Above Us Only Sky (13 page)

Stasys's face was moist from crying. While she'd been gone, he'd broken down. He didn't think she'd return. He said, “I was chopping onion.”

“I don't belong to you,” she told him.

“I didn't say—”

“I know what you think.”

“All right.” Stasys went to bed with the porcelain doll. He didn't like how the doll looked at him, so he set her on her back to make her eyes close.
What do I think?
he wondered.
Do I think about my parents? Do I think about our apartment in Kaunas? Do I think about my friends? Do I think about the death and torture I've seen? What do I think? What do I do?
He took a deep breath.

I think about a girl I found in the dirt, a girl with wings, a future. That is what I think now.

By August, Daina got a job sewing buttons, and Stasys got a job working for a butcher. He was quick with a knife. At first, the Nazis seemed more civilized than the Soviets, but as days and weeks passed, it became evident that they thought the Lithuanians were an inferior people. They didn't buy Lithuanian products. Goods were imported from Germany or the Germans nationalized the stores, taking all profits before shopping in them.

One particularly sunny September day, when everything seemed to glimmer, Daina walked home from the button factory. In front of her, a police car was parked and the Gestapo was out on the street shouting at an old man. “Get a move on! The street doesn't belong to you!”

The old man stopped. In Lithuanian, he said, “I'll walk how I please,” and pointed his cane at the policeman.

Without hesitation, the Gestapo shot the man in the head. The man dropped to his knees before toppling to the pavement. The Gestapo looked at the passersby, including Daina, her eyes now fixed to the bloody pavement, and he shouted in German, “See that this trash is picked up!” As the Gestapo drove away and the dead man's wife knelt by his side, Daina ran to a synagogue that had recently been vandalized and boarded up. There, she vomited between the synagogue's steps and a row of young pines.
I've seen too much blood spilled.
She prayed.
Please God, take me. Please.

At dinner, Daina told Stasys what she'd seen. “What are we supposed to do?” she lamented. “How are we supposed to keep living?” This talk was unusual. She never expressed her feelings to Stasys.

Without thinking, he got up. As did she. He took her in his arms, the two of them pressed and nestled against the kitchen window. Stasys buried his chin between her cheek and collarbone. She smelled like the oatmeal soap in the bathroom.

Without thinking, Daina let him hold tight.

He whispered, “I don't know what we are supposed to do.”

She opened her hand and touched the back of his neck.

“But it's going to be all right,” he concluded. With his left hand, he felt one of her wings. He thought,
If she can fly, she can take us away from this place.
He smiled.
Who thinks such crazy thoughts?
Then he kissed the spot between chin and collarbone where his lips rested against her skin. He couldn't help himself.

She pushed him away and said, “I'm sorry.” She didn't know what she was sorry for. Certainly not for pushing him away. That didn't make sense. “I'm tired. I'm going to bed.”

This was the first night when he felt compelled to say, “I love you.” He wouldn't apologize for grabbing on to her. Never. But instead, he said, “Good night.”

It was cold. The wind blew whitecaps off the sea. Daina had one nightmare after another. From the doorway, Stasys watched her toss beneath the bedcovers. He wanted to go to her and make it better. He wished that he could make the world the kind of place it should be, the kind of place it used to be, the kind of place they both deserved, but that was not possible, so he kept watch.

That first year, 1941, word spread fast that all the Jews in Vilnius and Kaunas had been killed. Mass graves, the kind Stalin liked, had been dug and filled by Nazis and Lithuanian conspirators.

Daina and Stasys had once upon a time hoped that the Germans would let Lithuania rule itself, but that wasn't to be. The Nazis were no better than the Soviets except that they were
slightly
pickier about whom they killed. Every day, the local newspaper depicted the Jews as having allegiances with the Soviets. Many Lithuanians believed what they read and saw, blaming the Jews for every past Soviet deportation, torture, and murder. Daina and Stasys were no longer naïve. They were surprised by their fellow Lithuanians who inhaled the anti-Jewish propaganda like ether.

