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This Landscape

Kathy Callaway

http://www.archipelago.org/vol5-2/callaway.htm

This landscape: modest, flat to rolling, sea-influenced with heavy mists and fog, even sixty miles inland, here. Forests and farms – Lithuanians are said to have a deep love of the land and growing things. It is a quiet country. Lietuva is once again its name and may mean “rain.” S
iauliai, pronounced show-lay, the fourth-largest city, is near the eastern edge of Samogitia, or Zemaitija, a deeply traditional area running westward to the Baltic Sea. It has been the main market-town in north-central Lithuania for several centuries, with a population 85% Lithuanian. By contrast, Riga, the capital of Latvia – sixty miles to the north – is half-Russian. So is Tallinn, in Estonia. The Russian military enclave of Kaliningrad starts only seventy miles south of here, on a bus-line that runs straight up to
Siauliai and on to Riga and Tallinn. Lukashenko’s Belarus is a mere twenty-six miles from Vilnius, three hours southeast of S
iauliai.

Still, S
iauliai seems comfortable with itself, is easygoing, pretty in its way and, from what I’ve seen, tolerant and good-natured – I’ve already been shown real kindnesses by strangers. There are some parks, a few nice churches, tree-lined streets. No cars allowed on the main shopping street, Vilniaus, which is tree-lined and handsome. Nothing especially historical here, most of it blasted away in centuries of wars, S
iauliai flattened in both World Wars, for this has always been a military city. One of the USSR’s largest strategic-bomber bases was just outside of town. This was an officially closed city, for residents only, most of whom worked at plants producing military technology. The unemployment rate here was 50% with the shut-down of those industries. The air is cleaner now but the groundwater seriously polluted with heavy metals and airplane fuels.^[1] Bath water is sometimes the color of tea – it’s like bathing in a tea-pot. The Danes provided some millions to replace the sewer-system of the city, but the money was “used for something else – we don’t know what,” as someone told me. Water a plant and it may die, unless you first let the water settle in a container for a day or two, the method also used for shaking down the drinking-water, a little trick which costs nothing. At the university, we are not to drink it in any case, or rather: “We’re used to it – you’d better not.”

For almost fifty years this school was a Soviet pedagogical institute, a language-center in a restricted military city. The Russian faculty still has considerable power. Valentina – former Dean and still head of the Russian Department – is also the only elected member of S
iauliai’s Russian Opposition Party and sits on the city council. I knew of her. In the first article I had found on the web under “S
iauliai,” I read that a year earlier, the bodies of six Russian soldiers were removed from their showcase graves in city-center by Lithuanians and reburied outside city limits.
Siauliai’s mayor refused to come out and console the Russian community, who gathered angrily in front of the empty graves. Valentina came instead, giving a speech of apology to her outraged constituents. At the university’s outdoor opening ceremonies the other day, a large, close-cropped woman in a pink suit rose with majestic irony when it was her turn to speak, cracked a joke to roars of approval from the students and took her time sitting down again. This was Valentina.

There has been a pitched battle for control of the Graduate Division between Valentina and R., the new Lithuanian power, the woman who arranged my stay. It began three years ago, when the only advanced degree possible was still in Russian. The next year, R. wrenched it into English only. Last year, a draw – no program at all, and this year, a desperate compromise: a forced double major in both, so in my small graduate class today I met four smoldering Russians and four uneasy Lithuanians, all compelled to study the enemy language: the Russians English, the Lithuanians, Russian. Five of them teach in the local schools. I asked them to jot down any concerns they might have about our writing class:

“I’m a pessimist and you’ll feel it. I hate writing. Horrible, terrible.”

“I’m not ready to hear critiques by my friends and you after sitting a long time and writing my abnormal poems.”

“I feel embarrassed in this class, as if standing not in my shoes.”

“Not poetry – I BEG YOU.” I looked up in dismay. What was all this? An overweight blond in the front row stared up at me for two solid hours with a fixed and unreadable expression, then announced it was her lunch-time and left.

Four dozen 3rd–year students in three sections, looking like colonies of meerkats on the alert, were simply frightened. It was they who told me the workshops had all been made compulsory – I almost laughed. Then, late in the afternoon I had my first coffee with R., the woman who invited me to teach here. I’ll tell you about it later. Most disturbing.

