Vilnius Poker Page 6

  I still cannot convince myself that she was really searching for me. I looked through her file at work: she is exactly half my age. If I were rich, or at least a minister, I could understand. If she were some awful old maid I could understand. But her body, her eyes, her mystery would seduce any man. And she picked an old geezer. I see all of him; he won’t hide anything from me. That man really is large and powerful, tall, and broad-shouldered: a person accustomed to pushing others aside by force. He really doesn’t look even slightly aged, or exactly twice as old as somebody. His smooth skin is nicely tanned, his muscles aren’t flabby, there isn’t an ounce of fat on his waist. His body’s still very firm (outwardly firm); a truly rare firmness in these days of flabby bellies. So far, he’s not even graying: only the hair on his temples and chest is scattered with silver dust. A peculiarly attractive, mostly older youngish Apollo, who apparently knows his own worth very well. A male by no means beset with infirmity, a voracious predator grinning with healthy little white teeth. The Vargalyses’ teeth don’t rot. That brazen man in the mirror almost believed he could catch the eye of a beauty half his age. But why doesn’t he calm down, why doesn’t he leave the mirror?

  Merely because he’s afraid. He’s afraid of losing, afraid of being left disappointed. Afraid of falling into a trap, but most of all he fears that all his faith in himself is no more than a pathetic deception.

  I do not love this person. He isn’t repulsive or unpleasant, but I don’t see the light in his eyes, the light that indicates a healthy spirit. I don’t sense the strength in him to give anything to others, even to Lolita. His gaze, brimming with rage, is the gaze of a prisoner who has been sentenced to death. Don’t tell me Lolita doesn’t see his eyes, doesn’t understand the despair in the blackened irises?

  True, Lolita is, in any case, a woman. Women hate abstractions; they place more value on tangible things. I’m sufficiently cynical; I can spit the disgusting truth in his face, explain what most attracts and astounds Lolita. It senses this as well: that thing hanging threateningly under his belly, that abnormally large organ of love, full of seductive, beastly power. His masculinity isn’t like others’— convulsively crooked with the foreskin always pulled completely back and deep scars marring (or decorating?) the head—signs of a brutal duel in a soft, one-eyed face. A man by the name of Stadniukas burned those scars in for eternity. He wanted to cripple it, but instead he strangely improved it: that scarred beast, instead of frightening women, awakens a tripled desire. So that’s how I would cynically explain to him what most attracts and astounds Lolita.

  But that would be a terrible deception too. For some reason, I don’t just crave demeaning him, but her as well. After all, she has never seen or experienced that thing. She hadn’t seen it when she started searching for me; she hasn’t seen it even now, as I stand in front of the mirror and pointlessly torment myself.

  But what, what, did she see in me?

  Grandfather sits hunched over in a deep armchair in the middle of the room, as always scowling angrily, soundlessly muttering curses on the entire world. Through the open window yellow and red leaves have fallen inside; they move as if they were alive, striving to get back to freedom. They are afraid of grandfather.

  “So, you’re fourteen,” says grandfather. “Seven times two.”

  He beckons with his finger; you must come closer. The dry leaves angrily rustle below your feet; for some reason it’s uncomfortable, almost frightening. Everyone avoids grandfather. When he shuffles down the little street of Užubaliai village, people quickly close their windows. Even the leaves of the trees fear him.

  “So, you’re fourteen . . .”

  Again you hear the rustle of dry leaves: grandfather’s big dog, as black as coal, is sitting next to the armchair and staring at you with an impenetrable stare. Grandfather stretches out a withered hand and starts feeling you over. With his fingers he kneads your shoulders and your elbows, squeezes harder on your upper arm, and despite yourself you stiffen your muscles.

  “All right,” grandfather mutters. “Rock and earth . . . Copper and flint . . . Everything is all right . . .”

  His words are strange, while his hand probingly explores your body. At last he has poked around all over you, you think you’ll be able to go now, but suddenly you break out in a sweat. Grandfather thoroughly prods everything there too, and angrily blurts out:

  “Unbutton it . . . Give it here!”

