Above Us Only Sky (7 page)

It was nearly a mile to the American camp where Frederick sat eating canned meat and crackers. He'd already made efforts to find his Uncle Joseph, to emigrate to America.

“Mutter!”
I told him. I kept repeating
Mutter
and then I added “Russians” and “help.”

Frederick held me tighter than anyone ever had. I remember that I bled on his shirt.

“You're safe.” He kissed my forehead and cheeks. My front tooth had broken on the wrought iron fence where I'd fallen. He got a cool cloth and pressed it to my mouth. I yanked it away. “We have to do something!” I pulled away from him and, using my best English, begged the American soldiers to help me.

Frederick urged me to stop. “We'll get your mother,” he said, “but it might take time.” He was relieved that we'd be able to leave Europe and sail to America. His Uncle Joseph would sponsor us. I cared about nothing save my mother. Every time he tried to hold me, I fought him. I followed the American soldiers, who seemed to be standing around, doing nothing, except avoiding me. “No,” they said, under no circumstance could they enter a Soviet-occupied zone.

I would not give up. All around, there were women setting up makeshift beds, men playing cards, children shooting marbles in the dirt. I remember the smell of boiling cabbage. “What if it was your mother?” I demanded of each soldier.

“Your mother . . .”

By the next morning, two soldiers were willing to help. One of them was a Russian translator. He had bribed Soviet guards with cigarettes and Wonder Bread before. He would help me. The other soldier loved and missed his mother. That was his singular motivation. Crossing into the Soviet zone, the American soldiers were understandably antsy. We all were. Thinking back, we were just kids. The Russians who accompanied us to my mother's house were also antsy because they weren't taking orders from anyone and they hadn't been for weeks. Their chain of command, whatever chain there'd been, had broken down. Anarchy reigned, and while it lasted, the Russian soldiers were pilfering money and food and whatever they could find of worth.

Entering my home, I immediately felt the emptiness of the place. I knew Mother was gone. Our family photographs had been smashed, glass littered the foyer. Our pantry door was open, the little food we'd had, gone. The sideboard drawers had been pulled out, piled by the steps. There were bloodstains on the duvet where I'd last seen my mother.

An American translator said something to the Russians, who shrugged. They had no idea. It must've been some Germans or maybe the Poles who'd done this. Probably the Poles. It would do no good to insist that my mother's murderers spoke Russian.

We found my mother, Emilie Vogel Kischel, in the bathtub. Even though her wrists were slashed, and my father's razor blade was in her grip, her hand resting on the porcelain ledge, I refused to think that she'd taken her life. I still don't believe it.

That afternoon, amid the shallow holes pocking our backyard, the two American soldiers and Frederick dug a grave. Hours must've passed, but I remember nothing of time, of the sun dropping lower in the sky. The one thing that has always stood out in my memory is the little girl who pushed open our wrought-iron gate just as the last shovelful of dirt was tossed aside. The men were breathing heavily, leaning against their shovels. The little girl came up and pulled at my skirt. “My mother said to bring you this.” She placed a gold foil–wrapped marzipan chocolate in my palm. A cold wind lifted the hem of her soiled dress. As she turned to go, I said, “Thank you,” noticing the grayness of her socks that drooped over untied laces. My mother was dead and my country in ruin.

“Who was that?” Frederick asked. The Americans propped their shovels in the dirt and motioned for Frederick to help them lift my mother's body. She was wrapped in a quilt that had been her mother's.

I shook my head that I didn't know the girl whose dirt-smudged face matched my mother's grave. Instead, I slowly unwrapped the chocolate, folding the foil into a tiny square, and as my mother was lowered into the grave, I sucked the marzipan from its chocolate shell.

I remember that I wanted to believe that the little girl was sending me a message from wherever the spirit goes when it departs this world. I wanted so badly to believe. All my life, I've tried to believe it. I've tried to believe in the goodness of life. The marzipan was flavored with sweetbriar roses, just like the ones Mother had grown. I could taste the flowers. Licking my fingers, I cried soundlessly as dirt rained down on her body. The marzipan melted on my tongue. Frederick squeezed my hand.

He is sixty-eight years old this year, and he is a good man.

The year is 1989.

I am going to meet my granddaughter.

7

Prudence, 2005

L
ast month, two of my colleagues and I were walking home from an early dinner when I spotted a baby house finch, a downy thing with pinkish feathers, teetering on the pavement. As its mother squawked, the little bird attempted to camouflage itself beneath a pile of twigs. I looked around, but I couldn't spot the nest.

“Someone is going to step on it,” Whitney informed me. She teaches basic zoology.

