Vilnius Poker Page 9

  “Do you know how it all ended up? Quite naturally: I began to hate any kind of innocence. If I had only understood what my mother was explaining to me, I would have lost my maidenly innocence by all possible means. I’ll tell you about my mother’s fantastic invented methods later, all right?”

  I can’t be all right: we’re approaching the Narutis, approaching the lonely portal that quietly chats with Saint John’s church. There’s no talking here; I have to go by calmly, without disturbing the old smells that have seeped into the walls. And Lolita understands me, understands without a word, by now she’s standing in my room by the window and stroking the curtain. But no—she’s lying on the couch with her legs curled up under her.

  Now she’s lying on the couch completely naked, her head leaning on her left hand, with her soft-skinned legs curled up under her. A secret fire burns within her—I still don’t know if she won’t set me on fire too. I only know what I see and feel now. I feel Lolita’s warmth, and I see her herself: the large, firm breasts, the belly hidden in half-shadow, the folded, twisted legs. I understand why an artist took her for a wife: he wanted to have an ideal model at hand every day. You could draw her, exclusively, your entire life. Not just her portraits—you could paint a meadow or a room: on the canvas there really will be a meadow or a room, but actually you’d draw her all the same. You can delve into her, express her, even though at that moment your paintbrush will leave an image of the Last Judgment on the canvas, or a still life of space-rending green peaches, or symmetrical gray squares. That’s just what the ordinary sight will see, but the second, true sight will invariably discern Lolita there.

  “Why do I talk about it? I don’t know . . . Sometimes it seems to me that she was a genuine Lithuanian, a Lithuanian of Lithuanians—with that idea of hers, of innocence. It’s like a national illness, you know? She tried to be innocent in absolutely everything. It was practically a religious aspiration, an unrealistic yearning. Her slogan should have been: ‘Never take a step!’ And: ‘If someone comes close to you, don’t wait, don’t stand in place—run as fast as you can!’ She wanted to be innocent in absolutely everything . . . Not God’s fiancée, no, no, not that at all . . . I’d say she didn’t want to surrender to the world, or something. If it were at all possible not to do something new, something unknown, something she hadn’t experienced yet—she wouldn’t do it. Understand? . . . If she had never been somewhere, she avoided going there. She tried her best to never go beyond the borders of the smells, events, and ceremonies she had already experienced; anything new could injure her mystical innocence . . . Don’t touch that flower, she would say, don’t show it to me! . . . Don’t tell me about the sea, never, ever, tell me about the sea! We got into a horrible row the first time I secretly ran off to the sea! . . . Never mind the sea, she had never tasted lemons! A lemon could injure her innocence, you know?”

  “So, it’s always about your mother. And you?”

  Lolita moves her legs uneasily, rubs her cheek with a finger; bars of light slink over her chest, briefly light up her navel and the lower part of her belly, the thick, curled-up hair. Her mother intimidates me. I don’t want to hear another word about her mother. She was my age. Someone my age, obsessed with a pathological idea of innocence.

  Lolita suddenly sits up, bends her somewhat spread legs and leans on her knees with her elbows, her hands hanging down, her fingers almost reaching her ankles. The halo of thick hair glows with an angry fire around her head. Her body, unusually coarse, almost vulgar, looks at me rapaciously; the plainly visible dark sexual opening irritates me. It’s only like that for a few moments. The lamp is ashamed and hides behind her back; now her face, her entire front, is in shadow, and her voice is much calmer.

  “Don’t make fun of my mother. Her world was bigger than ours. Just think how much she invented about those things she never experienced, the things she denied herself . . . I envy that ideal world of hers . . . Imagine it—you invent a lemon yourself. With all the details, with a bunch of non-existent characteristics . . . Come on now, a real lemon compared to an ideal like that—nothing more than a fog, a banal yellow fruit, while yours . . . She was a theoretician, an aesthete; I went for practice and experimentation. She pounded that abstract idea of innocence into me so thoroughly that to this day I’m dying to lose my innocence in every possible sense, to try out everything immediately, to run looking who knows where, and to constantly look, to look for something never seen, never experienced, never known . . . And I like just exactly the kind of men I can’t understand, the kind I don’t know what to expect from . . . Understand?”

