Vilnius Poker

by Ričardas Gavelis

the battle between light and dark is always won by grayness and twilight. As long as the essential elements, black and white, God and Satan, exist—all is not yet lost. The end comes when everything mixes into a unbroken sugary fog, when nothing no longer differs from anything else.

His ruin is inexplicable and therefore even more frightening.

the most disgusting of all possible thieveries—the theft of a person’s solitude.

“Shit!” grandfather howls. “Shitty shit!” I already know that the Russian tanks are in Kaunas, that Lithuania has met the doom grandfather predicted. “Shit!” grandfather roars. “The little fools—they fought with the Poles over Vilnius, only to live to see the Russkies! A shitty nation!” Grandfather rushes headlong with the little silver bucket from the outhouse in the bushes to the shed and back again.

“Here’s your god! A new kingdom’s come, a new government, and here—the new god of the Lithuanians. The age of Perkūnas is over, the era of Christ is over. The Russkies brought you a new god, kneel in front of him and pray. Here he is, get to know him, The Shit of Shits, now he’ll be the god of the Lithuanians! A shitty god for a shitty nation, and I’m his priest. Hosanna!”

“Today is the beginning of a new epoch! A new god has come to our land, by command of a prophet by the name of Stalin Sralin. Now he’ll shit on your heads for the ages. Get used to it! Pray to him!”

“It would have been better if a plague had overrun us, at least some survive. But we’ve been overrun with shit, and no one will stay clean! We ourselves poured shit on our own heads. Ourselves!

The slogan of the Lithuanian people: it may be shit we’re living in, but at least we’re alive! Do you have any idea what the Soviets are? They won’t leave a single person unshat upon, not a single thought unshat upon, do you understand? In the Soviet communion everyone will have to swallow a piece of fried shit. The Soviets discovered a great secret: the major part of any human being is shit, so you need to value him as shit, address him as shit, treat him like shit. This is Sralin’s doctrine of faith: you are shit and don’t even try to be anything else. Rejoice: we’ll be slaughtered; we’ll fertilize Siberia’s fields! They’ll grow bread for the Russians out of us!”

Is it possible that excrement can be love? Is it possible to love excrement? Is it possible that excrement can love someone?”

Every true search is hellish; great discoveries are made on the edge of insanity.

I searched for an answer (already then I searched for an answer) by destroying myself. There’s probably no other way. A person can escape his limits and exceed himself only by sacrificing a part of himself. But I sacrificed too much.

Every human resembles some sort of animal: a bird, a long-legged hunting dog, a rat. Giedraitis Junior doesn’t resemble anything, he’s completely lifeless: he reminds you of drab ruins that absolutely no one visits.

Her husband was the entire world to her; she existed only when he was next to her, afterwards she would seem to disappear, and all that was left was waiting until he would show up again… That’s worse than death.

If you think it’s the surroundings or other people that are to blame—you’re fooling yourself. Only you are to blame. Only you. You’re amazed at other people’s helplessness, weakness, stupidity? Don’t fool yourself—you’re that way yourself! You’re oppressed by the injustice of the world? Look inside yourself more carefully! The only one you have a right to condemn is yourself!”

love, I love Lolita, she’s the only living thing nearby; only my dead surround me. Grandfather, the great Lithuanian spy in Polish-occupied Vilnius. A hero, bravely fighting with the most windmill-like of windmills. Father, convinced by an unheard voice that the world isn’t worth his efforts. My two forefathers, kanuked so differently. By what means do They inject a healthy brain with their pathologic; with what form of the drab spirochetes are they able to penetrate the joints, the blood, the sperm? How did all of my people fall into a trap they didn’t see in time, which they didn’t guard against? What did Gediminas fail to consider, the all-knowing Gediminas, gloomily leaning over the piano, his hands raised, but still not daring to press the keys? What did I overlook, squeezed for long years between the moldy walls of my wife’s apartment? What unexpectedly wiped my brains clean and opened up the second sight? What do I have to guard my Lolita against? Lolita, my very own Lolita.

She hung herself decently, while we’re still living…” “To me she resembles Lithuania,” someone in the fog suddenly says, “The same senseless despair.”

If Mandelstam wrote and read his friends poems about Stalin, knowing full well that he would, one way or the other, be killed on account of them, was Mandelstam abnormal? I think it was Stalin who was abnormal.

In the end, do the great kanukai commissars—even Stalin—differ that much from cockroaches in their goals or essence? Even their whiskers are practically identical.

I stood in a dead-end corridor; doors leaned on both sides. I opened the nearest one on the right, beyond it ranged rooms crammed full of broken furniture. A vague presentiment told me there was a constant twilight here both day and night—as if that broken furniture devoured the light during the day and vomited it back out during the night. Standing there, my legs slowly sank into the rotten floorboards. It seemed something alive was holding me by the ankles. That corridor didn’t want to let go of me. For the first time it occurred to me that perhaps there was no way out of here. I rushed into a low gallery, ran out into yet another corridor, threw open all the doors in turn. It was the same everywhere: rooms stuffed full of broken furniture. That furniture looked like slaughtered people. An occasional door was locked, but I had neither the desire nor the strength to break them down. All I felt was the primitive fear of an animal trapped by pursuers. I tore up and down staircases and jumped over balcony rails onto the pavement of deep little courtyards. By now I heard the voices of the unseen pursuers surrounding me. I plunged through a creaking door and unexpectedly stumbled into someone’s living quarters. There were beds along the walls and an idiotic little carpet with swans hung on the wall. I was particularly reassured by a night pot with a handle set alongside a child’s bed. That was surely an object of this world. The awakened children’s dirty little faces stared at...

