Above Us Only Sky

by Michele Young-Stone

  Back at the train station, with the extra push of two Russian soldiers, Aleksandra boarded a cattle car bound for the northern Urals. In the center of the car, there was a hole for urination and defecation. In the center of the car, huddled around this hole, there were women and children and babies. In this place at this point, it was hardest to breathe. Bodies were pressed tight against one another. When the train slowed, there were mothers who dropped their babies through the cattle car’s hole, counting on the kindness of a passing stranger to save their infant.

  As the train rumbled north, growing colder, the dead were piled on one side of the locked car while the living cowered on the other. The survivors huddled close to keep from freezing, knowing that they were to be worked to death, possibly shot in the back of the head. Why were they singled out for such a cruel fate? Because they were educated? Because they’d been enemies of Russia at one time or another? Because they were landowners? There was no rhyme or reason.

  My father heard pieced-together versions of this story from his father, but being a consummate optimist, Freddie imagined that the grandmother he never knew was in a train car that ran off the tracks. Freddie imagined this train car hurtling down an icy hill, the side of the metal car cracking open like an ostrich egg, launching Aleksandra and the other women high into the air. Up there, in the cold temperatures, the air would be frozen. Time would stop. It was easy enough to imagine the spirit of vast-winged birds, knowing the gift of freedom, inhabiting each woman and child, each soul reborn a big gooney bird able to traverse the Pacific.

  Early in the morning on June 14, 1941, before the sun, before Aleksandra was taken to a waiting train, Russian soldiers came to the front door of the Vilkas home and shouted things too loudly and quickly. They said that the Old Man’s father was a criminal, an enemy of the people. Daina and her sisters gathered behind their father. The Old Man’s mother cinched a robe at her waist. Incensed and confused, she stood apart from her daughters. “What is going on?”

  It was only then, half-asleep, that the Old Man, who was twenty, practically a boy, still Frederick, came down the stairs. “What time is it?” He yawned.

  His mother was livid. She screamed at the soldiers, “Just what do you think you’re doing?”

  Frederick rubbed his eyes. “What’s going on here?”

  The soldiers struck Petras with the butt of a rifle. As he fell to his knees, Frederick, a bookish university student, threw his hands in the air. He had long supple fingers and strong narrow wrists. This is the unraveling of the Vilkas clan. Young Frederick’s violinist hands are helpless, unable to disturb the universe. There is a war raging inside and out.

  The soldiers pulled the Old Man’s father to his feet and bound his hands behind his back. Frederick’s three sisters crossed their hands like wings, covering their O-shaped mouths. If anyone had pried the girls’ fingers apart, the pent-up squeals of horror would’ve made the soldiers’ ears bleed. Frederick put his arms around his mother, demanding, “Let our father go this instant.” The soldiers laughed at him. Frederick lunged, but his sisters, their hands still over their mouths, formed a blockade, their shoulders and legs entangling him. No, Frederick. You are not going with Father. The soldiers tore quickly through the foyer closet, laughing at ladies’ hats and shoes. All the while, Frederick’s father was bound, helpless. His lip bled. Aleksandra punched at one of the soldiers, who smacked her face. Frederick lunged yet again, but his sisters were fierce, even in their long nightgowns. Already, they seemed of some other world, like mythical sirens, whose voices if released would crack the center beam overhead—sending shards of pine and plaster onto the interlopers’ heads, but the girls were silenced, their mouths puckered shut, their forces drained.

  Petras Vilkas was taken at gunpoint across green fields to an area behind the slaughterhouse where a mass grave had already been dug by other captives. Frederick ran as fast as he could to keep up with his father, who was still bound, rolling in the back of a Russian truck. When his father was pulled from the truck, Frederick watched from a canopy of pine. He had to do something. He had to protect his father. He had to protect his mother and sisters. Frederick’s father was propped beside the hole. The town banker was among the men whose hands were tied behind their backs. Frederick watched as the soldiers went from man to man, taking their jewelry and identification. “Get on your knees,” they ordered. Most of the Lithuanian men knew Russian, but they didn’t obey. The soldiers prodded them with rifles. From his hiding spot, Frederick felt like a coward, but he didn’t know what to do. His father was on his knees facing a pit. It was a hole the size of which someone would dig to lay the foundation for a house or pour a concrete basement. It was not meant for the bodies of grown men. Frederick convulsed and wept silently. What could he do?