Her girlfriend, Lenora, added, “That bird's going to get eaten by a snake or a cat. It's a goner.” The sun had barely set, and the night had all the makings of a gruesome fairy tale. Being the bird girl, I was supposed to be the savior, but I had a very strong sense that this little finch was not injured, more likely a fledgling fallen from the nest. If I removed it from the twigs, it would never see its mother again.

As the sky darkened, melding from orange to pink, I explained with little confidence to Lenora and Whitney that this fledgling house finch did not need saving. He would fly by morning. They weren't so sure. As they walked to their car, I took a seat on the winding trail. I planned to keep watch. I was feeling then as I'm feeling now that we're each as vulnerable as that baby finch, little more than the gnash of beak and crunch of bone, in desperate need of someone to watch over us.

In 1989, the Old Man called and made the most innocent proclamation. “I am telephoning to speak to my granddaughter, Prudence Vilkas. Do you know her? She is my family.”

I knew her. “Yes, I know her. Yes . . . This is she. I am Prudence Vilkas.”

“I am your grandfather. You are Lithuanian.”

I don't know what my parents said to one another about this initial revelation. It didn't matter. It still doesn't. I knew that I had been found. Finally, there was someone to watch over me—not that my father had been
entirely
absent. Not that Veronica hadn't tried. She occasionally took me for a pedicure and a fancy green salad. I hate to have my feet touched and I don't like rabbit food, but I never said anything.

Freddie sent guitar picks and funny postcards. He came to visit once a year, typically when he was nearby, touring with some band. Veronica would drive me to a Ruby Tuesday or some other strip-mall restaurant and wait outside while my father bought me a hamburger and tried to catch up on the past year of my life.

Mostly, I talked about Wheaton. I didn't have a whole lot else to say. I was a good student and a bird watcher. My father took note, buying me a pair of high-dollar binoculars.

The fledgling cried out in the night, stirring the twigs. I was worried about a hawk swooping down. If I housed the little finch, he'd be safe for sure, but his mother hadn't abandoned him. If I removed the bird, she might.

My neighbor Carlos came out to see what I was doing, why I was sitting on the pathway, night falling. I indicated the bird. “But what are
you
doing, señorita?” he wanted to know.

“Keeping watch.”

Throughout the night, the fledgling's mother flew down to feed. The baby bird tucked his beak into his breast to keep warm while the mother sang to him.

At first light, the fledgling burst free of the twigs. He kicked his feet like a runner at a starting line, flapped his wings, his head low to the ground, and after three wobbly attempts, my little house finch took flight. I watched his mother and then his father trail his course. I was eaten up with mosquitoes but I didn't care. I cried. At six a.m., I called Whitney to tell her the news. When I see the Old Man in the hospital, I'll tell him this story. The Old Man likes a good story.

We've been on the plane for forty-five minutes. The scotch has made my pilot neighbor loquacious. He doesn't like flying planes for rich people. He'd like to be rich. He'd like to have his own plane. I understand. I'd like to have my own boat, but I don't see it happening any time soon. I had wanted silence. I didn't want anyone telling me their problems. I have my own. But Sam Kirk is better than sitting beside Veronica. Like I said, his hair reminds me of Wheaton's.

8

Freddie

A
s a boy, Freddie Vilkas did not understand what his father knew implicitly, with every breath, with every pull on his cigar: that “family is most important.” Freddie was a dreamer, and despite his father's tales of murder and mass graves at the hands of Joseph Stalin and his Cossacks, Freddie was an optimist.

In the 1960s, Freddie tried to tell his father, “The times, they are a-changing,” and the Old Man laughed at him. “You're a fool, son. Nothing is changing until I can breathe in a free Lithuania. Stop being a hippie.”

Born in 1951, Freddie could've been a hippie, but not in his father's house.

The Old Man pointed his finger, yellow from cigar smoke, at his only son. “I was born Frederick. My mother was loony-gooney because she was crazy about big birds, birds she read about in books. Birds that can fly for thousands of miles.” The Old Man showed Freddie the sole remaining photograph of his family.

The picture had been taken two months before his family's demise, when his sisters were sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen. Daina was untamed with a penchant for tree climbing. The older girls were more serious, bookworms, studying medicine, playing bass and flute. All three were headstrong. The Old Man remembered his former self as protective of his sisters and his mother. When his father traveled, he was the man of the house. “It is not easy to be a survivor,” he often said, “to be the one left behind.”

Music was as much a part of the Old Man's childhood as his nightly meal. Music was a language kept and cherished. In music, there was history and joy. He could hold back tears. He could press his palms to his eyes and pretend he was blind and that the world was less ugly. In music, he could put aside the worst of the horror and eke out something beautiful, remember his youngest sister's face as she played violin, the concentrated gaze of a not-so-serious girl. Her name, Daina, meant song.