  You feel sick; you don’t want to obey, but the dog growls threateningly and you give in immediately. Frightened, you take out that thing, throbbing and flinching from every touch. Maybe grandfather has gone completely insane; but no, he’s as serious and intense as if he were praying. You look at the leaves on the floor, at the fire in the fireplace, and suddenly it starts to seem as if all of this has already been; at some other time you stood in front of a gray old man with long hair down to his shoulders and a wild beast as black as night. You’ve already waited for them to inspect you all over and give their blessing.

  Grandfather carefully turns your masculinity over in his hand, weighs it in his palm, squeezes its head.

  “A good pecker!” he says at last. “A genuine Vargalys pecker. With a copper end.”

  He hides it and buttons you up; probably he realizes you’ll keep standing there, completely dumbfounded. The dog gets up and rustles the red and yellow leaves, while tears gather in your eyes: grandfather is grandfather, but why did he have to show everything to that angry black beast?

  “You know, my child, you can have a woman already, any woman,” says grandfather. “Every Vargalys can have any woman. Even your shitty father.”

  You’re dumbfounded again, because grandfather is smiling. That’s impossible, grandfather doesn’t know how to smile, he doesn’t have the section of the brain that creates a smile. Even now, hardly born, the smile dies.

  “Go on!” says grandfather in his usual brusque voice. “And remember—you’re a Vargalys now. Persevere, my child, being a Vargalys is no kind of luck. And don’t try to understand yourself. No Vargalys has ever understood himself.”

  You walk out as if you’re dreaming, turn back once more, and see grandfather in the midst of the red and yellow leaves scattered about the floor, already muttering curses under his breath. He curses everything by turns: first Żeligowski and the Poles of Vilnius, then all the Poles in the world, the Russians and the Germans, life, God, the sun and the moon, father and mother, the Milky Way and every last galaxy.

  Unfortunately, she has never seen or experienced me at all; all she knows is the Vytautas Vargalys who walks the corridors of the library or the streets of Vilnius. Then what did she choose, who is that person who is twice as old as she is? Is it me, or not me? This person in the mirror, or maybe the phantom of her dreams, whom not even the real I could equal?

  If she really chose that person in the mirror, the one who has lost all hope, I must warn her, restrain her, before it’s too late. I don’t even know what’s more important to me—to help her, or to harm her, to take revenge (revenge for what?) on that mean-eyed man, attentively inspecting my nakedness. Surely she sees, surely she understands that beneath that solid-looking exterior hides a body that disobeys its master, a body living an independent life? That’s a dangerous body, the husk of an unnamable creature, into which my innards have been forcibly stuffed. You can look at that husk for hours upon hours, but you’ll see nothing real. I’m not there; there’s only that sad person of the mirror. Even I’m not able to penetrate his depths. And thank God for that!

  I have an inkling of what would happen if you were to worm your way even a bit deeper, if the exterior armor were to open itself up and uncover the weedy undergrowth and cobweb-caked corners inside. What would go on, if, somewhere in the world, there were a torch you could use to light up all of the little nooks of the spirit, or better yet—to scorch the bestiaries of the interior, so that all of the inner creatures, all of those abominations, would start clambering out in fright. It would be appr
opriate to classify people based just on the monstrosities crawling about inside them, on the basis of their profusion, types, and variety. All you would need to do is invent that torch, and nuns with modestly lowered eyes would instantly be stuck all over with warty toads, and holy martyrs would be covered in swarms of poisonous mosquitoes. So then what would it tell us about all the others?

  I know that naked person of the mirror well; I know what a procession of hellish monsters would swarm out of him. Creatures with the bodies of toads and the eyes of birds, lurching along on short little legs, twisted long-nosed heads with deranged stares, old women with swollen bellies splattered with warts, greenish slimy faces, fish-human servants of Satan with the snouts of mice, birds with hairy beaks and transparent guts in which pieces of human flesh were being digested, round glassy eyes without pupils, rotting bodies overgrown with tree bark, gigantic breasts with pimply, bloody nipples, spreading a hideous stench with every movement, clumsy dwarves belching waste, innocent girls run through a meat grinder and put together again into a single thing, smiling little figures pierced with needles, and then women, women, women, embracing the rot of tree trunks, with pockmarked frogs greedily mouthing at their crotches and blood-sucking bats stuck to their bellies, women distorting their faces in pleasure, giving themselves to long-bristled boars in lacy beds . . . And that’s just the edges of the gray hell, the good-natured periphery; the most essential thing is to see how he himself, that motley crew’s leader, appears, to see what he himself is up to . . .

