Out of Context

(Warning: I wrote this entry in a bout of culture shock. In my quest to be honest about my experiences, I have put Lithuania forth in an unflattering light. Please take this as what it is: not a commentary on Lithuania or its people but simply the ravings of a spoiled American out of context.)

I’m sorry, Lithuania. It’s not me; it’s you. Your buses stink, your people are rude, and your food, for those who actually eat anything in this godforsaken place, is enough to turn Cindy Crawford into a potato-shaped babushka. Let’s take these complaints one at a time.

Culture Shock Item #1: The Lithuanian Buses

Some smell like toilets, some like locker rooms, and the best like ancient attics drenched in diesel fuel. If you ride them after 7:00 am, you have to stand in the aisle and hold on to a greasy pole overhead while natives, mostly elderly women who have eaten too many potatoes, shove past, even though there is never any space in the back of the bus either. As they heave themselves forward, they knock me, my school bag, and all of the parts I am not supposed to rub up against people up against people. I imagine shouting, as I am thrust again and again into my wincing bus-mates, “This is what you get for sitting down!” Just when you think that it can’t get any worse, the bus police climb aboard.

If you think that “bus police” sounds like the equivalent of a Midwestern mall cop, think again. They may be all older women, and they may look all puckered and sweet, but if you don’t have a ticket, they will swarm around you with their little billy clubs and they will take your non-ticket-toting ass down. They will whisk you off to a van with shaded windows where they commit unspeakable acts of God-knows-what, but I’m sure it involves a scene like in Roald Dahl’s “Witches.” Another slippery thing about bus police: you never know when they’re going to show up. One minute you’re just minding your own business trying not to breathe through your nose and the next they’re invading the aisles in a spontaneous rendition of Charlie’s Angels meets the Golden Girls.

My first run-in with the bus police didn’t go so hot. I was standing at the back exit waiting to hop off at the next stop when the bus driver pulled over and failed to open the back door. At such moments, my Lithuanian abandons me, so instead of calmly requesting the driver to open the door, I began pounding excitedly on the Plexi-glass with my fists and yelling the Lithuanian equivalent of “Please! Please!” in a hysterical voice. It was only then that I realized we had been infiltrated, that I was trapped, and that in my present position of banging and shouting maniacally, I looked the slightest bit guilty. I then decided to confirm this by plunging around in the folds of my clothing for my ticket as though I were being attacked by a cloud of bees.

I am not the sort of person who cleans out her pockets on a regular basis, so when I reached for my ticket, I dislodged a linty nest of yes, bus tickets, but also store receipts, gum wrappers, bobby pins, grocery lists, and, somehow, the head of a broken potato peeler, which, though it did look vaguely threatening, didn’t stand a chance against their faithful clubs. After trembling through the scrunched wad like a woman condemned to die, I handed over the five tickets that looked the newest and prepared for the worst. Wouldn’t you know it, one of the tickets must have matched because the woman rolled her eyes (either a universal gesture of annoyance or a secret signal to the others that they’d have to jump me later), handed my tickets back, and went on to sweetly accost her next victim.

Culture Shock Item #2: The Lithuanian People

I am grateful to the bus police for one thing: They at least confirm that I exist. Other times I walk through this city and I could swear I’m invisible. Doors close in my face, people walk right in front of me and then stop, and pushing a shopping cart through the supermarket is like playing a virtual reality version of Atari’s Frogger. Yes, I know I’m supposed to be tolerant and understanding and blah blah blah, but at this point I’m just going to be honest: If one more person gouges me in the gut with a shopping cart, I’m going to look that person right in the eye, scream “AT-SI-PRA-SAU!” (EX-CUSE ME!) and gouge right back!

Culture Shock Item #3: The Lithuanian Food

I was reading an article about culture shock and discovered that one tell-tale stage is when you become fixated on food from your own culture. Lithuania doesn’t do much to help its cause, let me tell you. If Lithuanians were what they ate, this city would be full of gray meat torsos walking around on potato legs with dumpling arms and sour cream dollop heads. Because I am now completely obsessed with American food, I have been cooking more. However, this doesn’t work so well because I still have to buy the ingredients at Lithuanian grocery stores. Last night I baked corn bread. I imagined my mother’s fluffy golden cornbread clouds steaming with melted butter. Instead the texture resembled yellow Play-Do that’s been left out all night with the lid off. I’ve been so desperate to taste America I even went as far as making chili. Scott, bless his poor American heart, has been speaking about hamburgers like old, dead friends, and he’s even gone so far as to microwave hot dogs, which he’s then cut up and added to macaroni noodles in a powdered cheese sauce. I’m watching him go slowly insane, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

Considering all of this, it’s really no surprise what came next. Some would say it was only a matter of time.

