Above Us Only Sky (19 page)

21

November 1989

F
our hundred ninety-two miles west of Moscow, in Vilnius, Lithuania, Lukas Blasczkiewicz unrolled a sheet of canvas. Squinting at the speckled material, he looked for the outline of an angel. In everything, he looked for the winged girl who'd probably met an icy grave in Siberia. Because of
her
, he was not only a photographer, he was a painter and collector of wings—real wings, paper wings, wings formed from clay and glass, discarded cardboard, wrapping paper, particleboard, and packing material. Lukas Blasczkiewicz believed in miracles. After taking
her
photograph, he'd kept his own roll of film, developed it in secret, and printed the black-and-white photographs. With the negatives, he used milk and paint to add color. He experimented with techniques, curious about the bright light surrounding the girl. Each time he manipulated the negatives, he discovered something new.

Drawing inspiration from the photographs, he painted the girl singularly white, singularly red, singularly wrapped in her angel wings, cocooned as she might've been in that holding cell. He loved
her
, always and forever, for giving him the gift of sight. Every time a bird flew past, Lukas caught his breath.
God lives here now
. Twenty years ago, his mother died. At the funeral, Lukas had dropped a small locket with a picture of
her
, the winged girl, into the grave. His sisters were at the burial. His father was not; he was bedridden, dying the next year. His family was a shambled lot: one of his sisters was taking medication for something called manic-­depressive illness; another had lost three children to influenza. The third was so emaciated, self-starved, she looked like a corpse. Lukas might've been sad if he didn't see a little light in each of them, a glimmer of possibility. Because of
her
, he saw this light in everyone and everything.

Lukas's shop dated back to the seventeenth century and was located near the former Church of Saint Casimir. Under Soviet rule, the church was now the Museum of Atheism. Lukas couldn't pass the former church without snickering at the irony. He remembered that the winged girl had paid reverence to Saint Casimir. The fact that the Soviets would convert a church into a museum of atheism amplified the absurdity of the communist state. A former Polish and Lithuanian prince, Saint Casimir was a pious man who reportedly waited predawn for the chapel gates to be unlocked so that he could pray to the Virgin Mary. At age twenty-five, Saint Casimir died from tuberculosis. In 1522, after miracles were reported and attributed to him, he was canonized. It was rumored that his coffin, removed by the Russians, could cure illness. Lukas believed in such things. In fact, he was the kind of man to buy magic beans. He never considered himself foolish. Just faithful.

In the early morning, while the town slept, Lukas collected scrap metal in the form of tin cans and wire. He melted the metal down, cutting out and soldering wings. With a circa 1955 camera, he took moving pictures of the wings fluttering in the light of Vilnius square, outside the Museum of Atheism. He hung them, each pair, from the ceiling of his shop. Some of them he left metallic, while others he painted every color of the morning and night sky. Inside, he'd built a bubble machine that vented onto the street and filled the narrow passageway running perpendicular to his storefront with iridescent bubbles of all shapes and sizes. Children and adults passing by pointed at his three-story home. “An inventor lives there.”

“No, he's a magician.”

“He makes movies.”

“He paints.”

“He takes photographs.”

“I think he is mad.”

Lukas Blasczkiewicz spent his life making and creating. Ceaseless and devoted, he thought always of the girl with the wings who'd saved him from selfishness, depression, and self-loathing. Because of
her
, he saw the miracle of life everywhere. In butterflies and beetles, in the sky and underfoot. The antithesis of his Bolshevist enthusiast father, Lukas believed in more than men and their egoistic ventures. Solitary, he never felt alone.

In November 1989, on the same night that the Vilkas family prepared to fly west, first to Saint Petersburg, and then to Vilnius, Lukas Blasczkiewicz pulled open the heavy drapes that hid the interior of his shop from the curious passersby. He walked out onto the sidewalk, snowflakes the size of fists falling fast. The world was white like a photograph before it develops. Full of possibility. He stood back, looking through the plate-glass window to admire what he had wrought from the outside in. Cupping his face to the glass, he smiled to see his handmade paper lampshades, lit by candles, conical and square, suspended at different heights, hanging from his tin-plated ceiling. The shop emanated warmth. It was a refuge, a montage of who he'd become. The walls were covered with bright paintings and black-and-white photographs, each work, each wing rendered in as many forms and hues as he could imagine. The wind whipped his hair, and the black cat, her whiskers streaked white, meowed to return indoors. Lukas scratched his chin, thinking,
It is good and right to look from the outside in. Too many people don't stop to see themselves inside the snow globe, the big hand shaking the sphere.
Lukas grinned at the staircase he'd built from wrought iron. It spiraled to a second floor where he kept his books, everything from Beethoven to Byzantinism, but his favorite books were about flight, about the Wright Brothers—Orville and Wilbur—about Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart. He prized picture books with fairies,
Angels in Art, Birds of Eastern Europe.
He'd made this. The cat wound round his ankles and the wind gusted from the east. Lukas held up his finger. Something other than snow was blowing, heading their way. His thighs shivered. He bent down for Cat. She nuzzled and burrowed in his sleeve.

