Vilnius Poker. Ricardas Gavelis
my mother. But I feel compelled to tell at least one person in the world some tiny speck of truth. Perhaps some time I’ll tell Lolita about her. About her, about the labyrinth of the world, about the determination to do anything—whatever occurs to you.
Sometimes I get the urge to do almost anything, because I feel trapped, driven into a pointlessly spinning wheel it’s impossible to escape from. It makes no difference that this wheel of life, or labyrinth, is alive. A strange vitality throbs below the cobblestones of the street, hums soundlessly in the walls of old houses. The gray houses quietly mutter curses and the churches whisper between themselves in Latin, so no one will understand. They exist apart from the city’s morning clamor; there’s nothing here that affects them. They seem ready to slowly, with difficulty, lift up into the air and float off somewhere, where it’ll be better for them; it’d be better there for me too. Where? I don’t know of a place like that, I only know the direction: as far as possible away from here, as far as possible from dead Vilnius. Vilnius has been dead for a long time: the rumbling of barrels rolled along the pavement, the motley little shops’ signs, the secret tangle of narrow little streets are no more. The Lithuanian quarter, the Jewish quarter—the colorful towns within the city are gone. The face of Vilnius is gone; all the new neighborhoods are identical, they are nothings: soulless conglomerates of drunks, lines in the stores, and trolleybus wires. I look with my eyes wide open, but I can’t perceive anything more. No secret signs, no deeper meaning; there is only a monotonous, endless dream I am forced to dream against my will. A soulless play staged by a half-witted director: against the mysterious backdrop of old facades, the pseudo-drama of the world’s most dismal lifestyle goes on. The plot is known from the start, nothing unexpected can happen—unless the stage sets themselves were suddenly to start speaking in gloomy voices: they are the most alive things here. Vilnius’s heart beats in the walls of the buildings; it alone here has a soul. The streets turn towards the lazily rising hill, and on it, like in the nightmare of an impotent, sullenly protrudes the short and stumpy phallus of the castle tower, the godsend of the inhabitants of Vilnius, a universal symbol of debility. Everything, absolutely everything here is a dream. The Italian Renaissance buildings that you’d think were transported directly from Bologna or Padua, the ornate church towers spiking the sky, and between them—the faceless crowd of the giddy spectacle’s extras. It can’t be this way; God or Satan got something wrong here. Either these people ended up in the wrong city by mistake, or they’re in the right place, but the buildings, the churches, and the smell of ancient times have lost their way. Vilnius is a ghost city, a hallucination city. It’s impossible to dream it up or to imagine it—it is itself a dream or the concoction of fantasy. The spirits of the Grand Dukes of Lithuania walk about Vilnius, greet acquaintances, accost the girls, and grimly shove at the trolleybus stops. Here the smell of the Polish years, the smell of fires and plagues, and the most banal stench of cheap gasoline hover and mingle. Here, at night, the Iron Wolf howls desolately, calling for help. Here you can unexpectedly meet the dead, tortured once upon a time by the Gestapo or the KGB, repeating over and over again the name of their betrayer, which no one wants to hear. In Prague or Lisbon the past lingers next to today’s soullessness. In Vilnius, every building, every narrow little street crossing is simultaneously the scene of ancient life and today’s catalepsy. Vilnius is innumerable cities laid one atop another. It isn’t just the earth that lays down archeological layers here, but time, and air, and language do too. In the same spot, layers of Eastern and Western cultures lie hidden and turn into one another. Vilnius is the border where Russia’s expansionism and Europe’s spirit went to war. Here absolutely everything collided and mixed. Vilnius is a giant cocktail, stirred together by the insane gods of fog. If a city could exist alone, without people, Vilnius would be the City of all cities. But it’s people who express the spirit of a city, and if you attempt to understand what the figures in Vilnius’s streets mean, what that atrophying spectacle in which you yourself play means, you’d immediately realize you’re dreaming.
