by Rita Gabis
The woman behind the counter knows him. Everywhere we go, he introduces me: “This is my granddaughter,” he says, putting the accent on the middle syllable instead of the first. I choose the flaky sweet pastry called “butterfly,” but before the woman behind the counter can reach into the glass case and retrieve it, Senelis says, “More, choose more.” I ask him how much more. He sweeps his arm across the small room. “Anyting,” he says.
It must have happened more than once, but I remember it as a singular event; the woman behind the counter picking up a big white box and proceeding to fill it at my command. Two more butterflies. An éclair. A sugar cookie. Amazing.
When the box is full and tied up with that string so deftly measured and cut, Senelis pulls a wad of bills out of his pocket and peels off the cost of “more.” We wander out into the sunlight. I half expect him to stop before we cross the street and tell me it was a joke, that we have to give back all but my half-eaten butterfly, that he is testing me to see how greedy I really am.
Over and over my mother told me stories of privation in Lithuania during the war and in Germany after. People sucked on pebbles because there was no food to eat. She begged for bread with her small brother and younger sister. My grandfather never spoke about the war like that. “Anyting,” he said to me.
Was it the next day, or the next? He was arguing with someone back at the shack near the marshes. Maybe his son, my uncle Roy, who later moved to the farm in Kansas but at that time lived down the road with his wife Agnes. Or maybe Krukchamama, or my mother. I was in another room. Or I was outside and heard the shouting through the window.
“What was it about?” I asked my mother after I’d gone in, or she’d come out to find me for dinner.
“Money,” she said, and didn’t elaborate because what did a child know about immigrant grandfathers who hunted and played cards and made cherry wine by the case that tasted of time itself, the sticky sediment trapped at the bottom of the dark glass bottle?
My stomach twisted with guilt—that white box of more. All the little artifacts of my desire I’d chosen and gobbled up. The dollar bills my grandfather delivered with ceremony into the hands of the woman behind the counter. Out of love for me, my grandfather had incurred wrath. The pastries, for all I knew, cost as much as the electricity that flickered into dimness when too many lights were on in his house. But along with the certainty that my greed was at the root of the bickering I’d overheard, another thought came to me: my grandfather, who counted out the bills without any hesitation in the sugary air, was not rich, was not what he pretended to be.
CHAPTER 2
* * *
FAYE DUNAWAY AS AN INVADED COUNTRY
Whenever I think of Lithuania, I remember a scene in Chinatown: Jack Nicholson is trying to extract the truth out of Faye Dunaway, who was raped by her father and then bore his child—a girl.
“Who is the girl?” Jack Nicholson asks.
“She’s my sister,” Faye Dunaway replies, sobbing.
Nicholson slaps her. Asks the question again.
“She’s my daughter,” Faye Dunaway says.
Another slap.
“She’s my sister and my daughter,” Faye Dunaway cries.
In August 1939 the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union assigned Lithuania to the German “sphere of influence.” Then, as a result of the German-Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty of September 28, 1939, Lithuania became a Soviet satellite state.
In June 1940 Lithuania lost all independence to the Soviets. In early June of 1941, Russian soldiers arrested and deported thousands of Lithuanians to Siberian Gulags; Senelis’s wife, my grandmother, was among them. On June 22 of that same year, the Germans invaded the Soviet Union and quickly “liberated” Lithuania from Soviet control. In the beginning, the Reich’s strategy was to allow an autonomous Lithuanian government to form within the occupied country. This nod toward autonomy was short-lived. In mid-July of 1941 the Reichskommissariat Ostland—the German Civil Administration—was established in Lithuania, as well as in Latvia, Estonia, and parts of Poland and Belarus.
One truth about Lithuania is that, as a country, it is indistinguishable from the invaders, collaborators, ghosts, heroines, thieves, defenders, and healers it contains. It’s the raped woman and the father and the child. It’s those who know nothing about what went on behind closed doors and those who stood by and watched, those who shrugged and walked away. Those who hid strangers, who carried messages, who didn’t betray the hunted. It’s the hunted themselves.