Walking home disheartened, I saw another side of Lithuania – what it once was, perhaps still is. A country family had gathered under a large tree. The adults spoke quietly, apparently waiting for someone. Soon I noticed a small boy just behind them, his arms flat against the big trunk, his cheek pressed to its bark, his eyes closed in concentration. Normal enough for a three-year-old, I supposed, but I slowed in amazement at the behavior of his family, for no one told him to ‘stop that nonsense’ or to hurry up. They glanced over now and then to see if he had finished yet, kept their voices low and simply waited. At the light on Traku Street, I looked over my shoulder again. Nothing had changed under that dappled tree. There they all were, waiting for a small boy to finish his moment of ecstasy, as if they and the afternoon were the spokes of a great wheel turning around this boy-tree, for surely he wished himself into it, an experience they recognized, even respected. It seemed an almost religious scene.

As I headed down the hill to my apartment, to my right were the walls of a large prison. To the left over some trees, a kind of witch’s hat on top of the church-steeple – at the bottom of the hill, a golden archer on a very tall pillar, erected by the Soviets for
iauliai’s 750th birthday; beyond it, a graveyard tucked into the trees behind a low stone wall. Then a lake, very blue, with forest to the horizon – also the view out my bedroom window. From my kitchen, I see the red-walled prison at the top of the hill. And hear it, too.

I’m reading E. C. Davies’ book of 1926, A WAYFARER IN ESTONIA, LATVIA, AND LITHUANIA. The Baltic countries she traveled through will never exist again in such purity. What she describes has mostly been destroyed by the Germans or the Soviets, even to the local legends. Here is the lake out my bedroom window, which on my map is called Tal
os E
eras:

The lake of S
iauliai, one of these ‘travelling’ lakes, has a legend, too. One morning long ago, the people of the town woke up to find a brand-new lake hovering threateningly over their heads, which had apparently arrived during the night out of the blue. The lake was in a thoroughly bad mood, too, and threatened to drown the whole town if it were not respectfully addressed by its correct name, which, unfortunately, no one knew. As the lake itself refused to disclose its name, the position was serious, and the priests ordered prayers and processions. Things were getting desperate, but an old Jewish woman who had prayed and wept with the rest, thought at least there could be no harm done if she addressed it by a few pet names. So she began beseeching the lake: ‘Oh, Bitmelis, Bitmelis’ she cried, and this was the name of the lake, which had been christened ‘Little Queen Bee.’ It was pacified and at once settled down amiably, and there it is, even at the present day. Now this legend is of particular interest because it links the Lithuanian belief in the idea of the Word being all-powerful – and of such power residing in the correct use of the name – with a similar idea which holds good in certain Eastern Faiths…

When I asked about it, no one had ever heard the lake called by this name. No one knew anything of this legend.

Only bread, cheese, coffee, in the apartment – no time to shop…

I sat exhausted on my front steps this evening – hauling boxes upstairs – when a funny thing happened. There are quite a few dogs in the neighborhood, with personalities and grudges to match their owners’. People shout at loose animals – there are frequent dog-fights. I could hear them tonight but was too tired to think where I was sitting. Here came a big young boxer prancing down the drive and not on a leash. Just over my head, its owner, Regina, watched carefully out her open window. The dog’s name is Laura, or as she says it in her Polish accent, Lauw-ra. The dog spotted me sitting on her step and came to full attention. Regina bellowed in warning, “Laura!” The boxer hesitated – and came for me at a run. Regina hurried for the door but I just sat there, too tired to care, so when the dog reached me and I still hadn’t moved, it only shoved its face into mine and slobbered on it, knocking me over. I shrieked with laughter – Laura barked noisily, but now Regina arrived. The poor dog got hauled inside to a terrible scolding.

The whole neighborhood had seen me carry boxes up the stairs, then sit there exhausted like any workman with my legs sticking out. Ladies do not do this in Lithuania. I could see them glancing out their windows to see if it had all come to a bad end, yet, so when Regina shouted, everyone saw Laura make a run for me, and when I didn’t move, they braced for disaster. But the unexpected happened. That a dog had sized me up first was a big plus: warm smiles from the matrons on my street next day. Grins from the men. You can’t fit in – they have to fit you in, in such places, and the surest way is to end up the subject of a funny story, because being in the right kind means safety. Regina and I both knew it had been a close thing, though. Her face was ashen when I stopped by to thank her – the door open only an inch or two, Laura blowing at the crack, grinding her hindquarters and that stub of a tail.

