Ricardas Gavelis - Vilnius Poker

They remembered the Vargalyses with sympathy and a strange, pathological love. Telling erotic stories was among Julius’s duties; he had to tell them to VV’s mother while giving her a daily massage. She utterly loved erotic stories, even though she herself, both of them confirmed, didn’t sleep with her husband after VV was born. Janė had to suffer with VV’s father’s illnesses. He was a terrible hypochondriac; he surrounded himself with potions and pills.

“It was Vytie I was sorriest for,” Janė explained. “They would really torture him.”

The mother taught VV every day — up until he was grown. Two, three hours at a time. Who knows what she would teach him, but she didn’t leave him a free minute. She was a maniac mother: she was afraid that if her son were separated from her for even a minute he would instantly be ruined.

“I’d feed him secretly,” Janė burst out, “The lady was a vegetarian and a dieter, so she forced Vytie to starve too.”

The two of them considered VV their younger brother. God’s ways are mysterious: the two of them loved and protected VV, but began hating his parents more and more. They figured everything this way: the Vargalyses are trying to atone for their guilt; they don’t pile them up with work, pay well, but won’t acknowledge what mattered most: that they are their parents. This paranoid idea slowly took over Janė and Julius’s entire being; they rose and went to bed with a single thought in their heads: how to take revenge on their traitorous parents.

Even now they couldn’t agree as to which one had thought of killing the Vargalyses first.

Julius’s pure alcohol slowly did its dirty work: it all seemed unreal to me, you’d think I’d been listening to some legends. I saw VV’s mother proudly pacing the house’s winding corridors. She wanted to do good for everyone, but didn’t know how. I saw VV’s father: pale, his hands trembling, but able to kill a bull with a single blow of his fist, if need be. I saw the young VV too: frail, downtrodden, frightened of who knows what, pressing up against Janė, who protected her little brother. Suddenly I noticed Giedraitienė’s absence; suddenly I remembered that her tale was completely different.

“Yeah, there was a cow like that around,” Janė confirmed. “She was dying to charm everyone — even the barnyard animals. She’d mince around even in front of our dog. And her boy, they say, was a spy for the stribai .”

“What aunt? What sister?” Julius eyes widened. “Why, she’s a Pole! Her maiden name’s Stefanovič!”

I no longer tried to make any sense of it or understand it; all I did was listen avidly. Janė and Julius related how VV’s mother drowned herself. At that moment, the war was driving exhausted uniformed men through their yard. The first to appear were the Germans.

“Why are you retreating?” Vargalienė asked them all. “Why are you retreating when you have technology like that? What — do the Russians have better?”

“Technology’s useless, ma’am,” explained a polite little Silesian German. “My machine gun jams when it overheats, but they just keep coming and coming. This week I’ve mowed down some thousand Russians, but they just keep coming and coming, sticking out their bare chests. Technology has its limits, but the Russians are limitless. We don’t have that many bullets, ma’am.”

The next morning the Germans moved out, and Vargalienė announced out loud:

“We’ll be overrun by locusts, giant locusts. A single one can bite off a person’s head.”

VV’s father, forgetting his potions, was sipping champagne.

“But they’ve already been here,” he kept saying. “They’re not locusts. At best they’re stinking, starving, dirty little people.”

But Vargalienė didn’t hear anything; she just kept repeating that it’d be better to kill yourself than to wait for the locusts to devour you.

Janė and Julius were still considering how to execute their metaphysical decision. However, VV’s mother beat them to it; she drowned herself like some Ophelia. They pulled her out of the creek themselves; they were the ones who rolled her into the wagon. Vargalys’s pockets were bulging with banknotes. There wasn’t a single soul around. VV had disappeared somewhere; the two of them should have knocked off his father (their father), but they couldn’t do it.

“She was lying on the hay with her head tilted to the side and looking at us with glassy eyes. I kept waiting for her to open her mouth and say: ‘Locusts.’ I forgot everything; all I could do was look at those glassy eyes. I still dream of them.”

“Me too,” Janė echoed.

VV’s father rode off to the west with his wife’s corpse, completely forgetting his son. The wagon creaked off after the setting sun and melted into oblivion. All that was left lying in the yard was a graceful, austere, thousand-pound sterling note.

Only now do I understand why VV hated his father so: he couldn’t forgive him for forgetting him.

Most of all I regretted mentioning my mlog to them. Up until then, no one knew about it. I’ve been jumping up in my sleep with a nightmare for several days now. What the hell got into me?

By the way, don’t you find locusts remarkably similar to cockroaches?

The locusts and cockroaches so affected me that I got interested in all sorts of abominations: Old Town garbage cans, backed-up sewer pipes, and the city’s public toilets. The latter are interesting in a purely semantic sense. The writings on the walls of toilets are the last refuge for free speech in the Ass of the Universe. A person squatting down to make an effort manages to give birth to a crumb of truth together with his excrement. Apparently, the need for it is physiological.

Unfortunately, homo lithuanicus doesn’t even keep a toilet log. Practically all of the writing in Vilnius’s public toilets is in Russian. This isn’t the result of etiquette or upbringing. Homo lithuanicus simply can’t even poop the truth. He can’t even write up toilet walls.

This is an essential characteristic of homo lithuanicus. Muscovites of all sorts still hope it’s possible to say this or that, to change this or that, to wait for something. Homo lithuanicus knows a priori that it’s absolutely impossible to say, expect, or hope for anything. That’s why he doesn’t waste his breath unnecessarily; he’s supposedly saving his spiritual potential. It’s just that no one knows what for.

What do I have in mind? Concrete results. The world knows of some dozen Russian writers. But they don’t know of any Lithuanians, and they won’t, because the Lithuanians don’t waste their breath over anything; they’re supposedly saving their spiritual strength.

Homo lithuanicus , unable to express himself freely, would rather carry his soul to the grave without it ever being put to use. That’s how nations die.

By the way, about the extinction of nations. The Hungarians, Czechs, or Serbians one meets, with a single voice, claim that we should be proud of being Lithuanian. You’ve preserved your language with such a monster next door! You don’t realize yourselves what a heroic deed you’ve accomplished! Even the Irish lost their language!

But that’s meager consolation. The Irish remained Irish all the same, while language. . Perhaps I’m horribly mistaken, but if a few Lithuanian Joyces would show up, or a Beckett and a half — let them write in Swahili for that matter. But let them at last write, paint, or play music.

But they don’t write, don’t paint, and don’t play music.

There’s something here I don’t understand.

Homo lithuanicus , unfortunately, realized only too well that to lose is very easy and comfortable. Then you can blame everything in the world — just not yourself. Lord knows, it’s really comfortable. And gracefully, elegantly sad. Homo lithuanicus tends to do nothing but feel sorry for himself and bemoan his melancholy end.