Vilnius Poker - Ricardas Gavelis

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more so, without even a drop of blood. The child doesn’t want anything, he doesn’t remember anything . . . but you’re a good boy, they won’t touch you.”

      You raise your head quickly, quickly—really, they’ve disappeared; it wasn’t you they were looking for.

      “I already know. They’re kanukai.”

      “What, what?” Mama’s red lips smile.

      “They’re not bugbears,” you say proudly, because you’ve thought up a new word. “They’re kanukai. When I grow up, I’ll catch them.”

      Let’s reason this out logically. The black limousine intimidated me far less than it would have once. I’ve experienced too much to be terrified by the chilly whiff of Death’s shroud. I’ve consorted with that eyeless one for a long time; on meeting, we smile at one another like old acquaintances. Death is a woman whom I once had, but cast aside. Always expect revenge and treachery from a woman who’s been cast aside; don’t allow yourself to be caught by surprise. They know this perfectly.

      Let’s reason this out logically. They couldn’t have intentions on my body. They need more, far more. True, Their plan could have been this: a broken spine, paralyzed limbs, battered brains. That’s hard to believe: They know I couldn’t be dealt with like that. And I know, but all the same I’d rather think about realistic, common sense punishments. However, every last thing—even my liver, kidneys, and lungs—is screaming and shouting that the great game has begun again, and the price is my “I.”

      Besides—where had all the birds disappeared to, anyway?

      Some other, more fundamental logic must be sought in this case. Images and moods speak more effectively and astutely than words, you just need to listen carefully. You need to listen in a particular way; after all, I’ve studied this art in my nightmares and while awake, in dreams and behind the barbed wire of the prison camp. It’s imperative to hear what the united ALL whispers to me. Now I enter the old house in the depths of a garden. Now I pass slowly between the bookshelves, shadowing the small head of a woman with closely cropped hair. Now I slowly pull back the little curtain that hides two grim paintings. Now I shake Suslov’s flaccid hand. Incidents arrange themselves into a complex tangle, announcing the great secret in a drab script.

      A clear head, cold logic, and caution! The clock shows two o’clock in the afternoon; more than anything, I want to slowly die. If only someone were to know how solitary I am!

      The black bricks of the boulevard’s paving reflect a woman bent under the weight of a shopping bag, the emptiness of windows crammed with junk, the roof cornices’ ornamentations. Vilnius pants convulsively, like a dying beast. It’s close to three, prime work time, so no one is working: faceless figures keep trudging by—I don’t want to grace them with the word “faces,” those skulls with skin stretched over them. They walk along without even suspecting they no longer are. But after all, at some point they were, and could still be. Although no, they couldn’t, it’s too late. They’re all doomed already. All that’s left is to socialize with Vilnius itself—it understands me, and I have compassion for it. Vilnius suffers, oppressed by inactivity and somnolence, remembering the Iron Wolf like a dream. It should have howled through the ages, but grew decrepit long ago, sickened with throat cancer; its metastases eat away at the city’s brain too. Perhaps only we two, Vilnius and I, are still alive. The stream of the unalive constantly flows down the boulevard like a murky river. The messengers of gray nonexistence crawl over the city’s body like an invincible army of cockroaches. The history of the world is a chronicle of humanity’s futile war with cockroaches. Alas, the cockroaches always win. Vilnius sprawls helplessly, almost paralyzed, its hands shackled and its mouth gagged. However, it can still think. The two of us are still alive; for the time being still alive.

      The best place to hide yourself from passersby is next to Vilnius’s real river. The Neris is the river of Vilnius’s time, the river of memory. It remembers nothing itself; it just carries other’s memories. It’s not true that you can’t wade into the same river’s stream twice. Heraclitus was mistaken, or more accurately, he had some other river in mind, certainly not this river. The water of the Neris turns and turns in a circle, you can wade into the same stream many times. You can scoop up a handful of water that saw the founding of Vilnius, drink a gulp the Iron Wolf once drank. You fling a pebble into the murky current, it plops into the water, and its echo summons some ancient sound, words pronounced once upon a time—maybe even your own. The Neris remembers everything; it’s a miraculous river, you just need to hear it talking. Sometimes I hear it.

      There now, I pick up a small stone and throw it into the current. You’ll find the river said something, but I didn’t make it out: the cars got in the way. You need to listen to the Neris talking in the quiet of the night, or at least not here, where automobiles roar by.

      I walk away from the river; I’m drawn to wander aimlessly, even though I’ve long since memorized all the byways of Vilnius. Saint Jacob’s church nestles beyond the square where Lenin rules. The church doors are securely locked, and the stairs to the bell tower are fenced off with the thickest possible grade of sheet metal, so the nonexistent Lithuanian terrorists won’t climb up during some parade and aim a shotgun above Lenin’s bronze pate—straight at the government podium. It really would be handy to shoot from here, but who aims at puppets? Except perhaps the spirit of our platoon leader Bitinas.

      Lenin has turned his back to me; his arm points at the KGB building. I obey; I go straight up to it and stop for a minute, although others automatically quicken their step here: the building repels them, acts like some sort of anti-magnet. No one wants to be guarded, to be even more secure than they are. Only I don’t hurry away; this building hasn’t intimidated me for a long time, I’ve already been where this earth’s tortures seem like silly games. Only someone who has borne real torture can stand here calmly and think about the newest legend of our times: people say the KGB has outfitted bunkers under Lenin’s square, connected to the buildings by a tunnel. Times change, and so do the legends—earlier in Vilnius they would tell tales about ghosts and the accursed gold buried in churches’ naves. And about the Vilnius Basilisk.

      Most likely there’s neither tunnels nor bunkers here, but there are other, invisible tunnels and cells, I know quite a bit about them. The things that matter most in this world aren’t those you can see with ordinary sight. Only the second sight perceives the essence. Looking casually, you see only one interesting thing there: a deep hole dug up in the middle of the sidewalk—for absolutely no apparent reason. Bending over, I peer down: there are no bunkers to be seen.

      I’ve been gawking too long: a figure with puffy eyes dressed in canvas clothes blows his nose right by my ear and declares angrily in Polish:

      “What’s the gentleman standing around for? There’s people at work here, we don’t need any gawkers!”

      A Pole. One head of the multilingual dragon of Vilnius. A dragon that speaks ten languages, but doesn’t know how to speak a single one correctly. Someone from Warszawa or Kraków wouldn’t understand his accent. He spoke Polish on purpose, even though he sees that I’m Lithuanian. Many Poles still haven’t backed off; they naïvely remember the period between the wars, when they had seized Vilnius. Jokers—they seized it without even knowing why, the city always suffered economically. Vilnius, the city of Polish poets: the city of both Mickiewicz and Miłosz. Apparently, it’s the city of this bard of canvas clothes and cheap wine too. The poets wrote poems and the simpler Poles raged over Vilnius. It’s not just them; all of the dragon’s heads bite each other—the Lithuanian one, the Polish one, the Russian one, and . . . No, the Jews live here quietly. Folk wisdom gives birth to myths, but there is no mythology that would reflect Vilnius. Where else would you find a dragon like this, whose heads fight among themselves, swearing in different languages?

      “I’m talking to you—can’t you hear?”

      The puffy little eyes stare, enraged and insolent. The righteous fury of a lumpen who’s forced to work hung over, aimed at a well-dressed idler. It’s horribly depressing and dull; around us it’s even thick with the stinking pigeons of Vilnius, and here that still-not-sober Pole too.

      There’s

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