The Dedalus Book of Lithuianian Literature

by Almantas Samalavicius

  Once a day he was taken out for ten minutes to walk around. He was taken through three iron gates; at each of them he would have to stop, wait until they unlocked it and then wait until they locked it again. Since all the buttons of his clothing were cut off, Martynas walked through the yard holding his trousers up with both hands. A few other prisoners from neighbouring cells were taken out to walk, and the sight was rather comical: grown men walking like children with their trousers falling down. Martynas would have perhaps smiled, entertained by such a sight, but his split lip was very painful and abscesses had formed on his right cheek from lying on the cold cell floor. He had spent a few years underground in various bunkers and in damp hiding places, sleeping right on the ground, covering himself with pine branches or digging himself into the snow. But he had never complained about his health and there had never been anything like this. Freedom worked like medicine; in captivity the organism lost its immunity. Martynas decided that he needed to pay little attention to bodily things because now he did not need his body anymore. Everything had fallen to pieces and now it was death or Siberia that awaited him. He became so indifferent toward his body that the weekly mocking by the guards didn’t even concern him anymore. A thorough search took place every week: the prisoners were told to undress and ordered to open their mouths wide, crouch and then pull their buttocks apart to show that haven’t hidden anything. Afterwards they would go through your meagre belongings and if they found something suspicious they would take apart even your last stitch of clothing right down to the seam.

  One day everything ended very quickly. A guard took him to a small room with two windows with no bars. A table covered with red material stood in the middle of the room with three people sitting at it. Martynas, almost unable to hear with one ear, most likely due to an eardrum rupture while being beaten, calmly listened to the sentence: twenty-five years in a camp and ten years of exile. He stood, almost not hearing the list of charges. He was sure that this disgustingly red cloth was dipped in the blood of his murdered brothers-in-arms and all those Lithuanian citizens who were tortured, beaten to death or exiled to Siberia. He had seen a lot of blood, enough to paint all the Communist flags and all the tablecloths. There would still be enough left over for the Pioneer’s ties.

  It was all just smoke and mirrors – now they would take him to a storeroom, put a bullet to the back of the head and it would all be finished. Funny, but he didn’t feel fear – just a barely tolerable heaviness in his legs and stomach. It would be embarrassing if he couldn’t walk and the NKVD officers would have to carry him like a calf to the slaughter.

  ‘Do you want to say anything?’ asked a short man with round glasses and a narrow moustache under his nose, who was sitting to the side.

  ‘I fought for my homeland, and now you are sentencing me for betraying my homeland. Doesn’t that seem ridiculous to you?’ Martynas asked.

  ‘Take him away,’ came the terse order.

  Siberia greeted him coldly. On one stop along the way over the Vologda, Martynas, standing near the cattle car’s window criss-crossed with barbed wire, saw a strange spectacle: a sleigh on a road blanketed with snow full of unhewn logs that was being pulled by a short-legged one-horned cow. It was the first time in his life that he had seen a harnessed cow. The beast stamped on the snow, turning his head to the side, and it seemed that the cow was suffering unspeakable pain while the driver, a stocky, broad-faced Russian woman, occasionally slapped the animal on its sunken sides and hollered, ‘Hey, hey!’ Finally the tired cow stopped and slowly kneeled down on its front legs before its behind collapsed into the snow bank. Its eyes bulged, and thick, white steam gushed out of its nostrils. The cow was similar to a locomotive that had stopped and did not plan on moving anymore. It was as if something had gone awry in the mechanism and had been irrevocably damaged. The water or coal reserves were used up, like the will to live. The train moved forward but Martynas remained standing near the little window, still looking at the fallen cow that didn’t want to suffer anymore in the endless Siberian expanses that were quickly becoming dark.

  The train would stop constantly as living and breathing cargo would be unloaded. Lined up in ragged ranks and marched to a transit point, from which later, a day or even many days later, they would travel to a camp where lice, hunger, unbearably hard work and an emotionless, lonely death awaited them. As the train made its frequent stops, to those sitting in the sealed cattle cars who had not been called from the list, it seemed that all of Siberia was one enormous concentration camp, full of stops all bearing the same name – Death. The backbone of the railway line, travelling through the eternal frozen ground and the roads stretching from it, the legs of the journey where one had to walk to other camps – it was the skeleton of the merciless Lord of Death.

