When he exhales his last breath, I’m holding mine. Not one of us is stoic. Not one of us is dry-eyed. My Oma is speaking in German to him. Her hands are on his face, which has softened. The nurse closes his eyes. I feel angry that death is a constant part of life. This is a hospital, and people die here every day, and no one here, except us three, can possibly understand how special and wonderful the Old Man is—that he was born across an ocean, marched across a continent, sailed to a new world to learn another new language, raised a son to know the past, sought me out to give me my homeland. The Old Man returned home after forty-eight years in exile and found his sister. He is brave. He is a survivor. The Old Man is not just a man, and he never was, not in life or death. I can hear his music now.
“He’s gone,” the nurse says. Wait, I think. I want to keep listening. She repeats, “He’s gone,” and I’m wondering where. I’m like the innocent child tugging at the priest’s robe, looking for Jesus on the altar. If that’s his body and that’s his blood, why can’t I see him? Everyone is talking about him, saying that he’s here with us. Where?
The Old Man is gone. It seems that the deadbeat has let him off the ride. Gone but not forgotten. It’s too cliché, too small and too stupid.
A doctor has come into the room. The fly is belly-up on the window’s ledge, his green luminescence fading.
Just last week, the Old Man ate Pat’s Deli sausage links and made speeches. He’d been sick for the better part of a year, but my Oma was under strict orders not to tell anyone.
Before he was hospitalized, he spoke to Daina every day. He was jubilant three hundred and sixty-five days, and then on the three hundredth and sixty-sixth day, he was dying. He could not breathe. No bullet to the brain for him. Just a great sigh, a submission of sorts that he was done. It had been a good fight. How many years did we have together? Sixteen. Half my short life. Last week, he stroked his beard and told my Oma that it would be hard for her to get along without him. She laughed. Then she cried. He scolded, “I can’t leave if you will blubber.”
“Then don’t leave.”
He told my Oma, “You are as beautiful as the day I met you.”
“Don’t start acting sweet now, Old Man.”
28
Wheaton
June 2005
When I pulled the chain that opened and closed the wings, the motion produced a guttural sound. I looped the canvas straps over my shoulders and galloped through the warehouse, the noise like a dying lawn mower. It was my first semester at Saint Mark’s College: 1991. I took up creative space and residence in a warehouse, majoring in painting and printmaking but working with metal and fire, constructing massive wings and smaller things. Heating the metal with my torch, turning forks into ballerinas and waffle irons into skyscrapers, building other wonders for the ballerina to gaze upon. I worked small except for the wings, which grew larger and less manageable.
I’d bought a WWII flying helmet at an antiques shop and wore it as I hurtled across the warehouse, pulling on my chain. I should paint a foolish picture of a young man constructing the heaviest, most cumbersome machine with thoughts of flying. I have.
The last time I spoke to Prudence was October of 1991, when I told her, “I will never be the leading man.” I can’t remember what she said in response. It did not matter. The statement was shy one syllable of the ten I needed, representative of our relationship. Prudence Eleanor Vilkas was whole in 1991, and I was like one of my flying machines, noisy and useless. The voices that had once overwhelmed me spoke to me now of men with work unfinished. Hugo Valentine, who’d built half a parking deck attached to a sand heap in Boston, Massachusetts. Ban Bulawayo of Harare, Zimbabwe, who’d planted fifty acres of crops, his farm burned before the first harvest. I heard the voice of my father. The next idea will be better. Genius is never recognized in its own lifetime.
I made wings with paper clips and glue. I made them with Post-it notes and glossy potato chip bags. I pinned them to my corkboard with multicolored pushpins, and the irony of pinning wings to hold them in place was not lost on me. When I built the wings bigger, with carpet remnants and Styrofoam, my art instructors were intrigued, making mention of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian man, how everything seemed dissected, surgically rendered with precision. With each scrape of my putty knife, the wings became less real. With each brushstroke and smatter of ink, less willful. With each pounding and beating, I made wings less like wings. No matter what medium I used or how many forms I mixed, my wings were sterile. As I began working with sheet metal, I understood my own failings, knew that I would never fly. These wings with rivets and wires for opening and closing made a creaky metal sound. I imagined jumping off a cliff with them. Not to die. Just to see. My roommate reported that I stayed up all night, kept him awake, talked to myself in five-syllable phrases.
There was talk among the professors that my eye was not my own, that I was a forger, a cheat, a copycat, and then there was a flimsy book, pages dog-eared and water-damaged, produced as evidence. I sat across from my academic adviser, the book between us. Already I had gently, painlessly, like a clean splinter, removed myself from Prudence’s life. I hardly wrote to her. She hardly noticed. I was going elsewhere. Doing something on my own.
The book presented as evidence was a paperback titled Wings, a book of black-and-white photographs, of metal and bird wings, of girl wings and scars. “Have you been copying this man, Blasczkiewicz?” the adviser asked.
I flipped through the self-published book. Never. “I’m not.” The adviser did not believe me. I had never seen the book. Looking through the photographs, I did not recognize the two scars that belonged to Prudence Vilkas. How would I know? It was too strange to fathom.
