Ricardas Gavelis - Vilnius Poker

“You sound like you hated her guts,” Lolita says carefully.

“Excuse me,” I try to control my voice, “you’re correct. It’s not right to condemn a person who doesn’t have the strength to pull himself together, to oppose Them . You’d have to condemn all of humanity. Everyone is given the opportunity. . Oh, we’re short of money, we’re short of freedom! It’s all lies!. . If you think it’s the surroundings or other people that are to blame — you’re fooling yourself. Only you are to blame. Only you. You’re amazed at other people’s helplessness, weakness, stupidity? Don’t fool yourself — you’re that way yourself! You’re oppressed by the injustice of the world? Look inside yourself more carefully! The only one you have a right to condemn is yourself!”

“I always dreamed of meeting you,” says Lolita, “you’re a terrible person. Perhaps the worst I’ve ever seen.”

She looks at me with huge brown eyes (it seems I unintentionally said They : I’m losing my guard entirely), but Vilnius looks at me even more reproachfully. After all, by condemning others, I condemn Vilnius too. For what? Better remember one of my prayers. Lord, grant me patience and forgiveness, in order that I might understand everyone and forgive everyone. Do not let me forget they suffer too. Always remind me of my purpose, a thousand times bigger than myself, in order that I may disregard myself. Take anger and disdain away from me, give me the intelligence to always distinguish the victims from the executioners.

Have I calmed down yet?

“I’d like to feel that free,” says Lolita, “to have my own hermetic world. And you. .”

“Don’t wish for it, oh no, don’t. . Maybe you don’t even suspect how much you, me, all of us are protected by the cover of normal behavior, by automatic activities and banal rules. It’s the most powerful of our defenses; it’s our God, to whom we pray despite ourselves, even though we curse him all the time. . You want to create a world? Right away you’ll need both good and evil, and beauty. . and a God, a strange, unique God, who would be God no matter what you call him. .”

“Love,” says Lolita, “You forgot love.”

“And love. Of course, love. . Do you know what love turns into if you throw caution to the wind, if you’re left face to face with the world? Do you know what it turned into for my mother? She bought herself a stud, a gloomy giant, who screwed her. . That illiterate, soulless animal ravaged my mother’s slender, white body and took money for it too. There’s the love of a unique world for you. Mother refused to accept the common world, but didn’t manage to create her own, either. She was short of everything: God, goodness, beauty. . It was horrible to listen to her when she tried, in spite of it all, to speak. She tried, Lord knows she tried. . She wanted to do something, to change something, to exchange things, so nothing would be motionless, nothing would stay in place. And she kept killing all sorts of life: geese, cats, worms. . This is bullshit, and not my mother’s story, isn’t it?”

“That’s the only way you can say something genuine about a person,” Lolita answers calmly, and for that understanding I really do love her.

I love, I love Lolita, she’s the only living thing nearby; only my dead surround me. Grandfather, the great Lithuanian spy in Polish-occupied Vilnius. A hero, bravely fighting with the most windmill-like of windmills. Father, convinced by an unheard voice that the world isn’t worth his efforts. My two forefathers, kanuked so differently. By what means do They inject a healthy brain with their pathologic; with what form of the drab spirochetes are they able to penetrate the joints, the blood, the sperm? How did all of my people fall into a trap they didn’t see in time, which they didn’t guard against? What did Gediminas fail to consider, the all-knowing Gediminas, gloomily leaning over the piano, his hands raised, but still not daring to press the keys? What did I overlook, squeezed for long years between the moldy walls of my wife’s apartment? What unexpectedly wiped my brains clean and opened up the second sight? What do I have to guard my Lolita against? Lolita, my very own Lolita.

“I can imagine how your parents horrified their neighbors,” she says. “In such a homogenous, commonplace group of people. .”

“Oh, sister, how you’ve overshot! You really don’t get it? The two of them were perfectly pleasant, acceptable people! For the yearly ball at the university mother would order a dress from Paris. . Yes, yes. . You don’t really think that she went around town with her head shaved bare? You don’t really think that father would roll around in a drunken stupor in the company of professors? No, he would talk politics, make witty remarks. . It seemed they returned from a long, long journey, threw off their exotic clothes, and suddenly turned into the most proper bourgeoisie. . Perhaps that amazed me the most. I kept thinking, where are they keeping all of that, what’s really inside of them, what are they hiding from, what are they afraid of? That two- or three-facedness of theirs, that ability to undress themselves, their genuine selves, just like dirty clothes, drove me out of my mind. .”

As I talk I feel a soft lump covering my brain and drowning it in thick silt. Everything recedes into a fog. A wall appears between me and Lolita; I can’t step over it anymore, although I could just a minute ago. I’m slowly turning into something else. It’s a whiff of Them , an attack of Their secret plague. My innards teem and swarm with gray spirochetes too; no one can predict how much longer my spirit will hold out.

“Why did she kill herself?” someone asks out of the fog. “Did she get lost in herself? Look into the abyss too deeply?”

“I loved her.” I’m telling the holy truth, but that’s not what I should be talking about, not at all. “She was the unhappiest of us all. She hung herself decently, while we’re still living. .”

“To me she resembles Lithuania,” someone in the fog suddenly says, “The same senseless despair.”

“Resembles? Maybe in the sense that Lithuania never was ITSELF either, foreigners were always glomming on to her — through force and deceit. . Do you know why she hung herself? She persuaded herself she was going to give birth to a monster — large and hairy. . yes, yes, it had to be hairy. . She convinced all of us, it was all she talked about. . She thought Satan had impregnated her. But not the black one. . And not the one who says non serviam . . The very worst of all — her own private Satan. . How can I put this?. . By the incarnation of the evil of the universe, understand? She found neither love nor beauty in her invented world, but she found evil in it. . If she had given birth, she would have given birth to a monster that would destroy the world. And that monster would be her son, her beloved, even insanely beloved son. .”

“Horrible,” whispers the fog, slowly starting to resemble Lolita.

“No, not horrible. There’s no name for it. We can’t imagine even a thousandth part of her fear, her love, her responsibility to the future of the universe. She hung herself one calm, quiet morning, above grandfather’s Shit of All Shits altar. She got up from the table and went out to hang herself.”

“So she went crazy after all. .”

“I don’t know. Lord knows I don’t. It’s hard to say what ‘crazy’ means. What ‘normal’ or ‘abnormal’ mean. You could say that normal is pragmatism, the ability to adapt to circumstances. Are you abnormal if you understand the circumstances correctly, but still behave in such a way that death inevitably awaits you? If Mandelstam wrote and read his friends poems about Stalin, knowing full well that he would, one way or the other, be killed on account of them, was Mandelstam abnormal? I think it was Stalin who was abnormal. But anyway, this is all theory. . And as for mother. . she knew quite well how to exist in her surroundings. Perfectly well. Nothing threatened her. All of her nightmares were there next to her, understand? It was as if she would go in there, the way an artist goes into his creation, and then she could return. And live on, entirely properly. . That’s the thing. . When she talked about the monster she was going to give birth to, you could understand it as a metaphor, the creation of a poem of horror. That’s the way we all understood it. . The time itself was insane. Russian tanks were rumbling in Kaunas, a handful of collaborators was already rushing to Moscow to sign the papers to join the Soviet Union. . We thought mother was just reacting to everything in her own way. You think no one would have watched out for her if we had believed she could kill herself? We all thought she would keep talking and talking about it. . But she went off somewhere THERE and, completely consciously, didn’t want to return. She up and hanged herself. And what use was there in that? Unless maybe that sometimes I, I myself feel I’m that son of hers, that unborn monster.”