The Fire Letters
By
Eli Ausra
Copyright 2012 Eli Ausra
Smashwords Edition
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To My Dad, Edward, and My Mom, Ruth
From “Letters of the Dead” by Wislawa Szymborska
We read the letters of the dead like puzzled gods –
gods nevertheless, because we know what happened later.
…
Everything they foresaw has happened quite differently,
or a little differently – which is the same thing.
The most fervent stare trustingly into our eyes;
by their reckoning, they’ll see perfection there.
_Trans. by Vuyelwa Carlin
“My barn having burned to the ground, I can now see the moon.” _ Masahide
Chapter 1
Man, woman, and three children standing on house-high snowdrift, near Siaulai, Lithuania, winter 1904. (Photographer unknown. Destroyed 1959.)
The night he died, Darius dreamed he was skating on the frozen river back home. He was eleven again, playing tag in the taut cold air, his skate blades burnishing the pewter ice. As the sun waned in the early afternoon, most of the children started home, but Darius was racing one girl. Out to the center of the wide river, she matched him stroke for stroke. Then she put her hand on his coat sleeve and they were linked, one creature flying across the ice. He’d never skated so fast. One skip of his blade and he would tumble. But as long as he stayed with her, he wouldn’t falter.
"We’re faster than sunlight," he shouted. "We’re spinning the planet. We’re catching up with ourselves—see, there we are, skating together, up ahead."
Tannis laughed and shoved him away, breaking the spell. He waved his arms, regaining his balance as his skates swooped in a new circle with a life of their own. Stopping finally, he knelt, dizzy, and saw her green wool hat. Picking it up, he stood, swaying as his pulse pounded. Finally he saw her, by the logs where the children would put on their skates.
She was rebraiding her dark blonde hair and tucking the ends beneath her coat collar when two men approached her, coming down the narrow path the children had tromped in the snow from the village to the river. Darius pushed off hard against the ice, stroking deep to reach her quickly.
"But surely you’ve seen soldiers around. I ask you, do we look like soldiers?" one of the men was saying to her in Lithuanian. His ash-colored hair was topped by a black fur cap, the kind Russians favored, and his coat looked trim and thin, not at all like a villager’s or farmer’s coat.
She rested her mittened fists on her hips. "I know one thing and one thing only—soldiers or not, you don’t belong here."
Had Darius realized her bravado was for his sake, that everything she did she did with an eye to impressing him, would he have left her so easily years later?
"We belong here as much as you," spat the short, thick man with the brown mustache.
"Did you grandfather’s grandfather live here? No, he lived in a hut in Moscow while we were building cathedrals. You have no history here."
"But we do now. Lithuanian, Russian—" Speaking Russian, the short man pointed at Darius. "We’re subjects—" he pointed at the ash-haired man, "subjugated—" he pointed at her, "by—" he jabbed his fist skyward, "a fool. Our Czar."
She shot a look at Darius and said in Lithuanian, "We have to go."
The ash-haired man stepped forward. "Perhaps you’ve heard of the knygnesiai."
The legendary men, the knygnesiai, had for many years carried books across the border from printing houses near Hamburg, dodging soldiers enforcing the law against printing other than in Cyrillic.
"The ban has been lifted. There are no more book smugglers," Tannis said. She sat down on a log and began taking off her skates.
"But their spirit lives on, yes?" The ash-haired man bent to address her. "And the Czar might again ban your alphabet and the printing of books in your language. And where will you be if all the young people have grown soft and timid?"
"Soft?" Darius snorted. "Are you crazy?"
The men looked as if they’d noticed him for the first time, though surely they had marked him for their purpose as they’d watched him race Tannis. "We are looking for someone who is neither soft nor timid," the ash-haired man said. "Who would have been a book smuggler if he had been old enough. Someone who can skate as easily as he can run. Someone who is strong, trustworthy, and quiet."
Tannis snorted. "He’s not quiet. He loves the sound of his own voice too much to stay quiet for long."
"What would this person do?" Darius saw out of the corner of his eye Tannis, now booted for the heavy snow, pick up her skates.
"Deliver messages," said the short man. "Between commanders. We are bogged down in this snow and horses can’t get through."
Darius felt Tannis watching him. He frowned in what he hoped was a tough manner.
"We need someone who can fly like the wind," said the ash-haired man, "Someone no one would suspect of carrying messages between armies."
They paused.
"Are you coming?" Tannis asked him, her odd, light-colored eyes boring into his. He stared at her, then shook his head.
Now. Now would have been the time for her to grab his arm, to shove his shoulder, to burst into tears—to do something, anything, to distract him from taking the path he was about to take. But how could she have predicted that moment would turn him away from her? She was just a girl, a girl who had had to grow up fast in that difficult time and place, yes, but a girl without the benefit of the hindsight I now have.
Had I to do it over, I would have pushed the men into the snow, grabbed his hand, and dragged him back to the village. "Trust me," I would have said. "You don’t want to do that."
But even in his dream about this day, years later at the end of his life, I didn’t stop him. Instead I walked away.
He watched Tannis grow smaller as she climbed the hill to the village. "I am the one."
The army was planning an attack against the Bolsheviks. He heard that much. And once battered, the Bolsheviks would leave, which he supposed was a good thing too. They promised him money, which made no difference, as his father would soon get it anyway. The truth was, he would have paid them, just to be in the same category as the book smugglers.
The knygnesiai risked death to ride their horses into Prussia for the books printed in Lithuanian, keeping alive a small fire of language. The Czar’s intent, to strangle the language until it died, hadn’t worked. It had, in fact, probably done more to save the language, as the obstinate people spoke their mother tongue at home and in the streets and fields, saving Russian as their language of school and cursing.
