Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant (19 page)

Inside, I met Audron
’s son and mother. Everyone was smiling and seemed happy to meet me. The corridor into the living room was long, dark and narrow, but as I walked slowly along it the gloom ebbed away until I was met suddenly by a rush of bright, swimming light and colour. A long table in the middle of the room was covered with a smooth linen cloth with fine hay spread underneath it. I was told that this was to remind us that Jesus was born in a stable and laid in a manger filled with hay. There were twelve different dishes on the table, all meatless (the number represents the twelve apostles). They included salted herring, fish, winter vegetable salad, boiled potatoes, sauerkraut, bread, cranberry pudding and poppy seed milk. Before eating, Audron
’s husband took a plate of Christmas wafers and gave one to each person around the table, including myself. He then offered his wafer to Audron
, who broke off a piece and offered her wafer in turn to him. This continued until each person had broken off a piece of each other’s wafer. There was no particular order in which each dish had to be eaten, but I was told that it was customary to at least sample each food. Each symbolised something important for the year ahead: the bread, for example, represented sustenance for the coming months, the potatoes humility. My favourite was the poppy seed milk –
aguonu pienas
in Lithuanian – served with small, round balls of dough. The milk is prepared by grinding the scalded poppy seeds and mixing them with water, sugar or honey, and nuts. During the meal, Audron
explained to me some of the traditional Lithuanian beliefs surrounding Christmas. For example, it is believed that at midnight on Christmas all the water in the streams, rivers, lakes and wells changes to wine, though only for an instant. Another belief is that at midnight animals can speak, though people are discouraged from trying to listen to them. The following day, 25 December, the family took me to a park filled with snow and we walked and talked together by a huge, frozen lake. It had been a Christmas to remember.

One of the most rewarding experiences for me of living in Lithuania was learning the Lithuanian language. When I first told the women at the centre that I wanted to learn to speak Lithuanian they were puzzled: Why did I want to learn such a small and difficult language? It was certainly true that many Lithuanians spoke enough English for me not to have to learn Lithuanian. In fact, none of the other British volunteers, nor Neil the US Peace Corps volunteer, could say more than a few words. It was considered very strange for a foreigner to even want to attempt to learn Lithuanian. Nonetheless, it was the language I heard spoken around me every day and I knew that I would feel more comfortable, more at home, in Lithuania if I could speak with my friends and students and fellow workers at the centre in their own language.

Birut
was more than happy to teach me. She was very proud of her language and enjoyed discussing and speaking it with me. I wrote words down as I learned them to help me visualise and remember them and studied children’s books that Birut
’s daughters had read when they were younger. Birut
also taught me a popular Lithuanian nursery rhyme:

Mano batai buvo du

Vienas dingo, nerandu
.

Aš su vienu batuku

Niekur eiti negaliu!

Which means: ‘I had two shoes, one is missing, I cannot find it. With one little shoe, I cannot go anywhere!’

Within a few days of beginning to learn the language, with Birut
’s help I was able to build my own sentences, much to her initial surprise, and within a few weeks I was able to converse comfortably with native speakers. It helped a lot that I always asked my colleagues at the centre to speak with me in Lithuanian as much as possible. Everyone I spoke to complimented me on my ability to speak good Lithuanian, including one of my elderly neighbours who was especially amazed that a young Englishman could converse with her in her own language. It was also a benefit on one occasion when I was invited out with the other volunteers for a meal in a restaurant. The waiter did not understand English, much to the volunteers’ annoyance, so I translated the order into Lithuanian for him. I did not mind occasionally having to act as an interpreter for the other volunteers, because I found the experience very interesting and another opportunity for me to practise my language skills.

I was even once mistaken for a native Lithuanian. Walking home one day from the centre, a man wanting directions approached me, persisting even when I kept replying in Lithuanian that I did not know the place he was asking directions for. Eventually I stopped and said: ‘
Atsiprašau, bet tikrai nežinau. Aš nesu Lietuvis. Esu iš Anglijos
.’ (‘Excuse me, but I really do not know. I am not Lithuanian. I am from England.’) His eyes widened and then he apologised and walked away.

By the spring, I had settled firmly into my life in Lithuania. I had gradually developed routines that gave me a sense of calm and security and that helped me cope with change. Early each morning, just before dawn, I woke and pulled on some loose, warm clothes and went for a long walk through the streets to a local park filled with oak trees. The trees were tall, as though reaching up into the sky, and helped make me feel safe as I walked the identical, well-trodden route around them at the start of each day. After returning to my apartment to shower and get dressed for work, I walked up the long, steep road to the centre and sat and drank coffee while the women gossiped together about personal things that did not interest me. Neil had suffered for some months since Christmas with an increasingly painful back, which numerous trips to doctors had not helped. He eventually had to return to the US for treatment. I took over his classes to fill the gap, which meant that I taught English mornings and afternoons most days of the week. There had been other changes too – Birut
’s husband had fallen very ill and she had had to stop attending classes to spend time looking after him. At lunchtime I often stayed at the centre and ate sandwiches I had prepared the night before, though occasionally I ate at a local café with Žygintas whose workplace was near the centre. After work I bought frozen fish fingers, bread, cheese and other essentials before walking back home to prepare and eat supper, read and watch television before bed. I didn’t mind being on my own more often, though I missed Birut
and hoped I would see her again before long.