Unlike the real Vilnius, Gavelis’s Vilnius a one-dimensional city. His characters are constantly in motion around Vilnius’s Old Town or the streets leading to it, giving the city a claustrophobic, suffocating feel, a place where both space and time are deformed by the power of evil. Action frequently takes place in underground locations; the city seems to constantly shift under the characters’ feet, a nightmarish space that feels both closed and boundless at the same time. Representing the entire world as the capital of evil, Vilnius appears as an enclosed sphere of a city, a place where it is impossible to see everything or to understand its Satanic essence.
In all of the characters’ narrations, Lenin (Lukiškų) Square, with the statue of Lenin pointing at the KGB Building, is filled with negative emotions. The Old Town is the area described in the most detail. Its space exists as if a city within a city, a complex labyrinth where mythological beings live (the Circe, the Basilisk, Ahasuerus, the Iron Wolf). The Old Town is the favorite area for Vargalys and Lolita to wander; its streets dictate the theme of their conversations.
There is an obvious opposition between the old and the new areas of Vilnius. The center of the old Vilnius is Gediminas Tower, the symbol of Lithuania’s ethnic capital, described as a symbol of the nation’s powerlessness, the “short, stumpy phallus of Vilnius.” Lenin’s monument is the stereotypical symbol of Soviet Vilnius, unifying all the representations of Soviet cities. A foreign and threatening symbol of the new state and its power, in Gavelis’s novel it is mocked and disparaged, but still points directly at the KGB headquarters.
The prospect, the main axis of the new city of Vilnius, is understood as a foreign space, a river of the unalive, while the Neris, the safeguard of Vilnius’s memory, is the real river. The new neighborhoods of Vilnius are imagined as foreign, fraudulent, without their own history or genius loci, but mystically threatening.