That’s right. We went to McDonald’s. And what’s more, we relished each and every bite. Because at McDonald’s, a Big Mac is always a Big Mac and fries are always fries and the Quarter Pounder with Cheese, although here it’s called the McRoyal, still contains enough saturated fat to clog a small artery. Afterwards, we felt both more dead and more alive. As we waddled back to the bus stop, we promised each other that we’d never do that again. At least not until Thanksgiving.

The Anointing

I have been anointed in oil
by the bus that
runs too close to
the sidewalk on Manto
Gatve not only
oil but also
rain and whatever
the rain washed off
blood
perfume
piss
beer
smoke

in New York City I
once watched a man
bend back his head and
close his eyes and
smile and
take the whole sky in his arms and
spin

he smelled like I do
now
all of life is an
anointing all of life
is atoms suspended
in air my professor
said there is always
a chance however
small that you could
walk through a wall
there is also a chance
that the curtain of water
will pass right
through you

it’s enough to draw
the tongue from out
the mouth like
a dagger enough
to split you inside
out to throw back
your wings drenched
in blessing and
dance

Turgus Sriuba (otherwise know as Market Soup)

Every Sunday for 4 weeks now Scott and I have made a hearty pot of soup with whatever we can find at the Klaipeda market, which is still an endless source of fascination for me. The things one finds there! Outside, along the tables that stretch long-ways under the slanted roofs, there are mum fireworks exploding everywhere out of rusty, sawed-off plastic water bottles. Buckets upon grubby white buckets of orange mushrooms. Crates of raw red cranberries. Gnarled white parsnip fingers. Tumbling heaps of pink and green apples. Runty brown onions, peeling. Garlic in tubby ivory clumps. Wilting, lovesick bouquets of parsley, lovage, cilantro. Caveman clubs of green zucchini. The rare bell pepper, red or green or orange, small, often wrinkly, and deformed. And the people-the people! One man with a mouth like a rotten bathtub cut me a piece of pear, fondled the heft with his soiled hands, drew the knife across. In America, I would have run the other way screaming. As it was, I took the sample straight from his coal-black fingers, popped it in my mouth, and promptly bought a kilo. Best pears I’ve ever tasted.

Inside the market building you find the meats and eggs and cheeses. The ham section, for me, is like a car accident. I just stand there and stare until they try to sell me something, upon which point I get scared that I’m going to accidentally purchase Wilbur’s foot and move on. There are pig snouts and pig hooves stacked in piggy pyramids. Sawed-off piggy faces with the little piggy eyes, glazed over. Curling piggy ears, pink and alert. It’s like they would have just put the whole pig in there if they could have, but to make it fit, they simply chopped off the parts that stuck out and tossed them into separate piles. I wonder if they even killed the poor things first or if they just started lopping. As an American, I naturally feel that meat should be completely unrecognizable, even though I know that to wish this is to drown myself in falsehood.

Further on, there’s my chicken buddy who surprisingly hasn’t died of Salmonella even though she picks up the raw, rubbery pieces with her bare hands and does questionable things, like smear her fingers on her sticky apron or lick them thoughtfully to assist in separating plastic bags. One time I saw her drop a woman’s change onto a heap of raw flesh. My chicken buddy simply dug it out, wiped it on her grimy sleeve, and handed it over the counter. The woman looked almost as disgusted as I felt, which made me feel a little less foreign.

Then there’s the egg lady, whom I secretly fear, with a castle of blonde hair and lips like a two-year-old colored her with crayon. She will never allow me to buy less than 10 eggs at a time, even though I try obstinately to pretend I don’t understand her when she rejects, over and over, both my mini egg carton and my carefully rehearsed Lithuanian. “Sesi kiausinai, prasoum. Sesi kiausinai.” I’ve even tried calling her bluff by shaking my head and walking forlornly off with my empty container, but she is adamant. She knows she is the only egg lady at the market, and she uses it to her advantage. I’ve got to find another egg lady, one who understands that it would significantly raise our cholesterol if we had to eat 10 eggs before they went bad.

