Vilnius Poker Page 5

  For the sake of my clandestine investigations, I got employment at the library. It’s convenient to have the necessary books at hand. I say “necessary” even though I don’t myself know (no one knows), which ones they are. There are not, and cannot be, specialized studies about Them. This sort of knowledge has to be gathered by the grain. Not only that, but egoism and vanity keep whispering that I am the first to uncover the configuration of the world. The structure of Good and Evil. This is the most dangerous blunder a person walking The Way can make. It isn’t possible that The Way has gone undiscovered for thousands of years. There are hints of it in many books—hints that are perhaps excessively vague, sometimes almost incomprehensible, however, those quiet warnings and lessons are essential to someone who has begun clandestine investigations. Numerous names have been lost to the ages, but one or another survived. Saint Paul, Bosch, and Blake tried to warn humanity about Them—each one differently; de Sade, Nietzsche, and Socrates all paid for their daring in different ways. I am convinced that there have been direct studies of Their organization as well. Fires in the most magnificent libraries, the auto-da-fé of well-known books, manuscripts, and papyruses, weren’t accidental. We can only speculate about the real role of Herostratus in the history of the world. They know perfectly well what they’re burning every time, which of a thousand burning treatises had revealed Their secret. Their logic is truly ghastly: They don’t destroy one or several books; They understand perfectly well that this would give them away, attract attention. Sensing the danger, They destroy everything at once; They can destroy a city of millions on account of a single person who has grasped the Essence. The demise of Atlantis and the tragedy of Sodom and Gomorrah carry the traces of Their work to this day.

  And how is someone supposed to bear it all alone, seeing the wisdom of millennia going up in flames, hearing the moaning of millions of innocent people?

  When I found myself back at the library, Martynas instantly cornered me. He announces himself, without fail, the moment I want to be left alone. A short Vilnius thinker: hair shaved in a crew cut, sharp eyes, and the pale tongue of an invalid. He blocked my way, apparently emerging from the dusky corridor wall. A shabby pale blue couch and a crooked little table protruded from the wall; an ashtray made of bent tin, full of cigarette butts, billowed dust from the table. Tufts of hair and dust dirtied the linoleum floor; distorted, cheerless rays fell inside through the grimy windows. Scattered pieces of boards and little piles of brick dominated the world outside the window. The only thing that drew attention was a lonesome, miserable dog: a horrible mutt with a big, square head, a long rat-like body, and a thick tail dragging on the ground. He was snuffling at the earth; this he did so diligently, so devotedly, that the thought came to me automatically: he’s shamming. He’s sensed that I’m watching him, so he’s acting as if he has nothing to do with anything, that he’s idling about without any purpose. He vaguely reminded me of something—not some other dog, but an object, or an incident, or even a person.

  Martynas was the only male in my absurd group of programmers who didn’t have a computer. And the only one to study the humanities. According to someone’s sometime plans, we were supposed to eventually computerize the library catalog. Martynas would have been the one to prepare the index, bibliography, and classifications of literature. Under that pretext, he scurried about writers’ homes, ostensibly for consultations, but really just wanting to meet them and chew the fat. Like all of us, he essentially did nothing. In my eyes, he had no firm answers, but he craved an explanation for absolutely everything. His very life was an attempt to explain something. His apartment, in a cramped room, was stuffed to the gills with the oddest things. He called it his collection. You could sit in that room for hours on end, just staring at those things: vases, clothes, ashtrays, scrubbing brushes, canes, little boxes. It seemed that even they questioned you, that they wanted something explained. But that wasn’t enough for Martynas—he would keep questioning you himself too.

  “Listen, Vytautas, hasn’t it ever occurred to you that we have no past?”

  I had calmed down by then and caught my breath, so I could answer:

  “It depends on what we call the past. On who those ‘we’ are.”

  “Me, you, that bowlegged babe outside the window. And that laborer on the scaffolding . . . We have no past, we never were. We just ARE, you know? We’ve lost our past and now we’ll never find it. We’re like carrots in a vegetable bed. After all, you wouldn’t say a carrot has a past?”

