Ricardas Gavelis - Vilnius Poker

“Maybe that God of yours is a criminal, anyway, if he finds suffering and blood amusing?”

“No!” Martynas kept getting sadder. “You have to understand God! It’s all just a comedy to him. A theater show! There are no victims, no blood, it’s all fictitious. God laughs his head off when he hears little people making majestic pronouncements and then acting out pure stupidity. The way they honor morality before going out to butcher one another. He knows that the blood is squeezed from beets, that the torture sessions are intentionally laid on thick and senseless so that they’d be sillier, and that those who are supposedly burned at the stake shake off the ashes and are already preparing for the next scene. . It’s really sad to know that all of your painful work, all your aspirations have only one purpose — to make the Lord laugh. . When you start INTENTIONALLY playing in the comedy of the absurd, it’s easier. . Let’s drink!”

He poured the whole drink into his mouth and made a horrible face: Martynas never knew how to drink, which you wouldn’t say about our neighbor with the pistol. He apparently was of the type that sobered up as they drank. He slowly moved over to us and fixed his gaze on me.

“Calm down!” he declared, smiling wryly, “I’ve come in peace.”

He seemed to be ready to explode from self-assurance and self-satisfaction. I saw his eyes and I was amazed. They were not at all what I had expected. The beautiful light blue irises moved enigmatically; there was most definitely no emptiness behind those eyes.

“Lithuanians!” He rolled the word out again, practically spitting it. “And what is it you want, you Lithuanians? What do you expect? Who are you? I want to understand. To understand! I’ve always wanted to understand every variety of human, even the most pathetic.”

He ostentatiously lit up a cigarette and carefully looked me over again, then Martynas. His jacket under his left arm really was bulging. From close up his fingers didn’t look all that thick.

“You still believe the world’s going to help you out? You’re happy that the European Parliament, for the thousandth time, voted for a free Lithuania? That the U.S. Congress commemorates Lithuania Day? What use is it to you? It’s nothing more than a delusion. . don’t tell me you can’t distinguish a delusion from reality? You rave about a referendum on the separation question? We could arrange that referendum for you, just for a laugh. And what of it? We’ll apply a little bit of pressure, and you’ll vote the way you should.”

“And if we don’t?” Martynas got his back up immediately.

“What do you mean, if you don’t? You’d be afraid. Just try it — and there won’t be anything left of you.” His hand grabbed the glass the bartender shoved at him. “And by the way, let’s say you don’t. So, what of it? We’ll make the ballots change color when they’re already in the ballot box, so what should be marked on them will mark itself. But why the complications? My God, after all, we’re the ones counting the ballots. .”

“I’ll flatten his ugly mug!” Martynas muttered in Lithuanian.

“Don’t babble in that language of yours,” blue eyes said good-naturedly. “You know I don’t understand it. Besides, I can’t understand you even when you’re speaking Russian. Passive disagreement is the stupidest policy. It’s a pipe dream policy! Forget that Europe for once. Did they help you out much when we took you over in the forties?. . You need to think CORRECTLY, you need to get hold of reality. And you?. . One burns himself alive in protest, others solder freight cars that are filled with meat and bound for Leningrad to the rails, and still others parade in the streets after a football game singing nationalistic songs. . I don’t get it. What’s that all about? Come on, it’s nothing but a pipe dream. Come on, it’s all perfectly obvious. You won’t run anywhere, you won’t do anything! We won’t let you do anything!”

“That’s how Lithuanians differ from you,” Martynas announced furiously. “When they’re frying in the pan, at least they aren’t rejoicing over it.”

“What does a frying pan have to do with it?” Thickfingers was sincerely surprised. “What frying pan? You just need to be aware of how things are, and always will be. Always! For eternity! We won’t let it be any different! Where does this superiority complex of yours come from, this thought that you are somebody? If we need to, we’ll announce that you don’t even exist, and never did. No one will miss you. The Europe and America you’ve dreamed of won’t so much as peep when you disappear. We’ll arrange it so they’ll have other problems at the time.”

“So we’ll just disappear?” I couldn’t hold out.

“Anything can happen, if that’s the way we want it. The one who wins is the one who ACTS. There’s more Czechs than you — and what of it? The West bitched about it for a year or two, but everything stayed the way we wanted!”

I looked at him carefully and couldn’t get over my astonishment. He was sincerely sad, and there was neither stupidity in his eyes, nor anger — more like compassion. The way a good-hearted person is sad when he runs over a cat or dog with his car.

“All the same, you’re hopeless specimens,” he said thoughtfully. “You don’t even have anything to say. It’s impossible to understand you. It looks like the boss was right: you’re doomed to extinction.”

He deftly jumped off the chair, stretched himself almost imperceptibly, like a giant cat, and in a completely different, commanding tone ordered:

“You are not allowed to go outside! You’ll have to sit here for a while yet.”

Without staggering a bit, he marched off towards the toilet; halfway there he turned around and wagged his finger in warning. He had barely disappeared from the doorway when we both, without a word, got up and quickly went downstairs.

“Stinker!” Martynas spat out glumly.

”I wouldn’t say so. But it’ll end badly for him sooner or later.”

“Why?”

“The rank and file are required to carry out secret policies in silence, without giving it any thought. This one thinks too much and goes on about things that should never be said out loud.”

“He’s a stinker all the same! WE! Who are those WE?”

“That’s the most important question in the world.”

Martynas looked me up and down closely and had already opened his mouth, but at that instant we both stepped outside and stumbled into a strange world that scattered all words in the blink of an eye.

The square around the fountain with a weathervane, which was always busy and full of people, was totally empty, as if it had been swept by a giant broom — only the autumn wind ruffled the dark water of the puddles. It was completely quiet. No people to be seen anywhere. No trash, no trace of people. They had never lived here at all. It seemed we’d stumbled into a dead zone. A lone puppy, whining, dashed by. He deftly worked his short little legs, scurrying like he’d been wound up: apparently, he was driven by the same force that had eradicated the people. Despite ourselves, we stopped and looked around in horror: we felt as if we had gone out some other door and ended up in some other Vilnius, perhaps the inverse side of Vilnius. The windows of the houses were dead, the leaves on the trees were dead, life had abandoned this inverted city. The two of us, stunned, stared at one another. The urge came upon me to immediately return to the bar, let there be a hundred KGB agents with a hundred pistols perched there. We were already turning back, but the stage set suddenly changed. Two broad-shouldered men with angry faces scurried towards us, furiously waving their arms. They did not look human. They were fake. There couldn’t be real people in this inverted city.