Regina sits at her open window on the ground floor and hollers at every child who passes, keeping an eye on things for the building. She’s a big, warm-hearted Pole – actually, a doctor of some kind. I seem to have been dumped on her. She is the only one to help me, and though she speaks no English, she comes to the rescue every time. When she learned I wasn’t English but American, a small cloud crossed her face for a moment but, whatever the hesitation, she let it go.

Every night at my kitchen window, I can hear a man shouting from the prison on the hill: “Yoo-liee!” Brando-like, until Julie comes. She stands below to call back up to him, and this is how they visit. When she doesn’t come, he shouts to the neighborhood his entire frustration at his circumstance, his life’s story at many decibels, with pauses, side avenues and a main theme he returns to. Prometheus chained to his rock, his spleen torn out every night, it can go on for an hour. No one stops him.

On my way to do some shopping, I climbed the long, sweeping flight of steps to the top of the hill to see the 16th-century church of Saints Peter and Paul,
v. Petro ir Povilo Ba
ny
ia, as the sign on the gate reads, a massive white structure, visible for miles around with its tall steeple. The church had been an easy target in the closing days of World War Two but survived, was repaired, and the interior was now being re-plastered, I discovered. No entry. I walked around the walled courtyard, instead, and found some curious things. Off to one side, a ten-foot stump of a tree wearing a huge metal hat which came to a point with a cross on top, like a fairy-tale come to life, and some twenty feet in front of the building, a large boulder, its flat surface uniformly pocked with indentations. I walked to the far side of the church and discovered some of those big, powerful Lithuanian crosses, bristling with smaller ones that radiate from a central aureole, ironwork topped by crescent moon and twisting spikes. In front of each was a life-sized plaster saint but they looked almost threatened by their settings, didn’t seem to match these crosses. Around to the back of the church, I discovered something much more peaceful: under the linden-trees a very old cross, the gray wood cracked and neglected, on its top a small roofed porch with filigreed railings. A whir of wings from it…

Tonight I read in E.C. Davies’ book that this was a soul cross:

Since the old Lithuanians believed strongly in the transmigration of souls, it is not surprising to find that a special provision was made for the departure of the soul from the body at the moment of death. Hence we have this most interesting type of cross known as the ‘soul cross’, which is distinguished from all other types by having a little umbrella-like top, the idea being that the soul can shelter under it on its journey upwards if the weather is inclement. On the upright are a series of notches. The soul is typified as a small winged creature with gossamer wings, and, should its wings get wet as it leaves the body, it will naturally have more difficulty in rising; so it can rest on these notches and dry its wings before soaring upwards into the ether….

There must have been two pagan Lithuanias. This one, which could add a soul porch to the top of a foreign cross with little fuss, and the other one, iron suns and moons, ominous spikes, a hostile struggle. Or, perhaps this is what it came to. Lithuania was the last country in Europe to be Christianized – in the 14th century, a thousand years after the Council of Nicea had codified Christian practice for the rest of the post-Roman world. Pagan elements remain strong for Lithuanians even now, stopping only at the doorstep of the church. Witness this courtyard.

A bakery nearby. To my amazement, on display was a tall cake much like those crosses in spirit, the sakotis, Lithuania’s national cake: a narrow spiral of spikes, layers of sharp-toothed wheels – a stack of suns. Glazed, not frosted. In church, then, the body and blood of Christ, wafer and wine. For weddings, they eat the sun.

Wheels, spirals, spikes – carved wood, wrought iron. No frosting.

I made my way down Vilniaus Street, searching for simple things I needed for the kitchen. No time today for the big crafts outlet, the amber jeweler, all these deli’s, but I paused to smile at the titles in the bookstore window: Deividas Koperfyldas. Oliveris Tvistas. Robino Hudo.
erlocko Holmso. Lithuanian is full of these strange endings, most of them sibilants. You hear –as and –os and –is peppering their sentences at every turn. Late afternoon – street and shops crowded – still no kitchenware… I headed for what looked like a big department store at the end of the street and, just before reaching it, happened to notice a wooden news-stand neat as a small carved house. I stopped in surprise, for at either end of its roof were the stylized, crossed horse-heads in an X seen all over Estonia on older houses and farm-buildings, meant to keep evil spirits from flying under the eaves. But of course, this has to be their home – with the Balts, not the Estonians, an entirely different people. The horse has been central to Lithuanian culture for thousands of years, and I’ve heard they still have a great reverence for them. These X’s on gables, and the sun symbols found everywhere in the Baltics, are from the Balts’ homeland somewhere further to the east and south, where sun and horse were sacred. Old Lithuania is a heartbeat away from the Vedas, and so is its language. Some years ago in India, I heard of an extraordinary ancient ritual, the a
vàmedha, which meansmare-sacrifice.Tonight while paging through a book by Marija Gimbutas, the great Lithuanian scholar of Central European and Baltic prehistory, I saw that the Lithuanian word for mare, old text, is a
và.

