by Rita Gabis
I pat Aunt Agnes’s knee, and she jumps a little, as if she isn’t used to being touched anymore. If Uncle Roy were alive and present, he would have nothing of this digging around the past. “Pop was Pop,” he would say or fill the room with a version of Senelis’s nationalism: the old, lost, pure Lithuania, the Communist devils, the partisan warriors who drove them out.
My husband sits on my left, Aunt Karina on a settee catty-corner from us. The sausage on the table has a little sheen, a little nitrate sweat. Aunt Karina reaches for a cracker. Her fingers—they’re like Senelis’s now. Working hands. The nail beds a little stumpy. The hands slightly ruined by sun and time and effort. Everyone sits poised. My aunt’s willingness, her particular bravery to deliver over her memories, has stunned me into a kind of idiocy. She’s gone quiet along with everyone else. My mother maneuvers into the old caned rocker, hands in her aproned lap. What is Aunt Karina waiting for? A log falls in the woodstove, softly, a ghost shape in the fire.
Oh. She’s waiting for me.
CHAPTER 7
* * *
FATHERS AND SONS
This is a map of Poland and Prussia published in 1811, after the 1795 dissolution of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, after which Lithuania became part of the Russian Empire. It was still part of the Russian Empire the year Kazimieras Puronas was born.
My grandfather’s father, Kazimieras Puronas, was born in 1850 in Gindviliai, a tiny farming village in northeastern Lithuania where each year Marytė, a cousin of my mother and her sister, visits the graves of my great-grandmother Barbara (Senelis’s mother) and Barbara’s sister. My mother and my aunt will tell me Gindviliai doesn’t really exist anymore, which only means that immigrant knowledge is different from the knowledge of those who stay behind.
A knowledgeable map collector cautioned me about the lack of accuracy in maps of Eastern Europe made before midcentury, but I fell in love with this one by the British cartographer William Darton. Darton learned printing from his father, and in 1804, opened his own shop in London, Repertory of Genius. I wonder what kind of nod that was to his father. Was it “I’m the best, Dad, thanks to you” or “You thought you were smart, Dad, but I’m a genius!”? Darton Jr. died seven years after my great-grandfather Kazimieras was born.
I’m not sure why I care about this, but I do. Maybe it’s because I love the name of Darton’s shop. (No self-esteem issues there.) Maybe it’s because of the beauty of the map and its particularity. Or because a map implies, once the drawing and engraving and printing are complete, established knowledge, continuity, reliability.
Much of the story of my family and the story of Lithuania is a live grenade, a gun going off by accident in an attic, life up for grabs, countries changing hands so fast the local sign makers couldn’t keep up—what was in Polish had to be in Russian, what was in Russian had to be in German, then Russian again, then miraculously, Lithuanian. And as for Yiddish, that wild mix of German and Hebrew and Aramaic, that language I always thought of as the “village talk” of my Jewish grandmother, there is silence, the barking of a dog, a diesel-fueled used VW van backfiring in a gravel lot, a man in an undershirt pulling a rusted screen down over the window of a house whose owner won’t ever come around to make a claim.
The year 1811, Darton traces the Bug River, a watery dividing line at the start of World War II between German-occupied Poland and the Russian-occupied Baltics. But that war isn’t history yet. Napoleon still has to invade Russia. Europe is going to enter the age of empires. America will turn on the British. Darton works on a drafting table in London near a window for the light. Perhaps he imagines his childhood river, thin bodies of fish, cold against his palm, stones and currents, but not those who will try to cross the Bug in flight from the Germans, nor the completed territory of his own life, the final boundary.
My Jewish great-grandparents—Wolf and Ķlarah Treegoob, Israel and Esther Gabis—had by 1850 been forced from interior Russia to the Pale of Settlement. The Pale, or Чертá осéдлости, was a series of borders that determined where Jews could and could not live. Established in 1791 in imperial Russia by Catherine the Great, the Pale was in part an attempt to prevent Jews from commercial enterprise in highly populated areas where they were or could become a competitive threat to non-Jewish trade and business. The creation of the Pale prohibited Jews, as well as Poles, from buying and working land beyond a small allotment. They had to lease instead of own, and Jews paid multiple taxes far beyond what was levied upon the non-Jews in their midst. It was these hardships, coupled with strategically implemented pogroms in the late 1800s, that compelled my Jewish great-grandparents to leave for England and then the United States.