Darius met the men the next day, looked at their maps, took the papers they gave him and stuffed them in his socks where their edges scraped his skin. He skated on the river nearest his village, then turned at its confluence with a smaller river, then pumped his arms and stroked with the blades until he reached a bridge where a commander’s aide would be waiting. And so, from one commander and back to the other, he skated, carrying messages of strategy and hope and death.
That part is true. He told me the day afterward, after I stopped pretending to be mad at him. He told me in whispered staccato bursts how he glided on his sharp blades between snow-piled banks, and the forests and fields disappeared into white mist. All he had to do was skate to one outpost, then skate back to the other. He pretended, he said, that he was skating ahead of me, racing. And winning.
And now his dream takes over from what was so real so many years ago. His feet in the bladed boots look huge and as the blades scumble over bumps in the ice, his body shakes and he looks for a more glassy surface to follow, out in the middle of the river.
The sun bleeds through the mist, warmer than it had ever been in winter before, and Darius begins to sweat beneath his heavy, scratchy coat. The ice becomes cream-colored and spots beneath the surface remind him of currants in bread dough. He squints as he skates and realizes the spots are the bodies of insects, thousands of golden-brown bees, suspended in the ice.
Push, glide, push, glide, and now his skates begin to kick up chunks of ice. The top layer of the river ice has become a skin of water, and the bees shake free. They rise from their white amber, pelting his skin like little balls of shot. He swipes at them to clear the way, feels a sting on his left cheek, his left arm. The ice is cruel in its softness and snags at his blades. He trips and slides headfirst through sheets of water.
An upended stump stops him, thumping his ribs and cutting a spray of fire across his chest. He lies arms outstretched, trying to inhale, his hands raw and cold, his body aching. Then, with great effort, he sits up and peels the messages from his soaking socks. The ink blurs, then blossoms into petals of black, then dark blue.
Without the words, he realizes he’s nothing but a boy sprawled on melting ice, ink stains on his hands and pants, wet pages curling in his hands like dead leaves. Even in the dream, the urge to move catches at his mind. He tries to think: should he continue on and deliver the pages anyway or go back for new messages; keep skating and risk the ice melting further or remove his skates and find a path or road home.
He suspects that men are dying even as he lies on the ice hesitating. Then, inexplicably as dreams play out on the movie reels in our heads, his son appears on the ice, a grown man wearing a funeral suit. Then his wife appears, with that knife-chopped haircut, her faded baseball cap not able to hide her scowl. Then he sees me, ripe at the age of 18, my hair unbraided, ready to race him to the ends of the earth. We are standing on the ice in his dream. Then the ice groans and a cracking sound rips the air like gunfire. We disappear into the rift.
He shouts our names and dashes to the jagged edge of the ice, but before he can even take off his coat, more ice collapses and he is plunged into a cold that instantly numbs him. Thrashing his arms and legs in a desperate attempt to keep his head above water, he bellows our names. We have disappeared. He feels his body’s weight, and the skates, and the sodden coat, pulling him under.
And then he awakened, tangled in the bed sheets.
He yanked the covers off and lay on his back, panting. After a few minutes, his heart calmed. He climbed out of bed and noticed his pajamas were stuck to his sweat-drenched skin. He took a step. And then his body was falling again, his heart fractured like broken ice. I watched as the river beneath swept him away.
Chapter 2
Šiañdien šilčiaũ neĩ vãkar. Mán skaũda dẽšinę (dešinią́ją) ãkį . Pérduok jíems màno nuoširdžiáusius linkė́jimus.
Today is warmer than yesterday. My right eye aches. Give them my warmest greetings. (Letter excerpt, collection of Jonah Cherry.)
Neringa Aleksandrauskas had always been fascinated by x-rays and photographs—the one because of the promise of being able to see what was normally hidden, the other because of the promise of being able to stop time. When her mother, a widow, had remarried several years ago, she’d asked Nerry to take some photographs at the ceremony. Nerry dug out the old camera her grandfather Darius had given her years ago, when she was ten. She had taken some photographs of her mother, radiant after years of being alone, of the musicians in the dance band at the reception playing with a focus and intensity Nerry envied, of couples dancing so easily, so close and comfortable, during the slow songs.
Her mother’s life was like the leaf lens on Nerry’s camera, expanding to an F stop of 2.1, like the pupil of an eye opening to take in the world of light, while Nerry’s life was narrowing to a tiny circle of f16, barely allowing any light in. It was some comfort at least to have the camera in her hands again, to touch something she loved.
She worked as a technician in the radiology department at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, New York, cut off from time and sunlight in the machine-lit twilight of the X-ray rooms. She arranged people’s limbs on the cold metal table in spite of their moans and cries, aiming for the best image, sloughing off their pain and stories of accidents until she had a perfect white image, crisp on the black background. On her days off, she took the camera and prowled the Lake Ontario beaches, but she felt exposed photographing strangers and so focused on things that didn’t care: birds, dead fish, the waves, driftwood. She had a tiny apartment a bus ride from the hospital, but it was more storage unit than home, so on days she had double shifts, she’d nap on the staff room couch.
Which was why she answered the phone when she went back to her apartment one muggy day in June—she was too groggy to do the usual and not pick it up. Her mother’s voice sang out: "Hi Nerry. I thought you would want to know: Grandpa D. died. The funeral is Saturday at 9 a.m. in Waterbury. The twins have a Little League tournament in Pennsylvania starting Thursday, and then we’re driving to DC for the Bicentennial celebrations, so I won’t be going. But it might be nice if you could go."
Neringa leaned against the counter. "Like hell it would." Her mother’s dead husband’s father’s funeral was trumped by her mother’s second husband’s sons’ baseball tournament, and she thought it "might be nice" if Neringa went?
Her mother ignored her and offered the use of her credit card to take care of the short hop from Rochester to Waterbury and a car rental and motel in the area. Then she said, simply, “It might help you to go,” and hung up.
