Ricardas Gavelis - Vilnius Poker

That’s a hideous crime — to give birth to a little thinking creature, whose soul will be left untouched for five years at the most.

In Lithuania They start the kanukizing procedures through day-care nannies. In other places perhaps they do it differently.

They need the mass of humanity. They encourage procreation by all means. They aren’t in the least interested in the extinction of humanity. The more brainless beings, the more carriers of the gray spirochetes!

Even if, through some miracle, you hold out against Them during your teens and young adulthood, even if you reach such heights of resistance as Carp did, sooner or later They will grind you up.

For the love of God, don’t make children for Them !

Carp sat on the television screen, praised the Divine Party and condemned the Auschwitz guards as if there had never been any guards in the Gulag. It seemed someone had torn out a piece of my heart, took away my one and only sacred talisman. It seemed I had suddenly found out that my beloved sister was a horrible slut, and that in her free time she manufactured pliers which were designed to rip nails off of fingers. I realized that even Stepanas Walleye needed to be saved . I had to save that tall girl over there on the other side of the street, those children there, who are running like mad to who knows where. I must save the old, abused city outside the window. I must save the calm Swede sitting next to a fireplace in Stockholm and smoking a good pipe. Perhaps I especially needed to save him, because he doesn’t so much as suspect Their existence; he thinks that everything evil will pass by and leave him untouched. Like an aristocrat, he believes that all misfortunes are destined for others. He doesn’t notice the secret sucking stares; he has a sacred trust in his centuries of stability and doesn’t even suspect that his thinking alone shows the kanukai’s proboscises have already touched him, that the pupil-less eyes are already stalking him around every corner, that the drabness already covers both him and his neighbors.

I felt an irrepressible urge to talk things over. I had to try to save Martynas too.

I talked to him about Stepanas Walleye, told him about his nation, made up of five Russian writers, about the zone boss’s boots, which always shone — in whatever weather, at whatever time of year, as if he hadn’t touched the ground, and about the pen where Bolius grazed.

“The worst of it,” I got naïvely hot-headed, “is that what he says seems like the truth: they, the brownshirts, committed hideous crimes against humanity; they have to suffer retribution. But he condemns those hundred scumbags in hiding, and doesn’t say a thing about the quarter of a million of the same kind of scumbags who continue to live quite peacefully next door to him, and don’t even think of going into hiding. What may be may be, but he knows it! Because of his sufferings in the German camps he can feel like he’s a part of mankind demanding retribution. For his sufferings in the Gulag no one will let him feel a part of humanity, they won’t even let him mention it, and he obediently agrees to that. He’s betrayed us all! He, Stepanas Walleye! The invincible! He himself agreed that he’s a nothing. He did it himself, that’s what matters most.”

That, or something similar, was how I reasoned, attempting to understand something, but I only felt that absolutely everything was covered by a sticky layer, a cosmic jellyfish. I felt that I had to help all the people , before it was too late, while the trees still turn green and you can hope to find something alive beyond the lazy hills, as long as somewhere there still are all kinds of Swiss or Swedes, who at least already know that it’s inadmissible to admit, even for a second, that you are NOTHING. And to save them too is essential, because they have too much faith in themselves, they think there’s no way the fate of Spain in the Middle Ages or Atlantis could happen to them. Those naïve people!. . They don’t sense the pulsating of the cosmic jellyfish, or, feeling it, they run to a psychoanalyst, thinking it’s just something broken inside of them and everything around them is all right. They must be saved quickly! Gedis’s beloved dogs scampering around Vilnius must be saved, and the warbling birds, and the smell of flowers, and little girls’ smiles, and that part of all humans that’s called. . that’s called. . it doesn’t matter what it’s called, but it must be saved!

It was only then I realized I had been quiet for some time. The brakes engaged without my will; I didn’t say what I had no right to say out loud. Martynas was quiet too; he even turned off the television set despite the basketball game. The two of us were quiet, because that was perhaps the only means to communicate to some extent. Through long centuries humanity lost the habit of speaking straightforwardly , sensing that They could overhear everything. It’s only the voiceless conversation of two minds and four eyes that they cannot invade. The most difficult thing in the world is to communicate somehow. (I feel, I believe, I want to believe, that Lolita and I communicate this way.)

At last Martynas sighed and insensibly stared at the city outside the window. Then he turned to me and in all seriousness asked:

“Vytautas, has it ever occurred to you that Vilnius is God’s outhouse? That this is merely where he urinates and empties his bowels? Have you ever thought that we, even you and I, are nothing more than God’s excrement?”

You’d think Vilnius itself, its gray eyebrows dourly compressed, had asked me that, had asked me what I take it for — a beast or a cosmic jellyfish. Outside the window Vilnius was cloaked in dusk. Buried in a ravine, it seemed to be sinking deeper every minute. Only solitary church towers attempted to escape from under the earth, from out of the drabness. The towers of the churches and the short, stumpy phallus of Vilnius. Vilnius looked at me. Its stumpy, powerless phallus looked at me (looked, because a male sexual organ is an eye, while a vagina is a mirror). Your soul abandons you when Vilnius looks at you that way. You can feel you’re already a dead man if Vilnius starts talking to you.

I felt tiny, utterly tiny, and horrible — a monstrous dwarf, a midget of the soul, hiding all the horrors of the world within. I felt terrible because I know ; I know everything (but at the same time I know nothing). I was physically ill; I was nauseated. Outside the window, Vilnius sank below ground for the night, the toothless children of the camp crowded around me, and there I was in the middle of them — a disgusting midget with no right to live. It’s impossible to live knowing everything ; at least the tiniest bit of deceit, a sugary dream of drabness, is imperative. What should I have done? What should I do now? I should have grabbed everything (like those Jewish children) and carried it all away to a safe place. But I, the midget, was pierced through with a numbing premonition that there are no safe places.

I rushed to the toilet. I threw up green spit and a few gulps of dry wine. My life was like that reeking, vomited wine. I already knew a great deal and sensed a great deal, but I hadn’t saved anyone in my life. I didn’t save mother, or Janė, or Irena. I didn’t save Bolius, Walleye, or Gedis. I didn’t slay the Dragon. I only saved three large-eyed little Jews.

You’re sitting in ruins that smell of death next to St. John’s Church; the dark, as always, protects you from evil. Everything is evil now: the crooked streets of Vilnius, the murky air, even the bland hum of silence. Even silence itself is evil. Your city has been injured again — who can count all of its injuries, all of the notches left on the old pavement by the boots of foreigners.