Vilnius Poker Page 19
The walls didn’t answer; I realized I still needed to get out of there. The way back was a live labyrinth. I slunk past repeating rooms, corridors, stairs, and covered balconies; I should have exited somewhere long before, but still there was no end. I kept returning to the same intersection of corridors, the same inner courtyards. Like it or not, I remembered the labyrinth of Babylon, whose center could be reached only by always turning to the left. But I didn’t need the center of the labyrinth, I was afraid of it. I needed either an exit, or father. It seemed to me that I felt father somewhere close by; that sensation sometimes grew weaker—I would turn somewhere else, and the sensation would grow stronger again. I wandered around as if I were playing “warmer, colder”: it was warm, then it was colder, warm again, warm, still warmer, and then it kept getting colder. It would seem father was right there, on the other side of the wall, but I wouldn’t find a door in the wall. And if I did come across a door, beyond it I would see new stairs, new corridors, and new covered balconies. I wandered without sensing time or space; I came to only when my feet began to hurt. Who knows how many kilometers I had walked. I stood in a dead-end corridor; doors leaned on both sides. I opened the nearest one on the right, beyond it ranged rooms crammed full of broken furniture. A vague presentiment told me there was a constant twilight here both day and night—as if that broken furniture devoured the light during the day and vomited it back out during the night. Standing there, my legs slowly sank into the rotten floorboards. It seemed something alive was holding me by the ankles. That corridor didn’t want to let go of me. For the first time it occurred to me that perhaps there was no way out of here. I rushed into a low gallery, ran out into yet another corridor, threw open all the doors in turn. It was the same everywhere: rooms stuffed full of broken furniture. That furniture looked like slaughtered people. An occasional door was locked, but I had neither the desire nor the strength to break them down. All I felt was the primitive fear of an animal trapped by pursuers. I tore up and down staircases and jumped over balcony rails onto the pavement of deep little courtyards. By now I heard the voices of the unseen pursuers surrounding me. I plunged through a creaking door and unexpectedly stumbled into someone’s living quarters. There were beds along the walls and an idiotic little carpet with swans hung on the wall. I was particularly reassured by a night pot with a handle set alongside a child’s bed. That was surely an object of this world. The awakened children’s dirty little faces stared at me with big eyes. A naked woman with pendulous breasts stood upright in the middle of the room, not even thinking of covering herself. Right next to me, a tiny little girl with scrawny little braids turned over on her side in bed and in her sleep clearly said: “Please ring three times.” Finally I saw a window; beyond it shone a completely normal, ordinary, dear, beloved street light. I leapt forward and half-dropped, half-fell down to the pavement. The window was rather high up, well above my head. I saw the woman, her breasts hung out in the street, close the window, unaccompanied by the slightest screaming or astonishment.
I was standing in a side street right next to the Narutis. Still not fully recovered, I was horrified to notice two figures leaning against the wall. They were loitering there in terribly evil, terribly dangerous poses. But at last the cool air revived me, and I realized that I was as safe as safe could be in the damp Vilnius night. The two men, concentrating intensely but staggering anyway, diligently relieved themselves against the wall.
“I’m a Lithuanian, and you’re a Lithuanian,” one of them slowly expounded. “We’re both Lithuanian.”
“Yeah!” the second nodded, actually smacking his head against the crumbling bricks of the wall.
”We won’t give up Lithuania to any shitty Russkies!”
“Yeah! Give it to ’em in the nose, the rats!”
“Let’s kiss, brother,” the first one shook off the last drops and tried to hug his companion. His kisses were wet and slimy, like the damp-drenched pavement of the side street.
“You’re a Lithuanian?”
“Yeah!”
“And I’m a Lithuanian. We’re both Lithuanians.”
“Lithuania is the land of heroes!” the second loudly declared. “Yeah!”
The two of them staggered towards the street, while I continued to think about father. Exhausted by the oppressive air of the corridors, the stale side street felt like a mountain resort. I almost felt good. From down the street an inharmonious duet drifted:
Ride Lithu-uanians, up the castle hill,
Ride Lithu-uanians, up the castle hill,
Ri-i-ide on, ri-i-ide on, Lith-thu-uanians
Car-r-ry on, car-r-ry on, wreaths of glory! . . .
