Above Us Only Sky (15 page)

But his plea was unnecessary. Daina turned on her own. She spread her arms, her calloused fingers wide, like veins within the wings. This was between her and Saint Casimir and God. She was no longer afraid. Daina gave Lukas Blasczkiewicz the shot he wanted. His mother lode. His life's gold. She turned her wings to his spotlight, feeling them open further, growing, spreading, extending, until they filled the room, until she and Saint Casimir touched in the cold, damp cell. Daina felt enormous, brilliant.

Meanwhile, Captain Vincentas and Lukas Blasczkiewicz were thinking the exact same thing:
She is sent from God to right our wrongs
. Captain Vincentas said, “I can't breathe. I have the asthma.” He rushed from the room. The photographer mumbled, “You're amazing. This is incredible. You're an angel.” He repeated, “You're an angel,” “Dear Lord,” and “miracle.” At one point, he ran to the bathroom, but when he came back, he mumbled some more about miracles and gifts from God. He mumbled, the letters losing their order, like speaking in tongues, until the film ran out. “Genius!”

Captain Vincentas returned, his hands on his heart.

Daina glowed. She did not want to die. God did not want her to die. She smiled at Lukas and Captain Vincentas. She was grateful that the police had come for her. She was grateful for another turn.

16

Lukas Blasczkiewicz

Lukas Blasczkiewicz, the photographer, could be a side note or an asterisk, but after he witnessed the illumination of Daina Vilkas Valetkiene, a desire and impetus to make all things beautiful took root in Lukas. From that day forward, he spent hours studying and basking in wonders that others overlooked, from starflowers to weeds, from inchworms to cockroaches and everything in between. He transformed his world into a shrine, a place of worship for breath and motion, and then the oddest thing happened: Lukas Blasczkiewicz stopped aging. Not one gray hair. Not one wrinkle. People noticed his wispy black spikes, like his hair had been whipped, and they regarded his long purposeful strides, the silhouette of a man on stilts. Lukas halted with the same purposefulness when something caught his eye, his upper body swaying forward like a reed.

I
was born to a giddy Bolshevik in 1914. Few people know that there were giddy Bolsheviks, but there were, men and women with a fever for revolutionary change. When Czar Nicholas II sent Russian soldiers to fight in the Great War, it was a giddy time for those proletariat-hungry Bolsheviks like my father: a Marxist-Leninist man. A learned man. An earnest man, a real believer in the people. He'd traveled abroad. He'd met Lenin. He knew exiled theorists. He wanted to stake his claim in the reformation of a new Russia. He wanted to do something grand—to get rid of the monarchy.
Who do they think they are? The world is aflame!

I was born taking pictures. I'm a photographer, and even as a boy, I saw things in pictures, moving and still. So picture a man, so happy that he is kicking his boots in the air, heel to heel,
tap tap
in your head, and he's nearly horizontal. This was my father.

A prankster. He was not as serious as the other famous revolutionaries, like Lenin, Stalin, Dzerzhinsky, and Trotsky. He laughed too much. Like Dzerzhinsky, he was born in Poland, but unlike Dzerzhinsky, he'd never been tortured or jailed. His jaw was intact. And he was never famous. Just giddy. A jokester, a fool.

When Czar Nicholas II abdicated the throne, my father celebrated with spirits. He made merry. My sisters and I were babies. My mother told us these things. In 1918, when my father read in the newspaper that Czar Nicholas II, his wife, and their five children had been killed by the Bolsheviks, he hid his face behind his drafting hand. According to my mother, he said, “Well, it was necessary. We will discuss it no further. I don't think.” He paused. “It's terrible, but it's for the people.”

She said, “That's no good, killing children. We have three girls and a boy. The czarina had four girls and a boy. Her boy was not much older than Lukas. They used cold steel.”

According to my mother, my father told her that some evils are necessary, and that we should not think too closely on it. All his life, he'd wanted to think too closely, nose-deep in everything, but not this. “After all,” he said, “one of those children might've claimed the throne.”

“And rightfully so. It's their throne.” Mother smacked our father. She did this whenever his notions infuriated her. She was not a revolutionary. She was a mother with a hot temper and swift hand.