Once home, we pull out all the precious veggies and scrub off the thick clumps of dirt. Scott sets up shop at the dining room table with our only good knife and the cutting board while I boil water and fry up the chicken. As I mentioned in an earlier post, it is cold here and there’s no heat yet, so cooking a big pot of soup serves not only as sustenance for days but also as a furnace of sorts. Pretty soon the windows fog up with the rolling steam and we toss the onions and garlic in with the chicken. The pot becomes a veritable rainbow. Red tomato skins, white and orange parsnip and carrot medallions, khaki potato cubes, translucent ribbons of onion. Then, the finale, a heap of fresh herbs that glow almost neon green for a glorious minute, then fade to the color of autumn grass.

The Nineteenth Fall in a Free Lithuania

Fall has always been my favorite season. I adore wearing warm boots and thick, oversized sweaters. I luxuriate in harvest food and get a bubbly feeling in my stomach whenever I roast squash or sip cider or smell pumpkin pie. But the biggest reason is because I’ve always been a melancholy fool, even before I had much reason to be. Fall has always faithfully furnished me with plenty of opportunities to gaze out my window, wherever I am, and plunge myself into some vague delicious anguish while reciting poems from whatever poet I’ve been reading, especially poems about thwarted love, the passing of time, and, of course, death. This was most pronounced in high school after my 11th grade English teacher had introduced us to Alfred Lord Tennyson. I would sit out behind my parents’ garage on a fallen tree gazing abjectly out across the golden fields, smoking the secret cigarettes I had tucked carefully into my sock and imagining myself a modern-day Emily Dickinson. Oh, how the dying leaves wept as I recited!

“Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depths of some divine despair
Rise from the heart and gather to the eyes
In looking on the happy autumn fields
and thinking of the days that are no more”

Of course, this anguish was paradoxically a delight, and I wallowed in it. As I have grown older, I have found enough in this world to make me sad without extra assistance. Though I still revel in poetry, I have read less and less to the changing leaves. I have come to realize that pain is not a rich and languorous passion. Quite frankly, it’s real and it sucks.

Here in Lithuania the autumn seems more ominous. It brings us warnings on the wind of the short gray days to come, warnings of entire months of half-lit darkness striped with the freezing streaks of Klaipeda’s incessant horizontal rain. The dying leaves here are not like the Michigan leaves that drop to the ground engorged with a furious blood. Most simply turn brown and crispy and unceremoniously fall. Here it is already cold and windy and wet. As I write this, I’m bundled up in thermal pajamas, two blankets, and duck down slippers because unseen forces control the housing temperatures, and it has to get really cold for a consecutive number of days before those forces finally cave in and turn on the heat. Already, it would be difficult to survive if you had to live on the street.

Before the weather plummeted even more, Scott and I decided to visit the capital city of Vilnius. It takes about 4 hours to get there by train, a train with compartments that delightfully resemble the Hogwarts Express. We arrived late Friday night and ambled through Old Town to reach our bed and breakfast. The next morning we visited a few ancient, breathtaking cathedrals and then arrived at the Genocide Museum, also known as the KGB Museum, as it is located in the building where both the Gestapo and the KGB used to operate.

Lithuania, as you can probably guess, has had a very volatile history. After the first Russian occupation, it celebrated about 20 years of independence until it was invaded by the Germans during the Second World War. During that time, hundreds of thousands of Lithuanian Jews were massacred. About 1941, due to a secret treaty between Germany and the Soviet Union, Lithuania was handed over to the Russians, and what would become a 50-year occupation began, not ending until 1991-not even two decades ago.

To enter the KGB museum, you walk along a sidewalk that looks like any other sidewalk. Then you notice the memorial. That very sidewalk is where the KGB used to dump the dead bodies of Lithuanian resistors whom they had shot and killed inside the building. From small windows in the basement rooms, guards would watch civilians walk past. If anyone passing the dead bodies showed signs of recognition or remorse, the guards would make a note of it, and the passer-by would be hunted down and taken to the basement of that very building, which was a high-security prison.

