Above Us Only Sky (2 page)

I know that old people die, but the Old Man has been old since I met him. He's not supposed to die. We used to talk a lot about history, about the notion that life loops over and eventually you'll catch up with your younger self. Things repeat. Life keeps happening. Maybe that's what's happening now, maybe the Old Man is slowing down to catch up, and he'll leave the hospital a younger Old Man. All better.

He used to say that the observers, people like us who like to watch the birds, are far wiser than the TV watchers. We learn more from the birds, including how to nurture, how to sing, and how to adapt and change. You don't learn anything watching wars play out on the evening news.

When we take the boats out to tag migratory birds on their way to warmer climates, I always think about my first visit to Lithuania with the Old Man. He was amazed that I knew the names of so many birds. His mother was loony for vast-winged birds like gooneys, big birds that can traverse a whole ocean. The Old Man didn't know that I'd been studying coastal birds since I was eight. On the phone, I asked Oma, “What's wrong with him?”

“He's old, Prudence.”

It's June 1, 2005, so he is eighty-four. When I met him, he was sixty-eight.

“He should live to be one hundred.”

Oma sighed deeply.

“I don't want him to die,” I said. That's not how the Vilkas family rolls. We don't lie down in some hospital bed. We take a bullet to the brain.

Oma sighed again. I knew I was being ridiculous. She's spent her life with the Old Man. If anyone has a right to be upset, it's her.

“If you're going to come,” she said, “you should come soon.”

2

Prudence

T
here's this quickening and breathlessness at night that calls to mind the baby birds we've rescued. The insides of their mouths are pink, nearly the color of the setting sun. They are the most vulnerable creatures in the world, which is how I feel now. Exposed, ravenous for life, for one more trip to Lithuania, one more adventure with the Old Man.

I called Oma this morning. “How's he doing?”

“Not good, Prudence.” Her voice broke. “Are you coming?”

“Of course I am.”

When I met the Old Man, I was sixteen, rubbing my scars like pieces of flint, praying for a spark. As it turns out, I come from a long line of leggy bird women, women to whom I am allied by blood and birthright. The Old Man knew our history. When we finally met, he told me about the birds.

The first one we know about was named Aušrin
ė
. She was the Old Man's grandmother. Her name is Lithuanian for the morning Venus, the Sun's daughter. According to the Old Man, she was a girl hiding beneath the thick Lithuanian forest, her own wings bound by strips of cloth. She was an only child, always within reach of her parents, living under brush and pine, in trenches, battling Czar Alexander II's Cossacks in the darkest night, hand to hand, knife to knife. Aušrin
ė
crouched beneath her mother's skirts, three of them—khaki, dirt brown, and potato-­colored—sometimes all worn at once. Every few days, Aušrin
ė
's mother washed one of the skirts in a stream and beat it against a rock, and then she wore two. Once that skirt had dried, Aušrin
ė
's mother made it the top skirt, and Aušrin
ė
's worldview alternated from khaki to dirt brown to potato. After midnight, nearby villagers, supporters of the freedom fighters, ventured toward the forest and left baskets of food, but it was never enough.

In January, the fresh skirt froze along with Aušrin
ė
's mother's hands so that none of the skirts was particularly clean or warm. Within this frozen cocoon, Aušrin
ė
held fast to the heat of her mother's thigh.

The Old Man heard these stories from his mother, who heard them from Aušrin
ė
. These stories
are as much a part of me as my own life experiences. When I feel the warmth of an injured dove in my hands, its tiny heart pounding, I think of Aušrin
ė
, vulnerable, terrified, holding fast to her mother's thigh.

