by Rita Gabis
I GO BACK to the hotel to shower and change, take a taxi to an event at the hard-to-find Lithuanian Embassy on Sixteenth Street. The talkative cabbie pulls first into the drive of an apartment building, calls dispatch for directions, backtracks, and finally spots the small, elegant building opposite the park side of Euclid.
The lush Meridian Hill Park exists because Mary Henderson, wife of the Missouri senator who introduced the constitutional amendment to abolish slavery, made it her mission. When I was a schoolgirl in Missouri, Henderson’s name (the he, not the she) was drilled into us. Back then, white boys still went “coon hunting” into the African American neighborhoods, the engines of their cars ramped up, their beer bottles smashing against the curbs outside low stretches of apartments that contained lives the boys in the cars could not conceive of.
Our cleaning lady lived in one of those apartments. She stood barefoot in our kitchen and ironed my father’s shirts and did not genuflect or pretend to enjoy vacuuming and dusting. My mother taught German at the local high school, and that was the only reason we had “help.” Our cleaning lady’s broad-shouldered son was the president of my seventh-grade class. My mother, out of her teaching salary, made some modest contribution to the cost of his mother’s eye surgery. We stood with flowers in her crowded living room after she was home from the hospital: a television on somewhere, awkward thanks, my mother’s accent made more pronounced by the cramped, low-ceilinged acoustics. It would take me a long time to understand how many strange doors my mother opened in her life, out of kindness, desperation, bravery, ignorance.
The spring evening was just beginning. Here a Norway maple, there a red oak. Soft wind jettisoned the new leaves. I have a little fantasy—I’ll ask someone in attendance at the embassy to translate my grandfather’s pages on the spot. It’s more than a fantasy, actually. It has the energy of compulsion, so perhaps it’s the effort of restraint that will make me feel, the whole time I’m inside, as if any second I’ll knock something over, blurt out of turn, my voice querulous and then increasingly loud. Copies of Senelis’s reports are stashed in a notebook in my bag. I stand to the side of the walkway. Shadows cross the wind, beautiful. Better to stay out in the dusk.
Of course I go in. It’s a book party for a wonderful young-adult writer whose first effort is about a girl deported to Siberia during the purge that swept up my grandmother; a book I wish had been in print when I was growing up in Missouri. It would have explained so much about my mother’s chronic sadness, would have given me words to use when my Missouri friends asked me about my grandparents instead of “One grandma is missing.”
The incomprehension of my small classmates matched my own.
“Where did she go?”
“She might be in a prison somewhere.”
This always aroused curiosity: images of an old woman with blue beauty-parlor hair robbing a bank or holding up a cashier at Kroger’s with a Civil War–era rifle.
“What did she do?”
“Nothing.”
The answer was unsatisfactory. Neither titillating nor familiar, just—other. Inexplicable.
(“Meeting with the KGB is extremely hard on anyone,” Kuznetsov wrote, “let alone a woman.”)
A young, formal embassy guard greets me at the entrance. He speaks with a Lithuanian accent, and this surprises me because it’s familiar. I don’t routinely visit embassies so the fact that each job represents a foreign posting is new to me. Wouldn’t it be cheaper, I think in the moment, to hire someone local? As if Lithuanian pride and identity had no meaning. In the months to come, when I don’t want to think about anything else, I’ll remember the embassy employee, thin and proper and correct. Young—does he miss home? Is he rotated out? His voice is the first Lithuanian voice I’ve heard other than my mother’s for many years, with the exception of the recent visit with my aunts on Martha’s Vineyard. But my Aunt Agnes is German, and Aunt Karina’s Lithuanian accent is almost undetectable. When I left the Midwest in my teens, I left with a flat twang and an annoying penchant for calling people I didn’t know “hon” and “sweetie,” a habit picked up from the seasoned waitresses at Stuckey’s Pecan Shop off the interstate, where I worked the Friday-night fish fry and Sunday’s biscuits-and-gravy extravaganza. Missouri, the state I grew up in, Lithuania, the country I’ve never seen—two places on the meridian of my life.