  There were no cigarettes and no blindfolds, and it’s doubtful that, as much as Freddie the hippie would like to think his grandfather had a song in his head, Petras Vilkas was thinking about anything but his family’s fate. His beautiful wife. His daughters and son. From the pines, Frederick saw that his father still had his pocket watch. It glinted, sandwiched between his bound wrists, in the morning sun. Frederick watched as his father and eighty-three other Lithuanian men were shot in the backs of their necks and booted face-first into the mass grave. Some of the soldiers were laughing and smoking like this was all in a day’s work. Frederick wanted to look away, but he didn’t. Some of the men in the pit were still alive, but the dirt came just the same. It covered ministers and machinists. It dusted blacksmiths, accountants, and doctors. It fell in rich clumps over lawyers, shop clerks, poets, teachers, and musicians. It didn’t discriminate. The rich Lithuanian soil tended by its people was being used to conceal their deaths.

  More trucks arrived. More men died. In shock, Frederick watched. He did not blink. The image of mass murder, of his father’s death, was stamped, a black stain, into memory. It was on this day that Frederick first became an old man.

  When the soldiers were gone, he crept from his hiding place. Because it seemed like the most important thing to do, the Old Man clawed through the dirt to find his father. The Old Man was an innocent. Despite witnessing his father’s demise, he never thought a bloody fate would befall his mother or sisters, who were surely safe at home. Like his future son, he believed, Men don’t butcher women.

  As the Old Man dug, he heard moaning and pleas for help. He was able to pull some men, half-alive, to the surface. One man, a local poet, helped him dig for and uncover his father.

  Petras’s body was face down, another corpse across the back of his knees. Just the same, for a second, the Old Man was able to raise his father’s torso enough to see his face, his expression one of horror and disbelief. Even as his life had been snuffed, his gold watch, lodged between his wrists, kept time. The Old Man vomited in the pit. He hoped that the single bullet had killed his father. This was better than imagining him suffocating to death, the Lithuanian soil filling his lungs.

  The Old Man rubbed the dirt off the gold watch and pressed it to his lips. The poet, who was named Arturas, thanked the Old Man for saving his life. Likewise, the Old Man thanked him for helping to find his father. They grasped hands, each man crying, wishing the other luck. There was nothing else to do. The Old Man secured the watch in his coat pocket, careful to push it down deep and button the flap. Then, he ran home as fast as he could to tell his mother and sisters that Petras was dead. They would have to flee, but he didn’t know where they would go.

  The Old Man had no concept of how long it had taken to help three men to the grave’s surface, or how much time had elapsed since he’d followed the Russian truck. When he arrived home, his mother was on her way to Siberia. His sisters were gone. According to the neighbor, their bodies had been removed, heaved into the back of a truck. Nothing remained of his family, nothing but bloody bedcovers. That day, the Old Man lost any optimism that he might’ve inherited from his father. The Old Man look
ed around his empty boyhood home, picked up the family portrait they’d recently had taken, and sliding it from the silver glass frame, put it in his pocket where the watch was secured. Without his family, the house was a tomb.

  On the back stoop, he surveyed the land and wondered, What do I do? Where do I go? He considered seeking refuge at the university. He didn’t know that his professors had been the first men and women rounded up. He sat on the back stoop, staring at the forest. His mother had told stories about the trees marching to protect the Lithuanian freedom fighters. She told stories about black bears, reincarnated freedom fighters protecting the pines and the people. He stared unblinkingly at the forest. Fairy tales. His body was caked with death and dirt. When he saw his next-door neighbor Nelly Straż running toward him, he didn’t move. She was sixteen, the same age as his sister Daina. “You have to hide,” she said. Frederick didn’t acknowledge her. He had no will. She told him, “They’ll come back for you.”

