Above Us Only Sky (17 page)

The waiting room walls were the color of pea soup, and Stasys pressed his forehead to one of two small windows frosted with ice. He was reminded of the windows with eyes. There was always someone watching, always someone who knew things he didn't know, like that his parents were to be exterminated. Someone knew that some girls refuse to bleed while others are born with wings. But Stayis hadn't known any of these things. Someone or something knew everything that had been unexpected for Stasys, the slices of life that had knocked him off his feet and to the ground to grovel in the dirt. He was a survivor, but he didn't know if he could do it anymore. The Lord gives and the Lord takes away, and too much had been taken.

The doctor found Stasys with his nose and cheek pressed flat against the glass. Stasys saw the doctor's reflection and felt the man's hand heavy on his shoulder. The doctor smelled of antiseptic. Stasys presumed the worst. Despite the cold, Stasys was sweating. The doctor said, “She's going to be fine,” and patted Stasys's back. “She's a tough bird.” Someone or something knew that Stasys could endure no more. He turned to shake the doctor's hand, holding it in his grip, both men understanding the weight of this simple gesture.

Two days later, Stasys and Daina took their healthy baby girl home. Audra's head did lose its conical shape, and her eyes did change from black to blue. The first year, she slept in the same room as Stasys and Daina, but when she was nearly two, they gave her the little girl's bedroom and the porcelain doll. It was 1953. On March fourth, they secretly celebrated the Feast of Saint Casimir. Daina had told Stasys about Saint Casimir's visitation in the prison cell. They would always celebrate his feast. The next day, March fifth, Joseph Stalin, general secretary of the Communist Party Central Committee, died.

Comrades wept in the streets. Presumably out of grief, but truthfully out of jubilation. Daina and Stasys wept. The greatest butcher the world had ever known was dead. It didn't matter why anyone wept. It was a mass catharsis of the people, and that bastard Stalin would've liked it.

A month later in the quiet of two a.m., Olga pressed herself against Bohdan.

Bohdan was old, but he was not too old, and he would not pretend that he hadn't fantasized about feeling himself inside Olga. A man can't listen to jazz and swing and smell a woman and trace her figure with his hands without wondering,
What if she wants to be with me?
On this fortuitous night, Olga told Bohdan that she was crazy about him.

Bohdan laughed because he was an old man and he could scarcely remember the last time a woman was swooning on his account.

Olga guided his hand along the curve in her waist, stopping at the bend in her knee and then at the bend in her arm. She pressed his hand beneath and between her breasts.

Olga had always thought there was something bright within herself. If anyone could see this potential, it would be a blind man. Bohdan climbed on top of Olga, pouring himself like molten iron into her. Olga's skin was the stuff of Chinese lanterns, paper thin, and Bohdan was the flame causing her to rise high above the hovels of her past. Bohdan illuminated the night and, if only for a few seconds, saw the luminescence of Olga's face.

Across town, Daina was awake. She saw light spurting like firecrackers, spilling from a window, buoyed by the cloud-filled night. It settled like a shiny halo over the seaside village.

As Time will do whether we want it to or not, it passed. It passed quickly. Daina and Stasys grew older, and Audra grew up. Nothing was as scary as it had been when Stalin was alive. He was a mythic figure, the great father, who'd ensured the nation's success. This is what Stasys now wrote in pamphlets that were distributed to schools throughout Lithuania. There were fewer deportations to Siberia. No one felt as nervous about smiling or even laughing. Stasys joined the Lithuanian resistance. With ample access to paper, he participated in the underground newspaper, smuggling news about Lithuania's terrible economic condition to the Western world, especially to Lithuanians living abroad.

Olga still worked alongside Stasys, but nowadays, she talked a blue streak about her blind man. “I love him,” she told Stasys. After so many years, it was hard for Stasys to hold a grudge against Olga. They saw each other every day, and even though he felt in his bones that she was responsible for Daina's arrest, he couldn't hate her. As Daina once said, “Everybody has a story.”

PART FOUR

It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.

—Salman Rushdie

18

Prudence

M
y Oma and the Old Man returned home to Brooklyn. They had a trip to Lithuania to plan. During those months of planning before our actual journey, my Oma's worry lines doubled. Her fear had nothing to do with flying and everything to do with her past. In order to fly to Lithuania, officially known as the Western Province of the Soviet Union, we would first have to fly through Moscow. The East Germans, under orders from Moscow, had built that dreaded Berlin Wall that my Oma feared. At first just barbed wire, but later, concrete and watchtowers; the border guards had shot anyone who tried to cross, and she knew that too many boys had bled to death in the no-man's-zone between East and West. And now she was supposed to willingly enter the Soviet Union? It seemed like begging for death. She'd never been back to Germany. Her cousins were trapped in East Berlin. In order for her to even telephone one of them, her call was routed through Moscow. And now she was traveling to the Soviet Union? She couldn't imagine. Or she could imagine . . . which is why she wouldn't go. She couldn't go. Not to Lithuania, and certainly not to Moscow.

She explained this to the Old Man, and he dismissed her fears. “You worry too much.”

“And you are too optimistic.”

Certainly, the Old Man couldn't remember the last time anyone had called him optimistic.

