Above Us Only Sky

by Michele Young-Stone

  Daina was grinning. She was not going to say “I love you.” That was fine by him. He had enough love for all of them.

  Expectant, quiet in anticipation, their apartment took on its own voice as well as a hopeful breathing. In and out. Soon. Very soon. Life was coming. A beginning. There were new sounds and new sensations. They both heard the sea, even though it was nearly a mile away. In July, they felt the baby kick. In August, three days of heavy rains beat down and sounded like drummers squatted on the roof. The voices of children on the street floated through the open windows. The teakettle whistled and the bathwater ran. Tourists came and slept in the master bedroom. Daina and Stasys slept in the Jewish girl’s bed, the porcelain doll at their side. They were in a waking dream, nesting and clasping hands. At night, Daina prayed to see a vision of her mother. Sometimes she thought she heard her mother singing. Daina had been to a doctor, who said that she should have a healthy baby. There was no reason why she shouldn’t. Daina believed that the spirits of her family would be at the birth. Stasys was worried. What if their child was born with wings?

  What would the doctors do? Would they let Daina bring the baby home? Would they hurt the baby? Would they let his wife come home? Every night, he prayed for a healthy child. He didn’t care if there were wings, only that they could bring the baby home. He’d lost too much. He couldn’t suffer the loss of a baby he hadn’t even met yet.

  In September, the tourists went home, and Stasys and Daina went back to the big bed. He stayed awake listening, resting his head on Daina’s belly. Soon. Very soon. The house continued to whisper and breathe.

  Across town, Olga and Bohdan danced three or four nights a week. In the darkness, Olga lay still while Bohdan used his fingertips to draw maps and diagrams of places he’d seen—before he’d lost his sight—across her stomach and thighs, up and down her legs. She closed her eyes. Bohdan was not too old for her. He was just right. They did not engage in sex, only intimacy. In the daylight, they played with the dog, Emma. Olga helped Bohdan in the kitchen. The other tenants whispered behind their backs. Bohdan could hear what they were saying, but he paid them no mind. “I bet the Russian girl doesn’t pay him rent,” they said. “I bet the old man pays for sex with her.” Life was too short to be concerned with gossip. He did not care if Olga was Russian. She could be German or French. Even American. When he touched her face, which he did a lot, she always smiled for him. He knew that she was not always smiling. He sensed pain in her voice, but for him, she smiled. Sometimes they drank black-market whiskey. Always, they had a good time. When Olga told him about her sordid past, he said, “You were a child. It’s not your fault.”

  She touched his face the same way he touched hers, sensing his youth, the man he’d been, not the old man that he was.

  At work, Olga kept insisting that she’d had nothing to do with Daina’s arrest. She’d come to Palanga with a mission. Olga, the card-­carrying Communist, had a capitalist sensibility. If you worked hard enough, you got what you deserved. You got the handsome man. Nothing is out of reach. I can have whatever I desire. I must be ruthless and single-minded. Something in the slow pace of Palanga, the sweetness of Bohdan, the unconditional love of Emma had changed Olga. Something in the orderliness and cleanliness of this new life had transformed her. She couldn’t fully own what she’d done. Not for the rest of her life. She only told Stasys, “I’m glad your wife is back.”

  He nodded.

  Olga worked hard at her job. Her illustrations had a fierceness that Olga, the woman, now lacked. The red lines, the hammer and sickle, were sharp. “What do you think, comrade?” she asked Stasys, seeking his approval.

  “Fine,” he said. He couldn’t make her go away. Sometimes he’d forget, for a split second, what she’d done to his wife. He’d start to talk to Olga about Daina and the baby on its way. Then he’d remember and stop himself. Never mind. From the corner of his eye, he watched her work zealously, a contentment on her face that hadn’t been there the year before, and he understood too that if Daina hadn’t been imprisoned, she might never have wanted to live, she might never have let him be the husband he yearned to be.

  Stasys glared at the ridiculous words he was writing. He elbowed his typewriter, five and six keys clacking the paper at once. He chewed on his pencil. It was hard for him to think about anything but the baby on its way. The information office he and Olga shared fermented with hope.

