Vilnius Poker - Ricardas Gavelis

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she prattled on about clothing fashions and furniture, about wages and responsibilities. Explained that she had pulled me out of the quagmire. Complained about prices, about my lack of a career. With a strange malice she smeared friends who weren’t there, and when they showed up, she would take apart those who had just left. Maybe it wasn’t so terrible—she was exactly the same as others are. But Irena couldn’t talk that way. I glanced at her through the crack in the door many times, risking discovery. She was the one talking, all right. I didn’t understand where her real words had gone—her talk about heights and precipices, about man crushed and man defeated, her naïve attempts to understand all the wisdom of ancient and modern times—where everything I had loved her for had gone. True, even now she spoke to me in exactly the same way she had before. However, I immediately realized that she was lying to me, and speaking the truth there. The dull, monotone voice was ideally suited to those other words. It occurred to me that if I looked into her throat, there, deep, deep, inside that pink pipe, I would see a woven knot of little worms. Something was strangling and suffocating her, but at the same time she was becoming dangerous herself. She was intentionally playing a role for me. This dull-voiced woman probably had been playing my Irena for a long time; the latter was gone, vanished or degenerated. And until then I had felt nothing—I was deaf and blind. I was truly horrified. I grew three times as careful, three times as watchful, I feared inadvertently giving myself away. After all, she lived right here, next to me; I needed to hide my knowledge from her. Hide it from everyone. Who could I complain to? Except maybe Gedis.

      I didn’t discuss it with Gedis. I decided to act on my own, and I made one of my many irrevocable mistakes.

      I began to follow her even more closely. Her skin turned gray and grew coarse; she wandered lazily through the rooms or the kitchen, doing pointless things: she ironed the same clothes several times, moved them from one shelf to another and then back again, and ceaselessly watered the flowers. Mostly she did nothing at all, just stared vacantly in one and the same pose, turning some object over in her hands. She didn’t read books; she just stared at her television. True, as before, she would take my books and pretend she was reading them at work. Later, supposedly charmed, she would praise them, but I already knew they had been stuck in a kitchen cabinet all week, gathering dust. I just couldn’t understand when I had missed what. After all, that transformation couldn’t have happened overnight. I was deaf and blind: my Irena had been exchanged for another, and I hadn’t even felt it. Everything in her was artificial: her ingratiating voice, and the words stolen from Irena, and her purported deep gaze. I didn’t love her, I avoided her, sometimes I loathed her—and she didn’t even feel it, didn’t notice it! She’d drag me to bed even more often than Irena did. However, love play, that miraculous kingdom, suddenly turned into an oppressive, soulless exercise. It seemed to me that at any moment I would break into tears or start howling—she knew all of Irena’s erotic games, you could almost confuse the two of them. She sucked my penis inside in exactly the same way, pressed it and caressed it with hidden little muscles, as if there, deep inside, were scores of tiny little hands. Against my will I would forget for a short time, I’d nearly feel a climax, but quickly, breaking into a cold sweat, I would get hold of myself. She destroyed my Irena and crawled into her skin, but couldn’t play the part to the end. I was making love to a stuffed doll. Horror would come over me. To save myself I searched for differences. Thank God, the two were still different, even in bed. She always tried to end up on top (Irena didn’t like positions like that). In addition, she pathologically avoided light, she made love only in semi-darkness—Irena would turn on all the lamps, even in the middle of the night. For a long time I wracked my brains over this, but the mystery was completely ordinary: she was afraid that I would see her. She was afraid that I would see her body.