  Martynas’s chin quivered, ever so slightly, with emotion. His own worldly discoveries always shocked him. I was more interested in the dog: he suddenly started wheeling about the yard, sketching a crooked circle in the dust with his tail. As if he were trying to write a giant letter.

  “So, what of it?” I growled. “If we don’t have it, we don’t have it.”

  Martynas’s little eyes popped out; he gasped for air with his mouth open. I didn’t understand why he was getting so worked up.

  “Whoever doesn’t have a past, doesn’t have a future, either. We never were and we never will be, you know? We can’t change anything, because we don’t have a past, you know? . . . We’re a faceless porridge, we’re a nothing, a void . . . We don’t exist, you know? We don’t exist at all. Absolutely! Someone has stolen our past. But who?”

  Martynas even broke out in a sweat. He had fingered the secret’s cloak, crumpled it fearfully in his hands. Had he sniffed out Their scent?

  “I keep thinking—who was it?” he murmured breathlessly. “And it’s not just people . . . I had this white ashtray . . . A featureless mass production. It had no past—like us, you know? And one day it suddenly disintegrated, crumbled into white dust—and that was it . . . It didn’t have a past, either. It affects even things, you know?”

  I glanced at a tuft of dust and hair that had wound itself up in a corner. It suddenly fluttered, even though there wasn’t the slightest draft in the corridor. It slowly rose up from the floor, as if picked up by a live human, hung in the air, and descended again into the corner. Some invisible being turned that tuft around in its hands and put it back in its place. I quickly glanced out the window: the dog glared at me and shambled off. Carp walked down the path next to the slowly growing brick wall. He tiptoes past our windows several times a day, but every time I see him I get agitated. He is my talisman. I don’t remember his real name; in the camp everyone called him Carp. It’s a terrible thing: when we meet in the street, we don’t greet each other. Many of the camp’s unfortunates don’t let on they know one another when they meet. Maybe we really don’t have a past?

  The shagfelted Siberian dogs didn’t chew through the backbone of his spirit. There he is, walleyed Stepanas, nicknamed Carp. He’s pestering the Russkie commies again:

  “You’re like those carp! Carp! They’re frying you in a skittle, and you’re writhing and singing a hymn to the chef! It’s Stalin that’s cooking you, Stalin—don’t you understand? Are you as stupid as a carp?”

  He raises his arms to heaven and thunders as if he were on stage:

  “I’m ashamed that I’m a Russian! Ashamed! I’ll never be a carp!”

  You look at him, and it’s easier for you to breathe, easier to bear it, easier to wait for your doom. No incisorfanged Siberian huskies will bite through the backbone of his spirit. To you Carp is beautiful, even his crossed eyes don’t spoil his face. If you have a spirit, you’re beautiful.

  Martynas is probably right: I don’t have a past. It’s like a boundless country, one I’m destined to never find myself in. On long winter evenings I fruitlessly attempt to remember my own past. Memory willingly recreates sights and sounds, but those talking pictures aren’t my past. What of it, if those episodes once happened? That jumble of people and things doesn’t change anything in my life, doesn’t explain anything. It cannot become my past. All of that probably happened to someone else, not to me at all. That’s not the way my Vilnius night was, not the way my camp’s fence
was barbed, not the way my sweat smelled. The real past couldn’t stay so impassive, it has to be your own: recognizable and tamed. It’s like the nails with which your present is constructed. There are no nails holding mine together. I do not have a past, although there were many things in my life. It seems all I have is a non-past. In the great ALL there are no episodes that once were, and are now past; inside it everything is still happening.

  That’s why I took note of Martynas’s unexpected unveiling and his ideas, though they’ve been heard elsewhere many times before. That’s why the image, yet another vision of my non-past, engraved itself: Martynas, the thin little deity of all those with crew cuts, stands leaning sadly against the wall; cigarette ashes billow indifferently at his feet, and walleyed Carp tiptoes outside the window, stinging my tired non-heart.