In the crowded, ex-Soviet department store, where they still used the abacus, I had a stunning encounter. Just before closing-time, my arms full of kitchen things, I maneuvered my way towards the cashier, trying not to collide with anyone. Suddenly, black cloth swept by. And again. I turned with caution. Not far away stood two magnificent monks, tall and strong-looking, hoods thrown back on tonsures, the wool of their black robes of the finest homespun. The change in atmosphere took your breath away. They looked at no one as they swiftly selected things, and no one in that crowd looked at them. The monks did their shopping without the slightest self-consciousness, which made their presence all the more electrically felt. No one stared at them as I was doing because they didn’t have to: in Lithuania, these were heroes. In the long struggle against communism, it was the Catholic Church and monks like these who led the resistance against the Soviets in a pitched ideological battle, with a dozen underground newspapers. Many monks and priests were imprisoned, a number executed. In this ex-Soviet store, they were an explosive presence. When they finished their shopping and stood behind me at the counter, I could hardly manage my purchases. In a daze I watched the clerk’s fingers flying on the abacus.

The wind was up, the sun low as I left the store, making my way carefully down the broken steps with all my packages. Around the corner came two more monks, moving sharply as swifts, their black robes boiling….

On my way home, along the wall of the churchyard and under a line of trees, I thought I heard singing. A distant radio – but the voices seemed to come from overhead. I stopped to peer into the branches and, after a moment or two, found several children hidden there, quietly singing along with the radio. They didn’t stop or smile but only watched me, in that absent-minded way that children have of claiming their own privacy. Down the long flight of steps to the bottom of the hill, the moon just clearing the woods on the far side of the lake, I kept waiting for a mother to call those children down from the trees, dark as it was, but none did.

Much can be learned about a country by watching how its children play – and whether adults interfere. From what I’ve seen in Lithuania, children to the age of about three are smothered in affection by adults, who meet their every wish – we’d call it “spoiling them.” Beyond three or so, they’re given complete freedom to learn the hard way, are left entirely to their own devices. They have time to play, freedom to imagine. My university students here are extremely sensitive, perhaps even too vulnerable for our modern world; but this rests on an impressive inner stability.

The neighborhood children spent some time the other day making a large, very smoky bonfire. This alarmed me: they’re only eight or nine years old, but nobody scolded them or paid the least attention as they passed, simply avoided their smoke. When the fire had barely settled down, the children took turns leaping over it. Now I understood. This was all to do with Midsummer’s Eve; they were imitating the adults, who have leapt over bonfires for thousands of years in the Baltics, and still do, on what is now called St. John’s Day – Jannipäev in Estonia, Joninas here – but it’s really part of their old religion. Lithuanians have another word for it: Rasa, which translates, “the dew is falling.” Nothing to do with St. John – it’s an old fertility celebration.

Poinga, poinga, poinga… A little squirt spends hours each afternoon going back and forth on his new pogo-stick outside my window. Envy of the neighborhood...

Traku Street, I read on the Shtetlinks website before coming here, was the location of one of
Siauliai’s two ghettos during World War Two. The Red Prison is mentioned. Where was the Ghetto? It must have been very nearby. I watch the children on that vacant lot out my window and wonder. I’ve located old foundations on its periphery – but these could be anything. There is a drift of spirit over this neighborhood like a cold ground-fog.

Coffee with R. – I have delayed telling you – it was troubling. She chose an outside table and collected two cups for us, but the moment she sat down, and before I’d even had a chance to stir my sugar, she began to tell me an anti-Semitic joke. A very long one. She followed it with a second one, short and brutal. At the end she said matter-of-factly, “Well, you know, Jews are the brunt of all jokes, here,” – that such jokes were very common. She moved on to Lithuanian literature. It was my first day on the job. This was our first coffee. I found myself completely bewildered.