“You’re allowed to be inspired. You’re expected to draw from the work of others.”
“I haven’t.”
Sitting in that cramped office, I dropped my fingers like mallets striking a xylophone, hearing I need to be where somebody loves me, picturing a girl from an old black-and-white film twirling and skidding across a waxy dance floor. White knickers in bloom. Five neat syllables. Another five. I wanted a cigarette. When I held her in my arms, I smelled vodka on her breath and wanted to inhale her.
My eyes had turned white.
It was not my intention to disappear on that warm October afternoon in 1991. I remember my adviser sitting there across from my teacher, Mr. Wilkie, who was summoned to give his opinion on the matter.
I was remembering what Prudence had said to me just three years before. She said, “Wheaton, this has nothing to do with you.” She meant her family and her wings. And I had stopped asking her questions, limiting my sight to as little as possible. I twirled across the dance floor with the girl in white knickers, her face unreal, her hands like phantoms in mine. Something would have to change. Mr. Wilkie thought it would be important to take this evidence to the dean of the arts program. The adviser, whose name I can’t recall, agreed with him. They would need another opinion, one greater, more important than theirs. “There’s a similar sensibility in their work,” Mr. Wilkie noted, “but nothing to imply theft.”
I was not going to meet with the dean of the arts program.
In November 1991, Lukas was expecting me. I handed him a photograph of my metal bird and he sighed, opening the door wider, the early-winter sun glinting off the wings strung from the ceiling. His hands were like willow branches with leaves long and spindly enough to count multisyllabic strings, like beads of sound. Face-to-face, his ears were the size of cauliflowers, his head big enough for any number of voices. And his heart was not on his sleeve but worn like a cloak, how I’ve seen a man’s aura. He spoke to me without words. He spoke with emotions, specifically assurances that I had found my home. When I produced his book from my knapsack, he took it from my hands like he’d been expecting it, and as it disappeared somewhere between the sunlight and his black stride, I followed him inside. Imitation is tribute, bu
t I hadn’t been imitating. I’d been making art, my art, my sight, my wings. The clunky monstrosities of my birth. They weren’t for flight. They weren’t Prudence’s wings. They weren’t for dreams. My wings were for weight, to hold me down, keep me safe. They were my mother’s arms, the ones that had been taken. They were my father’s arms, the ones that had never held me, fumbling with plastic typewriter keys. My wings were a behemoth. What else would they be? Assurances. Setting the metal down. Letting the hammer fall. Nothing needed soldering, not anymore. I could be still somewhere without a pushpin or paper clip, without the memory of my father’s typewriter, how everything he wanted had nothing to do with me.
I was home.
It’s June 2005, and I can remember my 1991 homecoming with the greatest clarity. Lukas has sharpened my sight. I can also remember another June, in 1989, when I stood useless on Prudence Vilkas’s lawn, not understanding or knowing then that despite all appearances and efforts to the contrary, I was tied to her. Whether she loved me or not, there would always be a tether stringing her to me and me to her.
I apprenticed under Lukas for six months before my eyes were opened wide enough to see the obvious: the scars from the book Wings belonged to Prudence. Even then, I did not speak up. I did not want Prudence because I did not think she wanted me. I remember that in October of 1992, she and her grandparents came to see Lukas. I slipped out the back just as they came through the front door, the sound of the bell tinkling corresponding with the gasp of the back door opening. I could not face her.
Back then, I needed a father, and Lukas needed a son. I am not a copycat, or a thief of any man’s life or art.
I am thirty-two this year, a bit of a local celebrity—the American with snowy eyes in Lithuania. My paintings have been displayed alongside Lukas’s in local museums and restaurants. We throw parties and headline parades. Lukas is the stilt walker without stilts and I am the swami. We churn ice cream. I swirl pink sugar around paper wands and tell futures. I think we’ve attended every birthday party in Vilnius, my fingers sticky with cotton candy, the children yelling excitedly, tugging at Lukas’s long pants. They beg him to send another metal bird soaring above the lawn.
The children want to know their futures, and I try to tell them, centering my silk turban over my curls, but the visions and voices hardly come anymore. They have been replaced by the immediacy of living, of building, of gleeful shouting. Even my fingers are too sticky sometimes for counting.
Last night, Daina Valetkiene telephoned Lukas to tell him that her brother the Old Man is dead. Only Lukas knows that I am an old friend of Prudence’s. Only Lukas knows that I knew the Old Man. For fourteen years, this is how it has been, but then last night, I did not sleep. I thought about my old friend Prudence. I distinctly felt the absence of her hand in mine and realized that although I had belonged here with Lukas Blasczkiewicz, I might also belong elsewhere.
I rose before the sun. Lukas was already awake. He knows that I’m going. When the birds were only beginning to sing, we pulled my paintings from the beams and rafters, replacing them with blank sheets of canvas, creamy shades of nothingness, speckled fabric bleeding white and brown.
