From Russia with Lunch

by David Smiedt

It is the kind of sentiment anyone would have when he actually sees refugees face to face, begging with tears in their eyes. He cannot just help but sympathise with them. Among the refugees were the elderly and women. They were so desperate that they went so far as to kiss my shoes. Also, I felt at that time, that the Japanese government did not have any uniform opinion in Tokyo. I felt it silly to deal with them. So, I made up my mind not to wait for their reply. I knew that somebody would surely complain to me in the future. But, I myself thought this would be the right thing to do. There is nothing wrong in saving many people’s lives … The spirit of humanity, philanthropy … neighbourly friendship … with this spirit, I ventured to do what I did, confronting this most difficult situation … and because of this reason, I went ahead with redoubled courage.

  He concluded this remembrance by quoting the Samurai tenet that ‘even a hunter cannot kill a bird which flies to him for refuge’.

  The quietly spoken career diplomat died a year later. Despite the acclaim afforded him in Israel, Lithuania and the United States, his deeds remained virtually unknown in his home country. Only when a large Jewish delegation from around the world, including the Israeli ambassador to Japan, showed up at his funeral did his neighbours find out what he had done.

  By the most conservative estimates, Sugihara saved the lives of five times more Jews than the celebrated Oskar Schindler, yet there has not been and probably never will be a movie about him. All that stands is a modest Chinoise monument outside the Jewish Museum annexe in Vilnius and a name that is still included in Hebraic prayers of thanksgiving from Hoboken to Haifa.

  9

  Life of brine

  An old Jewish woman is walking along the beach with her grandson when a freak wave washes him out to sea. She immediately drops to her knees and wails, ‘Lord. Please deliver my little Hymie back to me. He is the light of my life, my joy. Bring him back and I will promise to be a more devout and observant Jew. I will spread the word of your glory for the rest of my days.’ Within seconds, another wave dumps the boy at her feet. At which the woman looks heavenward and says, ‘He had a hat!’

  After the bitches brew of hideousness that was Naishtot, or rather its ghosts, I wanted a holiday from history. Lithuania’s coastline – all 99 kilometres of it – beckoned. My first stop was Silute, which began life as an inn 500 years ago then quietly prospered as a fishing village. Marooned in a lake of windblown meadows with lilac wildflowers for whitecaps, Silute’s borders are marked by the traditional Lithuanian outpost of a disused factory.

  This verdigris of Soviet industrialisation came into being because of a policy of self-defeating specialisation. Industrial plants were designed to manufacture only single components such as springs, brackets or flanges (a word I’ve been wanting to use for decades). These were shipped or freighted elsewhere where they were then combined with other doodads to make a whatever. Apparently, this all had something to do with that phrase so beloved by Marxist undergrads, ‘controlling the means of production’.

  Come the 1991 revolution, however, Lithuania was left with an industrial infrastructure and workforce with precious little experience in producing a functioning anything. Still, Silute seems to be doing okay for itself with a dairy that has been producing rich cheeses for even richer Germans since 1842. Its surrounding countryside is scarified by peat works which have also been in operation since 1842 and export some 50,000 square metres a year of the dense dark soil.

  In the centre of the town was a chipper market that spilled beyond the corrugated iron tarpaulin built to contain it. Most of the stalls were given over to food. Mushrooms mushroomed from plastic buckets in masses of bulbous ivory. Still bearing yesterday’s dirt, dinky varieties the size of a snail were on offer for a dollar per kilogram. Salted gherkins lay submerged in vats and were ladled out to order then sprinkled with enough vinegar to turn a human mouth into a feline rectum.

  Other stalls offered nothing but creamy pale walnuts and tubs of 24-carat honey. Handfuls of fragrant dill and basil went for next to nothing, as did sacks of opalescent white onions and tubs of vermilion currants. Pale persimmons and marbled quinces stood in higgledy-piggledy pyramids while perfect dusted-ruby raspberries peered over the rims of two-litre ice-cream containers. Which went for under two bucks each. Less if the vendor next door was prepared to get into a bidding war with her neighbour.