22

Old Man, 1989

N
o one warns you that when you grow old, your heart that's been cooperating and keeping quiet, like it should do, is suddenly going to speak up and make you a driveling wreck.

I was a curmudgeon. I often wish that I had remained that way, to keep these blasted tears at bay. I feel my heart broken how it was nearly five decades ago, when the death of my family was raw, before I survived Germany and met Ingeburg.

When we were in Moscow, I knew that we had to get the hell out before Ingeburg succumbed to her fears. I knew that once we were in Lithuania, she would feel the land that I had been telling her about for so many decades. Because she was my bride, I thought of Lithuania as her home too. After all our years together, it seemed like she had to have known my sisters and my mother and father—even though she dismissed these notions, calling me crazy, insisting she was German and not Lithuanian. She could not be with this old man and not have some of my Lithuania rub off on her.

First we flew from Moscow to Saint Petersburg, and from there we boarded a plane for Vilnius, Lithuania. We sat on that damn plane for seven hours. It was like being held hostage because we were ready to leave the official Soviet Union for the so-called Western Province. We were ready to be in Vilnius, a grand city for six hundred years. I could not believe that finally I would see my homeland again. Finally, my son Freddie would see where I was born, where his family came from. And dear Prudence would see the steeples and the stained-glass windows filled with angels' wings.

It was worth the wait. I can tell you that it was worth Moscow. Part of me had feared that the Soviet Union had razed the churches and the university, my university, the largest university in Europe, but they had not. They had spared my city. The Gothic and Baroque churches, dating from the fifteenth century, were the same as I remembered, only the crucifixes were gone. Many of the stained-glass windows were covered with plastic tarps. It was an odd thing to see. One of the churches was a garage and another was a warehouse. There was even one turned into a radio factory. But my university where I had attended for one semester had been spared. It is the oldest university in Eastern Europe. I told Freddie and I told Prudence and even Veronica, who is not Lithuanian or German but from some fishing village or something. There were gardens and thirteen courtyards. Even in November, flowers bloomed. When I was seventeen, I had climbed to the top of the bell tower with a girl I fancied, and I remember it was May or June and the sun was setting and we could smell jasmine from the garden below, and that girl kissed me. I wish that I remembered her name.

On the streets in Vilnius, I took hold of Ingeburg's hand. I was never afraid that she would
die
in Moscow, because she is the strongest woman I have ever met, but I was worried about her. In Lithuania, she was regaining her strength as I knew she would. Prudence was skipping in the sunlight and I mistook her for my sister Daina. She wore black tights and short boots, a wool skirt like a Scottish kilt and a matching hat. It was an outfit like my sister would've worn. It is not easy to feel things, not pain or joy, because pain sits with you, and joy is fleeting, easily swatted like a bee. I know all too well these things, and even in the city I cherished, I contained my joy because seeing, touching, and smelling my birthplace, walking streets I remembered vividly as a child was untenable and unimaginable. Sometimes I feared it was a dream. The life I knew would be gone and once again I would be screaming, waking cold between the sheets. It is hard to feel deeply. It is easier to erect walls. When I listen to the great composers, I can settle in their world and hide. I am safe. Music is a refuge. I think the boy understands this. I used to think that he understood very little, but there is more of me in him than I thought. If there had been no war and no purging, would I be more like Freddie? It was stupid to imagine such things. If there had been no madness, there would be no Ingeburg. There would be no Freddie. There would be no Prudence. I might've married the girl whose name I can't remember, the one I kissed on the bell tower. These were the mad thoughts of an emotional man seeing his homeland after forty-eight years.

On our first day in Vilnius, I took my family toward the Upper Castle. I wanted them to see the splendor that surpassed anything in Moscow. On the way there, I grabbed hold of Natasha Sluska's gloved hand, startling the woman. “Do you like your job?” I wanted to know. She pushed her spectacles up her nose and declared that she liked it very much. At this nonsense, I told her that she was not a smart woman. Ingeburg gasped and told Natasha Sluska, “He does not mean it. Do not listen to him. He says that to me all the time.” Natasha Sluska smiled her polite Russian smile. Her thin lips were chapped white, blending in with her face. I told the Russian woman that I was tired of her company. She sneezed and Ingeburg said, “Gesundheit.”

