Ricardas Gavelis - Vilnius Poker

“A tunnel’s easy to guard,” I observed. “Cover the opening with barbed wire, tie a couple of man-eating dogs to it — and that would do it.”

“My boy,” the zone boss edifyingly pronounced, “Wake up. There’s no wire, no dogs, no guards. Why waste money if you can get by without spending anything? Those idiot Communist Youth are digging the tunnel. They are looked after and guarded by their own idiotic enthusiasm.”)

Stalin’s ultimatum to Lithuania is a classic example of Their pathologic: either Lithuania will let the Soviet Army divisions in to guard the Soviet Army divisions that are already in Lithuania, or the Soviet Army divisions will march into Lithuania without Lithuania’s compliance. Total freedom to pick whatever your heart desires. The implied alternative — forceful resistance — circumspectly annihilated: the leader of Lithuania’s army has long since been bought off. Lithuania was ruined when it let the first five Russian soldiers in, when Vilnius, thanks to the generous father of the people, Stalin, rode into Lithuania like a giant Trojan horse.

Vilnius, it’s Vilnius again!

Bookcases; there are bookcases around me again. Breathing in the heavy dust of the books, I occasionally turn around and throw a word to Gedis over my shoulder. I feel a burning weakness when I realize once again that he is no more. The loss is irreparable. All losses are irreparable. I had a mother, but I no longer have her. I had a father — he showed up and disappeared again. I had a beloved wife— They snatched her for themselves. I had a friend— They killed him. What will They do to Lolita?

Gedis revealed the structure of the library to me (the structure of all libraries). Stumbling into a sea of millions of books, I nearly went mad with joy; I just tried to keep from drowning. I devoured as many as I could get my hands on. I didn’t pay the least attention to the remote little rooms where dour figures with grown-together eyebrows sat. Gedis looked right at them. It was only at his urging that I realized for the first time what a special collection is. Of course I knew there are sections like that in libraries. But in my imagination a special collection was a small chamber hiding the couple hundred tomes that are taboo for a Soviet man. Oh, divine naïveté!. . Our most extreme fantasies, our most horrifying theories, fade to insignificance when compared to Their reality; they turn out to be no more than the naïve babbling of babies. Gedis laughed out loud when he heard about my several-hundred-volume special collection. Actually, there isn’t a single book in it, just a closed catalog, which is inaccessible to ordinary mortals. The size of the catalog shocked me. Hundred of thousands of books are buried there. God knows I shuddered in horror when I learned what portion of the world is hidden from us. Probably the best, the most important part. It’s an extraordinary mockery that those books are floating in the common sea of books, but are nevertheless unattainable. Even without ever having been in a library collection it’s not difficult to understand that among a million books you’d never find what you wanted without a catalog, without some coordinates. It’s impossible. Those books are right there, but for us they don’t exist. I discovered that there is also a special special collection with a separate catalog; those who aren’t among the chosen aren’t allowed to even come close to it. I was no longer surprised when I found out from the old-timers (I’ll never forget their frightened whispers) that there is a special special special collection too: books piled in the basement, bricked in like a nuclear shelter, with hermetically sealed metal doors. Books that almost no one can access. I’d had enough already, but Gedis just smiled wryly. He calmly declared that there should also be a box made of a special titanium alloy, the special special special special collection. That box is impossible to open; it’s impossible to even blow it up. Inside are hidden books that no one at all is allowed to read, or even to see.

Gedis always amazed me. I never understood (and I still don’t understand), where a scrupulous kid from a Lithuanian village got his strange inclinations. I wasn’t surprised that he defended his first dissertation in mathematics at twenty-five, and his second at thirty: a talent in mathematics doesn’t depend on your place of birth. But how could he, still plowing fields at sixteen, manage to crack philosophical systems like nuts, recite page after page of Proust in French and Joyce in English? When did he have the time to learn and come to love all that? After all, he grew up where many see only patriarchal values, wells with sweeps, pure Lithuanian maidens with golden braids, folk wisdom, and other pseudo-folk concoctions. From what good fairy did Gedis get a soul of the highest order, a subtle taste, and a boundless predilection for novelty, what instilled in him a longing for the distant islands of the soul, a hunger to take in everything? What force, what gods ordered him to play jazz and just jazz? You’d naturally assume, provincial of provincials that he was, that he wouldn’t even have known that somewhere in the wide world such a thing as jazz existed.

