by Rita Gabis
But you’ve told me this already, haven’t you?
“She knew a great deal because women would come for help to her. She would wash, put on clean clothes, go and stay through the birth and after. She learned by watching a doctor who one day told her she knew enough to do it all on her own. She was also very knowledgeable of herbs.”
Here, I stop listening. I’m thinking of my mother, who tends the long herb sheds and herb garden of a large nursery and landscaping business up the road. It’s summer. She still has most of her sight. (Macular degeneration will slowly rob her of it.) The show garden she’s made is round, like a planet. I’m impatient. Awed. She points at the waist-high chamomile, the purple sage, the flowering mint, the soft, invincible thyme, the high lavender, not stunted and lost in dry grass as mine is. It’s her gift. She’s in the middle of it all. A world that, for a moment, is only about life.
But life is full of reversals.
Suddenly, Aunt Karina is talking about Senelis.
“He met your Babita in Kaunas—his cousin introduced them. Some time later he was on leave from military duty, in Kaunas again, and decided to stop and visit her. She said, ‘Let’s get married.’ Just like that. She was very unhappy. Actually, she was engaged to someone else who was a policeman away at some convention for work he wouldn’t take her to. She wanted to get back at him. She and your grandfather even had to get a special license to get married so fast. She never loved him. When she saw him through the window or walking down the road she used to say, ‘Here comes my ass.’ ”
My Babita: her name was Ona—Anna in the Anglicized version—Puroniene. (In Lithuania, women’s last names have a feminine ending, iene; the phonetic pronunciation is ēnĕ.) Ona, not exactly the dutiful wife/grandmother who sucks on caramels and clucks her tongue at curse words and massages the cold flat feet of her husband with goose fat, who crouches before him, the bursitis in her knees like little ponds that spread under the weight of her thighs and wide hips and heavy breasts. My grandmother, my Babita, was thin as a match.
“She’d even been engaged before, to a doctor, older, very smitten with her. But one day she looked at him and said, ‘What am I doing with this old man?’ and that was the end of it.”
“Tell me about her family,” I say.
Her story, in brief, is the story of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, of Polish and Lithuanian nobles, all who speak Polish across the elaborate tables as the candles throw their tapered shadows and teeth grind and shred the meat of fallen animals, the Christmas goose, the “smoked meats all cured with juniper smoke,” in the words of the poet Adam Mickiewicz in his famous elegy to Lithuania, Pan Tadeusz; or, The Last Foray into Lithuania, written in the early 1830s. A poet who—like the city Wilno/Vilnius—both Poles and Lithuanians claim as their own. Nevermind that much of the Lithuania he describes in his poetry is now Belarus.
“Babita’s father was the caretaker of a huge estate, responsible for all the forests. When her father married, the [Polish] nobles he worked for gave him a whole big farm, so they were very prosperous.” Aunt Karina takes another sip of wine. “Babita said they had six teams of plow horses plus carriage and riding horses and someone who lived on the premises just to take care of the poultry! Her father had a large library with books in many different languages. Farming equipment from England. Parquet floors!”
Aunt Karina looks at me for a long beat to make sure I have taken in this very important detail about the floors. In my prewar apartment in New York, strips of thick oak lie atop the subfloor of the living room. Parquet. I’m too spoiled to really grasp the splendor of it.
Parquet, from the French, not the dirt floors of the shack Senelis grew up in. Parquet—of Versailles, the winter palace of St. Petersburg. My grandmother learned to read: Polish, Russian, Lithuanian. She walked on bare feet on those bright floors. She followed the poultry manager on his feathery clucking rounds. The hen smell and feed dust conjoining in the light of a changing century.
“After Lithuanian independence”—in 1920—“the large estates were all to be divided,” said Aunt Karina.
No more large landowners lording over peasants. For a country to last, all its people had to have a share in something.
“Your grandmother’s father was so damn mad, he said, ‘Take it all.’ He sold all of his land and built a house in town.”
