Above Us Only Sky

by Michele Young-Stone

  On the road, Soviet tanks rolled east. Daina and Stasys traveled through the woods, individually pretending to be pine trees. As children, they’d both heard the Lithuanian folktales about the woods coming to life, and they wanted to believe. During the day, they hid in granaries and churches, wherever they could find a corner or crevice. On June twentieth, as they sat in a pew with their heads bowed, a humpbacked woman, her face partially hidden beneath a gray wrap, approached them. She kneeled beside Stasys, who, despite the woman’s appearance, was worried that she was secret police. With his hands together, he stared ahead at the statue of the Virgin Mary holding the Christ child. The base of the Virgin was broken, her feet missing. The elderly woman whispered, “There is someone in town who will hide and feed you. He is a good man, and you can stay as long as you need.” She crossed herself and passed a slip of paper across the back of the pew where their hands were folded in prayer. Stasys and Daina trusted no one, but out of desperation, everyone. They had no choice. At any moment, they could be discovered and charged with treason or charged with nothing. They could be shot or sent to Siberia or sent to Siberia and then shot. They didn’t know who sent the old woman or why she was helping them, but they were hungry, and they hadn’t turned down a good turn yet. After the woman left, they waited in the church, nervous that someone would find them. At least, Stasys was nervous. Daina was always expecting capture, and with this expectation had achieved a sense of calm.

  When night came, they went to see the man called Tomasas. He lived in a small row house on a paved street. Green ivy covered the facade. Leaves encircled the front columns and laced the old bricks, and in the darkness, his house glowed lavender. When Tomasas opened the front door, he said, “Hurry up. I’ve been expecting you,” and ushered them inside. He would’ve taken their coats, but neither Stasys nor Daina had one. Tomasas was tall. He clapped his hands together. “Follow me.” He took them to the back of the house, to a small kitchen where turnips and garlic boiled. “There is good news,” he announced. “The Soviets are retreating. They are leaving by tank, wagon, car, horseback, and on foot. By any means possible.” At first, Daina and Stasys did not believe him. He urged them to sit and offered to pour tea. Tomasas was a man, but his mannerisms were more effeminate than Daina’s. He spoke with his hands. Daina said, “Why would they leave? That doesn’t make any sense.” In one gulp, Stasys drank his tea.

  “Why else? The Germans are coming. Marching from the south.”

  “No,” Stasys said, disbelievingly.

  Tomasas was tall and thin, a bright-green apron tied around his waist. He rolled out pastry dough. “Yes! Already, the Soviet flags are being pulled down and the Nazi flags unfurled.”

  “One devil for another,” Stasys said.

  “So it seems,” Tomasas agreed. He sprinkled sugar on the dough and covered it with a cloth.

  Daina laughed. At first a tickle, and then a full-on guffaw.

  Tomasas said, “Have you gone mad?” and this made her laugh even harder. No one had laughed in very many days. Daina covered her mouth. Tomasas brushed flour from his cheek, his hands on his hips. “What’s so funny?”

  Daina restrained herself. “Your kitchen smells of garlic, baked apples, yeast, and cheese. Please don’t take offense, but you remind me of my mother. She always fed us.”

  “Take offense?” He rolled his eyes. “That is the greatest compliment.”

  Daina, wanting to cry now, said, “It really is. She is wonderful. Her given name is Aleksandra.” The laughter subsided. Daina had an image of her mother rolling out pastry dough. Not anymore, she thought. She would’ve given anything to feel her mother’s embrace.

  Tomasas fed them until their stomachs swelled. As they ate, Daina and Stasys wondered the same things: What would the Nazis do to Lithuania? Would things be better? Would they make it to Palanga? Would they ever have a home again?