In my high-heeled sandals my feet hurt. I clatter into the room where the reading is, the seats already almost full. The author, Ruta Sepetys, has a wide, friendly face and a shock of blond hair. Her editor, who looks much younger than me, sits to my left. Two gray-haired women on my right strike up a conversation with me before the program begins. Both are Gulag survivors. It will turn out that many in attendance survived the Gulag. One of the things that will stun me when the room is finally full, the reading over, the Q and A in full swing, is how young some of the Gulag survivors look, early sixties perhaps, or even late fifties. In my mind, that part of history started and stopped with my own grandmother. But of course the purges and arrests and deportations went on and on and on.
Mikhail Suslov, a name heading many of the KGB interrogations I’m destined to read, distinguished himself for his brutal service in Lithuania during the early years after Yalta. (The infamous Yalta pact made by Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt in 1945 ceded, among other nations, the Baltics and eastern Poland to Stalin. In exchange, Stalin agreed to go to war with Japan as an ally of the West and help to demarcate and maintain the war-torn zones of Europe after the demise of the Reich.) The Yalta pact was Suslov’s “pass go” card. As is explained in his obituary in the New York Times: “As a member of a Central Committee task force, at the end of World War II, it was Mr. Suslov’s job to supervise the political integration of Lithuania with the Soviet Union, including the deportation to Siberia of thousands of people whose loyalty was suspect.” Looking around me as the seats filled, I wagered that at least some of the faces I saw had once looked into the face of Suslov, who had already decided their fate.
He died in 1982, a year before the poet Czesław Miłosz—born in the Kėdainiai district of Vilnius County—published The Witness of Poetry.
Miłosz spoke, when the book came out, in a large hall at the University of Massachusetts to a standing-room-only crowd that came expecting to hear poems from this man whose impossibly bushy eyebrows lived their own life; bristly flags raised, a furrowed line closed in a forbidding ridge. “I would like to talk about the existence of evil,” he began, in his drawn-out, heavily accented introduction. Faces looked down, hidden smiles. How, well, Catholic—how old world, the hip, politically savvy students and faculty from five colleges planted in the dreamy beauty of a green valley might have thought.
My Lithuanian relatives who did not emigrate would have accepted his opener as a given. For decades after World War II they never, at the local postal exchange, accepted a letter or package from the United States. Tear open an envelope from America, and you could be hauled in, accused of a foreign plot. Frustrated in their efforts to arrest my grandfather, the postwar Soviet secret police (formerly the NKVD, now called the NKGB until the intelligence service arm that contained the police was renamed the Ministry for State Security or MGB in 1946) came nightly, with tragic consequences, to the house of Senelis’s brother Paul. For years they came: pounding on doors, screaming, dragging the whole family outside in their nightclothes. Chests of drawers were pulled out, the contents dumped, pictures ripped from walls. Dogs howled as the police tormented Paul, his wife, and their children in the rain and the snow and the late northern light of summer evenings. One such night, Senelis’s pregnant sister-in-law could not, as the police ordered her to, move quickly enough down an attic ladder. She fell beyond the arms of her husband. The child born after that fall, still childlike though she is grown, is cared for today by her older sister, Marytė, and is held close by her entire family. When I met her she half smiled, her face shining, though she did not, in my presence, speak.
MEMBERS
OF THE Lithuanian parliament sit in the first several rows. A few look at notes, others chat, a bit stiff, decorous.
Before the reading, Ruta Sepetys gives a brief introduction, complete with slide show, about the horrors of Stalin. There he is, the monster with the mustache. She’s singing to the choir, so to speak. People nod as she speaks. There are tears on some faces, tears of memory, I imagine—not of him, but of the ruin his dictates brought down on them. I don’t remember the slides that follow. Perhaps there are cattle cars. Perhaps there are faces of purge victims, returnees from Siberia, a pair of shoes made of a bit of timber, a diary scratched onto bark. At a certain point Ruta Sepetys’s large, lovely eyes brim over. How is it possible a system of criminality could inflict such pain upon a population? Babies thrown from trains. Families separated. She seems innocent to me, open. All this evil—and growing up, no one spoke to her about it!