  It was all too much for me already: the morning’s half-witted pigeons, the Russian Orthodox churches, the girls in cocoa-colored coats, Vilnius’s stray dogs, the flat kanukish faces. That day (if that was one day) had tired me to death. A crushing, stunningly lucid despair came over me. All I wanted was to die on the spot. Nothing in heaven or on earth had the power to drown out that desire.

  All there is left to do at moments like that is to wait. To wait for who knows what, because there is no hope whatsoever. It’s as if you were sprawled all alone in a broken-down dinghy with your legs and arms paralyzed, and a mountain stream was quickly carrying you closer to a waterfall; not a soul about—only steep rocky shores and the thunder of water plunging into the nearby abyss. The spray from the waterfall hangs above the foaming rapids, the end is near, and you can’t even roll out of the boat and sink to the bottom with a rock, to finish everything in an instant. You have to suffer until the chasm snatches your body for itself: the stream of the waterfall will smash it against the splinters of sharp rocks, and then cast you, still alive, into the boiling cauldron of the gray vortices. You’re already dead, but you can think; that’s the worst of it: you grasp everything.

  Danger hid everywhere, just about anything could determine the outcome: the grim, hunched-over laborer on the scaffolding, the books on the shelves, the smell of linoleum. They watched me all the time, themselves invisible, inaudible, indiscernible. I was absolutely alone, but I couldn’t for a moment be by myself; I couldn’t avoid Their hellish guardianship.

  It seemed to me that the office was slowly widening, that the walls were receding from me—or perhaps I was the one cowering and shrinking and growing ever smaller. I knew I was sitting in my office, that the wide dirty window yawned behind me, but the inner vision was stronger: the room slowly turned into a desert, a scorched, sallow expanse where no plants grow and no animals wander. This landscape of gloom was more real than the view of the real office. It was empty inside of me, so the surroundings became empty too. I was suffocating; I was so alone and unhappy that all that remained was to die immediately. I was already on the verge of dying. Some life, even the most miserable desert creature, could have saved me—anything. But the desert was absolutely empty—only a distant thunder reminded me that the thunderlord is also always alone.

  It took me a moment to realize that it wasn’t thunder, but just a knock at the door. Somebody’s knuckles ordered me to come to my senses, tapped to a swinging rhythm, one of many of Gediminas’s swinging rhythms. Creaking, the door opened; Lolita stood on the threshold.

  “May I come in?”

  She carefully closed the door, awkwardly fixed her hair, and smiled guiltily:

  “If you only knew how sick I am of those women . . . Is it okay if I sit with you for a bit?”

  Somewhat flustered, she settled on the sofa, stretched out her long legs and leaned back, lowering her eyes. She probably expected that her pose, her slender waist, and her loose hair would explain everything on their own. She had never been to see me like this before; we rarely exchanged so much as a word. But there she sat on the sofa with her eyes lowered; with her forefinger she gently caressed her other hand. That defenseless caress completely did me in. Lolita, it seemed, begged me to sit down next to her, to help her, so she wouldn’t have to caress herself. She showed up just in time; she came true, the way an intoxicating dream comes true. A moment ago I really could have died. She saved my life. My dream came calling on me, even though I had never dared to summon it.

  And I stood there like a blockhead and got even more breathless. The silliest of all possible thoughts ran through my head: it’s not proper for a boss to turn red like a teenager in front of his employee. That was how much was left of my intellect. I was probably hallucinating. Her appearance was much too unexpected, entirely impossible. It was a miracle, although she sat there in an exceptionally earthy and ordinary way: a somewhat irregular oval face, not particularly symmetrical features, legs that had blundered their way out of my dreams, rather large, upright breasts. But the brown eyes, always turned in towards herself, towards her own inner being, suddenly looked at me. They spoke to me of plain and simple things, so plain and simple that I couldn’t believe it. I ought to have rushed to kiss those nearly unfamiliar (so familiar, so wished for and dreamed of!) woman’s hands, to tell her everything—not silly words of love, no—to scream that she is everything to me, that she had saved me from death . . . that I had conceived her during sleepless nights . . . That without her the world wouldn’t exist, the stars would stop moving . . . I ought to lick her feet, to crawl in front of her . . . I needed to at least temporarily go out of my mind and risk it, but I stood there like a statue and felt I would ruin that miracle myself. I didn’t believe the signs in her eyes. I believe in nothing.

