Above Us Only Sky

by Michele Young-Stone

  Natasha Sluska told us to go on our way. She would go back to the hotel.

  “If I knew we could be rid of you, I would’ve spoken up sooner,” I said.

  “It’s easier here than in Moscow.” Natasha smiled at us and patted Ingeburg’s hand to reassure her. “It’s not as strict.”

  We continued without Mrs. Sluska, passing another church, one used to house grain, but its stained-glass windows were intact, an image of the Virgin Mother holding the Christ child, an angel on each shoulder, a rendering of Our Lady of Perpetual Help.

  As I remember, the others were in awe of my city. They regarded everything as sacred ground, but me, I could not shut up. It was growing harder and harder for me to contain my happiness. My God, but it was strange that everywhere we looked there were turrets and steeples, but nowhere could you get on your knees before a cross and praise God. My mother was a woman of faith. She believed in God and angels and girls born with wings.

  Approaching Pilies Street, I breathed a sigh of relief because it still was a market street with vendors selling linen and amber, jewelry and art. Shielding my eyes, I gazed at the Upper Castle. I will never, not for my whole life, forget what I saw or how I felt. Even as an Old Man of sixty-eight, I was strong, but right then, I was weak in my legs. Wobbly even, blinking in the sunlight that accompanied my joy. Up there, where I had last seen the Nazi flag fly and before the Nazi flag, the Soviet flag, I saw my own flag. I had no words for anyone just then. Instead, I pointed, and for all my attempt to contain emotion, a rush of tears harbored for decades spilled down my cheeks. My beard was like a wet sponge. I was not embarrassed. I felt no shame.

  Ingeburg demanded to know what was wrong. She was talking about going for Natasha Sluska, worried about one thing or another. I vehemently shook my head to indicate that she should call no one. She should not be a fool, but she should look up to where I was pointing. There was a young man, a university student with a satchel passing by, and I grabbed hold of his arm. I couldn’t help it. I said, “Look there! Look up there! They’ve raised our flag. How is it that they’ve raised our flag?”

  In Lithuanian, he explained that last year, a group of students had taken down the Soviet flag. A crowd had gathered. The young man had been there. He shook my hand excitedly and told me how he and the others had sung the national song of Lithuania. They’d feared someone would be shot. Certainly, they supposed there would be some terrible reprisal, but then nothing bad happened. Within hours, our flag had been raised in its place and remained.

  The student and I were pointing at the flag. Pulling my handkerchief from my back pocket, I thanked him. I was still crying and then I was singing, not quietly, not fearfully, but unabashedly and with gusto, and this young man joined me. Freddie, who knew our national song because at one time he was a good and obedient son, joined us. We sang: “Lietuva, Tėvyne mūsų, Tu didvyrių žeme, Iš praeities Tavo sūnūs Te stiprybę semia.”

  I heard Prudence asking Ingeburg, “What does it mean?”

  Ingeburg explained, “They love their country.” As I’ve said, she is sometimes not as smart as she thinks. Sometimes she is much more German and American than Lithuanian. She cannot help it. Our national hymn means much more than loving one’s country. The hymn’s power soon became evident to everyone. On the street, men and women stopped and turned toward our flag. They also sang. I imagined that these men and women were like those men and women who’d been murdered over four decades ago. I imagined they were teachers and lawyers, doctors and butchers, poets and locksmiths, students and mechanics. I was proud. This was the Lithuania that I had described to Prudence.

  Ingeburg said, “Someone is going to see and report this. We’ll be picked up. They won’t let us leave.”

  I ignored my wife and her fears.

  When the song was done, everyone erupted in applause. Then, as if nothing extraordinary had occurred, the people continued on their way. I think my granddaughter understood then that this was also her homeland. Of course she came from this place—a country where everyone was always singing—and I think my son felt it too. He patted me on the back. There were tears in my boy’s eyes. I turned to Prudence to explain. “Our hymn means don’t forget history. Mankind is our duty. Unity. Lithuania forever . . . We are Lithuanian. We are not the Soviet Union.” I wiped my face with my coat sleeve and smiled. “We never give up trying to be free.”

