Vilnius Poker Page 15

  I hardly moved all day. I was half paralyzed, and on top of it all, Justinas showed up that evening and tormented me with his talk about women and his sexual prowess. He had never spoken about it before. This time you’d think he’d opened a bag of obscenities and uncovered his filthy insides. He never said the most important word aloud, but it was heard most, without actually being said a single time; all the talk, all of Justinas’s thoughts, revolved around it. It seemed he wasn’t in the least concerned about the women themselves, just their vaginas. In Justinas’s world, the streets were full of walking vaginas with completely unnecessary appendages: arms, legs, heads. The more I listened, the more I started becoming some kind of vagina maniac myself. To my own surprise, I praised my wife’s erotic talents in a mysterious whisper, and wasn’t in the least ashamed. He infected me with his mania; it was only a good deal later that I became disgusted. They really are capable of infecting people with all the forms of their plague; this must be strictly guarded against.

  I needed to run off somewhere as soon as possible and think things over. I signed up for a business trip to Moscow and packed my bag in an instant. She didn’t seem to want me to go, and she kissed me just like Irena when I left. I was stunned. She was intentionally driving me insane. I stood on the stairs for a long time, but I went to the station anyway. Too well I remembered the neckless ruler of the Narutis neighborhood. Too well I remembered the hopelessly, irretrievably dead Jake. Suddenly I felt there was no turning back. In the station bar, all my doubts began to bubble up again; once more, the simplest question arose: what’s going on here? Suddenly I realized that people, entire nations, the greatest countries come to ruin in just exactly this way—they fail to ask out loud in time: what’s going on here? (It’s enough just to remember the birth of Nazi Germany.) Of course, man became man because he’s able to adapt to anything; however, that adaptability will be his ruin in the end.

  I hurried back home; I prepared to press her into a corner and force it out of her. I was brimming with resolution. I opened the door quietly (as it happened, I had greased all of the locks and hinges in the house a few days before), went down the corridor, stepped into the living room, and came to a dead stop. Now I’m standing in the doorway of my living room, still in my wet coat, water dripping from my hair (it’s probably raining outside), heavy drops pressing on my eyelashes, but I see everything very clearly—it’s impossible to see any more clearly. She has fallen back voluptuously on the couch, half undressed, her thick, knobby thighs spread out, repeating as if she’s insane—don’t, don’t, we shouldn’t, but she’s ripping off the remains of her clothing herself, savagely grasping at Justinas, pulling him closer and continuing to senselessly repeat—don’t, don’t, we shouldn’t. With horror I see how the globs of flesh between her thighs join perfectly with Justinas’s hips, I see (or maybe I’m imagining it) how his fingers lie perfectly in the triple folds under her breasts, how they assemble themselves into a single thing like some mechanism: all of the parts sanded smooth and fitting perfectly. We shouldn’t, we shouldn’t, don’t, but she herself paws at him, sucks him into herself, moans with her head thrown back, my heart will jump out of my chest any minute, but I can’t move from the spot, my feet have grown to the floor, even my eyelids have turned to stone, without blinking I watch him screwing my Irena, my one and only Irena, I watch her body relishing him, endlessly, without respite, hypocritically and perversely, I watch Justinas fling himself on the rug completely worn out, and she kneels, her legs disgustingly spread, no longer repeating we shouldn’t, we shouldn’t, don’t. My eyes hurt, my heart hurts, I no longer know myself who I am now, what I will do the next instant—trample them both under my boots or fall headlong into despair; I know nothing, my soul is gone, completely gone, but it hurts all the same, that supposedly non-existent soul of mine hurts piercingly—after all, she was once Irena, my one and only Irena. The two of them move again, come to life, and start doing something weird. Suddenly I realize that everything that has happened was no more than a prelude, a meaningless, primitive prelude, and the real things are only just beginning.