  ***

  The Lord of the Dead will cut off my head, tear out my heart, rip out my guts, lick my brain, drink my blood, devour my flesh, gnaw on my bones, but I won’t die. I can’t die, because it’s not right, it can’t be like this, it can’t all end like this. I have to return so I can look them in the eye. Who are they? My wife and sons are already in the ground; all my friends are in the ground. The communists, collaborators, betrayers – it wasn’t worth looking into their despicable eyes.

  ***

  The deportees were bathed in a shabby barracks with the wind blowing in, their heads were smeared with a smelly liquid soap using the end of a narrow strip of wood. Some men were given wooden buckets filled with barely lukewarm water and ordered to wash themselves quickly because others were waiting. Martynas shivered from the cold, but the image of a hot day arose in his memory: there were six naked partisan bodies lying behind the headquarters of the local Soviet militia in the town of Olandija. Among them were two women, their stomachs bloated from the heat, bulging out like repulsive stones at the edge of a field. A militia officer came out of the headquarters and stood and urinated on the corpse closest to him. Afterwards he said something to his associates inside and started to jump on the bloated intestines of the corpses.

  The column herded from the sauna was met by a sledge in which lay barely covered bodies. The sledge turned through the gate and stopped, having driven just a few metres. The bodies were buried right there, behind the fence. A guard who had accompanied the sledge stabbed each body with a bayonet, and once again searched their shabby clothing – some corpses were almost naked – before two sickly looking men threw them into a shallow pit and buried them with a mixture of earth and snow. The new arrivals, arranged in rows opposite one of the three barracks, waiting to be called, watched this burial ritual.

  When the sledge with the guard and two gravediggers crept past them, one of the exiles whispered: ‘There won’t be hide nor hair left of us.’ Suddenly a sound could be heard amid the silence: at first something resembling chuckling, later turning into laughter. The man was laughing so heartily that he was quickly joined by several others standing next to him. And the angrier the guards became as they tried to calm them down, the louder they laughed. They laughed even though they didn’t want to laugh anymore, as if laughing for the last time.

  Martynas wasn’t afraid to go down the mineshaft – he had after all lived underground on and off for a few years: in bunkers in the forest, in hiding places under gardens, in the houses of farmers.

  Martynas spoke to his neighbour on his plank bed after hard work in the mines: ‘It’s all the same everywhere underground – darkness, dampness, a lack of air. But there, in Lithuania, the smell is different underground. Familiar, rich, full of life… But here, there’s methane, a spark and you will explode like in the eighteenth mineshaft… They say that two of ours were burned horribly, a Pole and a Tatar… I wanted to live, I believed that we would win, that an American would come to help us. Maybe he will still come, though nobody believes it anymore… I don’t know, I don’t believe it anymore… And Student didn’t believe it. Nobody believed it…’

  His neighbour, an elderly airman named Peter Zem
aitis, didn’t say anything to him at that moment, maybe just because he didn’t have the strength. Zemaitis didn’t mine coal underground. He pulled the ropes used to erect the columns that supported the mineshaft ceilings. The work was easier, but wet clothes, hunger and fatigue turned any work into hellish suffering.

  When they would finally come up from the 400-metre depths to the surface, a cold that was just as unpleasant was there to meet them. Wet clothes hardened, froze to the bone in an instant, becoming sharp and rattling like tin, so that it was hard to take a step.

  ‘Good lord,’ Zemaitis would say. ‘It’s the 20th century, technological progress, planes and radios, and it’s like we’re in the Stone Age with clothes made out of stone.’

  A month later Zemaitis was run over by a coal wagon. Martynas guessed that it wasn’t an unlucky accident: Zemaitis was praying and crying hard the night before it happened.

  After his death, laying next to the empty bed of his friend, Martynas tried to pray for his unlucky soul, however he was unable to do so. He tried to remember something nice about Peter Zemaitis, but his head was empty. Neither sympathy, nor compassion. The wagon was almost the same as a grenade, Martynas thought. He died honourably, but what remained of Zemaitis, from a person who had once been a soldier, the head of the family, a father of three? Nothing, just a little mound of snow. The only thing that Martynas’fading conscious was able to recall was how Zemaitis would remove the outer bark from the trunk and eat the white and relatively soft layer underneath. Cheesecake, he would say. A wooden cheesecake, that’s all that remains of a person.

