Vilnius Poker

by Ričardas Gavelis

You can learn to conceal yourself, to never give yourself away by expression, voice, or movements, but you can’t change your smell.

Life in Vilnius is a giant poker game, played by madmen. Everyone hides his cards, raises and raises the bet, grimaces and makes faces, hoping to deceive the others, but no one ever finds out what his cards really are. It’s a madmen’s poker game, there is no logic or sense in it: here they pass with four aces and raise to the skies without any face cards. Here everyone plays jeopardy, but no one wins the jackpot. Our life is an endless game of Vilnius Poker: its cards are shuffled and dealt by a scornfully grimacing death.

I no longer play: I fell out of the game.

In my dreams it doesn’t stop at all; that lethargic world suddenly explodes, really explodes—all of the people crack and split like over-ripe pears, and jellyfish-like gelatin, revolting slime, and warty tentacles that drip poison start gushing out of the cracks, striving to snatch up and entangle everything around them.

It’s only here that we finally realize that the world is the way we imagine it to be. Only here do we find out that attempts to change the world are ridiculous. All possible worlds are hiding in the boring—you’d say immutable—flow of life; you just need to come across them.

Suffering and ignorance are universal commonalities. The gods people invent, gods who know absolutely everything, couldn’t exist. They would suffocate in cosmic tedium. They’d simply kill themselves. If gods couldn’t commit suicide, what kind of gods would they be—what would remain of their omnipotence?

He was as smart as any devil, but he was never wise. He didn’t know how to stop, or even so much as pause. That ability is essential for a wise man. The wise man doesn’t rush about: he waits patiently until it all comes to him.

What matters most is the camp that unfurls within. What’s worse is when people spend their entire lives confined inside a gigantic camp without seeing any barbed wire, without smelling the smoke from the crematorium. When they don’t even realize that they are imprisoned.

But I was afraid to leave Vilnius, because I would instantly come across a profusion of my own long-lost futures, droves of lost possibilities, abroad.

I would sit down at the piano just so I could, for a brief moment, avoid pretense and openly play my despair, my spiritual impotence, and my hatred of myself; so that I could, for at least for a few minutes, be a terrorist who blows it all up.

A human life is a competition of ingenious idiocies. Everyone desperately tries to exceed the others with the boundlessness of their stupidity.