Vilnius Poker Read online

  The best place to hide yourself from passersby is next to Vilnius’s real river. The Neris is the river of Vilnius’s time, the river of memory. It remembers nothing itself; it just carries other’s memories. It’s not true that you can’t wade into the same river’s stream twice. Heraclitus was mistaken, or more accurately, he had some other river in mind, certainly not this river. The water of the Neris turns and turns in a circle, you can wade into the same stream many times. You can scoop up a handful of water that saw the founding of Vilnius, drink a gulp the Iron Wolf once drank. You fling a pebble into the murky current, it plops into the water, and its echo summons some ancient sound, words pronounced once upon a time—maybe even your own. The Neris remembers everything; it’s a miraculous river, you just need to hear it talking. Sometimes I hear it.

  There now, I pick up a small stone and throw it into the current. You’ll find the river said something, but I didn’t make it out: the cars got in the way. You need to listen to the Neris talking in the quiet of the night, or at least not here, where automobiles roar by.

  I walk away from the river; I’m drawn to wander aimlessly, even though I’ve long since memorized all the byways of Vilnius. Saint Jacob’s church nestles beyond the square where Lenin rules. The church doors are securely locked, and the stairs to the bell tower are fenced off with the thickest possible grade of sheet metal, so the nonexistent Lithuanian terrorists won’t climb up during some parade and aim a shotgun above Lenin’s bronze pate—straight at the government podium. It really would be handy to shoot from here, but who aims at puppets? Except perhaps the spirit of our platoon leader Bitinas.

  Lenin has turned his back to me; his arm points at the KGB building. I obey; I go straight up to it and stop for a minute, although others automatically quicken their step here: the building repels them, acts like some sort of anti-magnet. No one wants to be guarded, to be even more secure than they are. Only I don’t hurry away; this building hasn’t intimidated me for a long time, I’ve already been where this earth’s tortures seem like silly games. Only someone who has borne real torture can stand here calmly and think about the newest legend of our times: people say the KGB has outfitted bunkers under Lenin’s square, connected to the buildings by a tunnel. Times change, and so do the legends—earlier in Vilnius they would tell tales about ghosts and the accursed gold buried in churches’ naves. And about the Vilnius Basilisk.

  Most likely there’s neither tunnels nor bunkers here, but there are other, invisible tunnels and cells, I know quite a bit about them. The things that matter most in this world aren’t those you can see with ordinary sight. Only the second sight perceives the essence. Looking casually, you see only one interesting thing there: a deep hole dug up in the middle of the sidewalk—for absolutely no apparent reason. Bending over, I peer down: there are no bunkers to be seen.

  I’ve been gawking too long: a figure with puffy eyes dressed in canvas clothes blows his nose right by my ear and declares angrily in Polish:

  “What’s the gentleman standing around for? There’s people at work here, we don’t need any gawkers!”

  A Pole. One head of the multilingual dragon of Vilnius. A dragon that speaks ten languages, but doesn’t know how to speak a single one correctly. Someone from Warszawa or Kraków wouldn’t understand his accent. He spoke Polish on purpose, even though he sees that I’m Lithuanian. Many Poles still haven’t backed off; they naïvely remember the period between the wars, when they had seized Vilnius. Jokers—they seized it without even knowing why, the city always suffered economically. Vilnius, the city of Polish poets: the city of both Mickiewicz and Miłosz. Apparently, it’s the city of this bard of canvas clothes and cheap wine too. The poets wrote poems and the simpler Poles raged over Vilnius. It’s not just them; all of the dragon’s heads bite each other—the Lithuanian one, the Polish one, the Russian one, and . . . No, the Jews live here quietly. Folk wisdom gives birth to myths, but there is no mythology that would reflect Vilnius. Where else would you find a dragon like this, whose heads fight among themselves, swearing in different languages?

  “I’m talking to you—can’t you hear?”

  The puffy little eyes stare, enraged and insolent. The righteous fury of a lumpen who’s forced to work hung over, aimed at a well-dressed idler. It’s horribly depressing and dull; around us it’s even thick with the stinking pigeons of Vilnius, and here that still-not-sober Pole too.