  “And I’m that kind?”

  “You understand . . .” she blurts out, and continues down the street. “You understand everything perfectly well. You’re intelligent. Besides, you have your secret, and I don’t know what it is . . . And I don’t want to know . . . If I were to know, then at least I could predict what you’ll do, how you’ll behave . . . And I don’t want that . . . I want to experience everything myself, understand?”

  She gets more and more furious; her voice angrily cuts the air of Pilies Street into pieces, and then flings them in my face. It is slowly getting lighter, or it hasn’t gotten dark yet. By now we have almost gone the entire street to the end. By now she has almost gotten all of it out—earlier, now, later.

  “What did you ask me to begin with?” she says sadly. “Why am I telling you this drivel?”

  “You were explaining why you’re attracted to horrible people.”

  “Oh . . . Because I can see only two signs in a person’s face—either unhappiness, or peace. The kind of peace that means stupidity, clean business, bacon, money, very soft furniture, fear of authority, endlessly just and moral behavior, shiny shoes that are never dirty, perfectly even dentures, a precise daily schedule, peaceful sleep . . .”

  In an instant the mood changes; suddenly Lolita is quiet, and without her voice something inexplicable is going on in the dimness. I’m walking down a street of Old Town, a woman walks beside me, but I have absolutely no idea who she is—I know her name, a few of her real or invented stories, but does that really mean I know her? A completely strange, dangerous woman is walking next to me and probably wants something from me—at this moment or in general. She probably wants to use me, like all women do, or perhaps even to deceive me cruelly. An extremely graceful woman—I can’t get enough of her walk, her legs gliding as smoothly as in a dream. She’s very young; it’s not clear what she wants from me, this fairy of Vilnius. At any moment she could look at me with a magic glance and turn me into a stone, or a submissive slave. I feel I am in her power. She controls me with magical powers, or at least she could control me: if she were to look at me with her entrancing eyes I would obey, I would carry out any order. But she doesn’t look—maybe she thinks it’s still early, maybe she’s saving her authority for the critical moment. You have to guard against her; you shouldn’t admire her.

  There’s practically no fog left; I see the streets, the square and the most important thing—the hill and Gediminas Castle. Here the Iron Wolf howled in Grand Duke Gediminas’s dream and promised the castle a great future. Now Vilnius itself is a dream city, a ghost city. Among the faceless figures walking the streets, the good dead of Vilnius (the old ones and the entirely new ones from the post-war period, the last Lithuanian aurochs) look much livelier. It’s not clear which is a dream—the ancient city or the Vilnius of today. Only the ancient castle in the new city is unavoidably real: a lonely tower, emerging from the overgrown slopes of the hill—the phallic symbol of Vilnius. It betrays all secrets. The symbolic phallus of Vilnius: short, stumpy and powerless. An organ of pseudo-powers that hasn’t been able to get aroused in a long time. A red three-story tower, a phallic NOTHING, shamelessly shown to everyone, Vilnius’s image of powerlessness. The great symbol of a castrated city, of castrated Lithuania, stuck onto every postcard, into every photo album, every tourist brochure. A perverted, shameless symbol: its impotence should be hidden,
not acknowledged, or it should at least pretend it’s still capable of a thing or two. But the city has long since lost everything—even its self-respect. Only lies, absurdity, and fear remain.

