Ricardas Gavelis - Vilnius Poker

Now I sit in the Narutis, nearly gagging from the smell of scorched cabbage, and try to overcome it with vodka. The vodka is warm and disgusting, undoubtedly diluted with tap water; it turns your guts inside out. I sit all alone waiting for my Godot, like the others gathered here. Somewhere else perhaps there is a world, somewhere else rivers flow and winds blow. Somewhere else (Lord please, please!) maybe there are even humans. But here — only bitter, cheap cigarette smoke, the stench of scorched cabbage, and the monotony of time flowing backwards.

I came here looking for something: a thing, an animal, or a person. A thing, an animal, or a person? It’s trivial, it’s all nothing. A mysterious object that means something to me couldn’t turn up here. The only life here is the cockroaches, dazed by the light, crawling out of the cracks. The gray ruler of Old Town’s streets, the short, neckless spiderman, will surely not show up here. So why should I find an answer in this universe of boiled cabbage, vodka, and deformed faces? However, something tells me to wait just precisely here. The memory of the neckless spiderman won’t give me peace. I sit and look at everyone in turn, not putting my hopes on anything, until my glance stumbles upon an unusual, unexpected figure of a man who doesn’t fit in here. I could swear he wasn’t here a second ago. He sprang from the earth; every wrinkle in his face, every fold in his clothes, screams and shouts that he didn’t get here the way everyone else did. He has some sort of secret purpose. And his purpose can only be me. I feel a sharp pang in my chest; my hand pours the rest of the tumbler into my mouth of its own accord. The man looks straight at me. His eyes are brimming with quiet and. . wait, wait. . yes, a sweetish smell of rot. I have already seen his beautiful, elegant hands, so out of place next to the dirty shirt and frayed remains of a jacket. I already know he’s come for me, but I have no idea what he could want from me (I don’t want anything from him).

Don’t tell me he’ll simply take me out to the street and push me under a passing truck? I’m not Gedis, after all. Gedis knew something, and I’m just barely beginning to speculate. Perhaps he came to intimidate me, to break me, to take away my will? The man stands up, rises to his full, gigantic height, and approaches. I look only at him, at his glassy eyes with narrow pupils, and I know him, I know him well.

“Hello, Vytie.”

It seems a hundred thunderclaps should roar; it seems the entire Narutis should sink straight into the ground. The man pats my hand. I don’t pull it away because across from me sits my father.

“I thought you were in America. . or Australia. .” I say in a weird voice. “In Chicago, or Melbourne.”

“As far as I know, this country is called Lithuania,” father says calmly, as if we had separated only yesterday, “and this city is Vilnius.”

I obediently followed him out, through the inner door of the Narutis, through the stench-spreading kitchen, through a small inner courtyard. We climbed up creaking stairs; several times my feet sank into rotten wood. Father’s back swayed in front of my eyes, sometimes widening, sometimes narrowing. It pulsated like the naked heart of a giant animal.

“You think I’m dead?” father inquired without turning around. “In a certain sense that’s true.”

The two of us turned into a long arched hallway; on both sides there were doors, doors, doors. Some of them were open; slovenly women were working inside. Everything seemed natural, but there was something missing. I didn’t immediately realize I wasn’t hearing even the slightest sound, not even our own footsteps: their echo was apparently stifled by the rotten floorboards. They were rotten through — your feet stuck in them as if it were a swampy meadow; we should have left footprints as we passed by. I suddenly put it together that we were circling around in the places where my Irena would disappear; we were slowly penetrating into the kingdom of the neckless spiderman. My throat suddenly dried out; I fearfully asked myself what my father was doing here. Where was he taking me? Why does he feel at home here? His back no longer pulsated, it flashed regularly before my eyes, turned to the right, to the left, to the right again, to the left, to the right, to the right, to the left. In the empty rooms I discerned only rickety furniture piled in the corners. Those rooms were endless; we went and went, I could no longer understand where all of this labyrinth could fit: the Narutis quarter isn’t all that large, we should have exited its borders long ago, maybe even Old Town’s borders. Finally, father stepped into a large windowless room and stopped.

“Greetings, son,” he said hoarsely. “Sit down, we’ll talk.”

For some reason it seemed everything had to be this way. I had to sit on the rotten floor, father had to stand off a bit — as if he feared I would suddenly touch him and convince myself he’s woven out of fog. It seemed he had to say just precisely what he said. He talked a lot. I don’t remember how the time passed, I don’t remember where the bottle of Jamaican rum came from, or the tall candle in a bronze candleholder. The candle looked fake: its flame didn’t flutter; it seemed the air in the room was solidified, not even our breathing could budge it. Father kept talking about mother, our house, and grandfather’s altar; then he spoke about the war. I was seized by an unpleasant presentiment: he said no more about himself than what I already knew. You’d think thirty years had literally been erased from his life. He talked about the war like a person who hadn’t experienced it, about foreign countries like a person who hadn’t visited them. It seemed he had come from our last evening together, but for some unknown reason he was aged and hunched over, for some unknown reason his voice had lost its resonance. The conversation (or father’s monologue) bobbed along over and over in the same spot; the good feeling that everything was the way it should be slowly disappeared. I no longer listened to his words, I just looked at father’s face and tried to at least read something there. I started getting angry with this elderly person who had invaded my life without warning, confusing everything, even though everything was already confused without him. My face probably gave my thoughts away. Maybe I just imagined it, but my father’s eyes suddenly flashed tenderness and fear, together with a desire to help me. Undoubtedly I only imagined it; however, it was enough — my anger instantly dissipated. I came to my senses and realized that my father was sitting in front of me. Father, whom I hadn’t seen in thirty years. A man from whose seed I am created, whose weaknesses and strengths I inherited. My eyes involuntarily flooded with tears. I probably hadn’t cried in a quarter of a century. But that time I cried. No, I wasn’t sorry for myself; probably I was the most sorry for father, for the man with tousled gray hair sitting in front of me. I was sorry for the back nooks of Old Town, reeking of boiled cabbage and drowning in a drab silence, I was sorry for Vilnius, above which hung a fog of fear and despair, sorry for all of its inhabitants, the irretrievably dead, who don’t even know they are no longer alive.

“Father,” I interrupted his speech, “Father, what should be done?”

The two of us were like wanderers in the desert, only he was more experienced. He knew more. However, he was quiet; perhaps he was vacillating or deliberating. It was only then I felt how stuffy, how dead the room’s air was. I was practically suffocating. But father was still quiet, intently looking me in the eyes, or even deeper, as if he wanted to look straight through into my brain.