I could see that if someone like this woman could tell such jokes – a university official, highly cultured, well-traveled – that anti-Semitism must still be very widespread in Lithuania. That was my first thought. And she knew of my interest in the Shoah. Was this some kind of test? A warning? Before changing the subject, she added if I wanted to know about the Jews in Lithuania, I should talk to Elke the German teacher from Cologne, because “she’s also interested in such things as you are.” I watched her red mouth move and didn’t know what to say.

This is how the Jews are remembered, then, I thought to myself: as the butt of jokes. As if still here. “Sarah, Sarah!” says the elderly woman through the wall to her neighbor, in R.’s longer one, pronouncing the name Sadah, “Tell Avrihim the debt is not cancelled!” R. explained, “She knew that by putting pressure on the wife instead of the husband, her own husband would get paid faster!” She threw her head back in a low laugh. But it occurred to me when I thought about it that, in fact, this joke showed a fairly close knowledge of Jewish life, some cultural savvy. This wasn’t so much an anti-Semitic joke as a Jewish one, but the people who should be telling it were gone. She had no right to repeat it but didn’t see this, had told the joke as though she’d just overheard it from a Jewish neighbor across their adjoining fence, he and the uncle laughing over it while their women washed up after supper in the 1930s because this joke was not without affection. I was ready to leap to my feet and throw the table aside, my own thoughts so alarmed me. What had I been hearing?

The names she had used were real Jewish names, surely pronounced just this way: Avrihim and Sadah. How could she know this joke unless it had been passed along without a break since it was last told in Jewish
iauliai? The parts she spoke for husband, wife and their two married neighbors had been done in familiar, even in comfortable character. Was this some Lithuanian way of saying, We miss you? It seemed an impossible thought, given that ninety-three percent of all Jews in Lithuania had been killed in the Shoah, a quarter of a million people, more than a few of them by the Lithuanians themselves, according to painfully emerging evidence. Such an enormous loss does not go unrecorded on a nation’s psyche. There has to be an outlet.

“Very common, here,” she had told me – very common – the warm cultural life of the missing Jews reconstructed by Lithuanians every day all these years in this strange and chilling fashion? There is a terrible poignancy to these jokes and in the fact that Lithuanians are so fond of telling them, even to a visiting scholar from America, even on her first day, even the very moment you sit her down for coffee. I do not think this woman is hard-hearted – she’s the mother of two polite young boys, has a distinguished and devoted husband, knows perfectly well what constitutes a tasteless joke. I think she wanted to talk about the Jews. I think she did it in the only way so far psychologically available to most people in countries like Lithuania, where an entire culture and its people were suddenly erased, leaving an enormous vacuum.

Walking home from the café sick at heart, I came across the little boy and the tree. There seemed to be two Lithuanias, two sides to the national character, a sweet side, full of light, and a darker one. An upward movement – a counter-pull. Prayers, and curses. Two worlds contending. Some kind of dualism not much to do with ethnic background, as if it came with the territory, with Lithuania.

All day I couldn’t remember her second joke, short as it was. Tonight, I see why. It took the form of the currently popular Russian type which is lightning-fast, a little blitzkrieg, very ugly. “A Jew opened a shop,” she began. But that was it. She threw her head back in silent laughter. No echo of Jewish humor, here. No warmth at all. This was a Holocaust joke for anti-Semites, so unlike the first that I thought perhaps it wasn’t Lithuanian, at all.

Late at night, some kind of unrest among the prisoners. Terrific howling on the hill, along with banging of metal in an insistent rhythm. Guards on the roof with sub-machine guns, pointing them into the prison-yard….

I couldn’t dislodge them. Tell Avrihim, I thought again for the hundredth time… debt not cancelled.

In my food-store at the top of the hill, where everything is behind long counters – nice pastries – dark breads – those perfect Baltic potatoes, yellow inside – I purchased again the excellent white local cheese, pointing to what I wanted, and some pastries. As I turned, I noticed something I’d failed to see before. Near the window, a cubicle about six feet square like a free-standing ticket-office and, inside it on a high stool, a middle-aged man bent over his work, wearing a magnifier in one eye, a fixer of watches and other small things, the parts littering his bench like a Lilliputian scrap-yard. When he glanced up he didn’t quite take me in but merely returned to his work, concentrating carefully, with a halo of light warming his bald head and his beautiful long fingers guiding the small tool. In this dim and shabby place, he was a sight as old as trade itself in Europe, a man exquisitely immersed in his craft in the midst of busy market-sounds – in this case, just an old Soviet food-shop with a game-arcade right behind him, four teenagers hip-shooting the enemy and whooping it up. He seemed not to notice.