  For some reason I’m sitting in the break room again, someone’s tossed me into a room with peeling plaster and set women around me. Besides myself, there’s only one man here—Martynas Poška, our library’s sad little chatterbox, a weird variety of crew-cut deity, a pathetic searcher for justice, and a collector of absurdities. At one time I even thought he was walking at least in parallel on The Way; I was shocked by his thin, long face, his eyes brimming with horror, his spineless whispers: “They don’t need it . . . it was done intentionally . . . a Satanic system . . .” But you scarcely start to think Martynas could be one of your own, when he brushes his hand across his face, suddenly changing it for another, and again I see the sneering crew-cut Martynas, the library’s sad little chatterbox. Someone like that can’t walk The Way, thank God, he can’t be Their spy, either: in whatever company, he’s the one that talks the most. And I always listen. I don’t disdain any conversation, any company. He who knows The Way doesn’t have the right to disdain people who have been kanuked; he knows all too well that his great discoveries and advantages are just a matter of fate, and only his mistakes are truly earned. You cannot condemn those around you; the desire to demean others is inspired by Them. Everyone should be viewed with secret hope, and their words examined for expression of a strong spirit. Almost no one is completely kanuked.

  Take Martynas: some spiritual organ of his secretly manufactures anti-kanukas hormones; I’ve been convinced of this many times. Inside of him hides a deep protest against Them, although unfortunately, he hasn’t an inkling of Their existence.

  Martynas was always a person of faith. He had faith in the power of reason. He thought the majority of our misfortunes proliferate because there aren’t enough virtuous, stubborn, and talented young men to sacrifice themselves and fix at least the biggest idiocies of our life. Martynas feels he himself is one of those young men. He dedicated his dissertation to the study of education, although its scope was much larger. He even flushed out a few substantial things. It wasn’t just a standard dissertation, but two full-scale treatises. One was philosophical for the most part, written like Spinoza: axioms, theorems, and their proofs. The other was almost sociological: a lot of rich documentation confirming the already proven theorems. Martynas carried out a titanic labor: he began it in his sophomore year and labored over it twenty-five hours a day for an entire eleven years. He was even left without a wife or children. Martynas Poška was a scholarly fanatic.

  He painstakingly studied the path of the Soviet citizen from preschool to a university degree, and with mathematical precision proved that everywhere and at all times the only thing taught is how to swallow ready-made propositions, lifeless tropes, and barren constructions. Nowhere is thinking taught. No one is taught to create images for himself, to find propositions, to arrange logical schemes. No one is taught to search for truth, no one is taught to doubt. And worst of all—no one is taught the fundamentals of morals and humanity. In a word, we raise imitators, talking parrots, soulless automatons—but not Homo sapiens. Martynas always had a boundless respect for the concept of Homo sapiens. In the second part of his opus he scattered a bouquet of the most dreadful examples—from moronic educational programs to young killers spouting off: they had murdered just for the hell of it—not even out of anger, nor out of any dark instinct, but merely because they hadn’t grasped the simplest rudiments of human morality.

  When his dissertation immediately stumbled on every rung of the bureaucratic ladder, Martynas understood nothing. He still believed in the power of the intellect. After all, an educational system like that ruined absolutely everything: the economy, politics, people’s souls; in a word, his dissertation bolstered the entire country. But no one, absolutely no one, would even consider speaking of its shortfalls or merits. A multitude of identical faces and identical voices vaguely muttered, “Come on, now, how can you, you understand yourself, after all, you understand everything.”

  Force is neither Their only nor Their basic method. Treachery, deceptive persuasion, and a peculiar hypnotism are far more significant, far better suited to Their purposes. It’s always Their bywords:

  “Come on now, you understand, you surely understand everything yourself!”

  “The time hasn’t come yet for ideas like that!”

  “Is it worth your while to be in such a hurry?”

  They don’t try to merely break your spirit, but to force you to break it yourself. Obviously, They must occupy key positions in the educational system. It’s particularly important for Them to start with children as soon as possible.

  For the love of God, guard the children!

  Martynas refused to understand this. He still believed in the power of intellect. Besides, he was a sufficiently bold and brazen young man. He marched on Moscow itself, camped overnight in the reception rooms of the masters, took Olympus by a long-term siege. He climbed quite high; the only thing higher was the very apex, the banquet table of the gods.

