Vilnius Poker Page 10
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 threatened suicide if the state wouldn’t give them a new apartment.”
“So what happened?” Stefa laughs.
“Two 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.
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.
All father needs from this world is paper and marks he can write or draw on the greedy surface of paper. And a glass too, into which this or that has been poured. Nothing more. The smell of paper and liquor lingers in his office. Here, the feeling experienced in a gloomy forsaken house, or in a dusty old attic filled with mysterious things, comes over you. Here, everything has died; inside you can only imagine ghosts. It’s the excavated room of an inhabitant of Pompeii. Miraculously extant furniture. Ancient Pompeian books. The smell of thousand-year-old wine. You immediately feel like you’re under thick layers of frozen lava, that the sun and light are far, far away. Here, only the stunning Pompeian drawings provide heat and light. It seems to me they weren’t designed for this world, or for the light of day. My father (his hands?) drew them, so that, blazing up briefly in the real world, they would vanish again for eternity. And when the world tried to take them, father instinctively defended himself. Once some passerby visited his office and saw the drawings. I wasn’t the only one to sense they were drawn by the hand of a genius. Several art buyers immediately flocked into our courtyard (they did resemble shabby birds); one of them moaned wordlessly, another conceived the idea of immediately taking the drawings to Paris. For several days the courtyard resembled a gypsy camp.
Father finally saw his drawings himself. Closed up in his office, he glumly looked through sheet after sheet, talking out loud to himself. He
spoke a secret language that was unintelligible to me. Maybe he had thought up one that could describe his drawings.
He built the bonfire at night. The drawings went into the fire only at the very beginning. Then father started carrying his manuscripts, journals, and books into the yard: slowly, seemingly weighing things over calmly, he piled ever more bundles of paper into the fire. Soon clothes, grandfather’s carved chairs and Turkish carpets began falling into the bonfire too. Mother stayed in her bedroom, never taking her eyes from that bonfire of the world, but she didn’t even try to restrain father; she didn’t say anything at all. She waited for father himself to stop—she waited all of her life for him to stop. But father continued burning his world according to a spectral scheme. He’d fling some item into the fire, and leave another identical item unharmed. He chose certain cups, plates, and glasses as sacrifices to the fire. There’s no telling what gods he made offerings to, what demons he wanted to scare off. He finished that ceremony of fire just as calmly as he had started. It lasted for maybe an hour, maybe two, but that dance of fire didn’t stay in the great ALL; it crumbled into bits. I see only individual burning things, my inhumanly calm father, and my mother’s pale face in the window. There are no smells left, and neither the fire’s crackling nor the hubbub of the agitated household can be heard. Everything goes on in complete silence, just from time to time a dry heat wafts onto your face.
I regretted father’s sketched portraits most of all. He always drew the same person—a strange hermit of the swamps by the name of Vasilis. Vasilis would wander into our yard at regular intervals; father got along with him perfectly—you see, the two of them never said a word to each other. Vasilis would come silently and leave silently, piled up with healing herbs and bundles of roots. Grass snakes wound themselves around his arms and tiny, nimble little birds would perch on his shoulders. For posing father would pay him with salt. He would draw the portraits quickly, with enormous inspiration. The real Vasilis didn’t appear in any of them; the people in those portraits would always be different, as if that hermit who lived on vipers and frogs changed his face every day. But actually he was always the same: ragged, tanned almost black, murmuring something to his snakes and birds, showing his eyes to no one. He came to the great auto-da-fé too, and helped father throw books and drawings into the fire. Then he slowly shuffled off into the darkness, accompanied by an owl flying in circles above his head. He didn’t show up in our yard again; I would only see him out in the middle of the swamp, calmly walking through the most treacherous bogs, like Christ walking on water. When father burned his portraits, it was as if Vasilis lost touch with reality, with the ground beneath his feet. To me it seemed as if those portraits contained absolutely everything: the swamps, and the auto-da-fé that was to be, and Christ, and the night owls, and non-possession, and impotence. But it was all destroyed in the flames. I managed to hide only “Woman-spider,” “Faithfulness,” and “The Crane”—I stuck the names on myself. That crane is the most nightmarish bird ever drawn by a human. I’ve never seen another creature so obviously flying to destruction. That crane radiates pure despair; it knows itself that by now it’s almost disintegrated, that it almost isn’t there anymore. But it flies anyway—just above the ground, slowly and weakly. It’s a flying stuffed bird of doom, a ghost appearing in broad daylight through some mistake. Perhaps a bewitched princess turned into a bird who will crumble into ashes at any moment. That crane is the sister of the woman who, in another drawing, is slowly turning into a giant hairy spider. Or maybe the spider is turning into a woman; one way or another, change, by some inexplicable means, is depicted in the drawing. The change is what’s so horrifying; it’s brimming in every line, in every little hair on the spider’s legs. Horror reigns everywhere, except for the woman’s face and eyes. She is completely indifferent; it’s absolutely all the same to her that she will soon turn into a disgusting anthropod. Or the opposite—it’s all the same to her that she’s a spider almost turned into a woman. In “Faithfulness,” an attractive young girl with gigantic breasts, on all fours, devours her dead husband. There’s emptiness in her face and eyes, but her whole body, every seen or only imagined little muscle, is brimming with a rich, bloody ecstasy. She loves her husband—even dead. She wants to become one with him. Her gigantic breasts keep swinging lower, it seems as if the devoured flesh of the dead merges into them, embellishing them even more. The dead husband’s body adorns her, beautifies her for another man.