I won’t lie to you. I was ambivalent about going. My mother’s beauty and joy had turned to the purest ugliness. Her cheeks sagged. Her chin, which had been slightly dimpled, was like a crevice. I think my father was unconsciously drawing her disfigurement as he mumbled about hard work, how it was the path to righteousness. I think he believed this. They were sickening. I was suffocating, turning into a mumbler myself. I told you: I saw the world in pictures. I still do. There is nothing linear in my mind. There never has been, and Father’s deportation to the gulag, and Anton’s gift giving, and my sisters’ later marriages, the one prison sentence, and my mother’s dementia, none of it follows a straight line. It was all foretold in 1908 when my father embraced Bolshevism. I will always paint in blues, yellows, and blacks, the colors of bruises. I will always curve a line and drop graphite fast like gravity, like the world should be. I will never take an oath or swear any allegiance without changing the words in my brain. This is how I survive. If you are in a situation near to mine, do the same. Keep your brain tidy. Set perimeters.
Recently, I’ve begun painting my eyelids blue, setting the timer on my camera to capture just how blue an eye can be. My hair is long, twisted beneath a trapper’s hat. I live in a third-floor walk-up in the Western Province of the Soviet Union. Above a shop. Out back, I raise rabbits, soft fuzzy things with pink and gray eyes. I work hard, taking pictures of the giddy people of this Western Province of the Soviet Union. Sometimes Mother writes to tell me that Father is doing poorly. Sometimes she writes to say that my sister, the one in a Soviet prison, might come home soon, and sometimes she writes to say that she’s thinking of murdering Father or taking her own life. She’s a complex woman, but when I think of her, I remember her before the revolution, before Father went away, when her beauty was her own and thereby ours.
I will not succumb to history. Never. My name is Lukas Blasczkiewicz, and if I learned one thing from my father, it is “Never embrace another man’s idea of the world.” I have my own ideas. This is a constant. In an inconsistent world, constants are a comfort. When I was thirty-six, I was awakened in the middle of the night and driven to a police station in Palanga to take photographs of a winged woman. Depending on your beliefs, she was like a bird, like a magic fairy, and most certainly like an angel sent from God. Because of her, I developed a thirst for miracles. I am on a quest like a knight. And no, I am not mad. I don’t suffer dementia like my mother. I am sane. I am the sanest man in all the world. At least, I believe I am.
17
On January 9, 1950, Olga walked home. She felt sick, and this sickness was a biting, caustic, jabbing pain in her gut. Waves of nausea sent her to the toilet. Never had she felt anything like this, like the sickness was born on the inside and coming out, not like she’d caught something somewhere and she had merely to take an aspirin and dispense with it. This illness started in her trunk. It spread. Her scalp hurt. Her hands felt crackly. Her elbows were scaly. She was no longer a beautiful woman. She was like a monster, only she was just now recognizing her scales and claws.
She called the man in Moscow and said, “The woman I told you about, the woman named Daina Valetkiene . . . She is not a traitor.” Her voice broke. “Can you send her home? Can you send her back? Is she . . . dead?” Olga’s chest tightened. There was a fist in her throat. She was telephoning from the kitchen. Anyone could be listening.
The man said, “The woman is still in Palanga. I don’t know why. They like her there, I guess.”
“Can you do anything? Can you make them release her before she’s transported?”
“She ought to be on a train by now, but she’s not. The Western States are incompetent. I don’t care how many Russians we send west. Incompetence and laziness run rampant.”
“Will you see about helping her? She is not an upstart like I thought.”
“Why do you care about this, Olga? It sounds like the sea is making you soft.”
Olga bit her lip. “That’s not it.” She tried to sound upbeat. “You know me: I’ll never change.”
The man laughed. “No, I don’t guess you will. Come see me when you are back in Moscow. Will you do that? I miss you.”
“Of course.”
“I’ll see what I can do for you. No guarantee. For all I know, the Lithuanians killed her in their bumbling. What is she like?”