I walk slowly through a dream called Vilnius, while the weird sensation that all of this has already been pierces my brain. Once I went down the street in exactly the same way, in exactly the same way I considered what the dream—the yellowish leaves, blown about by the wind, and the old house in the depths of a garden—could mean . . . The exact same pair of dazed pigeons have already perched by the announcement post. Lolita has already waited for me in the corridor, rocking her waist back and forth in exactly the same way . . . Everything has already been, everything, everything, has already been. I know it’s just déjà vu, but all the same a sense of fear stabs right through me. In exactly the same way Stefa’s hips sway before my eyes, the hips of all the women in the world, Virgilishly leading me ever closer to the secret . . . The exact same shabby dog with a huge head and still larger sexual organs and a long body like a rat’s sniffs the ground outside the window . . . The coffee break table seems just as unreal as it has seemed many times before.
Why do I come here? Why do I waste the time—I should devote every instant left to me to a single purpose. I don’t understand what my employees are doing here, why they gathered here (or maybe—who gathered them here?) Sometimes it seems they all have a secret purpose here—just as I do. The library is essential to my clandestine investigations. But what do the others find here? Don’t tell me things are as ordinary as they seem at first glance? The majority found a place where it’s possible to do nothing and get some kind of pay. The authorities needed to shove Martynas off into a corner, to dupe him with an abundance of books, to isolate him from the scholarly centers. The communist Elena was introduced to look after everyone. And so on. (It’s not clear to me why Lolita ended up here.) Which of these women are nothing more than silent victims, and which are Their secret agents? Stefa is the only one I don’t suspect—I have carried out certain experiments with her. Which one? Maybe Gražina, the plump petite with the greasy glance? Or Marija, the mustachioed green finch with the burned-out bass? Or Laima—the exhausted fish, constantly blurting out some sort of nonsense? Or maybe the newcomer Beta, blinking goggle-eyed? (Can short hair have some essential meaning here?) They could have picked any one of them, or all of them together. All of them in front of my eyes, all of them sitting at the table, only Lolita stands by the window and follows Carp with her eyes: he’s hobbling by the construction site again. It’s Saint Carp, my talisman, a person who even in the face of death wasn’t afraid to call a tyrant a tyrant and a slave a slave. (Who knows which is more dangerous—probably calling a slave a slave to his face.) Lolita follows him with her eyes and smiles: I’ve told her about Carp. My Lolita. My, my Lolita. But can anything in the world really be mine anymore? Have I ever really had my own woman?
Like it or not, I think about my wife. After all, I had a wife—a loved one, the only one, the true one. I had . . . I should call her my savior and the one who opened my eyes (unfortunately, Irena opened my eyes not just to happiness, but to horror too). She showed up when my entire life was distorted into a hideous hallucination. That was the Narutis period; drunkenness, a premonition of insanity and a very real, boundless pain jumbled together in it. I had just been released from the camp. I have no idea where I lived; I have no idea how I scraped together money. I remember, as if though a haze, loading freight cars at night and hunkering down during the day in ground-floor rooms with broken-out windows and doors that wouldn’t close, getting drunk with seedy companions. To me, the morning didn’t differ from the night, and the sun never rose at all; in my Vilnius there was nothing but a lingering, dismal haze. I was drunk all the time. I don’t know how long that lasted, but I do not regret those days, months, years. I was obliged to live through all of that; my path led through the Narutis, through syphilitic dumps, through the very bottom of Vilnius. Every true search is hellish; great discoveries are made on the edge of insanity. I don’t at all regret ending up in the gutter, the same way I don’t regret landing in camp. I had to go through all of the circles of hell, so that I would, in the end, grasp what matters most, so that I would discover Their footprints. My circles of hell were marked by barbed wire, and then by alcohol. Good Lord, the amount I drank! Only my father’s iron genes saved me—according to all the laws of nature I should have gone insane or turned into a wreck. I searched for truth, delving into the very cheapest alcohol. I searched for an answer (already then I searched for an answer) by destroying myself. There’s probably no other way. A person can escape his limits and exceed himself only by sacrificing a part of himself. But I sacrificed too much. Many times I thought I surely won’t find