The Old Man hadn't protected anyone like he should have, but he could save the music. He tried to do this with his son. Freddie was born with a violin lodged between his chin and collarbone, made to practice two hours a day, the Old Man's wrist gliding the air like a maestro.

Brought up in the Catholic Church, Freddie suffered through public high school in high-water denim, his hair shorter than everyone else's. The girls laughed at his musty, ill-fitting jackets, his white tube socks and scuffed loafers. The Old Man told his son, “You complain about being bullied? You don't know what it is to be bullied. You know nothing. You understand nothing.”

Freddie's mother tried to temper the Old Man's jabs: “How can he know what he did not live?” But no one could protect Freddie from the wrath of his community. When he was twelve years old, Freddie grumbled in church. The service had ended, and the parishioners were milling about, waiting to thank the priest. The entire congregation, and those who didn't hear, were later told, “Freddie Vilkas said, ‘Lithuania wasn't even a country for very long. Nobody's ever heard of it.'” A collective gasp rose to the rafters.

The Old Man walked over to Freddie and smacked him. He pointed his finger. “You ungrateful, you. You keep your mouth shut forever.” The collective gasp evolved into a collective but silent cheer. Freddie had it coming! How dare he disrespect his homeland? Even the priest comforted the Old Man: “One day, he will understand.” The Old Man was ashamed of his son. Freddie was humiliated.

As long as Freddie lived in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, he was Lithuanian. He would speak it, write it, and play its music. To do otherwise was unacceptable.

He tried.

When the Old Man was at work, Freddie sometimes handled the singular photograph, imagining his father's family as they might've been before Stalin killed them. Trying to imagine what his father and the other Lithuanians felt. But he couldn't, and it wasn't fair that he should suffer because of the past. Freddie was still under the illusion that the past is past, that it doesn't repeat itself, catch up with itself, loop over and over, unstoppable.

When Freddie was just a boy, he eyed the photograph with suspicion. Maybe the Old Man exaggerated the past. Maybe he couldn't think straight because he was old or because he'd survived a war. The Old Man was always old. Freddie was sick to death of him and his death stories. Freddie couldn't conceive of a world where grown men murdered girls.

The photograph's border was frayed by Freddie's eager hands. He wanted to know the truth. It was hard to tell what anyone looked like, but according to the Old Man, his mother was blond with a pert nose like a finch's beak. His father was tall with hair like his own, how the Old Man's hair used to be before he went gray. All three men had blue eyes, swirly ocean marbles. Daina had starburst eyes, hazel with an orange sun. Danut˙e and Audra had gray eyes, alternating hues of soft blues. They were both blond like their mother, Aleksandra, while Daina was brunette. The Old Man's father was named Petras. In the picture, Petras was supposed to look stoic, but a smile broke through. According to the Old Man, he was a jovial father when he should've been more serious.

At night, Freddie dreamed his grandfather Petras to life, but instead of a mass grave, Petras was blindfolded like in the movies. His last request was a cigarette, and a Russian general hurried to give it to him. In Freddie's subconscious, there was romance in everything. The Russian general flicked open his lighter, shielding it from the wind. Petras inhaled. With his hands tied loosely behind his back, the cigarette dangled above his handlebar moustache. Until the end, Petras wiggled his fingers, keeping time with some song. He was smiling and smirking, arrogant as hell—as heroes have license to be—when the bullet reached his brain.

Freddie lived between his dreams, between mythical dark pines coming to life and the Old Man's horror stories: “No one escaped! My sisters were butchered.”

Freddie needed an ally: someone, anyone, who'd understand him. He managed to find this savior in an Italian kid named Marco. Marco's parents had suffered the wrath of Mussolini. They carried their own horror stories to the United States. Together, Marco and Freddie formed an alliance dedicated to living in the now. All things contemporary. Movies, comic books, girls, and music. In 1967, Freddie thought he'd move west when he graduated—find his place among the much-maligned hippies. Play in a band or something. There was no doubt he could play anything with strings. Even the Old Man had to admit, “I taught him well.”

The day that Freddie left Brooklyn, the Old Man stood on the front stoop of their brownstone. He puffed and pointed a cigar. “You'll be back with your legs between your tail.” He tended to reverse idioms. “You don't know nothing!” And speak in double negatives. “The world will eat you up.”

Ingeburg watched from the window. She'd already said her good-byes. She'd given Freddie sixty dollars and a dozen Spam sandwiches.

The Old Man narrowed his gaze.

Ingeburg's palms itched and she broke out in a sweat. She banged on the wavy glass of the living room window—“Wait!”—and hurried onto the porch. “You have something for him! Don't you have something for him?” Her expression pained, she added, “Don't be not smart, Old Man. Don't be that way.”

