My thoughts keep getting more dog-like.
I am the secret God of Vilnius, but at the same time, I’m the most ordinary of dogs: I reek of dog; I can eat offal; I urinate with my leg raised. It’s harder for me to understand people than it once was, even though I know more about them all the time. More and more all the time. The essence of Vilnius is deceit. If you understand the deceit of Vilnius’s prisoners, you’ll understand the Vilniutians themselves.
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. Many have fallen out, but Vytautas Vargalys, Ahasuerus Šapira, Levas Kovarskis, and Stefanija Monkevič still sit at the table. . As long as the game continues, I don’t have the right to reveal the cards in play. And it continues; it will end only when the last one rises from the table. A pointless and meaningless game played by madmen: the last one left at the table won’t by any means win the jackpot. The jackpot will come to nothing, the cards themselves will come to nothing: everyone knows this, but they keep heaping more and more into the jackpot, even though a pile of corpses, sleepless nights, hysterical tears, suicides, and murderers are piled up there already. I suppose Lolita Banytė-Žilienė was a suicide. She smelled like a suicide.
I don’t understand why all of this worries me so much, what I still want to find out about that wretched Vilnius Poker and its players. What are they to me, what meaning do they have anymore? It’s pointless for us to be interested in the fate of the world: it doesn’t concern us anymore. It’s unproductive to study the world because there’s nowhere to put any new information about it to use. Rummaging around in people’s actions and thoughts is like playing chess with yourself.
But the dragon of Vilnius won’t give me any peace. Vytautas Vargalys searched for him, Teodoras Žilys molded him out of clay, and Lolita Banytė-Žilienė caressed him and made love to him. Ergo, he really does exist.
If he didn’t exist, I wouldn’t need anything in the gloom-wrapped city of Vilnius. I can remember the past without idling around the crooked little streets of Old Town.
I listen to old man Vilnius wheezing heavily as he breathes. Cities fall ill too — their illnesses are similar to human illnesses: they suffer from both hypertension and cancer. Cities die in horrible pain as well. But what’s even worse is when cities rot alive. When people peck around in stinking putrefaction, thinking that’s what life is. In my human life, people often asked me why I didn’t defect to some other country. I don’t know the reason myself. I had to die before I finally realized why. I was agonizingly interested — and even now I’m interested — in the people of Vilnius. People like that aren’t found anywhere else. Where else would I have found Vytautas Vargalys, who had traveled through the hell of the prison camps and then through the horrifying hell of the abyss? And who had, in the end, created his own private hell, which even I can’t fathom? Where else would I have met Lolita Banytė-Žilienė, a bird of paradise with a poisonous beak and the claws of a dragon? Or Martynas Poška, the crazy collector and guardian of Vilnius’s rot? In what other country would I have been able to play crushing, meaningless Vilnius Poker?
It’s a shame I don’t know how I died. One of the crazy players of Vilnius Poker who’s arrived on our side could tell me that, but even that won’t happen. We don’t recognize one another here and we don’t have names. That’s naturaclass="underline" all names apply only in a single lifetime. They change all the time: they mean nothing. I was the mathematician Riauba, now I’m a dog — so what should I call myself? You’re all sorts of things, but you are always you, and your name — every one of your names — means nothing. It only marks one of your many lives. Those are the rules here.
Hindus frequently turn into the trees of Vilnius. Others travel to Vilnius as mice, pigeons, or cockroaches. Vilnius is crawling and teeming with aliens. They want to fathom the secret. We all want to fathom the secret, each his own. But why is there such a profusion of aliens struggling to get into Vilnius in particular?
It’s only Vilnius Poker, or its hands, that could answer, but what its cards are is an unknown. Who will answer, who will explain? Maybe Lolita Banytė-Žilienė, whose father was a KGB colonel, or a history professor, or. . Or what? The strange logic of humans demands an explicit answer. As if it were possible to find out! For some reason, people yearn to resolve and explain everything, even that which I didn’t find out — what it is Vilnius Poker is hiding. Lolita’s father was neither a KGB colonel, nor a history professor, nor. . Then what was he? Either one or the other, or nothing — poker is poker, one can only make conjectures in this case. It’s easier for us thinking dogs: Lolita’s father always smells like Lolita’s father, and nothing else is important. People’s strange logic doesn’t apply to us. In general, no logic applies in Vilnius. You won’t find unarguable answers or absolute truths in it. Vilnius is a city of infinite possibilities. Vilniutians sit at the table and get cards you won’t make any poker hands out of. But you have to play anyway. If you fold — you’ll transmigrate into the company of the Bangladeshis. It’s only when you fold that everything becomes obvious. A Bangladeshi is a Bangladeshi. Sometimes I visit them in the giant city garbage dump beyond Fabijoniškės. They sleep in piles of rags, cardboard boxes, or the heating pipes; they dig around in the decay of the dump. They’re the only ones who understand me. They don’t feed me reeking pieces of meat, like others do. They talk to me. One elderly man, who cut off his frostbitten toes last winter with a jackknife, frequently explains his theory to me, and I almost agree with him.
“Vilnius is a city under a spell, my dear dog,” he likes to explain. “We both know this is true. Vilnius was the ethnic capital of Lithuania, then it belonged to Polonized Lithuania, then Russia, then Poland, and now it belongs to Russifying Lithuania. Where else is there a capital of a country that has belonged to one, another, and a third, a capital that wasn’t a part of Lithuania even when Lithuania was independent? Can you imagine Paris belonging to Spain? No, Vilnius could only be compared perhaps to the Armenians’ Ararat, which isn’t in Armenia. It’s a miraculous mountain too; it was no accident that Noah disembarked there. But Vilnius is ten times as miraculous. To a thinking person it reveals ten times, twenty times as many secrets. That’s why I sit here, in a garbage dump, my dear colleague.”