  There’s your grandfather, he’s a hundred years old. His jaws tremble frequently, but his eyes flash lightning. A disheveled bag of bones in a corner of the hospital room, he moans and rocks his bandaged hand like a baby.

  “Grandfather, can I help?”

  “I can still walk,” say his angry, narrow lips, “look out for yourself.”

  Staggering, he crosses the room; he is followed by perhaps ten pairs of old, feeble eyes. Along the ground hovers an oppressive smell of sweat and carbolic acid. Grandfather is making his way down the narrow corridor by now, bracing himself constantly against the wall.

  “When I was fifty years old, you were born,” says his hunched back, “Now you’re fifty yourself, and who has been born to your son? Where is your son? Where are your grandchildren?”

  The nauseating smell of corpses emanates from the beds lined up in the hall. The eyes of the live corpses next to the wall follow us. The hall is jammed full of patients, they moan and writhe like little worms.

  “Give me a cig,” says grandfather’s trembling chin.

  He blinks frequently from the smoke, but he doesn’t cough. He carefully looks to the sides, leans down over the stair railings, and finally he raises his withered head next to your ear:

  “There are eleven carcasses in my room. At least seven are Poles.”

  He stares at you without blinking, testing if it’s possible to trust you with the great secret.

  “Three of them are pretending to be Lithuanians,” he explains further. “They’ve invented Lithuanian last names for themselves. They don’t speak Polish. But I saw through them: they’re secret Poles. The secret Poles are the worst.”

  He scratches his leg with a scrawny hand, pulls up one leg of his pajamas. Grandfather’s calf is mined with deep scars, something like a rotten tree trunk.

  “You know,” he says with his head hanging, “It’ll turn out they’ve slipped in among the doctors too. They’re giving me the wrong medicine on purpose! . . . They’re not ready to murder me . . . They want me to rot alive . . . They’re taking revenge: I’ve ruined a lot of blood for those Polacks . . . They saw Vilnius like they saw the back of their heads . . .”

  Grandfather giggles foolishly, winks at you, and nods his head, inviting you to come downstairs. He doesn’t manage to wink with one eye; he flaps both eyelids at the same time. You go through the landing below and descend to a door under the stairs. By the time you adjust to the dark, a sickening lump comes up at the back of your throat. It’s an unbelievable hospital latrine, walloping you with soured excrement. The tiles on the wall have been broken out, the floor is fouled, there are puddles stagnating everywhere. Grandfather, giggling, squats by a hideous heap of waste, an entire tower of it. It looms there like a symbol of humanity; it’s the Absolute, the Shit of All Shits, with a puffy, pulpy body. Tongues of fresh waste cover it like a mantle—all colors, from yellowish to black. You feel sick, you want to scream, but the old man just giggles insanely.

  “You know a person by his shit, Vytie!” His hands grub around in the heap of waste, separating them by color. “I’ll get even with those Poles! Let them all devour their own shit . . . See, these pale ones—they’re Vacelis’s. You hear, Vyt, they all gorge themselves without blinking an eye, they’re just surprised: why does that gravy have such a strange scent? A scent, you hear, it’s a scent to them! And they devour it—the more they shit, the more they devour, eh?”

  The black tiles of the boulevard, laid, incidentally, during the Polish period, remain behind my back. I climb the steps to Pamėklių Hill. The Polish yea
rs, the German years, before them and after them—the Russian rule. You won’t even remember Vilnius’s Lithuanian years; it flows only in the Neris, with its waters it keeps turning and turning in a circle. I’m almost the only one climbing the stairs, everyone else is headed down. Why are they so ugly? Surely there aren’t people like that walking around in other beautiful cities? Do faceless figures tread the streets of Bologna too? Or Lisbon’s? Do people’s innards spill out so vividly everywhere, does consciousness shape existence so clearly everywhere? I keep asking myself this, even though I know very well that They paint the landscape of both Portuguese and Italian faces. Their system didn’t show up yesterday, nor a century ago. And certainly not in Lithuania. When and where? No one knows. The sphere of the earth, speedily spinning to destruction, doesn’t bother with such metaphysical problems; it’s too busy spinning to destruction.