  Ingeburg said, “What if we get reported?”

  “Stop it with your worry! Stop it this instant!” I was irate with my wife, tired of her fears, and I told her, “No more!” In Moscow, I could understand, but not here.

  We continued down Pilies Street. We were walking and I suspect that my wife was worrying that Natasha Sluska was reporting us to someone in the KGB, but then we heard a man speaking in Polish.

  23

  Ingeburg

  The stranger was leaning against a railing on the front stoop of a brick house and smoking a Russian cigarette. There were three other men smoking with him. He told his friends, “They’re tearing down the Berlin Wall. I heard it on BBC.”

  I stopped and looked at the man. He wore a thick leather coat and checkered wool cap. “What did you say?”

  The man wasn’t paying attention to me. Then, in German, I asked him again, “Wie bitte?” What did you say?

  “Pardon me, ma’am.” He tipped his hat, explaining himself all over again. “It’s the beginning of the end. The wall is coming down. You can see cement being chipped away on the television. The East and the West are crossing over. The border guards are standing around useless; some of them have left their posts.” At this, he laughed and clapped his hands, his cigarette ashing on the stoop.

  “In the no-man’s-zone?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “And no one is being shot?”

  “No!” he said. Then the total stranger, his cigarette dangling from his lip, grabbed me around the waist and pulled me to him. I could not believe what he was telling me. I reached my arms around his neck, and the other men on the stoop applauded. This was as incredible to me as men and women raising the Lithuanian flag and breaking into spontaneous song.

  The stranger and I parted but clasped hands. The Old Man asked if what the stranger had said could be true. I knew that it had to be true. I believed. No one would say something so impossible to believe. Then the fear that had taken hold, that purple rotted plum, was replaced by the goose’s golden egg. I had it. The gold was mine. I owned it. The fear that had poisoned my bloodstream was replaced with the memory of good schnapps and garden waltzes. The wall is coming down. Hunks of concrete are falling to the ground. I recalled the sweetness of marzipan on my tongue and for the first time in so long, I felt safe.

  The world is changed, and no, Old Man, I am not a Lithuanian. I am a German girl. I am that pie-faced German girl you kissed when my face was unmarred, when my tooth was intact. Germany is my homeland.

  I grabbed the Old Man and kissed him.

  He said, “Are you all right, Ingeburg?”

  I was better than all right. Wrapping my arms tight around his neck, I kissed him again. I do not think I had ever loved him as much as I did at that moment.

  24

  Prudence

  The Old Man took us to one of the garages in town (formerly a church), and there he hired a car to drive outside Vilnius to the farm where he was born—where he’d grown up and lived twenty years. Understandably, my Oma was grinning. I don’t imagine anything could’ve wiped that smile from her face. She was suddenly fit as a fiddle, talking about the crumbling wall, her cheeks rosy. She was planning her trip home to Germany. She intended to see her long-lost cousins and visit the house where she’d grown up. Thomas Wolfe said you can’t go home again, but back in 1989, we were all giving it our best shot, and to me, at sixteen, it seemed that we were succeeding.

  But the Old Man’s road home had changed. When he’d li
ved there, it was paved, but in 1989 it was gravel and dirt. Along the road, the tall pines the Old Man remembered still towered majestically beside us. This was ancient forest. The Old Man told us that bears were rare in the pines, but once when he was a boy, out playing and looking for bugs and toads, he spotted a brown bear. He said that he kept very still, but his heel came down on a twig, and the bear looked at him. He told us that the bear had blue eyes. They were sad and lonely eyes, and the Old Man didn’t look away, nor did he move. He and the bear stared at one another. When he went home and told his mother about the bear, she told him and his sisters that many of the freedom fighters who’d died in the forest had turned into animals, and that bears were good fortune. The Old Man and his sisters halfway believed her stories. She was always dancing and singing and telling stories, and that was the reason Petras had fallen in love with her. Petras also believed her stories. The Old Man said that a child should always love his mother, but that he and his sisters didn’t just love their mother. They preferred her company to that of their friends, making up excuses to be with her. She liked to wear long pants and fitted shirts rolled at the sleeves. She kept her blond hair pinned in a bun except at night, when she took it down and she and the Old Man’s sisters took turns brushing one another’s hair. “She was never old,” he told me. “Not like me.” He seemed to think on this for a long time.

