Vilnius Poker Page 18

  Even if we’re all destroyed, They will remain. If we turn the earth into a desert poisoned with chemicals and radiation, nothing will be left alive in it. But not entirely! Cockroaches will survive even a nuclear war! Cockroaches are invincible. Let’s think about that. Perhaps we’ll sense how the flow of thoughts brings us closer to grasping Their essence.

  Perhaps that’s Their ultimate goal, to leave the world empty but for Them. Even if it’s only in the form of cockroaches. In the end, do the great kanukai commissars—even Stalin—differ that much from cockroaches in their goals or essence? Even their whiskers are practically identical.

  This sort of reasoning carries me, floats me through Vilnius; I don’t want to think about anything anymore, I don’t want to smell and hear my city, I don’t want that which is long since dead to haunt me. I go where my feet lead me, and they can only lead me to a single spot. On its own my hand pushes open a familiar door; my feet stumble on the uneven stairs.

  The Narutis is exactly the same as always. The same walls, the same faces. Little broken-down tables with crooked legs. Meager snacks, thrown any which way onto metal plates. Men indifferently swigging beer and cheap wine that turns the blood to sand and breeds worms in the liver. (It would be ridiculous to look down on them or condemn them—they don’t destroy and ruin themselves any quicker than those who never touch wine, but voluntarily breed worms in their brains.) There’s a smell lingering here that you can smell only in barracks and railroad stations. Nothing has changed at the Narutis, only I have changed considerably. My fashionably-cut suit and well-rested eyes are improper here. My appearance should irritate everyone. However, the regulars just look me over indifferently and turn away again. I know very well why that is. There is an indelible mark, whose meaning no one knows, pressed onto the face of a person who once haunted the Narutis. You won’t find it looking in a mirror; you won’t figure out what it is that gives you away as a member of the secret Narutis community. I can see that mark on other people’s faces immediately. The oppressive mark of Mackus the Hunchback.

  I even flinch: it seems like Mackus the Hunchback will come to the table at any moment and, as always, ask for vodka. Without doubt he will address me as “sir,” he always addresses me that way. Only in the Narutis will you meet an alcoholic wreck who addresses everyone as “sir” or “mister”; he still remembers his associate professorship and his fiery speeches at scholarly councils. Mackus remembers a great deal, although there’s one thing he tries very hard to forget: how, in fifty-three (I still hadn’t been released), with several other trustworthy boys, he took secret KGB files outside the city and burned them, so that no one would even know the names of the people who are gone, and, even more, so that no one would find out that they had not, and could not, have committed any crimes. At that time the authorities were trembling and hiding their work; they desperately needed helpful hunchbacks. Mackus the Hunchback helpfully burned up those musty papers that dispassionately reported the suffering of Lithuanians and the genocide the government had commenced. They were the only documents, and he burned them up—later he vainly tried to forget it. But he unavoidably remembered those thousands of flaming files (probably mine too)—and with each burned file a person’s fate burned as well. Mackus even started imagining that it wasn’t paper he had burned, but rather thousands of live people. In his dreams, the charred pages turned into charred limbs and fried intestines. He desperately wanted to forget it, but after the third drink he would start telling all about it over and over again. I’d always pour him some vodka—and not just to hear about the dreadful bonfire of Vilnius again. I was sorry for Mackus the Hunchback: they didn’t succeed in entirely turning him into a kanukas, a speck of conscience remained in him. Hundreds, or maybe thousands of much more serious criminals don’t remember their crimes for an instant; they don’t feel they’ve committed a crime at all. At least Mackus the Hunchback reproached himself.

  “It was all of our memory I burned up,” he would say glumly. “For that I’ll burn in eternal fire myself. I’ll be the first to get thrown into the pool of fire. I destroyed those files so that later anyone who remembered, who was seeking justice, could be cut off by saying: you made all of this up, how are you going to prove it?”

  I took a gulp of warm beer and looked around again—after all, it’s not Mackus the Hunchback I’m looking for at all. I came wanting to repeat the unrepeatable, the episode that had once occurred. Or maybe it hadn’t happened at all?

  At that time I stood on the edge. Gedis was already gone. The city drained me and ravaged me with its ghostly stares. I felt persecuted, pressed into a corner, but like a crazed beast I went straight for the hunters. I sat around in the Narutis; I frequented Old Town’s dives. I was seeking destruction; I was provoking Them.

  Now I sit in the Narutis, nearly gagging from the smell of scorched cabbage, and try to overcome it with vodka. The vodka is warm and disgusting, undoubtedly diluted with tap water; it turns your guts inside out. I sit all alone waiting for my Godot, like the others gathered here. Somewhere else perhaps there is a world, somewhere else rivers flow and winds blow. Somewhere else (Lord please, please!) maybe there are even humans. But here—only bitter, cheap cigarette smoke, the stench of scorched cabbage, and the monotony of time flowing backwards.

