From Russia with Lunch

by David Smiedt

  The lightest stroke she was capable of delivering felt like a sleeve flapping in a breeze. I should have left it at that but in the name of research asked to experience a moderate blow. Her arm moved through no more than 90 degrees and the ensuing crack verged on the chiropractic. My body felt the momentum before my brain had a chance to process the message my back was screaming. I figured that this was going to hurt plenty. Only to discover that when the pain did kick in, I had vastly underestimated its tenure and ferocity. The Vilnius hangover – as it shall evermore be known – felt much the same. Albeit without the razor-thin contusion on either side of my spine.

  I needed quiet. I needed fresh air. I needed coffee and I knew where to get all three.

  Time was running out as I only had a day to go before I was due to pick up a hire car and leave Vilnius. The plan was to traverse the country in a clockwise direction with Naishtot – where my father’s family originated – sitting at around seven o’clock, before finishing at Moses’ home town of Birzai, which was located in Lithuania’s north at around twelve. Along the way, I was determined to experience as much of the nation as I could, drop in to its major cities (including Kaunas, through which Moses travelled on his way to London), dally at its fledgling tourist attractions and get lost in its backblocks. No one else in my family was remotely interested in making this journey and there was a certain modest pleasure in knowing it would be undertaken by the grandchild to whom he was a mystery. And vice versa.

  While waiting for the taxi that would take me to the Europas Parkas sculpture sanctuary, Mark – tutu asunder and possibly vomit-flecked – stumbled into the foyer with the remains of his posse. A few had been lost along the way and their flight left in an hour. Within twenty minutes, the obliging Robert Stackiokas had deposited me at the gates of an artistic wonderland. I have the softest of spots for projects that the timid write off as ludicrously ambitious but an individual sees through to fruition. Gintaras Karosas is that soldier. In 1987, the 19-year-old sculpture student read that Lithuania was in fact the geographical centre of Europe and summarily decided that as such it should be home to a permanent exhibition of pieces by the continent’s best and brightest installation artists. Although the cartographic hotspot that motivated this undertaking is some 14 kilometres to the north of where the park stands, Gintaras got the green light to begin clearing 55 hectares of neglected woodland on which his vision would be fulfilled.

  Between 1991 and 2006, more than one hundred artists from over fifty countries took part in projects organised by the park with the current exhibition being a bit of a greatest hits affair. While a lake of lawn forms the central axis of Europas Parkas, it’s in the myriad paths snaking into the sun-speckled pine forest that the real magic lies. Arcing along a spongy trail of needles and cones is arguably Karosas’ masterpiece. His labyrinth of Russian television sets – stacked four high on either side of the path – covers 3135 square metres and culminates in a fallen statue of Lenin, one hand outstretched in whatever emotion the viewer chooses to see in the gesture. According to the park’s booklet, ‘The sculpture symbolises the absurdity of Soviet propaganda that for over half a century had been implanted in people’s minds with the help of senseless TV’. Amid the silence of the woodland, the statement is cogent and stinging. It struck such a chord in the general public that 617 Lithuanians felt the urge to schlep their own disused Soviet sets from home to the relative isolation of the park and add them to the pile. Staff would routinely arrive at work to see a couple of monitors lying by the entrance gates and only when the piece took out a Guinness Record for most television sets used in a sculpture – a category that actually existed beforehand – did a cease and desist plea by Karosas put a stop to the donations.

  With only dragonflies and opalescent black beetles for company, I padded through the undergrowth and was captivated time and again as sculptures announced themselves without warning. Several were fluid and organic while others were a study of geometrics whose harsh edges stood in stark contrast to their natural backdrops. ‘Writing about art’, goes the old saying, ‘is like dancing about architecture’, so I’ll simply share a few favourites without the embarrassment of interpretation.

