Vilnius Poker - Ricardas Gavelis

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on the greedy surface of paper. And a glass too, into which this or that has been poured. Nothing more. The smell of paper and liquor lingers in his office. Here, the feeling experienced in a gloomy forsaken house, or in a dusty old attic filled with mysterious things, comes over you. Here, everything has died; inside you can only imagine ghosts. It’s the excavated room of an inhabitant of Pompeii. Miraculously extant furniture. Ancient Pompeian books. The smell of thousand-year-old wine. You immediately feel like you’re under thick layers of frozen lava, that the sun and light are far, far away. Here, only the stunning Pompeian drawings provide heat and light. It seems to me they weren’t designed for this world, or for the light of day. My father (his hands?) drew them, so that, blazing up briefly in the real world, they would vanish again for eternity. And when the world tried to take them, father instinctively defended himself. Once some passerby visited his office and saw the drawings. I wasn’t the only one to sense they were drawn by the hand of a genius. Several art buyers immediately flocked into our courtyard (they did resemble shabby birds); one of them moaned wordlessly, another conceived the idea of immediately taking the drawings to Paris. For several days the courtyard resembled a gypsy camp.

      Father finally saw his drawings himself. Closed up in his office, he glumly looked through sheet after sheet, talking out loud to himself. He spoke a secret language that was unintelligible to me. Maybe he had thought up one that could describe his drawings.

      He built the bonfire at night. The drawings went into the fire only at the very beginning. Then father started carrying his manuscripts, journals, and books into the yard: slowly, seemingly weighing things over calmly, he piled ever more bundles of paper into the fire. Soon clothes, grandfather’s carved chairs and Turkish carpets began falling into the bonfire too. Mother stayed in her bedroom, never taking her eyes from that bonfire of the world, but she didn’t even try to restrain father; she didn’t say anything at all. She waited for father himself to stop—she waited all of her life for him to stop. But father continued burning his world according to a spectral scheme. He’d fling some item into the fire, and leave another identical item unharmed. He chose certain cups, plates, and glasses as sacrifices to the fire. There’s no telling what gods he made offerings to, what demons he wanted to scare off. He finished that ceremony of fire just as calmly as he had started. It lasted for maybe an hour, maybe two, but that dance of fire didn’t stay in the great ALL; it crumbled into bits. I see only individual burning things, my inhumanly calm father, and my mother’s pale face in the window. There are no smells left, and neither the fire’s crackling nor the hubbub of the agitated household can be heard. Everything goes on in complete silence, just from time to time a dry heat wafts onto your face.