The library bookcases are grim and monotonous (for some reason I’m walking through the library again), like the secret corridors of the Narutis quarter. And the dimness is exactly the same. I walk aimlessly; the bookcases slowly slink by. It seems it’s a desert, a boundless desert of frozen thoughts and metaphors. Here, between the identical rows of books, I immediately remember the labyrinth of rooms cluttered with broken furniture.

a man accepting slavery as if it were a stroke of luck—a self-satisfied slave.

All of us Lithuanians, up against free Europeans or Americans, feel the way blacks do about whites: we envy them and we hate them, we have very well-founded accusations against them and we feel we’re in the right, but at the same time we can never get rid of our inferiority complex.

As long as there’s nothing in your head except a hunger for meat and winter boots, you’re a proper Soviet citizen.

A McCarthy suddenly shows up even in the wealthiest societies. Even Hitler can be chosen in a free election. You might think a thriving Englishman immediately rushes off to think about the Universe and the structure of human society. Not at all; one collects neckties, another—diamonds. Each according to his means. Not for God, but for Mammon. They let you have a lot of gold—if you renounce your soul.

they had an unpleasant intrinsic vulgarity. People like that think they’re masters everywhere and at all times. (Gedis explained that this is characteristic of Americans too.)

But faceless neighborhoods are no different than people in whose eyes you can’t read anything. It’s no big deal to be on your guard when you see an angry spark in a person’s eyes; it’s easier to escape in time when you see a sullen threat in them. The worst is when there’s no expression at all, when the shape you simply took for a pole, a rock, or a withered tree suddenly comes to life and bares its bloody fangs. It’s worse because you’re not expecting it. After all, you can’t go around being afraid of every pole, every rock, and every withered tree.

But the world has already punished the Germans and will continue to punish them, while these will remain righteous for eternity, my child… Russia never knew how to admit its own guilt. We love tyrants: Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Stalin… We’re afraid of them, but we respect them, we LOVE them, my child! That’s what needs to be burned out of the Russian soul

Unconsciously, books became everything to me. They smelled like flowers and thundered like storm clouds, caressed me like a woman and hurt me deeply like the vilest of enemies. Every last thing was an open book.

What matters is that I know, and if I know, ergo it’s possible to know, ergo, sooner or later someone else will realize it, the one who will come after me.

The idle rich had yachts and heaps of free time, but they didn’t advance either souls or art, like the wealthy of ancient times; they merely competed to see who could internalize the most dolce far niente. They didn’t hurry, but functioned effectually. The soul was irrevocably driven out of people. They intruded everywhere.

it wasn’t enough to destroy your true enemies, you needed to burn out the entire genetic field with fire.

“I’m not going to have children for the benefit of this hell,” a deep, hoarse woman’s voice spoke. “Better to strangle them to start with. Why should I wait for someone else to do it?”

Jews, love, and Marx—everything in its place.

He tore off my dress, tore it into tiny shreds, placed me naked in front of himself, examined me with a professional eye and said he would put me in his show: naked, covered with shit, stuck all over with scraps of newspaper used to wipe yourself in the toilet. And he would name it “Lithuania”…

The sun shines, that’s the worst of it.

It’s actually even worse for people who live in free countries than it is for us. Our very life, our very surroundings force us to search for answers, because it’s so obviously bad here—nauseatingly bad.

“In Vilnius there can never be just the two of you. If you sit with a friend or a woman, Vilnius will, without fail, sneak up on you like some odd third one. You can’t get away from Vilnius. There isn’t another city like it in the world… America’s blacks know this sensation well. Their Vilnius, that third one, is called the blues. Not a song, not the music… I don’t know… a mood, or God fluttering in the air… In a word—the blues. One old man in Harlem explained it to me this way: when some other old negro talks, and I listen, it ain’t just the two of us, there’s always a third, and his name is the blues… And our blues is called Vilnius. Horrible, beloved Vilnius.”

Their secret lingers everywhere—in the constellations of the stars and in the morning fog of a dream that hasn’t dispersed, in the pavement of every Vilnius side street and inside the most disgusting slut’s vagina.

Without a doubt God exists, but I see no reason to pollute the brain with the idea of God.

You’re right, Kovarskis, no one dies from the Vilnius syndrome. It’s much worse than that. You live with the Vilnius syndrome!

what does it mean to return to a corpse’s womb?

After all, the only way you can retaliate for your miserable life is by taking it out on the children—let them experience all this insanity too.”

I grasp it all in a torturously slow manner, like swallowing barbed wire.

I hate computers. They’re perfect idiots: obedient and brainless, but capable of performing their tasks flawlessly. They do not doubt, and they have no opinions. The Ruling Old Folks’ Asylum, during their sleepless nights of drivel, dreams that people could be exactly the same. The Ruling Old Folks’ Asylum isn’t a concrete government or anything like it—it’s all the elderly mean-eyed guys who crave control over us, who want to dictate their will to us: it’s the head of the apartment cooperative, it’s reserve colonels, it’s sauna directors. This vindictive and evil old folks’ asylum is a unique contemporary phenomenon, something that never existed before, and never will again. It drags us backwards, restrains and impairs us in every way imaginable. Watch out for mean-eyed old folks!

It follows that self-irony is a means of defending one’s life from oneself.

I spew thoughts the way Vilnius’s gypsy women spit sunflower seed husks. My thoughts are soaked in spittle and chewed up. Still, it’s a good thing; at least there are those spittle-soaked husks.

Only a Lithuanian is qualified to write the opus “What is the Ass of the Universe.”

if you think it’s worth calling a person a slut just because he sells his body and not his soul, as is customary.

“Life is a tale, told by an idiot, signifying nothing.” If that’s true, I’d really make a good storyteller. I’m sufficiently idiotic.

the eyes of a fallen saint.