  I was inexplicably moved by the aquamarine steel ring that appeared to hover around an oak tree trunk. I loved Marius Zavadskis’ take on the hamster exercise wheel into which you could climb and sprint without going anywhere. Then there was Dennis Oppenheim’s three-metre-high lounge chair made of 300 metres of rolled steel and 100 square metres of iron mesh; it featured a pond into which the sitter’s bottom might splash down amid two tonnes of water topped by floating flowers which were changed every day by park staff. Top prize was a two-way tie. Evaldaus Pauza’s marvellously earnest and bespectacled young girl holding a giant balloon to which her ponytail was vertically attached by static electricity was charm in ore. Ditto Mara Adamitz Scrupe’s overblown glass vegetables – turnips, beetroot, pumpkins – which harnessed solar power by day and glowed softly from within come dusk.

  Perhaps the one drawback of the park is that you begin to invest almost every object that crosses your line of sight with artistic purpose – a phenomenon which I doubt Karo-sas would have a problem with. This was brought home to me as I encountered a tightly bound package of stainless-steel girders each of which bore welded struts in a lattice formation. A meditation on bonds perhaps? A homage to the majesty of cooperation which can lead to a sum greater than its constituent parts? How about part of a stage that was being erected for a concert nearby and which a smoking roadie hoisted onto his shoulder while affording me a view of almost more bum crack than I’d seen the night before?

  Robert picked me up at the gates and decided that we should have a poke around the Verekai Estate on the way back to Vilnius. Although he had lived in the city all his life, he had never visited this compound of thirty neoclassical buildings which had been erected as a summer getaway for bishops. Perched high on the banks of the Neris River, it afforded a view of the city as lush as a first romance. Which Robert savoured while dragging heavily on the Marlboro that seemed as much a part of his face as his eyebrows.

  A commercial pilot with 6000 flying hours to his credit, Robert had switched to surface transport after a takeover bid for his company had suspended trading. That was six months earlier. He smiled the smile of a man who has accepted the powerlessness of his predicament and looked for the income-generating silver lining that came with car ownership. A little over two decades ago, there was only one type of auto available to Lithuanians. The Soviet-made Lada was a tinny box that crumpled like cellophane and had all the charisma of a stamp collector in his forties. In many societies, the first car – albeit a cross between a citrus fruit and an explosive device – is a late teen rite of passage. Robert got his at twenty-seven.

  ‘It was a dream for people under the Soviets,’ he smiles. ‘The only people who were eligible for a car had to have worked for the same company for ten years. Their boss also had to like them enough to offer authorities a letter in which their good character was set out. One argument, late arrival or sick day was enough to make sure you never got this letter. Then there was the cost: 5000 rubles. The average monthly salary was 200 rubles. Even if half of your salary went on repayments it would take over four years to pay off the Lada. Which usually only lasted six. Now everyone in Lithuania has cars.’

  This became apparent as we inched through the traffic which clustered around the shiny glass skyscrapers and boxy shopping centres in the newer part of the city. This was, however, the opportunity to run my planned route around the country by Robert. With each town mentioned, he became increasingly concerned. As we pulled up outside my hotel, he asked how I had managed to find a driver who would join me for several weeks on the road. I replied that I hadn’t and would be hiring a car. He then shook my hand with the kind of formality usually reserved for bunkered soldiers about to go over the top.

  3

  A spa is born

  An Englishman,
a Frenchman, a German and a Jew are lost in the desert. Weak and dehydrated, the German moans, ‘I’m so thirsty. I must have beer.’ The Frenchman adds, ‘I’m so thirsty. I must have wine.’ The Brit chimes in with, ‘I’m so thirsty. I must have tea.’ The Jew says, ‘I’m so thirsty. I must have diabetes.’

  The reason for Robert’s concern became clear the next morning while browsing through a leaflet from the car hire company. Aside from the fact that I had never piloted a left-hand drive through a right-side-of-the-road nation, it seemed the first place I had chosen to do so has the highest rate of auto fatalities in the European Union. I later found out that Lithuania also has the highest suicide rate in the EU and a significant number of self-sacrificers choose to die in their vehicles.