  One sad evening Martynas, well into his cups, leaned over to me and whispered enigmatically: “That muckety-muck talked to me for two hours! I understood it all . . . they don’t need it . . . it was done on purpose . . . you can’t imagine what a Satanic system it is!” He spoke in a whisper, casting furtive glances at the corners of the empty room. It was then I thought he probably was walking right next to me on The Way. Alas, alas.

  On his return from Moscow, he quickly went through all the bureaucratic offices, collecting copies of his opus. That’s when remarkable things started happening. He didn’t find a single one. All of the offices claimed they never had a copy. The manuscript he had left at home vanished without a trace. Then they fired him from his post, quite officially, for not having defended his dissertation on time. He couldn’t manage to find other work. Openings would mysteriously disappear as soon as he approached the personnel department’s door. At last, late one evening, an unfamiliar voice telephoned him and suggested he apply at the library. That was how he ended up: without a wife, without children, without his great work. But he didn’t fall into hysterics, didn’t drink himself to death, and didn’t start fearing his own shadow.

  On the contrary, he started expressing dreadful heresies out loud—the way people sing as loud as they can when they’re going through a haunted forest. I suspect Martynas sees apparitions too. Even now he almost never shuts his mouth. For some reason we’re sitting at the coffee break table again and talking about something. And again it repeats itself: more and more often, my time turns in circles and returns to the same spot.

  Leodead Brezhnev’s portrait listens indifferently. An abundance of the usual conversational themes: Lithuanians and Russians, the food that isn’t, rising prices, Russia as the kingdom of idiots, America as a paradise where dollars grow on trees, the decrepit government, youth has no ideals, the world’s ecological system is disintegrating, we were born Lithuanians, will there be a war?

  Now the theme approaches the eternal circle, which is nearly impossible to escape from: the absurdities of propaganda, what are they blathering, who do they think we are? The theme has been discussed and dissected to death, but Martynas is still pontificating:

  “They actually know no one will listen to them. No one will hear what they say. So there’s no need to put even a speck of logic into what they’re spouting off about. It would be a useless waste of effort. Besides, they’re concerned about people’s health. Imagine what would happen if a political commentator suddenly said something intelligent. A catastrophe! Fifteen hundred people would get a heart attack. Three thousand would go into nervous shock from the unexpectedness of it. At least several dozen would start prophesying: they’ll decide the end of the world is coming . . .”

  “Comrade Martynas, Comrade Martynas . . .” Elena drawls lazily.

  Pretty Beta, who separates me
from Elena, is completely stunned: she showed up here recently and isn’t used to Martynas yet. Whenever he opens his mouth, every newcomer or stranger thinks a platoon of soldiers will pile into the room at any moment and drag Martynas off to a penal colony. The old-timers are used to it, even Elena, even though she represents the Communist Party in our company. She interrupts Martynas’s heresies with the monotony of a robot, but she doesn’t even bother to scare him or lecture him.

  Laima took advantage of the silence. She resembles a fish, a large cod. I always want to let her back into the ocean. She looks around quite serenely and announces:

  “Last night I saw an evening with Marcinkevičius on the television. A very good poet.”

  My neighbor Beta’s jaw even dropped: you need to get used to Laima too. She always speaks out of turn. That’s her style. She’s even weirdly secretive, like every fish.

  Elena willingly takes up the theme of nationality. She likes to play the knowledgable Lithuanian. The wolf’s satisfied, and the sheep’s healthy too:

  “He’s the only true Lithuanian poet.”

  Martynas’s eyes bug out horribly:

  “Oh, yes, no one else knows how to exclaim with such sad, longing pathos: O sancta Lituanica! I suggest introducing a unit of yearning sadness, let’s say . . . hmm . . . a marcinkena or a marcena. One marcena would be equal to . . .”

  “His trilogy is a true Lithuanian epic.” Elena’s knowledge is wide, she reads the newspapers diligently. “The people create a national poet with their own hands.”

  ”Yes, I see how that nation, its sleeves rolled up, under the careful eye of the KGB and censorship, dripping with sweat, swiftly creates a national poet,” this from me, needlessly of course.