Our tour of the basement prison was enough to bring me to tears. English audio guides informed us of the atrocities committed there, of how 20 people would be kept in one room, not allowed to stand within 50 centimeters of the walls and never allowed to sit. We witnessed the padded cell furnished with the actual straight jacket interrogators had used, the long black ribbons of sleeves flayed out like bats’ wings. We stood inside the solitary-confinement room where prisoners were kept for weeks on end in order to break down their sanity. We peered through windows into the water rooms where prisoners had to stand naked on a stool for several days. When they drifted off to sleep, they would fall into the water. In the winter, they sometimes filled the rooms with jagged chunks of ice. Finally, at the end of the snaking corridors, we saw a collage of photographs, the dead bodies of men and women that the KGB had carted around town and propped up in different places in order to provoke the natural human emotions of other resistors and family members. Their clothing soaked in blood. Their faces almost comical, dazed. Their mouths half-opened, eyes rotting. This is where I thought about all those I love-about Scott and about all of you-thought about what that would do to me, to anyone, and I lost it.

Upstairs, on the 2nd floor, there was a different exhibition about the hundreds of thousands of Lithuanians-the elderly, the dashing young men, the pregnant women, the newborn babies- who had been shipped off in cattle carts to Siberia for years of hard labor in work camps. I was strangely reminded of Dr. Suess’s story about how the Grinch stole Christmas. Remember that? All the Whos down in Whoville lost everything: their Christmas presents, their Christmas lights, their food, even the logs for their fires. But the next morning, the Grinch heard singing-singing! They had nothing, yet they still held hands and rejoiced. In Siberia, Lithuanians made prayer books out of birch bark, rosaries out of thread. They made wedding cakes out of boiled potatoes. They gathered for Christmas Eve “feasts”, Easter “feasts”. They crocheted pillow cases. They wrote poetry. They played busted accordions. They danced! They hooked their arms around each other’s waists and smiled-smiled!-for pictures. One picture showed several women, some younger than me, wearing sheepskin coats and jumbles of thick headscarves. Snow whirled around them, the white flecks pelting their raw faces. They held heavy tools in their mittened hands. But they had all locked arms, and they were smiling. All of that, all of that, and still they were smiling.

To see that, to see what humans can do to one another, and then to see how that very same fucked-up creation can react is, itself, miraculous. The tendency when I hear such stories is to vilify one side and bestow the other with sainthood. The Soviets were evil, the Lithuanians were good. To do this is to miss the material point.

I had assigned my class to write a paragraph on an experience that changed their lives. One student, who is from Russia, wrote about a Russian friend of hers who had been caught in the middle of the recent Russian-Georgian conflict in South Ossetia. In America, we cursed those damned Russians and cheered on the underdog, the Georgians. But it was Georgian soldiers who changed my student’s life by shooting and killing her young friend. Whatever our intentions, war comes down to killing.

Now almost 20 falls here have passed free of Soviet occupation. Remarkably enough, the Soviets finally understood the Lithuanians to be serious about independence when Lithuanians from all over the country gathered in Vilnius around the Parliament building and the Television Tower on a frozen January evening in 1991 and held hands and sang. They sang patriotic songs, Roman Catholic songs. The Russians cut the city’s electricity, and the tanks rolled in. Still the Lithuanians stood and sang. In the dark, the tanks rolled silently, some over legs, arms, torsos. The swinging guns knocked protestors down and threw them under the rolling treads. The singing continued. With the whole world watching, it would have been folly to fire. After killing 14 people and injuring hundreds, the tanks withdrew. Finally, the Soviets packed up and left.

Now I see elderly men and women who never make eye contact and I finally understand why, because they have lived through that hell, through that fear. Now I climb the stairs to our apartment, an old Soviet building, and the concrete walls are the same dirty sea-green color as the walls of the prison, and I shiver and wish there were more light. But now I also teach students from Russia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, students who have just graduated from high school. I am teaching the first generation of college students here who has never, even in their earliest years, known Soviet rule.

We are here, and we are free and alive. Life itself has triumphed.

It’s enough to make you want to grab someone else’s hand and break out singing.