From Russia with Lunch (21 page)

‘How long?' she asked.

When I find myself in socially uncomfortable situations, my instinct is to make with the funnies and hopefully break some of the ice. My response – ‘That's a rather personal question' – only served to further freeze her upper slopes and after adding a 30 per cent smartarse tax to the room rate quoted by the equally frosty tourist office, she tossed a key attached to a bakelite wedge in my direction. Clattering off the counter and onto the floor, it echoed through the lobby.

Now I am generally not one for conspiracy theories, but bugger me if that might not have been the signal for some hunchbacked lackey to start icing up the bath in which I would find myself sans a kidney the next morning. Can I add that our entire conversation was also conducted with a menthol cigarette dangling from her extravagantly lacquered lips. By the close of this discussion, she was beyond words and when I asked directions to the lift she merely sucked on her bottom lip, thus causing the tip of the smoke to rise in the direction she couldn't be bothered pointing to.

The lift, meanwhile, was one of those arthritic trundlers which lurched from floor to floor with a death rattle that would have had Norman Bates plumping for a Holiday Inn. The musty corridors were lined with carpet in a rigor mortis purple and I found myself walking to my room a little more briskly than I intended. Once inside, I was presented with a cubicle dominated by a single bed, a large window which was rapidly being filled by storm clouds and a succession of surfaces which bore peeling testament to the laminator's art. The shower was no more than a shower-head attached to the wall beside the toilet. And yes, out of sheer boredom I multitasked.

With fat splats of rain now head-butting the windows, I was temporarily confined to this dreary box. Hoping television was to be my salvation, I flicked on the set only to encounter a grainy image strikingly similar to the one outside the window. As thunder caused the panes to tremble in their frames, the howling started. To one side of my room, a woman began sobbing incessantly, each clap bringing with it more anguish. As if on cue, when she paused for breath a lonely and frightened dog a few doors down made its presence known. In a touch that would have made Stephen King get the hell out, the lights then flickered. Quietly confident that my girlie squeal had been drowned out by the haunted hound, the lamenting lady and the squally storm, I bolted down the passage and out of the lobby with only alliteration for company. In the deserted and sodden pedestrian mall, can-can music still played and in the distance an amber-lit café beckoned. Huddled under a canopy out the front were half a dozen teenagers trying to smoke their way out of an extended lifetime in Panevezys. Inside, it felt like I had arrived late to a wake.

Only one of the dozen tables was occupied. In this case by two women – one of whom was delivering the universal ‘you're too good for him' speech while the other sniffled daintily into a handkerchief. The scene was presided over by a teenage waiter I imagined was the kind of boy whose pockets were filled with disgusting discoveries. At least that's what the crescents of dirt under his fingernails implied. He also seemed chronically shy, a trait which was rather at odds with his job choice and multiplied when it became apparent we would have a language barrier to surmount.

Shortly after he ferried out a stack of caramel pancakes to the restaurant's only other customers, I motioned him over to my table, pointed at their food, gestured at my table and even went so far as to pat my stomach. He responded with the smile of sympathy-tinged obligation reserved for all crappy charades then disappeared into the kitchen. He then reappeared preceded by a chef in stained checked pants and an expression which suggested I had been referred to as ‘a troublemaker'.

‘What you eat?' she said.

I once again pointed to the dessert being enjoyed by my fellow diners.

‘You want this?'

‘Yes, please. The caramel pancakes.'

‘Is fruit.'

‘Oh, I thought they were caramel.'

‘Is fruit. What's the matter? You don't like fruit?'

‘Of course I like fruit. I just like caramel more.'

‘No caramel. Is fruit.'

A plate of fruit pancakes later, I squelched across the mall and within minutes was locking the door of my hotel room. Then stacking a chair against it for reasons I still can't quite explain. The beseeching chorus that had driven me away earlier in the evening had now dulled to sporadic whimpers, although I was unsure if they were canine or human in origin.

Things weren't much better the next morning and after stifling the dry retch elicited by the congealed breakfast buffet, I hunched spittle-flecked and caffeine-deprived towards my car. I was done with Panevezys. Done with having smiles unreturned. Done with drivers who regard your road courtesy as their right. Done with miserable fuckers who walk away when you try to pat their dogs. Done with this city that felt like it was stuck in a Nick Cave song.