It’s a prism. It belongs to anybody who wants it. It even belongs to people like me, who for many years hated to pronounce its name. Not because I had any special empirical knowledge of Lithuania. I had the lullabies my mother sang to me so I’d sleep and the stories she told that kept me from sleep—the ones about war, the ones about the potatoes that made her fat in the displaced persons camp. As a small child, I was well aware that my mother had lost her own mother to war. This deficit, this wound, was always present, even when it was not spoken about directly. “Vat do you vant from me?” she’d say. (I wanted her to talk like the other mothers I knew.) When she was angry, she became more explicit. “I had nu-ting!” she’d cry out. Meaning, of course, no mother, no grocery shelves stocked with twenty different kinds of cookies, no meat three times a week, no Disney, no childhood. I conflated my mother’s anger and sadness, the disappearance of her own mother, the war itself with Lithuania.
Years later, in 1990, when Lithuania declared independence from the Soviets, stood fast in the face of deadly retaliation, and, remarkably, became its own nation, my mother traveled back to the country of her birth (she had also gone there during the Soviet occupation). She invited me to go with her. The ticket she wanted to buy me seemed an invitation to enter into the deepest sorrows of her life. Whatever Lithuania was, if I stepped off the plane onto the foreign tarmac, it would never let me go. I turned her offer down.
Memories from the months after 9/11 also made me think of Lithuania. A week or ten days after the towers fell, some of us who had jobs downtown were allowed to show ID at a police checkpoint set up along Canal Street and go to work—for me, an office at the Tribeca Film Center, a few blocks up and west from Chambers Street. The area was desolate, shops closed, faces grim. Sirens wailed back and forth from “the pit.” For weeks the air stank—the smell can’t be described, though many of us have tried to. Glass, fuel, death. After work, I walked home, back through the checkpoint, north by thirty blocks and east. I ate. I showered. No matter what shampoo I used, no matter how hot I let the water run, I couldn’t get the burnt odor from my hair. It was in my clothes, the palms of my hands.
It’s not memory of that odor, though, that brings to mind Žeimelis, a little Lithuanian town near the Latvian border where my mother and her family lived when she was a girl. Or Švenčionys, where the family later resettled minus my grandmother (my Babita, as I learned to call her, though the proper, if now somewhat archaic, version in Lithuanian is Bobute), who by then had been arrested by the Russians and was gone, the small library she administered boarded up. Every trace of her a rumor.
It was the palpable presence of absence.
“Do you feel it?” people in Tribeca asked one another about what was both amorphous and irrefutable.
“Is it their spirits?” someone would say. Someone you would never expect to utter such a thing; the angry Greek waitress at the corner diner, maybe, or the producer who flew in from L.A. when planes were airborne again and stood in the middle of the brick street looking up, as if at a hovercraft or as if he were trying to locate the source of a din in the air, in a pitch humans were never meant to be able to hear.
The dead exerted a pressure on the burning wind. They crowded into the mockery of the light that day after day dazzled us as we walked the unconsoled ashy streets. They grabbed at our warm hands. We held on to cell phones, coffee cups, children’s hands, so as not to feel the emptiness.
; This was how I learned that mass murder alters matter separate from the dead. The air changes. Gravity shifts. Time bends and breaks everywhere you look.
In both Žeimelis and Švenčionys, Jews were herded together and massacred. My mother was in her early adolescence then.
“Aside from my grandmother, what do you remember about the people who vanished from the towns you lived in?” I asked her during a visit she made to my home in New York City in 2010.
“Nothing,” she said, immediately.
“You knew that Jews lived where you lived?” I asked.
She thought for a few seconds.
“Yes,” she said.
“And then what?” I prodded.
“And then they were gone,” she said.
IN 2010 THE Lithuanian Parliament declared that 2011 would be the “Year of Remembrance of Defense of Freedom and Great Losses” (during the Russian occupation) as well as the “Year of Remembrance of Lithuanian Citizens Who Were Holocaust Victims” (during the German occupation). How Lithuania storied its past was something I’d never considered. My conversation with my mother grew out of a desire to uncover—what, I didn’t know. I couldn’t name it yet or understand it, but I had begun the kind of amateur genealogical quests I’d always disdained, focused first on the Jewish side of my family, then quickly encompassing the Lithuanian side as well.
