Ricardas Gavelis - Vilnius Poker

He turns away from me and starts quickly piling the brains back into the refrigerator. I clearly see the pained wrinkles by his eyes; I feel the trembling of his hands. He is afraid; he is afraid of what he has found, and even more he fears sharing his suspicions with me.

“I know the human expression of a face,” my voice speaks by itself , it’s not me in control, it’s not me choosing the words. “I know an inhuman expression too. Kovarskis, have you ever sensed stares that suck you out? Have you seen fingers with lumpy joints reaching for you?”

Finally I silence my voice. It’s said too much. Kovarskis sits on the table again and fixes his gaze on me, nervously swinging his legs.

“Old man,” he says in a tired voice, “It’s already been at least a year since not just those stares follow me, but the walls of the room too. You think I asked Šapira to find me somebody because I wanted to brag about my discovery? Why brag — it merely needs to be publicly announced. You see, that expression. . I named it the Vilnius expression. I could show you hundreds, millions of faces like that. Look at the images in the newspaper and you’ll see what I’m talking about. . It’s horrible how MANY people there are with that expression. In Vilnius — from seventy to ninety percent. . There’s too many of them. . Ninety percent, can you imagine? And no one has noticed it until now? Something’s not right here. . No one noticed?. . A person with that expression is most certainly ill with Kovarskis’s disease, understand? That bug sits on his brain. If you look for it, there’s no way to miss it. So why hasn’t anyone noticed?. . You ask, is it just in Vilnius? No, of course not. It’s everywhere. By now I can spot that expression even in pictures of huge crowds. Kovarskis’s disease thrives everywhere. It should have been discovered a long time ago. It has been discovered a long time ago, understand? But why isn’t it described anywhere, not even hinted at?. . The worst of it is that you can’t tear that bug off the brain, you won’t cut it off; it’s joined to the brain’s biochemical circulation. My disease is incurable. . Vilnius Syndrome. . I know all of its symptoms, I could describe even the most minor of them. .”

If an abyss had opened up beneath my feet, if my own brain had been covered with cockroaches, if lightning had struck in that basement — maybe I would have withstood it. But now I want to scream, to howl like a wolf. I know all of it’s true. I’m drowning. I’m somewhere else, running down the streets, shrieking like a madman. But no, I run quietly, spitting out the suffocating air. I’m not running, I’m standing. I’m drowning.

“What matters most is the dimming of the brain,” Kovarskis lectures in a monotone, rocking back and forth as if he were hypnotizing me. “Constant, continually intensifying, almost blissful. . As if the thoughts had softened and were becoming streamlined. . One patient explained it to me this way: my thoughts became soft and warm, I understand, better and better all the time, that it’s all right the way it is, and it doesn’t need to be better. Helplessness isn’t bothersome anymore, you’re not in the least put out if you can’t think of something or if you don’t understand. .”

The shadows draw closer to me. I listen to his speech like a curse; unfamiliar faces crowd around me, and my heart grows stiffer and stiffer. Cold penetrates through all the pores of my skin; I am in an icy desert where the sun never shines. They’ve even physically slithered into our brains; it’s irreversible. Horror stuns all my thoughts, all of my feelings. My saliva is bitter, but I cannot for the life of me manage to swallow it.

“The feeling of love disappears. . Self-respect. . Pride. .” he arranges the words on the butchery table, on the girl’s stomach, on his own knees. “The language changes. Sometimes it seems to me I could instantly recognize someone afflicted by Vilnius syndrome with my eyes closed, just by the way they talk. Expressive words, color, and mood disappear. All that’s left is a bunch of stiff constructions, always the same, meaningless and vacuous. . At the end, deformation of the body begins. The joints get twisted, strange lumps grow in the most unlikely places, and the eyes are left empty.”

I was waiting for this. I was waiting for this, but the blow is crushing all the same. An invisible blade pierces my heart, pliers squeeze at my throat. It’s a strange thing, hope. After all, it was all obvious a long time ago, but I still hoped. I still hope. I look at the light-eyed Semite who’s still talking, and I see that he is not kanuked. I remember Lolita — she can’t be kanuked. Kovarskis himself showed me healthy brains. Returning home, I’ll look in the mirror and see a human face.

“But I always only get up to a certain point,” Kovarskis speaks without stopping, hurrying along, “The deformation of aspirations, the deformation of the body, the deformation of speech. . But what happens next? I can’t ever track down what happens next! Death? No, Kovarskis’s disease isn’t fatal. All of my stiffs with the syndrome had died of something else. . Listen, old man, maybe those damned bugs can grow SMALLER after all?”