  Nelly took his hand and tried pulling him off the stoop. He didn’t budge. “Come with me,” she begged. Frederick stared into space.

  “They killed your sisters! You have to get out of here.”

  The Old Man was angry that he’d believed in the brave bears and marching pines. It was useless.

  Nelly pleaded, “Come on. Get up now! We have to get out of here!”

  The Old Man looked disappointedly at the forest. Of course, his mother told fairy tales. That’s what mothers do. Nothing mattered anymore. He rose, letting Nelly lead him across the field toward her house. She said, “There’s a bed in the basement. Mother’s got a pot of soup on to boil.” She patted his hand. “You’ll be all right.” She said it again, “You’ll be all right.” She said this as though she were the one who needed convincing. She was sixteen, the Old Man was twenty, and the world was mad, terribly, horribly so.

  Within a few days, the Germans, who’d made a pact with the Soviets, broke this pact. Hitler decided that he wasn’t going to let the Soviets keep Lithuania, or Estonia, or Latvia. Or Finland or part of Poland either. The German tanks rolled north and east. The Soviet tanks retreated.

  The Straż family who hid the Old Man in their basement were Jewish­—as the Old Man constantly reminded Ingeburg. In 1940, when Soviet tanks rolled into Lithuania, the Straż family had waved a Russian flag. They figured they had a better chance of surviving a Soviet regime than a Nazi one. But many of the Lithuanian families who hated the Soviets equally hated the Jews for waving their Russian flags. As the Germans marched into Lithuania, these families waved Nazi flags, hopeful that Hitler would be better than Stalin. There was no lesser of two evils.

  Less than a month after the Old Man went into hiding from the Russians, the Nazis came to the front door of the Straż house. They informed the Straż family that they needn’t pack anything. They wouldn’t be gone long, just long enough to register as Jews. There were public documents testifying to their Judaism, and additionally, their neighbors had reported them as Soviet sympathizers.

  They were certainly Jewish, but first and foremost, the Straż family was Lithuanian.

  The Gestapo found Frederick in the basement and, grabbing him by his overcoat, pulled him up the stairs. He wasn’t registering with the others. They already knew who he was, and he wasn’t a Jew. They seemed to know everything. It was unnerving. One of the Nazis, a man twice Frederick’s age, punched him playfully in the arm. “You hid among the vermin.” The Nazi smiled before he spit on the Straż family room floor. The Old Man slid his finger into his trouser pocket to check for his watch and his photograph. They were safe. “Where’s Nelly?” he asked.

  “Where’s Nelly?” the soldier mocked. “Never you mind.”

  The Germans advised the Old Man that he would be serving the Führer and the German people in the war effort. Words failed the Old Man. It was astonishingly clear that he was as significant as a nit on someone’s scalp, irritating because he was there, but ultimately inconsequential.

  On the eighth day of the Old Man’s march toward Germany, the Straż family was exterminated, a bullet to each brain at the Ninth Fort, a former Soviet prison. They were Sasha, thirty-eight, Ibrahim, forty, Nelly, sixteen, Andrew, fifteen, and Yana, eight. Sasha and Ibrahim tried to barricade their children from the bullets, to no avail. Like the Old Man’s family, they were guilty of nothing.

  The Old Man marched, a young man caught between monsters. As he walked, he remembered his family’s music: his mother’s voice, his father’s violin, his sister’s flute, and he breathed in time with his memory. He was an old man hobbling over rocky terrain toward a foreign land. The Germans told him that Hitler had saved him, that he owed his life to the Führer. They were liars. All of them! The Nazis and the Reds. His feet were tired. As a boy, he’d been taught that good triumphs over evil, but it hadn’t. It didn’t.

  The Germans searched him for weapons. Surprisingly, they let him keep his watch and his photograph. As a group, the soldiers were well fed and well ordered. Amid such insanity, it was uncomfortably wrong that there was the pretense of humanity.