Gone the McCormick land tractor, the pulsation milking machine, the sheen of inlaid wood the length of the library. Who were these people? Selling, marrying—in an instant. Petty. Desperate. Well-off. Poor. I love you. I hate you. You want my land, take it. You want my hand, it’s yours.
Aunt Karina lets out a long sigh, so loud that Homer looks over, his huge lion’s face impassive but inquiring just the same.
“We need to stop,” I say.
“Yes.” She’s too tired to look at me.
Aunt Agnes, in her acrylic sweater and Kansas polyester pants, announces at the doorway to the kitchen, “We eat now.”
We stand. My husband moves toward the food, but Aunt Karina catches me by the elbow. “I want you to know something,” she whispers, raspy.
Again, the bird dog alert.
“Your Aunt Agnes doesn’t know anything. Don’t listen to anything she tells you about the past.”
“Okay,” I whisper back, feeling instant loyalty to Aunt Agnes.
Aunt Karina looks satisfied. Apart for thirty years, and now we’re suddenly conspirators. We share a secret about Aunt Agnes that lies on top of an even bigger secret, one neither of us will name. I nod to her solemnly to seal my oath of understanding, my allegiance to Aunt Karina’s superior knowledge, and because she is the elder and I am the younger, she goes before me to the table.
THERE’S NO MORE talk of family history at dinner. We all eat quickly. Sucking the meat from the bones. Taking seconds. Eating the spears of broccoli whole, like forcing little swords into our mouths. Salt. Something sweet—a pear crisp. The scoop of ice cream on top demolished instantly by the sugary heat.
I thought this would all happen so quickly, thought my husband and I would be at the house for one afternoon, and if there was anything to be learned about my grandfather’s collaboration we’d learn it lickety-split—or I’d know right away that this was a futile journey. “Of course,” my husband and I say, we’ll be back in the morning for Aunt Karina’s pancakes and more talk. The aunts retire to the living room. We tackle the dishes. Aunt Agnes returns stealthily, stands very close to me, like a horse sometimes does when you’ve got a bucket of feed or a carrot in a pocket.
She whispers, “Don’t listen to your Aunt Karina. She don’t know nothin’. It’s all made up stuff.”
“Really?” I try to look shocked and disapproving of Aunt Karina.
“She tells a big bunch of lies, but she was so young she don’t remember,” says Aunt Agnes.
“Thank you so much for telling me this.” I kiss Aunt Agnes on the cheek. Among my mother and Aunt Karina, she’s the underdog. I love her.
“You remember what I tell you,” she says.
I promise I will, even though I believe that Aunt Karina, up to this point anyway and insofar as she is able, is conveying to me the bits and pieces of family lore that were given to her firsthand by her own grandmother and mother and father. Up to this point. Insofar as she is able.
ON THE DARK road back to the hotel in Vineyard Haven my husband and I both start talking at once about Aunt Karina. Not the particulars of the stories. Not the brooch on her sweater or the cough that fills her chest, but her. There’s a pressure zone around her. It’s the zone of a woman who is fighting to hold on to her own story. The one she’s lived by in which a man loves her and praises her work in the church and talks about every little thing with her through all the days of their years together, and is innocent of any wild, indecent claim. She’s holding a pack of ten wild dogs on ten thin leashes. She’s looking into my face and forcing herself not to consider my clarity, my steadiness, my lack of a wigged-out Oprah affect, w
hich, if I had it, would cause accusations to fly from my mouth the way they do sometimes from the mouths of the hurt and homeless in the city. On the subway once, a woman (impossible to tell her age) bundled in stinking dirty rags stood up and screeched at me, “You whore, you dirty whore.” I instantly believe I’m guilty of anything. I looked down at the scuffed subway floor, got out as soon as we reached the next stop.
The hotel room is small and the heater noisy: floor-to-ceiling windows look out onto the very still Main Street. We come in from the cold and fall into bed, rummaging for extra covers in the closet first. Not even bothering to wash or brush our teeth. Soon my husband sleeps. The bed has one of those mattress pads that seem to be made of plastic. Every time I shift and turn, it crimps and crackles. I give up. Stand. Open the double doors to winter.
