Vilnius Poker. Ricardas Gavelis
it anywhere. Grandfather’s already lining everyone up: Janė’s brother, who’s overslept (I cannot look at him, I’d strangle him); the frightened cook; mother looking about with horrified eyes, apparently waiting for grandfather to stop. We all turn our noses aside, but we crowd inside the narrow shed and stare, stunned, at grandfather’s altar, blinking our eyes, teary from the keenness of the stink. The altar is a cracked pig’s trough, decked with flowers, stuck with crosses made from old bunches of twigs and decorated with a yellow wax candle. The candle’s flame quivers; it flutters from the stream of poisonous stench rising from the trough.
“Kneel! Everyone kneel! Kneel in front of God!”
But no one kneels, not even grandfather himself; everyone is staring at the teeming, swarming, reeking trough. The little silver pail lies tossed to the side, as if in mockery. It’s as silent as a tomb, except that water irritatingly drips from the ceiling. I look too, gazing through fluttering spider webs, and I can’t believe my eyes. The trough is full of reeking waste; grandfather carried it here with the little silver pail. That teeming, seemingly live waste, the waste of us all, in which satiated little white worms writhe. The sight is instantly nauseating, and the hideous stink is suffocating besides. Grandfather grins wickedly, fixes his hair with his befouled hand.
“Here’s your god! A new kingdom’s come, a new government, and here—the new god of the Lithuanians. The age of Perkūnas is over, the era of Christ is over. The Russkies brought you a new god, kneel in front of him and pray. Here he is, get to know him, The Shit of Shits, now he’ll be the god of the Lithuanians! A shitty god for a shitty nation, and I’m his priest. Hosanna!”
Grandfather laughs raucously, while we stare at the trough as if in a trance. I no longer know what to think, the oppressive smell pushes the thoughts out of my brain, the air is nothing but a stench, the entire world is a stench, it’s the only thing in my head, in place of thoughts, in place of words—just the stench.
“Today is the beginning of a new epoch! A new god has come to our land, by command of a prophet by the name of Stalin Sralin. Now he’ll shit on your heads for the ages. Get used to it! Pray to him!”
A glass clinks; I see father, like a doll, drink a sip of champagne (he brought his glass with him even here). This infuriates grandfather. His eyes flood with blood like a bull’s; he’s no longer speaking, but rather hissing:
“It would have been better if a plague had overrun us, at least some survive. But we’ve been overrun with shit, and no one will stay clean! We ourselves poured shit on our own heads. Ourselves! Now we’ll live in the kingdom of shit. The slogan of the Lithuanian people: it may be shit we’re living in, but at least we’re alive! Do you have any idea what the Soviets are? They won’t leave a single person unshat upon, not a single thought unshat upon, do you understand? In the Soviet communion everyone will have to swallow a piece of fried shit. The Soviets discovered a great secret: the major part of any human being is shit, so you need to value him as shit, address him as shit, treat him like shit. This is Sralin’s doctrine of faith: you are shit and don’t even try to be anything else. Rejoice: we’ll be slaughtered; we’ll fertilize Siberia’s fields! They’ll grow bread for the Russians out of us!”
Grandfather has gotten hoarse; he jabs his finger at the trough, although he doesn’t need to jab, everyone is looking at it as if they were entranced, the white of the little writhing worms is in everyone’s eyes, the lush stench is burning everyone’s nostrils. It seems to me that the teeming shit is looking at us from the trough—pleased and sated—it’s mocking us; it knows that now will be its right and might. Horror overtakes me: suddenly I see a gigantic wave of shit relentlessly creeping towards Lithuania’s meadows and forests, its cities and villages. It creeps along like a glacier, consuming everything in its path, flooding over the earth. Little figures wave their little arms, try to defend themselves, shriek and instantly suffocate—what can they do, if even hundred-year-old firs snap like matchsticks and drown in the teeming glacier. The wave of shit doesn’t hear the moans, it has neither ears nor eyes, it’s soulless and all it knows to do is to creep forward. Everything is done for; nothing remains alive, nothing really alive. I understand now what grandfather wanted to say. I’m the first to rush outside; I suck air in and look around, as if I really could see that novel glacier. Behind me father and Janė’s brother come out, mother creeps out last of all; she looks around with eyes that see nothing, and, addressing no one, asks:
”How did you allow Lithuania to disappear? Why didn’t you do anything? Were you poisoned in advance with something that took away your power?”
It was practically the first time I realized that mother also thinks. As if she had read my mind, she slowly turns towards the forest, smiles to someone unseen and clearly, intelligently, says:
“God is love. Is it possible that excrement can be love? Is it possible to love excrement? Is it possible that excrement can love someone?”
A majestic vat of shit looms on the sleigh, filled with a hundred buckets, the entire camp’s efforts. Two frost-covered men pull the sleigh, while other skeletons-to-be battle with dreams on three-tiered bunks. Not far away someone is furiously masturbating—it’s always the ones who won’t be around in a few days who suddenly start up. They want to reproduce themselves, but there’s nothing here to impregnate, except for the air.
You and Bolius haven’t slept for several nights, there’s so much accumulated inside the two of you that there’s no room left for sleep.
“Then the Germans took a dislike to our university. They closed it and threw us into a camp. I remember the railroad meandered along a ravine, and on its slope Hilterjugend kids danced a devil’s dance. There was nothing human left in them anymore, just the Nazi plague’s bacillus. That’s the worst of it—children! They unbuttoned their flys, shook their little peewees, and tried to pee on us. They were breathless with the sensation of power.”
The professor didn’t see it, but you did: the fifteen-year-old stribai,2 reeking of moonshine, with shotguns on their shoulders, were children too. And not some Hilterjungends, but the sons of Lithuanian ploughmen. Bolius didn’t see them. Give a half-grown kid vodka and a gun—he’ll do whatever you say. And those others, without pausing for a second, keep pulling and pulling at the sleigh with the vat of shit.
“Before that they drove us in trucks, while we were still on Lithuanian soil. There were just a couple of guards; they were playing cards. And we rode—thirty healthy, unchained men—and did nothing, we didn’t even try to run. We sat and waited for something . . . Why do we Lithuanians always just wait?”
Bolius looks sadly at the camp’s night shit carriers and nods his head:
“There you have it: we obediently drag a pile of waste . . . There you have it . . . I’d lay a wager they’re Lithuanians . . . that’s so Lithuanian . . .”
But the professor is wrong: the wind carries their somnolent voices; you can easily hear that they’re speaking Russian:
“Forgive me, colleague, but I cannot agree with that conception of yours. Besides, Berkley ultimately proved . . .”
It’s my mother I’m most sorry for. I never spied on her, but she was in view all the time—always with Janė’s brother. I would accompany them to the bedroom and then retreat, I couldn’t stand to see more, but sometimes I would hear those sounds. I saw how she paid Janė’s brother money for that. The sullen, eternally unshaven boy would later shamelessly count the litai, and she would stumble down the house’s corridors like a ghost. A slender, beautiful ghost with an upright posture. She was lost in the world; she never found any road. They poked out the eyes of my mother’s soul, took away any feeling for life. All she saw around her was a labyrinth and steep walls, it was entirely the same to her whichever direction she turned, whatever she did. You could never guess what mother would do the next minute, what else she would think up. Sometimes she would chop the heads off the geese in the inner courtyard. Once a cat got underfoot—she did the cat in too. Perhaps she didn’t distinguish cats from geese. Sometimes she would quietly swig from father’s reserves, until she’d collapse, lifeless, on the floor in the middle of the corridor. Sometimes she would