I was not afraid. Rather, I felt that I had lived my whole life to take this trip. It was late summer, but already I was counting the days. In Los Vientos, blue crabs were fat, the size of dogs, a sign that the worst of the heat was nearly behind us. I remember that I no longer had time for Wheaton. I'd replaced him with father-daughter dates, phone calls with the Old Man, and dusty history books. I'd also started taking lone walks to the pier because I coveted the ghost of my great-aunt Daina. She did not belong to Wheaton. I remember that when I did see Wheaton, I was usually relaying the Old Man's stories. Wheaton's eyes reflected the Atlantic. He stopped telling me about his visions. I guess he knew that I had other things on my mind. He never complained. He couldn't find fault or place blame. He understood my desire to see my homeland and discover my birthright. I suspect he was counting beats:
the closing curtain
. Five.

From the pier, I admired the horizon, imagining what was on the other side. I didn't tumble again. There was no reason. Soon enough, I'd be crossing over. I felt the pulse and beat of bird wings like a musical interlude, a drumroll of sorts.

On November 4, 1989, we boarded a flight from New York to London. My Oma warned each of us that we were flying into the belly of the beast. “We should turn around in London and fly home.” On our flight from London to Moscow, her knees buckled in the aisle, and Freddie had to basically carry her to her seat. “We shouldn't be doing this.” When she started hyperventilating, the Old Man pulled a bottle of tranquilizers from his pocket, and Freddie ordered her a whiskey on the rocks to wash it down.

After a while, the sedative took effect. My Oma tinkled her ice and fingered the small bag of pretzels on her lap tray. “She is fine,” the Old Man assured us. Veronica and Freddie held hands. The Old Man regarded them with curiosity. Veronica was the woman who was neither Lithuanian nor German, but she was my mother, so she couldn't be the most terrible woman in the world. I had my father's dark hair, but other than that, I resembled neither of my parents. They'd started dating in September, after Freddie took up residence across the causeway in Saint Mark's. Never mind that they were still married. At sixteen, I could not be bothered with their ridiculousness.

My Oma took another pill and ate a package of sugar cookies. After her third sedative, she lost consciousness, her head slumping onto Freddie's shoulder. Many of the passengers on our plane spoke Russian, and somewhere in the sky above the Republic of Volgograd, the Old Man was out of his seat, starting conversations with them. “I'm Lithuanian. I am taking my family to see our homeland.” The Old Man was very proud of his return. According to him, everyone on the flight told him that he would love Moscow. “It is a golden city.”

At some point, we all nodded off, awakened by the pilot's announcement that we would be landing shortly. Ingeburg was white-knuckled, gripping the armrests. As the landing gear came down and the wing flaps came up, she had a noisy, foul burst of gas. When the tires touched down on the freezing tarmac, she vomited on Freddie's lap. The interior of the plane rattled as Freddie grabbed for the sick bag. My Oma apologized. Then she refused to move. “We should not be here,” she insisted. We were stuck in our seats while the other passengers made putrid faces as they were trapped in the aisle by her row. We were the last ones to disembark.

Surprisingly, there was a car, courtesy of a branch of the Soviet Union's Diplomacy Office, waiting for our family. The Old Man had never been in the Soviet Union, but he liked the changes that Mikhail Gorbachev had instigated—what he'd seen on the news, the new concepts like perestroika and glasnost. Change was happening fast. Of course, the Old Man believed in the fall of communism. He'd always believed in it, but what had once seemed impossible now seemed to be coming to fruition. It was emotionally overwhelming.

We managed to clean my Oma up and get her off the plane, but she did not want to get in the waiting car, certain it meant transport to our deaths. The other passengers had descended into the underground rail system. “It's okay,” Freddie told her. The Old Man was surveying the landscape, telling everyone to hurry it up. “Inge,” he said, “get in the car and stop being not smart.”

The colorless November sky reminded me of how Wheaton's eyes sometimes looked.

As our official car headed through the city, we saw high-rise utilitarian housing complexes, row after row of gray and tan buildings. Nearing Moscow's center, we crossed a grand bridge over the Moskva River and encountered gold-domed Gothic cathedrals and palaces. Our hotel was on a busy street, not far from the Kremlin. Lined with flags, it looked more like an embassy than a hotel.

At the front desk, a woman with a blond coif and bright blue eyes informed us that they'd had two luxury suites reserved for us, but then they'd had a celebrity—whose identity must remain a top secret—come and insist on those suites. She smiled, apologizing for the inconvenience, explaining that this was to be expected as we were now in Moscow, the richest, grandest city in the world.

On the elevator ride up to our floor, the Old Man told me that the hotel reminded him of the fun house at Coney Island, all trickery, smoke and mirrors. I thought it was quite lovely, with high ceilings and red velvet drapes, but as we entered our adjoining rooms, he pointed out just what he meant. Our drapes were dusty and cinched with jute rope. The writing table was wobbly. The ceiling was stained with watermarks and black mold, and the windowpanes were loose, the glazing nearly gone, the draft vicious. Our two rooms shared a bathroom, and although it smelled of bleach, many of the floor tiles were cracked or missing. Outside, a heavy snow fell, and if you stood close to the window, you felt the cold. Being from Florida, I liked the cold. It was new to me.

While Freddie and Veronica unpacked, my Oma curled up on the bed. The Old Man checked our room for bugs, not the crawling kind. He told me that he never imagined himself in Moscow, but he would do whatever it took to show me our homeland. “Just wait until you see our Lithuania.” He put his hand to his chest. I put my hand on top of his and thought I felt his heart beating. I could not wait!