Ricardas Gavelis - Vilnius Poker

He crawls around her , and she continues to kneel, her legs spread disgustingly, her behind stuck up in the air; she keeps raising it higher, and curls up as if she wanted to turn herself inside out. Justinas sticks his nose right next to her grinning vagina and sniffs at it like a dog; they both sniff, it seems they’re even wagging their tails and melting with bliss. I look and I don’t believe my eyes, I look and I don’t understand what they’re doing now , even though by now I realize, without understanding anything I realize, that the two of them have slowly, with relish, begun Their act, Their dance of love. I feel my fury fading, all of me fading, but all the same I look at them, at their hanging tongues, their gray faces, the convulsive movements of their bodies (what’s left of them — they’re no longer human bodies), and I’m overcome with horror, I realize it’s not me who will trample the two of them, but they who will kill me if they realize I’m watching them. That can’t be seen by a human being; that’s impossible and incomprehensible. You couldn’t even imagine anything like it. Now they are like some kind of plant or jellyfish — I’ve never seen anything like it. Never. Nowhere. I don’t know what to call it. You wouldn’t find it in even the most horrifying dream. A human being couldn’t even dream of such things. It has no name, I have no name myself, because I’m standing in the doorway of my living room and I see everything. It doesn’t fit inside my head, there’s a lot that no longer fits in my head, I need to save myself quickly, I quickly close the door, but all the same I hear those sounds, I go down the stairs, sensing an oppressive smell following after me, I’m as empty as a finished bottle (but maybe something’s still there, at the very bottom?). And everything is greenish: a greenish sunset and a greenish Vilnius, my hands are greenish too — for some reason I examine them closely, I even feel over my joints with my greenish fingers, greenish figures pass by, and behind the corner a greenish death waits for me, craving to finally suck an infinite greenish emptiness out of me. I am no more; I am long since no more.

I wandered the wet streets all night. I turned circles through a greenish Vilnius, an accursed ghost city, a hallucination city, which has finished sucking out the last fluids of my soul. I do not know what I was that night. I was both a madman and a genius, a corpse and a newborn, a dead thing and the embodiment of a soul that had lost its way. I was horrified. I didn’t recognize the streets; I didn’t recognize my own city. If someone had spoken to me, I couldn’t have said where I was. I banged on Gediminas’s door several times, but behind it there was only silence and emptiness. In the near future the Russian Orthodox Church, the straw-haired man, and the crucial discovery awaited me.

I was left alone. They took away my support, the one I relied on most; they took away my Irena, sucked out the person nearest to me, sucked her out in full view, and there was nothing I could do. The worst of it was that I probably didn’t want to do anything: a secret instinct ordered me to protect myself first. Once more I looked over my hands. They were slender-fingered and sinewy. I was still alive. They hadn’t yet managed to turn me into not me. They try to turn all of us into something else: my former wife, the imbecile on the trolleybus, Bolius crawling through the bare meadow. They want to destroy all the hundreds (or more?) of our souls: the soul of the back of the skull and the soul of the forehead; the souls of the nose, elbows, lungs, and liver; the souls of laughter, sadness, thoughtfulness, and despair; the souls of unchanging habits and the soul of dreams — even the soul of all my souls. Every human’s soul of souls. This thirst to destroy doesn’t, it seems, make any sense. It cannot be their ultimate purpose; it can only be the means to attain something else. But what? For what pathological purpose? You smash into this question as if it were a rock the moment you start thinking about Them. If you could divine the purpose, you’d probably learn how to defend yourself. But you never succeed in solving the riddle. You think you’ve already given it a name, but again and again it turns out that it’s just a means to attain some other, still more secret, still more mysterious purpose. When investigating Their pathologic, you have to pay attention to all the trifles, because there are no trifles. There are no trifles, there is no one to ask, there is no one to rely on, and there is no one to comfort you — except rickety, crazy Vilnius.

But even so, why did Vilnius become Their global lair? This is one of the most difficult questions.

In my search for an answer I have only one meager hint. Tadeusz Konwicki, a Polish writer, spent his childhood in Vilnius when it was torn away from Lithuania. When asked how he writes about Vilnius without being there, he answered: I don’t need to visit there, you can find Vilnius everywhere — I see entire neighborhoods of Vilnius in Amsterdam and San Francisco: the streets, the houses, and the people of Vilnius.

There’s something immensely significant hiding in that answer: Vilnius is everywhere. In every real city you can come across the houses, streets, and people of Vilnius. But neither that poor, naïve Konwicki, nor other poor, naïve people know the most important thing: those are all Their residences. Settling in some city, They quickly impart a Vilniutian form to entire blocks. In a neighborhood like that in San Francisco or Amsterdam, you must immediately start looking about for Them.

But why Vilnius, anyway?

It’s impossible to understand what Vilnius is. You can only believe in Vilnius or not believe in it. Believing is difficult, I know, it’s very difficult. Even I sometimes cannot grasp that this geometry textbook of cement block barracks, this clanking concentration camp choking on fumes, is my Vilnius. That these ghosts, wandering aimlessly, without realizing that the remnants of their souls are surrounded by barbed wire, are Vilniutians too. Not everyone will see the real body beneath the drab clothing, not everyone will believe in Vilnius. I’m obliged to believe in it, because it gave me Lolita.

There she is — lying naked. I can admire her high breast and slender waist, feel the secret beauty fluids flowing through her long legs. Lolita entrances me, takes away my power to think logically. Her capricious spirit overwhelms me, forces me to forget what I should remember every minute. She is practically unreal; people like that can’t exist. A body like that shouldn’t have either a spirit or intelligence — its beauty should suffice. But she is full of both one and the other — even too much of everything. By her very existence Lolita mocks God and nature, and things like that are punishable. I’m terrified that I’m inadvertently bogging her down in matters that will sooner or later destroy me. I am a horrible swamp, but she too, only looks sturdy and dependable on the surface — she’s like quicksand, in which you can sink for eternity, herself.

“You’ve got it good,” I say, “you live in an old house. Old houses have a soul. The new ones don’t even have a face.”

“They can have one,” she answers immediately. “In other places, even when they’re building skyscrapers, they give them names. Whatever has a name can have a face too.”

Lolita has a face, really she does (although sometimes I get a craving to cover it, to hide it). The spirit is inevitably reflected in the face; neither dark glasses nor a nightmarish grimace will hide spirituality. It’s an unfortunate characteristic of a human: They immediately take notice of you.