  I stand completely naked in front of the mirror and almost admire him. His body has gone completely numb, but he patiently (and probably insolently) continues to stand against the bloody background, defying me. Suddenly I realize he sees straight through me too. I confess: I like those kind of people.

  Only those who have lost their spirit fear the monsters of the interior. Only those who have lost their balance pretend their insides are pure and refined. You can only become truly great by joining your heaven with your hell. All of the good in people is the same, but the kingdom of evil is different in everyone. I truly think this way, but could I confess this to Lolita? Does she have even the slightest idea of what’s going on inside of me, of what a quagmire she’s stepping in to? Wouldn’t she be frightened, seeing even one of my billions of Bosch-like inner landscapes? And how could I show them to her?

  Maybe I have to stand completely naked against a bloody background in front of her too, stand for hours upon hours, so that she could scrutinize my graying temples, my nearly pupil-less eyes with their darkened irises, my scarred masculinity—so she could look until she saw the headless monsters inside of me (or see me myself as a headless monster), until she could hear my inner music, until she could sense my true scent . . .

  No, all the same I do not understand why she chose me. There’s no explanation for it, or more accurately, there is only one explanation (so far only one) that I don’t even want to think about.

  Now I stand on the street by the bus stop across from the Russian Orthodox Church and absentmindedly look around (who knows when I stood and looked around). Not far off a girl in a cocoa-colored raincoat flashes by, on the church’s steps a furtive cat curls itself up; but that’s not what matters most. What plagues me the most is the memory of the limp-breasted Old Town Circe, her spirit hovering about. Even the trees are as quiet as she was then.

  Now I see the man with straw-colored hair, unsteady on his feet, now I sense the glare of his pallid eyes fixed upon me, smell the odor of rotting leaves. And it’s in that glare, in that odor, that the answer hides, an answer that unifies the scattered details into an excessively harmonious whole.

  All of Their subspecies watch you, secretly shadow you—even if they’re eyeless; eyes are not at all what matters most in this case. I could call Them “the observers,” “the watchers,” “the stalkers;” however, these names would imperceptibly lead away from The Way. Our language is merely a collection of labels, stuck alike to entirely different things, because those labels always run short, there’s never enough of them. (It’s They who always strive for words to come up so short, to be so inaccurate and deceptive.) But after all, it isn’t Their oppressive meddling that determines everything. The crushing groping about in the dark and the unceasing shadowing are probably the most obvious, but by no means the most dangerous things.

  I had been warned about Them when I was still a child, but I didn’t pay attention to it. I suppose that everyone (or almost everyone) is warned. Unfortunately, our civilization has taken such a turn that no one pays attention to the warnings. They drown in the stream of other impressions, images, and words. They’re decided, almost by agreement, not to notice, not to explain the odd things. Sooner or later that custom will push humanity to its doom.

  It’s imperative to save ourselves before it’s too late, to take at least the first small step towards The Way. Everyone must ask themselves if they have ever seen the stare of the void. I can’t think of a better description. I’ve devotedly investigated Their stares (a stare that’s one and the same), overcoming fear and disgust. And I always saw one thing in it: a hopeless void. Their boundless subspecies, Their infinite hierarchy, in which, it seems, even they ought to get confused, doesn’t help matters . . . Brazen youngsters, sullenly staring at you in a cafe. Pale-faced, pustular women spying on you through the glass of unwashed windows. Straw-haired, broad-shouldered men, secretly piercing you with the glare of colorless eyes. Filthy city pigeons, hypnotizing with their soulless bird pupils. Cockroaches twitching their antennae, staring at you from all corners without any eyes. Swamp sinkholes smelling of rot, they’re looking at you too, they’re destroying you too . . . Let’s start from the beginning, with humanoid creatures (Their subspecies, having the form of human beings). You will, without fail, see signs of an inner life in even the most miserable little human’s eyes. Even a lunatic’s eyes flash with a live spark from time to time. Lord of mine, even a dog’s eyes are alive! But not Theirs. Look around, I beg you . . . spot those who are secretly watching you . . . they don’t even particularly hide . . . examine their eyes . . . study them . . . study them well . . . You’ll surely see: all of those brazen youngsters, pustular women, broad-shouldered men with obnoxious faces, look with the stare of the void . . . No, their eyes aren’t empty; they simply look with the stare of the void. I can’t say it better . . . Imagine a beast that devours light—and not just light: words too, and love, and music, and dreams, and . . . Imagine its stare . . . No, I don’t know how to express it. All I can do is hope every thinking person understands what an absolute, oppressive void is.