Like all overnight genealogists, I turned to ancestry.com, Internet archives, books, disparate questions thrown at surprised family members. I watched myself print out passenger lists, names of camps that Stalin’s roundup squads populated with Lithuanians, saw myself become more and more like those people who zealously collect trinkets from the past; obsessive Saturday garage sale patrons who pick through the broken, the smelly, the stained, the puzzles missing three large pieces, the cardboard box of shells, the bikes with no brakes and busted chains. There are thousands of us on Internet search sites, millions of threads. My grandfather Horus was the village baker in such and such a time in such and such a place, does anybody know anyone who bought bread from him? My mother Ruschka taught piano to three children in ———— before the war. Are you one of these children? You would remember my mother. She had beautiful hands. A laugh that often turned into hiccups.
I searched to find out what I was searching for. The name of a town? The birthplace of a great-uncle? The date that a Russian noble, impressed by my great-grandfather Wolf Treegoob’s engineering skills (he’d fixed his shtetl’s decrepit grain mill), invited/commanded him to convert to Christianity and move to St. Petersburg? My great-grandfather refused, and shortly afterward, at the age of forty, fled with his family to London.
Every tidbit sent me searching for the next; a naturalization card, a long roll call of Lithuanians on ancestry.com with a version of the Treegoob name, the address of a hardware store in Philadelphia where my father had worked as a boy; he made the rounds each week to collect dime payments from the African Americans who had come up from the South with their hope, who paid on time for their refrigerators and stoves in tenements on pushcart streets.
I read books about Siberia and realized one day, with a small shock, that I couldn’t in that particular moment remember Babita’s first name. By the time my mother came for her visit in the fall of 2010 and we first spoke about Švenčionys, a longing I hadn’t expected—a question that wasn’t on the list in my notebook of, among other scribbles, Russian place names next to their Yiddish or Lithuanian or Belorussian or Polish counterparts—waited for her.
We sat at a side table against the wall in a large, airy café on the Upper West Side. Her gray hair was freshly cut in an attractive bob. Her eyes were clear. Her purple cashmere sweater showed off her trim waist. She loves cities. She’s traveled the world, my mother, without my father, who never liked to go anywhere.
For many years I went nowhere to make sure I would never become like her. Now, her cosmopolitan bent is one of the things I love about her. The way she’ll stop at a busy corner and take in the chatty Mandarin of the two elderly women with a grocery cart, the young man speaking a rapid Spanish into his cell phone, the little girl crossing the street with a pink backpack, holding tight to her frazzled mother’s free hand. Really take them in, the way some people shut their eyes and then open them at a bakery counter, in Paris maybe, near the Luxembourg Gardens, in a small shop overheated from the oven in back, where a woman of indeterminate age in a smock slips a delicacy into a thin paper bag, pleased not so much to serve you as to bestow upon you a prize that can’t be earned, only savored.
“China,” my mother will say about the two women with the cart, “from the north.” Then recall a homely detail about the Great Wall or the dense, earthy taste of the mushrooms at a hotel banquet in Shanghai. Which will lead to a memory of her father, my Senelis, who tramped around the parks off the tennis court in Oak Bluffs, on Martha’s Vineyard, where we spent our summers when it was still possible for middle-class families to have a second home there. He wandered for hours with a paper bag, looking for mushrooms: strange, bulbous, the caps soft as a deer’s pelt, the stems clotted with sandy dirt. His skill as a forager cultivated long before he briefly took to the forests and marshes of Lithuania and fought, along with his fellow partisans, the Russian invaders before the German invaders arrived.
At the little table amid the bustling clatter of cutlery and chatter and milk being steamed and plates set down, my mother sighed. She was happy. I didn’t encourage her visits very often, but lately it had occurred to me that the energy required to keep her at arm’s length, to refuse her love, was itself a form of furious attachment. I was happy to see her, to sit with her. This astonished me, in the moment, though later it occurs to me that it’s predictable, what time allows. If you’re lucky enough to have time.