I don’t need help, she thought. She grabbed a baseball cap, her backpack, and her camera, turned out the lights in her eternally dark apartment, and headed outside into the sinuous, oily air of early afternoon. The shore of Lake Ontario was a fifteen-minute walk away, through the tattered blowsiness of Charlotte, an old Rochester suburb. She hurried over a highway overpass, crossed a park with a bandstand, cut over down a dead-end street, through an opening in a fence, and shook herself free of the city.
The celadon waters of Lake Ontario lapped at the chunks of concrete scattered like some careless mosaic along the shore and the smell of decay caught at her throat. She hurried west to where the concrete ended, where swooping gulls, common as ants, shrieked over treasures marooned on the rocks—dead fish, tiny crabs, snails. She had taken over a thousand photographs of gulls—and just that week the guy whose closet-sized gallery in Pittsford displayed one photo of hers a month had asked her if she could photograph something different for a change—"like people. Artsy photos of people. Get in their faces, show what they really feel."
"I’ll try." But inside she seethed and it was all she could do to close the gallery door quietly rather than slamming it. People were the last thing she’d want to photograph—they were irrational, emotional, trouble-making creatures.
She’d not photographed since then—two weeks without a camera in her hands, if you didn’t count the x-ray machine, which in its way was a giant camera. But the news about her grandfather dying had made her think of the day he’d given her the camera and reminded her of how excited she’d been about what this little box of mirrors and metal could do. It was no Kodak Instamatic. It was a grown-up camera that even most adults could not afford or use. She had begged him for it, had practically demanded it, knowing, even though she was a kid, that she must have that elegant Hasselblad.
They’d gone to Waterbury to visit her grandparents, her dad sprawled in an armchair, her mother perched on a folding chair, her grandfather enthroned on the sofa in the stuffy, slip-covered living room. She was 10, and her grandfather’s voice was like an itch that made her want to squirm and scratch. It broke into Lithuanian for no apparent reason, then lurched back into English, providing just enough information to get her listening, then dumping her against a wall of nonsense sounds. Her parents spoke the language and though they’d taught Neringa some phrases and simple verbs, her knowledge was touristic, and that, combined with his slow, sandy voice, kept her in an irritated state.
Finally she asked to go up to her father’s boyhood bedroom where she could be assured of finding treasures in his childhood desk and dresser—a box of samples of clear glass animals he’d sold as a little boy from door to door, a golf-ball-sized glass marble with blue bubbles inside, a pocketknife the color of blood, a gyroscope. Her mother protested that she should stay and hear her grandfather’s stories, but her grandfather waved her onward, saying "Let the little Neringa have some fun. She can always hear the stories another time."
She had found the camera in a side drawer of her father’s old desk in the room he’d shared with Uncle Cazimir. It was in a black leather box that was lined with black velvet that had faded on the creases to a bluish-gray. The camera was heavy, shiny and clean, not a speck of dust on it. The lenses were dark and deep as tiny pools, and it had a little crank handle on the side. She knew the right way it should hang on her neck, lenses facing away from her chest, but it took her a moment to figure out that she had to look down into it to see what was in front of her. She walked downstairs with it and asked her father if she could get some film for it.
"Ah, no, I don’t think so, honey. It’s like giving a Rolls Royce to a baby," her father said. "You should probably leave it here at Grandpa’s for safekeeping." To her mother he said, "I forgot I had that damn thing. Blew all my savings on it after I got back from the war."
"Good thing I was a cheap date," her mother said, laughing.
"I thought about you and that camera—you first, of course—the whole time I was gone. Got me through those times," he said. "And you know, no one wrote to me except you—I think Ma and Pa were pretending I wasn’t gone."
Nerry noticed Darius dig in his pocket and pull out a handkerchief and blow his nose. "Pa," Nerry’s father said. "It’s okay."
Darius nodded, his eyes bright. He cleared his throat. "If she can use it, let her—it’s going to waste sitting up there."
And so her father had shown her where the film went, and how the buttons worked and what turning the dials on the rims of the lenses did. There was still the issue of what to do about film, but living in Rochester, hometown of Eastman Kodak, even a 10-year-old could figure out that someone, somewhere in the city, would have film she could buy and bring back to be developed.
It wasn’t like she was a precocious genius. She just quietly took photos over the years, admittedly drawing attention from photography buffs at the sight of a Rolls Royce hanging around a little girl’s neck. It was the one thing that defined her, even picking for her her boyfriends in high school—artsy loners and guys on the school newspaper—and her final boyfriend, the one who chased ambulances and shot film of crumpled cars, who told her she had sexy lips and got her pregnant at the age of 18, that summer of 1965.
She watched the gulls circle and pounce on a half-eaten pizza someone had left on a picnic table by the shore. Maybe a change of scenery would provide a fresh look through her camera lens. Maybe it would be good for her to attend her grandfather’s funeral.
Eleven years had gone by since her wedding day, that day she’d stood in the vestibule of the church, her wedding gown tight around her swelling belly, waiting for her father, who’d gone to fetch the rings the groom had forgotten. Perhaps seeing her grandfather laid to rest would lay to rest the curse he had placed on her at the end of that terrible day.
Chapter 3
Vė́jai švil̃pia ir̃ ū́bauja. Kàs čià atsitìko? Kodė̃l jū̃s tóks pìktas?
The winds whistle and howl. What has happened? Why are you so angry? (Letter excerpt, coll. of Jonah Cherry.)
"Come, saints of God, come angels of the Lord, come meet his soul," murmured the people gathered around the grave of Darius Aleksandrauskas. "Come and take him to the highest."
Their voices slipped in and out of harmony, some high, some low. Everyone but Nerry seemed to know what to say and do, with no prompting from the priest. The June morning was perfect at this early hour but already the blue was leaching from the sky, leaving a rind of white at the horizon. Nerry unbuttoned the top button of her short-sleeved white blouse and regretted the black pantyhose and black skirt, already soaking up heat from the sun.
