somewhere. (Which morning was it they disappeared—today, yesterday, always?) The birds have disappeared, and I’m slowly losing my soul, I’m starting to turn into something else. I’m even curious: who is this other? A beast or a demon? A madman? An envoy of the dark? My shape probably won’t change—only my eyes will lose their fire, their secret signs; I’ll quietly turn into a man blind to his soul, into a void, a fog. I’ll feel the blessed nirvana of imbecility. I won’t have to remember anything anymore.
For the time being I still remember. Like it or not, I remember my grandfather. Like it or not, I remember my father. Perhaps one of the secret gazes examining me is my family’s history?
In front of me, pressing a glass of first-class liquor in his hand, father sits and pushes words out his twisted lips. He scans the shining tabletop as if there, underneath his pointy chin, the words would quietly lie one atop another like dry tree leaves. My father, the one-time prodigy of Göttingen and Copenhagen; his intellect, probably equal to Dirac’s or Einstein’s, crumbled and turned into a sickening half-spirit gazing out of narrow, dull pupils. An invisible cudgel trounced him. But no, a cudgel wouldn’t have vanquished him. Father is very large, like all of the Vargalyses, he would just shake a blow off—we’re accustomed to blows. That intellect could only have been vanquished by a plague, a cancer slowly eating away at the brain.
“Except maybe a writer,” father pontificates, “perhaps it’s still possible to be a writer in this world. There was this colleague of mine in Göttingen . . . Sometimes he sends a line . . . His name’s Robertas . . . He’s writing the story of his life now. A book about non-possession. Do you know what non-possession is?”
The liquor glitters in the glass: Hennessy or Courvoisier. (Where does he get the money?) Father’s hands are beautiful, their movements smooth. They reek of nobility and inborn elegance. Even on the worst mornings his hands tremble elegantly. I do not love my father (I never loved him), but his hands fascinate me. If I were to draw a real human, I would paint him with my father’s noble hands. Hands are a man’s beginning of beginnings. Hands and eyes.
My father, a downed bird floundering between Kaunas and Polish-occupied Vilnius, the doctor of Göttingen who sometimes raves about the new European physics and Dirac’s delta function, now speaks of non-possession. He’s always talking about non-possession and loss. He breathes non-possession and loss; he lives by them. Winning or possessing, he’d die, the way others die of hunger or thirst.
“Non-possession is our core,” father lectures. “Even that which we possess—we don’t really possess, understand? We only supposedly possess it . . . What do we have—this or that object: houses, cars, books. These or those ideas, or women . . . But is your woman really yours? Do your ideas really belong to you? Not true! When things are bad, you’re invariably left all on your own . . . And all ideas instantly turn foreign . . . We’re permeated with non-possession, Vytie . . . We ourselves are living non-possession. Even our daydreams are taken away from us . . . WHO takes everything away—there’s the essential question of existence, Vytie. Everything that could really BE OURS is taken away and hidden somewhere . . . Or maybe there really isn’t anything on earth that could be ours . . .”
Father’s speech sometimes rises to holy revelation and sometimes falls to a drunk’s blathering. His ruin is inexplicable and therefore even more frightening. We’re born lost already, father likes to say; our birth itself is a loss. Sometimes I would secretly pray to all the gods for the slightest excuse for his ruin. He didn’t have any and didn’t even try to look for one, like other drunks do. (The greatest unwritten novels molder in the boundless inventions of drunks, blathering away about the tragic reasons for their downfall.)
It’s unbelievably difficult for me to understand him even now—and at the time I was only twelve, and later sixteen. Father disappeared at the very beginning of the war; there was talk that he had, by unknown means, run away to Switzerland, and then to America. I don’t know if that’s true; no one knows if that’s true. All I know is that father could do anything, overcome whatever obstacles. He could swim right across the Atlantic if he wanted to. The war meant nothing to him. I don’t think there was anything in the world that would have meant anything to him. I don’t think he vanished in the Americas; his mysterious disappearance and reappearance aroused completely different suspicions, the very worst of suspicions.
Sometimes I see my father writing articles (I see it now: maybe nineteen thirty-six, maybe forty). Suddenly he sits, leaning on an elbow, for three days, filling sheets with complex formulas, and then carelessly tosses the scrawled-over pile of sheets onto the armchair. There it lies for two, three, five months. Lies there until it’s covered with a thick, fuzzy layer of dust, other papers, and forgotten time. Forgotten time hovers about our house constantly. At intervals someone finds those discarded articles and sends them off somewhere—probably grandfather, he visits us two or three times a year. The shabby sheets of paper disappear, do something in the secret cosmos of written sheets, and then they return multiplied; enormous bundles of paper descend upon the house. I don’t know who publishes those articles—Zeitschrift für Physik or Physical Review—but the house is always full of author’s copies, postcards from some physicist or another, and father’s astonishment. Stunned, he turns those papers over in his hands, even forgetting his glass of cognac; it seems he keeps wanting to ask me something. Maybe he wants to ask me what’s the point of it all. What’s all this about, Vytie? Am I the one responsible for this? That’s what happens when a person absentmindedly tries to accomplish something.
Sometimes I see my father drawing. He can draw anywhere and with anything, but above all else he values first-class Chinese ink. He has it sent from Paris. (Where does he get the money?) There is life and death in his drawings, there’s soul in them. You can find God in them. Sometimes father draws without looking at the paper—his hand draws the lines itself, as if it had both eyes and memory.