I love the Old Man. This truth is not in past tense.
I love Prudence. This truth is not in past tense.
For the fourteen years I have apprenticed with Lukas Blasczkiewicz, I have quieted the voices of men with lives left unlived. I have made all manner of flying objects, including wind-up angels with eyes blue like the sky. They hover for seconds and fall into the hands of waiting children, who press them to the breast. I have danced and sung, letting my fingers count sleek black and white piano keys. I have climbed high steeples and never thought of jumping.
I am wrapping the slick polyester of a secondhand necktie over and under and anticipating a long flight and drive. I do not know what else the future holds. Lukas, who has no gray hair, reminds me that there is no death, only a passing over. He closes my eyes with his long fingers and keeps me still, my mind clear. There are too many canvases left unfinished in this short life I have chosen and dubbed mine. My canvas, I realize, is among them.
29
Prudence
In 1992, we went back to Lithuania. She was now an independent country. Germany was reunited. In three short years, the world had changed. On this trip, Freddie and Veronica stayed home. I was able to spend a full month with my aunt and uncle. First, we visited Vilnius and Kaunas. In Vilnius, we met Daina and Stasys’s daughter, Audra. She was blond, and according to Daina, she looked like my great-grandmother, Aleksandra. We spent a week at the university where Audra taught political science. Audra told me that she’d always known that Lithuania would gain its independence during her lifetime. “Maybe because of my parents and my upbringing or maybe because some things are inevitable, or maybe because I knew my people could only remain silent for so long.” Audra is an amazing woman. After a week in Vilnius and Kaunas, we returned to Palanga. I remember the windows open in Aunt Daina’s flat, a warm ocean breeze drifting from the west, their apartment smelling of the sea.
Every morning and evening, we walked the long stretch of dune and played in the Baltic’s shallow tide. I was mourning the loss of Wheaton, but I did so quietly. My aunt Daina still worked at the button factory, but my uncle Stasys was now a reporter for a Lithuanian newspaper. I could’ve remained there forever. For me, it was like hiding out, not the same as being home.
Next, we were off to Germany. It was my Oma’s turn to go home.
My Oma had gone to Berlin in 1990, by herself—to visit cousins she hadn’t seen in forty years—but on this trip, we were going to see her girlhood home, to see if it still remained. In 1990, my Oma hadn’t wanted to go. She couldn’t bring herself to see the home where she’d lost everything and everyone, not when she was filled with so much hope about the future. In 1990, she’d gotten to know her cousins, her mother’s brother’s children and their children, and they loved my Oma. How could they not? They described life behind the iron curtain, waiting in line for bread, being told that their fellow Berliners and Germans were suffering under capitalism, while they were thriving, but who was thriving? No one. They were hungry. They told my Oma what she already knew: before the wall, young people and educated people left in droves. The workforce dwindled. How could the communist leaders stop people from leaving? Build a wall and claim that the wall was to stop people from entering East Berlin. White is black and black is white. Two plus two equals five. Lies. Power has no conscience.
My Oma’s girlhood home still remained, but in 1992, it was no longer a single home. It had long been divided into three apartments. I remember that she ran her fingers along the brick facade. Out front, there were roses in bloom, but we’d brought our own to leave on the spot where her mother had been buried. My Oma hesitated at the front steps, bending down to feel the bricks with her hand. The Old Man steadied her with his left arm. She kept looking around like she expected to see her father or brother run past. Instead, a young girl with straight black hair darted up the steps. At the front door, she turned back, speaking in German, asking if everything was okay. My Oma grinned, showing her broken tooth. “Everything is fine,” she told the girl.
At the left side of the house, we passed through the same wrought-iron gate my Oma had known growing up. It was a beautiful day, the kind of day that makes it hard to imagine my Oma’s last day at home: soldiers and burials. Past the gate, there was a gazebo overgrown with a white star–flowered vine and a neatly trimmed hedgerow. Around the gate’s interior, there were dog and sweetbriar roses, the roses Ingeburg remembered from her youth, her mother’s roses. Even with black hairs poking from a mole on her jawline and wrinkles carved deep beneath her eyes, my Oma was youthful.
We placed the flowers on the grass at the site where the Old Man and my Oma agreed the grave had been dug. With the Old Man’s help, my Oma got down on her knees, slipping her fingers between the blades of gr
ass. The black-haired girl came out through the back of the house and told my Oma that her mother and grandmother were curious to know what we were doing. My Oma told the girl that she was sorry to bother them. She was an old woman. She had lived in this house as a girl. “My mother wants you to come inside,” the girl said. It was nearly the Old Man’s Lithuanian homecoming wish come true.
The little girl’s apartment was at the top of the stairs and to the left.
Nothing was as my Oma remembered. The space was cramped, everything divided as her country had been divided. In retrospect, I don’t think she wanted to be there in the small apartment. I don’t think she could breathe. We had ginger cookies and tea, and everyone spoke German. There was barely enough room for the five of us in the tight kitchen. According to my Oma, the apartment had once been her parents’ bedroom.
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