"Come and take him, far, far away," murmured her grandmother, Ilona, who held onto the ample black purse on her lap as though it were a life preserver. Her hands were deeply furrowed and knotted, as if they’d undergone geologic change, and Nerry thought what a great photo they would make, close up. But her camera lay deep in the large purse at her feet. If she weren’t at a funeral—she sighed and noticed how short Ilona had become. Why had she feared the woman for so many years?
Ilona had had Darius cremated and paid for a casket too, where, presumably, his ashes lay enclosed, ready for burial. Nerry wondered if Ilona was afraid that the legends were true, that, at the death of a person who’d lived a particularly long or difficult life, the dead who’d known him gathered and decided the fate of his soul. Why else would she have chosen cremation, which was, Nerry figured, contrary to everything Roman Catholic Ilona believed?
Compared to Darius, who’d spoken very good English, she was unknowable, silent where he was talkative, revealing little about her past. His stories of a dashing life spent on the run in a faraway country almost made up for the fact of their strange last name, and it had been Darius who had helped her begin to like her name, when he’d told her the story of the sea goddess, Neringa, and the villages on the Baltic where fisherman made offerings to her before going to sea.
As far as Nerry knew, Ilona had no stories to tell. Now she sat there, gripping her purse so hard her knuckles had turned the color of putty. She bent her head down to her hands as if to kiss them or to pray, and the rim of her black straw hat scratched Nerry’s arm. Hunched like this, she looked like a small black hill. A muttering hill.
Moments later, she straightened, took off her hat and ran her hand through her spiky hair, then jammed the hat back on and shoved her glasses more snugly on her nose. Her black tent dress made sausages of her forearms and bit into her neck. Her feet were penned into a pair of shower sandals and her toenails curled like talons. Nerry tried to picture her grandmother as a young woman. Impossible.
A high voice flamed into song, as a woman hired by the uncles began to sing Amazing Grace. Nerry heard Ilona take a deep breath, and then she opened her huge purse and took out a plastic bag knotted at the top. Humming softly along with the singer, Ilona untied the knot, then stood up and shuffled over to the casket on its bier by the gravesite.
She held the bag high and tipped it and the seeds poured like a waterfall onto the casket, making a hiss like falling rain. It was a bread bag and nearly full of seeds, so the rain went on for almost a minute. The singer paused an extra beat but soldiered onward. Then her voice softened into a whisper as a breeze gusted and birds began landing in the branches above the grave. The sounds of birds calling and cackling grew louder, and then one bird flitted down to the green Astroturf carpet, picked up a seed and flew off. Then another landed. And another. Now a flurry of black and gray wings fluttered down from the trees and landed on the Astroturf. And still more birds came, blue wings, gold and black wings, dark orange wings flapping and brushing against each other as the birds jostled each other, their beaks clicking and tapping as they began to clean up the seeds.
The priest cleared his throat and said what Nerry figured was an impromptu prayer, including as it did references to feathered creatures and a god that fed all believers eternal life. Ilona nodded to the priest, made the sign of the cross, then returned to her seat beside Nerry. "Too dry to find food. No rain," Ilona muttered. "They starving little things."
"For God’s sake, Ma," one of the uncles whispered.
"Is what we do," she hissed. She balled up the bag and threw it at him. He picked it up, stuffed it in his suit pocket, and faced forward.
"Ignorant," she said, then muttered some other words Nerry didn’t catch. The uncle’s face turned slightly red.
As the birds flew off and the priest began another prayer, she hefted her purse strap onto her wrist, rose from her chair, and walked toward where the cars were parked.
"Shouldn’t someone go with her?" one of the aunts whispered.
The youngest uncle snorted. "Only if they have shit for brains."
The priest began another prayer that seemed to call forth as if by magic spoken responses from the crowd. Nerry slipped away from the ceremony and followed Ilona across the cemetery, reaching her as she sat down on a low stone wall.
"Go away—I hate your sympathy," Ilona said. Nerry froze—the woman had spoken in nearly perfect English.
"I’m not here to give you sympathy," Nerry said, walking past her as if she’d decided on her own to sit on the wall.
Ilona leaned her purse against the wall and took a large white handkerchief from her bosom and wiped her face. "So? What, then?"
"Nothing." Nerry brushed off a section of wall out of arm’s reach of her grandmother and sat down. Oh damn. She’d left her purse back by her chair, with the camera inside.
Ilona leaned over the wall and spat on the other side of it. "Ha. Everyone wants something."
She got up off the wall with a grunt and hobbled over to a nearby sprinkler that bubbled like a tiny fountain instead of spraying the thirsty grass nearby. She dipped her handkerchief, pulled off her black straw hat and tied the wet cloth around her chopped white hair, which, Nerry thought, could have used a slicking with some pomade or hair gel. Looking like a pirate now, which actually improved her appearance, she retired to her seat on the wall. She smelled sour and hot, as though she’d been picking marigolds or digging onions.
"You cry?" she asked, as if they’d already been discussing the funeral.
"No." Nerry paused. She could say what she thought with Ilona—she’d probably never see her again and how much did the woman really understand of English anyway? "He put a curse on me."
"Humph. You call it curse. I call it stupid old man saying stupid words."
"You were there—he said I’d never love or be loved. What kind of man does that to his granddaughter? Especially when her father has just died?" She blinked, feeling tears rising, and cleared her throat. Eleven years had paved over the hurt and loss, or so she’d thought.
"Pah." Ilona waved at Nerry as though she were swatting a fly. "Maybe he see that you have a stone for a heart."
"Well. That’s quite a leap to make. Gee, how nice." Nerry cleared her throat and felt an odd desire to laugh. "And how would someone know that someone had a stone for a heart?"
