Ricardas Gavelis - Vilnius Poker

“Don’t you understand? You’re not sorry?”

“It’s just flesh,” says your voice, appearing out of nowhere.

“Just listen to him! Listen! His prick is just flesh! Do you understand what you’re saying? Are you in your right mind?”

“Let’s chop off his head and throw it in the politicals’ barracks. Now, that would be a laugh!” says the beanpole.

“Flesh? Flesh, you say? And what else might you be?” says the king. “All right, I’ll cut off your prick. I’ll poke out your eyes. I’ll chop off your arms and legs. Tear out your tongue. And what will be left, what more will be left of you?”

“Me. I, myself. Who hasn’t drunk piss.”

“He’s a psycho,” says the beanpole in his lame little voice. “Let’s cement him into the foundation and be done with it.”

Goga’s unhappy; he’s getting unhappier all the time. He snaps the razor: now folding it, now unfolding it. The sun is shining, that’s the worst. Through the barracks window you see a little tree. A puny, little green tree. If they cement you into the foundation, maybe you’ll be a little tree.

I found out quite a bit:

1. Teodoras went down The Way and was burnt to death;

2. Gediminas went down The Way and was crushed to death;

3. The Basilisk of Vilnius is still hiding in its lair;

4. I am going down The True Way and I am the closest target for its murderous gaze.

The only thing I didn’t know was how They would take me on. I look at Stefanija with pity — she kept trying to help me, but mostly she just got in the way and was underfoot. I look at Lolita with horror — she doesn’t even realize that she’s become a hostage.

I didn’t have children on purpose, so They couldn’t take them hostage. But now I have Lolita.

I looked at Gediminas in hope — he was the only one who could have helped me. Gediminas saw a great deal and knew a great deal. Innumerable cities, hordes of people, were tucked away inside him. He cruised the streets of Greenwich Village and drank beer with farmers in Montana. Caught shrimp with Japanese fishermen. Clambered around the Mayan pyramids. Gediminas was my eyes; he saw things I will never lay eyes on. I have only Vilnius, while he wanted to take in all the continents. The borders of his camp were much wider than those of mine. Paris and Amsterdam fit inside them, the world’s tallest towers jutted up in them — not just the stumpy, powerless phallus of Vilnius. People swarmed and teemed inside of him, people whom he had met far away and spoken to — in hope of finding an El Dorado of the human spirit, a place where Their proboscises don’t reach. It’s terrible, but he never did find those people or that miraculous place. People are the same everywhere, he would say after every trip; they aren’t safe anywhere. At the time I didn’t understand what he had in mind. People are the same everywhere. There are no chosen nations that are safe from Them. It’s actually even worse for people who live in free countries than it is for us. Our very life, our very surroundings force us to search for answers, because it’s so obviously bad here — nauseatingly bad. It’s very easy, Gedis kept saying, for the others to blissfully snooze off.

I will never fully understand who he was — that jazzman mathematician plowman. Who was this Gediminas? A lone warrior, or the leader of a legion? A fearless investigator, or a novice barely taking his first steps on The Way? Sometimes he’d be so much like his father, the patriarch of a Lithuanian village who had become one with his farm and his land. Gedis wandered a great deal through the world, but he kept returning to the shabby, ulcerated Iron Wolf. Apparently, it’s only in Vilnius that you can uncover the great secrets. In a city turned into a province of provinces by force, in a city on the edge between Russia and Western Europe and infused with both one and the other spirit. Only in Vilnius, in the farthest bastion of the Catholic church, the city of the many-headed, multilingual dragon, of the oppressive Basilisk, of the fog of oblivion.

And yet there’s more — in the city of the river of mystery.

Gediminas loved to sit on the bank of the Neris and wordlessly speak with the murky flow. The river names its city, he liked to say; it floats secret knowledge to the city and washes away the dirt of the soul. Now I, too, frequently sit on the bank and stare aimlessly at the wet bushes. The hung-over fishermen of Vilnius offer me fish that stink of tar. Gediminas is right: this river really does absorb words that are spoken in secret. It floats them away, and later, unexpectedly, brings them back from obscurity.

”Look at the Neris,” Gedis would say, “There are rivers of the dead and rivers of oblivion in the world. There are rivers of history and the river of all rivers. . But the Neris is the river of memory. Our spilled blood flows with it, our lost memory. .”

On the banks of the Neris, if you listen carefully, you can hear the names of all of the lost Lithuanians. Those who fell at the hands of the Teutonic Knights six hundred years ago, and those the Russians took to Siberia thirty years ago. It’s the only place the chronicle of Vilnius survives. . The gods only know what it told Gediminas. Only the gods know what Gedis wanted to say with his “Neris Blues,” which was by no means blues. Gedis played only avant-garde jazz — if that really can be called avant-garde jazz. But it was music. I carefully researched how They went about destroying contemporary music; nowadays jazz is perhaps the closest to real music. Real music was always improvised one way or the other; both the East and the West recognized this. You cannot write the human spirit into a musical staff and play it the same way every time. Earlier everyone knew this. Johann Sebastian Bach played swing like a born jazz musician; he felt the pulsation of the spirit. However, They cleverly locked spirit into staffs, measures, and beats. It was no accident They so persecuted the jazz musicians who longed to escape those restrictions. It was no accident so many jazzmen were butchered by persons unknown or went out of their minds. Jazz is enormously dangerous to Them , the ones who thrust the idea on the world that music is the careful repetition of rules and worn-out melodies heard a hundred times, and that to play is to get identical sounds out of identical instruments via identical means. Gedis wanted to play everything, whatever is possible. And even more so whatever is not possible.

But besides jazz he delighted in the strictness of mathematics. More and more often I think he was digging closer to Their pathologic through mathematics. In his mathematical work he was just as unruly and insane as he was playing music. I am almost sure it was in this fashion he attempted to break through the wall of logic and enter the domain of the pathologic . He wanted to grasp the entire mechanism of Their activities. And who knows if he hadn’t succeeded — otherwise why would they have needed to make all of his papers disappear? Some KGB could confiscate the manuscript of a novel, but why steal mathematical work?

I miss Gediminas very much. Vilnius itself misses him, that eternal third one , about whom Gediminas used to say:

“In Vilnius there can never be just the two of you. If you sit with a friend or a woman, Vilnius will, without fail, sneak up on you like some odd third one. You can’t get away from Vilnius. There isn’t another city like it in the world. . America’s blacks know this sensation well. Their Vilnius, that third one , is called the blues. Not a song, not the music. . I don’t know. . a mood, or God fluttering in the air. . In a word — the blues. One old man in Harlem explained it to me this way: when some other old negro talks, and I listen, it ain’t just the two of us, there’s always a third, and his name is the blues. . And our blues is called Vilnius. Horrible, beloved Vilnius.”