  As the Old Man pulled into the spot where he knew his house to have been, we saw a sterile radio tower in its stead. “It was right here.” The Old Man sighed loudly and resignedly. He was sad. His house, he told us, had been brick, and his neighbor’s house had been brick. He’d hidden in the neighbor’s cellar. There had been three families on the land.

  The Old Man showed us where each of the houses had stood, pointing out where they’d had their garden and where they’d kept their sheep and chickens. Surrounding the radio tower was a weedy field, a few pieces of broken brick the only evidence that anything like a family’s home had ever been in this place. The sun was shining. A glimmering piece of a hair barrette caught my eye. I picked it up and gave it to the Old Man. He kissed the top of my head and slipped the piece of metal in his pocket. I pointed out a rabbit not too far from us.

  The Old Man straddled the radio tower’s lowest beam and said, “This is where our living room used to be.” When he was twelve, he’d helped his father add a large kitchen to the back of their house to replace one that had originally been separate from the house. His mother loved to cook. She was a wonderful baker, and he and his sisters were often shooed from the kitchen for picking at cakes and bread.

  He said that his parents’ house was the biggest of the three. It was also the first house built after his mother and father had walked to Lithuania from Kazakhstan. Before his father’s brother left for America, they’d built two of the three houses. The Old Man looked up at the tower.

  I remember that his sadness was palpable. He’d carried his family photograph with him. He’d wanted to show us where the photograph had been taken. He wanted to show Freddie the room in which he’d slept. He’d imagined that some other family would be living in his home, and he’d tell them his story, and they’d embrace him as their kinsman, and they’d be glad to meet a Lithuanian living in America. They’d want to know what was happening beyond the iron curtain. The Old Man imagined that Freddie would be proud of him. He didn’t realize that already my father was overwhelmed, incredibly moved by the singing and the architecture, feeling a connection to this foreign land. While the Old Man sat uncomfortably on the metal beam, we stood around him like mourners at a funeral.

  There was nothing for us to see, but then I saw it. Up high, at the top of the tower, a massive nest, big enough for the Old Man’s blue-eyed bear to take up residence.

  “What kind of nest is that?” Veronica asked.

  We were all squinting to see. Even at sixteen, before my ornithology degree, I knew my birds. It was a black stork’s nest. The black stork was practically extinct. It was November, but the bird would’ve nested in Lithuania in the spring. In November, it would be somewhere warm like India. The black stork is a big bird, the kind of bird the Old Man’s mother would’ve loved.

  I told them. I explained that in all likelihood the bird would return in the spring. It was no easy feat to build such a nest. Her mate would’ve built it and she would lay her eggs here.

  We remained at the Old Man’s boyhood home, where so much had begun and so many stories had ended. We stared at the empty nest, believing the black stork would return, knowing the bird had chosen this spot because of the Old Man’s mother. It wasn’t impossible to suppose that the loony-gooney Aleksandra, lover of birds, would be reincarnated as a black stork and nest where she had nested before. We each felt this dreamy sensibility. Maybe the blue-eyed bear was watching from somewhere beyond the field, noting that the little boy he’d once been face-to-face with had returned. Perhaps the bear was faintly aware that things were changing for the better.

  Back in Vilnius, clouds squatted low over the city, and it snowed. There was a music to the hushed sound of flakes falling and boots treading, the white sky nearly indistinguishable from the ground. Natasha Sluska was in the hotel nursing a cold. My Oma’s itchiness and nausea had long vanished. I’m sure that she imagined the watchtowers toppling, the concrete and barbed wire coming down.

