Ricardas Gavelis - Vilnius Poker

Bitinas opens an iron box, takes a photograph out of it, and carefully lays it in front of you. His hands are majestic; they spread a crushing calm. You won’t escape from hands like those.

“Take a good look!”

In the photograph there’s a bony-faced man, probably not a Lithuanian. You don’t see anything special, maybe just that his hair is particularly unruly; it’s standing on end. You take a good look at his eyes. There’s no gaze in them; they’re like buttons set in his eye sockets.

“Who is he?”

“The executioner of the Lithuanian nation. Remember his name: Suslov, from the word ‘susas.’ He really is rather mangy.”

Bitinas smiles wryly, and scores of little veins in your temples start pounding; anger and mortification flood through your chest. They’ll make a spy out of you, but you want to do battle. That’s why you came here.

“He’s the emissary from Moscow. Sent here to deal with the Lithuanian nation. He has introduced two slogans. The first — finish off Lithuanian-German fascism. Pay attention — it’s the Lithuanians who are monsters, but he’s not. The second basic slogan — Lithuania without Lithuanians! No colonizers have ever introduced anything like that before.”

“I won’t be able to do it,” you answer, your voice trembles from that incalculable pounding.

“If we’re in the position where we’re forced to kill, we must first punish those who have truly earned punishment. Muravyov the Hangman, compared to Suslov, is no more than a babe in arms. He hung maybe a hundred, while Suslov’s counter has ten thousand as its smallest unit. He is a dragon. A dragon that must be beheaded. His head has to end up on top of a flagpole in place of the Soviet flag.”

Your head spins, you see the spike, and on it — a dried-up head. But not the man in the photograph, not the head of the dragon. Shudders shake you, but even with your eyes closed you see Bitinas’s head on the spike. A flashing bare skull and black whiskers. The prophetic vision is so strong that despite yourself you step backwards, while the live Bitinas’s ghastly head watches you attentively.

“We’ve selected ten men from various groups all over Lithuania, whose purpose is to track down the dragon. I picked you, Vytautas. I won’t give you a weapon. You don’t have the right to die in a ridiculous firefight. You’re meant for other things.”

You’re wracked by shudders, because you have to talk to the transfixed head of a dead man. There are gloomy tunnels about; vague flames flicker in them; they commune with Bitinas’s angrily flickering eyes.

“I believe if anyone can get to the dragon, it’ll be you. The dragon must be destroyed. The widows and orphans cry for it. Hundreds of thousands of Lithuanians in the snows of Siberia pray for it.”

“But why me?”

“You’re an exceptional person, Vytautas,” answers the head on the pike. “I can see it in your eyes: you’ll manage. That creature has no right to live. He’s driven us, the masters of our country, underground, and dares to breathe Lithuanian air himself.”

You want to answer that underground is a place of sobriety and safety, that it’s only here that you have nothing to fear, but you’re quiet, since the dead man’s bald head won’t believe it.

“I’m inexperienced. Why not you. . or some other old soldier?”

“Too many people know me and the others. A young man is what’s needed, a man no one knows. You see — you’re the son of working people. You’ve learned Russian at night, after backbreaking labor, studying Stalin’s writings, for which you could have been shot. You will need to play your role well.”

“It’s that hard to find the dragon’s lair?”

“Don’t tell me you have no inkling of how afraid he is? He’s afraid of us. He’s afraid of his staff. He’s afraid of the whole world. He doesn’t show his face anywhere. He sleeps only sealed up in a tank: we got this from a reliable source.”

The bald head lights a cigarette, and you breathe easier: the flame of the match lit up his waist and broad shoulders. There is no pike. Even Bitinas’s sad grimace calms you. Creaking, the cover of the tank stopped by the forest opens, and out of the hatch the dragon’s head emerges. It looks around and, just in case, releases a plume of fire into the nearest bushes.

“What do you think — who established the destroyer units in Lithuania? They didn’t even look for a nicer name. Destroyer units, that’s all. Sonderkommand . What do you think, whose idea was that?

“The dragon’s?”

“You’ve guessed it.” Bitinas smiles grimly, and you are stunned, because his eyes open wide and you see how much he’s suffering: you sense the pain gripping him, him — the iron man with the icy voice. “As you know, after a battle our soldiers’ bodies are gathered and laid out in the village and town squares. Just so that everyone who brushes away a tear while passing by can be seized immediately and sent to Siberia. Whose elegant idea was that, you think?”

“The dragon’s,” I answer firmly now. “The dragon’s.”

You know that you won’t escape from Bitinas’s sticky fingers. It will be your lot to face the dragon barehanded, and no one is promising you a princess or half a kingdom. No one is promising you anything.

“How do you blow up a tank?” you suddenly ask.

The mothers stubbornly drag the children to the front, but the children aren’t in any hurry; they look around. They want to see everything, feel everything, and understand everything — not just that bug-eyed drunk, but the shape of the trees’ branches and the construction of the trolleybus. It’ll be worse when they want to understand themselves. Or that young woman there with the sickly, dark bags under her eyes:

“I can’t stand it anymore! I feel like a caveman. Yesterday they were selling decent pork — two Russian women in the line got into a fight. They drew blood!”

“That’s the way it should be. As long as there’s nothing in your head except a hunger for meat and winter boots, you’re a proper Soviet citizen. What would happen if we had everything in spades? You’d start — God forbid! — to think. You’d become dangerous.”

A thirty-year-old homegrown philosopher with a shock of hair. He glances around to see if anyone hears how brave he is. Every establishment, every café is full of people like that. If all of their words would turn into matter, it would fill the streets and cover the tallest houses: Vilnius would be destroyed by empty words. Besides, that speaker is terribly naïve. If having everything could save you from Them , the world would long since be a different place. A McCarthy suddenly shows up even in the wealthiest societies. Even Hitler can be chosen in a free election. You might think a thriving Englishman immediately rushes off to think about the Universe and the structure of human society. Not at all; one collects neckties, another — diamonds. Each according to his means. Not for God, but for Mammon. They let you have a lot of gold — if you renounce your soul.

At one time I had decided that Their credo is a dictate of pure reason: They merely calculated that a society of kanuked creatures provides the most stability. If an anthill is the most stable way of life, then you need to construct human anthills. There can be no talk of the individual, freedom, or the soul; all of that just gets in the way. Their great commissar Plato described a state of that sort. It’s worth reading — it’s the germ of Their pathologic. Stalin attempted to bring a society like that into being. People aren’t necessary — every member of society is nothing more than a function. He lives by his function alone, thinks only of his function, dreams only of his function. Dzerzhinsky dearly loves children, but his function is to be an executioner, hence he becomes an executioner. Hess adores music, but his function is to kill the Auschwitz Jews, so he murders Jews. (Just thumb through Soviet books, look at the films — how many odes and thunderous apologias there are for people who sacrificed themselves and their inner beings to the functions thrust on them.) Every morning the only newspaper in the country announces what is to be done today, and everyone meekly obeys. Orwell described the life of such an anthill of the kanuked in detail.