Ricardas Gavelis - Vilnius Poker

“And if I were to start needling at you too? We’d go on picking on one another? You’d get mad first. Men are very touchy.”

I follow from behind, hanging back a bit, and wait patiently, because she speaks of intimate things only in Didžiosios Street. (Now she’s in Gorky Street. What a sad, sad absurdity — what does some Gorky, a miserable kanukized servant, have in common with Vilnius?) It’s only in this street, descending downwards, that she talks about what matters most to her. (Climbing up she always asks me about the camp.) It’s probably still quite early, but Vilnius is empty. Vilnius gets emptier by the day — the emptier it gets, the worse the crush in the streets. A dead city, and above it hangs a fog of submissive, disgusting fear. Vilnius, which I love, Vilnius, which is I myself, buried under lava like Pompeii, under the seas like Atlantis. Lolita and I are shadows: the live Vilniutians, that throng of ants, that murky river, don’t wander the evening streets, don’t talk the way we do.

“I can’t stand dead ideas,” she suddenly says. “I can’t stand symbols and metaphors. . My mother was obsessed with the idea of innocence. The idea of consummate innocence. Do you know what innocence is?”

“This membrane in the vagina. Sometimes very difficult to tear.”

“Vytas, stop it,” she fumes. “You’re making fun of me. I won’t tell you anything. . Although as it happens, it was exactly with a membrane that everything started. .”

Agitated, she looks around as if she were searching for ears in the walls, then she cowers and whispers. Even her whisper plays its own music. She doesn’t hiss like others do; you’d think she was uttering secret curses — only genuine fairies know them.

“Whoever walks between these walls can’t be innocent. This damn city wouldn’t put up with innocence. . But no, I was talking about the past, about my mother. . At first my maidenly innocence really was what mattered most to her. You can’t imagine how much you can talk about that. How many days, evenings, nights. For years! Mother started when I was about six. I’d run around the yards, mostly with the boys. For some reason I wasn’t attracted to dolls; I liked hideaways, ruins and boys better. . She immediately started in giving me lectures about innocence. She wanted to explain what innocence is. Abstract innocence — that’s what mattered most to her. It was complete mysticism. . Later she switched to concrete maidenly innocence, as a separate example. She explained in excruciating detail all the methods whereby, in her opinion, it was possible to lose your innocence. All night long — so I would know what I had to avoid. Her imagination was nightmarish. But enough of that. . Of course, I didn’t understand anything, but an image of mystical innocence formed within me. A live innocence. . Practically a little beast. . It was so. . sticky, without any holes or openings, hairy, and really cold — so you wouldn’t want to touch it. My six- or seven-year-old brain was full of that cold, hairy innocence, can you imagine? I’d dream of it. And how did everything turn out?”

She stops again, as if she needs to concentrate to answer, and takes a deep breath of air, Vilnius’s gray air. It smells of decay. Every evening street of Vilnius looks like a narrow path through an invisible bog. If you were to go a couple of steps to the side you’d immediately feel the sweetish breath of the swamp, the smell of peaceful decay.

“Do you know how it all ended up? Quite naturally: I began to hate any kind of innocence. If I had only understood what my mother was explaining to me, I would have lost my maidenly innocence by all possible means. I’ll tell you about my mother’s fantastic invented methods later, all right?”

I can’t be all right: we’re approaching the Narutis, approaching the lonely portal that quietly chats with Saint John’s church. There’s no talking here; I have to go by calmly, without disturbing the old smells that have seeped into the walls. And Lolita understands me, understands without a word, by now she’s standing in my room by the window and stroking the curtain. But no — she’s lying on the couch with her legs curled up under her.

Now she’s lying on the couch completely naked, her head leaning on her left hand, with her soft-skinned legs curled up under her. A secret fire burns within her — I still don’t know if she won’t set me on fire too. I only know what I see and feel now. I feel Lolita’s warmth, and I see her herself: the large, firm breasts, the belly hidden in half-shadow, the folded, twisted legs. I understand why an artist took her for a wife: he wanted to have an ideal model at hand every day. You could draw her, exclusively, your entire life. Not just her portraits — you could paint a meadow or a room: on the canvas there really will be a meadow or a room, but actually you’d draw her all the same. You can delve into her, express her, even though at that moment your paintbrush will leave an image of the Last Judgment on the canvas, or a still life of space-rending green peaches, or symmetrical gray squares. That’s just what the ordinary sight will see, but the second, true sight will invariably discern Lolita there.

“Why do I talk about it? I don’t know. . Sometimes it seems to me that she was a genuine Lithuanian, a Lithuanian of Lithuanians — with that idea of hers, of innocence. It’s like a national illness, you know? She tried to be innocent in absolutely everything. It was practically a religious aspiration, an unrealistic yearning. Her slogan should have been: ‘Never take a step!’ And: ‘If someone comes close to you, don’t wait, don’t stand in place — run as fast as you can!’ She wanted to be innocent in absolutely everything. . Not God’s fiancée, no, no, not that at all. . I’d say she didn’t want to surrender to the world, or something. If it were at all possible not to do something new, something unknown, something she hadn’t experienced yet — she wouldn’t do it. Understand?. . If she had never been somewhere, she avoided going there. She tried her best to never go beyond the borders of the smells, events, and ceremonies she had already experienced; anything new could injure her mystical innocence. . Don’t touch that flower, she would say, don’t show it to me!. . Don’t tell me about the sea, never, ever, tell me about the sea! We got into a horrible row the first time I secretly ran off to the sea!. . Never mind the sea, she had never tasted lemons! A lemon could injure her innocence, you know?”

“So, it’s always about your mother. And you?”

Lolita moves her legs uneasily, rubs her cheek with a finger; bars of light slink over her chest, briefly light up her navel and the lower part of her belly, the thick, curled-up hair. Her mother intimidates me. I don’t want to hear another word about her mother. She was my age. Someone my age, obsessed with a pathological idea of innocence.

Lolita suddenly sits up, bends her somewhat spread legs and leans on her knees with her elbows, her hands hanging down, her fingers almost reaching her ankles. The halo of thick hair glows with an angry fire around her head. Her body, unusually coarse, almost vulgar, looks at me rapaciously; the plainly visible dark sexual opening irritates me. It’s only like that for a few moments. The lamp is ashamed and hides behind her back; now her face, her entire front, is in shadow, and her voice is much calmer.

“Don’t make fun of my mother. Her world was bigger than ours. Just think how much she invented about those things she never experienced, the things she denied herself. . I envy that ideal world of hers. . Imagine it — you invent a lemon yourself. With all the details, with a bunch of non-existent characteristics. . Come on now, a real lemon compared to an ideal like that — nothing more than a fog, a banal yellow fruit, while yours. . She was a theoretician, an aesthete; I went for practice and experimentation. She pounded that abstract idea of innocence into me so thoroughly that to this day I’m dying to lose my innocence in every possible sense, to try out everything immediately, to run looking who knows where, and to constantly look, to look for something never seen, never experienced, never known. . And I like just exactly the kind of men I can’t understand, the kind I don’t know what to expect from. . Understand?”