From Russia with Lunch (11 page)

Pieces from as far afield as India and Mexico offer visitors the opportunity to see just what a multitasker the Devil is. He wrestles rams, covets maidens senseless and is awfully fond of a straddle. Inside one exquisite Venetian glass bottle he splays his legs over a plinth and grins upwards at the very thought of being balls-deep in brandy.

The Devil's long association with alcohol was a recurring theme: in one bronze sculpture, the Dark One is doing his best Pussycat Doll impression with legs akimbo, hips jutted forward and lascivious smile on his reptilian lips as he tempts a hapless human with a bottle balanced out in front of him on his tail. I was also smitten by a pewter mead service consisting of seven cups arranged on a tray. To the unsuspecting observer, all carried the same floral motif, yet one had you-know-who leering out from behind the greenery. This cup was ingeniously fitted with a false bottom, so that while those around you were getting slaughtered on honey booze, your intake was limited and no one was any the wiser.

The story goes that Lucifer invented alcohol from she-goat's urine – thus also inventing a new meaning for the expression ‘on the piss'. Another vice that the Devil is apparently responsible for is tobacco – although the experts remain divided over whether his wife cultivated it or whether it grew in his mother's grave. Either way, he apparently had a thing for one-eyed witches.

Although this is but one of the twenty-two collections AZ amassed in his ninety years, the Devil was never far from his mind. Aside from attributing his longevity to Satan, he seemed determined to assign the number 13 great significance in his life. After all, he met his wife on the 13th of the month and his only child was born in 1913. Convinced? Me neither.

What is undeniable, however, is the extent to which the Dark One stars in local mythology. At last count, his name was featured in the credits of 5000 tales. Until religious celebrations went underground in 1947, devil representations played an important role in Shrove Tuesday proceedings throughout Lithuania. Celebrating the end of winter and its demonic creatures, revellers would create masks made out of clay, fabric or wood, each trying to outdo the others in terms of sheer Luciferian ugliness. Dozens of these hooknosed, jagged-toothed caricatures hung in the museum. Although many bore a striking resemblance to the Muppets' Waldorf and Statler, favourite devil archetype characters included bears, crows, goats, beggars, gypsies and Jews. Original.

I am enough of a museum geek to have a top 5 and this one made it with a bullet. Spacious, multilingual, quiet and irreverent, its sheer wonder put my temporal faculties on hold. Two hours evaporated like English enthusiasm on day one of a test match, and I had just enough time to jot down the Devil's recipe for eternal youth: combine excretions of young lizards, antler shavings, white coral, rice and flour with almonds, vine slugs and honey. Then smear over the breasts, face and hands. I wondered whether I might be able to nab a vial or two in the giftshop.

Although I normally hurry through the half-arsed commercial appendages attached to museums, I was quite looking forward to this one. Deep in my painted velvet fantasies, I expected this to be a bounty of kitsch delights. Know what I got?
Bubkus.
Zero, nil, squat. An empty foyer and bewildered attendant who was clearly wondering why I was still hanging around. Helpfully mustering what little English she possessed, she said: ‘Toilet?'

I mustered my even scantier Lithuanian and replied, ‘
Krautuve
?' Which is an all-purpose word for ‘shop'.

She then gestured in the direction of the door, but I refused to go. Seized by the zeal of potential profits, I bolted towards her cubicle with such enthusiasm that she instinctively pushed her chair back a couple of feet. An ugly entrepreneurial dimension I never knew I had then proceeded to hijack my mouth for three minutes. As I recollect, I told this poor woman that she really should think about the merchandising opportunities afforded by her organisation. I then spoke of a canteen offering devils on horseback and a range of clothing for toddlers with the brand name Beelze-Bub. I fear I may even have used the words ‘PowerPoint presentation'. Imploring her to use her imagination I stood amid hypothetical shelving in the echoing foyer, bringing it home Al Jolson style with a grin and jazz hands. Again she pointed to the door – although this time it was an order.

Heading back towards the central artery of Laisves Aleja, I swung a sharp left en route to the magnificent Neo-Byzantine bulk of St Michael The Archangel. Built between 1891 and 1893, it features a series of soaring metallic domes that reflect the sky's mood. Which happened to be bruised and bloated with imminent rain. As imposing – ornate columns, garlands of floral plasterwork and terraced pediments – as it was, it was also blighted by unpainted downpipes and gutters from Ugly Aluminium R Us.

