Above Us Only Sky

by Michele Young-Stone

  “Do you think I’m nice-looking?” she asked Stasys.

  He looked up. “Nice enough, but I am trying to work.”

  “Do you think that you would like to know me better?”

  “I’m married.”

  He went back to work.

  The next day, she asked, “Why won’t you flirt with me? It’s no crime to flirt with a girl. It’s so boring being here all day, and it’s just the two of us. What’s the harm in a little flirting?”

  Stasys was bothered by Olga. At home, he told Daina that she was “fine.” He’d get by. He didn’t want to burden Daina with his problems. She worked a long, tedious day operating a sewing machine and attaching buttons to coats.

  Every day, Olga had some new shocking thing to say. “Why doesn’t your wife produce progeny for Stalin? Is she barren? I’m sure that I’m not barren.”

  “I don’t want to know whether or not you are barren. Leave me alone, please.” Stasys nervously felt for his shirt buttons to make sure they were in place.

  “You don’t like to have fun,” Olga complained. She stuck her paintbrush in her mouth and leaned with her back against her drafting table.

  Stasys ignored her. She made it difficult to concentrate. He was a man, twenty-four, not a boy, and he was a virgin. He took a deep breath and went back to work. There was nothing he could do. He couldn’t report her. She was Russian. He wasn’t permitted to complain. He would continue to ignore her. Eventually, she’d stop. Maybe he could find a man who would like her, and she would leave him alone. Olga glanced at him, taking the paintbrush from her mouth. “The more you push me away, the more I am determined.”

  “I’m married.”

  She shrugged. “Marriage is a piece of paper.”

  Stasys lacked even that. His love for Daina was unrequited.

  “I am Russian,” Olga told him. “You should think that I am beautiful.”

  “You are beautiful. Please stop!” He smacked his hands hard on his desk. “I can’t concentrate. I am working here.”

  “Look at my lips. This is not lipstick. These are my real lips.” She pursed them together.

  Stasys began to perspire. He brushed his fair hair back from his eyes. “You can look at your lips!”

  “Don’t be rude to me!” She huffed. “I am new to the Western Province of the Soviet Union. You should be kind.” She wagged her finger.

  This woman is dangerous. “I apologize,” he said, “but I do not want to judge your beauty.” At this, she put down her illustrator’s brush and approached Stasys’s drafting table. “Look at me!”

  He kept his eyes focused on his typewriter.

  “I said, ‘Look at me,’ comrade!”

  What kind of woman are you? Stasys got up, knocking over his chair, and rushed from the room.

  That night, he told Daina, “Comrade Grishin is strange. I don’t understand why they sent her here. I can illustrate the pamphlets. I can glorify Stalin the same as anyone. Put a big halo around his fat head.”

  “Don’t be so hard on her,” Daina said. “I’m sure she has a story like the rest of us.”

  Stasys didn’t tell Daina the specifics of what Olga had said, what games she kept playing, only that she was a peculiar and difficult young woman.

  Olga continued daily to hound Stasys. Not comprehending such sentimental notions as “love,” she repeatedly cornered him in their cramped office. Stasys talked a blue streak about the Soviet Union’s good news for the people. Olga swallowed audibly. “Why hasn’t your wife given you any children? Why is she denying Mother Russia her offspring?” Olga exhaled into Stasys’s ear. He was a man. When his right hand dropped to his side, it touched her thigh. “No,” he said. “My wife is not barren.” He stepped back. “I am tired of this.”

  “I’m warm,” Olga said, unbuttoning her sweater.

  “It’s cold.” Stasys looked up. Without wanting it, he got an erection. Olga pointed and laughed. “You want me.”

  “Please stop,” he told her.

  She was thinking, I can call someone in Moscow. I can find some reason to get rid of his wife. Why does he resist me? Here is my chance to start fresh, and he won’t let me.