Outside, just beyond the steps, two pensioners. Their basic pensions are 138 litas a month, only $34, so they are often to be found like this, selling whatever they can. A large and dignified man in coveralls stood holding one beautiful onion, the pride of his small allotment garden. Next to him crouched a woman with three tomatoes. He brushed off the onion and held it up for my inspection in his red hand, turning it this way and that. When I said “Yes,” he thought about the language gap then held up his finger – one lit – twenty cents. And so it goes. I opened my backpack and he placed the lovely onion in it carefully, as if he did this all the time. We smiled. I would have bought the woman’s tomatoes, too – she had inched them in my direction during the onion purchase – but the man gave me such a nice bow in parting, just the right size for his large self and the small occasion, that I would have spoiled it by staying.

A second coffee with R. – I couldn’t refuse. Her subject this time, thank heaven, was neutral: older artists. “They’ve suffered terribly since independence,” she said. “ Nobody wants them. For a few years they simply reeled, some went mad.” She explained that Lithuania has always been famous for drama and opera and, now that the theater was picking up again, parts were being found for these older actors and singers, who were also teaching an occasional class at universities or in the schools. “Like your visiting artists,” she said. “Except they’re not teaching their subjects. A famous actor from Soviet times is offering a course in algebra… another tutors in chemistry...” I was glad for this conversation. We needed to locate common ground – the arts would do. Her attitude was in all likelihood widespread in any case, I decided, if even she couldn’t see how revealing those jokes were. No doubt I was just as blind in other ways. She talked passionately about the arts in Lithuania…had been a music major, the violin her instrument…both sons studying it, now… We talked for a while about the importance of a musical education for all children but, for me, a worm had crawled into the apple. I felt I was learning something here I didn’t like the thought of, which undercut everything I believed in and set me adrift in my own life, a lesson now hardening by the hour: that art is not enough. It will not answer. She had moved on to Baltic languages and the history of her people. Some minutes later, as we prepared to leave, I asked if she employed any of those artist-pensioners at her university. “A few,” she said, but didn’t elaborate.

Lithuanians, unless they’re Russians or Poles, would be quite offended to be called Slavs, she’d told me. They are Balts, as I knew. Or even, a little wildly, Celts: on my first visit to the Teachers’ Room, a young instructor who had studied abroad marched over to me and said, “So! How am I to consider you?” Fists on hips. What could she mean? “Where did your ancestors come from?” I laughed a little – must not know many Americans, I thought. Assumes mine are all from one place.

“We’re Celts,” I offered, though this hardly covered the whole story. She brightened at once.

“Ah!” she cried, “Then I know you. We’re Celts, as well!” She ticked off “our common traits” but the only thing I could remember about “us” was Tacitus or someone remarking that Celts were fond of bright colors and incapable of prolonged thought. I wanted to ask her by what possible adventure Balts were Celts but didn’t get the chance – she’d flown out the door. Word for word, we could have had this same exchange, it seemed to me, four thousand years ago.

What’s outside your tribe is unknowable, where ‘knowing’ means to acknowledge mutual humanity. The names for any of the tribes I know all translate as ‘mankind’ or ‘people.’ Fine, when no other humans have ever been spotted in your world, but that was half a million years ago. Handy when others did appear on your horizon – they weren’t ‘mankind,’ thus easier to dispatch. This atavistic application of language, voodoo labeling, has been cleverly tapped into ever since, right up to the present day, wherever and whenever interests overlap. First, a campaign by increments to dehumanize. Then, do what you want, it doesn’t matter. They’re Not Us, they’re Other. Less than human.

“We have a term here for someone who doesn’t fit in – for outsiders,” one of the students told me yesterday, gloomily referring to herself. “We call them white crows.” White crauws is how she said it. I had to smile.