Natasha Sluska told us to go on our way. She would go back to the hotel.

“If I knew we could be rid of you, I would've spoken up sooner,” I said.

“It's easier here than in Moscow.” Natasha smiled at us and patted Ingeburg's hand to reassure her. “It's not as strict.”

We continued without Mrs. Sluska, passing another church, one used to house grain, but its stained-glass windows were intact, an image of the Virgin Mother holding the Christ child, an angel on each shoulder, a rendering of Our Lady of Perpetual Help.

As I remember, the others were in awe of my city. They regarded everything as sacred ground, but me, I could not shut up. It was growing harder and harder for me to contain my happiness. My God, but it was strange that everywhere we looked there were turrets and steeples, but nowhere could you get on your knees before a cross and praise God. My mother was a woman of faith. She believed in God and angels and girls born with wings.

Approaching Pilies Street, I breathed a sigh of relief because it still was a market street with vendors selling linen and amber, jewelry and art. Shielding my eyes, I gazed at the Upper Castle. I will never, not for my whole life, forget what I saw or how I felt. Even as an Old Man of sixty-eight, I was strong, but right then, I was weak in my legs. Wobbly even, blinking in the sunlight that accompanied my joy. Up there, where I had last seen the Nazi flag fly and before the Nazi flag, the Soviet flag, I saw my own flag. I had no words for anyone just then. Instead, I pointed, and for all my attempt to contain emotion, a rush of tears harbored for decades spilled down my cheeks. My beard was like a wet sponge. I was not embarrassed. I felt no shame.

Ingeburg demanded to know what was wrong. She was talking about going for Natasha Sluska, worried about one thing or another. I vehemently shook my head to indicate that she should call no one. She should not be a fool, but she should look up to where I was pointing. There was a young man, a university student with a satchel passing by, and I grabbed hold of his arm. I couldn't help it. I said, “Look there! Look up there! They've raised our flag. How is it that they've raised our flag?”

In Lithuanian, he explained that last year, a group of students had taken down the Soviet flag. A crowd had gathered. The young man had been there. He shook my hand excitedly and told me how he and the others had sung the national song of Lithuania. They'd feared someone would be shot. Certainly, they supposed there would be some terrible reprisal, but then nothing bad happened. Within hours, our flag had been raised in its place and remained.

The student and I were pointing at the flag. Pulling my handkerchief from my back pocket, I thanked him. I was still crying and then I was singing, not quietly, not fearfully, but unabashedly and with gusto, and this young man joined me. Freddie, who knew our national song because at one time he was a good and obedient son, joined us. We sang:
“Lietuva, T
ė
vyne m
Å«
s
ų
, Tu didvyri
ų
ž
eme, I
Å¡
praeities Tavo s
Å«
n
Å«
s Te stipryb
ę
semia.”

I heard Prudence asking Ingeburg, “What does it mean?”

Ingeburg explained, “They love their country.” As I've said, she is sometimes not as smart as she thinks. Sometimes she is much more German and American than Lithuanian. She cannot help it. Our national hymn means much more than loving one's country. The hymn's power soon became evident to everyone. On the street, men and women stopped and turned toward our flag. They also sang. I imagined that these men and women were like those men and women who'd been murdered over four decades ago. I imagined they were teachers and lawyers, doctors and butchers, poets and locksmiths, students and mechanics. I was proud. This was the Lithuania that I had described to Prudence.

Ingeburg said, “Someone is going to see and report this. We'll be picked up. They won't let us leave.”

I ignored my wife and her fears.

When the song was done, everyone erupted in applause. Then, as if nothing extraordinary had occurred, the people continued on their way. I think my granddaughter understood then that this was also her homeland. Of course she came from this place—a country where everyone was always singing—and I think my son felt it too. He patted me on the back. There were tears in my boy's eyes. I turned to Prudence to explain. “Our hymn means don't forget history. Mankind is our duty. Unity. Lithuania forever . . . We are Lithuanian. We are not the Soviet Union.” I wiped my face with my coat sleeve and smiled. “We never give up trying to be free.”

Ingeburg said, “What if we get reported?”

“Stop it with your worry! Stop it this instant!” I was irate with my wife, tired of her fears, and I told her, “No more!” In Moscow, I could understand, but not here.

We continued down Pilies Street. We were walking and I suspect that my wife was worrying that Natasha Sluska was reporting us to someone in the KGB, but then we heard a man speaking in Polish.