Above Us Only Sky

by Michele Young-Stone

  Rather than packing up this doll and these many possessions, Stasys and Daina left them where they were, choosing to live with the ghosts, never dismissing the possibility that the family might return. Everything was make-believe, but not in a good way. In a horrific way.

  In the beginning, Daina and Stasys pretended to be eighteen to each other and then they pretended to be twenty-two for the Gestapo. With their papers in order, Daina took Stasys’s surname. After all, they were married. Reality was an invention. Daina sat on the floor with her eyes closed. She was thinking about the porcelain doll. Not so long ago, she’d played with dolls. She realized she’d been in shock during the walk to the sea. She’d had no idea that men were capable of such cruelty.

  Stasys said, “Are you all right?”

  She’d forgotten he was there. With her hands pressed to the floorboards, she was back home.

  He said, “At least we’ll be warm tonight.”

  “No,” she said. “I’m not all right.”

  “I’m sorry.” He wished there was something else to say. He wished that his mother were here because she’d know how to console two children forced to play grown-up. Daina opened her eyes, staring right through Stasys. He was unnerved. “I’ll make something to eat.”

  She didn’t respond. Tonight, she’d go back to the sea. She’d go alone. It was no good being in someone else’s home, longing to be a little girl again. Whenever she considered the possibility that this family whose home she inhabited had been killed, she felt a stabbing pain in her stomach. She wanted to believe that the family was on holiday. Perhaps they went to visit the Louvre in Paris. Perhaps they were on a steamship bound for some tropical destination.

  Stasys made potato soup. As Daina stabbed the undercooked potatoes with a fork, he said, “You’d better eat.”

  “Where are you sleeping?” she asked.

  “Where do you want me to sleep?”

  “I’m not hungry.” She got up to look for a hairbrush. “I’ll have a bath. There are two bedrooms. Which one do you want?”

  Stasys planned to sleep outside whichever bedroom she chose to make sure she didn’t leave him. “Either one,” he said.

  Daina went to take a bath, an unbelievable luxury. In the bathroom folded on a shelf, there were plush towels that smelled of lavender. On the bathtub’s edge, there was a bar of oatmeal soap. From the tub, Daina saw a squished bug by the door. Someone had stepped on that bug. For some reason, it made her smile. Here was another trace of what had been, of real people knocking around living real lives. Stasys tapped at the door. “Are you all right?” Daina slipped beneath the water. He opened the door and peeked in to see her emerge. She was breathing heavily. There they were again: her wings. Somehow, they didn’t surprise him as much now. She covered her breasts with her hands. Stasys quietly pulled the door closed.

  From that first afternoon he saw her sitting in a saucer of dirt, he knew that she was different: his salvation. Why should wings surprise him? It made sense for an angel to have wings.

  After her bath and once Stasys was asleep, Daina planned to slip away from this ghostly apartment, but the lavender overtook her. She slept in the double bed, the door closed, Stasys sleeping against it. He couldn’t let her leave. He couldn’t be alone. Not now. Not yet. He worried that she was the only force keeping him sane, giving him voice and reason to survive. God in Heaven, she has wings.

  In the morning, Stasys washed up, and Daina took advantage. This was her chance to escape. She hurried down the steps. The day was warm and sunny. Pulling the door shut behind her, she ran toward the dunes. She thought she might’ve heard Stasys calling her name. She ran faster. She didn’t stop until her boots were covered in sand. Despite a raging war, there were tourists and sunbathers. A man in a black bathing suit with a Winnfield moustache said, “The water is lovely.” He and a little boy chased the surf. Daina was surprised that anyone could be happy. She pretended to be a sunbather, to be happy, to be one of them. She agreed with the man. “Yes, it’s beautiful.” In truth, it was. There was not a cloud in the sky. She listened for her mother’s voice but heard the squawk of gulls and gleeful tourists. She sat in the sand and untied her boots. Walking north, she looked for Mother and Father. She sought out Frederick, Danut˙e, and Audra. All around, she saw people who resembled each of them. Everywhere she looked, there were boys about Frederick’s age, kicking the foamy surf and chasing the tide. There were blue-eyed girls with blond hair, girls like Audra and Danut˙e. Beneath a straw hat, there was a woman with a braid down her back. It could’ve been Aleksandra. But it wasn’t.

  The hard-packed sand felt cool on the bottoms of Daina’s feet. She swung her boots, nearly approaching the woman who looked like her mother. Is it you? Why can’t it be you? Daina walked until the sun kissed the sea, an uproarious gay pink spread out before her, a gift from God. She stopped in awe to watch. Everything was the same as it had been except that everything was different, so awfully different. She changed direction. She would join her family. They were with God. She would be there too. She belonged with them. God would make sure that she returned to them. Maybe not tonight, but soon. If only Stasys had left her in the burning warehouse, she’d be with them now. Maybe they’d be on this same beach, but there would be no death and no war. There would be no bullets and no yellow stars. Her sisters would be laughing. Her mother would be doting. Her father would squeeze her tight, and her brother would call her little bird. With the state of the world, she wouldn’t have to wait long to die. She crossed herself and sat on the cold sand to lace up her boots.

  When she opened the door to the apartment, she saw Stasys, gaping and red-faced, standing on the cramped entryway steps that led to their apartment. “What?” she asked him. “What do you want? What do you have to say?”

  “Where did you go?”

  “It’s none of your business.”

  “I was worried.”

  “I took a walk.”

  Daina smelled like the ocean. Sitting on the soft velveteen settee, she unlaced her boots. She hadn’t worn stockings. Her feet were covered with sand. Her face was sunburned.

  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

  In 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.