Vilnius Poker Read online

  “You sound like you hated her guts,” Lolita says carefully.

  “Excuse me,” I try to control my voice, “you’re correct. It’s not right to condemn a person who doesn’t have the strength to pull himself together, to oppose Them. You’d have to condemn all of humanity. Everyone is given the opportunity . . . Oh, we’re short of money, we’re short of freedom! It’s all lies! . . . If you think it’s the surroundings or other people that are to blame—you’re fooling yourself. Only you are to blame. Only you. You’re amazed at other people’s helplessness, weakness, stupidity? Don’t fool yourself—you’re that way yourself! You’re oppressed by the injustice of the world? Look inside yourself more carefully! The only one you have a right to condemn is yourself!”

  “I always dreamed of meeting you,” says Lolita, “you’re a terrible person. Perhaps the worst I’ve ever seen.”

  She looks at me with huge brown eyes (it seems I unintentionally said They: I’m losing my guard entirely), but Vilnius looks at me even more reproachfully. After all, by condemning others, I condemn Vilnius too. For what? Better remember one of my prayers. Lord, grant me patience and forgiveness, in order that I might understand everyone and forgive everyone. Do not let me forget they suffer too. Always remind me of my purpose, a thousand times bigger than myself, in order that I may disregard myself. Take anger and disdain away from me, give me the intelligence to always distinguish the victims from the executioners.

  Have I calmed down yet?

  “I’d like to feel that free,” says Lolita, “to have my own hermetic world. And you . . .”

  “Don’t wish for it, oh no, don’t . . . Maybe you don’t even suspect how much you, me, all of us are protected by the cover of normal behavior, by automatic activities and banal rules. It’s the most powerful of our defenses; it’s our God, to whom we pray despite ourselves, even though we curse him all the time . . . You want to create a world? Right away you’ll need both good and evil, and beauty . . . and a God, a strange, unique God, who would be God no matter what you call him . . .”

  “Love,” says Lolita, “You forgot love.”

  “And love. Of course, love . . . Do you know what love turns into if you throw caution to the wind, if you’re left face to face with the world? Do you know what it turned into for my mother? She bought herself a stud, a gloomy giant, who screwed her . . . That illiterate, soulless animal ravaged my mother’s slender, white body and took money for it too. There’s the love of a unique world for you. Mother refused to accept the common world, but didn’t manage to create her own, either. She was short of everything: God, goodness, beauty . . . It was horrible to listen to her when she tried, in spite of it all, to speak. She tried, Lord knows she tried . . . She wanted to do something, to change something, to exchange things, so nothing would be motionless, nothing would stay in place. And she kept killing all sorts of life: geese, cats, worms . . . This is bullshit, and not my mother’s story, isn’t it?”

  “That’s the only way you can say something genuine about a person,” Lolita answers calmly, and for that understanding I really do love her.

  I love, I love Lolita, she’s the only living thing nearby; only my dead surround me. Grandfather, the great Lithuanian spy in Polish-occupied Vilnius. A hero, bravely fighting with the most windmill-like of windmills. Father, convinced by an unheard voice that the world isn’t worth his efforts. My two forefathers, kanuked so differently. By what means do They inject a healthy brain with their pathologic; with what form of the drab spirochetes are they able to penetrate the joints, the blood, the sperm? How did all of my people fall into a trap they didn’t see in time, which they didn’t guard against? What did Gediminas fail to consider, the all-knowing Gediminas, gloomily leaning over the piano, his hands raised, but still not daring to press the keys? What did I overlook, squeezed for long years between the moldy walls of my wife’s apartment? What unexpectedly wiped my brains clean and opened up the second sight? What do I have to guard my Lolita against? Lolita, my very own Lolita.

  “I can imagine how your parents horrified their neighbors,” she says. “In such a homogenous, commonplace group of people . . .”