What is remarkable about Panevezys is the war that was fought on its doorstep, a war that few outside Lithuania have heard of and one which commenced at the end of World War II. Just in case enough Lithuanian blood had not been shed in the shadow of Hitler's madness, the locals got nine more years of hostilities. ‘A historian in the future who opens the pages of our nation's life will be most surprised by two things. First he will surprised by the horror of the current [referring to the initial period of Soviet rule] slavery, the unprecedented cruelty and terribly sophisticated system of communist slavery, which seems to be able to stop the breathing of a free man and make him a complete slave, not only physically but spiritually,' wrote poet Bronius Krivickas, who was to die in a partisan battle with Russian forces in 1952. ‘However, the future historian will be even more surprised that a nation under such a yoke of slavery did not fall but managed to struggle hard and long. And the historian will ask from where did tens of thousands of partisans, who chose death instead of horrible slavery, draw such toughness? And from where did the enslaved, who chose martyrdom instead of betrayal, draw their strength?'

Under the cover of the forests around Panevezys and many other regions, Lithuanian partisans engaged in one of Europe's most protracted guerilla wars. Working in tandem with the Soviet forces under Nazi occupation, the partisans were dumbfounded when their former allies attempted to brutally subjugate them. In the name of democracy and independence, 22,000 Lithuanian fighters lost their lives between 1944 and 1953. Known as the Forest Brothers, some enlisted to avoid conscription into the Red Army while others feared deportation. Most chose to spend years sleeping in clammy forest bunkers the size of cupboards out of principle. Outgunned and outmanned, the Lithuanian resistance knew that victory was impossible. Rather, it merely sought to delay a complete Soviet takeover until the western nations implemented the Atlantic Charter of 1941, which affirmed ‘the right of all people to choose the form of government under which they live'. This was not to be. Roosevelt and Churchill's grand plan was negated by the Yalta Summit of 1945 where the pair gifted the Baltics to Stalin. As far as the western powers were concerned, Lithuania was none of their business.

The bitter partisans – whose number included a crosssection from farmhands to university professors – vacillated between acts of calculated mischief such as destroying ballot boxes at farcical Soviet elections to briefly occupying entire towns before fleeing into the forests in the face of reinforcements. The 30,000 partisans were supported by a network of sympathisers three to four times that size. It included thousands of young women – some barely out of their teens – who acted as information runners between battalions. In some instances partisan forces held off Soviet forces which outnumbered them ten to one. They gave as good as they got, but their inferior weaponry and size eventually told, with 10,000 being slain in the first year of hostilities. The lucky ones were left on battlefields while the corpses of others were propped up in town squares as a warning to would-be allies.

As the war wore on, the Lithuanian rebels became better organised in terms of battle tactics and supply lines. They even instituted a uniform policy and badges for meritorious conduct. A central command structure was established with fighting corps divided across three regions. Training camps run according to strict regulations sprang up in secret locations while the movement's aims were codified in their freedom declaration of 1949. Researchers estimate that about four per cent of Lithuanians were directly (as partisans) or indirectly (as supporters) involved in the antiSoviet resistance movement. Double the figure encountered by US troops in Vietnam.

Unable to flush out the Forest Brothers, Soviet authorities struck at their networks and until 1953 orchestrated a brutal liquidation of farm households, forced collectivisation and deportations. The stranglehold paid predictable dividends and by the early 1950s only 2000 partisans remained, most of whom devoted their energy to propaganda work in the form of underground periodicals – of which there were eighty at one stage, with most copies being individually typed. The stubborn, anti-Soviet sentiment of the partisans, combined with the intensity of the war they waged, might well have played a role in the transition to Lithuanian independence in 1991. Unlike Latvia and Estonia – which have ethnically Russian populations of 33 and 25 per cent respectively – Lithuania was not an attractive proposition to Soviet émigrés, who accounted for a mere six per cent of the population and therefore provided far less resistance to any movement towards autonomy.

Lionginas Baliukevicius, a guerilla commander, noted Lithuanians ‘have not learned to buy and sell their homeland. They have not learned to trade in their feelings. They are therefore good soldiers who are not afraid of laying down their lives for their homeland'. The last bullet in any clip was always kept for themselves as they would rather take their own lives than submit to their enemies. Those who were captured ended up being subjected to starvation, sleep deprivation and worse. A report into injuries suffered by a partisan commander found:

… the right eye is covered by a haematoma, on the eyelid there are six stab wounds made, judging by their diameter, by a thin wire or nail going deep into the eyeball. Multiple haematomas appear in the area of the stomach, as well as a cut wound on the finger of the right hand. The genitalia reveal the following: a large tear wound on the right side of the scrotum and a wound on the left side. Both testicles and sperm ducts are missing.

