Ricardas Gavelis - Vilnius Poker

“What the hell!” Martynas muttered.

I glanced in the direction where he was staring and saw indistinct figures looming in every other window of the building opposite. They surrounded the entire square, settled in as if it were an amphitheater. The glass of binoculars flashed in some of them. No, this wasn’t a dead zone: I felt as if I had ended up in a giant theater set. Everything’s possible in Vilnius. Everything really is possible in Vilnius. As if emerging from underground, four government ZILs with bulletproof glass lazily rolled up to the sidewalk (how could there be ZILs in Vilnius? Of course, this is an inverted city); elderly men in hats began to clamber out of them. As if responding to an unheard signal, several women with baskets came out of the neighboring houses and began mincing towards the store. A couple of young women with baby carriages followed them out. And they started to rotate around the fountain. One after the other, young men with optimistic expressions marched through the square in all directions. An instant ago it was completely empty, but now an unhealthy crush had formed — everyone moved stiffly, like mannequins. I still didn’t get it. I knew this square and its fountain well. I knew this store well — just like all the others, for the sake of a vision of plenty it was filled with cans of inedible fish, cereal, and cheap candy, and instantly crammed with people if sausages unexpectedly showed up.

“Who the hell let you in here?” one of the broad-shouldered men, who had at last hurried up to us, snarled in Russian.

“Yankovsky has gotten plastered again and for a few cocktails let them go take a look,” the other, a likable brunet, replied phlegmatically.

“I’m going to write up a report about this!” hissed the first one. “I’ll trash him, the damn philosopher!”

To them, we didn’t exist; they talked over Martynas’s head.

“They see us,” the brunet calmly observed. “They’re coming this way already.”

“Get into the store, now, and just you try something!” The angry one went so far as to shove me in the back.

The procession of hats really was close by. Stepping inside, I noticed a group of militia restraining a crowd around the corner of the building. I slowly started catching on to what was going on, while by now Martynas was poking me in the side:

“Look!” he hissed, stunned, “Just look! We’re in Sinbad’s cave!”

Again it occurred to me that we were, despite it all, in an inverse Vilnius. The store was the same, but completely different. The shelves were buckling with wildly colorful cans, packages, and jars. Saleswomen who looked like nymphs in bright blue smocks smiled at us; their eyes said they loved us. In the huge room a few buyers wandered about casually, occasionally stopping by the refrigerated shelves or cases.

“It’s fantastic!” Martynas hissed in my ear. “There were narcotics in the cognac, we’re hallucinating. Do you see the canned crab? Do you see three. . no, four kinds of caviar?”

That wasn’t all I saw; there were many more things an inhabitant of Vilnius wouldn’t behold even in his pathetic dreams. The procession of hats advanced right up behind out backs; whether I wanted to or not, I heard the guests’ questions and the guide’s answers.

“It’s a pleasant square,” a hatted voice declared; a strange voice: hoarse, but biting at the same time.

“The inhabitants like it,” the guide spoke Russian with a mild accent that merely emphasized the suggestiveness of his velvety voice. “It’s particularly popular among young mothers. They like to bring their babies here, to meet and chit-chat. The air here is especially clean, and there are a lot of green spaces.”

“It really is a pleasant square.”

I recognized the hoarse voice; it froze my blood. An oppressive foreboding wickedly told me I hadn’t been driven here merely to observe a strange spectacle, that something really evil was about to happen. My foreboding asserted that They had arranged this performance especially for me. Martynas wasn’t choked by any foreboding; he grabbed several colorful cans from the shelves.

“Lobsters!” he whispered resignedly. “I thought I’d die without ever tasting lobster!”

“There aren’t very many people here,” the hoarse one observed.

“Most people are at work. In the evening there’s more. We do avoid lines, however.”

The hats were nearly stepping on our heels. The hoarse voice terrified me, even though I hadn’t the slightest idea why I feared it so, feared it and probably hated it. The women with the baby carriages were still zooming around the square like they’d been wound up. The optimistic young men chatted, waving their hands about with excessive cheer. They depressed me; I so wanted to stop them all. Martynas poked me in the side again. With his glance he caressed cans of Lithuanian game destined only for export. The sides of the cans boasted in fancy type: “Taiga’s Gift.”

“As far as I know,” he observed philosophically, “Lithuanian boar, moose, and deer have never so much as smelled the taiga. A little misunderstanding.”

“It’s a metaphor!” I made an effort to collect my senses and take up Martynas’s tone. “Lithuanians have surely smelled it.”

“Oh, I get it. In the sense that our boars are so tasty because Lithuanians were taken to pasture in Siberia? As clear as mud.”

“We try to always have at least several varieties of meat for sale,” explained the guide. “Some like game. Some — it’s funny, really — have a high opinion of horse meat. It’s probably a fad from the French.”

“It’s not good to chase after foreign fashions,” muttered the hoarse one. “It’s ideologically dangerous. Small things lead to bigger ones.”

Martynas quietly cursed in Russian. If he starts to curse in Russian it means the end of the world is coming. Once more I looked around, once more I wanted to know if everything going on here was for real. I wouldn’t have been the least surprised if that entire preposterous store were to sink into the ground and disappear without a trace. I almost wanted it to, because then the hoarse voice would have disappeared too. But whose was it? Whose?

“The sonofabitches!” Martynas seethed. “And if I were to turn around and explain to them how things really are?”

“We try particularly hard to provide ample fruit,” the guide cooed. “Working people need vitamins.”

I calmed down a bit, perhaps because the hoarse voice was quiet for the time being. I looked over the great performance’s participants. The director’s hand could be felt everywhere, but the actors played their parts badly. Their movements were nervous; they wanted everything , but apparently they had been warned not to take more than a few items. A few women, it seemed, went into shock. Their blank faces stared at some culinary miracle and their lips moved without a sound. Going by, the broad-shouldered men roughly jostled them, awakening them out of their trances.

“Our stores,” the guide explained, “compare favorably with, say, American stores. In ours, people don’t purchase groceries for an entire week. A working man knows he’ll always find what he needs. He buys only enough merchandise for one time.”

“You live well,” the hoarse one declared. “And are there ever shortages?”

His voice was driving me out of my mind. I felt I was going to stop at any moment, turn around, and fix my eyes on the procession of hats.

“Unfortunately, it does happen,” the guide reported sadly; you could feel unappeasable pain in his voice. “Unfortunately, sometimes a person comes into the store and can’t buy what he wants.”

“He’s a bit confused,” Martynas interjected between his quiet cursing, “He just now said that you can always find whatever your heart desires.”