Ricardas Gavelis - Vilnius Poker

In the camp he was a symbol of the resistance of the spirit to me; I feasted upon it, it kept me alive! These were always his words: they can eat me alive, but they’ll never break me! Never! I’m invincible! I’ll never say out loud that they’re right! Never!

He held out against what no human could — even Bolius didn’t have the strength to hold out. And now Carp had perished. He betrayed not just my faith in him, but even his own church.

They had destroyed even Carp! Neither Auschwitz nor our zone boss had overcome him, but the calm, soulless stare of Vilnius finished him off.

That was yet another direct warning to me: no one, but no one, holds out against Them!

It’s a rule of Theirs that’s cast in stone. They always finish their work to the very end; They don’t lose their crown at the last minute. It’s a matter of Their honor that Stepanas Walleye be the one to sit himself down in front of the television cameras. Just about anybody could have been planted there; someone who hadn’t languished in any forced labor camp, or someone who had sat in Auschwitz but hadn’t afterwards stumbled into the Soviet meat grinder (if there are such people at all). Someone who had languished in both places, but had always been and always would remain blind, would have sufficed too. But this couldn’t have satisfied Them . It was precisely Carp who was needed. It had to be him, Stepanas Walleye. He was precisely the one who had to publicly honor the cancer that had eaten him up. I clearly understood that only this could be enough. Only a complete, universal grayness, voiceless birds, exterminated bees, and blind swallows with their wings ripped off could satisfy Them .

In the camp, he despised those of his partners in misfortune who just didn’t want to see through it. They were an indescribable, absurd, gut-wrenching clan. They founded underground communist cells and tried to persuade others, and themselves, that Papa Stalin didn’t know a thing about the horrible mistreatment that had befallen them. The Father of the People had to show up one day in a shining cloud like the Messiah, announce eternal Justice, and extol the members of the underground communist cells. Stepanas Walleye called those paranoids carps.

“You’re like those carp,” he’d scream in their faces, “You’re being fried in the pan, and you writhe and sing hosannas to the cannibal chef. You don’t belong to the human race and never will. You’re carp!”

He called them carp with such fury that the nickname Carp stuck to him.

He’d sidle up to me and Bolius and to the other Lithuanians, and repeat glumly:

“I’m ashamed to be a Russian. I’m ashamed! Guys, accept me into your nation.”

He even learned some Lithuanian and proudly twisted his tongue, muddling the words with a dreadful accent. He’d assert to Bolius and me:

“I’ll get out of here. I know that I really will get out. And even if I live a thousand years, I’ll never be a carp. I have a brain, whoever it was that gave it to me — God or nature. I’m invincible!”

He really did leave the camp and settle in Vilnius.

And now there he is, hanging around on the television screen and singing hosannas to the old and new cannibal chefs.

Even Carp was vanquished in the end! They took away the brains he was so proud of!

I could just see all of our zone guards, and the zone boss himself, sitting comfortably in front of their screens and lazily applauding with gloved hands. I can just see a hundred thousand guards sitting in a gigantic open field, so they can see one another, enjoy one another, and feel their combined power. They lazily applaud Stepanas Walleye for his accurate and timely words. Now he was their colleague.

It was no different than if Giordano Bruno were to take up preparing firewood for the bonfires of the Inquisition. If Thomas Jefferson were to demand that the Bill of Rights be recalled forthwith. If Saint Paul were to start persecuting Christians and profaning Christ by all available means.

Once upon a time he sat in front of me — his lip split, sucking on the hole left by his knocked-out teeth — and told me about his dream:

“We’re worse than the Germans. . Yes, yes, only we’re to blame. . One mustachioed Georgian couldn’t accomplish anything. . But the world has already punished the Germans and will continue to punish them, while these will remain righteous for eternity, my child. . Russia never knew how to admit its own guilt. We love tyrants: Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Stalin. . We’re afraid of them, but we respect them, we LOVE them, my child! That’s what needs to be burned out of the Russian soul first of all!. . The love of the whip, as Pushkin, Alexander Sergeyevich said. . And by the way, I wouldn’t take Pushkin into the new nation. I’d take Dostoevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich. . And Bulgakov I’d take, with his Heart of a Dog . . Too many Russians have a dog’s heart, my child. . Way too many. . I’ll establish a new church, a genuine Russian church. I must establish it, my child! And I won’t accept a single person who believes in the sacred Russian destiny to rule other nations, to create an eternal empire. Not a single one raving that Moscow is the third Rome. . I’ll only take those who will understand their guilt, who will understand what they really are, who will want to become real. . Real humans, my child. Who will fear nothing, bow to no one, but won’t oppress anyone, either. . That’s how a new Russian nation will be born. A great nation! Perhaps I won’t be in it myself, maybe I’m too lowly for it too ordinary. .”

Stepanas was quickly taken on by the zone boss himself, and this meant the end. Our boss was the paranoid demiurge of the camp. You could sense a satanic system in all of his pathological activity; he had some purpose that was comprehensible only to himself. For example, he wouldn’t prevent the carps from gathering, but later he would suddenly add ten years to the sentences of all the members of the communist cells for starting up an illegal organization. There is no communist party of the zeks, he’d like to reason, ergo, they’re illegal. He thought it amusing that the carp, whom the Communist Party had shoved in there, secretly made sacrifices to it, and because of that got extra punishment. He wanted to perceive some kind of paranoiac essence in this, to “understand a person’s liver,” as he himself would say. (The gypsy baron from the neighboring barracks swore that during the annual celebration of the Revolution, the boss ordered him to serve up a human liver.) The majority of people are brainless manure, he liked to repeat, they’ll not only eat others up, that’s too ordinary — no, they’ll eat themselves up.

“I need to understand your liver,” he said one day to Stepanas Walleye. “I’ll take you on.”

This meant the end. When the boss would take someone on, nothing would be left of a person, not even that liver of his. The boss had taken on Bolius just before Stepanas.

The last time I saw Walleye in the camp, he was in the pit where we used to dig gravel. There was only the shadow of a shadow left of him. He staggered and repeated:

“Never! Remember, guys, never! I’m invincible!”

That hideous summer at the camp I made an eternal vow to myself to never have children. It’s inadmissible to bring little creatures with souls into the world, souls that They will instantly devour. At least I can’t do that. Millions of people don’t even consider that they’re merely giving birth to sustenance for Their spiritual cannibalism. Millions of mothers don’t even ponder the hideous doom they’re sacrificing their infants to. Not a single child asks his parents to bring him into this world. Not a single father has tried to ask his child this.