  “Oh, sister, how you’ve overshot! You really don’t get it? The two of them were perfectly pleasant, acceptable people! For the yearly ball at the university mother would order a dress from Paris . . . Yes, yes . . . You don’t really think that she went around town with her head shaved bare? You don’t really think that father would roll around in a drunken stupor in the company of professors? No, he would talk politics, make witty remarks . . . It seemed they returned from a long, long journey, threw off their exotic clothes, and suddenly turned into the most proper bourgeoisie . . . Perhaps that amazed me the most. I kept thinking, where are they keeping all of that, what’s really inside of them, what are they hiding from, what are they afraid of? That two- or three-facedness of theirs, that ability to undress themselves, their genuine selves, just like dirty clothes, drove me out of my mind . . .”

  As I talk I feel a soft lump covering my brain and drowning it in thick silt. Everything recedes into a fog. A wall appears between me and Lolita; I can’t step over it anymore, although I could just a minute ago. I’m slowly turning into something else. It’s a whiff of Them, an attack of Their secret plague. My innards teem and swarm with gray spirochetes too; no one can predict how much longer my spirit will hold out.

  “Why did she kill herself?” someone asks out of the fog. “Did she get lost in herself? Look into the abyss too deeply?”

  “I loved her.” I’m telling the holy truth, but that’s not what I should be talking about, not at all. “She was the unhappiest of us all. She hung herself decently, while we’re still living . . .”

  “To me she resembles Lithuania,” someone in the fog suddenly says, “The same senseless despair.”

  “Resembles? Maybe in the sense that Lithuania never was ITSELF either, foreigners were always glomming on to her—through force and deceit . . . Do you know why she hung herself? She persuaded herself she was going to give birth to a monster—large and hairy . . . yes, yes, it had to be hairy . . . She convinced all of us, it was all she talked about . . . She thought Satan had impregnated her. But not the black one . . . And not the one who says non serviam . . . The very worst of all—her own private Satan . . . How can I put this? . . . By the incarnation of the evil of the universe, understand? She found neither love nor beauty in her invented world, but she found evil in it . . . If she had given birth, she would have given birth to a monster that would destroy the world. And that monster would be her son, her beloved, even insanely beloved son . . .”

  “Horrible,” whispers the fog, slowly starting to resemble Lolita.

  “No, not horrible. There’s no name for it. We can’t imagine even a thousandth part of her fear, her love, her responsibility to the future of the universe. She hung herself one calm, quiet morning, above grandfather’s Shit of All Shits altar. She got up from the table and went out to hang herself.”

  “So she went crazy after all . . .”

  “I don’t know. Lord knows I don’t. It’s hard to say what ‘crazy’ means. What ‘normal’ or ‘abnormal’ mean. You could say that normal is pragmatism, the ability to adapt to circumstances. Are you abnormal if you understand the circumstances correctly, but still behave in such a way that death inevitably awaits you? If Mandelstam wrote and read his friends poems about Stalin, knowing full well that he would, one way or the other, be killed on account of them, was Mandelstam abnormal? I think it was Stalin who was abnormal. But anyway, this is all theory . . . And as for mother . . . she knew quite well how to exist in her surroundings. Perfectly well. Nothing threatened her. All of her nightmares were there next to her, understand? It was as if she would go in there, the way an artist goes into his creation, and then she could return. And live on, entirely properly . . . That’s the thing . . . When she talked about the monster she was going to give birth to, you could understand it as a metaphor, the creati
on of a poem of horror. That’s the way we all understood it . . . The time itself was insane. Russian tanks were rumbling in Kaunas, a handful of collaborators was already rushing to Moscow to sign the papers to join the Soviet Union . . . We thought mother was just reacting to everything in her own way. You think no one would have watched out for her if we had believed she could kill herself? We all thought she would keep talking and talking about it . . . But she went off somewhere THERE and, completely consciously, didn’t want to return. She up and hanged herself. And what use was there in that? Unless maybe that sometimes I, I myself feel I’m that son of hers, that unborn monster.”

  “Stop!” says Lolita. “It’s my fault, I provoked you. Out of curiosity. I really want to know everything about you. Absolutely everything. But it’s just ordinary curiosity. You won’t be angry if I admit it? You’re as white as a sheet.”

  I look at her; now I see well. The drab fog has disappeared; once more sounds are no longer hollow. Lolita smells of milk and grass . . . and something else sugary . . . But I have to ask; I warned her I’d ask, even though I’m sorry for her. I have to ask. It won’t leave me alone. I have to know everything. Practically every strange death is Their work.