According to the Old Man, the trees came to life back then, shaking black dirt from their roots. They marched forward, a brave effort to bolster the freedom fighters; their tall piney boughs turning into knobby arms, they tossed the Russian soldiers from their midst. The pines meant to protect their people, the Lithuanian freedom fighters, but it was not hard to light a match or follow a trail of boots to a hole where a man, woman, and little girl hid. Eventually, all the freedom fighters would be shot or rounded up. Aušrin
ė
's parents were killed because they wanted to be Lithuanian and not part of Western Russia. Aušrin
ė
would be dragged from the forest. Her body was limp. Her parents were dead. Her head was shorn to protect her from lice and rape. It was January 1864, and she was walking beside other orphaned girls, girls pretending to be boys, their faces smudged with dirt. She was taken to her grandparents, who were already walking away from Lithuania. She would now walk with them. No one told the exiles where they were going, only that they were going.

Day and night, men and women begged the Russian soldiers to go home. They were shot and fell to the snow. There are tales passed down from one generation to the next that recount how the snow remained white, that no one bled, but these are stories, fantastical rememberings, or if fact, maybe the men and women were too frozen to bleed.

Aušrin
ė
walked in her mother's shoes, much too big for her, her wings itching under a wool tunic that was cinched beneath a man's coat. It dragged the ice.

As she walked, Aušrin
ė
remembered the Lithuanian music her parents and grandparents had taught her. She pictured the scales and notes, their ascent and descent. She was thirsty, licking her lips until they were twice their size, blistered and numb, the skin flaking black. She remembered her mother on violin before the great uprising, before they fled to the forest. The year was 1863. Her parents had explained to Aušrin
ė
that as they were born on Lithuanian soil, so too they would die on Lithuanian soil. They would not abandon their country. Aušrin
ė
thought that she was not as fortunate as her parents. She was forcibly leaving the Lithuanian soil they so loved.

Her grandparents were nervous and old. Aušrin
ė
thought that they would all succumb to the snow and die in some no-man's-land between Lithuania and nowhere, but her grandfather kept patting the wool cap on her head, assuring her, “We will walk home again. Do not worry, little bird.” He didn't mean him, that he'd walk home again. He was going to die of exhaustion and frostbite in a foreign land. He meant Lithuania would walk home again. He meant AuÅ¡rin
ė
.

When I met the Old Man in 1989, he told me that I should be proud of my Lithuanian heritage. “We Lithuanians are not shirkers.” The Old Man was lively, smacking his fist in his palm. “We are fighters, Prudence Vilkas.” He pointed his cigar at me. “You are a fighter.” Up until the day the Old Man first telephoned me, I had no idea that I was Lithuanian, that other girls had been born with wings, or that I was born a fighter.

When Aušrin
ė
's grandfather fell to the ice and could not rise, he pressed the gold pocket watch, the same watch my father passed on to me, into Aušrin
ė
's palm. She slipped it in her coat pocket. The watch was real gold, and all that was left of their estate. Aušrin
ė
concealed it as carefully as she hid her wings, telling herself that she carried nothing, not wings, not watches, not dreams. When her grandmother disappeared in an icy mist, Aušrin
ė
considered falling to the ground. It would be easy to sleep; she could join her mother and father in Heaven. But then she felt a gloved hand from this world, the cold desolate one, squeeze hers. Nearly frozen, she squeezed back. It was all she could do. She had lost her voice.

During the day, Aušrin
ė
walked without resting, and at night, the soldiers herded her and the other exiles into makeshift jails. All the while, the gloved hand that belonged to a boy two years her senior reached out to hold hers. This boy's parents were also gone, fallen victim to starvation. They had given their last bits of food to him. His name was Steponas, and every time Aušrin
ė
dropped, because she wanted to give up, he pulled her to her feet. He wasn't letting go. At times, he held her from behind, feeling her shrunken wings against his chest, his hands clenched in a fist, to keep her from falling down.

Their caravan of sleighs broke down on the steppes of modern-day Kazakhstan. The exiles were told repeatedly that they would never return to Lithuania and so they worked to make a new home. Lithuania was a memory in their muscles and bones. Lithuania survived in the sweat on their brows as they shaped bricks from hay and mud to build houses before the next winter arrived. Steponas and the other boys erected a cross. As the Old Man explained to me, “They made a small Lithuania away from their Lithuania. They made it their own. In secret, they sang and danced and recounted their Lithuanian history.”

