Ricardas Gavelis - Vilnius Poker

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.

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?