This poor bastard was then nursed back to health so he could be executed.

Refusing to surrender, Lithuania's last resistance fighter killed himself in 1965 while the last hiding partisan emerged out of seclusion in 1986, some forty years after his nation was occupied and only then because he needed medical treatment. To this day, Lithuania's Forest Brothers are revered and remembered for their part in a war the rest of the world couldn't be bothered with.

12

The last Jew in Birzai

Morris had turned sixty, so he went to see Dr Myers for a full medical check-up. When he had finished, Dr Myers said, ‘Relax, Morris, you're in very good shape. I can't find anything wrong with you. You'll probably live till you're a hundred. So how old was your father when he died?'

Morris replied, ‘Did I say he was dead?'

Dr Myers then asked, ‘How old is your father, is he still active?'

‘He's eighty-three and goes jogging and Israeli dancing every week' Morris replied.

Dr Myers was very surprised. ‘How old was your grandfather when he died?'

Morris again answered, ‘Did I say he was dead, doctor?'

Dr Myers was astonished. ‘You mean to tell me that you are sixty years old and both your father and grandfather are alive? Is your grandfather active?'

Morris replied, ‘He goes swimming twice a week, and plays a full round of golf every Sunday, weather permitting. Not only that, he is 107 years old and next month he is getting married again.'

Dr Myers said, ‘If he's 107 years old, why on earth would your grandfather want to get married?'

Morris looked Dr Myers in the eye and said, ‘Did I say he wanted to?'

Having almost circumnavigated Lithuania in a clockwise direction over the course of three weeks, my journey was to end in the northwestern enclave of Birzai, Moses Dibosis' home town. Probably swayed by my tenuous connection to the place, I liked it from the get-go. Not least for the fact that its 15,000-strong population is served by six commercial breweries and its most famous geographic feature consists of 9000 sinkholes some of which can, and have, swallowed homesteads whole. What could possibly go wrong?

Located at the confluence of the Apascia and Agluona rivers – and therefore could, according to one tourist brochure, have been called a ‘resort town' – Birzai is anything but. Therein lay its underplayed charms. If Panevezys had been a blind date, I would have excused myself after the entrée and escaped out of the bathroom window. Birzai, on the other hand, was a middle daughter of a town, pretty without realising it, getting on with life knowing mollycoddling or favouritism were never going to come.

Birzai fulfilled another cracking little town criteria in that it had an overstuffed museum run by a gent who creaked like old floorboards and followed me around switching lights on and off as I entered and left rooms. What I liked most about this establishment and its appraising curator was that Maurice-come-latelys like myself were not its audience. No one spoke English and the notes that accompanied the exhibits were in Lithuanian only. This was a place for the locals to cherish the contributions their neighbourhood stars had made to Lithuanian life.

The batons of notable conductors were displayed beside the immaculately dusted typewriters once owned by prominent Birzai scribes. Another exhibit was dedicated to the multi-medalled gliding feats of Gediminas Veskes, and then there's barrel-chested Zydrunas Savickas. Twice taking out the World Strongman Championships – 2005 and 2006 – he is built like the proverbial concrete ablution block and routinely pulls off feats most commonly associated with Marvel comics. Here is but a sample of the world records he currently holds: 10 consecutive lifts of a 320-kilogram barbell, tossing a 22-kilogram medicine ball 17 feet into the air, deadlifting a 462-kilogram Hummer tyre, covering 100 feet in 7.5 seconds while carrying a 500-kilogram yoke. Metric inconsistencies aside, you gotta give the 33-year-old his chops. And who says Gen Y can't make their own fun?

Dozens of piano accordions spoke of Birzai's penchant for music, as did antique reed harps, magnificently crafted ten-string mandolins and a combination cello and double bass which featured one string, a boxed base for resonance and was played with a horsehair crop. It was
Yentl
meets
Oklahoma!

I find few experiences more confronting than seeing religious artefacts which have been destroyed as a statement of power. The museum had plenty, from delicately reconstructed shrines which had been axed by Soviet troops to the charred remains of a holy Torah burned by Nazis. There's confronting and then there's the kick-to-the-guts personal. In another display cabinet was a collection of tarnished copper pots with crude hole-punched monograms on the handle. Upon fleeing Lithuania, my mother's grandmother felt it imperative to not only take her three favourite copper pots but to fill them with food for the journey as they did not know where their next meal would come from. These items of necessity gathered the dust of symbolism in a Cape Town kitchen, a gleaming echo of a faraway life polished weekly by the black staff who came attached to this one. The cookware, as it is now called, was once again transported over the seas when my family migrated to Sydney in 1987.