Over many years, the exiles built farms and schools where they spoke Lithuanian. Outside their homes, they spoke Russian, but behind closed doors, always Lithuanian. They lived this way, reaping what they'd sown, making babies, building fences to keep thieves at bay. In 1874, Steponas married Aušrin
ė
. She gave birth to two sons. Their younger son, Petras, was the Old Man's father. Their older son was called Juozas, but later he would Americanize it to Joseph.

Fifty-four years passed. In between, one generation died and one was born.

As the First World War neared its end, Aušrin
ė
's husband, Steponas, and their two sons, Juozas and Petras, made plans for their return to Lithuania. Petras had dark hair and blue eyes. Like the Old Man. Like Freddie. I am tied to all these people by more than wings and watches. If I ever think to forget where I come from, my scars itch and my breathing quickens.

The Old Man said that as an old woman, Aušrin
ė
stopped concealing her wings. Instead, they bulged and quivered beneath whatever shift she wore. The townspeople in the village in Kazakhstan called her Paukštis,
bird
. Their village thrived. The farms produced crops. Not everyone was making plans to walk back to Lithuania. For many, too many years had passed. It was too risky to leave. For some, they were too old for the long journey, and for others, they couldn't find proof of their Lithuanian identity. The children and grandchildren of the exiled knew Lithuania only through stories and music. Aušrin
ė
and her husband hadn't seen Lithuania in more than half a century. Petras had never seen it. Papers had to be drawn. It was a difficult undertaking, but they all agreed that they must return. Aušrin
ė
and Steponas and their children, Juozas and Petras, and Petras's wife, Aleksandra (the Old Man's mother), gathered all the possessions they could stow in two wagons and began the yearlong trek back to Lithuania. Aušrin
ė
and Steponas never doubted returning to a land they knew from distant memory kept close in the bone because the land itself, the rich soil, belonged to them. Lithuania was their birthright.

Aušrin
ė
's grandfather's gold watch was hidden inside a mattress along with what valuables the family had acquired over five decades. The mattress, piled with a chest, carpets, and bedding, was in the bottom of a camel-drawn wagon. According to the Old Man, when they first saw the ancient Lithuanian forest, Aušrin
ė
's wings expanded, slicing through her wool shawl. The group wept at the sight, not of Aušrin
ė
's wings, but of something even more spectacular: their homeland.

In 1918, when Aušrin
ė
sat on Lithuanian soil, drawing lines in the dirt she remembered so well, she was sixty-four, the same age as her grandfather when he died in the snow. As predicted, she had walked home again.

In the 1920s, Petras, who taught music at the university, and his brother, a tailor, purchased a plot of land. The earth was thirsty for Lithuanian sweat. Everything Petras planted grew as if fertility spells had been cast. The Old Man told me, “Nothing died, Prudence. I whacked a stick at the flowers, because I was a stupid boy, but nothing died. The stalks grew to spite me. The gardens were lush with vegetation. The ladybugs like jewels.” According to the Old Man, it was a magical place.

Last night, I tagged white pelicans, the first I've seen this year. Later, I called Veronica to ask if she knew about the Old Man.

“Your father told me a few days ago.”

“What do you mean? Why didn't you call me?”

“I figured you knew more than I did. I figured you'd call me when you were ready.”

Although the Old Man still refers to her as the “woman who is not Lithuanian and not German,” Veronica likes him. It's hard not to like him. Last night when I put a band on a toddler pelican, it flopped around in the nest and the female and male pelicans shielded it with their feathers. There are fewer toddlers this year. Usually, we see three per nest, but this year, there are only one or two in each nest. We don't know if there is a new predator or if the pelicans are laying fewer eggs. On the phone, Veronica said, “Are you going to fly up and see him?”

“Of course.”

“I can fly up with you. I can drive your way and we can fly up together.” When I didn't respond, she took my silence to mean yes. I know that she is trying to be nice, but this sadness feels like my own, not something to be shared.