  Unlike the market experience I was used to, where retired stockbrokers sell their tree-change artisanal sourdoughs and sly operators demand retail prices without the premises that might necessitate them, Silute’s version was a Monday to Friday place of business. This was not a faux rustic and slightly hokey departure from malls and high streets. It was the alternative option to the town’s supermarket and one it seemed many preferred. The queue at the butcher’s, for example, was three deep and when you wanted a ribeye or sirloin, Harry Cleaver would liberate it from a hanging carcase on the spot, before plunging his blood-flecked hands into a bowl of kidneys glossed like J Lo’s lips to serve another customer. Beside this and incongruous to no one but me sat a florist. It was testament to the scrupulous cleanliness of both retailers that as I watched the butcher weigh a palmful of tripe, all I could smell was jonquil.

  Lunch was a pair of herrings that had been swimming the day before and smoked that morning. Most Jews will tell you that they have had this fish every which way – chopped, pickled, marinated in the Danish tradition and boiled until it had the flavour and consistency of a hand-me-down nappy – but this was a revelation. Still brine salty, the faintest trace of wood lingered in the flesh which ceded to the teeth like third-rate startlets to a second-rate director. I topped this off with a bucket of raspberries. Eaten by the avaricious handful, they impart the type of viridian goatee most often sported by Hannibal Lecter after ‘having a friend for dinner’.

  Perhaps one of the most chilling fictional characters of recent years, Hannibal ‘the Cannibal’ is actually a Lithuanian export. It seems that when author Thomas Harris was searching for a landscape and historical juncture that would set an impressionable protagonist on the path to gorging murder, Lithuania during the Soviet–Nazi War answered the call. Naturally, an enterprising Lithuanian thought ‘He used us so why not use him?’ and set up a themed travel experience for fans of the books and films. For several months preceding my journey, tourism agency Aurimas Jukna was offering visitors to Vilnius a visit to a nearby estate for a ‘Hannibal feast’ and a meeting with ‘Lecter’ for 100 euros. The first apparently involved much red meat, fava beans and chianti. The second, an ageing amateur actor who all but chewed the scenery when he was supposed to be threatening as much to the audience. Unfortunately, the experience was no longer on offer when I was in town. When I asked why these tours had been cancelled, the receptionist at Aurimas Jukna said, ‘The people. They didn’t come.’ Go figure.

  Walking off lunch, I decided to explore the market’s clothing section. By which I mean several stalls selling enormous beige undies the gussets of which went on for days. There were also mottled grey leather jackets with matching zipsided shoes and polyester suits that seemed to have been designed in a dark room by a method actor preparing to play a dictator who had been on the run for decades.

  The most intriguing establishment, however, was that of the bag lady. This rather dignified babushka with potato dumpling limbs and a garrulous demeanour sold nothing but shopping bags, and second-hand ones at that. These had somehow been sourced from upmarket stores, presumably in Europe, so that a shopper in Silute could convey the impression that he had just nipped out to Prada at lunchtime. She haggled with the best of them and had little time for explaining why an Emporio Armani pack cost half as much as a Giorgio Armani one. There was but one word she knew in English and it was ‘diffusion’ – which is fashion-speak for a designer’s more budget-friendly streetwear line.

  An hour up the coast lies Klaipeda, Lithuania’s third largest city and its only commercial port. Its provenance came to pass as a result of some
serious chutzpah from the interwar independent republic, which claimed it as part of Lithuania in 1923. Until that point it had spent almost its entire history – stretching back to 1252 – as a German city, save for a brief spell from 1629 to 1635 when it was overrun by Swedish forces, who no doubt arrived on blonde-wood vessels constructed with nothing but allen keys.

  By the seventeenth century, it was the nexus of a burgeoning grain, flax, hemp, linseed and timber industry with Britain. So lucrative was this trade route that large contingents of Scottish and English traders decided to settle in the town, then known as Memel. There then followed two cataclysmic fires which all but destroyed the city, and a period of plague and famine that lasted from 1709 to 1711 and saw the local population thinned by some 3000.

  Its heyday came in 1807 when King Wilhelm III decamped there after Napoleon forced him to flee Berlin. It’s not much to go downhill from, but Memel managed it when the local Teutons became increasingly vociferous against Lithuanian rule following the Nazi Party’s ascension to German government in 1933. On 23 March 1939, Hitler heeded their call. This turned out to be the last of the Fuhrer’s territorial annexations before the outbreak of the war which would see two-thirds of the place reduced to rubble.