He looks at me with such hope, with such infinite pleading, that he could probably melt a rock with that look. But I’m not a rock. I’m a human. I ought to tell him the truth: No, Kovarskis, the bugs don’t get smaller; your patients, overstepping the boundary, turn into kanukai. You’re right, Kovarskis, no one dies from the Vilnius syndrome. It’s much worse than that. You live with the Vilnius syndrome!

“I can’t announce my discovery, my life’s work.” He’s no longer talking, but hissing. “I cannot unveil the disease with my name, as long as I haven’t found an antidote, or at least the cause. I need to work. Work, work, and work. . I need to dissect the living, and first of all — THE GOOD ONES. I must find out why they have immunity. I need a genetic laboratory. I need to know if it’s hereditary. . Help me. Help me, if you can. If you still can.”

He falls silent and fixes his horrified eyes on me. He stretches out his hand and cold fingers brush against my cheek.

“If you still can. .” he whispers, as if it were the greatest secret of all, “because your facial muscles sometimes arrange themselves so oddly. . Very oddly. . Do you occasionally get the urge to follow others, to discover their secrets? Does it sometimes start to seem to you that someone’s emptied your brains, that SOMEONE ELSE’S thoughts flutter around in your head? Do you look in the mirror often? And how do you like yourself?”

You’d think someone had smashed me up the side of my head. He said THAT. A purple mist floods my eyes, the strokes of my pulse hammer into an empty skull. He didn’t really see something, did he? In an instant all my infirmities, all my old pains, flow over me; the most awful suspicions are reborn. I feel a strange ache in the joints of my fingers, then in my knees and the vertebrae of my neck. In horror I feel my neck shorten, my head grow to my shoulders. And my heart overflows with despair, a horrible despair and loneliness, unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. Even without a mirror I see my hair slowly turning the color of straw. I already know that behind my knees, between my thighs, on my sides, soft, quivering mounds of flesh have sprouted. I am slowly turning into a kanukas. I’m probably standing next to the Narutis by now, looking around and sensing how the entire secret world of Old Town obeys me; I sense my neckless, bug-eyed, deformed-finger power. But this merely strangles me with a still deeper despair and loneliness. I understand what I couldn’t understand until now: we, the kanukai, do not give birth to kanukai; we can only reproduce our kind by kanuking healthy people! I’m lonely and sad, as lonely and sad as a single tree, Lord of mine, how I want to kanuk someone! Where am I, where am I? The trembling hand of the imbecile slides down the girl’s long thighs, approaching the unseen but inferred secret opening, but the girl, drowned in her dreams, feels nothing. The black-haired woman’s legs, in taut brown stockings, encompass me, I melt like wax, I no longer even hear the Old Town Circe’s enchanting breathing, I sense only the sweetish scent of rotting leaves. Madam Giedraitienė, with a familiar motion, roughly pulls me closer, and blooming breasts reveal themselves underneath the old rags — Irena’s breasts, I recognize the mole under the nipple, I recognize their color and smell; a short-cropped little head of hair watches me, hidden between the library’s dusty bookshelves, the supple body thrashes, struggling out of my hands, but it’s all predetermined, I tear the lacy underpants into shreds and recoil at the sight, because there is nothing between her thighs — just a smooth, empty spot, like a plastic doll’s. Bolius slowly, thoroughly chews on the grass, Jebachik giggles quietly, even choking with it, while Bolius clumsily turns around, attentively inspects his own dung heap, and, bending over, sniffs at it. Even I notice the stench, the disgusting stench of formalin or something else besides, I am all alone in the basement with the girl’s corpse, my head keeps reeling more and more, I have no strength left, I stagger and grab the corner of the table. My fingers are right next to the girl’s now completely softened body, its breasts fallen over to the sides — a palm would easily fit between them. I get such an urge to put it there; I need to get out of here as fast as possible. I gather my strength and inadvertently lean against the girl’s body, realizing too late that it is a magic touch, fingerless hands snatch me, carry me somewhere, stuff me into the dissected girl’s crotch, the world is no more and neither is my body, because I have been completely stuffed into the square space with perfectly straight-edged sides; I’m choking on stinking blood, but I cannot escape, there is nowhere to escape to, there’s no room, I’m returning to the womb, and my last thought, my last question is — what does it mean to return to a corpse’s womb?