Vilnius Poker Page 12

  ”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 start breaking the mirrors. Sometimes . . .

  It’d be better to be quiet about 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 any secret here, between the scattered, reeking clothes, puddles of vomit, and cockroaches crawling up the walls. I realized what direction I was heading in, but I didn’t have the strength to stop. Returning to Vilnius after nine years, ostensibly released to freedom, I couldn’t live just any old way: I no longer knew how to live. I had never been destined to experience freedom. I was the slave of a single, sole idea, and the worst of it was—for a long, long time I didn’t know what idea. I understood just one thing: everyone lives in error, the world doesn’t behave the way it should; once upon a time it erred, and it can’t manage to fix its great mistake. Why did I, even though I had been exonerated, have to wander the garbage dumps like a stray dog, while the person (or dragon?) whom I was once supposed to hunt relished life in the radiance of absolute power? At that time I thought of nothing but him. Now I think about him too.

  “Anyone can grab a pistonmachine and spray in every direction,” Bitinas’s long, bare head says softly. “Any fool. That’s not your destiny, my dear Vargalys. You’re destined for the great dragon hunt. Think about him, think only about him. Dream of him, become one with him, my son. Devour him, like he devours Lithuania. Drag him out of his stinking tank . . .”

  Why, to what purpose was I assigned ordeals that made me doubt afterwards whether there is a human in the world at all? I doubted whether humanity is, on the whole, fit to exist. I couldn’t understand who devised that horrible mechanism, or who controls it. The idea of a merciful God is absurd: if God exists, he is a madman and a sadist; he needs to be fought. The Buddhist theory of inescapable pain doesn’t explain anything, it’s merely an observation. The abyss of the Apocalypse is an effective metaphor—but who can get concerned about all the world’s inevitable end? No, the explanation had to be here; I searched for it within myself and without. Nothing else concerned me. Not even myself. Nothing! I wasn’t intimidated by the puffy faces of my drinking partners, the bloody knives that could stab me too, or the grotesque sluts indifferently smearing fetid unguent on hardened chancres in my full view. I was on the other side of everything. And still I drank, Lord of mine, how I drank!

  Probably I approached the secret regardless, approached along the paths of death and insanity, gathering horrible experience grain by grain. It has been said that to kiss a leper all over is a holy sacrifice. It has been said that after long prayer and fasting, the Holy Virgin reveals herself. I sought that in my own way. Who can appreciate the sensation you experience when you watch your penis penetrate the rotten vagina of a syphilitic? Who tells the truth about the revelations that beset you after a week of drinking, when the vodka for sobering up runs short? I realized I was drowning, but I held it sacred that at the very bottom, before releasing the last gasp of air, I would find the answer. And I kept drinking. At the end of the inclined plane a church waited for me, Vilnius’s Basilican Church. I very well remember the torn-down crosses in a corner of the courtyard and the walls sullenly bending in on me, ready to collapse at any moment. The old churches of Vilnius are desecrated in various ways—some as warehouses, some as museums of atheism. A little factory that made the crudest wine had been set up in that one. I came across a breach in the fence and slipped in with the entire gang; I could drink without restraint. Inside, contorted piping branched about, grim vats loomed, and dust reigned. The dust of dust. The drunken guards slept it off right there, on the stone floor, with their greasy faces turned to the vandalized altar. We would sit around a brimming vat like devils and drink to the point of insanity. The wine there was brewe
d from anything—from rotten fruit, from garbage, even, it seems to me, from the church’s sticky dust. They must obscure everyone’s intellect at whatever cost. I spent my nights right in the church; I wanted to meet my end there. The time and space of Vilnius were deranged. I would sit down on a broken chair in some dump, and I’d end up in the church next to a bucket of garbage wine. Occasionally I would be surrounded by talking animals or the chopped-off heads of people with little legs; sometimes Plato would climb out of the church walls—wearing a dingy cap with a peak and a leather jacket—the harsh commissar of the kanukai. There was only one way to determine what was a hallucination and what was reality—to drink still more, then the hallucinations would usually disappear.

  I nevertheless prayed my holy virgin into existence. I don’t know when she presented herself for the first time, there couldn’t be a first time anyway—Vilnius’s time was completely confused. Irena emerged from the fog, gazing at me pitifully. Sometimes she would come arm-in-arm with Plato, half-naked, vulgarly made up. I would seriously ponder why that pederast Plato gave up boys and broke his own famously declared principles. I would down a glass and still another glass, but only Plato would disappear, Irena wouldn’t vanish, and one day I woke up not in a nook of the church, but on a folding bed in her apartment.

  She lived in a decaying room, a former nun’s cell; her window looked straight out at the breach in the wine factory’s fence. To this day I still don’t know why she stopped me on the very edge. I was a drunken scum with puffy eyes. More than once I again fought with headless figures or poisonous white rabbits. More than once I again climbed into the ruinous breach in the fence. But Irena didn’t order me to do anything, didn’t preach, and didn’t scold. She simply opened my eyes. The road of my life was truly unique: I had already almost acquired the second sight, but I didn’t have the first; I had never known the ordinary world that everyone sees. It was only thanks to Irena that I experienced for the first time what a friend is, what a woman is. She was my friend for a long time—that one and only, the true one, a part of your own self. Only Irena forced me to realize that in this world a man means nothing without a woman.