  I had already raised a leg to take a step, but suddenly I froze. I had expected it, waited for it, but the sight still caught me by surprise: around the corner a black limousine quietly hums; two (or three?) pudgy faces, with large vacuous eyes, stare from inside. The faces of priests who were never ordained.

  “Don’t pay attenshion,” a wheezing voice suddenly says.

  I jerk back, but the speaker has already shuffled off. An old, old Jew—Lord knows, there aren’t any like that left these days. You’d think he’d climbed out of a Chagall painting or a Sholom Aleichem book. Just now he was walking on the roofs, or perhaps even flying; barely a second ago he put away his flea-ridden, dirty wings. His face is nothing but wrinkles and the round glasses with fractured lenses on his nose; his clothes are practically from the last century. A genuine eternal Jew. Maybe he really is Ahasuerus. I’ve seen him somewhere before. He approached and mumbling horribly, said:

  “Don’t pay attenshion!”

  The automobile suddenly roars and screeches, tearing off down the street. Only now do I realize this is the same place, maybe even the same time, the same fear, the same despair. The Russian Orthodox Church sullenly waits for something; on the left darts a girl with a cocoa-colored raincoat. The morning image of the old house I’d never seen before has unlocked the fateful day’s fettered box. Today the birds, grandfather pressing his soiled hands to his cheeks, Lolita’s divine legs, eternal Ahasuerus in the middle of moribund Vilnius, and the pudgy faces of unordained priests were hidden inside it. Now the box is left empty, because I myself am as empty as a dry well. I have arrived at the critical juncture; beyond it is the final stretch. I begin the inevitable race to doom. A race with myself; in it, the faster you run, the more you try to stop. Lord, give me secret powers, give me strength and reason. Strength and cold reason.

  I began on The Way against my will. I had already settled down and forgotten all the quests for meaning. Even chest pains no longer upset me—it was just the first ones that were frightening. I no longer tormented myself if I didn’t feel the slightest desire when I saw an ideally sexy woman. I was forty-three years old.

  I remember the day and the place very well. The same place: across from the Russian Orthodox Church on Basanavičiaus Street. The day was sunny and clear—not just externally, but also on the inside. A brilliant clarity ruled in my soul. On days like that your intellect works smoothly and gracefully; you suddenly understand a number of things you hadn’t even tried to grasp for months. Perhaps it’s only on days like those that you sense you have a soul at all, not just a computer of brains crammed with neurons.

  I made careful note of the date: it was the eighth of October, the height of Indian summer. I sensed that something particularly important was about to happen. My internal clarity allowed me a brief glimpse of the future, to see that which was yet to be. It was probably the first time it occurred to me that there is no past and no future, there is only one great ALL. To the left, a girl in a cocoa-colored raincoat kept darting by. Lazy cobwebs—witch’s hair—floated in the calm sea of the sky. Every single thing was infinitely significant. Every single thing brought the climax closer; it was inevitable. Everything had already been determined before I was born.

  Suddenly I felt a strange stab; it hurt the most tender, delicate places of my being. A keen danger signal flew from the deepest nooks of my soul. I quickly looked around, but all I saw was a grimy cat, furtively crouched by the Orthodox Church’s stairs. The piercing danger signal resounded louder still. I felt brazen proboscises shoving their way into the very core of my being, there, where there is no armor. I automatically looked about for the limp-breasted woman of the dusk, the Circe of Old Town: at that time, I still naïvely believed that only she could have such proboscises.