  It dawned on Stasys that he was an orphan. This was something Daina had realized right away, on June fourteenth, the day her family was murdered. This realization was why walking to Palanga was her only recourse. She was ready to die and join her family. She could be slain en route or after she saw the Baltic Sea one last time. But Stasys, because he’d been forced into the Red Army, was only now coming to terms with the loss of his family. He’d been too busy surviving to comprehend what had happened. His father had died a month before the Red Army invaded, and his mother, a professor of dramatics, had been picked up, along with her fellow teachers from the gymnasium, and taken to the forest. He’d seen the mass grave where she’d been booted. Because of the tree roots, it was a shallow grave. He glimpsed a red wool hat and a leather shoe, but he didn’t dig. He was too afraid to bend down. Just standing beside the pit, he felt like the soil was falling over his head.

  The Russian soldiers found him at the gravesite and took him into custody. They explained very matter-of-factly: “You will join us or die.” Unlike Daina, Stasys did not want to die. At all cost, he wanted to live. He surmised that in time, he would escape from the army. He would live because his parents would want him to survive. To do otherwise would be a disappointment. He was brought up disciplined and educated. He knew history, and now he knew terror firsthand. He was taking this girl to the sea because it was a noble mission. It was survival.

  Tomasas sheltered Daina and Stasys for two nights, until the ladies in town were lining up outside his boutique to get their hair styled and set. This desire for beautification was a good sign, a kind of normalization—this luxury, this treat.

  Before departing, Stasys and Tomasas shared a cigarette in the hallway that connected Tomasas’s beauty parlor to his apartment. “Listen,” Tomasas told Stasys, “my father was a Bolshevik. He openly justified the first killings, even the death of the royal family. He was a fan of Trotsky. Now, he is in Siberia.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Tomasas shook his head. “Don’t be, but I must tell you: I am worried about your wife.”

  “Who?”

  “Your wife.” Tomasas was still pretending to believe their lie. These fabrications were important for everyone’s sanity. Tomasas continued. “I fear that Hitler will be no better than Stalin. He will not grant us our independence. No one will. They are all greedy grubbers. Mad monsters. We’ll have to fight.” He paused. “And your wife, I think she is set on dying. Not fighting. None of us are made from this cloth, but your wife will want to end it after she fulfills this quest to see the sea. She is aligned with the dead.”

  “How can that be?”

  “The dead have a grip on her or she on them. With her, it can’t be otherwise. Watch out for her. Life is precious.” Tomasas leaned down and kissed Stasys on the lips. “I will pray for both of you.”

  Stasys felt the man’s stubble against his cheek. He went to wipe the kiss away but stopped. Instead, he shook Tomasas’s hand. “Thank you for everything.”

  The next morning, Tomasas packed bread, cheese, and salted meats for Daina and Stasys. He cried as they left. Daina wagged her finger at his sentimentality.

  Continuing on their quest, the pair of orphans had something to talk about: Tomasas. “He was very nice.”

  “Very hospitable.”

  The farther Stasys and Daina walked, the closer they were to the ordered clacking of German boots. “My father always had good things to say about the Germans,” Daina said.

  Stasys shook his head at her strange optimism. She didn’t seem like a girl bent on death. Just the opposite, but Stasys didn’t know that Daina was anticipating the conversation she would have with her father after she joined him in death. She would tell him about the German invasion, and he would wonder how the Germans behaved as occupiers. Had they ransacked everything? Was Hitler as mad as the newspapers said?

  Watching the sky alight with bombs, Stasys said, “I don’t know if there is anyone we can trust.” Daylight was beginning to break. They were close to th
e sea, hiding behind random hay bales in the middle of a field.

  “Especially not each other,” Daina answered. She was thinking of her sisters, remembering Stasys holding the fur coat.

  He didn’t know why she would be so cruel for no reason. He told her that he’d lost his parents, that he’d been forced to do the Soviets’ bidding. He’d spent days witnessing the worst horrors, things he could never verbalize.

  Daina thought that she could punch Stasys in the lip until it was fat and bled dark purple like blackberry jam. She thought that the Germans must be better than the Soviets who ravaged her sisters and killed her parents. Maybe they would grant Lithuania her freedom. “I am fine on my own,” she told Stasys. “Just go home.”

  Stasys had no home.