But I know, I want to say. It’s the only story of my mother’s family, told again and again.
The protagonist of Sepetys’s novel is named Lina.
“She is our Anne Frank!” someone declares during the Q and A.
Anne Frank was real, I almost snap back. Though of course I understand that the fictional Lina represents all the real children, children who were, as my mother would have been if she were not in hiding, taken away with their Babitas and Senelises, their mothers and fathers, the men quickly separated from the women.
Still, I’m so disturbed by this comment, so disturbed by the papers in my bag, that faces blur. And it has nothing to do with Ruta Sepetys, whose book Between Shades of Gray is a marvel and who once posted a bit on her author’s site about her writing process. Her account of her endless redrafting, her refusal to lighten up what was inherently tragic so it would be more palatable to potential publishers, instantly won me over.
In Sepetys’s book, the grown-up Lina returns to the repressive Soviet-occupied Lithuania and buries her drawings and diary notes from her time in the Gulag in a large glass jar, because people are forbidden to discuss this saga of personal reality, record it, publicize it. Then in Kaunas, in 1995, shortly after Lithuanian independence, two construction workers unearth Lina’s hidden testimony.
“She is our Anne Frank!” When I read about the glass jar in Sepetys’s book, I thought immediately of the diary kept by one Kazimierz Sakowicz, a Pole born in Vilna and trained in the law, though he ultimately became a journalist. Poverty drove him from the city, with his wife, to a rural outpost called Ponary, less expensive in the deteriorating economy of wartime. Sakowicz, for reasons we won’t ever know, took cryptic and sometimes not so cryptic notes on the human slaughterhouse, conceived by the Germans and manned almost exclusively by Lithuanians, that Ponary became during the war. There, before fleeing the country, the Russians had dug out huge pits meant for the storage of gasoline. Approximately eighty thousand people, the majority of them Jews, were shot at the edge of one of twelve pits. Most of the Lithuanians who signed up as shooters were members, like Senelis, of the Lithuanian Rifleman’s Union, Šaulių Sąjunga.
Sakowicz buried many of his observations of their savagery in lemonade bottles that were subsequently unearthed. Like Lina’s glass jar.
Only—not like Lina’s glass jar.
I WAIT, AFTER the context given for Stalin’s purges, through Ruta Sepetys’s brief but moving reading from her book, wait as the different members of the Lithuanian parliament stand and make speeches. Their central point, apart from praising Sepetys’s book, seems to be “Finally, somebody in the West is writing about what happened to us and people are reading it.” I wait for some mention of the nonfictional lemonade bottles and the people who were once lined up at Ponary, their naked backs targets for the Lithuanian shooters. Wait for mention of the odd neutral weather reports that often precede Sakowicz’s notes on the continual carnage at the pits. “A nice day.” “Clouds, a bit warm.” (Senelis’s handwritten reports from the microfiche file at the Holocaust Museum, printed out from one of my flash drives in the hotel business center, seem to grow heavier, larger in my handbag.)
After Ruta Sepetys signs my book for my mother, after I congratulate her on a job well done, she says something to me about her book being for all of “us.” But I don’t feel like I’m part of the “us,” or that the “us” includes my Jewish grandmother and grandfather and their parents and grandparents. The two elderly women who sat next to me during the reading write their addresses on a piece of paper and tell me to let them know if I ever publish anything about the Gulag. I, who save everything, immediately lose that piece of paper. I’ve looked for it, through stacks of files, in pages of books, the corners and shelves in my study many times since, but it’s gone.
The parliament member I end up speaking with is Adomenas Mantas: Oxford-educated, part of the Lithuanian right, though I don’t know that then. I ask him why he went into politics. He shrugs. It’s what his family does, he quips, but when our talk turns to the issue of wartime collaboration he speaks about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Rwanda and about how attitudes can’t change unless a structure for change is put into place. I have a cracker in one hand, a cup of seltzer in the other. He’s short, elegant, though his clothes seem somehow to be choking him a bit, sleeves pulling, collar maybe leaving a red mark at the back of his neck. He tells me a joke. The gist of it, as I remember, is something like this:
A group of people just come home from the Gulag are swapping stories.