In 1943, Stasys and Daina turned eighteen. In their pretend world, they were twenty-four. Daina slept in the big bed. Stasys slept in the Jewish girl's bed, the porcelain doll on the nightstand, sometimes eyes open, sometimes eyes closed.

Stasys thought about very little other than Daina. She was the only good thing he had. Everything about her impressed him as disciplined and strong. She worked hard, her fingertips striated from needle and thread. Every day after work, she walked on the beach. Most nights, if he got home in time, he accompanied her. If she wanted to go alone, he followed, fearful that without him, she'd ascend over the black water and fly west like some strange bird camouflaged by night, gliding through dark mist, invisible but for the hushed flap of wing. He could not let her go.

14

I
n 1944, there were bonfires in the street. The Germans were leaving. The Red Army was returning. Anyone who'd been identified as conspiring with the Nazis was picked up and killed or deported to Siberia. Daina and Stasys had no allegiance to Hitler. So far, they had not been reported.

Daina continued to work sewing buttons and Stasys got a job writing educational pamphlets. The pamphlets detailed, as ordered, that children belonged to the state more so than to their parents. “Children who report on their parents for fascist or antiproletariat statements or deeds are the people's heroes. Stalin is their Father, and they are the new and greater future.” Stasys also illustrated these pamphlets, which had to be freighted to Moscow for approval before being returned to Lithuania for distribution.

Years passed. Daina worked. Stasys worked. The world was monotonous. Everyone was a “comrade” and Stalin was a hero. Lithuanian culture and customs were suppressed, and the rest of the world seemed to forget that Lithuania and their neighbor Baltic states, Latvia and Estonia, had once been sovereign nations.

At night, when they felt brave or could no longer tolerate being comrades, Daina and Stasys laughed at the ridiculousness of the propaganda. “Can you imagine
believing
that Stalin is our great father?” They'd look around, afraid the house was bugged, but so bored with the grayness of their lives, they were willing to take the chance. “But we're nobody,” Daina would say. Always, they whispered.

Stasys would shrug. “Everybody's nobody.”

Stasys was so adept at his job that he was eventually hired to write a scientific report stating that communism made people physically and mentally stronger. (He was not a scientist.) He wrote, “There is strong evidence that communist men and women will outlive their corrupt capitalist counterparts.”

Daina said, “I hope you never start believing those lies.”

“Have a little faith in your husband.”

At this, she laughed. Their marriage was as real to her as the propaganda Stasys penned.

In 1949, Stasys was assigned a full-time illustrator to work on his pamphlets. Her name was Olga. She was Russian. Here in Palanga, she'd take direction from Stasys, who took direction from a man in Moscow. Olga's artwork was meant to complement Stasys's pamphlets. Pictures spoke louder than words. Olga was not educated at university. She was educated on the street. Orphaned, she'd been apprenticed by a prostitute who worked along the Moskva River, though Olga suspected that her artistic gifts were inherited from the mother she never knew. Olga was born in a Siberian gulag in 1928. Her father was called Andrei Petrovich. He was a guard who delighted in leaving scars like Braille along the torso and thighs of Olga's mother. For the slightest infraction or for no reason, he relished torturing all female enemies of the people. Olga's mother was not special. When she became pregnant, he beat her harder, running his fingers along the bloody striations crisscrossing her back—accusing her of being with someone else, which was ludicrous.
The lines
, he thought,
are mine. They belong to me.

When there was a baby, Olga's mother begged Andrei to spare the child's life. Babies did not survive where “Labor is a matter of honor, glory, courage, and heroism.” Andrei obliged the poor woman, putting the infant on a transport train bound for Moscow.

Olga's surrogate prostitute mother found Olga bundled alongside the Moskva River. Prostitute or not, she figured she had as much right as anyone to have a child. Besides, orphaned children were an embarrassment, a black smudge on the glorious beauty and wealth of Moscow. To avoid this besmirchment, dirty, hungry children were rounded up and shot. Not knowing Olga's exact age or birthday, her surrogate prostitute mother celebrated it on the anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution—November seventh. In this way, when there were fireworks and bonfires, they could pretend that the revelry was in honor of Olga's birth.