  I came here looking for something: a thing, an animal, or a person. A thing, an animal, or a person? It’s trivial, it’s all nothing. A mysterious object that means something to me couldn’t turn up here. The only life here is the cockroaches, dazed by the light, crawling out of the cracks. The gray ruler of Old Town’s streets, the short, neckless spiderman, will surely not show up here. So why should I find an answer in this universe of boiled cabbage, vodka, and deformed faces? However, something tells me to wait just precisely here. The memory of the neckless spiderman won’t give me peace. I sit and look at everyone in turn, not putting my hopes on anything, until my glance stumbles upon an unusual, unexpected figure of a man who doesn’t fit in here. I could swear he wasn’t here a second ago. He sprang from the earth; every wrinkle in his face, every fold in his clothes, screams and shouts that he didn’t get here the way everyone else did. He has some sort of secret purpose. And his purpose can only be me. I feel a sharp pang in my chest; my hand pours the rest of the tumbler into my mouth of its own accord. The man looks straight at me. His eyes are brimming with quiet and . . . wait, wait . . . yes, a sweetish smell of rot. I have already seen his beautiful, elegant hands, so out of place next to the dirty shirt and frayed remains of a jacket. I already know he’s come for me, but I have no idea what he could want from me (I don’t want anything from him).

  Don’t tell me he’ll simply take me out to the street and push me under a passing truck? I’m not Gedis, after all. Gedis knew something, and I’m just barely beginning to speculate. Perhaps he came to intimidate me, to break me, to take away my will? The man stands up, rises to his full, gigantic height, and approaches. I look only at him, at his glassy eyes with narrow pupils, and I know him, I know him well.

  “Hello, Vytie.”

  It seems a hundred thunderclaps should roar; it seems the entire Narutis should sink straight into the ground. The man pats my hand. I don’t pull it away because across from me sits my father.

  “I thought you were in America . . . or Australia . . .” I say in a weird voice. “In Chicago, or Melbourne.”

  “As far as I know, this country is called Lithuania,” father says calmly, as if we had separated only yesterday, “and this city is Vilnius.”

  I obediently followed him out, through the inner door of the Narutis, through the stench-spreading kitchen, through a small inner courtyard. We climbed up creaking stairs; several times my feet sank into rotten wood. Father’s back swayed in front of my eyes, sometimes widening, sometimes narrowing. It pulsated like the naked heart of a giant animal.

  “You think I’m dead?” father inquired without turning around. “In a certain sense that’s true.”

  The two
of us turned into a long arched hallway; on both sides there were doors, doors, doors. Some of them were open; slovenly women were working inside. Everything seemed natural, but there was something missing. I didn’t immediately realize I wasn’t hearing even the slightest sound, not even our own footsteps: their echo was apparently stifled by the rotten floorboards. They were rotten through—your feet stuck in them as if it were a swampy meadow; we should have left footprints as we passed by. I suddenly put it together that we were circling around in the places where my Irena would disappear; we were slowly penetrating into the kingdom of the neckless spiderman. My throat suddenly dried out; I fearfully asked myself what my father was doing here. Where was he taking me? Why does he feel at home here? His back no longer pulsated, it flashed regularly before my eyes, turned to the right, to the left, to the right again, to the left, to the right, to the right, to the left. In the empty rooms I discerned only rickety furniture piled in the corners. Those rooms were endless; we went and went, I could no longer understand where all of this labyrinth could fit: the Narutis quarter isn’t all that large, we should have exited its borders long ago, maybe even Old Town’s borders. Finally, father stepped into a large windowless room and stopped.

  “Greetings, son,” he said hoarsely. “Sit down, we’ll talk.”

  For some reason it seemed everything had to be this way. I had to sit on the rotten floor, father had to stand off a bit—as if he feared I would suddenly touch him and convince myself he’s woven out of fog. It seemed he had to say just precisely what he said. He talked a lot. I don’t remember how the time passed, I don’t remember where the bottle of Jamaican rum came from, or the tall candle in a bronze candleholder. The candle looked fake: its flame didn’t flutter; it seemed the air in the room was solidified, not even our breathing could budge it. Father kept talking about mother, our house, and grandfather’s altar; then he spoke about the war. I was seized by an unpleasant presentiment: he said no more about himself than what I already knew. You’d think thirty years had literally been erased from his life. He talked about the war like a person who hadn’t experienced it, about foreign countries like a person who hadn’t visited them. It seemed he had come from our last evening together, but for some unknown reason he was aged and hunched over, for some unknown reason his voice had lost its resonance. The conversation (or father’s monologue) bobbed along over and over in the same spot; the good feeling that everything was the way it should be slowly disappeared. I no longer listened to his words, I just looked at father’s face and tried to at least read something there. I started getting angry with this elderly person who had invaded my life without warning, confusing everything, even though everything was already confused without him. My face probably gave my thoughts away. Maybe I just imagined it, but my father’s eyes suddenly flashed tenderness and fear, together with a desire to help me. Undoubtedly I only imagined it; however, it was enough—my anger instantly dissipated. I came to my senses and realized that my father was sitting in front of me. Father, whom I hadn’t seen in thirty years. A man from whose seed I am created, whose weaknesses and strengths I inherited. My eyes involuntarily flooded with tears. I probably hadn’t cried in a quarter of a century. But that time I cried. No, I wasn’t sorry for myself; probably I was the most sorry for father, for the man with tousled gray hair sitting in front of me. I was sorry for the back nooks of Old Town, reeking of boiled cabbage and drowning in a drab silence, I was sorry for Vilnius, above which hung a fog of fear and despair, sorry for all of its inhabitants, the irretrievably dead, who don’t even know they are no longer alive.