  I want you, Stasys Valetkys. I get what I want. Olga regularly strolled past his walk-up, admiring the red geraniums planted around the bottom step. She sometimes knelt to smell the flowers and imagined herself within, a part of this world. She’d bake traditional Russian sweets to welcome Stasys home from work. (Olga loved sweets.) She’d wash dishes and fluff pillows and whatever other domestic chores were required of a wife. She did not belong in some cramped boardinghouse. She deserved a real home. She deserved to be a real wife and maybe one day a real mother. She hadn’t come all the way to this western province to be a spinster. And she liked Stasys—as good as anyone. He seemed nice, and he was playing hard to get. In that respect, he was an unusual man. She liked it, his peculiarities.

  Olga never intended to be cruel. She simply never comprehended that Stasys and his wife were real people with real emotions. Emotions that did not include basic needs like hunger and warmth were incomprehensible to Olga Grishin, who was only just venturing into notions of love, like a young girl discovering romance novels.

  In November 1949, there were rolling blackouts. Stasys stood in the street watching Daina undress. He couldn’t help himself. She was all shadow through the window except for the roundness of her wings catching the moonlight. The heart-shaped wings were intoxicating, and Stasys knew that he’d never be with another woman. Unrequited or not, his heart belonged to Daina.

  Olga walked home from work, thinking about how she would successfully seduce Stasys, when a golden-haired mutt, fur nearly the color of Stasys’s hair, crossed her path. “Hi, little one,” Olga said, extending her hand to the dog’s snout. The dog retreated, and she continued on her way. “Bye, little one.” Hearing the dog whimper, Olga turned back and saw the mutt staring at her. The dog’s eyes were crusty.

  “Come on, if you want. I don’t care.” Olga kept walking. A few seconds later, she turned back to see the dog following.

  “That’s all right by me,” she said, smiling. “I don’t mind the company.”

  If she had the salted ham from the day’s lunch, she could offer the dog something to eat, but she’d finished everything. She had been ravenous, filled with adrenaline after calling a government comrade in Moscow to report Daina Valetkiene as a traitor. It was as easy as that. Certainly Stasys’s wife, like most of these sniveling Lithuanians, was in some way conspiring against the Soviet way of life, undermining Soviet thinking, and perpetrating crimes against the great father by sullying his grand name.

  Olga laughed as the dog trailed her to the brick row house where she rented a room from a blind man named Bohdan. All day, Olga had been happy, anticipating Daina’s arrest and her own union with Stasys. She turned the doorknob and checked to see if the dog was still behind her. Pets were not permitted, but she did not care. She would do what she liked. The blind man was as anti-Soviet as they came. One day a week, he collected the rent, and then he got drunk and listened to American jazz records like Benny Goodman, Billie Holiday, and Louis Armstrong. He’d be arrested sooner than later. Olga thought daily about turning him in. He was flaunting his wealth with booze and music when the money belonged to the state. She often thought that her landlord was the perfect subject for a propagandist poster: Capitalists are stricken blind because they do not serve the common good.

  The mutt followed Olga through the front door past the blind man rubbing furniture polish on a banister and past a little neighbor girl sitting cross-legged, reading a book.

  Shutting her bedroom door, Olga retrieved a handkerchief from her bureau and wiped the dog’s eyes. As she cleaned, the dog licked her face. “Look at you,” she said, wiping the muzzle next. “You’re a pretty girl.” The dog sniffed Olga’s bed and walked
in three circles before jumping onto the mattress as if it had lived there always. Bohdan knocked at the door.

  “What is it?” Olga said.

  “I need to speak to you.” It was the blind man.

  Leave me in peace.

  “I’m not decent,” Olga said. She was never exactly decent.

  “What do I care? I don’t see.”

  To the dog, Olga said, “I’ll call you Emma.”

  Since she was a little girl, Olga had imagined living the life of the bourgeoisie. She’d imagined having a horse and a little dog or a kitten to love.

  Bohdan knocked again.

  “Go away!”

  Olga was on her knees scratching the dog’s neck. “It’s all right. You’ll see. You’re safe.” The dog whimpered. “But you will need a bath.”

  Bohdan knocked harder. This time, he said, “Is there an animal in there with you?”

  Olga said, “Leave me alone. I paid my rent.”