I’ve known the street before me all my life. I had my first waitressing job at thirteen at a café in an earlier incarnation of this same hotel. At the end of the summer I called the Labor Department on the management because they were shorting us ten cents for every dollar we made. And I was an underage worker to boot. The grizzled, sweaty Portuguese fry cook who’d been my friend cursed me for ratting out the bosses. I took it on the chin, as they say, even though I was surprised he didn’t believe in justice and ten cents for all.
My arms are freezing. That hotel burned down, this one built right in its place, a replica, a fake. But the little street is as it has always been, and suddenly—I smell it before I see it—snow. Sparse, the flakes individuated. I try to follow different ones: dizzying. A cold bit of memory. Hammond: I’m still a child. It’s Christmas, and we’re staying with Aunt Karina and Uncle Alan. But he and I are alone on the street outside their apartment building, looking up at a thicker, faster snowfall quickly covering the base of the lampposts, sidewalks, the slick roofs of large gas guzzling cars, our hats, the long bridge of my uncle’s nose. Maybe a cab goes by. Maybe Susie the cat sits fat and regal high in the yellow-lit window above us. Of those things I can’t be sure.
The memory is this; he catches a flake and shows it to me on a dark sleeve or in a gloved hand and says, “Look, each one is different.” Because I am small, he seems as tall as a lamppost. I suck in the cold air at the wonder of it, the tops of our shoes already white. The intricate design. The infinite daunting splendor.
CHAPTER 9
* * *
AUNT KARINA’S PANCAKES
Brilliant sun. Now the kitchen seems open, the wood floors gleam. The cloister of shadows is gone. I hang our coats on the hooks in the pantry—there’s my father’s jacket my mother sometimes wears when she brings wood in. I press my face to the waterproof fabric. For a second, I have him—then he’s gone.
There’s a trick to the batter only Aunt Karina knows; something to do with egg whites and cottage cheese and lots and lots of butter. We hardly eat butter at home. I’m drunk with it now. This morning Aunt Karina seems revived and Aunt Agnes tired. The wound on her leg. A child she gave away in Germany at the end of the war—a brief encounter with an American GI—she can’t find a trace of her boy. He’s a man now, in the States, but where? After breakfast I find her crying on the couch in the living room. Even in her the war continues.
My husband and I eat and eat. The warm syrup pours like water. The coffee gives a jolt. I never want to talk about Senelis again, but can’t stop myself. After the sticky plates are cleared, the little digital tape recorder is brought out again. I’m terrified I’ll erase what I recorded the afternoon before, confuse which little arrow means things disappear and which button will hold hostage the details of these women’s lives.
Aunt Karina begins again:
“Your grandfather was still in the army, so they lived where he was stationed. All three kids born in different places—Kaunas, Trakai, Žeimelis. For a while we lived on an island outside Vilnius, and had a horse, a high-strung, skittish Arabian. Once your Babita was driving the cart across the narrow strip of land to the island and someone had dropped a bag in the road and that darn horse stopped and wouldn’t go and backed up right into the lake.”
Aunt Karina tries to remember the horse’s name—Amazon. She’ll remember the name differently later, but I’ll forget her correction and the recorder won’t be on. So it’s Amazon, defiled by my forgetting, Arabian, white, long-necked, the withers a defined ridge—one of the few creatures on earth to best my Babita, my thin one, my shrew.
Aunt Karina goes on, but it’s my Jewish grandmother the horse makes me think of. London, 1910. Her family has fled there from Ukraine. My Rachel, my Nana, nine, ten years old, loves to watch the farriers at work. She sidles in, with her own stubborn beauty, among tall men and stalls and manure rakes and listens to the hammering. The gorgeous, frightening creatures whose bodies give off steam, whose lips, huge, take in and gum the straw; the chewing, the filing, the shoes strung on the rack—how she loved it all, she told me. She stood there for hours, men pausing to take her in, as here they look out from their work, out of their time, at me.
Blacksmiths and Farriers, London, 1910
“It’s late,” my mother says, high-pitched, a cup rattling a little in the saucer she holds in her hand. Aunt Karina has just started talking, but breakfast took over the morning.
