Ricardas Gavelis - Vilnius Poker

I regretted father’s sketched portraits most of all. He always drew the same person — a strange hermit of the swamps by the name of Vasilis. Vasilis would wander into our yard at regular intervals; father got along with him perfectly — you see, the two of them never said a word to each other. Vasilis would come silently and leave silently, piled up with healing herbs and bundles of roots. Grass snakes wound themselves around his arms and tiny, nimble little birds would perch on his shoulders. For posing father would pay him with salt. He would draw the portraits quickly, with enormous inspiration. The real Vasilis didn’t appear in any of them; the people in those portraits would always be different, as if that hermit who lived on vipers and frogs changed his face every day. But actually he was always the same: ragged, tanned almost black, murmuring something to his snakes and birds, showing his eyes to no one. He came to the great auto-da-fé too, and helped father throw books and drawings into the fire. Then he slowly shuffled off into the darkness, accompanied by an owl flying in circles above his head. He didn’t show up in our yard again; I would only see him out in the middle of the swamp, calmly walking through the most treacherous bogs, like Christ walking on water. When father burned his portraits, it was as if Vasilis lost touch with reality, with the ground beneath his feet. To me it seemed as if those portraits contained absolutely everything: the swamps, and the auto-da-fé that was to be, and Christ, and the night owls, and non-possession, and impotence. But it was all destroyed in the flames. I managed to hide only “Woman-spider,” “Faithfulness,” and “The Crane”—I stuck the names on myself. That crane is the most nightmarish bird ever drawn by a human. I’ve never seen another creature so obviously flying to destruction. That crane radiates pure despair; it knows itself that by now it’s almost disintegrated, that it almost isn’t there anymore. But it flies anyway — just above the ground, slowly and weakly. It’s a flying stuffed bird of doom, a ghost appearing in broad daylight through some mistake. Perhaps a bewitched princess turned into a bird who will crumble into ashes at any moment. That crane is the sister of the woman who, in another drawing, is slowly turning into a giant hairy spider. Or maybe the spider is turning into a woman; one way or another, change , by some inexplicable means, is depicted in the drawing. The change is what’s so horrifying; it’s brimming in every line, in every little hair on the spider’s legs. Horror reigns everywhere, except for the woman’s face and eyes. She is completely indifferent; it’s absolutely all the same to her that she will soon turn into a disgusting anthropod. Or the opposite — it’s all the same to her that she’s a spider almost turned into a woman. In “Faithfulness,” an attractive young girl with gigantic breasts, on all fours, devours her dead husband. There’s emptiness in her face and eyes, but her whole body, every seen or only imagined little muscle, is brimming with a rich, bloody ecstasy. She loves her husband — even dead. She wants to become one with him. Her gigantic breasts keep swinging lower, it seems as if the devoured flesh of the dead merges into them, embellishing them even more. The dead husband’s body adorns her, beautifies her for another man.

My father could have been the best artist in the world. He truly could. However, he refused to budge from the spot. He didn’t in general want to move.

Oftentimes I see him leaving the villa, slowly walking out to the car. Opening the door, he stops and starts groping for a cigarette. I follow his movements through a grimy window and I know very well ( now I know) what it is he’s waiting for, what he hopes for. Any incident whatsoever, the slightest excuse, so he could immediately return to his room, calmly settle himself in the armchair and pour himself a brimming glass. But no one will save him. I see so much suffering on his face that I want to scream at the top of my voice, to rush to mother, to grandfather, to everyone in a row, to every passerby in every city under the sun, today, yesterday, tomorrow, at all times, to shake them all at the same time and beg: leave him alone, don’t torture him, let him, at last, do nothing ! I want to lie down under the automobile’s tires and shout: see, he can’t drive, let him return to his drink!

But he has to sit at the wheel, he has to drive to the university, he has to go into the lecture hall and be a professor (act a professor?). To repeat words repeated many times before, to draw marks on the blackboard drawn many times before. To look at the faces of students seen a hundred times before. You can’t shake all of that off. There is no bonfire that would burn up the Kaunas highway and his lecture hall. . and the alien ideas of long dead physicists. . and the motley crowd of students. . There is no such bonfire, so father futilely tried to set it on fire in his mind at least, throwing everything in one after another: our house. . the surroundings’ wretched meadows. . the entire swamp together with Vasilis. . the stream frozen in fear. . mountains and seas. . all of rotten humanity. . the tiniest of creations, even bacteria. . even ideas, all ideas of all time. . And most importantly — man’s immortal soul.

He begins speaking only on those mornings when, in spite of it all, he succeeds in escaping from the unbearable circle of events, in returning to his office and filling a brimming glass of champagne. (Where does he get the money?)

“Equilibrium is the lowest state of energy,” his deep voice slowly explains. “The lower you get, the greater your equilibrium. That’s a cardinal law of nature, Vytie. . People do strive so for equilibrium, therefore they sink even lower. . Into an even deeper pit, into an even greater equilibrium. . There is no road up, Vytie, ALL roads lead only downward.”

But father speaks less and less often. Speech is a type of interaction with the world, and father only wants to interact with himself. That’s why he surrounded himself with mirrors. They’re hung everywhere: in the hall, in the corridors, in the bedrooms, in the bath. Mirrored walls, mirrored ceilings, only mirrored floors are lacking. Mother couldn’t bear those mirrors taking over the house, but father immediately found a Solomonic solution. Now it’s as if they’re not there — as long as father doesn’t take possession of a room. Upon entering, he immediately takes it into his power. He opens every little cabinet’s, buffet’s, and secretary’s doors (on the inner side of the doors are mirrors). He pulls back innumerable little curtains, drapes, portières (mirrors crouch, cowering behind them). He turns pictures hung on long strings around (mirrors are set into the other side of the canvas). When the ceremony’s finished, father can see himself all the time. He can drink and painstakingly follow how he drinks.

Drunkenness is his separate world. Father drinks all the time. Grandfather, in one of his fits of cursing, said that if he couldn’t find anything in the house to drink, he’d cut open one of father’s veins and fill a glass with blood. A watery shit courses through most people’s veins, grandfather sullenly explained, but this specimen differs from others in at least this respect: a cocktail of cognac, rum, champagne, port, and all types of vermouth flows in his veins.

Almost every day I secretly watch father. It’s a shameless, dirty pursuit, the most disgusting of all possible thieveries — the theft of a person’s solitude. Spying on father, I turn into the most revolting creation of the Universe, coming alive as eyes, as a kanukas sucking others’ vital fluids. I curse myself afterwards, even slap myself in the face, but all the same I cannot stop. Our house itself tempts and entices you to secretly watch others. Corridor after corridor covered in carpets, doors always ajar, mirrors reflecting the view around the corner, around a bend, in a far-off room. Dusk always hangs over the house; it turns you into a nameless, faceless spy searching for a victim. Here, like it or not, you see what you shouldn’t see. Here you are beset by the urge to inspect another person through the tiniest crack. In this house my acquaintance with the world goes on ( now it goes on), it’s only here that I can study a person from so close up, like a large worm pinned to a board with a cold silver pin. (The Russians burned our house down when they invaded again in forty-four.)