  On October 6, 1951, after twenty-four hours in labor, Daina delivered a daughter with a cone-shaped head and black eyes. The doctor told Daina that her eyes would change color, “and her head will round.” Daina looked in awe at her baby. She didn’t see the black, sharklike eyes or the conical head. She saw the most beautiful baby in the world.

  In the hallway, upon hearing that he had a healthy baby girl, Stasys asked the doctor, “Is there anything unusual?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Anything different or peculiar?”

  “I told you about her head, but that’s standard with a forceps delivery.”

  “Is Daina all right?”

  “She lost a lot of blood. She’s a bleeder. Weak, but she will be fine.”

  Stasys took a deep breath and pushed the door open. His wife was most certainly not weak.

  Walking past three other women in recovery, he went to Daina. “Are you disappointed?”

  “About what?” Her eyelids were droopy.

  He whispered, “That she doesn’t have your wings?” He bit his knuckle. They had avoided this topic, but he couldn’t any longer. He had to know how Daina felt.

  “Of course not, Stasys.” She shook her head at his silliness. “Did you see her? She’s amazing.”

  Stasys peeked at the swaddled baby, at her five fingers on one hand, five on the other, at the smallness of her back. “She is.” He opened the blanket to touch each toe. Her eyes were squinty, her complexion ruddy, her chin dimpled. He kissed her forehead and tiny ears. Resting his palm on her fuzzy blond head, he looked at Daina. “I love you.”

  Daina kissed him. “I’m tired.”

  All total, there were six women in the recovery room. Each of them had had a healthy baby. Each of them had had her first baby. Today was an epiphany, a birthday for six mothers and six children, a wish that each of these children would one day raise the Lithuanian flag.

  Stasys sat on the edge of Daina’s bed, telling her, “You did it! You’re wonderful. I love you so much.” Daina tugged at Stasys’s shirtsleeve. Neither of them knew what the future held. Since the day they’d met, they’d merely been surviving. “I would like to name her Audra after my sister. Is that all right?”

  “Whatever you want.”

  Daina kissed the knuckle Stasys had been biting when he’d first asked if she was disappointed about the wings.

  She whispered, “Come closer.”

  Stasys leaned in, pressing his face to Daina’s. “What is it?”

  “I love you,” she said. “I’m glad that you were a boy and not a bear.” She scratched her cheek. “But I am very tired now.”

  Daina handed the baby girl to Stasys, who was unsure what to do. He cooed and made tic-toc sounds with his tongue. Daina rolled over and closed her eyes. Stasys told the baby, “Your mother loves me. Did you hear that? She loves me.” He sat at Daina’s side. He’d given up needing to hear those words, but just the same, they were music to his ears. When Audra started to cry and Daina didn’t wake, he tried rousing her. The other mothers were feeding their babies while nurses in green uniforms skittered past. What had the doctor said? She’s a bleeder? What did he mean? Stasys stopped one of the nurses. She was Russian. “I’m worried,” he said. The baby was wailing. “Can you check on my wife?” The nurse was petite with short, dark hair. She had deep lines above her lip that disappeared when she smiled. “The baby is hungry,” she said.

  Stasys agreed.

  The nurse checked Da
ina’s wrist for a pulse, and then, shaking her head, lifted the blankets covering Daina’s legs. “She’s lost a lot of blood. I’ll get the doctor.” Daina wore a peaceful expression. Audra’s cries of hunger fell on deaf ears. Unconsciously, Stasys slipped his finger into the baby’s mouth and whispered to Daina, “Don’t go to sleep on me. You have to wake up.” He thought, You’ve gone and done it to me, haven’t you, Daina? You finally told me that you loved me, and now you’re going to break my heart in two. The nurse took the baby. Helpless, Stasys was herded toward a small waiting room while Daina was wheeled in the opposite direction.