The revolution came—just as my father had hoped. But what had he anticipated? There was no great parade. No celebrations. The churches were closed. The shops were rationed and nationalized. Food disappeared. Then there was the Red Terror, the Cheka—hundreds of henchmen donning long black coats, rounding up landowners, the top military officers, their wives and children, the clergy, the bourgeoisie. Everyday people on the street.

Thousands were shot on suspicion of being enemies of the Bolsheviks and then “enemies of the people.” The numbers were printed in the newspaper as a warning. According to Mother, Father justified these murders by saying, “Lenin can't have another revolution. Russia can't have another revolution. He's doing what's necessary.” Mother smacked him. In 1920, Father worked as an illustrator for
Pravda,
one of Russia's newspapers.

Six years later, the men in dark coats came to our door. Perhaps Father expected it, but I don't think so. Like I said, he was giddy with revolution, always wanting to be part of something big. We knew this. So when the henchmen came, we all wondered,
Why are they here? Father is a Bolshevik. He is true to Lenin. Why is Father being arrested?
I was twelve. My sisters were five, seven, and nine. I remember thinking that we might be going with him. I knew of other children who'd disappeared, but they did not want us, only Father. I had suspicions as to why we were spared. These notions had to do with my mother. With long black hair, and eyes like sapphires, she was exotic-looking. More importantly, she was admired by a man who knew a man who knew Joseph Stalin, Lenin's successor. Thankfully, this man was not a friend of Joseph Stalin's. To be Stalin's friend meant that you would inevitably be suspected of trying to undermine him, which meant that you would be shot in the nape of the neck or sentenced to hard labor. These were the options. Stalin was a great liquidator and exterminator. He quickly learned that the cleanest and quickest way to kill someone was to have them bend over, to point the gun upward at the nape of the neck and pull the trigger. Less blood. Less mess. Less writhing and moaning. I think this was partly learned when the last czar and czarina and their five children were killed. Rumor has it that they fought. Rumor has it that bayonets ended their young lives. Too much mess. It was that cold steel Mother mentioned. I see these things in color. I always have. Too much red.

My father was sentenced to twenty years hard labor. It had something to do with one of his cartoons, some suspicion that he was spreading anti-Soviet propaganda. Father denied this claim until he was faced with death or prison. Admission meant prison. Denial meant death. With this in mind, he confessed to a crime he hadn't committed.

The portly man who was a friend of a friend of Stalin's was named Anton. He visited the house when my father was working in Petrograd—before Father's arrest. My mother had told us that we were not to tell my father about Anton's visits. We never disobeyed Mother. Besides, for some time, Father's giddiness had been waning.

After the Cheka—the secret police—took my father away, Anton visited more frequently. I think he gave my mother ration coupons. I know that he gave her furs. My sisters and I pretended that nothing was wrong. We weren't permitted to do otherwise. There were to be no tears. I understood that to cry, especially in front of Anton, meant that I might join my father in some tundra prison. Anton often said, “Tell the boy not to look at me. His eyes are like ice.” I had my mother's eyes. I still do.

My mother drank tea and acted like the bourgeoisie we were supposed to despise. She met with other ladies who wore plumed hats, and she talked about Anton, waving her hands, the cuffs of her blouses adorned with gold thread. She wiggled her pinky finger to describe Anton's manhood. The ladies laughed. In his absence, my father's giddiness had apparently taken hold of Mother. She took to drinking hard spirits and laughing too robustly for someone whose husband had been sentenced to hard labor.

I was thirteen when Anton bought me my first camera. I thanked him, averting my eyes, shaking his hand like the young man I was supposed to be. He bought my sisters all manner of dolls with eyes that opened and closed. Somehow, he had money. I knew too that he had his own wife and children in Kiev. My sisters and I called him Uncle Anton and sat on the front steps when he and mother went into our father's bedroom. If you can picture us there, me and my sisters lined up smallest to tallest, all of us with our mother's raven hair and blue eyes, licking our fingers, eating the sweets Uncle Anton brought—you'd see that we were smiling. I wish I had snapped our photo on one of those afternoons, but there was something deeply sad in us. I never thought of it then. Back then, I only thought of the sugar on my tongue, how lucky I was that there was a man bringing candy, but now I remember the sadness.

