Ricardas Gavelis - Vilnius Poker

Force is neither Their only nor Their basic method. Treachery, deceptive persuasion, and a peculiar hypnotism are far more significant, far better suited to Their purposes. It’s always Their bywords:

“Come on now, you understand, you surely understand everything yourself!”

“The time hasn’t come yet for ideas like that!”

“Is it worth your while to be in such a hurry?”

They don’t try to merely break your spirit, but to force you to break it yourself. Obviously, They must occupy key positions in the educational system. It’s particularly important for Them to start with children as soon as possible.

For the love of God, guard the children!

Martynas refused to understand this. He still believed in the power of intellect. Besides, he was a sufficiently bold and brazen young man. He marched on Moscow itself, camped overnight in the reception rooms of the masters, took Olympus by a long-term siege. He climbed quite high; the only thing higher was the very apex, the banquet table of the gods.

One sad evening Martynas, well into his cups, leaned over to me and whispered enigmatically: “That muckety-muck talked to me for two hours ! I understood it all. . they don’t need it. . it was done on purpose. . you can’t imagine what a Satanic system it is!” He spoke in a whisper, casting furtive glances at the corners of the empty room. It was then I thought he probably was walking right next to me on The Way. Alas, alas.

On his return from Moscow, he quickly went through all the bureaucratic offices, collecting copies of his opus. That’s when remarkable things started happening. He didn’t find a single one. All of the offices claimed they never had a copy. The manuscript he had left at home vanished without a trace. Then they fired him from his post, quite officially, for not having defended his dissertation on time. He couldn’t manage to find other work. Openings would mysteriously disappear as soon as he approached the personnel department’s door. At last, late one evening, an unfamiliar voice telephoned him and suggested he apply at the library. That was how he ended up: without a wife, without children, without his great work. But he didn’t fall into hysterics, didn’t drink himself to death, and didn’t start fearing his own shadow.

On the contrary, he started expressing dreadful heresies out loud — the way people sing as loud as they can when they’re going through a haunted forest. I suspect Martynas sees apparitions too. Even now he almost never shuts his mouth. For some reason we’re sitting at the coffee break table again and talking about something. And again it repeats itself: more and more often, my time turns in circles and returns to the same spot.

Leodead Brezhnev’s portrait listens indifferently. An abundance of the usual conversational themes: Lithuanians and Russians, the food that isn’t, rising prices, Russia as the kingdom of idiots, America as a paradise where dollars grow on trees, the decrepit government, youth has no ideals, the world’s ecological system is disintegrating, we were born Lithuanians, will there be a war?

Now the theme approaches the eternal circle, which is nearly impossible to escape from: the absurdities of propaganda, what are they blathering, who do they think we are? The theme has been discussed and dissected to death, but Martynas is still pontificating:

“They actually know no one will listen to them. No one will hear what they say. So there’s no need to put even a speck of logic into what they’re spouting off about. It would be a useless waste of effort. Besides, they’re concerned about people’s health. Imagine what would happen if a political commentator suddenly said something intelligent. A catastrophe! Fifteen hundred people would get a heart attack. Three thousand would go into nervous shock from the unexpectedness of it. At least several dozen would start prophesying: they’ll decide the end of the world is coming. .”

“Comrade Martynas, Comrade Martynas. .” Elena drawls lazily.

Pretty Beta, who separates me from Elena, is completely stunned: she showed up here recently and isn’t used to Martynas yet. Whenever he opens his mouth, every newcomer or stranger thinks a platoon of soldiers will pile into the room at any moment and drag Martynas off to a penal colony. The old-timers are used to it, even Elena, even though she represents the Communist Party in our company. She interrupts Martynas’s heresies with the monotony of a robot, but she doesn’t even bother to scare him or lecture him.

Laima took advantage of the silence. She resembles a fish, a large cod. I always want to let her back into the ocean. She looks around quite serenely and announces:

“Last night I saw an evening with Marcinkevičius on the television. A very good poet.”

My neighbor Beta’s jaw even dropped: you need to get used to Laima too. She always speaks out of turn. That’s her style. She’s even weirdly secretive, like every fish.

Elena willingly takes up the theme of nationality. She likes to play the knowledgable Lithuanian. The wolf’s satisfied, and the sheep’s healthy too:

“He’s the only true Lithuanian poet.”

Martynas’s eyes bug out horribly:

“Oh, yes, no one else knows how to exclaim with such sad, longing pathos: O sancta Lituanica! I suggest introducing a unit of yearning sadness, let’s say. . hmm. . a marcinkena or a marcena. One marcena would be equal to. .”

“His trilogy is a true Lithuanian epic.” Elena’s knowledge is wide, she reads the newspapers diligently. “The people create a national poet with their own hands.”

”Yes, I see how that nation, its sleeves rolled up, under the careful eye of the KGB and censorship, dripping with sweat, swiftly creates a national poet,” this from me, needlessly of course.

Elena gives me a murderous look, but lets it pass. She’s afraid of me.

“And the national poet doesn’t snooze, either,” Martynas interrupts in a sweet little voice, “I can literally see him, taking heed of strict instructions from the authorities, practicing profound Lithuanian poses in front of the mirror. Do you know what’s the most Lithuanian pose of all?”

“He’s going to say something nasty!” Laima announces with cheerful horror.

But Martynas doesn’t get the chance to say anything nasty. Elena cuts him off angrily:

“You despise your own nation, Comrade Poška. You don’t like Lithuanian art.”

The great Lithuanianist Martynas ought to explode in fury, but he just swallows his saliva three times and says rather calmly:

“Where is it? Where’s the art? Where? Show it to me.” Anxiously, he looks under the table, out the window; he even sticks his nose behind the cabinet. “You know, there is no art. I can’t find it anywhere! Maybe someone took it and carried it off? Where, my dear, is your art?”

The newcomer Beta got truly intrigued, she even leaned forward. I’ve such an urge to stroke her little short-haired head, and then her firm, probably not very large breasts.

“You don’t even know Lithuanian art, Comrade Poška!”

“That’s a lie! I know eighty-five kilometers of Lithuanian writers, I’m an expert! Lithuanian writers are divided into the sad ones and the cheery ones. The latter I refuse to study. And the sad ones’ sadness is of two types: a tearful sadness, measured in marcenas, more typical of poets, and a sighing sadness, more typical of prose writers. They sigh because the censor’s framework is suffocating them. They sigh in an apartment with a custom kitchen, custom bath and custom toilet provided by those setting the censorship framework. It’s particularly important that the Lithuanian writer have a custom toilet. He spends most of his time sitting on the custom toilet and writing nothing. Because his creative freedom is restricted. If he were given freedom, wouldn’t he just write like mad! Now, it’s true, he can’t very well imagine what that ‘like mad’ would be, but that’s secondary. You can’t demand too much of a Lithuanian writer’s imagination.”