Another box ticked by Birzai on my list of marvellous small town traits is that is doesn't have the population to warrant too many specialist merchants. As a result, certain but not all establishments become many things to many people. A favourite was the café-cum-haberdashery that fell just short of accomplishing either goal. In fact, it was more like a café-cum-school cafeteria. Staffed by curt tuckshop ladies with goitres and hearts of gold under their ample bosoms, five of the six cracked formica tables were occupied by teenage girls with inexpertly painted nails and mobile phones that buzzed, beeped and blared incessantly.

The boys who wandered in – wearing neat blue blazers, charcoal slacks and expressions of manufactured indifference – pretended not to notice the girls. Who in turned held it together until said chaps departed, only to collapse into fits of ‘omigodhesawmelookingathim' giggles. Others held intense debates over the wording of SMS messages before reaching a consensus, at which point the young lady in question would respond to her beau's text. As is the case around the globe, the young man on the receiving end of this missive would put far less thought into his word choice and reply almost immediately. His subsequent message would then be dissected by the committee and the whole process would start again. Meanwhile the older girls took it in turns to call boys they knew to be keen on them and conducted the entire conversation on speakerphone as their friends listened in, a process I was drawn into when one of them gave me the universal finger-over-closed-lips signal for silence. For the first time in Lithuania, I felt like part of a gang – any gang. And I'm glad it happened in Birzai.

Intrigued by the fact that there was an Australian in town asking for accommodation – at the one hotel in town – the director of the Birzai Tourist Information Centre, Giedre Stankeviciute, asked what had brought me there. I gave her a précis of both the book you are reading and the Moses Dibobis story, expecting her to send me on my way. Instead she said, ‘Do you want to meet the last Jew in Birzai?'

Does the pope shit in the woods? Does a bear wear a funny hat? Twenty minutes later, Seftel Melamedas shuffled into the room, neatly folded his jacket on a chair and regarded today's history dredger. At eighty-two, he was born the year Moses Dibobis left Birzai for Africa. Any fanciful notions I had that he might provide some fraying memory that linked Moses to him then him to me was soundly quashed when I slid a piece of paper bearing my grandfather's name towards Seftel and he shook his head. ‘No,' he said with Gie-dre acting as translator. ‘I don't know him or the family.'

Seftel elaborated no further on this answer but his rheumy eyes softened as he delivered the news, as if knowing I was hoping against hope for the practically impossible. He then explained why it was so. Before World War II, even after years of local Semites migrating overseas, the Birzai Jewish community numbered 11,000. He recalled a Hebrew school at which he had studied for six years, Jewish law firms, banks and medical practices, a kosher mill and an extensive calendar of concerts and plays with Jewish themes. He also spoke of five separate synagogues – as in four that he didn't go to. Especially after he married a Russian
shikse
(his word), meaning a non-Jewish woman. This marriage enabled him to enlist in the Soviet army at the beginning of World War II. With the awkwardness of translation beginning to take its toll, Seftel decided to flirt with Giedre for a few moments. If I followed the gist of their conversation correctly it went somewhere along the lines of:

‘A pretty girl like you could live somewhere better than this. Why don't you go to Australia with him?'

‘I'm married.'

‘But Australia's better than here and he's an author, a respected man.'

‘I don't think he's that respected and he is also married.'

He then ceased the negotiation with a ‘you youngsters are going to do what you want to do anyway' shrug and declared he had to go. Before he did, I handed him a photocopy of the one photograph of Birzai that Moses had carried to Africa. Taken in 1920, it was a grainy snap of three storehouses facing onto a muddy street. I asked Seftel if he recognised the spot. He asked for a lift to the supermarket, which he said was close to the area in the photograph. It wasn't, but I admired his chutzpah. Long since destroyed, the buildings have been replaced by a trio of whitewashed apartment blocks notable for nothing but their quintessential averageness.

