Vilnius Poker - Ricardas Gavelis

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me; then in horror I felt a nearly inexplicable stitch, a strange stab that wounded the most tender, delicate places of my being. The stench of rotting leaves emanated from the imbecile; it seemed the danger signal that had sounded inside me before was recurring. Involuntarily I thought: so it’s They who sucked out this person’s soul; the kanukai kanuked him. Once he was human. The spectacle was probably over, the sign given, even though the actor was still standing on the miserable stage. Gediminas’s final convulsions, the black Circe’s gaze, all of the horrifying pictures were numbered and almost explained. Everything was much too clear—I actually felt faint on account of that purity and clarity. But what of it—I didn’t know what should be done. No one knows what should be done.

      But still the spectacle continued. The imbecile, with his piggish little eyes, stared at a girl who was sitting not far away. Apparently she had emerged from underground, or appeared out of nowhere. She sat quite close to me, daydreaming and completely forgetting herself, and looked at the rainy window glass. Both her coat and skirt buttoned up the front and had spread out somehow obscenely—they uncovered her long thin legs and the lace of her underwear; under them the dark, warm triangle of hair was apparent. Her dreamy face and that voluptuous, dangerous tunnel extending between her thighs straight to the tempting, damp mystery was horrifyingly incongruous, but all the more enticing. The imbecile felt it too; he carefully sat down on the neighboring seat, quickly stuffed his hands into his pockets and froze as if he’d had been paralyzed. I was completely done in by that girl’s involuntary voluptuousness, the imbecile’s fingers moving hysterically in his pants pockets, and his face, which he suddenly turned towards me. He looked at me as if I was one of his own, smiled knowingly, and turned back again to the sugary damp tunnel. Strings of slimy saliva dripped from the corners of his lips. He pulled his hands out of his pockets and intently stretched them towards the girl’s legs. Slowly, carefully, he thrust them into the tunnel between her thighs. I swear, at that moment there wasn’t a drop of fear left in his face.

      I jumped out of the trolleybus; I thought I heard the horrified yell of the girl as she was awoken from her daydreams. There was just one thing on my mind—that my apartment was right near by, and I had to get to it. I doubted I would succeed in returning home alive. Afterwards, an interval of several days disappeared from my consciousness.

      Thank God, Stefa took care of me. Thank God, the Academy of Science took care of Gediminas’s funeral. Thank God—after all, like me, he lived all alone. And he died all alone (as I am destined to do). It’s just that the Academy of Science, which suddenly honored the eternally chastised Gediminas Riauba after his death, won’t bury me.

      In Lithuania, truly great people are valued, if at all, only after their death. In the very best case.

      That live skeleton crawls on all fours through the pen and nibbles at the grass. That skeleton of a tall man with a toothless mouth and bloody gums rips out a dried-up clump and slowly chews it. There is nothing left in his eyes; Plato and Einstein are dead, Nietzsche and Shakespeare are dead. In his eyes a void remains, a boundless, bare expanse. You know this man. You know his name. You’ve spent hundreds of nights talking together. Vasia Jebachik sprawls next to you and giggles. If they should catch us, we could end up in the pen ourselves. The man suddenly stops and spreads his legs. It seems some kind of thought flickers on his face. He strains to think, tries to remember something, while between his legs hangs a thick sausage of waste. It dangles for a long time and finally falls down. Your heart wants to jump out of your throat, but you can’t pull your eyes away from him.

      “Bolius!” you say in despair.

      He doesn’t hear. That human animal no longer knows his own name; he turns around and sniffs at his waste. He calmly leans over and chomps the steaming, reeking sausage with his toothless mouth. He chews it blissfully, with his head thrown back no less. You know this person.

      “They’ve done your prof in, Ironsides,” Vasia Jebachik grins, “And there’s another one.”

      The second shaved head is much younger; he doesn’t crawl, he reclines with a pained expression on his face. He still has a human face. The older one suddenly yowls. You’re wracked by spasms, because you know this person’s name. All of Lithuania knows his name. You want to kill someone, because it’s impossible to go on living. Whom should you kill? Perhaps Bolius? Or maybe yourself? It’s the fundamental question of philosophy: do you kill someone else, or yourself? God was killed a long time ago.

      “The other one’s supposedly a Swede,” Vasia whispers. “Balenberg, or something . . . Ha! Do you see a Swede? He’s the King of the Jews! I’d recognize a Jew a mile away!”

      Your hands shake, your heart no longer beats, you’ve died already. You no longer are, there is only an all-encompassing NOTHING, which has no meaning nor objective, no purpose, which looks with a multitude of invisible eyes, gorges with a multitude of invisible mouths, and blankets the entire earth—it has no cracks, no weak spots; it’s invincible, eternal, unchanging. Under it cities disappear, people disappear, the whole lot disappears, Bolius disappeared, you’ll disappear in a minute, sooner or later nothing will be left—just that nothing, existing for itself and because of itself, but it’s almost all the same to you, since you no longer are. You’re dead already.

      “Let’s get lost, Ironsides,” Vasia Jebachik blurts out. “If they catch us here, it’s all over for us. They’re hiding that Swede like you wouldn’t believe!”

      For two or three days I lay in a fever, then suddenly I came to my senses—with a dull head and an empty heart. I felt somewhat like the only life left among the dead. Everything in the world appeared to be as usual, left standing in the same place and the same way. But everything was illuminated in a new light, arousing the second, the true sight. It’s not difficult to get used to obvious, tangible changes. It’s much more difficult when things seemingly haven’t changed, but mean something else entirely. If you were to try to reconcile the old and the new perspectives, you could go out of your mind. I saved myself simply by not even attempting to remember the old world; I accepted the new without any stipulations. I saw it clearly, like a finished painting, like the dragon’s fiery breath.

      All of Their subspecies—from the commissars of gray powers down to the last peon, all of the beasts marked by Their sign, seek the same thing. They suck, devour, and ingest your essential powers, the inner strength, thanks to which you are human. They devour people, but leave them looking perfectly healthy on the outside. They suck out just the insides, leaving an ashen emptiness inside. They suck out fantasy, inspirations and intellect, as if it were everyday food or a refreshing drink. They are able to adjust to circumstances better than any other living creature. It’s impossible to avoid Them; They are everywhere. It’s They who fixed things so that in the eternal war between the darkness and the light a soulless gloom always wins. They discovered the near truth, which is worse than the blackest lie. If the human race really is doomed to extinction, it will be solely thanks to Them.

      A hundred times I tried to logically refute Their existence. But I reached the opposite goal—I unarguably proved that They really exist. The simplest proof—an argument ad absurdum. Let’s say They don’t exist. There is no such subspecies of live creatures whose sole purpose is to kanuk people, to take away their intellectual and spiritual powers; that kingdom of sullen, flat faces doesn’t exist. Let’s say none of that exists.

      Then how can you explain humanity’s structure, all the world’s societies, all human communities, their aspirations and modes of existence? How can you explain that always and everywhere, as far as you can see, one idiot rules a thousand intelligent people, and they quietly obey? Whence comes the silent gray majority in every society? Would a person who wasn’t kanuked think of vegetating in a soulless condition and say that’s the way everything should be? Why is it always enough to arrest a thousand for the just cause of a million to be doomed? Who raises and sets all governments on the throne, who hands the scepter to Satan’s servants—to all sorts of Stalins, Hitlers or Pol Pots? How do thousands, even millions of people disappear in the presence of all, and the others supposedly don’t even notice? How does humanity manage to forget its history and repeat that which has already caused catastrophe more than once? Where does everyone’s intelligence and memory disappear to at such moments? What

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