      I regretted father’s sketched portraits most of all. He always drew the same person—a strange hermit of the swamps by the name of Vasilis. Vasilis would wander into our yard at regular intervals; father got along with him perfectly—you see, the two of them never said a word to each other. Vasilis would come silently and leave silently, piled up with healing herbs and bundles of roots. Grass snakes wound themselves around his arms and tiny, nimble little birds would perch on his shoulders. For posing father would pay him with salt. He would draw the portraits quickly, with enormous inspiration. The real Vasilis didn’t appear in any of them; the people in those portraits would always be different, as if that hermit who lived on vipers and frogs changed his face every day. But actually he was always the same: ragged, tanned almost black, murmuring something to his snakes and birds, showing his eyes to no one. He came to the great auto-da-fé too, and helped father throw books and drawings into the fire. Then he slowly shuffled off into the darkness, accompanied by an owl flying in circles above his head. He didn’t show up in our yard again; I would only see him out in the middle of the swamp, calmly walking through the most treacherous bogs, like Christ walking on water. When father burned his portraits, it was as if Vasilis lost touch with reality, with the ground beneath his feet. To me it seemed as if those portraits contained absolutely everything: the swamps, and the auto-da-fé that was to be, and Christ, and the night owls, and non-possession, and impotence. But it was all destroyed in the flames. I managed to hide only “Woman-spider,” “Faithfulness,” and “The Crane”—I stuck the names on myself. That crane is the most nightmarish bird ever drawn by a human. I’ve never seen another creature so obviously flying to destruction. That crane radiates pure despair; it knows itself that by now it’s almost disintegrated, that it almost isn’t there anymore. But it flies anyway—just above the ground, slowly and weakly. It’s a flying stuffed bird of doom, a ghost appearing in broad daylight through some mistake. Perhaps a bewitched princess turned into a bird who will crumble into ashes at any moment. That crane is the sister of the woman who, in another drawing, is slowly turning into a giant hairy spider. Or maybe the spider is turning into a woman; one way or another, change, by some inexplicable means, is depicted in the drawing. The change is what’s so horrifying; it’s brimming in every line, in every little hair on the spider’s legs. Horror reigns everywhere, except for the woman’s face and eyes. She is completely indifferent; it’s absolutely all the same to her that she will soon turn into a disgusting anthropod. Or the opposite—it’s all the same to her that she’s a spider almost turned into a woman. In “Faithfulness,” an attractive young girl with gigantic breasts, on all fours, devours her dead husband. There’s emptiness in her face and eyes, but her whole body, every seen or only imagined little muscle, is brimming with a rich, bloody ecstasy. She loves her husband—even dead. She wants to become one with him. Her gigantic breasts keep swinging lower, it seems as if the devoured flesh of the dead merges into them, embellishing them even more. The dead husband’s body adorns her, beautifies her for another man.

      My father could have been the best artist in the world. He truly could. However, he refused to budge from the spot. He didn’t in general want to move.

      Oftentimes I see him leaving the villa, slowly walking out to the car. Opening the door, he stops and starts groping for a cigarette. I follow his movements through a grimy window and I know very well (now I know) what it is he’s waiting for, what he hopes for. Any incident whatsoever, the slightest excuse, so he could immediately return to his room, calmly settle himself in the armchair and pour himself a brimming glass. But no one will save him. I see so much suffering on his face that I want to scream at the top of my voice, to rush to mother, to grandfather, to everyone in a row, to every passerby in every city under the sun, today, yesterday, tomorrow, at all times, to shake them all at the same time and beg: leave him alone, don’t torture him, let him, at last, do nothing! I want to lie down under the automobile’s tires and shout: see, he can’t drive, let him return to his drink!

      But he has to sit at the wheel, he has to drive to the university, he has to go into the lecture hall and be a professor (act a professor?). To repeat words repeated many times before, to draw marks on the blackboard drawn many times before. To look at the faces of students seen a hundred times before. You can’t shake all of that off. There is no bonfire that would burn up the Kaunas highway and his lecture hall . . . and the alien ideas of long dead physicists . . . and the motley crowd of students . . . There is no such bonfire, so father futilely tried to set it on fire in his mind at least, throwing everything in one after another: our house . . . the surroundings’ wretched meadows . . . the entire swamp together with Vasilis . . . the stream frozen in fear . . . mountains and seas . . . all of rotten humanity . . . the tiniest of creations, even bacteria . . . even ideas, all ideas of all time . . . And most importantly—man’s immortal soul.

      He begins speaking only on those mornings when, in spite of it all, he succeeds in escaping from the unbearable circle of events, in returning to his office and filling a brimming glass of champagne. (Where does he get the money?)

      “Equilibrium is the lowest state of energy,” his deep voice slowly explains. “The lower you get, the greater your equilibrium. That’s a cardinal law of nature, Vytie . . . People do strive so for equilibrium, therefore they sink even lower . . . Into an even deeper pit, into an even greater equilibrium . . . There is no road up, Vytie, ALL roads lead only downward.”

      But father speaks less and less often. Speech is a type of interaction with the world, and father only wants to interact with himself. That’s why he surrounded himself with mirrors. They’re hung everywhere: in the hall, in the corridors, in the bedrooms, in the bath. Mirrored walls, mirrored ceilings, only mirrored floors are lacking. Mother couldn’t

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