The library bookcases are grim and monotonous (for some reason I’m walking through the library again), like the secret corridors of the Narutis quarter. And the dimness is exactly the same. I walk aimlessly; the bookcases slowly slink by. It seems it’s a desert, a boundless desert of frozen thoughts and metaphors. Here, between the identical rows of books, I immediately remember the labyrinth of rooms cluttered with broken furniture. Earlier I had even hoped to come across father here, quietly dawdling around the corner, inhaling on a cigarette that’s hidden between his fingers. Now I don’t expect anything anymore, although the books charm me anyway. No, they didn’t provide me with clear answers. But they helped me grasp a great deal. I came across many of Their attributes in books first, and only afterwards in the real world. Books protect me from aimless wandering, from hasty conclusions. There was a time when I thought They existed only here: in Vilnius, in Lithuania, in Russia. I didn’t have the strength to think about everyone, about the entire world. A study of history dispelled this fallacy. In the twentieth century alone Their activities mark Italy and Germany, China and Cambodia (They have long been fond of China in general). And then there’s Spain in the Middle Ages, where They ruled for entire centuries! It’s enough to remember Charles the Bewitched, the impotent dwarf: when he was dissected they discovered that he had a heart the size of a child’s fist, rotten intestines, and one black testicle. I came across incontrovertible evidence that Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor, a christened Jew who burned Jews at the stake with the greatest enthusiasm, was Their commissar.
Alas, They are everywhere, in every country, in every system. They are and were in every epoch—sometimes they were in control, more often they hid, but they always waited for their chance. My head spins from all the data about kanuked people, nations, and even civilizations. In the encyclopedia of the kanuked, the Roman Empire would nestle next to Plato, the first of Their world commissars. The kanukas of kanukai, Stalin, would end up in the encyclopedia next to the ruin of the Mayan civilization. Alas, even entire civilizations are kanuked, the same way people are. To this day scholars haven’t managed to properly explain why all the old civilizations, without exception, came to ruin, or what laws of death govern them. After all, they don’t die biologically, the way people do. Where did Greece and Egypt’s power and wisdom disappear to, even though Greece and Egypt still exist? Where are the ancient Chinese, Mayans, or Aztecs? Researchers seize on any and all arguments, even co-opting space aliens, but They don’t raise the slightest red flag. They, only They, are to blame! What other evidence do you need? Scholarly conjectures sometimes drive me into a rage. It’s known that a civilization died over the lifespan of several generations, that it encountered no epidemics or cataclysms. And they vaguely babble on about some social reasons or who knows what else. How can they be so blind? It’s always Their pupil-less eyes peering out of the ruins of a civilization. No, They don’t control nature’s powers or kingdoms, however, they manage to destroy what matters most—people’s spirit. They penetrate into every person’s brain, and then calmly retreat. Nothing more needs to be done. The kanuked destroy themselves.
But it isn’t the study of individual nations that matters most to me, I’m most interested in the activities of individual people who have gone down The Way. It’s not an idle curiosity or a desire to delve i
nto strangers’ fates. Oh, if only I could restrain my distant, secret friends, if only I could guard them from destruction! Alas, they are distant not just in space, but in time too. But their fatal mistakes are actually warnings of incalculable value. I can avoid those mistakes. It’s not for me to die in a car crash like Camus (like Gedis). It’s not for me to be stuffed into prison, like Jean Genet, or guillotined, like de Sade (the poor revolutionary Marquis—they made him into nothing more than a symbol of sexual deviation). Better to balance on the edge of the abyss, as Ortega y Gasset does, practically the only one in modern times who dares to survey Their methods. (Deception is possible here too: They could have purposely cracked the cover open a bit, calculating that reasoning about the revolt of the kanuked masses is useful to Them. On the other hand, Ortega duped them anyway: he showed how art has been stolen from the Western world—that’s one of Their biggest achievements.) Alas, those who have protected themselves, like Ortega, are few, wretchedly few. Rummaging about in the lives of like-minded thinkers, I risk turning into a necrophiliac: there’s so many corpses, madmen, and suicides there. Even Nietzsche, the divine, poetic Nietzsche! A man who dared to publicly declare that sooner or later we’ll succeed in triumphing over Them, in healing kanuked man and in cultivating a true, inspired, Übermensch who doesn’t submit to Them. It’s awful to even remember Nietzsche’s lot. In life he was destroyed, forced into insanity and suicide, deceived and misrepresented. But even that wasn’t enough. They don’t leave even the dead in peace. Their Satanic calculations are horrifying: Nietzsche’s music of the heavenly spheres, his divine poetry, was handed over to one of the worst maniacs of the twentieth century. The dream of an unkanuked man, in the hands of the Great Kanukas, turned into butchery and labor camps. Is it possible to think up a worse method of discrediting someone? Millions of people, hearing Nietzsche’s name, involuntarily remember Hitler and the Nazis. Yes, it isn’t just that books give me support—at the same time they destroy me by degrees, and constantly deepen my despair. On some level it begins to seem we’ll never succeed in penetrating Their secrets, much less in surmounting Them. I know only one thing for sure: whatever you do, you must always leave an escape route open. You can never burn all of your bridges. One of Their key pathological methods is to drive a person (or even an entire nation) into a real or imaginary situation with no escape route, so all that remains is a single, unguarded step straight into Their prepared trap. Convincing a person it’s the only way is of utmost importance. It’s the only way to reach the height of kanukism, to reach Their paramount sphere of prowess: a man accepting slavery as if it were a stroke of luck—a self-satisfied slave. (Once, well in his cups, our zone boss condescended to chat with us, the “incorrigibles”; he told us that in the mountains, twenty kilometers away, there was some sort of tunnel being dug, that people were digging it without a roof over their heads, practically without food, and without warm clothes.