  “Tell me about your husband.”

  “I didn’t think you’d be interested. I thought it might even be unpleasant. Why should I talk about some third person?”

  “I’m interested,” I say, as if I wanted to hurt her on purpose. “Five sentences. Who he was and why he’s gone.”

  “He was an artist. A sculptor. Probably not a genius.” She puts the words on the table in front of me carefully, one at a time. I clearly see how they tremble, how pained they are. “He died. An unfortunate accident. You haven’t heard about it? It’s a well-known story.”

  “Sort of: that he drowned or something.”

  “Let’s not talk about him,” Lolita asks. “I don’t know what I could say . . . He was . . . he’s gone . . . It’s sad . . .”

  I don’t hear the siren of danger; I don’t feel the pang there, deep inside, in the very softest spot. It’s calm everywhere, even too calm. Every unexpected death piques me, but this one didn’t bother me at all. Lolita didn’t say anything stinging anyway, but I do see her eyes, I smell her scent, I even sense her bio-energy fields—I would notice danger at once. I want to sense it, but apparently it isn’t there.

  “It really is a sad story,” is all I say.

  Outside the window sprawls filthy, messy Vilnius: the new city collapsed on the old one. An inexplicable presentiment suffocates me, perhaps flowing from the future, since there is no stimulus for it from the present or the past. But it’s not frightening, because Lolita is, and in her there is both a body and a spirit. A glass, and a noble drink within. Do I love her because of the way she is, or is she that way because I love her? Does she make me better, or have I already made her so? Is she that way because she knows I love her, or because she doesn’t know how much I love her?

  And again: do I really love her?

  Vilnius, again and again: the old houses, cowering, trying to crawl underground, and the new multi-storied buildings insolently sticking out. The old ones are afraid; this is no place for them, they belong in Bologna, Padua, or Prague. The churches bend their spires down to the ground—they’re afraid to be so different. I go down the street and don’t even try to guess who’s devouring me with their eyes today. No spy intimidates me anymore: neither the men with massive heads, nor the fine-featured women with short-cut hair, nor the straw-haired lumpens with puffy faces and colorless eyes, sullenly staring out of the gateways, out of the doorways, through fly-stained windows. They have all become a customary part of the landscape. The daily routine of the continually siphoned-off and kanuked human being. Getting on the trolleybus, I’m actually amazed if I don’t find a hunched figure somewhere in a corner, glaring at me with the eyes of the meaningless void. I’ve known for a long time that the ones you see don’t matter. The ones that matter hide in secret cracks, like cockroaches. Cockroaches ought to be Their organization’s symbol, Their totem, Their heraldic sign—cockroaches on a greenish, moldy background, on the background of beloved, despised Vilnius—with all of its sounds and smells, which never abandon me. It’s like a beloved woman whose body has been eaten away by syphilis and leprosy. But you love her anyway; that love is eternal, even though nothing is left of her body but ruins, rot, and reeking wounds. You stroke the reeking ulcers, your hand dives into the abscesses, but you see the divine body it once was. Love doesn’t fade, it only grows stronger; you love even the wounds, because you know what that woman (that city) once was, what it could be. What it should be.

  Vilnius, again and again: a narrow, little Old Town street, smelling of oblivion and wet leaves. With an uneven arc it turns to the right, no one knows where it ends or where it leads. Probably to nonbeing, to the void. An old wall overgrown with lichens should surround it, and above the paving stones a single light blowing in the wind should dangle. But the wall is evenly painted with bright paints and the lantern, merely pretending to be old, shines calmly and steadily. Everything here is unreal, like in a burned-down theater, and no one worries if you’ll believe the acting. Everything is soaked in cheap pretense—no one knows why, or for whom. (Pretense is Their ploy too. They consider it extremely important that a person pretend to be something other than what he really is. They consider it extremely important that a person should sing about how full and happy he is, even though he’s a half-starved slave. It’s not enough for Them that a person is quiet; they need him to sing merrily. And the worst of it is that people really do sing.) In an ornamented gateway, a trio of teenagers loiter with their fists jammed into their windbreaker pockets. They spit constantly and swear every other word. They glare at me with wolfish glances and turn away: an easier target will show up.