Olga didn’t know. She’d never met her.
In the jail cell, Daina ate a zeppelin: a traditional Lithuanian potato-and-pork dish that long predates the Hindenburg. Captain Vincentas’s wife had cooked up a batch for Sunday dinner. He’d told his wife about what he’d seen, about the wings, and at first she didn’t believe him.
“You’re drunk all the time,” she said.
He said, “I swear on my father’s life.”
His wife wrapped up three zeppelins for the girl. “Maybe she’s an angel.”
“That’s what I think.”
It was Sunday, a week since Daina had been imprisoned.
Daina ate hungrily. She said, “Please tell your wife thank you. This is delicious.”
Captain Vincentas said, “We got a call this morning.” He looked disappointed.
“What kind of call?” Daina took another bite. “Is it time for me to go?” She looked up at the dark ceiling, thinking of the waterbirds that might be feeding on the jail’s winter lawn or flying overhead. Maybe she’d see the birds when they moved her outside for the transport to Russia.
Unconsciously, the captain touched her face. He couldn’t help himself. Her cheeks were rosy despite the grayness that permeated the jail. “You’re not being deported.”
She didn’t understand.
“You’re not being deported.”
“What’s going to happen? What is it?”
“I think you’re going home.”
“You think?” She felt her wings, flat beneath her nightgown, pulse. “Home?”
“I think.” He looked at her plate. “My wife is a good cook.”
Daina nodded.
“No one wants you to leave.”
“When can I go home? Can I really go home?” This was the first time that she thought of her apartment with Stasys as home. She belonged somewhere.
“They’ve already sent someone to get your husband. I wanted to share a meal with you, to show you kindness.”
She put her hands together in prayer, pressing them to her lips. I’m going home.
Daina Vilkas Valetkiene was desperate to live.
Stasys rode to the jail in the same black car that had picked Daina up. He sat in the backseat, praying. Please, God, let her be all right. Please . . . Inside the jail, she was waiting, wearing the nightgown he’d last seen her in. A blanket was draped over her shoulders. It belonged to Captain Vincentas. She tried to give it back to him, but he said, “No, keep it. It’s cold outside.” He wanted to hug her, but his subordinates were watching. It was unprofessional, and considering her wings, it might also be a sin. There were no formalities, no papers to sign. Everyone in Moscow would pretend that this had never happened, and everyone in the Palanga jailhouse, except for Lukas Blasczkiewicz and Captain Vincentas, would do the same.
Walking to the car, Stasys held Daina close. “Are you all right? Did they hurt you? Oh, Daina.” He kissed the side of her face and the top of her head. “I love you so much.” He’d never spoken the words aloud, but he couldn’t stop from saying them now.
“I know you do, Stasys.” She saw it in the way he looked at her. For her part, she’d grown accustomed to him, to their daily rituals. She’d even become fond of him, his kindness. The man she knew as Stasys Valetkys couldn’t be the same boy from her sisters’ bedroom, not here in Palanga, not after pledging allegiance to Hitler and then to Stalin, not after nine long years together.
The same frosty windows that had watched Daina leave watched her return. She was covered by the captain’s blan
ket and her husband’s coat, climbing the front stoop. “Things are going to be different,” Daina told Stasys, as he turned the key to the front door. “Things are going to be better.”
“It’s already better.” There was no point in inquiring about an explanation for Daina’s detention, because if there was something in writing, it was usually “Fascist, Enemy of the People, Traitor to Mother Russia”—which meant traitor to Stalin, Russia’s father. Really, it meant nothing. That was the problem. People disappeared and died for nothing.
On the same night that Stasys retrieved his wife from prison, Olga went to Bohdan the landlord. She knocked at his bedroom door. She was going to tell some cute story about the dog Emma. She was maybe going to ask for a glass of something stronger than water—because she needed it. Instead, she hiccupped. Then her left eye twitched. Then her face itched and a prickly rash spread across her chest and up her neck, shame made manifest.
