Ricardas Gavelis - Vilnius Poker

“And I’m that kind?”

“You understand. .” she blurts out, and continues down the street. “You understand everything perfectly well. You’re intelligent. Besides, you have your secret, and I don’t know what it is. . And I don’t want to know. . If I were to know, then at least I could predict what you’ll do, how you’ll behave. . And I don’t want that. . I want to experience everything myself, understand?”

She gets more and more furious; her voice angrily cuts the air of Pilies Street into pieces, and then flings them in my face. It is slowly getting lighter, or it hasn’t gotten dark yet. By now we have almost gone the entire street to the end. By now she has almost gotten all of it out — earlier, now, later.

“What did you ask me to begin with?” she says sadly. “Why am I telling you this drivel?”

“You were explaining why you’re attracted to horrible people.”

“Oh. . Because I can see only two signs in a person’s face — either unhappiness, or peace. The kind of peace that means stupidity, clean business, bacon, money, very soft furniture, fear of authority, endlessly just and moral behavior, shiny shoes that are never dirty, perfectly even dentures, a precise daily schedule, peaceful sleep. .”

In an instant the mood changes; suddenly Lolita is quiet, and without her voice something inexplicable is going on in the dimness. I’m walking down a street of Old Town, a woman walks beside me, but I have absolutely no idea who she is — I know her name, a few of her real or invented stories, but does that really mean I know her? A completely strange, dangerous woman is walking next to me and probably wants something from me — at this moment or in general. She probably wants to use me, like all women do, or perhaps even to deceive me cruelly. An extremely graceful woman — I can’t get enough of her walk, her legs gliding as smoothly as in a dream. She’s very young; it’s not clear what she wants from me, this fairy of Vilnius. At any moment she could look at me with a magic glance and turn me into a stone, or a submissive slave. I feel I am in her power. She controls me with magical powers, or at least she could control me: if she were to look at me with her entrancing eyes I would obey, I would carry out any order. But she doesn’t look — maybe she thinks it’s still early, maybe she’s saving her authority for the critical moment. You have to guard against her; you shouldn’t admire her.

There’s practically no fog left; I see the streets, the square and the most important thing — the hill and Gediminas Castle. Here the Iron Wolf howled in Grand Duke Gediminas’s dream and promised the castle a great future. Now Vilnius itself is a dream city, a ghost city. Among the faceless figures walking the streets, the good dead of Vilnius (the old ones and the entirely new ones from the post-war period, the last Lithuanian aurochs) look much livelier. It’s not clear which is a dream — the ancient city or the Vilnius of today. Only the ancient castle in the new city is unavoidably real: a lonely tower, emerging from the overgrown slopes of the hill — the phallic symbol of Vilnius. It betrays all secrets. The symbolic phallus of Vilnius: short, stumpy and powerless. An organ of pseudo-powers that hasn’t been able to get aroused in a long time. A red three-story tower, a phallic NOTHING, shamelessly shown to everyone, Vilnius’s image of powerlessness. The great symbol of a castrated city, of castrated Lithuania, stuck onto every postcard, into every photo album, every tourist brochure. A perverted, shameless symbol: its impotence should be hidden, not acknowledged, or it should at least pretend it’s still capable of a thing or two. But the city has long since lost everything — even its self-respect. Only lies, absurdity, and fear remain.

For some reason I’m sitting in the break room again, someone’s tossed me into a room with peeling plaster and set women around me. Besides myself, there’s only one man here — Martynas Poška, our library’s sad little chatterbox, a weird variety of crew-cut deity, a pathetic searcher for justice, and a collector of absurdities. At one time I even thought he was walking at least in parallel on The Way; I was shocked by his thin, long face, his eyes brimming with horror, his spineless whispers: “They don’t need it. . it was done intentionally. . a Satanic system. .” But you scarcely start to think Martynas could be one of your own , when he brushes his hand across his face, suddenly changing it for another, and again I see the sneering crew-cut Martynas, the library’s sad little chatterbox. Someone like that can’t walk The Way, thank God, he can’t be Their spy, either: in whatever company, he’s the one that talks the most. And I always listen. I don’t disdain any conversation, any company. He who knows The Way doesn’t have the right to disdain people who have been kanuked; he knows all too well that his great discoveries and advantages are just a matter of fate, and only his mistakes are truly earned. You cannot condemn those around you; the desire to demean others is inspired by Them . Everyone should be viewed with secret hope, and their words examined for expression of a strong spirit. Almost no one is completely kanuked.

Take Martynas: some spiritual organ of his secretly manufactures anti-kanukas hormones; I’ve been convinced of this many times. Inside of him hides a deep protest against Them , although unfortunately, he hasn’t an inkling of Their existence.

Martynas was always a person of faith. He had faith in the power of reason. He thought the majority of our misfortunes proliferate because there aren’t enough virtuous, stubborn, and talented young men to sacrifice themselves and fix at least the biggest idiocies of our life. Martynas feels he himself is one of those young men. He dedicated his dissertation to the study of education, although its scope was much larger. He even flushed out a few substantial things. It wasn’t just a standard dissertation, but two full-scale treatises. One was philosophical for the most part, written like Spinoza: axioms, theorems, and their proofs. The other was almost sociological: a lot of rich documentation confirming the already proven theorems. Martynas carried out a titanic labor: he began it in his sophomore year and labored over it twenty-five hours a day for an entire eleven years. He was even left without a wife or children. Martynas Poška was a scholarly fanatic.

He painstakingly studied the path of the Soviet citizen from preschool to a university degree, and with mathematical precision proved that everywhere and at all times the only thing taught is how to swallow ready-made propositions, lifeless tropes, and barren constructions. Nowhere is thinking taught. No one is taught to create images for himself, to find propositions, to arrange logical schemes. No one is taught to search for truth, no one is taught to doubt. And worst of all — no one is taught the fundamentals of morals and humanity. In a word, we raise imitators, talking parrots, soulless automatons — but not Homo sapiens. Martynas always had a boundless respect for the concept of Homo sapiens. In the second part of his opus he scattered a bouquet of the most dreadful examples — from moronic educational programs to young killers spouting off: they had murdered just for the hell of it — not even out of anger, nor out of any dark instinct, but merely because they hadn’t grasped the simplest rudiments of human morality.

When his dissertation immediately stumbled on every rung of the bureaucratic ladder, Martynas understood nothing. He still believed in the power of the intellect. After all, an educational system like that ruined absolutely everything: the economy, politics, people’s souls; in a word, his dissertation bolstered the entire country. But no one, absolutely no one, would even consider speaking of its shortfalls or merits. A multitude of identical faces and identical voices vaguely muttered, “Come on, now, how can you, you understand yourself, after all, you understand everything.”