Olga's surrogate mother died when Olga was sixteen. Olga had already joined the family trade. She was beautiful, blond, her face and limbs supple, with skin the color of alabaster despite the harshness of the ice and snow that turned so many young faces ruddy. After Olga's surrogate mother passed, Olga upgraded her clientele, entertaining Central Committee members and sometimes their wives. There was no one to garnish her wages, and she didn't have to discriminate between men and women. Anyone with money was fair game. Olga rejected sentimentality as though the wounds that had crisscrossed her mother's back and thighs were her own. But truthfully, her wounds were deeper. Unlike Stasys and Daina, Olga hadn't had a real family to lose. No real mother. No father. The Siberian winter of her birth had been tattooed on her bones. She was always cold, never satiated. Never enough wool. Never enough bread. Never enough anything.

Her dream was to leave Moscow, to live by the sea, to find a good man and have children. When she petitioned a Moscow government official, she knew that she would either have the opportunity to start over, to make believe she was someone other than a prostitute, or she would be sent to Siberia, to a lifetime of hard labor. She showed the government official, an oafish man who liked to watch her undress but was capable of little else, her drawings. Olga held her breath. “You see,” she told him, “I am good at more than one thing. Do you see?” She was nervous, kneading her hands in her lap. He looked at her drawings, tossing them to the floor. “You stupid girl,” he said, “I have been wanting to help you. I am not heartless.”

On June 15, 1949, Olga Grishin received her illustrator post in Palanga, the Western Province of the Soviet Union, the former Lithuania.

She was glad to meet Stasys. His Russian was good. Her Lithuanian was poor, but that was no matter. Everyone was required to speak Russian in the workplace. After two weeks of working civilly side by side, Olga spoke up. “You are a very handsome man.”

“Thank you, comrade.”

“You are welcome.” Her blond hair was braided over one shoulder. She was what Stasys would describe as a “pretty girl,” but he had no interest in any girl except for Daina.

“Do you think I'm nice-looking?” she asked Stasys.

He looked up. “Nice enough, but I am trying to work.”

“Do you think that you would like to know me better?”

“I'm married.”

He went back to work.

The next day, she asked, “Why won't you flirt with me? It's no crime to flirt with a girl. It's so boring being here all day, and it's just the two of us. What's the harm in a little flirting?”

Stasys was bothered by Olga. At home, he told Daina that she was “fine.” He'd get by. He didn't want to burden Daina with his problems. She worked a long, tedious day operating a sewing machine and attaching buttons to coats.

Every day, Olga had some new shocking thing to say. “Why doesn't your wife produce progeny for Stalin? Is she barren? I'm sure that I'm not barren.”

“I don't want to know whether or not you are barren. Leave me alone, please.” Stasys nervously felt for his shirt buttons to make sure they were in place.

“You don't like to have fun,” Olga complained. She stuck her paintbrush in her mouth and leaned with her back against her drafting table.

Stasys ignored her. She made it difficult to concentrate. He was a man, twenty-four, not a boy, and he was a virgin. He took a deep breath and went back to work. There was nothing he could do. He couldn't report her. She was Russian. He wasn't permitted to complain. He would continue to ignore her. Eventually, she'd stop. Maybe he could find a man who would like her, and she would leave him alone. Olga glanced at him, taking the paintbrush from her mouth. “The more you push me away, the more I am determined.”

“I'm married.”

She shrugged. “Marriage is a piece of paper.”

Stasys lacked even that. His love for Daina was unrequited.

“I am Russian,” Olga told him. “You should think that I am beautiful.”

“You are beautiful. Please stop!” He smacked his hands hard on his desk. “I can't concentrate. I am working here.”

“Look at my lips. This is not lipstick. These are my real lips.” She pursed them together.

Stasys began to perspire. He brushed his fair hair back from his eyes. “You can look at your lips!”