When the woman who’d raised Olga contracted influenza, coughing herself to death on a straw-filled mat, Olga did not cry. When other women, supposed friends, met their ends, Olga would nurse them to the last, but she would not cry. Always, she felt a gnawing chill. She felt the cold most in her femur bones, and the sensation made her wonder if there was something more than this exhausting fleeting life, a compilation of pleasure, pain, and death. Tears were a sign of weakness, and weakness was sickening, but then, standing in front of a blind man, a man who couldn’t see her tears, Olga succumbed.
When she tried to speak, Bohdan said, “You don’t have to say anything.” He put his hands to her face and pressed the tears hard against her cheekbones—like he was trying to bury them back under her skin.
Olga fell asleep on his couch, and when she awoke, he said, “Let’s get out of here.” In the darkness (the world was always dark for Bohdan), they walked Emma six blocks to a squat cement building behind a taller brick building where Bohdan left a satchel behind a stack of wood. He said, “Come on,” and they walked out of sight. When they returned twenty minutes later, there was whiskey and raspberry-filled chocolates where the satchel had been. Even though it wasn’t rent day, Bohdan splurged. When they got home, he played Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday. Taking his hand, Olga said, “I’ll teach you to dance.”
He said, “I’m blind. I’m not deaf. I can dance!” And he could. Old man that he was, he could dance. He took Olga in his arms and spun her gracefully in the cramped space, telling her, “Before the Russians, we had dance halls. We went out every night.” He laughed. “Communists aren’t much for dancing. They more fancy marching.”
Olga laughed. It’s true! We much more fancy marching. She was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party and proud of it. There were few things in life for which she was proud, but her allegiance to Stalin and the Party was something she took seriously. Stalin was like God. He giveth and he taketh away.
Bohdan ran his fingers along Olga’s cheek and chin. “You are young and beautiful.” She searched his eyes. Even though he couldn’t see her, he sensed something in her—she knew. She took his calloused hand and put it at her waist.
He said, “You’re young, too young for me.”
She whispered, “My body is tired and I am sad.”
He said, “That’s no good. You’re too pretty to be sad.”
Two days later, eight blocks away, Daina climbed out of bed and went to the little Jewish girl’s room where Stasys slept. She knelt on the floor, whispering Stasys’s name. For nearly ten years, he’d been a light sleeper. He said, “What are you doing?” It was one o’clock in the morning. “Is everything okay?”
“I don’t know.”
He sat up. “What’s wrong?”
Daina said, “I don’t know how to tell you.”
“What is it? You can tell me.”
Daina kneaded the thin cotton nightgown bunched in her lap. “Will you be my husband? Will you show me how to make love?”
His heart felt like it would beat out of his chest. His hands quaked. He never imagined that she would want to love him. Slowly, Stasys made his way to the floor. “Are you sure?”
She nodded.
He pressed his lips to hers. He could inhale her, her wind-chapped lips ripe like fat berries against his. He didn’t remark on her wings. He’d known about them for so long, they seemed as natural as her arms and legs, which were lean and sculpted. He saw her limbs and sometimes her wings when she climbed the dunes and bird-watched at sunset. When she was in their apartment, she was clothed head to toe. At home, her hands, calloused from work, were always busy with some chore, but not on the beach and not now. Not here. Beneath Stasys’s blanket, Daina was the woman he watched on the beach. She was sublime. He’d never even held her hands, so he did that now, feeling the striations on her fingertips and breathing deep the rich smell of pastry still clinging to her hair. He’d waited so long, and he’d been willing to wait forever. In the early morning hours, he felt breathless. Her legs were wrapped around his. Neither of them spoke.
Hours later, a sparrow flapped ice from its wings, darting outside the window, and Stasys told Daina that he loved her, anticipating that she might respond in kind. Instead, she smiled contentedly and shut her eyes to the morning light.