We grew up. Mother grew disoriented. Anton died. Father came home in 1944, eighteen years after he'd been taken away. I was thirty years old. My sisters were married. The oldest was a doctor. The middle sister was in a sanitarium. The youngest sister was in Siberia. She and her husband had been declared “enemies of the people.” No one knew why. When Father came home, he was no longer giddy. His jaw was intact, but he walked with a limp. His right hand had been broken three or four times, so he started drawing dark disfigured faces with his left hand.

I worked for a local newspaper, taking pictures of farmers and factory workers.

I lived at home with Mother and Father. In my spare time, I worked as a portrait artist, taking photographs of those who could pay for developer and lighting, plus a few extra rubles for necessities or extravagances for pretty girls. And then, in 1950, I was reassigned to the former Lithuania. The Soviet Union was deporting Lithuanians to Siberia and simultaneously sending Russians to Lithuania, repopulating the state.

I won't lie to you. I was ambivalent about going. My mother's beauty and joy had turned to the purest ugliness. Her cheeks sagged. Her chin, which had been slightly dimpled, was like a crevice. I think my father was unconsciously drawing her disfigurement as he mumbled about hard work, how it was the path to righteousness. I think he believed this. They were sickening. I was suffocating, turning into a mumbler myself. I told you: I saw the world in pictures. I still do. There is nothing linear in my mind. There never has been, and Father's deportation to the gulag, and Anton's gift giving, and my sisters' later marriages, the one prison sentence, and my mother's dementia, none of it follows a straight line. It was all foretold in 1908 when my father embraced Bolshevism. I will always paint in blues, yellows, and blacks, the colors of bruises. I will always curve a line and drop graphite fast like gravity, like the world should be. I will never take an oath or swear any allegiance without changing the words in my brain. This is how I survive. If you are in a situation near to mine, do the same. Keep your brain tidy. Set perimeters.

Recently, I've begun painting my eyelids blue, setting the timer on my camera to capture just how blue an eye can be. My hair is long, twisted beneath a trapper's hat. I live in a third-floor walk-up in the Western Province of the Soviet Union. Above a shop. Out back, I raise rabbits, soft fuzzy things with pink and gray eyes. I work hard, taking pictures of the giddy people of this Western Province of the Soviet Union. Sometimes Mother writes to tell me that Father is doing poorly. Sometimes she writes to say that my sister, the one in a Soviet prison, might come home soon, and sometimes she writes to say that she's thinking of murdering Father or taking her own life. She's a complex woman, but when I think of her, I remember her before the revolution, before Father went away, when her beauty was her own and thereby ours.

I will not succumb to history.
Never.
My name is Lukas Blasczkiewicz, and if I learned one thing from my father, it is “
Never embrace another man's idea of the world.” I have my own ideas. This is a constant. In an inconsistent world, constants are a comfort. When I was thirty-six, I was awakened in the middle of the night and driven to a police station in Palanga to take photographs of a winged woman. Depending on your beliefs, she was like a bird, like a magic fairy, and most certainly like an angel sent from God. Because of her, I developed a thirst for miracles. I am on a quest like a knight. And no, I am not mad. I don't suffer dementia like my mother. I am sane. I am the sanest man in all the world. At least, I believe I am.

17

O
n January 9, 1950, Olga walked home. She felt sick, and this sickness was a biting, caustic, jabbing pain in her gut. Waves of nausea sent her to the toilet. Never had she felt anything like this, like the sickness was born on the inside and coming out, not like she'd caught something somewhere and she had merely to take an aspirin and dispense with it. This illness started in her trunk. It spread. Her scalp hurt. Her hands felt crackly. Her elbows were scaly. She was no longer a beautiful woman. She was like a monster, only she was just now recognizing her scales and claws.

She called the man in Moscow and said, “The woman I told you about, the woman named Daina Valetkiene . . . She is not a traitor.” Her voice broke. “Can you send her home? Can you send her back? Is she . . . dead?” Olga's chest tightened. There was a fist in her throat. She was telephoning from the kitchen. Anyone could be listening.

The man said, “The woman is still in Palanga. I don't know why. They like her there, I guess.”

“Can you do anything? Can you make them release her before she's transported?”

“She ought to be on a train by now, but she's not. The Western States are incompetent. I don't care how many Russians we send west. Incompetence and laziness run rampant.”

“Will you see about helping her? She is not an upstart like I thought.”

“Why do you care about this, Olga? It sounds like the sea is making you soft.”