  The waiting room walls were the color of pea soup, and Stasys pressed his forehead to one of two small windows frosted with ice. He was reminded of the windows with eyes. There was always someone watching, always someone who knew things he didn’t know, like that his parents were to be exterminated. Someone knew that some girls refuse to bleed while others are born with wings. But Stayis hadn’t known any of these things. Someone or something knew everything that had been unexpected for Stasys, the slices of life that had knocked him off his feet and to the ground to grovel in the dirt. He was a survivor, but he didn’t know if he could do it anymore. The Lord gives and the Lord takes away, and too much had been taken.

  The doctor found Stasys with his nose and cheek pressed flat against the glass. Stasys saw the doctor’s reflection and felt the man’s hand heavy on his shoulder. The doctor smelled of antiseptic. Stasys presumed the worst. Despite the cold, Stasys was sweating. The doctor said, “She’s going to be fine,” and patted Stasys’s back. “She’s a tough bird.” Someone or something knew that Stasys could endure no more. He turned to shake the doctor’s hand, holding it in his grip, both men understanding the weight of this simple gesture.

  Two days later, Stasys and Daina took their healthy baby girl home. Audra’s head did lose its conical shape, and her eyes did change from black to blue. The first year, she slept in the same room as Stasys and Daina, but when she was nearly two, they gave her the little girl’s bedroom and the porcelain doll. It was 1953. On March fourth, they secretly celebrated the Feast of Saint Casimir. Daina had told Stasys about Saint Casimir’s visitation in the prison cell. They would always celebrate his feast. The next day, March fifth, Joseph Stalin, general secretary of the Communist Party Central Committee, died.

  Comrades wept in the streets. Presumably out of grief, but truthfully out of jubilation. Daina and Stasys wept. The greatest butcher the world had ever known was dead. It didn’t matter why anyone wept. It was a mass catharsis of the people, and that bastard Stalin would’ve liked it.

  A month later in the quiet of two a.m., Olga pressed herself against Bohdan.

  Bohdan was old, but he was not too old, and he would not pretend that he hadn’t fantasized about feeling himself inside Olga. A man can’t listen to jazz and swing and smell a woman and trace her figure with his hands without wondering, What if she wants to be with me? On this fortuitous night, Olga told Bohdan that she was crazy about him.

  Bohdan laughed because he was an old man and he could scarcely remember the last time a woman was swooning on his account.

  Olga guided his hand along the curve in her waist, stopping at the bend in her knee and then at the bend in her arm. She pressed his hand beneath and between her breasts.

  Olga had always thought there was something bright within herself. If anyone could see this potential, it would be a blind man. Bohdan climbed on top of Olga, pouring himself like molten iron into her. Olga’s skin was the stuff of Chinese lanterns, paper thin, and Bohdan was the flame causing her to rise high above the hovels of her past. Bohdan illuminated the night and, if only for a few seconds, saw the luminescence of Olga’s face.

  Across town, Daina was awake. She saw light spurting like firecrackers, spilling from a window, buoyed by the cloud-filled night. It settled like a shiny halo over the seaside village.

  As Time will do whether we want it to or not, it passed. It passed quickly. Daina and Stasys grew older, and Audra grew up. Nothing was as scary as it had been when Stalin was alive. He was a mythic figure, the great father, who’d ensured the nation’s success. This is what Stasys now wrote in pamphlets that were distributed to schools throughout Lithuania. There were fewer deportations to Siberia. No one felt as nervous about smiling or even laughing. Stasys joined the Lithuanian resistance. With ample access to paper, he participated in the underground newspaper, smuggling news about Lithuania’s terrible economic condition to the Western world, especially to Lithuanians living abroad.

  Olga still worked alongside Stasys, but nowadays, she talked a blue streak about her blind man. “I love him,” she told Stasys. After so many years, it was hard for Stasys to hold a grudge against Olga. They saw each other every day, and even though he felt in his bones that she was responsible for Daina’s arrest, he couldn’t hate her. As Daina once said, “Everybody has a story.”

  PART FOUR

  It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.

