Ricardas Gavelis - Vilnius Poker

“It’s so handsome!” says Robis in a thick voice. “It’s so big and handsome!”

Yes, a strange inner voice whispers, yes, it’s big and handsome, all of you is big and handsome, you are like a god. I don’t understand what Robis is doing, my thoughts wilt, I don’t think anything, I just wait to see what will happen. He sighs quietly, slides somewhere lower down, I wait, I keep waiting, and suddenly I feel a damp touch there, below, in the most tender of spots. I subside into a sticky, warm sweetness, and the strange voice keeps warbling: only for you, only for you can it be this sweet, because you are like a god. It’s really hard to tear my stuck eyelids apart, I can barely see: Robis has lain down on my hips, his eyes are like a beaten dog’s, it’s some kind of a painting, in reality it’s not like that, there’s no such impossible sweetness, even my bones grow soft and mushy — any moment I’ll close my eyes, helpless. Yes, the strange voice beckons, only gods dream such dreams, wait a bit, it’ll be even better. I throw a last glance at the giddy dream, but my eyes stumble on the sheets of paper on my belly, suddenly I understand that this is no dream, that everything is for real!

Suddenly I realize what’s going on here. Giedraitis Junior, sensing something bad (he always senses things), arduously tears himself away from me, panting heavily. I don’t know what to do, I just assure myself that nothing happened, nothing, nothing, has happened and couldn’t have happened. I want just one thing: that he too, would understand that nothing happened here; nothing, absolutely nothing, has taken place.

“Is it nice?” Giedraitis Junior asks quietly. “If you want, I’ll kiss your feet. . I collect things that you’ve touched. . Let me finish. . Soon, to the end. .”

He looks at me again with big eyes, like I’m one of his own. It’s green around me, everything is green, except for the white of the undelivered letters on my belly. What would those apparitions think of me, seeing their naked, spread-eagled god? I find myself thinking of what my grandfather would do to me and it takes my breath away. I’m completely calm; I’m just sorry that Giedraitis Junior spoke. I’m sorry for his voice, sorry for him himself, because now I will have to kill him. If he spoke up like that, it means everything really did happen. Now I will have to kill him, otherwise I’ll never wash off the shame.

He’s gone in an instant; I see only a helpless lump of a body, splatters of blood on the grass, and my beaten knuckles. He’s choking on snot and blood, wheezing, slinging little whitish papers to the side. I need to calm down, otherwise I really will kill him. Giedraitis Junior is all bloody, even his glance is bloody; his words are bloody too.

“You screwed my mother!” he screams, “I know everything! You screwed my mother! I’ll tell father! He’ll kill you! Cut you into pieces! Tear out your eyes! Rip off your shitty peewee!. .”

He eyes me so furiously that it seems he’ll strangle me with his very eyes, his very look. Everything in my head is muddled: the night trains, the game with strangers’ fates, the babbling of the creek, Madam Giedraitienė’s limp breasts and commanding voice, starving grandfather’s sluggish stare, Junior Giedraitis’s doggish gaze, and a white ceiling which looms above me, presses down on me; I have to shake my head roughly so it will rise up a bit and grant me just a speck of freedom, just the slightest chance of remaining alive. For the time being still alive.

“What’s the matter with you?’ Lolita asks. “Have you been beset by ghosts?”

She is calm and good-natured, there’s only a note of curiosity in her voice. By now she has put on a robe, only her legs are severely naked; they bother me. Her body should be different, perhaps old and tired — then neither her intelligent eyes nor her strange wisdom would surprise me. Sometimes it seems she should have been born a man. It’s practically pathological: I want to turn the most beautiful of my women into a man — into an elderly giant who’s seen everything, who could truly be relied on. She could substitute for both Gedis and Bolius — if not for those intoxicating legs, if not for those breasts rising up and forcing their way out of her clothes, like fish out of a net.

Lolita reads my mind: she carefully covers her legs, sinks into a shadow. Her profile is a bit predatory, it’s one that could be a man’s too. Maybe I should dress her in men’s clothes for conversations? No, they would make it even more obvious that she is a woman, a woman of women.

“Talk about something. That’s the only way to drive the ghosts away. Tell me about your mother. You promised.”

It’s true, I promised; I actually thought up a bargain. An eye for an eye, a death for a death. A story for a story.

“And you tell me about your husband. Even though you didn’t promise.”

“I didn’t think you’d be interested,” she says, and falls silent for a long, long time.

I see my mother standing in the intersection of the hallways, not knowing which way to turn. What can I say about her? Would she herself let me? I ask, even though I know it’s all the same to her. Everything’s all the same to her. She would listen to a story about herself as if it were the tale of some stranger. And immediately forget it all.

“She was rich. She married against her family’s will. It’s understandable — there a fattened burgher’s family, and here — a crazed genius with flashing eyes. My mother was very pretty. . or maybe not. . I don’t even know. It probably doesn’t matter. . She relied on father absolutely, that’s what was the worst. No friends, no gatherings, no charity work. Her husband was the entire world to her; she existed only when he was next to her, afterwards she would seem to disappear, and all that was left was waiting until he would show up again. . That’s worse than death. To blindly rely on someone — that’s worse than a slow, painful death. . Without father she lived as if she were in a dream, she would drift up and down the corridors, she didn’t even talk. .”

Mother comes into the room; it seems she badly wants to say something — it always seems she wants to say something important. But she’ll be quiet, she’ll just stretch her slender arms out to me, and drops of blood will drip from her fingertips. She’s killed something again, she’s always killing something; you’d think she wanted to make the world smaller so it wouldn’t be so complicated.

“You rely on someone. .” I say quietly, quietly. “And then that someone spits in your face. . I don’t know why father turned away from her. They didn’t interact at all; they lived in different ends of the house so they wouldn’t, God forbid, meet. . She was suddenly left alone, facing the world she had never tried to understand. Her world was her parents’ family, then her husband and his affairs. . She didn’t know how to live, understand, she didn’t have anything of her own: no goals, no aspirations, no worries. Can you imagine what it means for a forty-year-old woman to begin to get to know the world — like a child, like a naïve teenager?. . And she was utterly determined to understand the world — by herself, independently. . I don’t know how to explain it. . Well — we all know how our day will begin tomorrow, what we will need to do, what we want. . She didn’t know anything.”

“She didn’t adapt?” Lolita asks carefully.

“Not that, no, not that, Lola! She took on the world like. . like a game. . like a miracle. . I don’t know. . She didn’t try to adapt to it, she just as calmly as you please created her own universe with inexplicable, spontaneous laws. Whatever came into her head, that was a law of the universe. She was up to her ears in money; she had the complete freedom that all artists and thinkers in general can only dream about. It was just that she didn’t know what to do with that freedom. She spat on society, family, children, making money, and all rules, and decided to try some kind of experiment. No one could predict what she would think up next. The worst of it was that she didn’t know herself. She could sleep days and stay awake nights. Week after week, from morning till night, cook up fancy meals, and then dump everything out. I mean dump it out, understand — not parcel it out to some villager, or to us, or to some guest, but dump it out. . You’d think she was trying to find the slightest minutiae that could concern her. But to her it was all absolutely the same. Her husband had turned away. . I was of no concern. . no activity concerned her. . religion didn’t attract her. . nor any amusements, either. . And yet she still tried to live . .”