  I probably gave her a terrible look—she bit her lip and again smiled guiltily. Unfortunately, my eyes don’t give away any feelings, they simply look. At the very best they frighten or insult. She fidgeted as if she were sitting on hot iron, then suddenly leaned forward with her entire body, closed her eyes, and murmured despairingly:

  “Vytautas! Vytautas, t . . . t . . . touch me . . .”

  Some sort of gigantic bubble instantly burst, splattering me with its hot spray. My gigantic bubble of fear and absurd doubts. In that instant, I understood everything I should I have understood some time ago. A difficult, hysterical happiness took my breath away. Why, she had been searching for me for some time already, searching for me herself! She would wait in the corridor for me to pass by, aim to stand as near as possible, to catch my glance with all of her body. Why, she had been searching for me herself: suddenly I saw her breast heaving in fear and her hands desiring caresses with entirely different eyes. That divine woman was desperately searching for me! Crazy circles swam before my eyes, and when they cleared, I saw her smile, Lolita’s familiar, dear smile. Everything was so plain and simple that I was mortified, and felt some other, nameless sensation—perhaps shame. After all, she had walked next to me for a year, for two, for three; I saw her a long time ago, but I was blind and an idiot, and a coward, and . . .

  “Lord of mine,” I squeezed out by force, “Lord of mine . . . A hundred times, a thousand times . . . What nonsense . . .”

  “Jesus. At last . . .” She kept smiling; that smile cut me like a scourge, punished me for the lost time, for my blindness and my wretched fear.

  I still didn’t believe that her hands, her lips, her breasts finally belonged to me, that she was perhaps even happier than I . . . that here she is . . . that here is Lolita . . . that I, wretched fool, could have ruined everything today as well . . .

  I didn’t hear what she said afterwards. She glanced archly with her brown eyes and spoke as if we were old lovers who had no end of common memories, as if no wall had been left between the two of us for quite some time. And still I feared that I was only imagining it all, that I had concocted that miracle while sitting in the sallow, empty office, trying to save myself from death, that I had put my faith in a hallucination and would soon pay for it dearly . . .

  But Lolita was as real as my pain, as my despair; she laughed soundlessly, throwing back her lo
ng chestnut hair.

  “Jesus, Jesus,” she kept repeating, “all this time! . . . And if I hadn’t happened for no reason whatsoever to . . .”

  Again she laughed soundlessly, as if the heaviest of rocks had rolled off her chest, while I, in horror, sensed the sallow desert, the dirty city pigeons, the flat faces of the kanukai, Ahasuerus, and the Orthodox Church receding and disappearing—the whole lot slowly receding and disappearing. I sensed an empty hope reviving within me, a hope I’d lost many times before; the desire to do nothing but caress and kiss Lolita was strangling me—but my heart was knocking a warning to Gediminas’s beloved swinging rhythm.

  Now I stand completely naked in front of the mirror—my body’s chilled, but I stubbornly look at myself—for an hour now, or a day, or a week. My dusky, tanned skin stands out from the red wallpaper in the background; the portrait in the mirror, painted in excessive detail, stands motionless, hinting of a slick kitschy spirit: the overly pretentious red color of the background and affectedly smooth lines. Something here’s not real, not believable, as if the painter had merely sought a cheap effect. Or perhaps he was seeking a genuine effect, but inadvertently overdid it: the portrait’s particularly fatalistic stare . . . the convulsively clenched fists . . . the coarsely emphasized sex . . . the theatrical pose . . .

  I myself am in the frame of the mirror, but at the same time it’s not me, it’s some he, looking at me with angry eyes. Sometimes he rubs his temple with a finger or brushes his palm across his chest. You would think he was ashamed of his nakedness. What could Lolita have found seductive about this person in the mirror? What attracted her to this mistrustful person with edgy nerves and an enigmatic martyr’s smile?