Ricardas Gavelis - Vilnius Poker

Now I kneel in front of a door that’s been left ajar and in astonishment watch my father drink. My heart thumps in my chest and my head spins slightly. I can’t believe my eyes. Father, stark naked, has rolled himself up into a thick carpet. At first it’s even hard to notice him; it seems there’s nothing more in the room than a roll of carpet and a glass set at one end of it. Father sticks his head out of the inside of the roll, takes the glass with his lips and teeth, turns it up, drinks a gulp, and carefully sets it down again. And then — strangest of all — he pulls his head back inside the carpet. For a minute father’s not in the room, there’s only a rolled-up carpet and the glass set at one end. Then father sticks his head out again, grasps the glass with his teeth again. . The way a snail emerges and hides again in his rugged home. I’m not horrified at all. I don’t think for a second that father’s gone out of his head. I’m so stunned I don’t think at all, I just look. I’ve turned everything into looking. Now I am an eye, an eye without a brain. Father sticks his head out of the carpet. Pulls it back again. Out again. He drinks in small gulps, barely sipping.

For a long, long time I don’t understand what he’s doing. My face gets hot, my thoughts scatter. At last I vaguely realize: he can’t drink in the usual way; he’s obliged to perform this absurd ceremony. He’s obliged to pour alcohol into himself in an immeasurably serious, intricate, and aesthetic way. That’s how he lives. And I steal his most intimate secrets: I look and don’t close my eyes, not even at the most horrifying moments; that’s how I live. I want to understand my father, because it’s the only means by which to understand myself.

It’s just unclear what the view outside the trolleybus window, of the gloomy wooden houses of Žvėrynas and dirty frightened dogs, has to do with this. And there are still no birds, although by now the metal box carrying me is turning to the left, shortly there’ll be the bridge, and beyond it the library. But that doesn’t concern me; I just want to understand my father. It isn’t just a few isolated threads that join the two of us, but a wide current overflowing from one to the other. Once I seized father’s limp hand: for some reason I wanted to feel his heartbeat, but I couldn’t find his pulse. It seemed as if his heart had stopped. It was only after a few long seconds that I realized our heartbeats were the same , as if a common heart drove common blood through both our veins. Maybe that’s why I always look at father as if I’m looking at myself. Maybe that’s why I never understand what he’s doing. It’s only yourself you can’t understand that way.

I don’t understand now, either: he ordered Janė to undress, while he himself casually walks around, constantly sipping from a glass. Janė undresses without hurrying; I glue myself to the keyhole and nearly choke. I used to be dazed if she so much as leaned over to clean the table, generously revealing her loose breasts; I’d lose my breath as soon as I attempted to scrutinize the divine roundness of her belly through her flowered apron. Now she’s undressing right here, without even glancing at father; she’s undressing for me , she’s looking straight at me, maybe she knows that I’m glued to the keyhole, whereas father’s standing next to her and doing nothing. Why does he need it? Why does Janė need it? Why is she looking straight at me? She looked exactly the same way when four Russian soldiers raped her: two of them held her knees spread, one pressed her shoulders to the ground, while the fourth just couldn’t hit the right spot. She didn’t scream, she didn’t struggle, there was no sign of suffering on her face, and her eyes gazed at me attentively. She didn’t shout for help, not even with her eyes, she calmly gazed straight at me, although she really couldn’t see me; I watched her unseen from a hiding spot.

Perhaps that look got confused with yet another — when she discovered me in a secluded spot, by the window to the inner courtyard. No one ever wandered by there, a thick layer of dust had settled on the floor. I sat on the window sill, horribly exposed, having pulled out that burning masculinity that wouldn’t fit in my clothes, and looked at it with an imbecilic gaze. During those years there were moments when I felt I could rape a dirty wall or a window frame. Or all of the house’s mirrors. Or the air above the hilly field. I just didn’t know what to do with it.

I didn’t hear her footsteps. I turned my head and realized she had been standing there for some time already.

“Poor thing! You don’t know what to do with yourself anymore?”

She looked at me shamelessly, taking me apart bone by bone. I couldn’t imagine how I was to go on living. In an instant she had realized my secret, learned of my great shame. She, of whose breasts, legs, and belly I would dream at night, whom I could not imagine dressed, who, in whatever clothes, would appear more naked than naked. My fantastical erotic plans collapsed in an instant; Janė became unattainable. I could no longer either buy her or catch her accidentally; now she would just laugh at me. I was eternally separated from her heavy breasts, from the secret blackness below her belly that quivered erotically underneath her clothes. Now she could only despise me. And she kept looking below, at it .

“Poor thing!” she repeated in a throaty voice. “Come to the shed after dinner. You know — where the boards are. .”

And I went to the shed; it remained a sacred place to the very end. There Janė took away my virginity. There, four years later, the Russian soldiers raped her. There my mother hung herself. There, in the summer of nineteen-forty, my grandfather built his altar of horror. Misfortune after misfortune burdened our shed; it should have broken into flame sometime of its own accord.

I see grandfather ripping off the shed door so it will be brighter inside. I see a little silver pail falling out of his hands.

“Shit!” grandfather howls. “Shitty shit!”

I already know that the Russian tanks are in Kaunas, that Lithuania has met the doom grandfather predicted.

“Shit!” grandfather roars. “The little fools — they fought with the Poles over Vilnius, only to live to see the Russkies! A shitty nation!”

Grandfather rushes headlong with the little silver bucket from the outhouse in the bushes to the shed and back again.

“Over here!” he nearly roars, “Let’s pray! I’ve built an altar!”

To me it’s both kind of awful and funny; for the time being I don’t understand anything, even though by now the stench has reached me. It floats along the ground, slowly climbs the walls, pushes through the windows, it’s no longer possible to stand it in the house; it descends to the yard, but the stink lingers there too. It seems that nightmarish stench has permeated all of Lithuania’s air; you can’t escape it anywhere. Grandfather’s already lining everyone up: Janė’s brother, who’s overslept (I cannot look at him, I’d strangle him); the frightened cook; mother looking about with horrified eyes, apparently waiting for grandfather to stop. We all turn our noses aside, but we crowd inside the narrow shed and stare, stunned, at grandfather’s altar, blinking our eyes, teary from the keenness of the stink. The altar is a cracked pig’s trough, decked with flowers, stuck with crosses made from old bunches of twigs and decorated with a yellow wax candle. The candle’s flame quivers; it flutters from the stream of poisonous stench rising from the trough.

“Kneel! Everyone kneel! Kneel in front of God!”

But no one kneels, not even grandfather himself; everyone is staring at the teeming, swarming, reeking trough. The little silver pail lies tossed to the side, as if in mockery. It’s as silent as a tomb, except that water irritatingly drips from the ceiling. I look too, gazing through fluttering spider webs, and I can’t believe my eyes. The trough is full of reeking waste; grandfather carried it here with the little silver pail. That teeming, seemingly live waste, the waste of us all, in which satiated little white worms writhe. The sight is instantly nauseating, and the hideous stink is suffocating besides. Grandfather grins wickedly, fixes his hair with his befouled hand.