  Daina had ideas that she would take flight over the sea. Every summer except for this one, her family had gone to Palanga. Beneath the hot sun, they walked past shops and outdoor flower markets. Daina’s sisters chatted about books while Daina looked toward the sky. At home in Vilnius, she tended to forget the wings sprouting from her back. Beneath heavy silk blouses and hand-me-down dresses, they were compact enough, flat enough to forget, like two hands against the small of her back, but in Palanga, walking cobblestoned streets in strapless sundresses, a backdrop of tall-steepled churches and towering pines, she felt them move, as if they yearned to be free of undergarments, wool and silk, as if the sea were where Daina belonged. She remembered running after pigeons, the birds scattering in her wake. Arms outstretched, she turned back to her brother and sisters. “With the right breeze, I’d be gone.”

  Danut˙e told her to be quiet. “You’re always showing off.”

  Frederick said, “We should get ice cream. We’re on holiday.”

  Daina remembered that overhead, all types of birds soared. As they tromped toward the sea, her mother ran up and pulled at Daina’s scoop-back bathing costume, draping a cover-up over her wings. “There, that’s better. I don’t want you to burn.”

  Would the birds still be there in Palanga? What about ice cream? Would Mother be drinking lemon tea with honey, preparing to sing? Would Father play his violin? Which books would Audra and Danut˙e discuss? Daina felt that walking to Palanga was walking home. She told Stasys Valetkys, “I am set on Palanga. You can go your own way.”

  Stasys countered, “I am going your way, whichever way that is.”

  13

  Palanga was how Daina remembered, except for the Nazi soldiers parading up and down the street. She knew a little German. They were demanding to see her papers, and she was thinking about the sea, about undressing and exposing her wings. Stasys spoke German. He said, “The Soviets took our papers.”

  The German authority wanted to know where and when.

  He recited their lie.

  “Report to the Gestapo and apply for papers.”

  Daina wasn’t the least bit afraid.

  “Right now.”

  She pursed her lips at the police. She’d take her time. If they grabbed her out here in the open, it would be fate. After all, she was meant to be with her sisters and brother, her mother and father, not here with this boy who’d watched her sisters die a terrible death. But before her own end, there was the sea. The waterbirds and the salt air. That wasn’t very much to ask, was it?

  Daina and Stasys walked west. They saw Jews lined up in the street. Whole families: men, women, children, babies, all wearing yellow stars. “What are they going to do with them?” Daina asked.

  “I’m sure they’ll be okay,” Stasys lied. The babies cried. Mothers, their hands resting on the heads of waist-high children, assured them, “It’s all right. Everything will be fine.” The Germans shouted at them. Some passersby whispered about the abuse.

  Daina was more intent than ever on joining her family. This world was not of her or for her. Stasys said, “They’re probably going to move them to the countryside.”

  “As opposed to the seaside?” Daina knew that he was lying. She was sixteen, but she was not stupid.

  “I don’t know. Probably.”

  Daina and Stasys stood stock-still, watching the line of thirty or so people question and console each other. Daina’s mouth was agape. Stasys reached for her hand, but she pulled it away. She didn’t need kindness, not his. One of the Gestapo shouted at them to keep moving. Honestly, Daina and Stasys didn’t want to see what was happening. No one did. They were glad to be ordered away.

  That first night in Palanga, they did not speak, not even Stasys, who used the sound of his voice as reason to stay alive. Because he could hear the timbre and pitch change, he was real, just like his parents, who’d been real, who’d birthed and raised him. In his voice, he heard theirs. They’d loved him. He had his mother’s eyes and his father’s chin. Compassion and love were real when he remembered them. Hold on to it, he thought. Otherwise, the madmen win.

  The first two nights in Palanga, they slept beneath a wooden pier that creaked with the tide. Daina tried to stay awake. She planned to venture far out into the sea while Stasys slept. She planned to submerge her wings in the black water, but Stasys did not sleep. Remembering Tomasas’s warning, he kept vigil, plum-colored caverns appearing beneath his eyes while Daina’s eyes closed and she lost consciousness.

  During the day, Stasys nodded off for ten minutes here and ten minutes there.

  “You look terrible,” Daina told him.