“Don't be rude to me!” She huffed. “I am new to the Western Province of the Soviet Union. You should be kind.” She wagged her finger.

This woman is dangerous.
“I apologize,” he said, “but I do not want to judge your beauty.” At this, she put down her illustrator's brush and approached Stasys's drafting table. “Look at me!”

He kept his eyes focused on his typewriter.

“I said, ‘Look at me,' comrade!”

What kind of woman are you?
Stasys got up, knocking over his chair, and rushed from the room.

That night, he told Daina, “Comrade Grishin is strange. I don't understand why they sent her here. I can illustrate the pamphlets. I can glorify Stalin the same as anyone. Put a big halo around his fat head.”

“Don't be so hard on her,” Daina said. “I'm sure she has a story like the rest of us.”

Stasys didn't tell Daina the specifics of what Olga had said, what games she kept playing, only that she was a peculiar and difficult young woman.

Olga continued daily to hound Stasys. Not comprehending such sentimental notions as “love,” she repeatedly cornered him in their cramped office. Stasys talked a blue streak about the Soviet Union's good news for the people. Olga swallowed audibly. “Why hasn't your wife given you any children? Why is she denying Mother Russia her offspring?” Olga exhaled into Stasys's ear. He was a man. When his right hand dropped to his side, it touched her thigh. “No,” he said. “My wife is not barren.” He stepped back. “I am tired of this.”

“I'm warm,” Olga said, unbuttoning her sweater.

“It's cold.” Stasys looked up. Without wanting it, he got an erection. Olga pointed and laughed. “You want me.”

“Please stop,” he told her.

She was thinking,
I can call someone in Moscow. I can find some reason to get rid of his wife. Why does he resist me? Here is my chance to start fresh, and he won't let me.

I want you, Stasys
Valetkys. I get what I want.
Olga regularly strolled past his walk-up, admiring the red geraniums planted around the bottom step. She sometimes knelt to smell the flowers and imagined herself within, a part of this world. She'd bake traditional Russian sweets to welcome Stasys home from work. (Olga loved sweets.) She'd wash dishes and fluff pillows and whatever other domestic chores were required of a wife. She did not belong in some cramped boardinghouse. She deserved a real home. She deserved to be a real wife and maybe one day a real mother. She hadn't come all the way to this western province to be a spinster. And she liked Stasys—as good as anyone. He seemed nice, and he was playing hard to get. In that respect, he was an unusual man. She liked it, his peculiarities.

Olga never
intended
to be cruel. She simply never comprehended that Stasys and his wife were real people with real emotions. Emotions that did not include basic needs like hunger and warmth were incomprehensible to Olga Grishin, who was only just venturing into notions of love, like a young girl discovering romance novels.

In November 1949, there were rolling blackouts. Stasys stood in the street watching Daina undress. He couldn't help himself. She was all shadow through the window except for the roundness of her wings catching the moonlight. The heart-shaped wings were intoxicating, and Stasys knew that he'd never be with another woman. Unrequited or not, his heart belonged to Daina.

Olga walked home from work, thinking about how she would successfully seduce Stasys, when a golden-haired mutt, fur nearly the color of Stasys's hair, crossed her path. “Hi, little one,” Olga said, extending her hand to the dog's snout. The dog retreated, and she continued on her way. “Bye, little one.” Hearing the dog whimper, Olga turned back and saw the mutt staring at her. The dog's eyes were crusty.

“Come on, if you want. I don't care.” Olga kept walking. A few seconds later, she turned back to see the dog following.

“That's all right by me,” she said, smiling. “I don't mind the company.”

If she had the salted ham from the day's lunch, she could offer the dog something to eat, but she'd finished everything. She had been ravenous, filled with adrenaline after calling a government comrade in Moscow to report Daina Valetkiene as a traitor. It was as easy as that. Certainly Stasys's wife, like most of these sniveling Lithuanians, was in some way conspiring against the Soviet way of life, undermining Soviet thinking, and perpetrating crimes against the great father by sullying his grand name.