Olga bit her lip. “That's not it.” She tried to sound upbeat. “You know me: I'll never change.”

The man laughed. “No, I don't guess you will. Come see me when you are back in Moscow. Will you do that? I miss you.”

“Of course.”

“I'll see what I can do for you. No guarantee. For all I know, the Lithuanians killed her in their bumbling. What is she like?”

Olga didn't know. She'd never met her.

In the jail cell, Daina ate a zeppelin: a traditional Lithuanian potato-and-pork dish that long predates the
Hindenburg.
Captain Vincentas's wife had cooked up a batch for Sunday dinner. He'd told his wife about what he'd seen, about the wings, and at first she didn't believe him.

“You're drunk all the time,” she said.

He said, “I swear on my father's life.”

His wife wrapped up three zeppelins for the girl. “Maybe she's an angel.”

“That's what I think.”

It was Sunday, a week since Daina had been imprisoned.

Daina ate hungrily. She said, “Please tell your wife thank you. This is delicious.”

Captain Vincentas said, “We got a call this morning.” He looked disappointed.

“What kind of call?” Daina took another bite. “Is it time for me to go?” She looked up at the dark ceiling, thinking of the waterbirds that might be feeding on the jail's winter lawn or flying overhead. Maybe she'd see the birds when they moved her outside for the transport to Russia.

Unconsciously, the captain touched her face. He couldn't help himself. Her cheeks were rosy despite the grayness that permeated the jail. “You're not being deported.”

She didn't understand.

“You're not being deported.”

“What's going to happen? What is it?”

“I think you're going home.”

“You think?” She felt her wings, flat beneath her nightgown, pulse. “Home?”

“I think.” He looked at her plate. “My wife is a good cook.”

Daina nodded.

“No one wants you to leave.”

“When can I go home? Can I really go home?” This was the first time that she thought of her apartment with Stasys as home. She belonged somewhere.

“They've already sent someone to get your husband. I wanted to share a meal with you, to show you kindness.”

She put her hands together in prayer, pressing them to her lips.
I'm going home.

Daina Vilkas Valetkiene was desperate to live.

Stasys rode to the jail in the same black car that had picked Daina up. He sat in the backseat, praying.
Please, God, let her be all right. Please . . .
Inside the jail, she was waiting, wearing the nightgown he'd last seen her in. A blanket was draped over her shoulders. It belonged to Captain Vincentas. She tried to give it back to him, but he said, “No, keep it. It's cold outside.” He wanted to hug her, but his subordinates were watching. It was unprofessional, and considering her wings, it might also be a sin. There were no formalities, no papers to sign. Everyone in Moscow would pretend that this had never happened, and everyone in the Palanga jailhouse, except for Lukas Blasczkiewicz and Captain Vincentas, would do the same.

Walking to the car, Stasys held Daina close. “Are you all right? Did they hurt you? Oh, Daina.” He kissed the side of her face and the top of her head. “I love you so much.” He'd never spoken the words aloud, but he couldn't stop from saying them now.

“I know you do, Stasys.” She saw it in the way he looked at her. For her part, she'd grown accustomed to him, to their daily rituals. She'd even become fond of him, his kindness. The man she knew as Stasys Valetkys couldn't be the same boy from her sisters' bedroom, not here in Palanga, not after pledging allegiance to Hitler and then to Stalin, not after nine long years together.

The same frosty windows that had watched Daina leave watched her return. She was covered by the captain's blanket and her husband's coat, climbing the front stoop. “Things are going to be different,” Daina told Stasys, as he turned the key to the front door. “Things are going to be better.”

“It's already better.” There was no point in inquiring about an explanation for Daina's detention, because if there was something in writing, it was usually “Fascist, Enemy of the People, Traitor to Mother Russia”—which meant traitor to Stalin, Russia's father. Really, it meant nothing. That was the problem. People disappeared and died for nothing.

On the same night that Stasys retrieved his wife from prison, Olga went to Bohdan the landlord. She knocked at his bedroom door. She was going to tell some cute story about the dog Emma. She was maybe going to ask for a glass of something stronger than water—because she needed it. Instead, she hiccupped. Then her left eye twitched. Then her face itched and a prickly rash spread across her chest and up her neck, shame made manifest.