“A tunnel’s easy to guard,” I observed. “Cover the opening with barbed wire, tie a couple of man-eating dogs to it—and that would do it.”
“My boy,” the zone boss edifyingly pronounced, “Wake up. There’s no wire, no dogs, no guards. Why waste money if you can get by without spending anything? Those idiot Communist Youth are digging the tunnel. They are looked after and guarded by their own idiotic enthusiasm.”)
Stalin’s ultimatum to Lithuania is a classic example of Their pathologic: either Lithuania will let the Soviet Army divisions in to guard the Soviet Army divisions that are already in Lithuania, or the Soviet Army divisions will march into Lithuania without Lithuania’s compliance. Total freedom to pick whatever your heart desires. The implied alternative—forceful resistance—circumspectly annihilated: the leader of Lithuania’s army has long since been bought off. Lithuania was ruined when it let the first five Russian soldiers in, when Vilnius, thanks to the generous father of the people, Stalin, rode into Lithuania like a giant Trojan horse.
Vilnius, it’s Vilnius again!
Bookcases; there are bookcases around me again. Breathing in the heavy dust of the books, I occasionally turn around and throw a word to Gedis over my shoulder. I feel a burning weakness when I realize once again that he is no more. The loss is irreparable. All losses are irreparable. I had a mother, but I no longer have her. I had a father—he showed up and disappeared again. I had a beloved wife—They snatched her for themselves. I had a friend—They killed him. What will They do to Lolita?
Gedis revealed the structure of the library to me (the structure of all libraries). Stumbling into a sea of millions of books, I nearly went mad with joy; I just tried to keep from drowning. I devoured as many as I could get my hands on. I didn’t pay the least attention to the remote little rooms where dour figures with grown-together eyebrows sat. Gedis looked right at them. It was only at his urging that I realized for the first time what a special collection is. Of course I knew there are sections like that in libraries. But in my imagination a special collection was a small chamber hiding the couple hundred tomes that are taboo for a Soviet man. Oh, divine naïveté! . . . Our most extreme fantasies, our most horrifying theories, fade to insignificance when compared to Their reality; they turn out to be no more than the naïve babbling of babies. Gedis laughed out loud when he heard about my several-hundred-volume special collection. Actually, there isn’t a single book in it, just a closed catalog, which is inaccessible to ordinary mortals. The size of the catalog shocked me. Hundred of thousands of books are buried there. God knows I shuddered in horror when I learned what portion of the world is hidden from us. Probably the best, the most important part. It’s an extraordinary mockery that those books are floating in the common sea of books, but are nevertheless unattainable. Even without ever having been in a library collection it’s not difficult to understand that among a million books you’d never find what you wanted without a catalog, without some coordinates. It’s impossible. Those books are right there, but for us they don’t exist. I discovered that there is also a special special collection with a separate catalog; those who aren’t among the chosen aren’t allowed to even come close to it. I was no longer surprised when I found out from the old-timers (I’ll never forget their frightened whispers) that there is a special special special collection too: books piled in the basement, bricked in like a nuclear shelter, with hermetically sealed metal doors. Books that almost no one can access. I’d had enough already, but Gedis just smiled wryly. He calmly declared that there should also be a box made of a special titanium alloy, the special special special special collection. That box is impossible to open; it’s impossible to even blow it up. Inside are hidden books that no one at all is allowed to read, or even to see.
Gedis always amazed me. I never understood (and I still don’t understand), where a scrupulous kid from a Lithuanian village got his strange inclinations. I wasn’t surprised that he defended his first dissertation in mathematics at twenty-five, and his second at thirty: a talent in mathematics doesn’t depend on your place of birth. But how could he, still plowing fields at sixteen, manage to crack philosophical systems like nuts, recite page after page of Proust in French and Joyce in English? When did he have the time to learn and come to love all that? After all, he grew up where many see only patriarchal values, wells with sweeps, pure Lithuanian maidens with golden braids, folk wisdom, and other pseudo-folk concoctions. From what good fairy did Gedis get a soul of the highest order, a subtle taste, and a boundless predilection for novelty, what instilled in him a longing for the distant islands of the soul, a hunger to take in everything? What force, what gods ordered him to play jazz and just jazz? You’d naturally assume, provincial of provincials that he was, that he wouldn’t even have known that somewhere in the wide world such a thing as jazz existed.