All of us Lithuanians, up against free Europeans or Americans, feel the way blacks do about whites: we envy them and we hate them, we have very well-founded accusations against them and we feel we’re in the right, but at the same time we can never get rid of our inferiority complex. Gedis didn’t have the slightest complex. Presenting a paper at some mathematical congress in Paris, he’d spend every free moment at the Louvre, in jazz clubs, or heaven knows where else. He drank coffee with Sartre, argued about painting with Picasso, and played a jam session with Coltrane. He didn’t have an ounce of snobbery; even I would learn about his exploits accidentally, sometimes from him (“when I played with Trane, for some reason I got the urge to play this idiotic trill. . like this. .”), but most often from others — they would tell me about it with their eyes popping out in envy and amazement. I only learned how respected he was as a mathematician from the letters of condolence. It seemed every other topologist in the world, all the universities and academies, sadly brushed away a tear, knowing that without Gedis, topology would never be the same as it had been before him (that’s what Professor Edwards wrote from Oxford). Even the mystic Grothendieck, for the first time in several years, awoke from his self-imposed exile in Tibet and wrote with a thin little brush in red ink: “By now I have forgotten what mathematics is, but I will always remember who Gediminas was. The Grand Duke of Lithuania.” I was friends with Gediminas for ten years, and, from the way he talked, I thought he was merely one of a hundred thousand ordinary servants of mathematics. There is probably nothing more beautiful than a great person who doesn’t value his greatness.

I remember many of his monologues, but best of all I remember how he played. Gedis’s music wove itself into one great ALL, it even seems to me that it reinforces and supports the unity of that ALL most. When he was playing, I’d suddenly get the feeling Gedis had already lived in this world more than once, that there were Aristotles and Platos, Confuciuses and Lao-Dzes lying hidden inside him for ages already; he didn’t need to study them — all he had to do was remember. He plays Shakespeare and Saint Augustine, resonates with Hume and Eliot’s The Wasteland , Moore’s sculptures, and Rauschenberg’s broad compositions. And he doesn’t play, Lord save us, what’s already written, carved in stone or painted. Gedis plays pure music. He plays that which others leave between the words, the lines and the colors; what others aren’t able to express. He plays scents, dreams, and illusions all the time. Once he organized a concert for me alone, a concert overflowing with horror, which, Lord knows, I’d think I’d dreamed up if there weren’t live witnesses walking around. I know now that he already had some idea of Them at the time; a presentiment of Their intentions bid him answer quickly by way of his music. Up until then, Gediminas would only occasionally sit in with newly forming quartets in Vilnius. He would blend in instantly to any style, but it wasn’t that he just joined in; rather he immediately raised the quality of the entire ensemble. He had an inborn talent for persuasion and teaching — without any imperiousness or force. The young jazz players of Vilnius unanimously confirmed that during the course of several hours, without saying a word, he would explain so much about jazz, improvisation, and music in general that, according to one violinist, “you start hearing the violin of God, even though you know very well that God surely never plays the violin.” When Gedis announced he was organizing an ensemble, all of the invited came running headlong, throwing other work aside, even though he warned them that after all the trouble they would give only one concert. The jazzmen were determined to carry him on their shoulders, together with the grand piano, to wherever he wanted. Incidentally, that’s just what happened. Gedis categorically demanded the concert be held in an abandoned church. At first it seemed to me the caprice of a madman: they needed to temporarily steal a concert grand and cart it off who knows where. Once more I witnessed how much influence Gediminas Riauba had over people; his colleagues accepted this whim without blinking an eye. The concert was entirely underground: no posters, no tickets, no invitations. They had to break into the church illegally, quietly breaking down the door. All of the participants felt like conspirators; it seemed to me that, despite themselves, they feared that uniformed officials would crudely interrupt the music at the crucial moment. Excited by these surreptitious preparations, I was hardly surprised to find out that Gediminas had selected my church. The little wine factory had long since closed down; the church was left completely forsaken — it seemed even the exterior was covered in cobwebs. I was calm; I got nervous only on the evening of the concert, walking up the stone-paved street and smelling the oppressive smell of garbage wine. It seemed I was stepping into my own past, full of secret dangers.