What did you do to get twenty-five years? Answer: I killed someone.
What did you do to get fifteen years? Answer: I robbed someone.
What did you do to get ten years? Answer: Nothing.
BABITA WAS SENTENCED to fifteen years’ hard labor in the Gulag. She was a librarian. So the joke fits her and doesn’t fit her, and I don’t fit in with the grateful audience at the embassy.
In our family narrative, Babita was tortured for a year in Lubyanka. This will turn out to be not entirely true—it was several weeks, not a year. But maybe time in the death cell does that to you—alters hours into weeks. The scars on her forearms where the skin was pulled out with pliers—
“Where is your husband?”
“Who were his accomplices?”
“Where are your children?”
“Admit to your crimes!”
All night, all day. For many days. Time crushed like stones.
THERE ARE NO cabs outside. I walk and walk until the blisters on my heels force immediate action, slip out of my sandals, the pavement cool under my bare feet in the dark. After the green of Meridian Park is long behind me, a cab finally rushes up. We travel (slower than cabs in New York), back to the center of the city. Out my window, the moon is so huge it seems to need a crane to keep from falling.
The Lina/Anne Frank comparison confounds me; the packed room of people confounds me, people who unlike Anne Frank had their books signed, tried out the Brie and delicately sliced meats, left half-empty wineglasses on a mantel and windowsills, withstood the flashes of the cameras—a picture for an old acquaintance or a friend the busyness of life has kept them from until this evening, pictures to show grown children or grandchildren or even great-grandchildren.
I’ve known a few people more dead than alive, who’ve gone into some broken or corrupt hovel of the self no appeal or offer of assistance can reach. The finality of their ruin is hard to grasp at first. And when you do, ultimately, you force yourself to back away, to understand you’re powerless over a despair that no entreaty or born-again motif countermands. But as far as I could tell, I had been among the living all evening—people who had stabbed at ice to build a road under the snow, people freed by an official document made of paper thin as onionskin, come home to a Lithuania under siege, come here. I had documents stamped by an archive, a long recording of a hesitant conversation with my mother, her sister, and their brother’s widow. I had those pages of my grandfather’s handwriting, but not his streets, not the particulars of his innocence or his crimes. I had
a book I wish I’d read as a child, but not the country where the story began, the scent of juniper, the feel of the land. I had nothing to do then, but go.
CHAPTER 14
* * *
THE HUMAN HEART
JUNE 2011
My plane ticket to Lithuania was in the travel-agency envelope on my desk. In Vilnius, a young woman named Viktorija whom I’d found through the chair of the English language department at Vilnius University was busy ordering files for me from the Lithuanian archives. A “fixer” named Rose waited for me, a woman originally from Belarus, who had lived in Lithuania for many years and was recommended to me by a colleague of my husband’s at the New York Times. I was reading about war. It was making me very tired, and I didn’t want to read with numbness and stupidity about the slaughter of Carthage by Appian of Alexandria, “torn asunder in all shapes of horror, crushed and mangled,” or the battle scenes in War and Peace, turning the pages mindlessly, as if I was looking through an Ikea catalog. But I couldn’t shake my fatigue.
Instead of excitement and/or trepidation about my fast-approaching trip, all I could think of was a chair: a big chair with torn upholstery like the ones upstairs in our apartment. When I thought of the chair, I imagined myself sitting in it for a long time, not reading, not watching television, not listening to music or talking. Just sitting, very quietly, until my weariness lifted like the mist of morning from the field of battle. My days, as they say, were numbered, only I didn’t know it. I only knew that when I ran through the green profusion of Riverside Park, past the roses, the buds still sealed and secret, out of the shade of the chestnut trees, I was cold, even as the sweat ran down my face and I took the concrete stairs back up to the street two at a time.