All of us Lithuanians, up against free Europeans or Americans, feel the way blacks do about whites: we envy them and we hate them, we have very well-founded accusations against them and we feel we’re in the right, but at the same time we can never get
rid of our inferiority complex. Gedis didn’t have the slightest complex. Presenting a paper at some mathematical congress in Paris, he’d spend every free moment at the Louvre, in jazz clubs, or heaven knows where else. He drank coffee with Sartre, argued about painting with Picasso, and played a jam session with Coltrane. He didn’t have an ounce of snobbery; even I would learn about his exploits accidentally, sometimes from him (“when I played with Trane, for some reason I got the urge to play this idiotic trill . . . like this . . .”), but most often from others—they would tell me about it with their eyes popping out in envy and amazement. I only learned how respected he was as a mathematician from the letters of condolence. It seemed every other topologist in the world, all the universities and academies, sadly brushed away a tear, knowing that without Gedis, topology would never be the same as it had been before him (that’s what Professor Edwards wrote from Oxford). Even the mystic Grothendieck, for the first time in several years, awoke from his self-imposed exile in Tibet and wrote with a thin little brush in red ink: “By now I have forgotten what mathematics is, but I will always remember who Gediminas was. The Grand Duke of Lithuania.” I was friends with Gediminas for ten years, and, from the way he talked, I thought he was merely one of a hundred thousand ordinary servants of mathematics. There is probably nothing more beautiful than a great person who doesn’t value his greatness.
I remember many of his monologues, but best of all I remember how he played. Gedis’s music wove itself into one great ALL, it even seems to me that it reinforces and supports the unity of that ALL most. When he was playing, I’d suddenly get the feeling Gedis had already lived in this world more than once, that there were Aristotles and Platos, Confuciuses and Lao-Dzes lying hidden inside him for ages already; he didn’t need to study them—all he had to do was remember. He plays Shakespeare and Saint Augustine, resonates with Hume and Eliot’s The Wasteland, Moore’s sculptures, and Rauschenberg’s broad compositions. And he doesn’t play, Lord save us, what’s already written, carved in stone or painted. Gedis plays pure music. He plays that which others leave between the words, the lines and the colors; what others aren’t able to express. He plays scents, dreams, and illusions all the time. Once he organized a concert for me alone, a concert overflowing with horror, which, Lord knows, I’d think I’d dreamed up if there weren’t live witnesses walking around. I know now that he already had some idea of Them at the time; a presentiment of Their intentions bid him answer quickly by way of his music. Up until then, Gediminas would only occasionally sit in with newly forming quartets in Vilnius. He would blend in instantly to any style, but it wasn’t that he just joined in; rather he immediately raised the quality of the entire ensemble. He had an inborn talent for persuasion and teaching—without any imperiousness or force. The young jazz players of Vilnius unanimously confirmed that during the course of several hours, without saying a word, he would explain so much about jazz, improvisation, and music in general that, according to one violinist, “you start hearing the violin of God, even though you know very well that God surely never plays the violin.” When Gedis announced he was organizing an ensemble, all of the invited came running headlong, throwing other work aside, even though he warned them that after all the trouble they would give only one concert. The jazzmen were determined to carry him on their shoulders, together with the grand piano, to wherever he wanted. Incidentally, that’s just what happened. Gedis categorically demanded the concert be held in an abandoned church. At first it seemed to me the caprice of a madman: they needed to temporarily steal a concert grand and cart it off who knows where. Once more I witnessed how much influence Gediminas Riauba had over people; his colleagues accepted this whim without blinking an eye. The concert was entirely underground: no posters, no tickets, no invitations. They had to break into the church illegally, quietly breaking down the door. All of the participants felt like conspirators; it seemed to me that, despite themselves, they feared that uniformed officials would crudely interrupt the music at the crucial moment. Excited by these surreptitious preparations, I was hardly surprised to find out that Gediminas had selected my church. The little wine factory had long since closed down; the church was left completely forsaken—it seemed even the exterior was covered in cobwebs. I was calm; I got nervous only on the evening of the concert, walking up the stone-paved street and smelling the oppressive smell of garbage wine. It seemed I was stepping into my own past, full of secret dangers.