Ricardas Gavelis - Vilnius Poker

The rookie seemed different; she wasn’t entirely ruined yet. Maybe she wasn’t particularly pretty, but she was gushing youth, still looking for something, still hopeful. A short-cut little head of hair, a slender energetic body, and large gray eyes. I carefully examined her intellect. I didn’t need a fool, nor someone who was too intelligent. Vaiva was exactly that, and besides — she wasn’t as irksome as Stefa. She willingly accepted the boss’s attentions, stayed to work evenings, visited me at home a couple of times. She behaved properly: she didn’t act cheap, but she didn’t hide her legs, either. I was truly happy that I had found an assistant; I trusted her with secondary work. I was already thoroughly resolved to include her in an important experiment. I tried to make her like me, if need be I would even have married her — details couldn’t block my essential aims.

But for the time being, I continued to wander through the library’s collections alone. At night, there between the bookcases, I read Plato’s Republic for the hundredth time. I attempted, to no avail, to comprehend the species of commissars he had originated. A species in which Robespierre and Mussolini shone. A species whose development says a great deal to a sharp-eyed investigator. I kept asking myself: why do you always end up alone in the presence of the commissars? Where do friends and like-minded fellows, in general any agreements with others, disappear to?

How do They manage, at the fateful moment, to separate everyone, so they’re left alone? That was the question of that fateful evening.

Otherwise the evening was no different than any other, just that the strangest visions kept raging in my head — fragments of angry sentences, oppressive premonitions — anything you want, just not thoughts. And those that I managed to knit together anyway were alien , not mine. It seemed like someone else was thinking with my brains. It was an indescribable sensation. A ferocious being settled inside of my skull, perturbing my brain, sullying it with disgusting proboscises. I saw it, taken out of my head and set on the floor, stinking and blackened. At intervals it occurred to me that it was stuck all over with fat, pink leeches that quivered with relish. Plato was probably one of them — the very fattest one, full of me , twitching with idle overindulgence.

I knew quite well that Plato had nothing to do with it, that I was being devoured by a very genuine being; it had made its way inside me and was delighting in my helplessness. I imagined I was beginning to slowly turn into something else. I was fully conscious, not even overly tired, but suddenly I felt as if I had landed inside an oppressive dream. In this dream I was supposed to turn into something at any second. I was still myself, but I had already begun to inexorably change. I didn’t turn into a different person, nor into some other thinking being. They had a different purpose: I was supposed to turn into something sticky, nasty, and soulless. I was threatened by a mortal danger, but there was no way I could defend myself.

Kafka’s Metamorphosis doesn’t describe change itself. Samsa wakes up already transformed into a gigantic bug. That’s awful, but the metamorphosis itself, even the premonition of changing, is still worse. Kafka knew about it, surely he knew; apparently, in spite of everything, They had destroyed a part of his manuscripts.

However, I was no Samsa, I wasn’t anyone’s fictional character. I was a real person, I was sitting in a real library, and this waking dream was suffocating and choking me. Horrified, I looked around at the identical rows of bookshelves. Something was stalking me in the labyrinth of dusty book spines. Alas, alas, it was not I who was the Minotaur; the real beast was patiently waiting for me, or maybe it had even begun to quietly masticate me, its eternal victim. I didn’t know which direction to turn, where to go look for it. It was identical on every side: defenseless book spines in the drab, spiritless light; turns, nooks and traps. Going one or a dozen steps to the side wouldn’t change the view: once more — an aimless chaos of book spines, a distorted, dusty silence. I asked myself why do I sit here evenings and read tattered books? Why do I look for answers to questions, why do I wrestle with something if no one, absolutely no one, needs it? The soaked, fog-drenched inhabitants of Vilnius need only bread and meat, cushy furniture, and easy work; then there are some who need to whine about a dying Lithuania too — just whining, don’t you dare lift a finger. And what could I give them? Vague premonitions, a quadrille of toothless camp children, a pile of portraits of people who once were ? Who needs me? Vilnius, perfectly justifiably, wants to strangle me, the disturber of the peace. I had an urge to set the library on fire, to set all of Vilnius, the entire world, on fire. Even though there was (there always is) a simpler way — set yourself on fire, one way or another. Kalanta burned himself alive in a square in Kaunas for just that reason — whatever purposes and motives others would pin on him. And still simpler and more human — simply calm down. Why the torture? It’s much better to bow your head and to feel a flawless, drab benevolence overtaking you. Let the dead bury their dead. Lord knows, why do I want to open my eyes, what in this godforsaken city is worth fighting for? ( Now I’d answer — for Lolita. It’s worth sacrificing a hundred like me for her.)

I don’t know where these thoughts would have led me, but suddenly I heard a completely extraordinary noise. I didn’t even hear it; I couldn’t hear anything — it was completely quiet around me. I smelled that sound, I felt it with the seventh sense. Through the long evenings and nights I had grown so much a part of the library that I would have sensed even a stranger’s dream there.

This time no such sensitivity was needed; I felt the hapless intruder’s breathing, his clumsy movements. He carefully floated in the library’s labyrinth, thinking he was undetectable and inviolable, absolutely trusting in himself, like all of Them. He had no suspicion that I could feel him. Heated blood throbbed at the top of my throat, raising a barely detectable salty taste. In the dusk the bookcases resembled ancient ruins. The variously colored book spines faded, the corners of the bookshelves crossed and changed places, and I was surrounded by all shades of drabness. It seemed I had ended up between the camp’s barracks on an early, murky morning. All of the guards and the zone boss himself tried to turn me into a bug, a slug, a rock. They sat about inside their well-heated little houses and greedily sucked my soul. Everything was over; all that was left for me to do was to surrender. But suddenly I saw a dusky light squeezing under the book shelves; like a madman I rushed towards it, turned a corner, still another, and finally exited into a dead-end corridor at the end of the bookcases. He was covered in a dim light, permeated in a strange, bitter smell. A live creature sat there, my mortal enemy, a sullen octopus that had sucked out my fluids. At last I discovered him.

The octopus was named Vaiva; it had a short-cropped little head of hair and nervously smoked a cigarette. She stood at the end of the dead-end corridor, turning the pages of a book. Her movements were jerky; her fingers crawled over the pages, devouring the letters. I immediately recognized the place, the corridor, the row of books. She was looking over the books I had selected and put in a safe place the week before. She greedily turned the pages, photographing them with her eyes. I wanted it to not be true, I wanted it to be just a dream. But Vaiva was only too real. She stood leaning her shoulders against a shelf, her sweater kept rising and falling against her chest. A gray miniskirt barely covered her crossed legs. She turned the pages of a French book; I immediately remembered that she hadn’t put down on her job application that she knew French. I quietly slunk closer; some ten steps still separated us. I still hoped that everything would end up as a joke, a small fright and explanations. But I couldn’t deceive myself; the sensation that had brought me here was much too strong and real. She was just exactly the beast who had been stalking me. An impostor, worming her way into my immediate surroundings, knowing what books I read, even writing up summaries for me.