  He shrugged, not caring how he looked, only that she didn’t run away.

  On the third day, they were chased away from the pier by Lithuanian soldiers under German authority. That night, they found an empty warehouse two streets from the coast. Stasys’s eyelids were too heavy. He used his fingers to hold them open. His fingers failed. He hadn’t slept in days, and he hadn’t slept well in months. He slept, awaking to smoke, coughing. Daina was beside him. He nudged her. “It’s burning. We have to go.” She didn’t open her eyes. “Fire!” he shouted.

  “We’re supposed to die.”

  “The warehouse is burning.”

  She wasn’t moving.

  “Let’s go.”

  She wouldn’t budge. She had gone on long and far enough.

  Not much taller than Daina, Stasys grabbed on to her boot heels. He pulled her from the smoky confines, her skirt up her back—how he’d first found her with skirt overhead, pretending to be a turnip or a bird. You’re not going to die. As flames raged, Daina lay in the dust, her dark hair gnarled, her starburst eyes explosive, reflecting the firelight. Her legs and buttocks had dragged the floorboards. She was splintered and filthy.

  “Get up,” Stasys said.

  She rolled onto her side.

  “Get up!”

  “There’s no point.”

  He tried to pull her farther from the flames, but he was too exhausted. He lay down on top of her to protect her from the fire and to hear her breathing. She didn’t care. Perhaps she would sink into the earth and be swallowed up. It is a mortal sin to take one’s life, but it is no sin to raise your arms in submission and let the world destroy you.

  Less than fifty feet away, the fire raged, but it never came any closer.

  On the fourth day, they went back to the Baltic Sea. They bathed and rinsed their smoky clothes, hanging them on the bordering pines to dry. Stasys glimpsed the wings folded against Daina’s back and thought that he was hallucinating from exhaustion and hunger. They sat apart, huddled and hidden between dunes, Daina’s hands covering her small bosom. She called to Stasys, “Where are we going to stay now? Do you have any ideas, soldier boy?”

  He hated that she called him soldier boy.

  “I’m not in any army,” he said.

  “But you’d like that, wouldn’t you? Carrying a gun around and shouting commands? You’d like to be the one telling people what to do!” Daina hugged her knees to her chest.

  “Why are you being spiteful?” Stas
ys wanted to cry.

  She would never tell him, I saw you there, in my bedroom! You watched my sisters die! You’re a monster! She could never tell him. Right now, Stasys, half boy and half monster, was all she had. Men are mad, but not the sea. She peeked over the dune, and Stasys caught sight once more of her wings. How can that be? he wondered, rubbing his eyes. He wanted to ask about the wings, but what if he’d gone mad? She’d have even more reason to leave him. He kept quiet.

  Two days later, they went to the Gestapo for their papers. It was a large office in a former warehouse. There were cubicles. Electric typewriters and adding machines whirred. Papers were penned in black script. Cards were stamped. Food ration coupons dispensed. Stasys was told that there was an apartment for rent. “Do you have any money?”

  He did not. They’d lost everything in their make-believe and real worlds.

  “You have thirty days to make payment.” A lease and bill were produced in triplicate. Stasys signed. As did Daina. Stasys pocketed their copy. Daina kept her eyes to the floor until one of the German soldiers raised her chin and studied her face. In German, he said, “You’re like a baby. So fresh.” Daina did not know what to say. Stasys said, “Thank you.” They moved through the lines, Stasys thanking everyone for their help. Many of the Germans were dismissive, but some of them smiled at the young couple. Daina would not smile.

  The apartment was in a residential square by a florist and next to a bakery. Furnished, it held the possessions and breath of a Jewish family. It was as though at two in the afternoon, a mother, father, and daughter had disappeared. There were clothes, cigars, ashtrays, canned meats, coats, and family portraits. On the kitchen counter, there were recipe cards, a clue to the former residents’ last supper. There were books with places saved and words underlined. There were knitting needles laced through unfinished hats and scarves. In the little girl’s room, there was a porcelain doll upright on the bed, her porcelain hands resting on her lap, as though she were waiting patiently for the girl to return.