Ricardas Gavelis - Vilnius Poker

When did I see this scene? Did I see it at all? I remember my paws burned as they stuck to the hot bitumen of the roof. There wasn’t so much as a hint of a breeze. And it occurred to me that I could, for all it’s worth, change the course of events. I could have jumped up and knocked the rifle out of his hands. But I couldn’t explain anything to him.

It slowly gets lighter. I’ve sat in the gateway the entire night long. We dogs think very slowly.

I’m drawn to run to the village, to Stefanija Monkevič. I’m drawn to Lolita Banytė-Žilienė’s grave. I’m drawn to the barred basement window, behind which Vytautas Vargalys sits and smokes. If I were three dogs, I’d run everywhere at once.

But even alone, I sense, I smell the essence with all of my doggy being. I almost understand what the dragon is doing with my Vilnius.

The people of Vilnius can’t avoid lying, because Vilnius itself lies.

Probably all the cities in the world lie sometimes. They want to appear prettier, smarter, or more lovable. That’s a nearly innocent lie. Vilnius lies all the time — consistently and maliciously. Vilnius wants to deceive; perhaps that’s the only purpose of its existence. It lies with people, because people are the city’s words. But it lies with its streets too, and with its houses, and even with its past.

Today I don’t believe nighttime Vilnius, either. It wants to pretend it’s the same as always. It’s a clever pretender. If St. Anne’s Church were to suddenly disappear, or Gediminas Square were to turn into a swamp, everyone would notice it. Vilnius lies in a much more subtle way; its deceptions are always covered in mist. Only a thinking dog can fathom them.

First of all, Vilnius dissembles with its smells.

The city’s smells form in layers: with effort, you can smell out even the very oldest, ones that dispersed once upon a time, in the depths of the ages. Ancient smells don’t air out; it would seem the stench of gasoline ought to cover everything — but no, you sniff and sniff, carefully smell it out, and finally you sense that an Old Town crossroads smells of ancient blood and ripened hatred, Jewish love and Polish honor. The new building crammed in place of an old mansion spreads an abundance of smells, but they don’t conquer the scentscapes of old wine, aurochs roasts and ruinous gold. In the world of scent, the ancient mansions are more genuine than that new building. In the scentscape of Vilnius, the twentieth and the fifteenth century exist side by side. The flow of time doesn’t apply to the smells of Vilnius.

I’m so accustomed to that city of smells that I keep forgetting people can’t smell. Although I suspect some can; they just don’t reveal themselves to anyone.

And then I suddenly found out that the city changes its smell. Early in the morning I dashed down to the square next to Symphony Hall; at least a couple of streets run together into a single spot there, like creeks. The smell of river mud and a gloomy craving for freedom always hung around there. That smell was just as familiar to me as the way the square looked. I sensed the new smell from a distance. It was strange and artificial. I couldn’t be mistaken — a dog’s nose doesn’t lie. The square smelled neither of river deposits, nor of a craving for freedom — merely of narcissus and a silly cheerfulness.

It was unbelievable. The scentscape of Vilnius, the most immutable, eternal part of the city, had suddenly unraveled. It was a bad omen.

After that morning, I scrambled to examine my map of smells. To my horror I realized it was all constantly changing. The scentscape of Vilnius turned out to be unstable. The smells of the city were playing an incomprehensible game. One morning, the fundamental, centuries-old smells of streets, houses, and rivers would suddenly change. A hundred times I had smelled that right here, in this intersection, there was once a leather workshop, and later, perhaps a century later, someone had murdered all the women and children nearby; one morning I would suddenly discover that none of it had happened. There was no leather workshop; there was no slaughter of women. Suddenly the intersection would smell only of an expensive banquet and Dominican hymns. True, the real scent would return sooner or later, but not always. Sometimes it would be shoved out by yet another, completely unexpected smell. It seemed the city was furiously changing its own self, hiding its true past, its own essence.

As a former jazzman, it instinctively occurred to me that Vilnius was secretly swinging. That it simply improvises a bit — so it wouldn’t be so boring. There is the basic smell theme, the familiar map of the city’s smells. But that’s only the theme; it can be varied and expanded, returning over and over again to the beginning. That’s exactly what ancient Vilnius took up. I smelled those threatening changes and naïvely judged them to be a game, musicianship without any hidden purpose.

I can’t be angry with myself for that. I was merely a novice. I still didn’t know anything about Vilnius Poker.

I had to run around as a dog for five years before I realized that Vilnius lies intentionally. Little by little, it accustoms its inhabitants to not feel or notice the deceptions. A little at a time, it takes up playing tricks on not just the sense of smell, but other senses as well. The pavement on the cross street above Pilies Street is at one time polished slippery, at another time coarsely rough, and later it turns slippery again. At first, you think you’re only imagining it; later, you don’t even notice it.

Unfortunately, people don’t notice even drastic changes, and Vilnius lies a little bit at a time, very carefully. Some old house will just get a foot or two smaller; a week later by the same amount again; then more and more. Its color slowly changes too. Regardless, a few years later the house is completely different. And Vilniutians don’t even notice this. These changing people are accustomed to a changing city. If you left Vilnius for a long time, on your return you’ll no longer find some cross street: it simply won’t be there anymore. The inhabitants of Vilnius, with perfect equanimity, will say it never was. And they won’t even think they’re lying. Only people like that can live in a lying city.

This morning is lying too. Street cleaners in orange jackets sweep the bare asphalt with brooms. Maybe they see fallen leaves there? The streets are still empty; the lights don’t dispel the dimness in the least. It’s the dimness swallowing their light.

“Oh, look, what a doggy,” says a fat woman to her stripling assistant, who is mysteriously gathering leaves one at a time. “A hungry doggy. A stray.”

The urchin raises his mysterious eyes to me, and picks up a whiff of a warm winter hat. He’s thinking it wouldn’t be at all bad to skin my hide.

Skinners like that didn’t proliferate in Vilnius before. Besides, I wouldn’t make a warm hat — I freeze quite a bit in this hide myself.

Sometimes I think I’m lying myself: I pretend to be a dog, although I am by no means an ordinary dog.

Vilnius slowly awakens from its doze, a howling police car flies by: some Vilniutian met the morning no longer in this world. I’m dejected, I’m unbelievably depressed, although, thinking logically, this can’t be. We thinking dogs don’t have feelings. Maybe we don’t have them, but I remember them anyway. I dream them, and dreamt feelings are even more intense than real ones.

Although I’m not convinced even of that. A human inevitably believes in something. I haven’t believed in anything for a long time now.

There’s nothing real in Vilnius anymore. Its houses can change, switch places, disappear, and then show up again. Its people apparently can be several places at once, act several different ways at the same time, and invent not just their future, but their past too. It’s always because they have neither a real past, nor a real future. It’s always because the city itself lies shamelessly, so it has taught its inhabitants to lie too.