Vilnius Poker - Ricardas Gavelis

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ones are long since under the ground . . . Still others console themselves with the thought that it’s an unfortunate mistake, but shortly a bright future will arrive . . .”

      Bolius closes his eyes; he doesn’t want to show the suffering in them. He wants you to see only wisdom in his eyes, a clever Voltaire-like little smile, so that at least in your thoughts you’d forget your desecrated body and believe that the spirit can’t be fenced in with barbed wire.

      “They’ll do the same thing to us,” you say suddenly. “We’ll be praying to the Shit of Shits too.”

      Bolius opens his eyes in a flash, you actually recoil—the anger that flows from his gentle eyes is so unexpected.

      “Son!” he spits out fiercely between clenched teeth, “You don’t know what a human is. Listen carefully: HUMAN! It’s impossible to defeat a human. You can kill him, but defeat him—never. They’ve taken everything away from me: my wife, children, freedom, love, the world, God, learning, the sun, air, hope, my body, they’ve done everything so that I would no longer be myself, but they haven’t overcome me. And they won’t! Within me lies an immortal soul, whose existence they deny!”

      Bolius roars, even Vasia Jebachik lifts his eyes from his still and glares sullenly at the two of you.

      “Ironsides, shut your prof up,” he says sarcastically, “He’d better be quiet. The Doc keeps staring at him, and if he takes him to the fifth block—none of his gods will help him. Neither Buddha, nor Shiva, nor that little Jew Einstein.”

      Justinas was like a splinter driven into my life: I stumbled over him wherever I turned. He acted friendly with me, but somewhat from above: after all, he belonged to the cream of the party, and I was nothing more than a computer specialist. I no longer listened to what he was saying; I sensed he wouldn’t give himself away with words. I studied only his face and hands. I would look at the double roll that was forming under his chin, at his soft, indistinct features. His face was covered with a thin, barely noticeable layer of fat, but it wasn’t just an ordinary layer of fat, the result of pointless gluttony. That layer—puttied over the sharp corners, protrusions, and hollows—was a natural part of his construction. Justinas’s face couldn’t express sudden or strong emotions, that’s not what it was made for. It was designed for something like emotions, for half-feelings and a calm, stable existence. His eyes were the color of water. His hands, however, held the most meaning. A strange, unfathomable hieroglyph hid inside them. A hieroglyph of decay, stagnant water and twilight. They were pale and covered in brown freckles, with swollen joints. The fingers were stumpy, bloodless, and almost transparent. There were no veins to be seen on his hands. Those hands wouldn’t leave me alone. An irresistible desire kept coming over me: to cut into Justinas’s finger and see what would run out of the wound, what there was inside of him. Probably a continuous gray mass, a sticky bog of non-thoughts and non-feelings.

      He got along famously with my wife—their thoughts and words, and even their movements, coincided. The two of them looked like brother and sister. I felt I was standing on the threshold of the secret. Sometimes I got the urge to track Justinas, and sometimes I unexpectedly felt sorry for her, or more accurately, for the pathetic remains of my Irena that would at intervals flare up in her. A human is weak: I would caress her secretly in the dark of the night, examine the body, lost in dreams, with the tips of my fingers. A human’s sensations are deceptive: sometimes it seemed that I didn’t feel the triple rolls under her breasts, I didn’t find the disgusting globs of flesh between her thighs, I didn’t feel the coarse hair tangled around her nipples. I was completely deranged: sometimes I talked to her, sometimes to my Irena. I had to resolve to do something, but I didn’t know what. I kept trying to lure her out into the yard when I heard Jake barking. I wanted to bring the two of them eye to eye, and see either bristling hair on the nape, insane eyes, and bared fangs, or a tail wagging hysterically and a tongue trying to lick. But as soon as Jake’s yelping sounded, she would find piles of work that couldn’t be put off. The longer I failed to bring the two of them together, the more I believed the dog would decide everything. Sooner or later the two of them had to meet, and then . . . “Then” came one gloomy Saturday morning. She was bored and, of her own accord, suggested we go outside. I was about to argue against it; I wanted to read, but I glanced out the window and saw Jake romping around the yard. I went down the stairs with a numb heart; I almost wanted to grab her by the hand and drag her back home. I secretly hoped Jake would have run off somewhere.

      But Jake was lying next to the bench, all tensed up, ready to jump up and bound towards us. She turned to him first, squatted carefully, stretched out her hand and, crying out, jumped back. A bitter smell of mold suddenly spread through the yard. My leaden feet wouldn’t carry me closer, I didn’t want to know anything, and for a few long moments I didn’t know anything, but suddenly, almost against my will, I understood it all. It would have been better not to. The dog was dead. His infinitely lifelike pose, his open eyes gazing forward, completely did me in. An instant before he was energetically romping about, even now his doggy soul hadn’t yet entirely left his body, but at the same time he was somehow especially, hopelessly dead. She wailed out loud, caressed the rigid, curly-haired body, and I dare say even forced out a tear. I didn’t believe a single one of her wails, not a single one of her movements. That time she played her role badly, no one in the world would have believed her. The yard immediately got sickeningly colorless; the smell of mold or decay became unbearable. I was seriously frightened; I was afraid to even get close to her. The cowardly, nervous little person deep inside my soul just wanted to run, to escape as far as possible, to dig under the ground, to crawl into a cave and tremble there. The other—the brutal man who had gone through hell—wanted to strangle her with his bare hands. I wanted to howl, when suddenly she turned around and looked at me with Irena’s pure, sad eyes.

      I hardly moved all day. I was half paralyzed, and on top of it all, Justinas showed up that evening and tormented me with his talk about women and his sexual prowess. He had never spoken about it before. This time you’d think he’d opened a bag of obscenities and uncovered his filthy insides. He never said the most important word aloud, but it was heard most, without actually being said a single time; all the talk, all of Justinas’s thoughts, revolved around it. It seemed he wasn’t in the least concerned about the women themselves, just their vaginas. In Justinas’s world, the streets were full of walking vaginas with completely unnecessary appendages: arms, legs, heads. The more I listened, the more I started becoming some kind of vagina maniac myself. To my own surprise, I praised my wife’s erotic talents in a mysterious whisper, and wasn’t in the least ashamed. He infected me with his mania; it was only a good deal later that I became disgusted. They really are capable of infecting people with all the forms of their plague; this must be strictly guarded against.

      I needed to run off somewhere as soon as possible and think things over. I signed up for a business trip to Moscow and packed my bag in an instant. She didn’t seem to want me to go, and she kissed me just like Irena when I left. I was stunned. She was intentionally driving me insane. I stood on the stairs for a long time, but I went to the station anyway. Too well I remembered the neckless ruler of the Narutis neighborhood. Too well I remembered the hopelessly, irretrievably dead Jake. Suddenly I felt there was no turning back. In the station bar, all my doubts began to bubble up again; once more, the simplest question arose: what’s going on here? Suddenly I realized that people, entire nations, the greatest countries come to ruin in just exactly this way—they fail to ask out loud in time: what’s going on here? (It’s enough just to remember the birth of Nazi Germany.) Of course, man became man because he’s able to adapt to anything; however, that adaptability will be his ruin in the end.

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