Ricardas Gavelis - Vilnius Poker

“Except maybe a writer,” father pontificates, “perhaps it’s still possible to be a writer in this world. There was this colleague of mine in Göttingen. . Sometimes he sends a line. . His name’s Robertas. . He’s writing the story of his life now. A book about non-possession. Do you know what non-possession is?”

The liquor glitters in the glass: Hennessy or Courvoisier. (Where does he get the money?) Father’s hands are beautiful, their movements smooth. They reek of nobility and inborn elegance. Even on the worst mornings his hands tremble elegantly. I do not love my father (I never loved him), but his hands fascinate me. If I were to draw a real human, I would paint him with my father’s noble hands. Hands are a man’s beginning of beginnings. Hands and eyes.

My father, a downed bird floundering between Kaunas and Polish-occupied Vilnius, the doctor of Göttingen who sometimes raves about the new European physics and Dirac’s delta function, now speaks of non-possession. He’s always talking about non-possession and loss. He breathes non-possession and loss; he lives by them. Winning or possessing, he’d die, the way others die of hunger or thirst.

“Non-possession is our core,” father lectures. “Even that which we possess — we don’t really possess, understand? We only supposedly possess it. . What do we have — this or that object: houses, cars, books. These or those ideas, or women. . But is your woman really yours? Do your ideas really belong to you? Not true! When things are bad, you’re invariably left all on your own. . And all ideas instantly turn foreign. . We’re permeated with non-possession, Vytie. . We ourselves are living non-possession. Even our daydreams are taken away from us. . WHO takes everything away — there’s the essential question of existence, Vytie. Everything that could really BE OURS is taken away and hidden somewhere. . Or maybe there really isn’t anything on earth that could be ours. .”

Father’s speech sometimes rises to holy revelation and sometimes falls to a drunk’s blathering. His ruin is inexplicable and therefore even more frightening. We’re born lost already, father likes to say; our birth itself is a loss. Sometimes I would secretly pray to all the gods for the slightest excuse for his ruin. He didn’t have any and didn’t even try to look for one, like other drunks do. (The greatest unwritten novels molder in the boundless inventions of drunks, blathering away about the tragic reasons for their downfall.)

It’s unbelievably difficult for me to understand him even now— and at the time I was only twelve, and later sixteen. Father disappeared at the very beginning of the war; there was talk that he had, by unknown means, run away to Switzerland, and then to America. I don’t know if that’s true; no one knows if that’s true. All I know is that father could do anything, overcome whatever obstacles. He could swim right across the Atlantic if he wanted to. The war meant nothing to him. I don’t think there was anything in the world that would have meant anything to him. I don’t think he vanished in the Americas; his mysterious disappearance and reappearance aroused completely different suspicions, the very worst of suspicions.

Sometimes I see my father writing articles (I see it now : maybe nineteen thirty-six, maybe forty). Suddenly he sits, leaning on an elbow, for three days, filling sheets with complex formulas, and then carelessly tosses the scrawled-over pile of sheets onto the armchair. There it lies for two, three, five months. Lies there until it’s covered with a thick, fuzzy layer of dust, other papers, and forgotten time. Forgotten time hovers about our house constantly. At intervals someone finds those discarded articles and sends them off somewhere — probably grandfather, he visits us two or three times a year. The shabby sheets of paper disappear, do something in the secret cosmos of written sheets, and then they return multiplied; enormous bundles of paper descend upon the house. I don’t know who publishes those articles— Zeitschrift für Physik or Physical Review —but the house is always full of author’s copies, postcards from some physicist or another, and father’s astonishment. Stunned, he turns those papers over in his hands, even forgetting his glass of cognac; it seems he keeps wanting to ask me something. Maybe he wants to ask me what’s the point of it all. What’s all this about, Vytie? Am I the one responsible for this? That’s what happens when a person absentmindedly tries to accomplish something.

Sometimes I see my father drawing. He can draw anywhere and with anything, but above all else he values first-class Chinese ink. He has it sent from Paris. (Where does he get the money?) There is life and death in his drawings, there’s soul in them. You can find God in them. Sometimes father draws without looking at the paper — his hand draws the lines itself, as if it had both eyes and memory.

All father needs from this world is paper and marks he can write or draw on the greedy surface of paper. And a glass too, into which this or that has been poured. Nothing more. The smell of paper and liquor lingers in his office. Here, the feeling experienced in a gloomy forsaken house, or in a dusty old attic filled with mysterious things, comes over you. Here, everything has died; inside you can only imagine ghosts. It’s the excavated room of an inhabitant of Pompeii. Miraculously extant furniture. Ancient Pompeian books. The smell of thousand-year-old wine. You immediately feel like you’re under thick layers of frozen lava, that the sun and light are far, far away. Here, only the stunning Pompeian drawings provide heat and light. It seems to me they weren’t designed for this world, or for the light of day. My father (his hands?) drew them, so that, blazing up briefly in the real world, they would vanish again for eternity. And when the world tried to take them, father instinctively defended himself. Once some passerby visited his office and saw the drawings. I wasn’t the only one to sense they were drawn by the hand of a genius. Several art buyers immediately flocked into our courtyard (they did resemble shabby birds); one of them moaned wordlessly, another conceived the idea of immediately taking the drawings to Paris. For several days the courtyard resembled a gypsy camp.

Father finally saw his drawings himself. Closed up in his office, he glumly looked through sheet after sheet, talking out loud to himself. He spoke a secret language that was unintelligible to me. Maybe he had thought up one that could describe his drawings.

He built the bonfire at night. The drawings went into the fire only at the very beginning. Then father started carrying his manuscripts, journals, and books into the yard: slowly, seemingly weighing things over calmly, he piled ever more bundles of paper into the fire. Soon clothes, grandfather’s carved chairs and Turkish carpets began falling into the bonfire too. Mother stayed in her bedroom, never taking her eyes from that bonfire of the world, but she didn’t even try to restrain father; she didn’t say anything at all. She waited for father himself to stop — she waited all of her life for him to stop. But father continued burning his world according to a spectral scheme. He’d fling some item into the fire, and leave another identical item unharmed. He chose certain cups, plates, and glasses as sacrifices to the fire. There’s no telling what gods he made offerings to, what demons he wanted to scare off. He finished that ceremony of fire just as calmly as he had started. It lasted for maybe an hour, maybe two, but that dance of fire didn’t stay in the great ALL; it crumbled into bits. I see only individual burning things, my inhumanly calm father, and my mother’s pale face in the window. There are no smells left, and neither the fire’s crackling nor the hubbub of the agitated household can be heard. Everything goes on in complete silence, just from time to time a dry heat wafts onto your face.