  You couldn’t say Vilnius is suffocating in emptiness. It’s full, that is, full of emptiness, the worst form of emptiness. Pure emptiness is an ideal, a type of divinity. They aren’t worried about emptying; what They need most is simply to extract and embalm, and then to stuff the free space with surrogates. That’s the only way to bring in the new order: an ostensible man, a kanukaman. That’s the only way to create a new conglomerate: an ostensible city, a kanukacity. That’s how an ostensible world shows up, a kanukaworld, where God has been exchanged with the Shit of All Shits, time has been turned into eternal stagnation, and space becomes despair. A kanukaman’s virtue turns into the art of pretense, and honor becomes scorn. Even the blackest passions turn into oppressive drivel, while love becomes an erotic hymn of bodies . . . I saw it; that scene still stands in front of my eyes, but I do not want to name it or talk about it.

  The kanukacity oppresses me; Vilnius annoyingly repeats itself: its sounds and smells, its people and animals. The faces are all the same; it’s rare to come across a more interesting one. Although here’s one that’s really worth noticing: a thin, unshaven little face with cracked round eyeglasses. The face of an exhausted tramp, although the little guy is arrayed like he’s on parade: there’s even a bow-tie with red polka dots tied around his neck. I’ve seen him before; perhaps I’ve seen him many times. He’s like the ghost of Vilnius—a short little Jew, so Jewish it’s quite striking. A Vilnius Jew: not a banker, nor a sharp-eyed cheat, rather a small businessman or a craftsman, but brimming with archaic Jewish wisdom, able to cite from the Torah, the Kabbalah, or Hassidic teachings for hours on end. He slowly totters by, glances at me, and suddenly, quite clearly, says:

  “It’s a dangerous road. Oy, a dangerous road!”

  Don’t tell me we know one another? Surely he doesn’t know where I’m going? Surprised, I stop, while he totters on unconcerned, easily climbs up the creaking metal stairs, and in an instant is already balancing on the edge of the roof, merrily waving at me from above.

  I’m no longer surprised. Anything is possible in Vilnius. I emphasize: absolutely anything is possible here. Perhaps this is Ahasuerus himself, come f
rom the depths of the Polish years or a painting of Chagall’s. The main thing is, he’s right. The Way truly is dangerous. Extremely dangerous—if even a unshaven descendant of Vilnius’s old watchmakers warns me. At least someone spoke the truth. In the worn-down, played-out conversational record of Vilnius you won’t, unfortunately, hear a word about Them, even though everyone, absolutely every person, feels Them. But all of the recitative street monologues and all the anecdotes whispered in smoking rooms repeat the same thing—it’s enough to make your teeth hurt: the shortages, the stupidity of the authorities, the kingdom of universal lies. If those were the only things that mattered, we would be almost happy. How nice it would be, how simple and easy, if we could, even for an instant, identify Them with the authorities, the system, or the machine of compulsion. If that were all Their power would mean. If the threat were concrete and rational. No one even suspects that all the cursing of the government, even jokes told around the table, are dictated by Them, secretly regulated by Them. No one suspects that the most important part of their brain has been excised, the most important words taken out of their speech and the meanings of others deformed. At one time I myself thought Their goal was to suck out everyone with their pupil-less eyes, to wring out their secret powers, to feed on them the way blood-sucking insects feed on their victims’ blood. But I quickly understood it was just the means to attain a totally, completely different goal. They strive to turn us into something else, something not ourselves; they strive to infect us with gray spirochetes. But why? At one time I thought They valued control most. It’s entirely natural to think that way when you live in a world where idiots, having got hold of authority, hang on to it tooth and nail, determined to destroy millions just so they could freely rule the millions that remain. But by no means are They idiots. Power is also nothing more than a means. A mangy KGB agent is no more than a KGB agent; the government mafia is no more than a sullen mafia. It’s just the upper layer disguising the true essence. You can dig in Their direction all your life, but They’ll be hiding there anyway, in the depths. You get infected with Them like the plague and you feel (if you feel it) just the symptoms of the illness. To battle Them sometimes seems just as senseless as the hope of catching disease-causing microbes with your hands.