Ricardas Gavelis - Vilnius Poker

Filthy, dazed Vilnius, where you get up every day and think you didn’t go to bed there last night. Where you go to bed, thinking that tomorrow you won’t be getting up there. A soulless blues, of which only a rhythm and a melody are left, even the blue notes don’t sound anymore, because music has irremediably lost its spirit. Blues without a soul is always horrifying — it’s like a dead man walking. Gediminas is the dead soul of Vilnius’s blues.

I cannot go it alone anymore. I never could look at others from on high, I never could turn into a demiurge indifferent to God. I always felt that those others are part of me; their weakness is my weakness, their kanuked brains a reflection of my own dissolving brain. I never tried to stand above others and talk to God about my own private matters. Who knows if it’s worth talking to God at all. It seems to me God has also been kanuked.

Every seeker needs direction. Their secret lingers everywhere — in the constellations of the stars and in the morning fog of a dream that hasn’t dispersed, in the pavement of every Vilnius side street and inside the most disgusting slut’s vagina. Their secret cannot be coded into any one sign, any one scent, or any one dream. It hides everywhere —like the name of God — you just need to know how to read it. The blond-haired girl slowly going down the evening street carries Their mark within her. If you could understand her completely, you would solve Their secret too. The fissured wall of an old house most certainly conceals Their hieroglyph; perhaps if you overlaid a drawing of those cracks on a map of Vilnius you would see Their secret pathways. But it’s the river that matters most.

The river is paramount. I cannot write anything down on paper ( They destroy papers). I cannot encrypt anything ( Their pathologic deciphers everything). I cannot carry everything in my head ( They will rip my head off). The river is the only place my information can survive. I whisper my secret prayer, every day, only to the river: do not try to name Their purpose, because there are no words for that; do not identify Them with any government, any system, any organization — that’s just what They are waiting for, for you to attack particulars instead of universals.

I have offered the Neris hundreds of my prayers, most often at night. Night and the dark always guard me. In the dark you are invisible; the oppressive stares of the kanukai don’t reach you. The river’s current saved me from the unbearable weight of knowing. The Neris is Vilnius’s ear; it heard me.

Now I walk along the bank and for the hundredth time arrange the secret signs, checking to see that none have gotten lost. The Neris flows in from the unknown, from the depths of the ages — just as They did. No one has yet determined the epoch when Their development turned aside from humanity’s development, no one has researched Their evolution or Their history, although all of that should be tucked away somewhere deep within every person’s memory. In their genetic memory — no wonder They try so hard to change humanity through genetics. Lithuania without Lithuanians! The Crimea without Tatars! Europe without Jews! Vilnius without a memory! The genes of memory hide in the Neris’s current too; there’s extinct nations flowing there, and death factories, and witch hunts. Across from Žirmūnai’s first bend there is a small patch of land dotted with multi-colored stones. Every little stone there has its own hidden meaning. The two giant boulders — they’re the two great geneticists, Hitler and Stalin. I can sit on either one of them. The boulders stand opposite each other. The one on the left, without doubt, is Hitler; I seem to see that famous shock of hair, fallen on his forehead, or maybe the little kanukish eyes, or maybe I hear the hysterical voice. That rock is Hitler. The second sits there more quietly, sunk into the ground; he weaves his plans in secret. When I’m standing here, I’m afraid to turn my back on him. It seems he’ll start moving any moment, deftly crawl over and sink his poisonous teeth into my ankles. I’m still afraid of that rock, of his Georgian mustache, of his sticky fingers. But he is just a rock, both of them are just rocks. Never get distracted by politics and government leaders, they don’t matter as much as the ordinary backyard kanukas who’s devouring everyone with his stare. All politicians are just robots; police intelligence organizations — second-rate robots; government officials — third-rate robots. Don’t look for answers in the system of government. I know Them , believe me. I look over the huge number of little stones rolling under my feet. There must be millions of them lying here. The six million Jews Hitler finished off; Stalin tried to better this number, but he didn’t make it, he didn’t make it. Why Jews (dark gray smooth little stones) in particular? Perhaps they really did transmit secrets no one else knows through the ages? But it’s impossible to look for the logic in Their doings — take that pile of white stones looming over there. Several million Ukrainians, starved to death by Stalin. So it turns out Ukrainians also know something they shouldn’t? And what do the Crimean Tatars have to do with it? Questions without answers. And a continually growing suspicion that it’s all done for no reason whatsoever. Why does a river flow? Because it flows. Sometimes They act with the particular inevitability and senselessness characteristic of inanimate nature. If Hitler’s death factories had reached their planned capacity, they would have destroyed more people in a year than were born in all of Europe. Thanks to Their secret doings the world’s countries have stored up more weapons than are needed to destroy all of humanity.

A withered bush juts out beyond the garden of stones. There I hid yet another thought of mine, one born in a difficult, nightmarish dream: Their dialectic isn’t the world’s dialectic. Their doings unravel the world’s harmony. The bush’s branches are dead; the rotten leaves hang on crooked stalks. They can only kanuk a human; neither rivers nor trees submit to Them. When sucking out people’s souls, They , willingly or not, contradict nature. The community of soulless humans destroys nature by its very breathing, even with its thoughts. Particularly thoughts. That’s how ecological disasters happen. That’s how the one that still awaits us all will happen. The ancient Chinese knew very well that a person’s spirit, his thoughts, and his morals affect nature directly. A human spirit changes air, fire, water, the origins of the cosmos, and cosmic harmony. When the spirit fails, so does the great harmony. Futurologists delving into ecological balance with computers are ridiculous. They count external symptoms, but they don’t know the deeper reason. They have no idea what I’ve encrypted into this poor, puny bush. They can’t see a bush like that right in front of their eyes. They don’t live in Vilnius. They are blind — I was like that too, not so very long ago. If we want to save ourselves, we don’t need to count the smoke coming out of factories, but rather the remains of the human spirit.

Why, what’s it all for? Why do They need it? Why did the kanukai metropole settle into Vilnius in particular? Why not in Bangkok, Port-au-Prince, or a nameless valley of snakes in Burma? Don’t tell me They are attracted by the Neris’s broad banks and the high-rise building boxes that are slowly wading into the stream? Vilnius really could drown; the houses could, in a sad row, crawl into the water. Unfortunately, the Neris is too shallow.