      Now, carefully, gropingly, I explore her body (I’ve already explored it a hundred times). The night spreads a somewhat bitter smell; not far off a dog barks gruffly. I practice seeing in the dark—not with my eyes, but rather with my fingers, my fingers turn into eyes, I see all of her in a halo of pale light. I see her for the hundredth time, but all the same I cannot control my disgust. That woman’s breasts are swollen, three hideous rolls lie pressed together below. It seems that if you ran your finger over them, you’d clean a tangle of cobwebs and putrefaction out from those wrinkles. The waist has disappeared somewhere; square thighs stick out immediately below the bulging breasts. Between the legs, almost from the knees up, sprout fat globs of flesh—something like thick ropes. They rise right up to the hair below her belly; it seems that they twist themselves straight into that woman’s innards and pierce her through. Under that woman’s arms upright globules of fat converge. Coarse tufts of hair curl on her nipples and even between her breasts. I see only the threatening parody of a body; the separate parts don’t suit one another—it seems she could crack apart at any moment, disassemble like a matrioshka doll. And from her entire body, from every pore in her skin, a sour smell spreads; the smell of night’s blunt knife, the smell of mold. It intensifies my disgust; I realize that what I’m seeing is no laughing matter. It isn’t her frivolous twaddle, or her husky voice; it’s real and tangible. A mysterious deformation is ravaging that woman. It’s not some kind of illness; the bristling mane of our neighbors’ black Jake proves it’s not an ordinary illness, one that medicine can cure. It’s something else, entirely, completely, something else, something mysterious and somber, connected to mold . . . to cockroaches . . . to oppressive smells . . . connected to me, to my life . . . perhaps earmarked for me, aimed at me, destroying me first of all . . .

      I sensed that the catastrophe couldn’t hide only inside her. I knew I had to investigate what she did outside of the house, whom she met with and where she went. I had already caught on to a few things, but I still couldn’t entirely grasp what path I was taking, my thrashing heart squeezed into a fist.

      She didn’t sense she was being followed (I had opportunities to convince myself of this), but she always escaped from me. This stunned me: even without sensing the real danger, she maintained an absolute conspiracy. She would disappear through courtyard passageways, or simply turn a corner and vanish, as if she had floated off into the air. I would search for at least a door, a window, a crack in the wall where she could have disappeared. Unfortunately, always unsuccessfully. She was attracted, drawn into the old part of Vilnius, closer to the narrow little streets and churches, the neglected buildings and gloomy, filthy courtyards. You’d think it was only in Old Town that she could disappear, in league with the spirit of Vilnius itself. That spirit of the city intimidated me. All of Vilnius grew faint and muffled, all there was left of it was crooked, fly-stained little streets and dirty courtyards with whitewashed toilet stalls. The city shrank into the narrow, decrepit buildings, into the realm of the ground-floor dives. In the courtyard passageways I would be met by bandy-legged dogs and dirty chickens. The entire motley pack would furiously sniff me over. Dazed men staggered along the walls. Shrill women hung laundry on sooty clotheslines. In the squares, sullen groups guzzled the cheapest garbage wine out of bottles. Hoarse, drunken cries bounced between the thick walls; I practically didn’t hear a word of Lithuanian anywhere. It seemed I was no longer in Lithuania, that at any minute I was going to have to speak a narrow gutter language I didn’t know. My ancient, sacred city was beset by the lowest order of lumpen. I had to shove my way through them to follow the waddling woman’s figure. She felt at home between the fly-stained walls, even her walk would improve. But I was an alien here, and not welcome. Bleary-eyed men looked at me with surprise and a strange malice. Surprised dogs would sniff at me, unable to understand what that smell was doing here. I was shocked: it had been many years since I had seen this Vilnius. But after all, my own old spirit had to linger here; I myself, as I was ten or fifteen years ago. Perhaps she was intentionally attempting to lure me back to the past.

      There was no peace left at home, either. Increasingly weird characters began visiting, as if bugs had converged on my apartment from unknown cracks and corners. They beset my house like apparitions. They were seemingly different, even very different, but at the same time exactly the same as her. My practiced eye already distinguished the critical details: the unusual movements, the emptiness of the gaze. All of their hands were chubby, with swollen joints, and covered in small, tawny freckles. From every one emanated the familiar sour smell of decay. One sturdy fellow, by the name of Justinas, seemed especially typical to me. (He was some sort of party functionary, a representative of the nomenklatura, a person from a special world where everything

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