Ricardas Gavelis - Vilnius Poker

But Giedraitienė’s legends lacked elementary consistency. According to her, VV reigned over the neighboring forest brothers; he would give the leaders his grandfather’s instructions. I believe I’ve already mentioned that the elder Vargalys secretly coordinated the forest brothers’ actions. I can’t conceive why VV would have needed to endanger the entire unit to save his life. I’m even more confused about why he would have denounced the go-between Giedraitienė, his provider and protector. One sentence of Giedraitienė’s made me prick up my ears immediately. Robertas, after all, couldn’t have done it, she muttered indistinctly, he wouldn’t have betrayed his real mother. According to her, in a moment of weakness VV had given the entire unit away, and then disappeared for parts unknown. She was the only one who knew about his betrayal, so she was constantly gnawing at him — the living reproach of his conscience.

I’d say two facts destroy her hogwash. First, VV really was imprisoned; there are way too many witnesses. Second, his leader Bitinas’s unit was in operation for at least several years after VV’s arrest.

I was much more interested in the news that a couple, a brother and sister who once looked after VV’s mother, were still living quite peacefully in the village of Užubaliai.

I’d never even dreamed there could be live witnesses. They could tell me about VV’s childhood! They could give me the link my mlog most lacks.

My mlog, compared to life, is as orderly as the alphabet. Life is much less coherent. After listening to Giedraitienė’s ravings, I was planning to end up at VV’s mother’s nurses by early morning. But I ended up there after something like a week, because Kovarskis suddenly came to visit me and from the doorway announced that VV had visited him just before his fateful outing to the gardens.

“He dissected my stiffs.” Kovarskis announced, “He often liked to amuse himself that way. Maybe he was a secret necrophiliac.”

I didn’t believe a word he said; these fantasies are Kovarskis’s secret predilection. He thinks there are too few genuine horrors and abominations in the world, so they need to be invented too. That’s all very well for him. I suspect he doesn’t know himself which parts of his stories are true and which parts are complete fiction.

“You mean to say VV trained himself in advance to cut people up?”

“No,” he answered in a somber voice, “Vytas would only prepare brains. The rest of it didn’t interest him. But the key thing is that yesterday I was questioned about it by this humanized phallus.”

I immediately knew he had the detective in mind, the one who had prowled around the library too. Kovarskis always had a knack for describing people accurately. I’d love to include Kovarskis in my collection, but he’s as slippery as a snake. Even when he’s drunk he never talks about himself. You can’t figure him out. What is he, a man of such talent, doing in that morgue?

“That guy got nothing but shit, anyway. I told him Vytas and I would guzzle grain alcohol, and that he was terrified of corpses.”

I looked at his twinkling eyes and wondered — is he one of us, one of theirs, or no one’s? I had to risk it: life isn’t lived without risk.

“What, do you suppose, was VV looking for there?” I asked carefully. “In those brains.”

“Cockroaches!” Kovarskis replied, without blinking an eye.

I had barely managed to include Giedraitienė’s rabbits in my collection when other creatures started determinedly intruding on it too. I have cockroaches in mind.

The cockroaches in the den VV had set up between the library’s bookshelves. Cockroaches in the brains of the dead. Cockroaches in all of my acquaintances’ apartments — bold, menacing, invincible. The cockroaches of Vilnius are no longer an object of nature, rather a purely metaphysical one. It’s impossible to overcome them. The best poisons from Holland and Germany affect them once and only once. They return after a few days and just get fat on the poison. They’re secretly watching us when we empty our bowels in the toilet or make love to women. There’s even cockroaches in birthing centers. They accompany us from the first moments of life. And accompany us to our very deathbed. Cockroaches breed even inside sealed refrigerators.

I visited VV’s mother’s former nurses anyway. They met me by the gate, as if they had been waiting there for a long time. Little brother seemed enormously suspicious: he demanded I show my documents. The two of them lived on a farm, and where the village of Užubaliai itself was tucked away, I never did find out. Apparently a minimalist artist had decorated the interior of the cottage: a table, chairs, and a shelf. Even the curtains were patternless. The owners looked like ascetics from the Middle Ages: thin, tight-lipped, untalkative.

Like a magician, Julius (that’s how he introduced himself) pulled out a bottle, filled three shot glasses and snapped his fingers:

“We’ll drink the first one on an empty stomach!” he said threateningly.

It was pure grain alcohol. Julius glanced at me more agreeably and poured seconds. Janė (that was his sister’s name) somehow, who knows when, managed to quickly cut up some sausage. Outside the window a red sun was solemnly setting.

“You see, this guy was just here,” Julius said after a silence, “who was pretending to collect material for an encyclopedia. But he gave off a familiar smell.”

That was how I found out that the detective had already managed to make a visit.

“So, what are you collecting?” Julius inquired rudely.

Suddenly I decided I had to tell them about my collection and my mlog. They understood everything immediately.

“Oh, you want to understand the world, for whatever that’s worth,” Julius stated calmly.

We drank grain alcohol all night long, and the two of them kept on talking. They never went to church, so the confessions they had never made had been accumulating for years. They didn’t spare themselves or defend themselves. They really did make confession: they tried to remember all their sins, not hide them.

After the war, the Vargalys house was left without owners. The two of them drank the fine wines that were left behind and paged through incomprehensible books, until the Russian soldiers arrived with some guy who pronounced them Vargalyses.

“So we’re part Vargalys too,” Julius smiled wryly.

“We sat out two months in the can for being Vargalyses.”

“Why didn’t you deny it?” I asked, somewhat drunk already.

“What’s the difference? When they found out who we really are, they sent us to Siberia, anyway.”

“Bullshit,” Janė suddenly interrupted. “We both wanted to somehow atone for our sins against the Vargalyses.”

That’s how their great confession began. Janė and Julius were abandoned as children; they went forth into life from an orphanage. The mythology of orphanages is difficult for those of us with parents to understand. We can’t comprehend the belief penetrating the orphan’s soul that he is, at the very least, a prince kidnapped by fairies.

Orphanage mythology stated that Janė and Julius were left by an expensively dressed lady who swore to come back for them later. Actually, they don’t even know if they really are brother and sister. All their lives they felt a secret attraction for each other, but they lived like brother and sister. The Vargalyses took them in as servants. According to the orphanage mythology, they seemed like they could be Janė and Julius’s parents. And “could be,” to those throwaways meant “probably were.” Slowly it began to mean, “without doubt they are.” This was obvious nonsense for many reasons, but it didn’t seem to matter to Janė and Julius.