Ilona shrugged. "He think it of me too."
"Oh. So you weren’t being insulting for the sake of being insulting."
A corner of Ilona’s thin lips lifted and she looked down at her hands.
"What kind of stone, I wonder? Would he have gotten more specific? Because if it’s granite, I’m screwed. But if it’s soapstone or—or, what are some of those soft stones—alabaster maybe?—then maybe there’s hope," Nerry said.
"You take words too seriously," Ilona said. "Maybe you need refresher mourning lessons. I show you how we mourn. We move like this—" she clasped her hands in front of her square, damp face as if in prayer, and began to sway, murmuring into her fingers words Nerry couldn’t catch. She could have sworn she heard snatches of When the Saints Go Marching In and Oklahoma in her grandmother’s keening.
Ilona peeked at her through her hands and her shoulders started to shake. It took Nerry a moment to realize she was laughing.
"I think it’s time to go," Nerry said. People were standing now. She got up to join them, a short, skinny crow regaining its flock, its murder.
"Hey. You girl." Nerry turned and ducked, but the black straw hat glanced off her chin and hit the grass. "Someday you need this." This time, Ilona didn’t hide her laughter.
Nerry rubbed her chin. "I don’t think so." She snatched up the hat and flung it back at Ilona, aiming for the branches above her grandmother’s head, then without waiting to see where it landed, headed back to the gravesite. She met Aunt Zora halfway, poking through the grass in her high heels to collect Ilona. Maybe there was still something important that had to be done, like watching the casket be lowered into the grave? At her father’s funeral, on a cold, rainy November day, they hadn’t waited and had all left, for which Nerry at least had been glad.
But the relatives were all clustered around the bier now and as she reached them, she slipped in and observed the aunts, uncles, and cousins reach for a clod or handful of dirt and one at a time sift it over the casket, which now lay in the ground. Aunt Zora appeared with Ilona, hat in hand, who crowded in too and was given a clod, which she tossed at the casket like a baseball. Then the priest intoned some more and it was over.
Several peoplecame up to Ilona and spoke to her in Lithuanian. She replied in staccato phrases, her face stony. Must have been friends of Darius, Nerry thought. As people started to walk back to the cars, she fell in step beside Ilona and when no one else was nearby, asked, "The ashes ARE in the casket, aren’t they?"
Ilona patted her huge purse. "Except some in here."
"In your purse?" Nerry’s voice squeaked.
"I scatter them later," Ilona said. "His heart always in two places. So should his ashes be."
"But then the spirits will come," Nerry said, half joking, half curious to see Ilona’s reaction.
"I scatter quickly. No spirits ready that soon."
Afterwards, back at the house where Ilona and Darius had lived, the men gathered in the tiny living room with some of the cousins who’d come, few of whom Nerry knew very well as they were a decade younger than her and in their teens now. Most of the aunts and a few friends and neighbors had gone into the kitchen and were preparing platters of sausage, cheese, and black bread. Nerry took a folding chair someone offered her and sat near the slip-covered sofa where Aunt Zora’s husband Mario and Uncle Caz sat arguing over whether Bo Jackson signing on with the Kansas City Royals would have any effect on their beloved Giants.
Across from them, on the other slip-covered sofa, Uncle Petras, whom Nerry had heard the cousins calling Uncle Pet Rock, was assuring a neighbor of Ilona’s that in spite of what President Reagan was saying, the radiation from the Chernobyl nuclear plant explosion would eventually end up being blown around the world to Waterbury. "But it will be a small dose," he said.
After a while, Petras joined the baseball conversation and the talk turned to the baseball games they’d attended as boys, and then Nerry heard her father’s name. Soon they’d be talking about how he died or regretting his life cut short in its prime. She went into the kitchen.
"Hi Neringa. We’ve got to sit down and catch up sometime. Has it really been eleven years since we last saw you?" Aunt Zora said, handing her a gallon milk jug. "Put that in the fridge, will you? I swear, you actually look younger now than you did at your wedding. How’s your mother been doing?"
"She’s fine." Nerry put the milk in the fridge and turned back to tell her aunt that her mother was loving having twin stepsons to raise, but Aunt Zora was making her way out to the living room, a platter of meat held high. She couldn’t go back out there again, and she didn’t know her aunts by marriage that well, and anyway they were leaning against the counter chatting with each other and didn’t seem to know who she was. True, her hair had been long and blonde when they’d last met, at her father’s funeral, and now her hair was curly and dark, a drab brown that absorbed color rather than reflecting it. She probably looked like a stranger.
She ambled down the hallway into the bedroom at the back of the house. It appeared too neat, as though someone had gone through and cleaned it of anything that mattered. She patted the white crocheted bedspread, peeled away the covers and peered at the sheet and pillowcase, looking for what? stains? Something. Anything that would show he’d been there. But there was nothing. How could a man disappear? She wished for a moment she’d come back when he was alive, to tell him how wrong he was to say those things to her.
She smoothed the covers neatly and on impulse lay down. The springs creaked. She could hear voices in the living room but not enough to isolate the speakers. What had he thought as he lay there his last night in the house? Was there any part of him that knew he was going to die?
If so, why couldn’t he have murmured an addendum to what he’d said eleven years ago? Then again, who was to say he hadn’t? But wouldn’t she know, in some way, if he had?
He had come to America to dodge the Czar’s draft, expecting to go back in a year or so. He had come with nothing, not even a dollar. The stories of his youth in Lithuania were his currency, even years later after he was able to buy a house and a car. And his oldest son, Nerry’s father, was his gold.
Was it true spirits of the dead hung around for a while before moving on? Maybe not as wooowooo ghosts in the stereotypical way but in a more logical way, in some dimension other than this one. Maybe if physicists looked hard enough, they’d discover the dead transformed into another form of energy other than their earlier carbon-based bodies. Maybe that energy was constantly there, if only humans could perceive it.