  He crawls around her, and she continues to kneel, her legs spread disgustingly, her behind stuck up in the air; she keeps raising it higher, and curls up as if she wanted to turn herself inside out. Justinas sticks his nose right next to her grinning vagina and sniffs at it like a dog; they both sniff, it seems they’re even wagging their tails and melting with bliss. I look and I don’t believe my eyes, I look and I don’t understand what they’re doing now, even though by now I realize, without understanding anything I realize, that the two of them have slowly, with relish, begun Their act, Their dance of love. I feel my fury fading, all of me fading, but all the same I look at them, at their hanging tongues, their gray faces, the convulsive movements of their bodies (what’s left of them—they’re no longer human bodies), and I’m overcome with horror, I realize it’s not me who will trample the two of them, but they who will kill me if they realize I’m watching them. That can’t be seen by a human being; that’s impossible and incomprehensible. You couldn’t even imagine anything like it. Now they are like some kind of plant or jellyfish—I’ve never seen anything like it. Never. Nowhere. I don’t know what to call it. You wouldn’t find it in even the most horrifying dream. A human being couldn’t even dream of such things. It has no name, I have no name myself, because I’m standing in the doorway of my living room and I see everything. It doesn’t fit inside my head, there’s a lot that no longer fits in my head, I need to save myself quickly, I quickly close the door, but all the same I hear those sounds, I go down the stairs, sensing an oppressive smell following after me, I’m as empty as a finished bottle (but maybe something’s still there, at the very bottom?). And everything is greenish: a greenish sunset and a greenish Vilnius, my hands are greenish too—for some reason I examine them closely, I even feel over my joints with my greenish fingers, greenish figures pass by, and behind the corner a greenish death waits for me, craving to finally suck an infinite greenish emptiness out of me. I am no more; I am long since no more.

  I wandered the wet streets all night. I turned circles through a greenish Vilnius, an accursed ghost city, a hallucination city, which has finished sucking out the last fluids of my soul. I do not know what I was that night. I was both a madman and a genius, a corpse and a newborn, a dead thing and the embodiment of a soul that had lost its way. I was horrified. I didn’t recognize the streets; I didn’t recognize my own city. If someone had spoken to me, I couldn’t have said where I was. I banged on Gediminas’s door several times, but behind it there was only silence and emptiness. In the near future the Russian Orthodox Church, the straw-haired man, and the crucial discovery awaited me.

  I was left alone. They took away my support, the one I relied on most; they took away my Irena, sucked out the person nearest to me, sucked her out in full view, and there was nothing I could do. The worst of it was that I probably didn’t want to do anything: a secret instinct ordered me to protect myself first. Once more I looked over my hands. They were slender-fingered and sinewy. I was still alive. They hadn’t yet managed to turn me into not me. They try to turn all of us into something else: my former wife, the imbecile on the trolleybus, Bolius crawling through the bare meadow. They want to destroy all the hundreds (or more?) of our souls: the soul of the back of the skull and the soul of the forehead; the souls of the nose, elbows, lungs, and liver; the souls of laughter, sadness, thoughtfulness, and despair; the souls of unchanging habits and the soul of dreams—even the soul of all my souls. Every human’s soul of souls. This thirst to destroy doesn’t, it seems, make any sense. It cannot be their ultimate purpose; it can only be the means to attain something else. But what? For what pathological purpose? You smash into this question as if it were a rock the moment you start thinking about Them. If you could divine the purpose, you’d probably learn how to defend yourself. But you never succeed in solving the riddle. You think you’ve already given it a name, but again and aga
in it turns out that it’s just a means to attain some other, still more secret, still more mysterious purpose. When investigating Their pathologic, you have to pay attention to all the trifles, because there are no trifles. There are no trifles, there is no one to ask, there is no one to rely on, and there is no one to comfort you—except rickety, crazy Vilnius.

  But even so, why did Vilnius become Their global lair? This is one of the most difficult questions.

  In my search for an answer I have only one meager hint. Tadeusz Konwicki, a Polish writer, spent his childhood in Vilnius when it was torn away from Lithuania. When asked how he writes about Vilnius without being there, he answered: I don’t need to visit there, you can find Vilnius everywhere—I see entire neighborhoods of Vilnius in Amsterdam and San Francisco: the streets, the houses, and the people of Vilnius.

  There’s something immensely significant hiding in that answer: Vilnius is everywhere. In every real city you can come across the houses, streets, and people of Vilnius. But neither that poor, naïve Konwicki, nor other poor, naïve people know the most important thing: those are all Their residences. Settling in some city, They quickly impart a Vilniutian form to entire blocks. In a neighborhood like that in San Francisco or Amsterdam, you must immediately start looking about for Them.

  But why Vilnius, anyway?