  Martynas was also quickly moved to the surface to work. One day a layer of coal toppled onto him, and if it weren’t for the German POW Ott Bartel, Martynas would never have seen the light of day again. He broke a few ribs and a shinbone, and suffered concussion.

  After recovering a little in a local hospital, where the only medicine was ointment for scabs, he was given a job in the carpentry workshop. The work was easier, but it was accompanied by unceasing and excruciating hunger and cold. It wasn’t the lack of medicine that killed people off in the hospital, but the starvation. A thick broth with a big piece of bread would have made a number of people rise from their deathbed.

  There were forty-three mineshafts in the coal mines of Vorkuta, and there was also a chalk and cement factory, a cattle farm with a hide-processing workshop and a soap workshop.

  Summer lasted one month in Vorkuta. Nature managed to do in one month what it takes at least half a year to do in Lithuania: the buds built up, blossomed and then the fruit ripened. The summer was short, like the life of a deportee, as farmer Zibolis liked to joke. He was very ingenious: seeing that the Germans, who were even more ingenious, would buy sweaters, he himself started to buy torn clothes from his co-workers that didn’t suit anyone anymore. He would mend, wash and sell them to the Germans from the Privolzhsky district.

  Later Zibolis discovered a clever scheme for providing rabbit meat to the deportees. At one point he didn’t go to work anymore. He was barely alive and would stay in the barracks, washing the floor and feeding coal into the stove made from two metal containers. One day after returning from work, a few of Zibolis’ closest neighbours – you couldn’t call them friends, because there were no friends there, just neighbours – had an unexpected surprise waiting for them. The meat that he gave them to try was not salted or sweet, but very soft. ‘Siberian rabbit,’ Zibolis said proudly and laughed. ‘Siberian rabbit,’ the deportees repeated. They ate, laughed and chewed with mouths that were not used to such delicacies anymore. Later a few of them threw up, but not because their stomachs weren’t used to food all of a sudden. It’s possible for people to forget how to walk, but not to eat. Zibolis told us how he had hunted those rabbits.

  Left alone to wash the barrack floor, he noticed that a number of rats would come up through the holes in the floor when it was quiet in the barracks. They ran around in groups from one bed to another, smelling the shabby rags thrown on the plank beds, and constantly chewing on something. Zibolis collected gum from the prisoners, made a sling, and the rabbit hunt began. Those that threw up were recent arrivals, and though they already knew what hunger was, their imagination still worked according to old habits. There were no habits that were important anymore for experienced prisoners, except for one – to eat something.

  The carpentry workshop was situated near the soap workshop. Martynas would go there because women worked there. He wanted to look at them. Women reminded him of home and what he had lost: something very human, fragile and miraculous. He longed for the experiences of two people while they are silent or doing some sort of simple, everyday work. Perhaps he also longed for love or was moved by a memory of sexual attraction. It was just a memory, because the attraction itself wasn’t there. When you walk, constantly hungry and starved, when you lose half your weight – Martynas, who earlier had weighed more than 170 pounds now weighed about 100 pounds at the best of times – sex becomes merely an exotic, rare memory that means little.

  He would come and look at the women like they were moving pictures. Life would become more comfortable and warmer, as though some sort of meaning appeared for life that had been extinguished by being in the camp.

  He met Casper on precisely such a day, having come to the soap workshop, the only venue where he could feed his aesthetic hunger for humanity – to watch how the women walked around the big metal vats, using long pokers to mix the bubbling, horribly smelling mass, which was used afterwards in making cheap soap that didn’t lather.

  ‘Well, you want one of them?’ asked the one-eyed man, who looked like an old pirate with an eye-patch as he approached Martynas.

  ‘If you’d spread her on bread,’ Martynas replied.

  Casper was one of the first deportees taken in 1941.

  ‘I haven’t spoken Lithuanian for a long time,’ said Casper when they met once again in a dilapidated shed near the carpentry workshop that was used for storing firewood and other kinds of junk. It was possible to stop briefly there and take a break from the work and despicable supervisors.