"If you are here still," she whispered, "Could you take back what you said that day?"
No answer.
She swung her legs over and planted them on the floor, sitting on the edge of the bed. What now? Why had she come, anyway?
"I thought I saw someone go by," a voice outside the door said. The door opened and Uncle Mario peered around it. "Oh. Nerry. Did you go down the hall a second ago?"
"No. Maybe. A minute or so." She got up. "I should go help with the dishes."
She followed him to the kitchen, where Ilona was rummaging through the drawers in search of something. She had changed from the black dress to a tent-like faded blue house dress, worn white tennis shoes, and a baseball cap She nabbed a disposable cigarette lighter and headed out the back door.
"Her and those damned cigarettes," Aunt Zora said. Nerry went to the window. Knowing Ilona, you couldn’t be sure that all she was setting on fire was mere nicotine and tar. But she was barreling back inside, the cigarette lighter flying into the wastebasket with what might have been a cuss word. She opened another drawer and started digging.
"I guess I saw Nerry," Uncle Mario said.
Aunt Zora stopped wiping the kitchen table. "But you said you saw someone in light blue. She’s wearing black and white."
Ilona looked up from the drawer she was ransacking and her eyes met Nerry’s.
Uncle Mario shrugged. "Maybe I saw the white and thought it was blue."
Aunt Zora rolled her eyes. "Maybe you thought you had one beer but you really had two."
"I didn’t have any beer," he protested.
She waved him back into the living room and untied the butcher’s apron she’d put on over her black dress. "Ma, we’re going to go now," she said in a loud voice. "But if you need anything, call me. Promise? You’ll call me? Anything. Okay?"
Ilona grimaced, said some words in Lithuanian, and Zora nodded. "Yep. Took care of that. Did Cazimir tell you he’s going to come by before work tomorrow and sort through the bills and take care of them? Well, he is. And Petras is going to see about getting the headstone you wanted. I’ll come by tomorrow and do some straightening up for you."
Ilona waved her off as if she were a pesky fly. Zora shrugged, seemingly unperturbed by the dismissal, and left. When you were rumored to have been chased around the kitchen table at age five by your mother wielding a butcher’s knife, perhaps you didn’t expect any signs of affection from her.
It appeared everyone else had already left, even though it was barely noon. Ilona was gathering up another lighter, a pack of cigarettes, and a can of soda, but seeing Nerry she stopped. "Come with me."
Nerry hesitated. Her flight wasn’t due to leave until early the next morning, and she had nowhere else to go. She followed Ilona outside, keeping her distance. The last time she’d been alone with her grandmother had not ended well. True, she’d been only 12 at the time and somewhat weird and impulsive herself, but the experience had taught her Ilona was not to be trusted. Then again, she herself hadn’t been entirely honest then either.
Chapter 4
Žõdžiai arbà nè vìską tepasãko, arbà per_daũg pasãko ir̃ atvėsìna vìdų
Words either don’t say everything or they say too much and make the insides cold. (Letter excerpt, collection of Jonah Cherry.)
The year 1959 had rolled around to August, and it was Darius’s birthday, an event that necessitated Nerry and her father and mother drive down from Rochester to visit. After a big noon dinner, the family cut into the cake Mick, Nerry’s father, had ordered special from a local bakery, which everyone treated like it was the best bakery in the whole world. The cake was a tower made of rings of dough and decorated like a carnival with pink and red and green dye, and after singing Happy Birthday in Lithuanian, they dug in while Mick, as the oldest child, serenaded Darius by singing his favorite song, the one that went "oh Danny boy." Guaranteed to make Grandpa’s eyes redden.
Nerry’s mother offered to help Ilona cut the cake but Ilona ignored her. Her mother’s face reddened and she sat back. Nerry remembered overhearing her parents discussing Ilona after one of the regular summer visits to Waterbury. "She doesn’t pay attention to you because she was taught that women weren’t worth paying attention to," her father had said to her mother. "There’s nothing mean about it, honey. You’re just not a person to her."
Nerry was fine with her grandmother ignoring her. As long as she got a slice of the weird cake.
Afterwards, Nerry played outside with her young cousins, but they were so young, some of them in diapers, that at 12 she felt more like their babysitter and she could only stand them for so long. Luckily their parents soon took them home.
Bored, she strolled into the living room where Darius was holding court and instantly regretted not staying outside. "Here my little Neringa, have a seat," Darius interrupted what he was saying and shifted over on the sofa. "Would you like a glass of lemonade? We’re out of lemonade, Ilona," he called into the kitchen. "Bring some more."
Her grandmother came out with a pitcher and plunked it down on the folding TV table next to him. "A glass?" he said. "It’s like pulling teeth with you." She disappeared and came back with a tray with several glasses on it.
"Little Nerry, I give you advice about marriage,” her grandmother said, handing her a glass. "Ashes to ice, amber to bees, love rides away on a fast horse, sorrow never leaves."
Her grandfather sighed and shook his head. “No, no, you’ve got it wrong, woman. It’s ‘Bring ashes to water, turn ice to bees, chase love on a fast horse, but sorrow on your knees.’ Can’t you even remember a simple proverb? Jesus.”
Her grandmother put down the tray and disappeared into the kitchen, slamming doors behind her.
Nerry sat down between her grandfather and her father on the sofa and held the glass of warm lemonade without drinking it.
"Where was I?" Darius asked. Mick said something in Lithuanian and everyone chuckled. "Oh yes. The Czar wanted to draft all the young men to fight his stupid war for him. But I didn’t want to fight for the Czar. I heard someone say there was a guy with a crooked leg who would go around and take your army medical exam for you so you could get a deferment. Sounded good to me, so I paid him to take the exam for me in Kaunas.
