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.