Vilnius Poker by Ricardas Gavelis

Author:Ricardas Gavelis [Gavelis, Ričardas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Letter
Published: 2013-06-13T04:00:00+00:00

The studio, with its high ceiling, was as surreal as a memory. A tiny fireplace and battered antique chairs, all of them different. Lolita sat in one with her feet outstretched; she was guarded by a mass of beasts, people, plants, clay, and metal Bosch-like phantasmagoria. This room had a soul; these sculptures hadn’t turned into soulless things like Gediminas’s piano. The dead owner could walk inside at any moment—and what would I have done then? And how would Lolita, suddenly forced to choose, behave—maybe she would grab us both? I shouldn’t have come here. I tried to quiet my beating heart; I attentively inspected Kazys Teodoras’s world. On the shelves, on the fireplace, around me, under my feet, above me stood, lay, hung his works—from matchbox to man-size. There was a mass of them—as if Teodoras had wanted to construct an entire world. A five-meter monster rammed against the ceiling crowned everything; it spread invisible proboscises, it wanted to snatch up everything in sight. Me first of all, me and Lolita.

“That’s the Deformer,” explained Lolita, following my stare. “When I asked Tedis what that meant, he said, after thinking about it: a reformer reforms, and a deformer deforms.”

Teodoras really did want to build an entire world around himself. He formed it from clay, cut it from stone, poured and polished metal, soldered the most fanciful metal sheets, carved wood, poured glass, and wove all of it into a stunning tangle. By way of this studio I hoped I would find a road to Lolita’s inner world, but some third being lurked here, the secret third one of Vilnius. What was it holding in its possession, what part of Lolita? I was disconcerted by its insolence, by its evil intentions. It seemed to be lying in ambush and looking at me disdainfully. A large red cylinder with green lumps, carelessly thrown into the corner, irritated me the most.

“That’s the irritator,” Lolita said hollowly. “Tedis explained that every studio has to have something whose sole purpose is to irritate visitors.”

I tried to imagine this Tedis, a shaggy athlete with sleepy eyes, in the long autumn evenings carefully, lovingly, decorating the red irritator with green lumps.

“It’s strange that you don’t remember him. Half of Vilnius knew him . . . I don’t know why: he was a quiet guy . . . nothing bohemian about him . . . He raved only in his studio, all alone . . . Others would rather rave in public, and turn impotent in the studio . . . and cast busts of Lenin.”

I slowly recovered from the studio’s gloomy spell. One way or another, this was still a sculptor’s studio, and not a mausoleum. Apparently Teodoras’s spirit wasn’t getting ready to bother us. But Lolita was afraid all the same. Her uneven face twisted up entirely; her cheekbones protruded. She was still too young; she wasn’t accustomed to keeping company with her dead ones. She glanced around as if she were afraid one of the figures hanging from the ceiling would speak in her former husband’s voice.

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