  This was a pity on two fronts. The first was that it wrecked one of the most characterful cities in the nation. Memel/Klaipeda – depending on who was ruling at the time – was once distinguished by the architectural style known as Fachwerk. Utilising timber frames and decorative wooden fretwork that lends an austere geometric motif to the ochre walls, the aesthetic is a combination of illustrated storybook and gingerbread Bauhaus. While a handful of these buildings remain, a walk through Klaipeda is more often an exercise in rueful hypotheticals of what once was as opposed to what is.

  The second misfortune to befall Klaipeda lies in what was constructed in the wake of World War II. By the mid-1950s, the Soviets had transformed their only ice-free Baltic harbour into an industrial hub featuring a trio of oil terminals and 55 hulking cranes spread along 17 quays with a total length of 32 kilometres. All of which makes Port Kembla or New Jersey look like Cannes. Everywhere you go in Klaipeda that is in proximity to the water – which is to say most of the town – monstrous meccano sets leer over proceedings. As does a rusting leitmotif of shipping containers and diesel-belching freighters.

  Klaipeda’s Old Town offers a pleasant but brief distraction from the port, which is the city’s lifeblood. Arranged in a grid of narrow streets, it features several fine examples of Fachwerk. Which for the most part house drab banks and their life-sized window cut-outs of overjoyed families who have recently taken on a lifetime of housing loan debt. What separates this Old Town from most others in Lithuania is the absence of churches, the three of which were obliterated during the war. The focal point is undoubtedly Teatro Aikiste, an intimate cobbled square edged by tatty souvenir shops, barely-in-the-black cafés and a fetching whitewashed drama theatre that will forever be remembered for providing the balcony from which Hitler announced the city’s reincorporation into the Reich.

  Klaipeda’s beautiful people head to Fredericho Pasazis, an enclosed laneway that houses half a dozen restaurants of varying ostentatiousness. On the day I was there it was apparently hosting a mutton-dressed-as-lamb festival where aluminium blondes old enough to know better paraded their size-14 derriéres, knock-off size-12 Diesel jeans and skittish Pomeranians only to be ignored by too-cool-for-school tech boys who were engrossed in their machiattos and BlackBerrys.

  Those who call this area home are Lithuania’s equivalent of Catalans or Basques. Although Klaipeda’s original inhabitants were predominantly Samogitian or Curonian, the Germanification of the city saw them embracing some aspects of this culture while rejecting others. Unlike many other Lithuanian towns, the vast majority of the faithful here were Protestants, which fostered an influx of Scandinavians and Scots, who in turn married into the population. So distinctive were these folk that the greater Lithuanian population decreed them a ‘new’ ethnicity known as lietu-vninkai, while the area surrounding Klaipeda came to be referred to as Lithuania Minor.

  Considering themselves neither Lithuanian nor German, the language of choice in the region was Lithuanian, their allegiance lay with Prussia and their traditions were mainly Curonian. As was a doozey of a myth regarding the city’s origins. The story goes that two brothers decided to search for the ideal location for a new settlement. As you do. One stayed close to shore while the other reckoned that paradise lay in the kilometres of marshy bog at what is now Klaipeda’s back door. No one ever got to ask swamp boy why his vision of happily ever after entailed daily squelching as he was never seen again. All that was found was a single footprint in the mud. Most probably delighted to be rid of his dimwitted sibling, the surviving brother named the town after the man he would no longer have to carry or cover for. Klaipeda is thus a hybrid of the term klampi peda which means – wait for it – ‘marshy footprint’. The romance never ends.

  Klaipeda’s New Town reveals the city for what it is: a hardworking commercial port which is reluctantly going along with the idea of becoming a tourist destination. Its primary artery, Manto Street, is bedecked in office blocks the colour of week-old silverside, all seemingly vying to make the abstract notion of gormless into a concrete architectural reality. Amid these are four-star business hotels whose clients talk in tonnage and whose idea of luxury is an onsite table-dancing venue with in-room extras. Throw in the dingy slot machine caverns, bat’s nest themed cocktail bars and cheesy Americana steakhouses (‘Entrance For Smiling People Only’), and Klaipeda’s New Town is the cultural equivalent of a bowel scraping.