My next stop was the Jewish cemetery where no doubt several of my ancestors were buried. Singly and after dying of natural causes. The graveyard was the size of a football field and bounded on all sides by suburban gardens. Shaded by poplars and overgrown shrubs, the few headstones that remained upright had been buffed smooth by time and indifference. It was impossible to know where the graves lay as moss had subsumed everything below ankle height and was making its lichen way over the myriad crumbled memorials. Some viewing this collage of decrepitude might have felt outraged at a perceived lack of respect, but I couldn't help thinking it wasn't a bad place to spend eternity. Quiet, verdant, and with no grand ‘here lies …' extravaganza, it was perhaps the most peaceful cemetery I had ever seen. Besides, who was meant to maintain it? There is only one Jew in town and because he married out of the faith, Seftel wouldn't be allowed to be buried there anyway.

Driving past a smattering of sunflower-yellow wooden churches, all folksily wholesome and diligently tended, I eventually arrived at Birzai's one hotel. Located in the town's backblocks beside a yogi-calm lake, the Hotel Tyla was run by a team of two young men who seemed barely into their twenties. Although the two-storey affair in whitewashed concrete could have comfortably accommodated forty, I was the solitary guest that night but the lads pulled out all the stops.

Both dressed in suits and ties, one opened the door while the other checked me in with hotel-school English of which he was justifiably proud. Their faces were set on high-beam and nowhere else in Lithuania had my welcome been so warm or genuine. The receptionist then insisted on carrying my bag up the one flight of steps to my room, which opened onto a small balcony overlooking the lake now coated in a fairy floss dusk. Within a minute of him leaving, there was a knock on the door. Opening it to find my duo of grinning hosts, I immediately wondered if their wholesomeness was about to be sullied by the offer of some female company, should that be my wont. Instead, they were wondering what time I would like to eat dinner as a cook had to be summoned from town. Not wanting to be a bother, I said that I didn't want to be a bother. I would be happy to drive the few minutes to Birzai's CBD. They seemed hurt to the core by this response and proceeded to tell me what a good cook Marta was.

They weren't wrong. Alone in the spotless tiled dining room, I feasted on a rich beef stew and enough cabbage salad to end a honeymoon before retiring to my room with a complimentary cherry brandy from the lads. At which point they both piled into Marta's car and the trio disappeared into the evening. And what an evening. An egg-blue half-moon doused the lake in mercury and the air was baptismal-gown clean. With enough alcohol in my system to gag the inner cynic perpetually juiced on Gen-X irony, I receded into a tranquillity that I wondered if the restless Moses Dibobis had ever enjoyed in his home town.

The next morning, I would be driving to Vilnius where my wife Jennie would meet me for a few days of sightseeing before we departed the dinky airport en route to Amsterdam then Sydney. The time had come for conclusions to be drawn and observations distilled about this Lithuanian adventure. What I hadn't counted on was the envy I felt towards my countryfolk. I envy the sanctity with which they regard their comparatively new-found freedom. I envy their Baltic winds that turn pine forests into harmonicas. I envy their baroque Old Towns and the fact that their lives unfold against such a backdrop. I envy the joyous fervour with which they celebrate who they are and who they will never be again. But most of all I envy their self-assuredness, which I originally mistook for aloofness or suspicion. Lithuania, like its inhabitants, will hold your gaze.

Would I go back? Probably not, but only because of what I brought home with me. For in standing by the mass graves of my forebears and walking through the streets where they traded, rejoiced, suffered and worshipped, the scope of their sacrifice for future generations was never more daunting or appreciated. Unlike Moses/Maurice, I am not an observant Jew. I didn't forgo almost my entire family in the name of a better life where one's faith would not turn out to be a death sentence. But in travelling to the home from which he – as well as my father's grandfather – fled with no more than a ticket and a packed lunch, I have come to treasure a link that Lithuania reinforced beyond measure.

And it was Seftel who brought it home. ‘You know,' he smiled, holding my hand as we said goodbye, ‘I miss the Yiddish most. It was the language everyone spoke in my childhood. I don't remember much now but I still dream in it. Anyway,
Abee gezint
.' Which means ‘as long as we are healthy'. Up until that point I had known only a single phrase in Yiddish, one which translates to ‘Look at that face, it looks like a bottom', plus half a dozen terms for varying degrees of idiocy:
schlemiel, schmendrik, shmo, schlemuzel.
Yet Seftel's words echoed with a faint recognition it took Mel Brooks to shift. In the film
Blazing Saddles,
he plays a Sioux chief who encounters a family of African-American settlers. Asked by one of his equally Semitic braves if they should be slaughtered, Brooks incants in Yiddish:
‘Zeit nisht messhuge. Loz em gain. Abee gezint
.' Which means: ‘Don't be crazy. Let them go. As long as we are all healthy.'