Ricardas Gavelis - Vilnius Poker

Whoever or whatever had sent him, I wasn’t prepared to avoid my fate.

The studio, with its high ceiling, was as surreal as a memory. A tiny fireplace and battered antique chairs, all of them different. Lolita sat in one with her feet outstretched; she was guarded by a mass of beasts, people, plants, clay, and metal Bosch-like phantasmagoria. This room had a soul; these sculptures hadn’t turned into soulless things like Gediminas’s piano. The dead owner could walk inside at any moment — and what would I have done then? And how would Lolita, suddenly forced to choose, behave — maybe she would grab us both ? I shouldn’t have come here. I tried to quiet my beating heart; I attentively inspected Kazys Teodoras’s world. On the shelves, on the fireplace, around me, under my feet, above me stood, lay, hung his works — from matchbox to man-size. There was a mass of them — as if Teodoras had wanted to construct an entire world. A five-meter monster rammed against the ceiling crowned everything; it spread invisible proboscises, it wanted to snatch up everything in sight. Me first of all, me and Lolita.

“That’s the Deformer,” explained Lolita, following my stare. “When I asked Tedis what that meant, he said, after thinking about it: a reformer reforms, and a deformer deforms.”

Teodoras really did want to build an entire world around himself. He formed it from clay, cut it from stone, poured and polished metal, soldered the most fanciful metal sheets, carved wood, poured glass, and wove all of it into a stunning tangle. By way of this studio I hoped I would find a road to Lolita’s inner world, but some third being lurked here, the secret third one of Vilnius. What was it holding in its possession, what part of Lolita? I was disconcerted by its insolence, by its evil intentions. It seemed to be lying in ambush and looking at me disdainfully. A large red cylinder with green lumps, carelessly thrown into the corner, irritated me the most.

“That’s the irritator,” Lolita said hollowly. “Tedis explained that every studio has to have something whose sole purpose is to irritate visitors.”

I tried to imagine this Tedis, a shaggy athlete with sleepy eyes, in the long autumn evenings carefully, lovingly, decorating the red irritator with green lumps.

“It’s strange that you don’t remember him. Half of Vilnius knew him. . I don’t know why: he was a quiet guy. . nothing bohemian about him. . He raved only in his studio, all alone. . Others would rather rave in public, and turn impotent in the studio. . and cast busts of Lenin.”

I slowly recovered from the studio’s gloomy spell. One way or another, this was still a sculptor’s studio, and not a mausoleum. Apparently Teodoras’s spirit wasn’t getting ready to bother us. But Lolita was afraid all the same. Her uneven face twisted up entirely; her cheekbones protruded. She was still too young; she wasn’t accustomed to keeping company with her dead ones. She glanced around as if she were afraid one of the figures hanging from the ceiling would speak in her former husband’s voice. She turned ugly, horribly ugly; she tormented herself, but I wanted her to tell me about it. I wanted to hear as much as possible. Perhaps I envied even her ghosts, even the dead. I turned into a tiny kanukas, quivering with greed; I wanted to suck everything out of her.

“I was an eighth or ninth grader, I spent the summer at my grandparents’,” she spoke in a sad voice. “Four of them showed up; they were making some kind of relief or mural for the Cultural Center. Four young artists with patched jeans. . I was probably fourteen or fifteen: a tall, skinny girl with unexpectedly swollen breasts. To others I already looked almost like a woman, I probably aroused desire, but actually I was as naïve as nature. . There was too much of something in me too little of something else. . I was missing a human, or an animal. . or a thought. . I was ready for anything. If someone had fixed me up with a child, I probably would have grown up a mother of mothers. If someone had given me a dog, I would have become the biggest dog specialist in the world. Anything suited me. . But there was nothing in the village, absolutely nothing. Some other summer I wouldn’t even have noticed Tedis. He was about thirty; to me he looked like a retiree. All four of them looked that way — like gray old guys, idiotically trying to act young. . But all the same I preferred talking to them, rather than to the kids my age from the neighboring farms. .”

As she talked, she recovered somewhat; sometimes she would smile at a completely unfunny part and her eyes would turn transparent. It seemed she was enjoying something, only I didn’t understand what.

“So, what more? Milk. Warm, fresh milk. With foam. . I kneeled on the wet grass and sucked it straight from the pail with a straw. . Grandmother went off to the left, behind the bushes, to milk the second cow. It was impossible to tie them next to one another, they’d start fighting immediately. . I drank warm milk, and Ted kneeled down next to me, with a straw too. . I saw how he looked at me. . He looked at me like God evaluating his creation. I felt as if he had created me. As if I were his sculpture. . Probably that summer I really was like a rock waiting to see what would be hewn out of it. . I don’t know. . I probably stuck to him myself, with all of a silly girl’s annoyance. And the milk had nothing to do with it. Probably he tried to shake me off. . But from that moment I became his — and that was it. It wasn’t love at first sight; I came to love him much later. But at that time he literally enchanted me — and that’s it. It seemed all of my quests met within him, it seemed he was just exactly what I was looking for. . Even when I hated him the most, I never forgot I was His and there was nowhere to escape from him. That’s how it was. . He became my God. I suddenly felt that’s the only way God could be: a thirty-year-old, shaggy, silent type. . I am his idea. . His dream. . His fantasy. . At that time my body changed a lot, I frequently stood in front of the mirror and God knows, I BELIEVED it was he who was changing me, making me the way he wanted. . Not to mention the soul. . He sculpted me anew, patiently peeled off husk after husk, tore off veil after veil; he entirely remade my childish mind. He cleaned out all of school’s phantasmagorias. It was only thanks to him that I grew up as a HOMO SAPIENS, and not a HOMO SOVIETICUS. I am a SAPIENS, aren’t I?”

“You didn’t feel any force?”

“No, no force.” She slowly examined her hands. “See, he even sculpted my hands. . Just imagine, a Cinderella of the soul, suddenly settled into the Prince’s palace! What force could there be?. . In place of all the Michurins, Makarenkos, and Brezhnevs I was flooded by an inner stream of Rasselases, Shakespeares, and Coltranes. I’d dream of Camus, Kierkegaard, and even Archbishop Berkeley. . In my dreams I slept with an entire galaxy of geniuses. . Ha, I’m probably the only woman in the world Kant raped!. . My God had no mercy; he gave a woman intelligence. I’m not bragging too much?. . You have no idea what it means to change from the top student in school to the accessory of a thirty-year-old shaggy-haired intellectual. Imagine you are being BORN and you see yourself being born. Tedis was a guru to me first of all, and not a man. A guru, and not a loved one. A guru, but not a lover. . A year or two went by, I had time to get used to men looking at me, at night I would sigh, dream about lips swollen from kisses, on the trolleybus I would lean my entire body up next to him ‘accidentally,’ but he stubbornly remained JUST my guru. . HEAVEN ONLY KNOWS what he wanted to make out of me — just not a lover, and not a wife. A spiritual disciple? Disciples are always men! I never understood him. I’ll never forgive him. He threw me to the wolves. It wasn’t enough that I was entirely his creation, I didn’t even know what it was he had made of me,” she suddenly gazed with a stare that saw nothing, and said angrily: “If I had understood him, I wouldn’t visit here, I wouldn’t sit here nights and talk to the walls. I’d sell this entire morass. They pay well for the dead ones.”