Ricardas Gavelis - Vilnius Poker

Martynas’s high spirits were interrupted by a creak of the door. Fyodorov, a Communist from another section, is making some sort of Communist signs at Elena. Elena, with the proud grace of a hippopotamus cow, sways out to see him.

“Vytautas, what milksops we all are, huh?” Martynas sighs in my ear. “Why aren’t we Irish? The same size country, the same number of inhabitants. . Even Dublin’s almost the same as Vilnius. .”

“Only Russia’s not next door.”

”There’s England!” Martynas continues buzzing in my ear like an evil spirit. “They fucked the Irish good too, but they held out.”

“They lost their language.”

“A language spoken by men with no balls is shit!” Now Martynas is hissing like a snake.

“Martis, maybe you really do hate Lithuanians?”

“I’m a hundred percent Lithuanian, and no one’s going to force me to love myself,” Martynas says in a deathly calm, and moans again: “Well, why aren’t we Irish? Where’s our IRA? Where’s our Sinn Fein? Where are the bombs? I want to be a terrorist!”

“Martis, finish about the writers,” Stefa offers lovingly, “the censor’s gone, you can go on.”

Stefanija is mistaken: the biggest censor is still hanging on the wall. A humanistic person, looking at that portrait, would have to feel pity and pain: a broken-down, barely creeping stiff, exhibited by his colleagues for threefold ridicule, like an old buffoon. But he’s staring too, his grim eyeballs are even bulging from the portrait — just that it means nothing to Martynas.

“Yes. . So, at night he prays to God that no one gives him that freedom, because if he got it, he wouldn’t know what to do with it. Now Lithuanian writers have an ironclad alibi: there’s no freedom. But what would happen then?”

A fog slowly comes over me again. Martynas mouths off soundlessly; all of the women and girls explode in laughter. Only Laima is completely serious. She’ll laugh suddenly, ten minutes later, after she’s returned to her room.

Why exactly did all of these people end up in the library ? Why is Lolita hiding out here, why am I sitting here? There is plenty of other work for a good programmer. In our situation, who needs an experimental computerized card index? So someone can find out with blinding speed that he won’t get this or that book, because it’s hidden in a closed special collection? I myself suppose I ended up here of my own accord; I still naïvely believe in my own free will. But after all, only They could have let me in here. Maybe it’s more convenient for Them this way to watch what I’m reading? Or maybe all books are nothing but lies , maybe reading makes Them happy, because it leads me further from The Way? Or maybe They’re too lazy to rummage through books themselves, maybe I’m only supposed to come across the texts that are dangerous to Them ? Maybe that’s the only reason I’m kept alive?

Bookshelves, bookshelves, bookshelves. Books, books, books. Narrow passageways — a secret labyrinth where it’s easy to get lost, to turn and turn in circles, never to return again. From all of the bookshelves there drifts an identical, barely noticeable warmth — as if from a raked-up pile of autumn leaves. Who knows what sorts of minotaurs wait in ambush for you in the dimness spreading from the concealed ceiling lights. (The library collection’s lights always spread dimness, not light.)

The soundless picture continues to flicker before my eyes. Martynas has tickled everyone so much they’d laugh if you showed them a finger. Still going on about the writers?

“. . every seven years a creative fever overcomes him. The symptoms: muses and ghosts torment him. His entire body starts itching. The pain is horrible. The time has come to beg the authorities for a new apartment. There aren’t many apartments, but writers multiply like dogs. That’s when the Shakespearean passions boil over. Sung in tones of the highest spirituality. What eloquence! What depth! You see at once that these are artists. What Greek tragedies! The Soviet writer could kill his brother or sister over a new apartment, or still worse — he could kill himself! I know at least six writers who publicly threatened suicide if the state wouldn’t give them a new apartment.”

“So what happened?” Stefa laughs.

“Two of them did it. One with tablets from America; the second used a really awful method. He categorically refused alcohol! His death was inevitable.”

“Martis, tell us about creativity, something about creativity,” Marija begs through her tears.

“My dear, it really is true creativity! The applications to get an apartment are great pearls of poetry! In it you’ll find living pain, true torture. True passion. I’ll devote the rest of my life to the publication of a collection of writers’ applications for their apartments. Otherwise history won’t forgive me.”

“That’s enough!” Laima declares, unexpectedly as usual. “It’s time to go to work. The boss is already frowning.”

The boss — that’s me. I thought about Martynas and frowned despite myself. I listen to his mockery and sarcasm, more often I listen to his serious conversation, occasionally I visit his strange collection. All of it leads somewhere, unfortunately, not where The Way leads; Martynas has turned down a side path. Even people who aren’t at all stupid frequently turn down them. Almost all do.

Most likely he thinks, as the majority do, that everything is determined by two elements; the battle between good and evil, black and white, light and dark. The great contradiction: we are light, while the others — darkness, underground vaults, bats, obscene birds of the night. Heaven and hell, God and Satan.

No one, almost no one draws the obvious conclusion: the battle between light and dark is always won by grayness and twilight. As long as the essential elements, black and white, God and Satan, exist — all is not yet lost. The end comes when everything mixes into a unbroken sugary fog, when nothing no longer differs from anything else.

It is this fog that is the eternal gaze that lurks even in our dreams. It is the Vilnius Basilisk’s gaze, piercing me every morning, a morning that begins with the overcrowded trolleybus, the crush of figures, the journey from non-existence into non-existence: from the drabness of dreamless sleep to the unthinking work machine. It’s only by Their will that the tired figures with puffy eyes cram into iron boxes with fly-covered windows and slowly creak towards their daily bondage. The day begins with smells: the stink of rancid sweat and cheap soap, the stench of last night’s drinking, and a whiff of nightmares.

But most important of all — the birds have disappeared somewhere. (Which morning was it they disappeared — today, yesterday, always?) The birds have disappeared, and I’m slowly losing my soul, I’m starting to turn into something else. I’m even curious: who is this other ? A beast or a demon? A madman? An envoy of the dark? My shape probably won’t change — only my eyes will lose their fire, their secret signs; I’ll quietly turn into a man blind to his soul, into a void, a fog. I’ll feel the blessed nirvana of imbecility. I won’t have to remember anything anymore.

For the time being I still remember. Like it or not, I remember my grandfather. Like it or not, I remember my father. Perhaps one of the secret gazes examining me is my family’s history?

In front of me, pressing a glass of first-class liquor in his hand, father sits and pushes words out his twisted lips. He scans the shining tabletop as if there, underneath his pointy chin, the words would quietly lie one atop another like dry tree leaves. My father, the one-time prodigy of Göttingen and Copenhagen; his intellect, probably equal to Dirac’s or Einstein’s, crumbled and turned into a sickening half-spirit gazing out of narrow, dull pupils. An invisible cudgel trounced him. But no, a cudgel wouldn’t have vanquished him. Father is very large, like all of the Vargalyses, he would just shake a blow off — we’re accustomed to blows. That intellect could only have been vanquished by a plague, a cancer slowly eating away at the brain.