  In retrospect, the task was not as daunting as the statistics might suggest, but that’s not to say the experience was free of challenges. For a start, yield signs are treated as mere suggestions, rather than instructions, and truck and mopeds alike stream into your path under the assumption that you will apply the necessary brakes. Which you do. Then there’s the rather frightening combination of mobile phones and post-adolescent leadfootedness. On countless occasions, Adidas-clad young men roared past me in battered Audis with one hand on the wheel and one eye on the road, the other of each being occupied by a bout of furious text messaging. Of course, such behaviour is by no means confined to Lithuania but is rather a global trait carried out by a small moronity.

  Seatbelts are also considered a nuisance, a trend which the authorities are trying to stem. One of the key strategies is a television campaign so graphic it makes Sin City look like Happy Days. Back home, these messages are usually delivered amid the squeal of rubber on bitumen following a cutaway to the shocked face of an angelic soon-to-be victim. The next shot is a pull-back to a scene of mangled metal surrounded by emergency personnel shaking their heads at the futility of it all. This approach was deemed too subtle for Lithuania’s acceleration junkies and the finished TV spot actually features an airborne toddler dummy flying headfirst through a windscreen and bouncing off the bonnet.

  For all their bad press, in my experience Lithuanian drivers were not hostile. Rather, most simply didn’t have anyone to teach them about road niceties as this is the first generation to enjoy widespread car ownership. U-turns will be thrown without warning or regard for solid lines. Tailgating could be a national sport and you can forget about thankyou waves should you let someone into traffic. That said, blaring horns are rare and I didn’t see a single fender bender in the weeks and thousands of kilometres spent on Lithuanian roads. There is certainly no suggestion of the road rage so evident in Australia, no single-digit salutes and none of the expletive-laden exchanges that lead to duelling wheel locks. Driving in Lithuania is what it is and either you buy into it or hail a cab.

  Where the world can learn something from Lithuania is in the area of roadsigns. Pedestrian crossings are signalled by depictions of an adult striding sedately. Around schools, however, the picture is one of three children in full sprint mode. Similarly, in rural areas where cattle might stray onto the road, they are signified exactly as they are most likely to appear: static. Deer, on the other hand, prance like antlered Nureyevs. The best signs are those alerting travellers to upcoming picnic spots. These feature the ubiquitous tables placed beneath pine tree silhouettes which totter over the scene at an angle so extreme as to suggest a last supper.

  My first self-drive destination was Trakai, a heavily tour-isted district an hour out of Vilnius. A smudge of lime rind between lakes Totoriskiai, Luka and Galve, the district is an art director’s wet dream and a photo retoucher’s nightmare – every vista more beguiling than the last, perfectly composed and with no airbrushing required. It is a Constable made manifest with swathes of conifer forest tumbling to wind-billowed water the shade of a purebred heeler. In the foreground stand clapboard houses painted sunflower yellow and emerald green, which have peeled and faded just so. These dwellings are neat but ramshackle, decorative but casually so. Each is garlanded by purple daises, vermilion hydrangeas and chrysanthemums exploding in two-tone pyrotechnics. Almost every garden also features an apple tree heavy with rouged fruit. The town is much loved by Lithuanians and its 7000 inhabitants are custodians of a history that once saw it function as the nation’s capital.

  Trakai’s chief attraction is also Lithuania’s most photographed. Built in the fourteenth century and destroyed by Russian adversaries around 350 years later, the Island Castle occupies an entire islet. Under the rule of Gediminas’ grandson, Grand Duke Vytautus The Great – a man who was clearly as fond of adjectives as he was armaments – it was considered one of Europe’s most formidable. Viewed from a distance it’s easy to understand why.

  Reached by a series of wooden footbridges, the Island Castle is an imposing array of bloated tiled turrets and defensive stone walls which are up to 3.9 metres thick. These ensconce a gravel trapezoid courtyard that easily measures 100 metres long and 20 across at its widest point. Three foreboding guardtowers – two on either side of the entrance and a third on the northwest corner – ensured no approach went unseen and this space is ringed by casements used for lackeys’ quarters and storage. Beyond it lies a fortified drawbridge leading to the five-storey royal residence, which is arranged around a damp stone square the size of a squash court.