  ‘No one is left from our group, no one,’ Casper said, shaking his head sadly. ‘They took us from Kaunas. I was a simple teacher, I didn’t wish any harm to anyone, I didn’t speak badly about the Soviet government, but it seems that somebody denounced me, and in the middle of June 1941 they knocked on our door in the night, perhaps in the early morning, I don’t remember anymore… Sometimes it seems like I don’t remember Lithuanian anymore. I think about some object, for example, a tool of some sort, that got left behind in the house. I had a lot of tools – I liked to work with wood and I would make furniture myself. I want to remember what things are called, but I can’t. Tears well up, my hands shake, I can’t and that’s it… They took us to the Sanciai neighbourhood, and there were a lot of people there, very long lines of wagons stood there, two trains right next to each other. I was carrying the children in my arms, I couldn’t hold onto our baggage any longer, they only let us take one hundred kilograms. I don’t know what we took there, I don’t remember – warm clothes and pictures. The NKVD officer shouted that it was too much, that it was all going to go missing anyway. Then he started to divide up our things with the soldiers right there and then. When I went to the wagon, a soldier ordered me to take my suitcase, leave the children and go with him. I said, ‘Shoot me here, I’m not leaving my family.’ They shoved us into a wagon in the middle of the train. It was raining outside, we were all wet, the children were crying, it was hot in the wagon and it was damp from the wet clothes. We laid down on the bunk planks. You couldn’t see anything in the darkness – no window, no ventilation, while the biggest problem was with the toilet. No one let you get off, you had to do everything in the wagon. A hole, a small one, the size of a child’s fist, had been made in a wall of the wagon to pee. A little trough was fixed there. That tray was more than half a metre high from the wagon floor. For us men, obviously it was still all right, but the women and c
hildren couldn’t reach it. The piss ran on the floor and seeped through badly joined planks. When the time came for bigger business, people covered the ground with a rag or paper so they could throw the shit out, but the hole was small – only a kitten’s head could get through such a hole. We had to push the excrement through with our fingers. before wiping off our shit-covered fingers on the sides of the bed, the walls, whatever. Nobody gave us water to wash or drink. As we were travelling the sun started beating down and the tin-wagon roof got hot. People fainted from the heat and thirst. They pounded on the walls of the wagon when the train stopped. The NKVD officers would answer that they would shoot us right there, because there could be no mercy for counter-revolutionaries and enemies of the people. Women died, two while giving birth, and a sick child died. But they were just the first victims, those who reached the end point of the journey. I remember that we were on a large Siberian river, I don’t remember which one, I don’t remember anymore. We were happy that we got fresh air, but most started to get diarrhoea from the fresh air and a number of those who arrived went on to the grave, children and the elderly were the first to succumb; the others were put to work. There weren’t any mines where we were taken so we were made to cut down trees for our own firewood. We were constantly on the point of starving. You right now, you’re living like royalty. But we were told, bullets were needed for the front, which was why we weren’t shot and that we had been sent here to perish. Then they transferred me to railroad construction. I don’t know why I stayed alive. Only about seventy of us of the few thousand men survived, and why I should be living when my wife and two children are all in the ground… They put them into the Siberian soil, and they’ll put me there too. Maybe that’s how God mocks man. I begged like Job for the One on High to send me to death, but still he took my children and wife and he left me to live on purpose so I would understand my pain even more, so that suffering would sting me even more, and as if that wasn’t enough, I ended up in a camp where there were more criminal prisoners than political prisoners. And God, he thought up yet one more humiliation: the criminals, the biggest thieves, pederasts and murderers of Russia played cards with me as the thing they used to bet, and the one who lost dug out my eye and gave it to his buddy as a debt. If God were looking, if he had eyes, he should have let me die, but I stayed alive. People ask me what I’m here for. I don’t know, that’s what God wanted, I say. They made up a case for me, that I had supposedly betrayed my homeland. How could I have betrayed it sitting in a camp? How, when I am living with Siberian bears, wolves and the dead who they stuck in the ground like potatoes in spring – how could I betray my homeland? I was lying in hospitals for a long time and still I lived. Now I think, well all right, I will intentionally not die, I’ll return alive to Lithuania. I’ll go through the villages and towns and tell everyone, let them put me in prison, or send me back to Komi, Yakutia, the Altai Territory. But I will return again, like an eternal Jew. I will once again go through the towns and villages and tell everyone the truth: that the Russians are worse than the Germans, that the Germans thought up concentration camps only during the war years, but that the Russians had established them ages ago after their god-awful Communist Revolution in 1917, and no one destroyed people so horribly as the Russians – and it wasn’t just the Lithuanians or the Latvians. They destroyed their own: millions, millions…’