  Turning on her hot plate, Olga cracked an egg for the dog. “A little something on your stomach. That’ll be nice.” The mutt closed its eyes, rubbing its paw against its nose.

  Olga put the egg down on the floor, and the dog eyed it and then Olga.

  “It’s all right. I’m not going to poison you.”

  Later, Olga took Emma outside to the spigot and, using a sliver of lye soap, lathered her fur. She pressed her head against the wet dog’s neck. This sentimentality toward an animal was new. In Moscow, she had not been afforded such luxury. She knew some girls who’d had pets, but they were thinner, less prosperous than Olga, because they weren’t just worried about feeding themselves.

  That first night, the dog slept at Olga’s feet.

  In the morning, the blind man knocked.

  “Leave me alone,” she said. To the dog, Olga said, “Shh.” She put her finger to her lips. Bohdan was blind, but he wasn’t deaf. He said, “I brought some breakfast scraps. A bit of sausage and egg. Can I come in?”

  When Olga opened the door, Bohdan said, “We used to have dogs when I was growing up.” He felt for Olga’s hand and gave her the plate of scraps. “What does the dog look like?”

  “Like honey. But with dark eyes like Egyptians in the films. I’m calling her Emma.”

  “Can I pet her?” He got down on his knees. Surprisingly, Emma came to him, and Bohdan settled on his haunches hugging the dog’s neck as Olga had done. “Nice dog,” he said, pressing his cheek against her wet nose. To Olga, he said, “I can help you take care of her.”

  “I don’t need any help.” But she did. She worked all day. The blind man was home, doing whatever it was that a blind man does all day in a creaky house. Dusting? Drinking? She didn’t know.

  “Okay,” Olga said. “All right.”

  “I’ll walk her when you are at work.”

  “Okay.”

  Bohdan smiled. Olga stared at his vacant gaze. I’m never going to report this man to anyone, capitalist or not. Maybe I want to be a dirty capitalist. At the thought of this, she laughed unabashedly.

  Ignoring her laughter, Bohdan stood up. “We’ll take good care of her. Bring the plate to the kitchen tonight. And if you want, I can let her outside later. Or I can take her for a short walk.”

  “That would be helpful, comrade,” Olga said. This was Olga’s way of reminding him of her allegiances. His position as a landlord could be a cover. He might be Soviet police. She couldn’t trust anyone. No one could. It was always wise to say “comrade.”

  Bohdan smiled and bent down to feel Emma again, but the dog had returned to Olga’s bed.

  He patted Olga’s hand. “Thank you.” He didn’t call her comrade.

  She stopped him. “Your surname is Straivinski. That’s Polish.”

  “Lithuanian.”

  “You’re Russian.”

  “No,” he corrected her, “I’m Lithuanian. My mother was Lithuanian.”

  Olga rolled her eyes. “But your father was Russian? You are a Soviet now.”

  “Like all men, my father was whatever they called him.”

  “All right,” Olga said. “Never mind.”

  “All right,” he said. “Never mind to you too.”

  15

  On Sunday, January 8, 1950, the secret police came to arrest Daina. She was twenty-five. In her pretend world, thirty-one. She was painting a tiny bird on a teacup. When the men in black trench coats grabbed her by the arms, the teacup dropped from the table, smashing into pieces. Red and blue paint splattered the floor, the paint bleeding lavender.

  “What are you doing with my wife?” Stasys demanded.

  “She’s being taken for questioning.”

  Daina felt her wings move. Just a smidgen, but it was enough. A sign. She was going to die now, nine long years after her family’s murders. In the Heaven she imagined, there was the beach, like in Palanga, but without secret police. Without bullets. At the Heaven beach, children laughed. There was no shortage of food. There was no shortage of fine wool or silk. There was ice cream. Her fingertips were uncalloused, brand-new, perfect for dancing hand to hand. Her face was smooth—no windburn—perfect for dancing cheek to cheek. Her mother was there, happy, singing. The little Jewish girl was there, holding on to her porcelain doll once more. Daina smiled as the Lithuanian police, acting on orders from Vilnius, orders that had originated in Moscow two months ago, carried her, similar to how they’d carried her mother, her slippers dragging the floor, from the house. Daina was a slight thing. One of the policemen put his hand on her head, guiding her into the backseat of the hearse-like car. Everything was white with new frost. Stasys saw that Daina was not upset by her arrest. He stood on the front stoop, knowing that the neighbors, every one of them, were wiping at their windows to see. It was like the windows themselves, the two rubbed-out circles, were eyes. Soon the frost would fill them in again. Everyone would know, and no one would say anything.