  Up close, the place is a bit of a shemozzle. Restored between 1951 and 1962, those in charge of the project seemed hamstrung by both budget and time constraints. Getting the place finished was apparently more important than getting it right. Which makes sense when you consider how odd it was that the Soviet authorities allowed such a monument to Lithuania’s once dominant military might to be resurrected. The restorers concerned were acutely aware of the possibility that their Soviet overlords might change their minds at any minute, and as a result decided to focus on broad brushstrokes as opposed to detail. I also don’t know whether the technology was available in the 1950s and 1960s to colour-match masonry and tiling but the original bricks and rough stonework contrast markedly with the newer manufactured variety. The tiled roof, for example, appears freshly ripped off a McMansion, which leaves the entire structure looking like it is wearing a badly selected hairpiece from under whose periphery peek tendrils of an entirely different hue.

  A maze of exhibits inside gave some clue as to the opulence enjoyed by the castle’s inhabitants. A collection of dainty, gold-rimmed Venetian glass in watercolour blues and yellows receded to one of intricately carved smoking pipes, delicate lace fans and caches of Lithuanian, Polish and Swedish coins which were found hidden in the ground during foundation excavations in 1963. There was also a significant amount of glazing, but that was confined to my eyes. Far more intriguing was the castle’s collection of militariana – a word which I don’t think exists but should. There were solid metal cannonballs the size of pouffes, chain mail combat gear and swords that made Excalibur look like a toothpick. Oddly enough, one room housed a taxidermy menagerie that not only featured local fauna but a tiger, a leopard and a lion. How these poor felines ended up here with perma-sneers and smelling vaguely of formaldehyde is anybody’s guess. I tried to find out by asking the lone attendant – who also had a perma-sneer and smelled faintly of formaldehyde. She replied, ‘Toilet. Two litas.’

  Yes, in addition to the entry fee to the castle, one paid to pee. Making my way past daytrippers mugging in the stocks and cages once used on prisoners, the experience was brightened immeasurably by the chance to have a crack at using some vaguely authentic bows and arrows in a nearby drained moat. Let me tell you, if the enemy was a foot high and two away, I would have been deadly.

  In addition to filling the castle with treasures acquired from various bellicose campaigns, the Lithuanian gentry also brought home human cargo. One such group were the Tartars. Captured after the battle of the Golden Horn in 1398, several families were transported to Trakai and apparently liked it so much that they sent for the rellies. Descendants of Turks
and Mongol tribes, the Tartars were soldiers who were ferocious and disciplined in equal measure, not to mention being horsebreeders and tanners of some repute. In modern recruiting terms, these would be described as a ‘desirable skill sets’. Devotees of Islam, the men maintained their traditional wardrobe of long black tunics with no collars but curlicues of gold braiding and an elongated white pork-pie style hat with maroon trim. The women stayed inside. Five thousand Tartars live in Lithuania today and no one has yet surpassed them when it comes to making sauces served as an accompaniment to fish.

  Another sect picked up at the medieval equivalent of duty free was the Karaites. Often claimed – by Jews – as a Semitic tribe, their religion adheres only to the authority of the Old Testament and Decalogue. Sure they read Hebrew and use finger-shaped pointers to touch the sacred parchment, but the expansive Talmudic interpretations of the Law and oral religious laws have no bearing on the Karaite faith. Which makes them kinda Jewish in the same way Sammy Davis Jr was. Emerging in the eighth century, the Karaites spread from their original base in the Byzantine Empire to the Crimean Peninsula from where Lithuanian honcho Vytautas decided to take 383 families home with him. In Trakai, they were later granted freedom of religion and rewarded Vytautas for this gesture by taking on the role of fortress guardians and bodyguards.

  The Karaites’ native dress also set them apart from traditional Jews. Think ornate flowing robes in bright, intricately patterned silks of red, yellow and blue. Add a Nehru collar, a wide sash belt in a solid contrasting colour and fez-like hats and you have the kind of outfit that might be worn by a rabbi hastily drafted into the Village People. This tiny community – which numbers less than three hundred today – went on to produce some of Lithuania’s most noted writers and scientists. Trakai is also dotted with distinctive Karaite architecture which features eaved single-storey wooden homesteads marked by three windows facing the street.