The key to the Teachers’ Room is kept in a locked box by the hallway receptionist, a thin woman of about fifty with a beehive hairdo. She knits and smiles, tends the ancient Bakelite telephone, which hardly ever rings, and plays Gregorian chants on an old reel-to-reel for the students, who are fond of her and squeeze onto the couches near her desk. She knows who I am by now, so always has the key ready when she sees me coming in the door. On Saturday, I stopped by to do some quiet work but, instead of our peaceful regular, found a large, sullen man of about eighty with thick white hair and a scrutinizing face, far too powerful a presence for a receptionist. An opera played on the reel-to-reel and he was reading a newspaper. Nor did he look up, strange behavior for somebody new on the job. “Could I have the key for the Teachers’ Room?” I asked, though there was faint chance he’d know English. No response – maybe he was hard-of-hearing. “Excuse me,” I said firmly. He studied me a moment over his half-glasses then returned to his paper. “Key,” I said, thrusting my fist forward in a turning motion, unlocking an invisible door, feeling like a fool, but it was my own fault for not knowing Lithuanian. He finally gave it to me.

Down the hall, the music cranked up a notch or two as I stayed for a while correcting papers – it sounded like FAUST. I smiled to myself as it got louder, but by the time I was ready to go, a bass voice had joined in – he was singing. I found him at the window with his back turned, one elbow out and his leonine head tucked in, his beautiful voice low on the register in Mephistopheles’ aria about the golden calf:

Le veau d’or est toujours debout!

On encense sa puissance. . . .

d’un bout du mond à l’autre bout!

Commenting on the world that had overtaken him: “The golden calf is still standing…one adulates its power…from one end of the world to the other”.… He didn’t see me. I set the key down quietly. She’d given him Saturdays, when his duties would be light, when no one would be here. It did show a nice sensitivity. “Et Satan conduit le bal…!”

Today our beehive lady approached me in the Teachers’ Room carrying a bag of large books, her sideline to augment what must be dreadful pay. “You want buy?” she asked, like a little girl selling her toys half-heartedly. I helped her to lay them out on the table. Two were collections of black-and-white photos of Vilnius and Kaunas, the bleary, high-in-the-chest views typical of Soviet photography. She turned the pages hoping to interest me, but I said No, not these, thanks. What about this one? “Gintaris,” she sighed, smoothing the cover of a large black-and-gold book, which showed three amber teardrops falling from a woodcut tree. The title – Russian above, English below – was: THE TEARS OF THE HELIADS I paged through it. Imprimatur: Moscow, 1991 – all about amber, glorious color on black pages. I hoped to visit Palanga soon, if I could figure out the buses…amber museum there…the Baltic Sea.… “Yes, this one, please,” I said, closing the cover. Though it must have amounted to half a week’s wages, she accepted the money sadly. She had not wanted to sell this book. The others were failed decoys.

Took it to bed with me last night – propped it on my chest. The English was overdone, too muscular: in short, fun. Amber is associated with the Lithuanian sun-goddess, but in this Russian book, the weight was on the Greek myth, where Phaeton, son of Helios, the sun-god, convinced his father to let him drive the great chariot of the sun for a day, but quickly lost control of it, the horses plunging too close to the earth, scorching everything. To save the world, Zeus killed Phaeton with a thunderbolt, near the river Oder or, in another version, the Vistula, where amber abounds. The Heliades were Phaeton’s three sisters who came to mourn him and were turned into weeping willows, their tears into those amber drops. A nice story, but not the one extant in Lithuania. Here it is in ripping Moscow English:

One folktale related by the Lithuanians, whose home is by the Baltic Sea that so often casts up blobs of amber after storms, tells the sad story of the sea princess Jurate, who enamoured of the handsome young fisherman Kastytis takes him to her amber palace at the bottom of the sea. However, in his rage the thunder-god Perkunas – twin to the Zeus of the Greeks and the Perun of the pagan Slavs – hurls a thunderbolt at the amber palace, wrecking it to its very foundations. Grieving for her dead lover, the inconsolable princess continues to this day to shed many a bitter tear, which the sea casts up as beads of amber. Meanwhile the larger chunks are believed to be remnants of Jurate’s ruined amber palace….

In the British Museum, on a clay Sumerian tablet from the 10^th century B.C., is the oldest known reference to Baltic amber. The poet tells of the search for this “gold-tinted gemstone in Arctic seas”… An old photograph of the missing Amber Room, now reconstructed in the Ekaterina Palace in the town of Pushkin… Snuffboxes…diadems… chess-sets…pipe-stands…. Stradivarius is thought to have coated his violins with amber resin… You can still buy amber ‘physicks’ bottled in Poland. Good for gout.