  Down, down, down, trampled underfoot, nothing more than twisted shards of metal.

  I was imagining it.

  We were tromping through the snow, marching down a side street. It’s hard to describe the sense of camaraderie our family felt, even Veronica, who was as caught up in this swirling hope as anyone else. Snowflakes fell and clung to our dark clothes. Our footprints disappeared behind each step.

  I remember that a man carrying an unwrapped side of beef hurried past us. It was four in the afternoon, and would’ve been dark but for the iridescent ice that turned the street electric. Most of the shops were closed except for a butcher’s and a frosty storefront, its red window box piled two feet deep with snow. A warm glow emanated from the glass facade, and within, a fire burned.

  It was intriguing. There was a red door to the side of the plate-glass window with a copper engraving glossed with ice. I brushed it off with my glove. L. Blasczkiewicz, Photographer, Artist. Returning to the storefront, I pressed my face to the glass, rubbing clockwise to get a better look. Inside was beautiful. Flitting lights darted across the ceiling.

  The Old Man said that we should keep walking. We didn’t need to bother with a photographer and artist.

  A cat jumped to the window’s ledge, startling the Old Man. It rubbed itself against the glass, just where my gloved hand was resting. My Oma announced that she liked cats. They’d had a cat in Berlin. My Oma wanted to go inside. I was in agreement. Freddie and Veronica were ambivalent.

  Pulling the door open, the wind gusted out of the east, knocking it back against the plaster and brick of the exterior wall. The Old Man grabbed it for me, and we hurried inside, where it was toasty and quiet. The wind whistled inward as Freddie helped his father pull the door shut.

  The five of us huddled within, watching the black cat wrap its way around spindle-legged easels. There were a dozen or more easels displaying paintings of angels and fairies. There were statues too: birds and beasts, and the squeak of metallic wings opening and closing above our heads. We started to spread out, each of us drawn to different corners of the room. There were black-and-white images of butterflies, birds, and dragonflies, enormous pictures, draped from the high ceiling.

  There were charcoal drawings, nearly all black except for single spots of light accenting a cheekbone or the curve of a wing. The drawings hung from picture molding. There were brighter drawings too—stunning monochromatic wings in pink and gold, the bend of a knee, the crease of an elbow rich with vibrant reds and glossy obsidian. Silver-foiled butterflies, strung along transparent filament, flitted across the room while met
al dragonflies, propelled by pulleys and fans, zipped past.

  The Old Man put his hand to his chest. Freddie and Veronica held hands. If I remember correctly, our mouths were agape. At least, I’m sure that mine was. We belonged here, and collectively we felt this place also belonged to us. The wind had carried us here.

  Just then, a willowy man with black hair came out from behind a red curtain. I remember clapping my gloved hands together because this somehow seemed appropriate to me. He’d created this place. First and foremost, all of this belonged to him. He took long strides, bending down to scoop up the cat, and asked, “How may I help you?” Even though we already sensed that we’d been called here, he didn’t recognize us, nor we him. He spoke English. He told us that he had photographs of Russian ballerinas. Did we like the foil butterflies? Were we interested in our own bubble machine? How about fairies? Did we like fairies? Walking toward me, he said, “You have long legs like a dancer.” He was so tall and slight, it seemed like he could disappear if he turned left or right.

  The Old Man asked him, “What is this place?”

  “A little of this and a little of that. I take pictures and paint pictures and make pictures, the moving kind. And sometimes, if I can get sugar, I make candy. My name is Lukas Blasczkiewicz.”

  Freddie said, “We are visiting from the United States.”

  “I do not know many Americans,” Lukas told us.

  The Old Man said, “I was born in Lithuania.”

  I remember thinking about dancing and ballerinas. When we lived in Nashville, I had a velvet-lined jewelry box that played music. When the box was opened, a plastic ballerina spun around, and I remember envying her pink toe shoes and wondering what she did when the box was shut. I couldn’t imagine that she just lay down. There had to be more to her than that.