The good coffee came. The sandwich with a bitter olive paste. Her hands were sun-marked. I used to examine them over and over when I was a small child, marveling at the infinite, tiny crosshatches and lines in the soft skin on top of her hands and at the joints of her fingers. Her palms always smelled vaguely of almonds.
I started to tell her about my haphazard family research. At a certain juncture I put my fork down, sat back. Said I had a question for her, which was not, after all these years, another accusation, that there were just certain things I was trying to understand.
“Where did the violence on your side of the family come from?” I asked.
She looked me straight on, took in the absence of vitriol in my voice, straightened up a bit, as if I were the teacher and she the good pupil. By “your side of the family,” she knew I meant her and her sister and her sister’s husband.
“Well, there was the war,” my mother said.
“But lots of people lived through the war and didn’t end up doing—” I didn’t elaborate.
Our waiter interrupted with dessert specials, his face open, something sturdy about his hands—a carpenter’s hands, or a painter’s. From the table next to ours, a whiff of just-cut oranges.
“Do you remember your mother ever raising a hand to you?” I asked.
We locked eyes. My mother’s face was thoughtful. “No,” she said, “never,” and then added what she had shared with me before: Babita didn’t like her daughters very much, was practical, efficient, remote.
“And Senelis, what about him?”
My mother shook her head. She took a sip of coffee.
“Never. He was never that kind of father. My mother was the cold one. But he had a love of life, and he loved us, always.”
I pushed my plate to the side. The morning rush was subsiding, and the café was quieter. At the end of our row of tables, our waiter wiped a cloth in a slow circle.
I asked my mother if she was sure.
She considered, leaned forward, looked up. We were both quiet, and then, almost as an afterthought, she remembered something. “He did beat my brother Roy in the DP camp.”
(After the war, displaced persons camps were established and run under the aegis
of allied militia in specified zones and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.)
My mother paused. She spoke again slowly, drifting back to an interstice in time that began to take on dimension, particularity. “They were terrible, those beatings.”
I’d always been able to see the girl in my mother’s face, even when she was in one of her rages. I saw it then; the oldest child, her cheeks fat from the starchy DP camp diet. Braids down her back.
“Why did Senelis do it?” I asked. It was hard to imagine Uncle Roy cowering before anyone. Him of the Brut cologne he must have showered in; when he visited, that pungent drugstore scent took over every room. A big man with a large tattoo on his huge right bicep, he had been a flight mechanic for the army on a base in Kansas, pigheaded as a teenager in Germany in the deportation camp, the war still breaking up inside him. But he was smart. Math and biology came easily to him.
“I don’t know why. Arguments, Roy disobeyed him, I don’t know,” said my mother.
“Did he use his hands?”
“Sometimes. Mostly, I think—a belt.”
My mother and I looked at each other.
“Tell me more,” I said, “about my grandfather.”
What exactly did it mean, I asked, to have fought in the resistance? Who was he resisting? My ignorance appalls me now.
“The Russians,” my mother said.
And what did he do when the Germans came into power?
She paused.
“He was a police chief,” she said.
“Under the SS?”
She paused again before saying, “Yes.”
EVERY YEAR FOR MANY years when I was younger, my mother would send me a pretty journal. Often the cover was of flowers, butterflies. Sometimes the motif was Asian—a water bird standing on one leg by a still pond. Lotus blossoms opened against a gilt background. Always, in the card that accompanied the journal, she would scribble, “Write happy thoughts.” This, of course, made me furious, made me immediately pick up a pen and write down one ugly thought after another. Many of them were about her. Raw and venomous. She wanted to suffocate me. I hated her. She, in her heart, hated me. Periodically I tore up the pages of most of my journals. The fantasy was, I think, that something would happen to me and my journals would become a marker of my life. Even if only one person read them—the language of what was to some degree pretty standard mother/daughter hostilities and to another degree the brokenness I carried out of the chaos of my early life—that reader might imagine this was the sum of me. Tearing up the pages felt like a self-betrayal and a rebellion—a way of enacting a freedom from the past that I didn’t feel yet, but hoped to.