  The Old Man counted the days like beats. He tried to put the image of his father and the other men out of his mind, but it was impossible. No amount of steps or days would accomplish that feat. Nothing would ever be one note, one chord, or one pitch again. Not forgetting, not believing, and definitely not living. With the greatest clarity, he pictured his mother rubbing her throat, opening her mouth to sing, the songbirds perched around their summer home on the coast of Palanga. The Old Man kept this sweet blue memory lodged in his parched throat, like a robin’s egg, making it difficult to swallow.

  10

  Prudence

  Night after night, the rest of the world slept under a blanket of dark clouds, their window units buzzing and hiccupping, and I went alone to the pier. To Wheaton, I pretended that I’d given up on seeing the ghost of a girl, but I hadn’t. She and I were connected. I needed to know if there were others like us. At first, Wheaton did not understand that this had nothing to do with him. This was about me. This was mine, and I plainly told him so.

  In May 1989, my father kept his word to his parents and drove his Chevette, lovingly called a “shit-vette,” north. I’m sure that he nervously rehearsed what he would say to the Old Man when they came face-to-face. Although he hadn’t seen his father since leaving home, he had seen my Oma. She told me that they’d met secretly at a coffee shop in the Wall Street district while the Old Man sat in their Brooklyn brownstone, smoking his cigars, thinking Ingeburg was out shopping or getting her hair done or doing any number of things women do. Things he needn’t be bothered with.

  During their clandestine mother-son meetings, my Oma encouraged Freddie to file for custody of me. She didn’t know that Freddie and Veronica were still married or that as much as he loved me, he couldn’t ask Veronica to give me up. Even though she’d walked out on him, he felt guilty. Music had been his first love. Then it was me and music second. Freddie didn’t suspect anything would change the order of things he loved. Veronica would always come third.

  During their secret visits, my Oma held back judgment while Freddie talked about possible recording deals. She humored him by asking for specifics, but she didn’t imagine a man who could love an instrument before a woman would have much luck in life, not at anything, even a musical career. It seemed to my Oma that a profound love was necessary to make beauty from any art, musical or otherwise. I can picture my Oma during these coffee-shop meetings with her chipped tooth and the pink scarf that always covers her set curls.

  Then in 1989, the secret meetings ended. Freddie was coming to them. He was driving to Brooklyn. My father and grandfather were going to meet face-to-face. My Oma anticipated meeting her granddaughter shortly thereafter. She was as anticipatory as anyone. Myself included.

  Freddie drove through the night, stopping only for gas. He remembered a song: I don’t care if it rains or freezes, long as I
got my plastic Jesus. He smiled. Music was his way of praying.

  The brownstone had not changed. Downstairs, he smelled lemon-scented liquid Pledge. Upstairs, mothballs. His mother was hysterical, hugging him and retreating, hugging him and retreating. She covered her mouth, her chipped tooth. “I’ve missed you so much, Freddie. Sit down, or you can stand, but have a seat. Relax. It’s so good to see you.” She hugged him again. She couldn’t stop. “When your father said that you are coming, I never believed it.”

  The Old Man was waiting in the downstairs study, playing Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto no. 1. Seeing Freddie, he stopped. “I can’t play how I used to because of the arthritis.”

  Ingeburg said, “Your father is fine. He exaggerates.”

  Freddie said, “It sounded good, Dad.”

  “You play, Freddie. Put down your guitar case, and you play for your father.” He extended the violin to his son.

  “Maybe later.”

  “Why not now? Play now.”

  Freddie didn’t want it to be this way.

  The Old Man said, “Don’t you practice?”

  “I’m beat, Dad.”

  His father pointed the bow at him. “You do nothing but what is best for Freddie. Always, and you never change.”

  Freddie looked at his mother. “It was a long drive.”

  “Go rest. Your room is nice for you.”

  At dinner, the Old Man sopped his plate with a hunk of bread. “Your mother is not going to fly in an airplane, so I arranged for a car to rent. It is settled.”

  “Nothing’s settled,” Freddie said.

  The Old Man looked to Ingeburg. “Tell your son.”