Ricardas Gavelis - Vilnius Poker

“So far, nothing.”

“What are these?” the special collections director asked angrily — he was the second witness.

I studied the portraits. I recognized a still very young Kafka. Cupid, drawn by VV himself, was aiming at Franz’s heart. Kafka was unshaven, like the drunks at the Narutis. Next to that smirked Camus’s somewhat horsy face. In the engravings, I recognized de Sade and Nietzsche. Higher up hung Baudelaire and Roman Polanski. Only by racking my brains did I recognize, somewhat uncertainly, Jean Genet too.

”They’re all writers, poets, one’s a movie director,” I spluttered. “I probably don’t need to comment on the other wall.”

On the other corner wall, each one larger than the other, paraded Plato, Marx, Lenin, for some reason Tolstoy with Picasso, and Chaplin. The company was crowned by the two great poker players who played for Europe, or maybe the entire world — the immortal Joseph and Adolph. Disdain and satisfaction lurked in their eyes as they looked at their cards. Lord knows I have no idea why VV didn’t draw their cards. After all, he drew Plato with a handlebar mustache.

“He’s carried a bunch of books from the collection over here,” the special collections director announced sadly, squatting and looking them over. “He stole them, although I don’t know how. Our security. .”

“You’d be better off keeping quiet about it.” I felt a certain glee that the detective spoke rudely with his colleague too. “I see that anyone who wants to can read your books. You’ll make a list later.”

He suddenly turned to me:

“Come on, give me a hand!”

Without a doubt, this was an acknowledgement of the worthiness of my intellect: he called on me, not my colleague, to lift up the couch. It would have been better if he’d recruited that flustered gray-eyes.

At first I thought my head was merely swimming, but then I recoiled in horror. Lord knows, a body chopped into pieces would have frightened me less.

Under the couch, millions of cockroaches crawled, twitched their antennas, and mated. All of the library’s cockroaches, every last one, had assembled there. Black and brown, the size of a flea and the size of a matchbox, shining and matte, they clambered over one another, crawled in dozens of layers; they were actually leaping up and down and flying around. They were so numerous they could easily have devoured me, chewed me up a single molecule, a single atom, at a time.

And all of them suddenly rushed off, spread out, hid in the shelves and between the books, crawled into invisible cracks; it seemed they simply dissolved into thin air. After a few seconds not a single one remained — just that where the couch stood earlier there was a myriad of little black spots: the tiny shit-balls of millions upon millions of cockroaches.

I was shaking all over, while the detective started resembling a philosopher who had suddenly got hold of his idée fixe. He wasn’t surprised; he didn’t recoil, like I had. He just smiled wryly, and his eyes announced that this was just what he had expected.

In one of my collection’s photographs, Lolita has an expression that looks as if cockroaches or ants were crawling all over her — over her entire body, over the most private and vulnerable spots. She stands there transfixed, because she knows there’s no way to avoid the torture.

For some reason it’s women like Lolita and men like VV who perish. In the meantime, everyone in our office and all my other acquaintances live on quite serenely; they’re all completely content and satisfied. They don’t fall in love with anyone. They aren’t plagued by oppressive memories. They’ll do their assistant professorships at the institutes, get bored in architectural offices, or paint the same colorful landscapes over and over.

Maybe if you really want to live, the only thing left is to perish?

I spend a lot of time with Lithuanian writers under the cover of the demands of my work. Supposedly, I consult with them, as is appropriate for devising a bibliographic index of belles lettres. Actually, I’m just scoping out new material for my collection. Lithuanian writers give me fodder for both the collection and my mlog. Incidentally, they’re constantly asking me if I don’t know of a good plot. There’s only one I’ve come up with.

It’s a story about this Dane, or Dutchman, living with a pretty little wife in a pretty little house in the suburbs, who’s very concerned about a lot of things. Salaries are extremely worrisome to him: they aren’t rising particularly fast. He’s troubled about national problems too: Danish butter (or Dutch cheese) is facing constantly growing competition in the world market. He works whole-heartedly and thoroughly, and in his free time he draws plans for tennis courts in his yard. They have to be special, different from all the other courts in the world. In addition, this Dane (or maybe a Dutchman after all?) signs every imaginable peace manifesto and supports the War on Drug Addiction League. At last, he decides to build his unique courts, but suddenly he sees that an unfamiliar white object has shown up on the spot in the yard that he’s allotted for it.

This Belgian (or Frenchman) gets very annoyed. He immediately calls the municipality, but no one there answers the phone. Completely furious, he calls the police, but all he hears on the phone is a strange sound, like mumbling, like someone chomping.

Then that Italian (or Dane) angrily huffs over to the intruder. Getting closer to the white object, his resolution fades, because the object is very large. In front of him protrudes a gigantic ass — roughly the size of a twenty-story building. It’s very clean, and perches there totally satisfied, as if it had been born there.

A footpath is already trampled up to it, and a sign in large, calligraphic letters announces: “Kiss every day from 4 to 6 p.m.” The Dutch Belgian is absolutely clueless. He hasn’t heard of the Ass of the Universe, or if he did hear about it, he thinks it’s imaginary. He calls the War on Drug Addiction League, the Peace Defense Committee, calls his lawyer, even the Women’s Club — but all he keeps hearing everywhere is the same strange noise: like incoherent mumbling, like some kind of chomping. All there is on the TV is an entirely analogous picture of an ass. This Danish Italian calls every possible number again, getting more and more nervous, until, in a moment of inspiration, he suddenly realizes what he’s hearing all the time on the telephone.

It’s the satisfied and content farting of that same sublime ass.

I have also created a story about the love of a prisoner. This prisoner was confined behind barbed wire. Behind what barbed wire, or whether he’s guilty or innocent, is completely irrelevant. At intervals, very infrequently, he’d succeed in seeing a woman from afar. She was so far away that he couldn’t make out her features, so he would invent them himself. He would draw these imaginary women. Sometimes they would resemble madonnas, sometimes street prostitutes, but that prisoner of mine no longer remembered what either madonnas or prostitutes looked like.

One day a miracle occurred. A young girl showed up right next to the barbed wire. She came again the next day, and the next. She was the daughter of the prison warden. The prisoner’s life acquired meaning. He could look at that girl. He would steal glances at her or watch her openly — she never noticed him, anyway. But others noticed.

In stories about convicts, they love to portray how brotherly they all are, how they help one another out. That’s very nice, but in actuality things are completely different. I know this — we’re all convicts, and I’ve never encountered any solidarity. The other prisoners cruelly mocked the young lover, told dirty jokes about the girl, and crudely assessed her attractions and her shortcomings.