"But something went wrong this time. He was recognized. One of the army doctors had seen him at another place pretending to be someone else. So word went out that I was going to be arrested. Fight in the army or be sent to Siberia. I hotfooted it home and bought a train ticket to Hamburg, packed some clothes and said goodbye to my mother and father.
"‘I’ll be back,’ I told my father. I didn’t say a proper goodbye to him, it was all so rushed. Besides, I thought I would return when it all blew over. Coming to America—it was supposed to be temporary. Well, the soldiers caught me a day later."
Nerry sat up.
Mick said something in Lithuanian, which set off a flurry of Lithuanian words between him and Darius, but it was hard to figure out what they were saying as their expressions didn’t change. Nerry sighed. Finally Darius took up the tale again. "So the soldiers caught me. They took my pack, my money, and would have taken my coat except that I laughed very loudly at them for wanting it. It smelled of horse, so they decided I could keep it. That was very lucky, because my ticket was sewn into the lining.
"They took me to a jail and left me in a dark hole all night and then in the morning, they gathered a group of us prisoners and began to march us down the road to where a military division had set up camp outside the city. I noticed as they prodded us along that we were going to cut around the edge of the main railroad yard. In fact, we were going to have to cross several sets of tracks. I couldn’t believe my luck."
"You going to drink that lemonade? Don’t you like it?" he turned the spotlight of his attention on Nerry. She took a tiny sip of the sour, cloudy liquid. Satisfied, he went on.
"I had to time it just so, slowing my pace without looking like I was dawdling, while I waited for several trains pulling out of the station to come closer to where we were. They were taking so long to pull out of the station, I finally had to make myself appear to trip and realistically fall, which I did and accidentally took down a guard with me. Again luck played its part—the guards didn’t shoot or even beat me. They merely called me names and poked me with a rifle butt until I got up."
"But I had slowed us enough so that the train was too close for our group to beat it to the tracks to cross. So the guards made us stop to let it go by. They had guns, see, but hadn’t bothered to tie our hands or feet—they figured the guns were enough to keep us in line.
"This was my one chance. The tracks the train would use were a short sprint from where we stood. I wasn’t sure how to time it—run too soon for the tracks and I’d be exposed and likely shot. Run too late and the train would run me over. I waited until the last possible moment. When it was nearly abreast of us, I ran for the tracks, hoping the soldiers would be too surprised to shoot.
"I hadn’t figured the train would be accelerating as fast as it was. I almost didn’t make it across in time. But before it went past, I dove across the tracks and landed on the other side. The wind was knocked out of me but I made myself get up fast—the train was barreling by, keeping the guards and their guns away from me, at least I hoped. But they started shooting at me under the train. I sprinted beside the train, looking for a way to grab on to a box car and swing myself up.
"Finally I caught at the railing of one of the last cars and held on. I heard pops of gunfire, but it was behind me. The train was flying now. By the time I pulled myself into the box car, the city was behind me.
"I didn’t know the route this train was following and when the train swept into a long tunnel, I panicked. I didn’t remember any tunnels going west. I thought I’d picked a train heading east. I didn’t want to go east—I wanted to go to the coast. Then the tunnel ended and the sun came out. We were going west, the right direction all along."
Nerry’s father raised his glass of iced tea and his grin crinkled his eyes. "Here’s to Pa. Nothing can catch you."
Behind him, Nerry’s grandmother, who had come to pick up the lemonade glasses, rolled her eyes and shook her head. Nerry’s grandfather saw it too. "What, Ilona? You can’t just listen, you have to inject your own pessimistic attitude into everything that comes through this house? What’s the matter with you? Can’t you let a story be told just once without trying to make it something ugly?"
"You spend too much time in the past," she snapped.
"And what’s so bad about that? Compared to here and now, it’s a paradise."
Nerry’s grandmother whirled around and left the room. Nerry’s father and mother changed the subject, like a team of football players passing the ball back and forth, and soon Nerry’s grandfather was laughing again.
Later, Mick wanted to take his father for a drive. Maybe to see a building or a car, it didn’t matter. He loved driving, and he was his father’s favorite, and anywhere he wanted to go was fine. Nerry grabbed a magazine from the car before they left. No way was she going to go with them—they’d all speak Lithuanian and leave her out of the conversation, plus she thought Waterbury was ugly.
Her grandmother had disappeared, which was fine with Nerry, so she took her magazine into her grandfather’s bedroom, the only room with a window air conditioner. Her grandmother’s bedroom was upstairs; she had moved recently, Nerry had overheard her parents say, because the air conditioner made her cold.
She lay looking at the photos of teenaged rock stars in her fan magazine and after a while fell asleep. The next thing she knew, she was awake and part of a great quiet punctuated by a creaking sound. Someone was walking down the hallway. Someone heavy. Someone who would yell at her for being in there.
She dove off the bed and wiggled underneath, her skin squeaking against the hardwood floor. The door opened and she looked through the fringed bedspread and saw her grandmother’s brown leather bedroom slippers shuffle past. There was a rustling sound, a slight thump, and then she dragged a dark wooden box into view and knelt beside it. Shoving a hand into the pocket of her housedress, she pulled out a handful of keys and began to try each one in the padlock attached to the front.
Nerry could hear her breathing, deep and ragged, and wondered if she could feel the vibration of Nerry’s heart pulsing against the floor. A click and her grandmother lifted the lid. The telephone jangled in the other room, and Ilona got to her feet and padded out the door.
The longer Ilona was gone, the more curious Nerry became. Finally she scuttled out from under the bed and knelt beside the box. It was actually a small trunk. Burned on one side was the word Cincinnati, the name of the freighter that had taken her grandfather to America. She lifted the lid. Inside were papers, hundreds, maybe thousands, folded into squares and rectangles, some tied into packets and stacked, others slipped up against each other like leaves.