  Instead I saw that man. The sight changed my entire existence; however, I can’t relate anything particular about him. The man’s hair was the color of straw and the pupils of his bloodshot eyes were colorless. He stood unsteadily on his feet; he kept pulling up his falling pants with his left hand. With his right he pressed a puppy, a few weeks old and blinking in fright, to his chest. A drunk like thousands of other drunks, selling stolen pedigree pups or flowers from someone’s garden. But I immediately realized it was a disguise. I abruptly turned around and hastened to catch the glance of his pallid eyes. My past and my future lurked inside them. Inside them hid the last drop, the critical link that joined all the connections. I finally saw through it all. The long, narrow cones of pale light protruding from the man’s colorless eyes instantly vanished, but it was too late. I understood him. I looked at him for an endlessly long moment, the kind of moment that escapes the real world’s time. Somewhere else, in some other time, it lasts for centuries on centuries. During those centuries of divine clarity, my intellect surpassed its own self; for a short time it turned into not just intellect. Even the most perfect logic doesn’t reveal the kind of connections that opened themselves up to me. Suddenly I understood what Saul heard on the road to Damascus. What Mahomet saw during the short moment before the water poured out of the overturned jug. I experienced that myself.

  In the meantime, the straw-haired man looked about, frightened; from him, as important evidence, emanated the smell of rot, like from a damp pile of old leaves. Suddenly he flung the puppy aside and galloped off into the gateway, not staggering in the least.

  It seems to me I saw Ahasuerus that time too. I could swear that at that moment he was shambling over the nearest roofs. I really do remember; he had taken his shoes off, and he carried them in his hand. He was walking around the roofs barefoot, but proudly and at the same time respectfully, as if he were walking through a palace hall. I believe he looked me over from above.

  At that moment he wasn’t what was on my mind. I realized I had to find Gedis right away, and not waste a second. The fateful spectacle’s curtains opened wide; I saw everything with the second sight, with pupils narrowing from an invisible light. Facts, incidents, dreams arranged themselves into a harmonious system (an excessively harmonious system); every thought, every detail strengthened my conviction. I hurried; I was in a huge hurry to see Gediminas. I didn’t know yet that it was already too late.

  When discovered, They immediately change tactics. There are numerous means of damage, a host of methods of crushing a person, within Their power. It’s impossible to surround Them, to trap Them in a corner, to push Them up against a wall—it’s They who surround you, who hold you in a siege like a live castle, whose walls, alas, are pathetically weak. A human being can’t withstand a siege. He can hold out for a month, a year, a decade; but sooner or later he breaks, at least temporarily. He doesn’t even feel when and how They break into his inner being, crawling inside like omnipotent cockroaches.

  I had found Their ghostly organization. I am surely not the only such investigator. There are no unique things in the world, just as there are no unique people. Certain books prove that I am not completely alone. That is all that upholds me in moments of absolute despair.

  When defending yourself from Them, even thinking about Them, you cannot give in to feelings—fear in particular. Th
e most important thing is to not allow yourself to be lulled or intimidated, to keep your hold on cold reason. The only way to save yourself from Them is with the constant vigilance of reason. In a certain sense, They behave logically—true, according to their own peculiar logic, which is nearly impenetrable to man, but they behave logically regardless. It’s probably Their only weak spot (if they have a weak spot at all). Only facts deserve attention; it’s worthless to trust in feelings or speculations. A clear head, cold logic, and caution. A clear head, cold logic, and threefold caution. That’s what keeps me alive.

  At least now I’m alive; until my great insight I merely vegetated, passed the days like everyone else, knew what everyone else knew, was doomed like everyone else was. Although no, I wasn’t doomed in any case, my Lithuanian luck was different. Nothing in this world happens accidentally. Only a complete idiot, a completely blind person, could suppose that I saw that straw-haired man by accident, that I discovered the link between his and the black-haired Circe’s gaze by accident; after all, it’s possible it would never have happened if I hadn’t paused by the Russian Orthodox church on Basanavičiaus Street that day and stayed to watch that furtive cat. No! All of that had to happen, a crack had opened in Their harmonious system, and it was exactly my fate to break in. Years upon years, entire decades went by, unconsciously preparing themselves for that moment. Only great insights give meaning to a person’s existence. I’ve already justified my existence: I discovered Their system. My life at last took on meaning when I took up my clandestine investigations. Let me die, even if today—all the same in the book of fate it will be written: he was able to understand, he fought until the end. He tried.