  It’s impossible to understand what Vilnius is. You can only believe in Vilnius or not believe in it. Believing is difficult, I know, it’s very difficult. Even I sometimes cannot grasp that this geometry textbook of cement block barracks, this clanking concentration camp choking on fumes, is my Vilnius. That these ghosts, wandering aimlessly, without realizing that the remnants of their souls are surrounded by barbed wire, are Vilniutians too. Not everyone will see the real body beneath the drab clothing, not everyone will believe in Vilnius. I’m obliged to believe in it, because it gave me Lolita.

  There she is—lying naked. I can admire her high breast and slender waist, feel the secret beauty fluids flowing through her long legs. Lolita entrances me, takes away my power to think logically. Her capricious spirit overwhelms me, forces me to forget what I should remember every minute. She is practically unreal; people like that can’t exist. A body like that shouldn’t have either a spirit or intelligence—its beauty should suffice. But she is full of both one and the other—even too much of everything. By her very existence Lolita mocks God and nature, and things like that are punishable. I’m terrified that I’m inadvertently bogging her down in matters that will sooner or later destroy me. I am a horrible swamp, but she too, only looks sturdy and dependable on the surface—she’s like quicksand, in which you can sink for eternity, herself.

  “You’ve got it good,” I say, “you live in an old house. Old houses have a soul. The new ones don’t even have a face.”

  “They can have one,” she answers immediately. “In other places, even when they’re building skyscrapers, they give them names. Whatever has a name can have a face too.”

  Lolita has a face, really she does (although sometimes I get a craving to cover it, to hide it). The spirit is inevitably reflected in the face; neither dark glasses nor a nightmarish grimace will hide spirituality. It’s an unfortunate characteristic of a human: They immediately take notice of you.

  “You’ve lived only in nameless houses?”

  “The labor camps were named very astutely,” I say. “Metaphorically! Above the gates there they write: work makes life sweet . . . Or: abandon hope, ye who enter here . . .”

  We talk about the camp mostly when we’re walking up Didžiosios Street. She starts the conversation herself, but I hardly get a word out when she gets scared, pushes me into a gateway and kisses and kisses me, shutting my mouth. And now she moves uneasily, curls up her legs, her body is ungracefully broken. I feel guilty that I’ve disfigured the ideal painterly lines of a nude: I’m a vandal, hacking at Goya’s Maya with a knife.

  “Before the war I lived in a haunted house. It surely wasn’t nameless. That was a crazy house, no less so than the Lord God. And it created horrors no worse than God manages to.”

  I spoke of ghosts and horrors quite unnecessarily. The fear that Lolita is nothing more than my invention darts through me once more. Demented Vilnius willingly gives birth to fantasies: I simply thought her up, I just very much want her to be, that’s why I see her, when in actuality she doesn’t exist. I’m consorting with a phantom of fantasy. But who I am talking to? To myself? It seems not—I don’t think the way Lolita does; her words frequently surprise me.

  “There you go again,” she says carefully, “your eyes are LIKE THAT again.”

  I’ve concocted a sad, melodious voice for her; it’s a bit intoxicating. I’ve concocted amazing girlish breasts for her, breasts like I’ve never seen before. Is it possible to invent a form you’ve never seen? Then there are her eyes—real or concocted? Her legs, Lord, her legs—could they really be concocted? I carefully come closer; I try to walk slowly and smoothly, because a sudden movement could dissolve Lolita, woven out of thickened air. I’m afraid to touch her—my fingers could go right through her. I close my eyes—now I don’t see, don’t hear, don’t touch her, but the scent is still there, the scent of the garden of Paradise, caressing my nostrils. I close my nose with my fingers, but there’s the sixth, and seventh, and tenth sense; all the same I feel her, and I can’t destroy that feeling. (Maybe that’s what they call love?) Whatever I do, Lolita exists; I cannot hide myself from her. I could not see her, not smell her, not touch her, but she unavoidably remains both inside me and outside of me—if I still separate my inside from my outside at all.