  Study them, first of all study those deranged gawkers, those kanukai in human form, maybe at last you’ll feel uneasy. Follow them yourself and perhaps you’ll begin to see things clearly. Perhaps you’ll grasp the danger that’s impossible to overestimate; perhaps you’ll even have the strength to resist. Perhaps you’ll at least have the strength to shout for help. Perhaps it won’t be too late yet.

  They start with the children first of all. For the love of God—guard the children!

  I wanted to run, to flee, from that accursed Russian Orthodox Church, but in spite of it all I held on to cold reason. I walked slowly, placing my feet carefully. Around me an unfamiliar world was in its death throes: angry women with puffy faces, crumbling gateways where staggering apparitions and withered trees with dried-up leaves took refuge. It even seemed to me that all the passersby spoke some unintelligible, hissing language.

  A murky brew bubbled in my brain. My head puffed like a steam boiler without a release value, ready to explode at any moment. My swelling skull did nothing but hum and clatter: inside a multitude of tiny little doors opened and slammed shut, and my thoughts ran along new, unfamiliar routes.

  At the instant of insight you fall into a new, absolutely different world. A universe of strange episodes and images that your mind isn’t adapted to, that no part of you is adapted to. Your eyes and ears, your arms and legs aren’t
suited to this novel world. You could trip in a level place or crash into an invisible wall that everyone else sees and goes around. I passed through Vilnius and sensed that the streets were no longer streets, the trees no longer trees, even I was no longer myself. I couldn’t even stop, close my eyes and calm down—I didn’t know if that might not be the most dangerous thing of all. A strange equilibrium only slowly (very slowly) appeared. The streets once more turned into streets (different streets), the trees—into trees (different trees); however, the new status quo only deepened the inner upheaval. I couldn’t orient myself in this new world. The ground eluded my feet. It seemed I understood everything, but I experienced no joy. I kept thinking: it’s much better not to know anything at all. It’s really not worth envying Saul, fallen to his knees on the road to Damascus, or Mahomet, transfixed in front of the falling jug. The grand insight brings only torment.

  I had to find Gediminas right away. Things that had been long since forgotten and had been thrust to the very bottom of my consciousness became enormously significant in the new world. Vague images flashed in front of my eyes, stories without beginning or end, which brought on a strange presentiment. In that muddle, like a leitmotif, Gedis kept appearing. I saw his sarcastic smile, heard his hoarse voice whispering, “Who sent her, who sent her, Vytas?” I could swear he once said, “I always feel like someone is watching me when I’m with a woman.” Yes, yes, he’d say something like that to me all the time.

  I hurried. I still didn’t know how to express my great revelation in words; I didn’t know what I would have said to him. However, I didn’t in the least doubt that he would understand me. I spun the telephone dial and considered how I should begin. Gedis, I have finally grasped the secret: They are watching us. Did you know? Aren’t you horrified? Or perhaps like this: Gedis, surely you remember the black-haired Circe who wanted to destroy us both. Did you notice the look she would secretly steal at us? . . . Or maybe start straight off, like this: Gedis, surely you don’t think that those observers, those pathological stalkers, are merely snooping, merely registering facts? Surely you don’t think they’re gathering the consummate card index just for the sake of the index itself? Do you have any idea of what their intentions are, or could be? . . . Finally his work telephone answered: “Riauba just ran out to the repair shop to get his car, and then probably he’ll get it into his head to take a spin around the highways.”