The map is a chimera. A ghost. Once the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was a vast multiethnic geographic entity that spread out in all directions for more than three hundred thousand square miles. Within that reach, all my forebears lived.
The map reflects, among other things, Russia’s partition. What the map doesn’t show is one of partition’s dictums: the outlawing of Latin and the Lithuanian and Polish languages. Space and speech. When both are claimed by someone else, what do you do? As a child, my own tendency was to become immovable and silent. But Kazimieras, like many other Lithuanians, sent his son, my Senelis, into local homes, where at considerable risk, teachers secretly taught children to speak and write the illegal language.
He wanted Senelis to become educated. He wanted him to have more than the two-room dirt-floored house with the few outbuildings for subsistence farming of wheat and potatoes and flax. Unlike his wife Barbara, Kazimieras was not completely illiterate, but he saw in his sons a vision of a life that outstripped his own in every way. They would have fluency. They would have more land. They might not even work the land.
My great-grandmother Barbara, from whom I inherited my middle name, bore twelve children with Kazimieras. Four died as infants, leaving two girls and six boys. But because there are several four- and five-year gaps between births, I suspect my great-grandmother was pregnant more than twelve times. My grandfather, my Senelis, Pranas Puronas, was her fourth child, born on the cusp in 1899, five years after his brother Jonas. After my grandfather was born, there would be another child who did not survive. The family’s firstborn, Ona, my Krukchamama, would live with my grandfather for much of his adult life.
When Senelis was seventeen his father got sick. It was “gumbas,” Aunt Karina told me. The literal meaning in Lithuanian is “nodule,” but Aunt Karina said the word covered “a multitude of sins.” Some kind of cancer brought him down, in from the glistening field, the precious cows, the herbs his wife dried in huge bunches upside down and tied to the rafters in what passed for a barn.
A pragmatist, as Senelis turned out to be, Kazimieras had a coffin made, as was the custom of his time, and kept it propped up against the wall in the room he slept in. It gave him comfort, I was told, to know that his wife wouldn’t have to be bothered. So he lay there with the raw sweet/bitter scent of the new planks, and perhaps a swirl, as he got sicker, of the old images: the pagan horse slaughtered when the master dies, two moons in one sky, the faces of his parents, his children—Krukchamama, Senelis, the others I never knew.
Barbara was an herbalist and a midwife. She must have treated his pain, so add the stink of valerian to Scotch pine and the hard-packed dirt floor and, in the other room, the fire. A few centuries earlier, they would have had a grass snake in a clay bowl in a corner inside for luck.
Kazimieras died in 1916. In 1918, after the war, came independence from the Russians. Lithuanian farmers were allotted plots of private land. My great-grandmother, with the help of her sons, dismantled her house and moved it, as did all the inhabitants of the small village, to the new site of her allotment. The town’s name never changed, but the sun threw a different angle of shadow on every threshold, and every child learned a different way home.
CHAPTER 8
* * *
AN EDUCATION
“In regular school, Se
nelis was taught in Russian,” Aunt Karina says.
My mother interrupts, her voice soft, a bit querulous. Didn’t Senelis fight in the war of independence against the Russians, the German Balts, and then the Germans proper in 1918, 1919?
“No, no,” Aunt Karina dismisses her.
A puzzled look comes over my mother’s face, but Aunt Karina, who is right in everything, must be right in this, too.
Aunt Karina continues. “They were all so poor the boys had to stay home and work on the farm. In 1918, when the Germans [in Lithuania] went against the Russians [in Lithuania], the Germans took our grandparents’ last horse and Senelis went begging to have the horse back to plow their fields. Otherwise, they’d starve. Grandmother Barbara’s youngest child was just two at the time. Imagine. No food. The horse gone. His father just dead.”
She’s asked me to imagine, so I do.
A young man runs. The mud of the road leaks between his toes. Already the little blue flowers are in the first ridges of the fields. Lina. Linseed. Linen. The cloth his mother makes. Rain. His is a rainy country. He runs like an ape, legs awkward, sometimes slipping in the mud and then wiping his hands on his thighs. He can see them now.