Freddie looked to his doting mother. “I don't want anything from
him
. I've had enough.”

Ingeburg stared pleadingly at the Old Man, who dug into the left pocket of his high-waisted trousers. “Come here now!”

Freddie rolled his eyes but climbed the steps. Ingeburg's heart broke—seeing them together, so much alike, yet so different—seeing them part.

“Put your hand out, boy,” the Old Man said.

“I'm not a boy.”

“Do it.”

Freddie held out his palm. He expected money, but he'd turn it down. He didn't want anything from his father. But then the Old Man did something unexpected. He pressed his father's gold timepiece into Freddie's palm, and cupping both hands around his son's, he said, “You can come home when you're ready.”

Freddie looked at the watch. He was confused.
Why are you giving this to me?
He wanted the Old Man to say something kind, something apologetic, something meaningful about Freddie's ancestors and the timepiece. Unfortunately, the Old Man wasn't like that. He turned to Inge, flicking his cigar ash, and said, “I gave it to him. Are you happy?”

Freddie slipped the watch in his pocket. “Thanks.” He was unsure what to say. Part of him wanted to fling the watch back at his father.
Screw you! My mother made you do this,
but Ingeburg had never made the Old Man do anything. Freddie didn't know how to feel. He walked toward the subway, singing a Beatles' song,
He's a real nowhere man/sitting in his nowhere land . . .
He was ready to start his own life.

In 1989, Freddie's former wife, whom he'd never bothered to divorce, contacted him, screaming into the telephone, “Your father had no right to call my home! Who the fuck does that old man think he is? He says he's coming here. He can't do that. You don't even pay child support.” She was out of breath. “What is going on?”

“I'll take care of it.” Freddie would've said just about anything to hang up with Veronica. There was a groupie in his bed. She'd planted herself there a day earlier and, except for moving naked between the bed, the refrigerator, and the bathroom, showed no signs of leaving. This was a serious problem but not an uncommon one. Just the same, he didn't want the mother of his only child to know that there was a woman in his bed. Freddie reassured Veronica, “I will handle it.”

“And I'm supposed to start trusting you now?”

“You called me. Isn't that why you called me?”

No one had said anything about trust.

Freddie phoned the Old Man in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. They hadn't seen each other since Freddie had left home, age eighteen. Ingeburg picked up. Overcome by the sound of his voice, she whispered, “Wait a second.” She crept upstairs, where she continued to whisper. “I miss you. I love you. Your father loves you. It's hard for him to say what he feels. I don't know about Prudence. He is insisting we go to Florida . . . No. No. I do not know when. I am not a mind reader. You have to be a mind reader to know what this man is thinking one minute to the next. But no, he is not crazy. I think he is too sane. He talks too much these days. I like him better quiet. I need a respite . . . How are you? I miss you. A mother is supposed to see her son.” Ingeburg had to say everything in one fell swoop.

Downstairs, she told the Old Man, “There's someone on the phone for you.”

“When did the phone ring?”

“You must not have heard it.”

The Old Man looked confused. “Who is it?”

“Just take it,” she said.

Putting the receiver to his ear, the Old Man said, “Who is this? What do you want?”

“Dad,” Freddie began, “I don't want anything.”

The Old Man looked accusingly at Ingeburg. “Freddie's on the phone.” Ingeburg shrugged. To his son, the Old Man said, “You always want something. You would not telephone if you do not want something.”

“I called to say hello.”

“Hello. Can we say good-bye now?”

“Dad! Listen: Veronica called me.”

“Is that your wife who is not Lithuanian and not German, and not worth a cent red? The one you don't live with? The one you never talk to? Is that the wife you married without anyone's consent?”

“Yes, that's her. But that's beside the point. She said you called her house. She said you called Prudence. Why did you do that?”

The Old Man looked to Inge and pointed at his cigars before beginning his dissertation. “Listen, my one and only son, Freddie, I am an old man, but I remember that when the Nazis came and they chased the Soviets away, the first thing they did was write everything down. First names and last names and your parents' names and their parents' names. I knew enough German. I could say ‘Heil Hitler.' I could say anything they want after the Red Army. The point is, I know your name. You are my son. You know my music. You are my son, but I do not know the little girl who is growing up, and she is your daughter, and I do not think that even you know her since you do not live with her, so I am going to see her. She is blood. I am going to introduce her to our Lithuania, a country that exists in the hearts of a people. I am a speech maker these days, but really, I am just an old man, and this is something I must do. Can you be there in Florida to keep your strange wife away from me? Or maybe she will want to hear about my sisters and your grandparents. I do not know. I know you, son, and I was wrong not to know my own grandchild before now.”