  I quickly open my eyes, draw in her scent, caress the long toes one by one, embrace the slender ankles—hesitantly, as if it could turn out that they’re not the same as always. I stroke the velvet of the calves’ skin, feel every little hair—everything is in place. With my palms I slowly fondle the thighs, the firm waist, the flat, smooth belly, where unseen little veins pulsate. All of her is waiting for me, the way the parched earth waits for rain. I sense her sweet warmth, caress the slender hands—their joints have actually softened from expectation. I know every one of her fingers. I love the elongated sharp nails of the hands. I adore the rounded porcelain of the toenails. I love the mole under the breast and the other one, large and light brown—on the nape of the neck, where the spine ends. I love the crooked scar on the right hip. I love the cracked skin of the lips. I love her forehead, the two wrinkles cutting deep; they grow distinct when she scrutinizes me. I love her breasts, formed of light and honey (they even thrash when I touch them). She is my song of songs, I’ve long since learnt her by heart, but she cannot bore me or seem, even for an instant, to be known, to not be hiding something unexpected. Her breasts that are always the same are different every time. I’m amazed that Solomon attempted to compare his loved one’s body to something. Lolita isn’t comparable to anything; she’s not even comparable with herself, because she is different every time. She is like an entire world, like a universe—with stars, nebulae, and comets. Her flavor is heavenly: I lick her cheeks; with the tip of my tongue I brush the neck and shoulders. There are more flavors in Lolita than in the entire rest of the world. A tart grape sugar behind the ears, and the salty sweat of passion under the breasts. A choking September apple flavor on the mounds above the knees and a mixture of love herbs covering the entire length of the spine. There are a thousand varieties of flavor hiding in her skin, and I distinguish them all: the wrinkled skin of her nipples is one kind, a completely different kind between her thighs—an impossible, supernatural smoothness. Her dry lips attempt to moisten my tongue, while the belly’s skin softly fondles it. It slides down the thin hair below the belly and unexpectedly gets entrapped in the hidden, damp space, where by now a slightly bitter flavor of desire is nascent, the flavor of Lolita’s tumult. The secret space is like the gates to the unknown, with my tongue I feel all of the little wrinkles, the slightest mounds, I strive to plunge into Lolita as if into an abyss, she is
my goddess and my ruler. She writhes like a ball of enchanted snakes, her trembling thighs caress my cheeks, convulsively clutch my head, the space of mystery nearly suffocates me, but I relish it, I relish it. I leave that bottomless unknown; I lick Lolita’s nostrils, bringing her the flavor of her own desire, and then the wordless caress of the tongues begins. By now I hardly know where I am; I only feel her breasts pressing marks on my body. I hardly see anything, but I know that her face hinders me—it’s too much of a face, too much eyes, too much spirit. I cover it with a corner of the gray curtain, as if in a dream I feel that faceless woman loving me like a panther, as if in a dream I see her body, now it is the body of all the women in the world. It no longer belongs to Lolita; it doesn’t belong to anyone—only to me. I make love to all the women in the world at the same time. I can love that way—I have enough strength. This universal woman body is made up of that which I have never experienced; it isn’t the body of my other women. I have never touched such overripe breasts, so fearfully pressed together. I have never felt such a flat, smooth goddess’s belly with my belly. I have never penetrated into such a winding, multifold, branching sexual space. This is the body of all the women in the world. A changing, faceless, sightless body, my song of songs, my death and my resurrection. I die and I am resurrected, again I die and am resurrected, everything recedes from me, even now I am left completely alone. Does Lolita really exist?

  Perhaps it’s possible to dream up that giddiness, that apocalyptic melody of bodies . . . that beastly desire, those floods and ebbs . . . probably it’s even possible to invent the sightless, universal woman body, her heavenly orgasm, when the entire skin becomes pure white and as thin as parchment . . . when every last vein shines through it—blue or dark red . . . to invent that supernatural, impossible vagina, in whose multifold space you go astray, which is different, unrecognizable, mysterious every time . . . you can invent even yourself, but it’s impossible to fabricate that boundless closeness, it embraces all of me like a nirvana, more perfect than death . . . It gives me meaning; you can’t invent that kind of closeness by yourself. Another person is essential here, in all of his wholeness . . . I am no longer alone . . . She doesn’t let me be alone . . . It’s a true closeness, a true connection . . . with her . . . with the trees . . . with all of oceans of the world . . . with hallucinating Vilnius . . . with me myself . . . A true connection, one that has nothing in common with the sexual dance of the body, little in common even with the erotic, it’s a true connection. As long as such things exist in the world, they alone make life worth living. (Maybe that’s what they call love?)