It was not the church itself that drew me so much as its crypt. Rather than using the catacombs for storage space, the church rather generously gave the basement over to students from the Kaunas University of Technology. Here, they created the Museum for the Blind. Where many would have constructed staid – yet worthy – exhibits lauding your Helen Kellers, your Stevie Wonders and your Brailles, this team instead decided to immerse the sighted in the world of the blind. As one might expect pootling around in a basement, what you are confronted with is perfect blackness. Light pollution is so much a part of modern life that it's easy to forget the crushing weight that total opaqueness brings to bear. Robbed of visual training wheels, you careen between alienation, claustrophobia and a fear you know is illogical. You also find yourself thinking the eyes will eventually adjust, yet no iris is wide enough to glean a shape from these tenebrous depths.

The museum is divided into five areas, each designed to sharpen a particular sense. The first is all about touch and you barge your way through hessian-covered boxing training bags suspended from the ceiling. Each weighs upwards of 20 kilograms and when nudged sideways they return to shunt you into others. It's like being trapped on a moving train in the world's longest tunnel where there's standing room only and all your fellow passengers are drunk body builders.

Bouncing against a padded wall, I found the entrance to the next section of the museum. It was accessed via a pitch black parody of the rebirth experience in which one plunged headlong through fleshy foam folds. Here, I was blasted by an industrial-sized wind machine which neatly transferred what felt like days of accumulated grit directly onto my wide and straining eyeballs. Traversing another set of out-sized rubber labia, I stepped into a hosiery forest. In what I imagine to be an approximation of a transvestite dance club, I found myself brushing against so many pantyhose in which dangled various spheres. Affixed to both ceiling and floor, the nylons bulged with globules ranging from the barely perceptible to the practically invasive. Between these were wind chimes which I set a-tinkling through a succession of unintended headbutts.

Groping through the gussets, I found a wall and like a street mime proceeded to travel along it hand after hand. Surely, a gap would present itself through which I could escape. None was forthcoming. With my internal compass scrambled, I was convinced I had travelled through 360 degrees with no exit detected. There are times when panic seems too impotent a concept to describe one's degree of terror and this was one of them. Logically, I knew the gris-tled church caretaker would eventually become suspicious that I hadn't returned to the surface and flick a secreted switch. This sense of rationality, however, had not only been kidnapped by hysteria and alarm, it was also beginning to exhibit traits of Stockholm Syndrome. It was only on the second circumnavigation of the room that I encountered a guide of thick oiled rope which disappeared round an unseen corner and towards the faintest outline of a spiral staircase.

With the icy sweat that had blossomed between my shoulderblades beginning to dry and my pulse diminishing to that of a freshly crowned Miss Universe winner on speed, I gripped the coiled twine a little less tightly and hastened towards the light. However, the Museum for the Blind had one more trick in store. The serpentine rope which had guided me from potential blubbing embarrassment to an adrenalin-enriched completion of the adventure tapered not to a knot or an adjoining banister or even a wan drooping. No. The jokers at the Kaunas University of Technology had seen fit to affix the bones of a human hand to this ultimate marker on the tour. I yelped like a puppy that had just been trodden on. Something which clearly delighted the museum caretaker, who did little to stifle his rattling giggles as he ushered me blinking and skittish into the bright afternoon.

Laisves Aleja is the longest pedestrian street in Lithuania and after slinking beneath an underpass, it resurfaces on the periphery of the modest Old Town. Wide and cobbled, it is hemmed by neat three-storey apartment blocks whose glassed-in ground floors have been given over to retail trade. Unadorned by the flourishes that seem to drip off Vilnius' buildings, these would have called to mind an Edwardian restraint and symmetry were it not for the fact that they are often painted in shades of pistachio and cut-price bisque. Where Vilnius is that girl in class who pops an extra button and wears her skirt just short enough to provide an intermittent flash of fake-tanned thigh, Kaunas was the one with mischievous eyes behind tortoiseshell frames who could quote Mel Brooks and refused to get a Facebook page. The more contact I had with her, the deeper my affections grew.