I attend the moment. My husband and I agree to take a different boat, a later train home. The recorder is recording. It even records my secret memory of my grandmother Rachel.
SENELIS’S FAMILY SETTLES finally in Žeimelis, a town on the Latvian border. Senelis is chief of border police. He rides a high horse in his polished boots. He patrols.
My mother (the oldest) and Karina (the youngest) and their brother Ramutas (Roy) are kids and do what kids do. They play “Indian,” smoke peace pipes with tobacco made from weeds, only Karina isn’t allowed; she’s too young. The older kids won’t let her do so many things. Roy catches fish, my mother cooks them outside on a Primus stove, and they run away from Karina with the fish and gobble them down in the outhouse while Karina cries and cries. They’re scientists—try to kill burdock by pouring vinegar on it. They bury apples in the fall to see if they’ll last through the winter. They dig them up when they are eight months older—the children and apples—the fruit not quite rotten, but soft, riddled with the slow burrowing of new worms.
Babita complains unendingly about Senelis. Where are her parquet floors now? Their house is small, owned by a Jewish family that lives across the street in a two-story building, a small notions store below. They are older people, the woman a seamstress. In Babita’s house, there is a backyard with chickens, and in the kitchen a huge brick stove. One night Senelis comes home drunk and threatens to shoot himself because she’s unfaithful.
(My mother related this incident to me during her earlier visit to New York City. When I bring it up again now, I watch my mother’s face when Aunt Karina says she doesn’t remember their drunk father, the gun, the threat. I watch my mother waver, silently will her not to surrender her memory to her younger sister’s. She doesn’t.)
Babita isn’t unfaithful, but she still corresponds with the aged doctor who would take her and the children in a heartbeat, take her away from Žeimelis, away from the blustering man with a gun who falls in bed beside her like a sack of feed and doesn’t remember what he said the next morning. She can’t do it. One sister is divorced. Another went into the convent, and then left it. Too much shame for the family to bear.
At least Senelis’s work keeps him away. She’s grateful for that. When he comes back, it’s with armloads of stupid things. Blue velvety slippers for Karina. A sleigh. Sausage made from venison or boar. It drives Babita crazy. To appease her, Senelis crosses the border and buys potatoes from a Latvian farmer, bushels of potatoes, all the potatoes in the world. And it’s not enough.
Babita takes a librarian course in Kaunas and then in Žeimelis works in the town library. She’s crazy for order. She doesn’t like girls very much, even her own. But her house is neat and her food is good. Whatever goes on between
her and Senelis, they make four children together.
Four?
I stop the recorder.
All my life, my mother has told me the war story of her life, her face growing red and swollen, the tears plopping down while I ate my graham crackers and drank my milk or came home late and stoned, my eyes bloodshot as if I too had been crying. She told me when I was ten and nineteen and thirty, told me as I walked out the door, told me even when I was gone.
But not once did she mention the lost one.
The proper village burial.
Senelis comes home, takes leave from his job as chief of the border patrol between Lithuania and Latvia.
SENELIS, IN UNIFORM, holds Aunt Karina. My mother and Uncle Roy are in front of him. Babita is in the larger dark hat, Krukchamama to her right in the smaller dark hat. The photograph is undated, but my mother looks like she is six years old, or a small seven, which would make the funeral year 1936 or 1937.
It’s Aunt Karina who has brought the photograph. The little death that calls, like all deaths, for silence.
CHAPTER 10
* * *
WAR
On the eve, what was Žeimelis like?
There was a market square the shape of an envelope, with a lemonade factory, a library (where Babita scowled at those who entered with torn pages, overdue books, lame excuses), an agricultural school, ten Jewish shops, a Jewish bank, a separate Jewish library, and a synagogue. Žeimelis: the root Zeim, from ziema, “winter,” where a Livonian knight Otto Grothus lived in the fairy tale of long ago. In 1937 there were nine Jewish tailors, three Jewish butchers, two bakers, one tinsmith.