  —Salman Rushdie

  18

  Prudence

  My Oma and the Old Man returned home to Brooklyn. They had a trip to Lithuania to plan. During those months of planning before our actual journey, my Oma’s worry lines doubled. Her fear had nothing to do with flying and everything to do with her past. In order to fly to Lithuania, officially known as the Western Province of the Soviet Union, we would first have to fly through Moscow. The East Germans, under orders from Moscow, had built that dreaded Berlin Wall that my Oma feared. At first just barbed wire, but later, concrete and watchtowers; the border guards had shot anyone who tried to cross, and she knew that too many boys had bled to death in the no-man’s-zone between East and West. And now she was supposed to willingly enter the Soviet Union? It seemed like begging for death. She’d never been back to Germany. Her cousins were trapped in East Berlin. In order for her to even telephone one of them, her call was routed through Moscow. And now she was traveling to the Soviet Union? She couldn’t imagine. Or she could imagine . . . which is why she wouldn’t go. She couldn’t go. Not to Lithuania, and certainly not to Moscow.

  She explained this to the Old Man, and he dismissed her fears. “You worry too much.”

  “And you are too optimistic.”

  Certainly, the Old Man couldn’t remember the last time anyone had called him optimistic.

  I was not afraid. Rather, I felt that I had lived my whole life to take this trip. It was late summer, but already I was counting the days. In Los Vientos, blue crabs were fat, the size of dogs, a sign that the worst of the heat was nearly behind us. I remember that I no longer had time for Wheaton. I’d replaced him with father-daughter dates, phone calls with the Old Man, and dusty history books. I’d also started taking lone walks to the pier because I coveted the ghost of my great-aunt Daina. She did not belong to Wheaton. I remember that when I did see Wheaton, I was usually relaying the Old Man’s stories. Wheaton’s eyes reflected the Atlantic. He stopped telling me about his visions. I guess he knew that I had other things on my mind. He never complained. He couldn’t find fault or place blame. He understood my desire to see my homeland and discover my birthright. I suspect he was counting beats: the closing curtain. Five.

  From the pier, I admired the horizon, imagining what was on the other side. I didn’t tumble again. There was no reason. Soon enough, I’d be crossing over. I felt the pulse and beat of bird wings like a musical interlude, a drumroll of sorts.

  On November 4, 1989, we boarded a flight from New York to London. My Oma warned each of us that we were flying into the belly of the beast. “We should turn around in London and fly home.” On our flight from London to Moscow, her knees buckled in the aisle, and Freddie had to basically carry her to her seat. “We shouldn’t be doing this.” When she started hyperventilating, the Old Man pulled a bottle of tranquilizers from his pocket, and Freddie
ordered her a whiskey on the rocks to wash it down.

  After a while, the sedative took effect. My Oma tinkled her ice and fingered the small bag of pretzels on her lap tray. “She is fine,” the Old Man assured us. Veronica and Freddie held hands. The Old Man regarded them with curiosity. Veronica was the woman who was neither Lithuanian nor German, but she was my mother, so she couldn’t be the most terrible woman in the world. I had my father’s dark hair, but other than that, I resembled neither of my parents. They’d started dating in September, after Freddie took up residence across the causeway in Saint Mark’s. Never mind that they were still married. At sixteen, I could not be bothered with their ridiculousness.

  My Oma took another pill and ate a package of sugar cookies. After her third sedative, she lost consciousness, her head slumping onto Freddie’s shoulder. Many of the passengers on our plane spoke Russian, and somewhere in the sky above the Republic of Volgograd, the Old Man was out of his seat, starting conversations with them. “I’m Lithuanian. I am taking my family to see our homeland.” The Old Man was very proud of his return. According to him, everyone on the flight told him that he would love Moscow. “It is a golden city.”

  At some point, we all nodded off, awakened by the pilot’s announcement that we would be landing shortly. Ingeburg was white-knuckled, gripping the armrests. As the landing gear came down and the wing flaps came up, she had a noisy, foul burst of gas. When the tires touched down on the freezing tarmac, she vomited on Freddie’s lap. The interior of the plane rattled as Freddie grabbed for the sick bag. My Oma apologized. Then she refused to move. “We should not be here,” she insisted. We were stuck in our seats while the other passengers made putrid faces as they were trapped in the aisle by her row. We were the last ones to disembark.