  At least it was until I found two of the most beguiling and quirk-filled museums. The first was devoted to the art of blacksmithery. With a working forge at its centre, it not only carried with it an undeniable element of glistening-bodied, spark-shedding showmanship but also provided a poignant link to the past in the form of curlicued traditional metalwork which was salvaged from the town cemetery before it was bulldozed by the Russians. Then there was the Clock Museum. Brand me a pointdexter if you will, but there are few more magnificent testaments to human ingenuity than the timepiece. Splayed out like dissected frogs were dozens of watches whose tremulous innards danced to their own metronomes. There were clocks made of candles, clocks powered by fire, clocks that depended on water to function. Time flew.

  Klaipeda’s saving grace, however, lies a ten-minute ferry jaunt across the harbour at Smiltyne, the northernmost village of the Curonian Spit. Before disembarking, however, you have to negotiate the body of water which inspired The Hunt for Red October. On 6 April 1961, Jonas Pleskys set out into the chop with an audacious plan to defect to Sweden. It’s at this point that Tom Clancy decided the yarn needed to be sexed up. You’ll see why shortly. Unlike the fictional Marko Ramius who nicked a cutting-edge nuclear-powered submarine, the 26-year-old Lithuanian captain in the Soviet navy had at his disposal a 300-tonne self-propelled barge. There was no dastardly pursuit as enacted by Sean Connery in the 1990 film version. Instead, Pleskys had simply set off on a mission to dump a load of chemical waste into the neutral waters of the Baltic Sea. Unusually high tides prevented the crew from fulfilling the task and Pleskys informed them that they were going to turn around and head for home.

  Well, at least he was straight up on the first part. Swinging the vessel through 360 degrees he motored to Gotland, an island speck off the coast of Sweden. Going ashore with a Lithuanian crewman, Pleskys declared he was seeking asylum. His mate was having none of it and promptly returned to the barge which was escorted back to Soviet waters. Pleskys, meanwhile, was tried, found guilty and sentenced to death in absentia. Eventually migrating to the United States where he was hidden by the CIA, Pleskys spent much of the rest of his life looking over his shoulder for KGB operatives.

  Another of those to sail this channel was my greatgrandfather Solomon Hershl Smiedt who, around 1892, aged nineteen or so, undertook the four-month
voyage to South Africa from Memel (Klaipeda). While the Memel side of the waterway has changed radically since that time, the spit side has not. This allowed me to gaze out on the same view he did while pondering the unfathomable bravery it took to give up his past and his family for the gamble of a better future. Considering the furthest from home he’d ever been was probably Sovetsk, there was no doubting Solly’s valour.

  In a country of bewitching landscapes, the Curonian Spit takes the coven. Essentially a sandbar stretching 98 kilometres, it is a geological spring chicken having come into existence a mere 5000 years ago. As with practically everything else in Lithuania – ‘See that dunny over there? It was created by Bowelitas, god of flatulence, after the pagan celebration of fibre and yoghurt’ – it has an accompanying legend. It involves Neringa, a female, if not feminine, version of Hercules, who created the place after gathering up sand in her apron and depositing it in an arc to protect local fisherfolk from the Baltic. Sweet.

  The spit was actually the result of sand drifts which originated in the nearby Samland peninsula following glacial withdrawal. A highly unreliable method of contraception. Initially, the drifts formed a gritty archipelago but were subsequently bound together by the wind into a desert of shifting dunes. Grasses and trees eventually took hold in what is known as the Lindsay Lohan phenomenon of partial stabilisation. Regarding woods as sacred places, the pagan fishermen who initially inhabited the spit felled little timber.

  The loggers who plundered the place in the Middle Ages did not feel the same way. Cue the shifting of mammoth sand dunes, which swallowed villages whole. During the Seven Years War, which raged from 1756 to you do the maths, the Curonian Spit was subjected to the geographical equivalent of a Brazilian wax. So extensive was the deforestation that an international conference was held in Danzig in 1768 to save the spit. A mission that was accomplished through extensive planting of trees, shrubs and grasses.