For a start, Kaunas delights in the cerebral over the physical. Its buildings might not be as grand or imposing but what awaits inside – such as the Devil Museum or Museum for the Blind – gives such aesthetics short shrift. On the 500-metre cruise from St Michael The Archangel Church down Laisves Aleja, I counted six theatres, each catering for different audiences: classical, children's, comedy, musical, modern and philharmonic. Wood-panelled bookstores abounded, as did myriad coffee and tea houses. These, however, were not the franchised abominations sprouting in retail precincts throughout the world where too-perky ‘customer greeters' demand to know your name before broadcasting to all and sundry the arrival of ‘a skinny mocha-chocolate grande Americano – no cream'. Rather, these establishments focus on a particular beverage with an obsessiveness that borders on the deranged.

One cappuccino-scented café offered sixty blends to be ground by the cup with double that number available in take-home packs. There was no food, no soft drinks, no artificial sweetener sachets. They did coffee, alone and magnificently.

Within 20 metres was a tea salon stacked floor to ceiling with foot-high jars, each containing its own pungent inveiglement. Dextrous shop assistants navigated the glassy heights via ladders on rails while customers dived headfirst into the canisters to breathe in the respective bouquets. It was an exercise in wondrous sensuality. A melange of berries, currants and the dried peels of orange and apple had me reeling backwards in time to my grandmother's kitchen in Johannesburg. Green teas laced with honey called to mind bushwalks in the New South Wales Blue Mountains while another scented with vanilla and lavender smelt simply like home.

Nursing a pot of orange pekoe and steeped in memories, I joined the dozen other customers in the cramped seating area. Beside me was a student I estimated to be in his early twenties. He wore faded denims, Converse sneakers, a Billabong hoodie and an expression that pleaded to be distracted from his engineering textbook. No sooner had I asked whether I could borrow his sugar than Vytautas Vargas surmised I was Australian. He then introduced himself and asked whether I surfed or had been attacked by a shark while doing so. Admirably masking his disappointment at receiving two negative answers, he then enquired about my connection to Lithuania and congratulated me for visiting his city.

‘This is the most Lithuanian city in Lithuania,' he said, delighting in both my confusion and his cryptic command of English. ‘There are more Lithuanians living here than in Vilnius,' he added by way of clarification. ‘You won't hear people speaking Russian or Polish as much here. Of course, we are proud of our city and like to have visitors, but we've not sold out like Vilnius. We know who we are and aren't going to change that to make us better friends with the EU.'

This was delivered with a smile that was not so much ear to ear but, I suspected, ended somewhere in the vicinity of the base of Vytautas' skull. Which made it tough to gauge just how much bile was involved in the sentiment. He then leant forward and whispered conspiratorially, ‘Dave, Dave, you like basketball?'

‘Sure,' I said, searching my cerebellum for the one piece of hoops trivia I had stored in preparation for this trip. ‘Basketball is popular at home. In fact there's an Australian player in the Lithuanian league, his name is —'

Before I could finish the sentence, Vytautas chimed in with, ‘Matthew Nielsen!', his voice sliding up an octave. ‘Good,' he continued, ‘tonight we play. You come.'

Despite being around the six foot two inch mark, I am to basketball what Britney Spears is to elegance and I asked whether I could sit this one out instead of participating. He gave me that special look perfected by teenagers everywhere who suspect an adult of being rather slow on the uptake, then explained that Lithuania was taking on Russia in the semi-finals of the European Championships that evening. He and some mates were gathering at a pub to watch the game and I was invited along. ‘After all,' he said as he jotted down that evening's location and time details, ‘they're your team too.'

In the meantime, he recommended I check out the Lithuanian Folk Instruments Museum. I nodded politely and wrote this excursion off as being slightly less enticing than a barium meal. An hour later, however, I stumbled upon the place and thought if this was a local's must-see, it was probably worth a squiz – seeing as I was right there and all. If this was a three-pointer, Vytautas would have drained it with nothing but net. I was transported into a world of plaintive melodies and deceptively simple harmonies. Spread over two houses which converge on a central courtyard, this facility bears testament to the Lithuanian love of music. At last count, some 500,000 folk songs have been collated with the most popular topics being love, family, life, lamentation, protest and emigration. The category that dwarfs them all, however, is work. Certain tunes became associated with traditional activities such as hay-making, harvesting, grinding grain, processing flax, spinning and weaving.