Up ahead, a little convoy in the drizzle. The smell of petrol makes the sky seem grayer. The family horse, old, is a light bay with thin legs, a Þemaitukai, a classic Lithuanian breed known for dexterity in battle, durability on the farm, and the ability to survive on feed from starvation harvests. He looks weak, is anything but. He’s already outlived his master, with whom he headed out to the fields as if the plow was a swallow on his back. Now useless, tied to the back of a stupid German truck with iron wheels that tear up the road. The poverty of that army. No rubber. A truck with a steering wheel you turn as if you are opening a manhole, bent close to it, hands almost bloody from it. The driver sucks on a Reemstma cigarette. Only a year older than my grandfather, but his face is screwed into itself like a worn-out clock.
“Prasome atiduoti arklys,” the boy my grandfather was says. Please, give back the horse. “Bitte giv die Pferde. Bitte. Bitte.”
What does my grandfather look like at that moment in the rain? Poor. Begging. He gets the horse back, but it’s not really clear how. Does he steal it? Does he somehow appeal to something in the soldier riding the back wheel casing? A soldier who maybe has a younger brother back home, or is sick of war, ready to defy the orders: We’re short on horses (and everything else), resupply any way you can. About to leave the fucking country anyway, so who cares?
My grandfather is like the light bay, untied now. A little whinny or snort. They head home where the barn is, where food is, fat a gold skim on a broth of last fall’s potatoes, new dill like hope in the thawing ground. Senelis looks like a beggar, but he doesn’t have a beggar’s heart. He’ll just do whatever has to be done, in the moment. He’ll snivel. He’ll offer the soldiers women, liquor, cigarettes. He’ll get them a hundred packs. Just give the horse back.
I always knew this about him. He could take off his pride and put it back on again. My hero.
THERE’S A GREAT shortage of officers in the Lithuanian army. A call goes out for new recruits. Three hundred and thirty-six young Lithuanian men apply. Strapping farmers. Lithuanian exiles from Vilnius, now overrun by Poles, who have the audacity to call it Wilno. Lads who can’t read. Boys whose fathers were killed by someone—a Russian, a Pole, a German, the crazy son of a neighbor who had fits and should have been drowned in the river at birth. Those who are accepted to the Military academy are all born between 1887 and 1899. Their studies last three months. Senelis is among them. Lucky boy. He’s the first in his family to go to secondary school. How proud his father would have been.
Senelis in 1920, upon acceptance into the Military Academy.
The new military academy is in Kaunas, sixty miles, give or take, from Vilnius/Wilno or Vilne, as it is known by the roughly sixty-five thousand Jews who live there. In the unforeseeable future, when the Poles are gone, the Jews are gone, and Vilnius is corpselike, all bone, no life, the academy will relocate there and be called the General Jonas Žemaitis Military Academy of Lithuania.
Almost every public building or institution in Lithuania carries a complicated archaeology of the past, ancient alliances and enduring enmities. In the days of the Grand Duchy, Lithuania’s military school was bankrolled by the king of Poland himself.
But the Grand Duchy is gone. It’s 1919, and then 1920. A Soviet-Lithuanian peace pact has been signed: the Moscow Treaty gives the Lithuanians autonomy as long as the Russians can use Lithuanian territory (both undisputed and not) to act against the Poles. The embryonic Polish Legions run riot in Wilno; their light cavalry parade in front of the cathedral, their horses shit on the brick streets. They conduct pogroms, a word that can’t fully evoke the slightly open mouth of a dead man in a photograph taken as trophy or evidence after one of the killing sprees of those days: his impossibly thick hair (how his mother must have loved it) up past his high forehead, lean body slack in the cloth stretcher set down on the cobblestone street that trips you up if your ankles are bad and your heels are high.
At night in Wilno, Polish young men my grandfather’s age drink siwucha—vodka flavored with flowers—like water. Sing “Strzelecka gromada” (Shooters’ squad), a line from the new song “My, Pierwsza Brygada,” which proclaimed the start of the Polish Legions and sounds like war itself, year after year after year.
