Not a word about “Vilnius Poker.” Gedis angrily spat into the water, raised his collar, and turned his back to the Neris.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” he muttered brusquely. “Don’t be afraid, the river won’t follow us. I’m sure of that.”
I felt the door which had, it seemed, slammed shut, was by no means closed, and that Gedis wasn’t trying to hide; he was still leading me forward.
“The worst of all is what you could find here — the beasts of Vilnius,” he looked down a little street creeping along a curve. “The dragon of Vilnius, which needs to have its head cut off. He’s hiding here somewhere too.”
“Not here,” I said, my mouth suddenly dry.
“I believe you, I believe you: you know another spot, maybe even that abandoned church. But don’t be mistaken: that beast is everywhere. A disgusting, scaly dragon, a Basilisk that kills with its gaze. There’s no hiding from it. It must, it must be beheaded. . Yeah, why ‘Vilnius Poker?’ ‘The dragon of Vilnius’ would be a hundred times better.”
My head spun and I felt faint. Without warning, Gedis had touched my most sensitive spots. He turned around carelessly and broke my glass shield. I was left stark naked; every one of his words lashed me with tongues of fire. I had never seriously thought about the dragon, and yet it had splattered me with its poisonous spray too.
“It always seems you’ll meet it any minute. It’s completely for reaclass="underline" gigantic, overgrown with mold, with ghastly, greenish little eyes. . Maybe it’s hunkered down in Old Town’s underground, or maybe it’s hiding in the new neighborhoods, in between the matchbox geometry. When you wake up and look out the window, it’s sprawling out there in the fog, across the new highway, spreading the smell of decay around. Content and confident in its power, in its invincibility. . Satisfied. . It’s here, it’s here somewhere. It has to be. It can’t not be. But what is it? What does it look like? Where is it? Maybe around that corner?”
“No,” I whispered to myself. “No, it won’t be there. It’s somewhere else.”
Bitinas sits with his head tilted sideways, looking at you intently. His skull, shaved bald, even shimmers. He’s the only one who didn’t take a nickname; he proudly calls himself by his real name. The only one to have the Vytis Cross, but he doesn’t put on airs at all; he pins it on only on the sixteenth of February. The exploits he plans are precise and elegant. It’s said that your group has lost the least men out of all the groups in Lithuania, and there’s a lot of them.
“Of course you want to get a pistonmachine,” Bitinas says in an icy voice. “Of course you want to fight and show your courage.”
You swallow, but you can’t manage to speak out, you just nod your head. Bitinas bewitched you long ago; you’re afraid of him.
“You won’t get a weapon. You are meant for other things.”
Bitinas’ shaved skull and small black whiskers intimidate and oppress you. He doesn’t look like an inhabitant of this earth, maybe because you’re conversing underground. Your bunker is an entire underground garrison: undetectable, unnoticeable. Bitinas even ordered the air vents run into the bark of trees; he even found a way to disguise it from the search dogs. You are moles, unaccustomed to the light of day.
“Our battle will be a long one, Vytautas. We’ll punish the settlers; we’ll punish the collaborators. The Russians must be left in a complete void, supported by no one.”
“To me that’s obvious,” you say, surprisingly boldly.
“I don’t doubt it. You’re an intelligent person. Yes, we’ll kill and be killed. A civil war is a terrible thing. It’s not Christian. But there are special tasks.”
Bitinas opens an iron box, takes a photograph out of it, and carefully lays it in front of you. His hands are majestic; they spread a crushing calm. You won’t escape from hands like those.
“Take a good look!”
In the photograph there’s a bony-faced man, probably not a Lithuanian. You don’t see anything special, maybe just that his hair is particularly unruly; it’s standing on end. You take a good look at his eyes. There’s no gaze in them; they’re like buttons set in his eye sockets.
“Who is he?”
“The executioner of the Lithuanian nation. Remember his name: Suslov, from the word ‘susas.’ He really is rather mangy.”
Bitinas smiles wryly, and scores of little veins in your temples start pounding; anger and mortification flood through your chest. They’ll make a spy out of you, but you want to do battle. That’s why you came here.
“He’s the emissary from Moscow. Sent here to deal with the Lithuanian nation. He has introduced two slogans. The first — finish off Lithuanian-German fascism. Pay attention — it’s the Lithuanians who are monsters, but he’s not. The second basic slogan — Lithuania without Lithuanians! No colonizers have ever introduced anything like that before.”
“I won’t be able to do it,” you answer, your voice trembles from that incalculable pounding.
“If we’re in the position where we’re forced to kill, we must first punish those who have truly earned punishment. Muravyov the Hangman, compared to Suslov, is no more than a babe in arms. He hung maybe a hundred, while Suslov’s counter has ten thousand as its smallest unit. He is a dragon. A dragon that must be beheaded. His head has to end up on top of a flagpole in place of the Soviet flag.”
Your head spins, you see the spike, and on it — a dried-up head. But not the man in the photograph, not the head of the dragon. Shudders shake you, but even with your eyes closed you see Bitinas’s head on the spike. A flashing bare skull and black whiskers. The prophetic vision is so strong that despite yourself you step backwards, while the live Bitinas’s ghastly head watches you attentively.
“We’ve selected ten men from various groups all over Lithuania, whose purpose is to track down the dragon. I picked you, Vytautas. I won’t give you a weapon. You don’t have the right to die in a ridiculous firefight. You’re meant for other things.”
You’re wracked by shudders, because you have to talk to the transfixed head of a dead man. There are gloomy tunnels about; vague flames flicker in them; they commune with Bitinas’s angrily flickering eyes.
“I believe if anyone can get to the dragon, it’ll be you. The dragon must be destroyed. The widows and orphans cry for it. Hundreds of thousands of Lithuanians in the snows of Siberia pray for it.”
“But why me?”
“You’re an exceptional person, Vytautas,” answers the head on the pike. “I can see it in your eyes: you’ll manage. That creature has no right to live. He’s driven us, the masters of our country, underground, and dares to breathe Lithuanian air himself.”
You want to answer that underground is a place of sobriety and safety, that it’s only here that you have nothing to fear, but you’re quiet, since the dead man’s bald head won’t believe it.
“I’m inexperienced. Why not you. . or some other old soldier?”
“Too many people know me and the others. A young man is what’s needed, a man no one knows. You see — you’re the son of working people. You’ve learned Russian at night, after backbreaking labor, studying Stalin’s writings, for which you could have been shot. You will need to play your role well.”