Ricardas Gavelis - Vilnius Poker

Her lips were firmly pressed together, she seemed to be speaking without opening her mouth. Suddenly I was afraid of the evil little flickers in her unseeing eyes. She wasn’t talking to me, probably to her God, but I had no desire to be God. I was a man; I had an intense feeling that in a moment I would say something I shouldn’t say. I was afraid of this angry woman with the insane flickers in her pupils, chopping the air with her words. I wanted my Lolita back, but she had disappeared without a trace. All that was left were the tin mobiles hanging from the ceiling, three fat Buddhas with animal heads set on the fireplace, and a bitter foreboding that something horrible was yet to happen.

“I’d purposely wear dresses with nothing on underneath, I flounced about and showed my charms however I could. He drove me out of my mind; he was impossible to understand, as suits a God. An absolute ruler, who needs to be cruelly punished. . One of his buddies snatched me up, and in the course of a month he taught me absolutely everything, never even noticing he had taken my virginity. And it was all fine with me, just because he was a close friend of Tedis’s. I took my vengeance; I slept with his friend. While with Teo we would discuss Beckett. . In the end I did what I had to do: I broke in here and destroyed everything I could. The works prepared for his one and only show. Intimate masterpieces, put away and not shown to anyone. I spoiled his entire world, and when he himself showed up, I nearly killed him with some bas-relief. . He tore off my dress, tore it into tiny shreds, placed me naked in front of himself, examined me with a professional eye and said he would put me in his show: naked, covered with shit, stuck all over with scraps of newspaper used to wipe yourself in the toilet. And he would name it “Lithuania”. . And afterwards everything was as strange as a dream and as short as a single day. We got married as soon as I turned eighteen. My mother was hysterical — she was probably hoping to raise a vestal virgin. . There was just one thing I wanted: to understand Tedis, but I didn’t even manage to see him clearly. I even secretly wrote down his peculiarities. He never brushed his teeth. He wore a beard, but he had bought himself piles of razors and electric shavers. He didn’t eat tomatoes or chocolate. It seemed to me that even those ridiculous details had some secret meaning. . He was horribly afraid of fire and anything sharp. . He had a strange way of categorizing every philosopher’s and artist’s work. For him there was a BEFORE and an AFTER. He divided everything that way: Kant BEFORE and Kant AFTER. As if all of them at some moment had caught some dreadful disease. . He could be unconditionally charmed with some person BEFORE, and abhor the same person AFTER. But it was never the other way around. . I kept asking, before WHAT and after WHAT? Teo didn’t explain. He didn’t explain anything about himself. . He would look at me and repeat: you are my best sculpture. Yes, I’m his creation. Made for who knows what purpose. He didn’t create me for himself, for his own good; I just knew that he broke and tortured me for my own good. . He was saving me from something. But from what? From myself? From hexed Vilnius? Or from those annoying people who kept crowding into his studio?. . He couldn’t stand to have someone look at him intently. He imagined that it was possible to steal the thoughts right out of your head that way.”

“What, what?” I asked, feeling my tongue slowly growing numb.

“I know, it’s funny. . And then when he was drunk he would sometimes say that people aren’t really people, that on the road of evolution some horrible mistake happened, that the real people are somewhere ELSE. . and then he was killed. . And nothing was left. . Until you showed up.”

”He was killed? You didn’t tell me.”

“I thought you knew. Everyone knows. It’s a famous story. He was burned alive.”

The room tilted. I tried to pull myself together; I clenched my teeth together firmly, chasing away the circles that flashed before my eyes. He was burned alive. He talked about not-human humans, an evolutionary mistake. He couldn’t stand kanukish stares. Shuddering, I looked around: the Deformer? Deformed bodies?

“It’s a hideous story,” Lolita said hollowly. “He was sitting in a camping trailer. Smoking, drinking, talking. . with that same buddy, my sexual tutor. . His friend left to lie down in his own trailer. Tedis was drunk, he fell sound asleep. . and the trailer started burning like a box of matches.”

I had to say something. It was imperative that I open my mouth, but my lips stuck together and my tongue wouldn’t obey me. Suddenly I felt I didn’t want to know anything, I felt I was on dangerous territory. Dangerous to my mental health. The premonition turned into conviction; the sculptor’s studio was a trap. Does clay burn?

“Well, none of that matters anymore. I have to show you what I brought you here for. The thing Tedis told me not to show to anyone. Maybe you’ll make something of it.” Lolita got up and went into a dark corner of the studio. “Teodoras’s testament.”

I followed behind her like a robot. Stupefied, I watched her carefully take the head off of some animal sculpture. Only after a few seconds did I realize it was the Iron Wolf. It really was iron; on the sides in crooked letters was written the entire legend of Grand Duke Gediminas’s dream. Like an automaton, I fixated on the wavy lines: “and he dreamed an iron wolf howled on the hill. . establish a city here, Duke, and news of it will spread throughout the world, like the howling of the wolf. .” Was Teodoras also of the opinion that the secret lay hidden within Vilnius itself?

“Look,” Lolita nervously lit a cigarette and spread two rolls of canvas in front of me. “These are Tedis’s only paintings. Ordinarily he never painted. He guarded these canvases like the apple of his eye. The Iron Wolf was his safe.”

Fumbling, I unwound the rolls and weighed down the corners with some clay animals. The field of the paintings slowly stopped rippling before my eyes. Now I saw.

From the left, not directly at me, but somewhat to the side, gazed the pale green face of a woman, taking up the entire painting, squeezed within the borders of the canvas. The woman’s eyes were large and lifeless; no soul, no personality hid behind them. And from the pupils, like the thorns of some poisonous plant, vague gray cones protruded — calm and indifferent, but not hunting for a victim, because every last thing was to be their victim.

Out of the right painting — this time straight at me, at all of us — stared a legion of little faces — each one out of its own cage or frame. A legion of little faces, all arranged in much too orderly a fashion, all piercing me with identically insolent eyes. They were seemingly different — with beards and mustaches and without; with hats, caps, and bareheaded; bald, disheveled, and plastered down. But I immediately realized that the face was always the same — a weak-willed, but at the same time insolent face, repeated over and over. Changing its makeup, disguising itself — but always identical: the horrifying, flat as a pancake face of a kanukas.

I didn’t sling the paintings aside. I didn’t get dizzy, and I didn’t lose my breath. I didn’t fly home like mad, and I didn’t lock myself in with seven locks. I simply turned to Lolita — and only then was I really petrified.

She sat leaning forward somewhat, her legs spread apart awkwardly, as if she were just about to stand up or was already beginning to stand up, and had suddenly stiffened. Her lips were opened unevenly; in their right corner hung a thread of spit. Her face was crooked, her fingers twisted unnaturally. It looked as if she’d been paralyzed. And it wasn’t just her: the cigarette smoke was frozen too, and the flame in the fireplace had turned to stone. I first thought it was a vision, a momentary illusion, but everything stayed that way. Only I alone could move. I worked my fingers and looked around. I don’t know how long this took. The raindrops outside the window hung suspended next to the glass. A filthy Vilnius pigeon, maneuvering between the church towers, hung leaning to one side, right by the cross.