In Kaunas, when my grandfather enters the academy, two-thirds of the Jewish population of Lithuania lives and works and prays there. They call the city Kovno. The academy exists because the Moscow Treaty exists. Lithuanian Jews from Kovno and the far shtetls answered the call to arms and joined long before Senelis’s first day at the academy. As volunteers or conscripts, they fought on behalf of the Russian Empire during the late 1800s and now into the new century. In the Sixth Infantry Regiment the Jew Nisonas Mackebuckis falls in battle. In the Fifth Infantry Regiment Jokubas Chaitas falls in battle. Lieutenant Colonel Moshe Dembovskis is a military doctor; he treats gangrene, syphilis, cupronickel-lead core bullets invading the mess of a leg, an arm, the soft sausage nest of a man’s intestines. He uses chloroform, mercury. Dembovskis survives, for the time being, when peace briefly descends. Having served in the Russian army when Lithuania is still part of the Russian Empire, he returns home to an autonomous Lithuania for more war. Let’s follow him back to the village of his birth, Vilkaviškis. The huge synagogue made of wood planking. To walk inside it must have been like walking into a forest.
I don’t really understand any of it: Poles in Wilno, Germans in Memel. The Russians everywhere; I look at Darton’s map again and again, at many maps, each from a different time, the borders so slippery, they seem meaningless. But they’re not, especially to the people who live within one, outside of another. People like my Jewish great-grandparents, in London by now, fleeing like thousands of others—including non-Jewish Lithuanians—because of poverty or because someone is always coming to slaughter them within those borders.
By the time Senelis goes into the academy, he speaks Lithuanian, Russian, a bit of German, and Polish. Maybe even a little Yiddish. If you gave him a drink or two, my mother says, he’d swear he knew French.
For now, the little aside, the mini-biography of Lieutenant Mausa Dembovskis, seems simpler, easier to understand.
But I must close this small page of his life. I’m like Aunt Karina, who marks the spot in the book and pulls my covers up to my chin. (I’ll push them down again.) “Laboniktas,” she says with a kiss. Good night.
AT THE END of the three months, my grandfather has gone from beggar to officer. Because the military school is still so new, many of what will become long-standing protocols and rituals aren’t in place. Unlike later graduates, Senelis is not called upon to kneel before the president of Lithuania and affirm, as the president touches a sword to each young man’s shoulder, “You shall not draw the sword without a cause nor sheath it without honor.”
My g
randfather is seated in the middle. The photograph is undated.
IT’S ALMOST DINNERTIME. In the kitchen, skin crisps around the roasting chicken, the pot of drained potatoes steams—a dot of butter, a white spoon of sour cream whipped into the starchy cloud.
Aunt Karina is flagging but stalwart. She’s a piling on the dock jutting into the sea of time. She asks for a bit of wine and coughs. The living room has gone cold. Time to throw another log into the stove. Did I do it? I don’t remember. Who fetched the wine? My husband? I don’t remember. No, it must have been my mother—my aunt’s supplicant.
“Should we stop for now?” I say. She’s sick, and I’m making her talk, talk and remember, talk unto death.
She presses her lips together and shakes her head. “No, let’s go on,” she says grimly.
This is costing her in ways I can’t know.
Almost dinner, and Aunt Karina is plodding through the years long before the war I need to find out about. I sink into the couch. I’m afraid I’ll cry. A small panic flutters in my throat. We’ll never get there. She’ll talk and talk, but my questions will never be answered. I try to rally.
Aunt Karina takes a small sip of wine, the glass too delicate for her hand. The shadows under her eyes are darker. Homer is beside me again. My aunt brushes a stray white wire of hair from her face. She’s old. I won’t speak with her again in this lifetime.
I bow my head so she won’t see that my heart is broken. I listen.
“Your great-grandmother Barbara was younger than her husband,” Aunt Karina says.
Oh god, she’s gone all the way back to my namesake and to Senelis’s father, Kazimieras.
“Long before they were married, when the horses were being hitched up for her baptism, a young man [Kazimieras] saw her up in the wagon and said, ‘There goes my bride,’ and sure enough, they were married. She was an illiterate midwife.”