  On Monday, January ninth, Stasys paced his office and waited for Olga.

  She brushed snow from her sleeves and started unbuckling her galoshes. “It’s freezing out there.” For two months, she’d left Stasys alone, and he had been glad for it.

  Stasys said, “You reported her, didn’t you? You fucking reported her!” He wasn’t prone to using expletives.

  Olga had forgotten what she’d done. She’d forgotten the plotting that had finally taken root and grown from one phone call to three men tromping up Stasys’s steps to steal his wife. “Calm down,” Olga said. “I didn’t do anything. I didn’t report anyone.” She hung up her coat. There was a lump in her throat.

  “You’re like a snake.”

  “Oh, Stasys, don’t say that. I didn’t do anything.” But she had done something. She remembered the phone call all too clearly now.

  And Stasys could imagine Olga doing something terrible. She was from Moscow. She must’ve done it. Who else would’ve done it? “You need to get her back,” he said.

  “I’m not the secret police. I can’t ‘get her back.’”

  “Just get her back.”

  She showed him her hands. “There’s nothing I can do.”

  “What do you want? I’ll give you anything. I need her back.”

  “I don’t want anything.” She searched the desk for her cigarettes. “I only wanted you to be sweet to me, Stasys. I only wanted you to love me how you love your precious wife, but I don’t want anything anymore.”

  “You did it!” Tears formed in his eyes. “I need her back.”

  “I’m sorry about your wife, but I had nothing to do with it.” She fumbled with her cigarettes, dropping them on the floor.

  “You’re a liar.” Stasys crushed them with the heel of his boot, then bent down and picked up the crumpled pack. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but please help me.”

  “I can’t do anything. I’m sorry.”

&n
bsp; “Is there a chance?”

  “I didn’t do anything.” Her palms were sweating. She rubbed them down her slacks, and Stasys grabbed on to her hands.

  “Help me, please.”

  Groveling, in all its forms, disgusted Olga. Such overt displays of weakness were sickening. She said, “Your wife is probably working for one of the resistance movements.”

  “No, she’s not.”

  “You can’t know everything about your wife.”

  “But I do know that.” Stasys pulled Olga’s coat from the rack. “Fix it. We’re running out of time.”

  “I can’t fix this.”

  “You have to help me.”

  Begrudgingly, she took her coat.

  When he heard Olga’s heels on the stairs, Stasys got down on his knees. He wasn’t a praying man, but he prayed now. Pressing his ink-stained knuckles to his lips, he prayed, Dear God, bring her back to me. I can’t live without her.

  In a holding cell in Palanga, Daina’s wings were discovered, literally uncovered as she was ordered to strip. Pale in contrast to the rest of her sand-and-wind-worn limbs, having been bound by undergarments and coveralls, the wings were slightly askew, the right wing fuller and higher than the left. Daina favored her right hand, and the wing was in proportion to the difference between her right and left breasts and her right and left forearms. She was tired of guarding them. For the nine years she’d been tangled up with Stasys, she had not acknowledged them to him, to anyone, whereas at home in Vilnius, they had been commonplace, envied by Audra and Danut˙e, who, in their own right, were gifted, in possession of beauty and brains: Danut˙e, the scholar and musician, and Audra, the caretaker and beauty. Their father used to tease that Audra would never have any girlfriends because they’d all be jealous of her looks, so she’d better be good to her sisters. Audra was beautiful with pink bow lips, blue eyes, and hair like wheat. She never had a cross word for anyone, and then, Daina remembered, she’d laughed at her murderer’s impotence. Daina missed Audra. She missed all of them, but soon they’d be together. Finally, Daina would meet her maker.