  “Father,” I interrupted his speech, “Father, what should be done?”

  The two of us were like wanderers in the desert, only he was more experienced. He knew more. However, he was quiet; perhaps he was vacillating or deliberating. It was only then I felt how stuffy, how dead the room’s air was. I was practically suffocating. But father was still quiet, intently looking me in the eyes, or even deeper, as if he wanted to look straight through into my brain.

  “You don’t know what to do now?” he asked in a thick voice. “You don’t even want to think about what’s waiting for you? You’re tormented by obliterating stares?”

  The questions were so unexpected and so well-aimed that I was at a loss for words. It seemed I should have anticipated something like this; now, however, my thoughts got confused, and I kept getting more feverish.

  “You feel as if something malicious and evil is gathering about you, something you cannot explain or even decently name. You feel some kind of threat around you? A dreadful danger?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve decided to find out for yourself what it is?”

  “Yes. I’m trying.”

  “Strange characters keep getting underfoot more and more frequently? You want to investigate them, but you no longer know yourself if you’re shadowing them, or if they’re shadowing you?”

  “Yes. I need help.”

  “Help? Help? There is no help. Don’t go there, Vytie. Don’t go there!”

  “Do you know the way?” My voice trembled, I shook all over, I wanted to be quiet, but I spoke all the same. “Do you know where it leads?”

  “Help?” Father gave a hoarse laugh; his voice no longer asked, but angrily asserted something. “As a child you weren’t afraid of either the light or the dark; the worst thing for you was the dusk, the dimness.”

  “Yes.”

  “You liked to hide in the dark: in basements, in burrows, so no one would see you. You felt safe there.”

  “Yes. Vilnius’s underground was my childhood paradise.”

  “People were disgusting and dangerous, they didn’t at all act the way they should. This was truly horrible to you . . . You felt they were controlled by something evil.”

  “Yes. Probably yes.”

  “You fought off these thoughts, these sensations, but they persecuted you.”

  “Yes.”

  “You didn’t want to curse every living soul, you didn’t want to blame them. You understood that they were merely victims, that the cause was hidden somewhere else, on the outside.”

  “Yes. Yes!”

  “Body deformations? The strangest degradations?”

  “Yes! Yes!”

  “Your friend transformed from the incarnation of wisdom into a dribbling idiot? A person close to you, sunk into an inconceivable swamp and trying to drag you along?”

  “Yes! Yes! Yes!”

  I screamed at the top of my voice, and father fell silent. Sweat poured down my face and chest; I felt as if I had been beaten, all my bones ached. Every one of father’s questions multiplied the confusion. Earlier I could still doubt, I could blame my own excessive sensitivity, or chance, or coincidence. I could contrive a defensive wall of rational arguments. Now that wall crumbled and cracked—and I crumbled and cracked myself.

  “It’s not true, Vyt. You’re imagining things,” father suddenly spoke exceedingly softly. “It’s not true. It’s a lie, Vyt. Come to your senses, look around. People are people, faces are faces . . . Everything’s all right . . . Everything’s all right, it’s okay . . . Look around—is anyone else raving the way you do? Come to your senses, Vyt . . .”

  “You’re lying,” I hissed, “Why are you lying?”

  He suddenly stood up and hung over me with his entire body, as if he wanted to crush me. He stuck his face, with its hot breath, right in front of my eyes. He looked at me with anger and despair. I still hoped for his help, and he looked at me like at a condemned man. I remember his eyes well. Inevitability has eyes like that.

  “You don’t even suspect what kind of hell you’ve opened the door to,” he spoke quietly, swaying to the sides. “To a hell without flames, without the hot tar, the very worst hell of all: quiet, indifferent, senseless, where the victims are satisfied with their murderers . . .”

  Suddenly darkness fell upon me. I heard a quiet rustle and felt a soft breeze on my cheek. By the time I collected myself, bo
th the rustling and the draft were gone. I was left alone in complete darkness. Crazed, I sprang towards the now silent rustling, began groping about and banging on the wall with my fist. I was obliged to catch up with him right away, to recover my father. I had to hug him, to kiss him, to say everything I hadn’t said. I didn’t want to save myself, not myself at all—I wanted to save father. I didn’t have the time to tell him I’m still strong. I could protect and defend him. The two of us could take on the entire world—me and my father. Why, we’re Vargalyses! We must fight together—after all, we’re branches of the same tree. I banged on the wall harder and harder, it seemed I even screamed aloud, “Give me back my father! Bring back my father!” I couldn’t even imagine I would never see him again.