Ricardas Gavelis - Vilnius Poker

I was standing in a side street right next to the Narutis. Still not fully recovered, I was horrified to notice two figures leaning against the wall. They were loitering there in terribly evil, terribly dangerous poses. But at last the cool air revived me, and I realized that I was as safe as safe could be in the damp Vilnius night. The two men, concentrating intensely but staggering anyway, diligently relieved themselves against the wall.

“I’m a Lithuanian, and you’re a Lithuanian,” one of them slowly expounded. “We’re both Lithuanian.”

“Yeah!” the second nodded, actually smacking his head against the crumbling bricks of the wall.

”We won’t give up Lithuania to any shitty Russkies!”

“Yeah! Give it to ’em in the nose, the rats!”

“Let’s kiss, brother,” the first one shook off the last drops and tried to hug his companion. His kisses were wet and slimy, like the damp-drenched pavement of the side street.

“You’re a Lithuanian?”

“Yeah!”

“And I’m a Lithuanian. We’re both Lithuanians.”

“Lithuania is the land of heroes!” the second loudly declared. “Yeah!”

The two of them staggered towards the street, while I continued to think about father. Exhausted by the oppressive air of the corridors, the stale side street felt like a mountain resort. I almost felt good. From down the street an inharmonious duet drifted:

Ride Lithu-uanians, up the castle hill,

Ride Lithu-uanians, up the castle hill,

Ri-i-ide on, ri-i-ide on, Lith-thu-uanians

Car-r-ry on, car-r-ry on, wreaths of glory!. .

The library bookcases are grim and monotonous (for some reason I’m walking through the library again), like the secret corridors of the Narutis quarter. And the dimness is exactly the same. I walk aimlessly; the bookcases slowly slink by. It seems it’s a desert, a boundless desert of frozen thoughts and metaphors. Here, between the identical rows of books, I immediately remember the labyrinth of rooms cluttered with broken furniture. Earlier I had even hoped to come across father here, quietly dawdling around the corner, inhaling on a cigarette that’s hidden between his fingers. Now I don’t expect anything anymore, although the books charm me anyway. No, they didn’t provide me with clear answers. But they helped me grasp a great deal. I came across many of Their attributes in books first, and only afterwards in the real world. Books protect me from aimless wandering, from hasty conclusions. There was a time when I thought They existed only here: in Vilnius, in Lithuania, in Russia. I didn’t have the strength to think about everyone, about the entire world. A study of history dispelled this fallacy. In the twentieth century alone Their activities mark Italy and Germany, China and Cambodia ( They have long been fond of China in general). And then there’s Spain in the Middle Ages, where They ruled for entire centuries! It’s enough to remember Charles the Bewitched, the impotent dwarf: when he was dissected they discovered that he had a heart the size of a child’s fist, rotten intestines, and one black testicle. I came across incontrovertible evidence that Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor, a christened Jew who burned Jews at the stake with the greatest enthusiasm, was Their commissar.

Alas, They are everywhere, in every country, in every system. They are and were in every epoch — sometimes they were in control, more often they hid, but they always waited for their chance. My head spins from all the data about kanuked people, nations, and even civilizations. In the encyclopedia of the kanuked, the Roman Empire would nestle next to Plato, the first of Their world commissars. The kanukas of kanukai, Stalin, would end up in the encyclopedia next to the ruin of the Mayan civilization. Alas, even entire civilizations are kanuked, the same way people are. To this day scholars haven’t managed to properly explain why all the old civilizations, without exception, came to ruin, or what laws of death govern them. After all, they don’t die biologically, the way people do. Where did Greece and Egypt’s power and wisdom disappear to, even though Greece and Egypt still exist? Where are the ancient Chinese, Mayans, or Aztecs? Researchers seize on any and all arguments, even co-opting space aliens, but They don’t raise the slightest red flag. They , only They , are to blame! What other evidence do you need? Scholarly conjectures sometimes drive me into a rage. It’s known that a civilization died over the lifespan of several generations, that it encountered no epidemics or cataclysms. And they vaguely babble on about some social reasons or who knows what else. How can they be so blind? It’s always Their pupil-less eyes peering out of the ruins of a civilization. No, They don’t control nature’s powers or kingdoms, however, they manage to destroy what matters most — people’s spirit. They penetrate into every person’s brain, and then calmly retreat. Nothing more needs to be done. The kanuked destroy themselves.

But it isn’t the study of individual nations that matters most to me, I’m most interested in the activities of individual people who have gone down The Way. It’s not an idle curiosity or a desire to delve into strangers’ fates. Oh, if only I could restrain my distant, secret friends, if only I could guard them from destruction! Alas, they are distant not just in space, but in time too. But their fatal mistakes are actually warnings of incalculable value. I can avoid those mistakes. It’s not for me to die in a car crash like Camus (like Gedis). It’s not for me to be stuffed into prison, like Jean Genet, or guillotined, like de Sade (the poor revolutionary Marquis — they made him into nothing more than a symbol of sexual deviation). Better to balance on the edge of the abyss, as Ortega y Gasset does, practically the only one in modern times who dares to survey Their methods. (Deception is possible here too: They could have purposely cracked the cover open a bit, calculating that reasoning about the revolt of the kanuked masses is useful to Them . On the other hand, Ortega duped them anyway: he showed how art has been stolen from the Western world — that’s one of Their biggest achievements.) Alas, those who have protected themselves, like Ortega, are few, wretchedly few. Rummaging about in the lives of like-minded thinkers, I risk turning into a necrophiliac: there’s so many corpses, madmen, and suicides there. Even Nietzsche, the divine, poetic Nietzsche! A man who dared to publicly declare that sooner or later we’ll succeed in triumphing over Them , in healing kanuked man and in cultivating a true, inspired , Übermensch who doesn’t submit to Them . It’s awful to even remember Nietzsche’s lot. In life he was destroyed, forced into insanity and suicide, deceived and misrepresented. But even that wasn’t enough. They don’t leave even the dead in peace. Their Satanic calculations are horrifying: Nietzsche’s music of the heavenly spheres, his divine poetry, was handed over to one of the worst maniacs of the twentieth century. The dream of an unkanuked man, in the hands of the Great Kanukas, turned into butchery and labor camps. Is it possible to think up a worse method of discrediting someone? Millions of people, hearing Nietzsche’s name, involuntarily remember Hitler and the Nazis. Yes, it isn’t just that books give me support — at the same time they destroy me by degrees, and constantly deepen my despair. On some level it begins to seem we’ll never succeed in penetrating Their secrets, much less in surmounting Them . I know only one thing for sure: whatever you do, you must always leave an escape route open. You can never burn all of your bridges. One of Their key pathological methods is to drive a person (or even an entire nation) into a real or imaginary situation with no escape route, so all that remains is a single, unguarded step straight into Their prepared trap. Convincing a person it’s the only way is of utmost importance. It’s the only way to reach the height of kanukism, to reach Their paramount sphere of prowess: a man accepting slavery as if it were a stroke of luck — a self-satisfied slave. (Once, well in his cups, our zone boss condescended to chat with us, the “incorrigibles”; he told us that in the mountains, twenty kilometers away, there was some sort of tunnel being dug, that people were digging it without a roof over their heads, practically without food, and without warm clothes.