Stasys was perplexed and disappointed. He naïvely thought that if a woman gave herself to a man, she must love him, but now he was annoyed with himself. Olga had been willing to be with him. Certainly, she did not love him, nor he her. It was stupid of him to think that words were more important than actions. Additionally, he couldn’t know what Daina was thinking. She’d never been transparent. No one had. No one could afford to show the outside world who she was, on the inside—not in this world. Stasys had to believe that Daina loved him. He’d been with her nine years, a boyhood, and he’d loved her from the moment he’d found her sitting in the dirt. His love was enough. Nothing else mattered.
After their night together, Daina talked and laughed more. She told Stasys about her coworkers and about the birds she encountered on the beach. She smiled. For Stasys, this openness was better than any confession of love. Days and weeks passed. Daina and Stasys slept in the same bed. Stasys thought that she sometimes looked at him strangely, almost accusingly, reminding him of when she’d called him “soldier boy,” and he had to look away because it was like she saw something threatening in him, something he didn’t know about himself. It unnerved him, so he tried not to think on it. Sometimes he felt her wings shift and move, but they were always tightly folded against her back as she lolled beneath the sheets. She was not the girl he’d met in the dirt saucer. The jail cell had changed her.
In 1951, Daina lost a taste for her favorite cheeses. She ate broth and complained about indigestion. Stasys worried that she was sick. “You should stay home,” he said, but she wouldn’t hear of it.
“I have to work.”
“And make everyone else sick?”
She threw up and felt better. Every day, she threw up at five p.m., just before leaving work. It was a purging. Maybe now that she was finally loving life, she would join her family. Maybe that was all that Saint Casimir had wanted from her in order to release her: a lust for life, an understanding of its worth—but now that she understood, now that the world’s beauty wasn’t wasted on her, she wanted to live. Eventually, she wanted to join her family, but not now, not yet. Her hair grew thicker and shinier, her stomach rounder. She worried that she had a tumor. One of her comrades at work told her, “You’re going to have a baby.”
Daina didn’t understand.
“I’ve never seen anyone more pregnant.”
“Pregnant?” Why hadn’t she or Stasys considered this? They knew where babies came from. Daina crossed herself and concentrated on the sewing machine in front of her. Her back ached. Her ankles were swollen. She’d thought it was from the job. She could sleep anywhere. Oh, Saint Casimir. They were expecting a baby.
When she got home from work, she sat at the kitchen table waiting for Stasys. Her own breath seemed loud. When Stasys came in, he dropped his wallet on the table and went to the breadbox. “I am too hungry.” She hadn’t been cooking dinner or packing his lunch.
She sat there, watching him, a blissful expression on her face.
“Are you all right?” He bit into a hunk of bread.
“I am having a baby.”
“No, you’re not.” He was chewing. He couldn’t chew fast enough.
“Yes, I am.”
“You’re having a baby?”
“We’re having a baby.”
He swallowed the hunk of bread and pulled a chair up to sit across from Daina. “How?”
“How do you think?”
“So, you’re not sick?”
“I don’t think so.”
Stasys began to cry, wiping the tears with the back of his sleeve. “I’m sorry.” He couldn’t have stopped the tears from coming and so he wasn’t sorry, but “sorry” had felt like the right thing to say. He wasn’t sure what a man was supposed to say in this situation. He sometimes forgot that he had grown into a man. He squeezed Daina’s hand. “I’m going to be a father.” Stasys Valetkys remembered his own father, a smart, generous man. A good husband with a gentle soul. Stasys’s mother had been the disciplinarian and his father had been the consoler. “You’ll be all right, son. You’re a smart boy.” He’d shown Stasys affection. Stasys would be a good father. He would show affection. Right away, he imagined a son.
“And I’m going to be a mother,” Daina said.
“I love you,” he said. And then Stasys imagined a daughter, a beautiful smart girl like Daina. It would be a baby, a new life, boy or girl. Whichever. It did not matter.
Above Us Only Sky Page 14
