Ricardas Gavelis - Vilnius Poker

I’m no longer surprised. Anything is possible in Vilnius. I emphasize: absolutely anything is possible here. Perhaps this is Ahasuerus himself, come from the depths of the Polish years or a painting of Chagall’s. The main thing is, he’s right. The Way truly is dangerous. Extremely dangerous — if even a unshaven descendant of Vilnius’s old watchmakers warns me. At least someone spoke the truth. In the worn-down, played-out conversational record of Vilnius you won’t, unfortunately, hear a word about Them , even though everyone, absolutely every person, feels Them . But all of the recitative street monologues and all the anecdotes whispered in smoking rooms repeat the same thing — it’s enough to make your teeth hurt: the shortages, the stupidity of the authorities, the kingdom of universal lies. If those were the only things that mattered, we would be almost happy. How nice it would be, how simple and easy, if we could, even for an instant, identify Them with the authorities, the system, or the machine of compulsion. If that were all Their power would mean. If the threat were concrete and rational. No one even suspects that all the cursing of the government, even jokes told around the table, are dictated by Them , secretly regulated by Them. No one suspects that the most important part of their brain has been excised, the most important words taken out of their speech and the meanings of others deformed. At one time I myself thought Their goal was to suck out everyone with their pupil-less eyes, to wring out their secret powers, to feed on them the way blood-sucking insects feed on their victims’ blood. But I quickly understood it was just the means to attain a totally, completely different goal. They strive to turn us into something else , something not ourselves; they strive to infect us with gray spirochetes. But why? At one time I thought They valued control most. It’s entirely natural to think that way when you live in a world where idiots, having got hold of authority, hang on to it tooth and nail, determined to destroy millions just so they could freely rule the millions that remain. But by no means are They idiots. Power is also nothing more than a means. A mangy KGB agent is no more than a KGB agent; the government mafia is no more than a sullen mafia. It’s just the upper layer disguising the true essence. You can dig in Their direction all your life, but They’ll be hiding there anyway, in the depths. You get infected with Them like the plague and you feel (if you feel it) just the symptoms of the illness. To battle Them sometimes seems just as senseless as the hope of catching disease-causing microbes with your hands.

Even if we’re all destroyed, They will remain. If we turn the earth into a desert poisoned with chemicals and radiation, nothing will be left alive in it. But not entirely! Cockroaches will survive even a nuclear war! Cockroaches are invincible. Let’s think about that. Perhaps we’ll sense how the flow of thoughts brings us closer to grasping Their essence.

Perhaps that’s Their ultimate goal, to leave the world empty but for Them . Even if it’s only in the form of cockroaches. In the end, do the great kanukai commissars — even Stalin — differ that much from cockroaches in their goals or essence? Even their whiskers are practically identical.

This sort of reasoning carries me, floats me through Vilnius; I don’t want to think about anything anymore, I don’t want to smell and hear my city, I don’t want that which is long since dead to haunt me. I go where my feet lead me, and they can only lead me to a single spot. On its own my hand pushes open a familiar door; my feet stumble on the uneven stairs.

The Narutis is exactly the same as always. The same walls, the same faces. Little broken-down tables with crooked legs. Meager snacks, thrown any which way onto metal plates. Men indifferently swigging beer and cheap wine that turns the blood to sand and breeds worms in the liver. (It would be ridiculous to look down on them or condemn them — they don’t destroy and ruin themselves any quicker than those who never touch wine, but voluntarily breed worms in their brains.) There’s a smell lingering here that you can smell only in barracks and railroad stations. Nothing has changed at the Narutis, only I have changed considerably. My fashionably-cut suit and well-rested eyes are improper here. My appearance should irritate everyone. However, the regulars just look me over indifferently and turn away again. I know very well why that is. There is an indelible mark, whose meaning no one knows, pressed onto the face of a person who once haunted the Narutis. You won’t find it looking in a mirror; you won’t figure out what it is that gives you away as a member of the secret Narutis community. I can see that mark on other people’s faces immediately. The oppressive mark of Mackus the Hunchback.

I even flinch: it seems like Mackus the Hunchback will come to the table at any moment and, as always, ask for vodka. Without doubt he will address me as “sir,” he always addresses me that way. Only in the Narutis will you meet an alcoholic wreck who addresses everyone as “sir” or “mister”; he still remembers his associate professorship and his fiery speeches at scholarly councils. Mackus remembers a great deal, although there’s one thing he tries very hard to forget: how, in fifty-three (I still hadn’t been released), with several other trustworthy boys, he took secret KGB files outside the city and burned them, so that no one would even know the names of the people who are gone, and, even more, so that no one would find out that they had not, and could not, have committed any crimes. At that time the authorities were trembling and hiding their work; they desperately needed helpful hunchbacks. Mackus the Hunchback helpfully burned up those musty papers that dispassionately reported the suffering of Lithuanians and the genocide the government had commenced. They were the only documents, and he burned them up — later he vainly tried to forget it. But he unavoidably remembered those thousands of flaming files (probably mine too) — and with each burned file a person’s fate burned as well. Mackus even started imagining that it wasn’t paper he had burned, but rather thousands of live people. In his dreams, the charred pages turned into charred limbs and fried intestines. He desperately wanted to forget it, but after the third drink he would start telling all about it over and over again. I’d always pour him some vodka — and not just to hear about the dreadful bonfire of Vilnius again. I was sorry for Mackus the Hunchback: they didn’t succeed in entirely turning him into a kanukas, a speck of conscience remained in him. Hundreds, or maybe thousands of much more serious criminals don’t remember their crimes for an instant; they don’t feel they’ve committed a crime at all. At least Mackus the Hunchback reproached himself.

“It was all of our memory I burned up,” he would say glumly. “For that I’ll burn in eternal fire myself. I’ll be the first to get thrown into the pool of fire. I destroyed those files so that later anyone who remembered, who was seeking justice, could be cut off by saying: you made all of this up, how are you going to prove it?”

I took a gulp of warm beer and looked around again — after all, it’s not Mackus the Hunchback I’m looking for at all. I came wanting to repeat the unrepeatable, the episode that had once occurred. Or maybe it hadn’t happened at all?

At that time I stood on the edge. Gedis was already gone. The city drained me and ravaged me with its ghostly stares. I felt persecuted, pressed into a corner, but like a crazed beast I went straight for the hunters. I sat around in the Narutis; I frequented Old Town’s dives. I was seeking destruction; I was provoking Them.