When the woman who'd raised Olga contracted influenza, coughing herself to death on a straw-filled mat, Olga did not cry. When other women, supposed friends, met their ends, Olga would nurse them to the last, but she would not cry. Always, she felt a gnawing chill. She felt the cold most in her femur bones, and the sensation made her wonder if there was something more than this exhausting fleeting life, a compilation of pleasure, pain, and death. Tears were a sign of weakness, and weakness was sickening, but then, standing in front of a blind man, a man who couldn't see her tears, Olga succumbed.

When she tried to speak, Bohdan said, “You don't have to say anything.” He put his hands to her face and pressed the tears hard against her cheekbones—like he was trying to bury them back under her skin.

Olga fell asleep on his couch, and when she awoke, he said, “Let's get out of here.” In the darkness (the world was always dark for Bohdan), they walked Emma six blocks to a squat cement building behind a taller brick building where Bohdan left a satchel behind a stack of wood. He said, “Come on,” and they walked out of sight. When they returned twenty minutes later, there was whiskey and raspberry-filled chocolates where the satchel had been. Even though it wasn't rent day, Bohdan splurged. When they got home, he played Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday. Taking his hand, Olga said, “I'll teach you to dance.”

He said, “I'm blind. I'm not deaf. I can dance!” And he could. Old man that he was, he could dance. He took Olga in his arms and spun her gracefully in the cramped space, telling her, “Before the Russians, we had dance halls. We went out every night.” He laughed. “Communists aren't much for dancing. They more fancy marching.”

Olga laughed.
It's true! We much more fancy marching.
She was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party and proud of it. There were few things in life for which she was proud, but her allegiance to Stalin and the Party was something she took seriously. Stalin was like God. He giveth and he taketh away.

Bohdan ran his fingers along Olga's cheek and chin. “You are young and beautiful.” She searched his eyes. Even though he couldn't see her, he sensed something in her—she knew. She took his calloused hand and put it at her waist.

He said, “You're young, too young for me.”

She whispered, “My body is tired and I am sad.”

He said, “That's no good. You're too pretty to be sad.”

Two days later, eight blocks away, Daina climbed out of bed and went to the little Jewish girl's room where Stasys slept. She knelt on the floor, whispering Stasys's name. For nearly ten years, he'd been a light sleeper. He said, “What are you doing?” It was one o'clock in the morning. “Is everything okay?”

“I don't know.”

He sat up. “What's wrong?”

Daina said, “I don't know how to tell you.”

“What is it? You can tell me.”

Daina kneaded the thin cotton nightgown bunched in her lap. “Will you be my husband? Will you show me how to make love?”

His heart felt like it would beat out of his chest. His hands quaked. He never imagined that she would want to love him. Slowly, Stasys made his way to the floor. “Are you sure?”

She nodded.

He pressed his lips to hers. He could inhale her, her wind-chapped lips ripe like fat berries against his. He didn't remark on her wings. He'd known about them for so long, they seemed as natural as her arms and legs, which were lean and sculpted. He saw her limbs and sometimes her wings when she climbed the dunes and bird-watched at sunset. When she was in their apartment, she was clothed head to toe. At home, her hands, calloused from work, were always busy with some chore, but not on the beach and not now. Not here. Beneath Stasys's blanket, Daina was the woman he watched on the beach. She was sublime. He'd never even held her hands, so he did that now, feeling the striations on her fingertips and breathing deep the rich smell of pastry still clinging to her hair. He'd waited so long, and he'd been willing to wait forever. In the early morning hours, he felt breathless. Her legs were wrapped around his. Neither of them spoke.

Hours later, a sparrow flapped ice from its wings, darting outside the window, and Stasys told Daina that he loved her, anticipating that she might respond in kind. Instead, she smiled contentedly and shut her eyes to the morning light.

Stasys was perplexed and disappointed. He naïvely thought that if a woman gave herself to a man, she must love him, but now he was annoyed with himself. Olga had been willing to
be
with him. Certainly, she did not love him, nor he her. It was stupid of him to think that words were more important than actions. Additionally, he couldn't know what Daina was thinking. She'd never been transparent. No one had. No one could afford to show the outside world who she was, on the inside—not in this world. Stasys had to believe that Daina loved him. He'd been with her nine years, a boyhood, and he'd loved her from the moment he'd found her sitting in the dirt. His love was enough. Nothing else mattered.