She stuck her hand in deep and stirred, feeling for treasure—gold coins or bags of jewels—something valuable. Instead, she brought up a battered brown envelope addressed in beautiful, flowing script to Darius Aleksandrauskas at an address that was not the house she was in. Tipping the envelope into her hand, she saw old photographs, in sepia and cream, black and silver, in dozens of sizes, from a tiny thumbnail-sized portrait of a woman with her hair piled on her head and odd pale-colored eyes, to a photo triple that size of grownups and kids in old fashioned clothes standing in front of an intricately trimmed house. Some photos were of people on horseback, some of people in wagons. A few were of people standing beside old black cars.
She put the photographs aside and picked up a piece of thick, cream-colored paper, and unfolded it. Definitely a letter. Dated 1938. Somebody had that same flowing script, like the trail of a butterfly, careening across the sky. But the words made no sense. The signature at the end, though, that she could read: Anna.
Grabbing another letter, this one on paper as thin as onion skin, she unfolded it. Yes, the numbers she could read—this was dated 1939. But this writer wrote in a tiny, bird-scratch handwriting and she couldn’t read the name at the end.
Quickly she unfolded several more letters and discovered more styles of handwriting. Several letters were dated 1921. He or she wrote in thick, firm, confident black strokes—the words were legible, though she didn’t know what they meant. She dug deeper and pulled out a packet of letters tied with string that crumbled where it had been bound so long. 1913. Another packet, 1933, the only one not on plain paper but on thin, fabric-like paper printed with roses. She thought she smelled perfume, sniffed the folded paper: Yes, faintly.
The floor creaked in the hallway outside the door, as if the house itself were warning her. She threw the scented rose letters and the photographs back in the trunk and dove under the bed, then realized she’d left the other letters out. She reached out and swept them under the bed, into the dust bunnies.
Her grandmother’s feet trod the floor again, slow, precisely placed, as if she were walking an invisible tightrope. There was a soundless moment and Nerry wondered if she’d been found out. And then she saw it—she had missed one of the photographs, which was sticking out from under the bed. If Ilona bent to pick it up, she would see Nerry. She saw Ilona’s housedress as she kneeled, then heard the sound of a paper sack being opened. She was filling the sack with papers from the trunk. Under cover of the rustling and crackling noises Ilona’s hands were making, she blew on the photo, willing it to scoot behind Ilona.
She moved it a half a foot, now a little behind Ilona, who hadn’t seemed to notice. Ilona was still scooping papers from the chest and dumping them in the sack. Several times she placed a photograph beside her on the floor instead of putting it in the sack. Then she got up and yanked something off the wall, her feet stumbling from the effort, and knelt with her prize. It was a picture frame, Nerry could see that much. Ilona turned it over in her lap and her fingers scraped the edges as if she were trying to rip the back off. Then she dumped it on the floor and left the room.
Nerry wiggled out from under the bed and reached for the photograph she’d tried to push with her breath, then ducked back under the bed. In the under-bed dimness, she could make out two men racing horses side by side, the horse hooves blurred, the men’s white shirts billowing. In the background, in perfect focus compared to the blur of horses and riders, a little boy sat on a fence watching them. This was really neat. What was her grandma doing putting the photos and papers into the sack? She couldn’t be tossing these in the trash, could she?
Still no footsteps and a lot of slamming of drawers in the kitchen.
She squirmed halfway out from under the bed and glanced at the picture frame. Behind the glass was a glossy black and white portrait of a woman with wavy light-colored hair and eyes that crinkled, as if she were laughing. It didn’t look like her grandmother, as this woman’s face was heart-shaped, not round, and she had a dimple in her chin.
Then she sifted through the smaller pile of photos her grandmother had set aside. One was of a girl with braids and a long dress, leaning against a barn. The girl looked like she was trying to smile but had forgotten how. Another was of a man and a woman and a draft horse, standing in the furrows of a half-plowed field. The woman’s face was turned to look at the man and her lips were parted as though she’d said something.
To a 12 year-old of a certain mindset, these photographs were magical and mysterious, like black and white illustrations for stories yet to be written. Nerry picked up the photos of the girl with braids and the couple in the field, but then the floor creaked. Clutching the photographs, she scuttled back under.
Her grandmother’s feet appeared, as did a larger paper grocery sack she stood upright on the floor. She knelt again and Nerry saw a screw driver bite into the back of the picture frame, lifting staples, until her grandmother’s hand lifted out the glossy woman’s photo. A whisper like falling raindrops and she had dropped the woman’s photo and the contents of the smaller paper sack into the larger sack. A few errant pieces of paper floated onto the floor and Nerry hoped her grandmother hadn’t yet missed the photos she’d set aside. Then she heard another rustle, like the sound of a rake through autumn leaves. Her grandmother had both hands in the trunk now and was scooping papers into the large sack.
Then she shuffled out of the room. Nerry stuck her head out from under the bed. The small paper sack lay on its side, empty; the larger one was gone. The empty picture frame lay near the wall.
What to do with the photos and the letters? If she left them on the floor, would Ilona think she’d overlooked them or would she suspect something? Better to not have them reappear. She scrambled out and stuffed them under the bed pillow, then lifted the trunk lid to see what was left.
Her grandmother had cleaned it out. Only a few scraps of paper and a wadded-up envelope remained, along with tiny piles of dust and sand.
Nerry picked up the envelope and was surprised by its weight. Unfolding it, she found what looked like a gob of hardened dark-red honey. Outside was glassy and rippling and the inside was flecked with bits of ancient pinecone, and in the center was something shadowy. Nerry held the golf-ball-sized amber up to the window. A bee. It was suspended, wings spread, ready to sting or fly or dance if its red-gold world were cracked open. Every detail had survived—she could see the netting of its wings and the tiny hairs on its legs, dusted with pollen. "Oh my god," Nerry murmured.