Located the Post Office today by stopping different people and simply holding up the parcel I wanted to mail. “Ah, Pashta!” they’d cry, pointing the way each time. It’s a fine stone building, mahogany partitions inside, desks for writing, also long queues and disappearing clerks. After some reconnoitering, I joined the right line and found myself behind a small, brown-coated woman, perhaps too poor, too hidden-away in life to venture out much, maybe too damaged by Soviet times, for when we neared the front of the line and she turned her head a little – I think to gauge if she could safely take out her coin-purse – I got the impression this was one of the few people in
iauliai who had never encountered a foreigner, or a stranger’s smile.

The smile had been nothing much, merely a reflex, but she kept looking at me. To my astonishment, her face now began to soften into sadness. She stared as if she recognized something but couldn’t quite remember where in the past she’d seen it. She took her time adjusting to this memory, all the while with her dim eyes fixed on me. Then she did something extraordinary. She stepped out of line and pushed me gently in front of her, making clucking sounds, completely surprising me. She flagged the attention of the bored young clerk for me, too, but when I’d bought my stamps and turned to thank her, she was gone. I caught sight of her hurrying out the big front doors and down the steps. Had it all been too much for her? Somebody gives you her place in line, I thought: what is that? I looked at the stamps in my hand, feeling a small, indefinable grief. This middle-aged, brown-coated woman, who in fact couldn’t have been much older than I was: what tectonic plates of history had collided, catching the hem of her life to crush her? But they hadn’t, quite. In the provincial post office of a small, Baltic country, a woman covers versts of frozen terrain and half a century of terror to help a stranger. The scrap of space she occupies, she gives to you. She’d left in triumph.

No one has time for my questions. Quite understandable, as I have a lot of them. I’ve now been asked to please direct them all to our department secretary, a languid beauty slow of movement. Wednesday, this exchange: “Edita,” I said, “to mail a letter, do I have to go all the way to the Post Office?”

“Yes.”

“There’s no post-box here at the university?”

“No.” A sub-tropical smile, the kind found in hammocks.

“Well, where do you mail the letters you type, then?” I said a little too sharply, not realizing she didn’t type many. “Do you walk all the way to the Post Office?” Edita pouted – a cloud threatened her holiday. Once outside, of course, I found a post-box just around the corner, attached to our building.

Friday, I had another question. This time, the long table was lined with teachers busy correcting papers. I asked her where I could find the big Saturday market. She looked seriously puzzled. “I don’t know of any market,” she said.

“There isn’t one?” But of course there was. Edita frowned as if checking her memory for any possible oversight, then shook her head.

“Hm-mm,” she said sadly.

“Edita!” cried one of the teachers. “You know there’s a market. It’s been there for seven hundred years!” Smiles along the table, but no one could tell me where the market was. “Oh, you’ll find it,” said one of them, flicking her pencil. “Can’t miss it.”

Questions are not the way, here. Nor are they in Estonia. Nor – an Asian connection to Baltic peoples lost in time – are they among Native Americans, either. No one tells you anything. To learn, first observe. When ready, imitate. You’re then sharply, cleanly corrected, humiliation being the oldest teacher. This approach is pan-Asian, perhaps universal, so archaic it involves no language and probably pre-dates our use of it. Think how the animals learn.

Last summer in the north woods, I awoke to the brief whistle of a bald eagle – a pair nested nearby. I rolled over to watch for them in the first gray light. The storm had moved on but the gale continued. There, an eagle – then another – and a third, this year’s awkward teenager, in a ragged brown coat. Over the next several minutes, I witnessed an amazing sight. All three sailed by not once but several times, upwind and down. Taking advantage of the gale, the adults demonstrated how to fly straight into a high wind without once moving your wings. One flap at the end to bank and come again, calling to their offspring, chiding him as he struggled to get the hang of it, rocked awkwardly, made little chalkboard cries. Oh, how he fought the temptation to flap those wings going upwind! On the fifth run, he got it: the moment he did, the adults left him.

The difference in how childhood is regarded, East and West, is Rousseau,^[2] whose influence never crossed the Oder or the Vistula. East of there, it is not Romanticized, remains indigenous, even Darwinian. To us, this looks cruel.