Ricardas Gavelis - Vilnius Poker

She stands and looks at me with complete indifference. I still don’t want to believe it; I wait for something to change, even though I clearly see everything in front of my eyes, even though I just now felt of it with damp, trembling fingers. The lamp with its colorless shade has stopped swaying; it illuminates everything with a lifeless light. She stands in front of me, disgustingly bent over; I don’t want to see it, but all the same my glance slides down her smooth belly until it reaches the long, slender thighs. Trembling, my hand stretches out, the fingers slide sluggishly between her legs, and Vaiva (or how would you call her?) nonchalantly crooks her thighs, letting my hand in. Once more I see, once more I feel it with my palm, once more I realize: she has no vagina, no labia, no mound of Venus, no pubic hair. Everywhere there is smooth, shining skin — like a plastic doll’s. My head feels slightly dizzy and I desperately want a drink. All of my phobias, fury, and rage have disappeared. Casually, sickeningly, she squirms out of my hands and squeezes by me. I quickly recoil: now I’m afraid to touch her, I don’t even want to look at her, because she’s not human, she is something else. I want a drink something awful. The book that saved me lies under my feet, I pick it up and vainly search for a title — there isn’t one anywhere. The binding is leather with an impressed ornament, and then the text starts up immediately — in Italian, it seems. A nameless Italian book.

Of course, Vaiva (or how would you call her?) didn’t show up again. I knew it was hopeless to search for her traces, but I checked, anyway. Her documentation had vanished; no one knew where it had disappeared to. The number of the building on Minties Street she had given for her address had never existed. I quietly rejoiced at avoiding the danger, until I realized a simple thing: she hadn’t been sent accidentally. They had come across my traces; only God knows what information the pseudo-Vaiva had managed to collect. At the very least, They now knew for sure that I was secretly looking for information about Their activities. It was just that They hadn’t grasped what I had already found.

I was stunned by that body, by that unearthly doll made of flesh and bone— almost like that of a human’s. In my mind I arranged and adjusted all of the details of her behavior, but I found nothing peculiar in them, nothing provocative. That ideal mimicry was intimidating; it nearly drove me out of my mind — it’s terrible to trust no one, to suspect every last person. I couldn’t get used to it, probably I eventually would have had a nervous breakdown, but this time Stefa came to my aid. She had anxiously followed my Donjuaniad with Vaiva; it seemed to me that she breathed a sigh of relief when she disappeared. And immediately, without a pause, she shoved me into the very midst of the kanukai. One gloomy morning she brought an elderly gray-haired man into my office. An expensive suit and a markedly correct pronunciation immediately gave him away as a stranger; he reminded me of a foreign diplomat. I chatted with him about the weather for some ten minutes before I realized it was Vasilis sitting opposite me. The eccentric Vasilis from the hut in the swamp, the sorcerer Vasilis, who understood the language of birds. I still hadn’t managed to collect my wits when he finished me off completely: he cold-bloodedly explained he had come to Vilnius to attend Stadniukas’s funeral.

Thank God, I was too exhausted and too dim-witted to feel all of that news’ absurd menace to the hilt.

Stadniukas the scab, Stadniukas the pervert, Stadniukas the executioner, who had lived like a gentleman for all those years practically next door to me in the Executive Committee Building, had just now died. He wasn’t struck by lightning, he didn’t burn in the fires of hell; he expired peacefully in his bed! Both of us walked the same sidewalks, probably passed each other a hundred times, and I didn’t see, didn’t hear, didn’t smell him! This can only happen in Vilnius, only Vilnius can hide a person that way for years upon years!

“You should have your eyes burned out. .”

“Burn his pecker. .”

“Shit on peas, shit on beans. .”

Sralin twitches his mustaches in the frame, and the nostrilly face flies around you. He minces and giggles, shitty Russkie NKVD.

I got so wrapped up in disconnected memories of Stadniukas that I almost wasn’t surprised at the miracle worker Vasilis. The nearly seventy-year-old looked my age at the very most. The dumb wizard spoke a foreign language fluently. The hermit of the swamps paraded his aristocratic manners.

He was terribly suspect. What did he show up here for? Why just now? I looked at his infernal eyes and had no idea of how I should act.

“You don’t resemble either your father or grandfather,” Vasilis observed calmly. “All the Vargalyses are very different. I know the Vargalyses well, better than they know themselves. After all, I’m writing a history of the Vargalys family.”

“Where is it?” I went pale.

“In my head. In this world, there’s no sense in trusting everything to a piece of paper.”

Those words miraculously calmed me. I felt that Vasilis was one of my own . We prepared to go to Stadniukas’s funeral together. Vasilis ponderously explained why it was not to be missed on any account.

“In attempting to understand certain people,” he lectured me, “I decided that the drab spirit of the swamp reigns in their heads. The name means nothing; all that matters is that it’s an evil spirit. Without question Stadniukas was beset by that spirit to an unusual degree. I believe when a person like that dies, the swamp ought to give an important sign.”

I wasn’t mistaken — Vasilis was one of my own . As if I had lost my mind, I threw all sorts of hints at him, and nearly spoke up about Them. Thank God, he was more sensible than I. He said what he could say, and clammed up like he’d been sewn shut. He really was one of my own.

At the funeral I stared more at those who had gathered than at the coffin, uncovered according to the Russian custom. Even now I hate the expression of Stadniukas’s face, his thin, predatory nostrils. I was afraid that if I stared enough at his mug, I could attack it and tear it into pieces, or even worse — get even with him, an eye for an eye — unbutton his fly and rip out all of that stinking seed of evil. In those days I could have done anything.

Groups of NKVD agents had gathered at the graveyard — all of them outfitted in civilian clothes, but they couldn’t, after all, change their eyes and faces. We stood a bit farther off; Vasilis watched the coffin with infinite concentration. The oppressive burial speeches came to an end; in them, the murder of innocent children was called a battle for the Communist cause, and denunciations — the embodiment of the highest morals. The refined sadist Stadniukas flew out of them as half angel, half holy martyr. It seemed to me that after every speech he got more and more bloated, the kanukai’s hypocritical words penetrated into the rotten body through the ears and nostrils; they exploded Stadniukas’s remains from within. By now the gravediggers had raised the coffin lid and grabbed for their hammers. The disappointment on Vasilis’s face grew ever more obvious. Even I fixed my eyes on the corpse. The body was swollen to nearly triple its size; a black steam seemed to rise from it. The gravediggers attempted to close the coffin, but the swollen body resisted.

And at last, what Vasilis and I had come for happened . Stadniukas’s long head suddenly broke off like an overripe pear ; a black, sticky gruel flowed out of the crack over the entire face. I gave a hoarse cry, while Vasilis only grew more engrossed, straining in his effort to avoid missing the slightest detail.