From Russia with Lunch (7 page)

Stanislaw's hunches were proven accurate between 1821 and 1835 by Professor Ignacy Fonberg of Vilnius University, a pioneer in the art later perfected by travel journalists of soaking in hot tubs and calling it research. A sanatorium was duly opened in 1838 and within five years 2000 patients a year were making the 130-kilometre trek – a journey of significant proportions at the time – from Vilnius for treatments that targeted cardiac, blood vessel, gastrointestinal, gynaecological and nervous system disorders. By 1914, 18,000 visitors a year were signing up for saturation. This figure blew out to 40,000 in the Soviet era, with dozens of new facilities being constructed to accommodate them.

Things quietened down after independence but Drus-kininkai is on the up again with US magazine
Newsweek
ranking it among the ten leading spa towns in Europe. It's an easy call to make. Here, there seems those extra few moments to take the long way through a well-tended but not prissy park covered by a tarpaulin of spruce and birch. Roundabouts are not considered mere exercises in vehicular management but ideal locations for floral-trimmed sculptures. There is also a church in Druskininkai so gorgeous that it made this lapsed Jew begin to reconsider the whole Messiah thing.

At the centre of a grassy landscaped square rimmed by anorexic birch sits the Russian Orthodox Church. Painted a shade of blue somewhere between cyan and summer with white accents, this diminutive wooden house of worship is topped by six black cupolas. It dates from 1865 and at a push could accommodate one hundred faithful. The eaves shelter a series of small yet beautifully detailed pentagonal paintings on religious themes. Such art continues on the iconostasis inside. These depictions were described by one guide book as being ‘rather more saccharine' than those on the building's exterior. I was equally moved by both so I guess one man's saccharine must be another's sugar.

My next stop was equally uplifting. Lithuania's burgeoning green movement has seen facilities such as the Echo of the Forest spring up like fungi in moss. An oak tree grows through the centre of this building and its walkways come oh-so-close to succeeding in giving visitors the promised illusion of ‘walking on air'. Imagine an indoor treetop walk and you'll begin to get a picture of the Echo of the Forest. Although the space is relatively small, through cleverly detailed design, the use of recorded birdsong and wind, and an assiduous blend of living insects and plants, it's an evocation that verges on the meditative.

Mellowed by harnessed nature, I took a stroll to the Ciurlionis Memorial Museum to pay homage to Lithuania's greatest artist. It's a title which may at first glance seem tainted by hyperbole but is actually rather quite understated considering his achievements.

Born close by in Verena in 1875, Mikalojus Konstantinis Ciurlionis spent his childhood in Druskininkai. The eldest of eleven children, his Polish peasant father played the organ at the local church while his Lithuanian mother entertained her brood with indigenous folklore. By the age of ten, his musical talents were undeniable and before his teens were over Ciurlionis was one of the most celebrated students at the Warsaw Institute of Music. A year after graduating, he wrote the tone poem
In the Forest,
the first ever symphonic composition by a Lithuanian. Featuring a melancholic nod to Chopin and Bach plus the repetitive bass figures which would become his trademark, this work holds the same place in the hearts of the locals that
Waltzing Matilda
does in the hearts of Australians.

As the twentieth century rolled around, Ciurlionis – who had by then acquired some repute as a composer – decided to take up painting and drawing. It was the equivalent of Céline Dion deciding to star in a sitcom and could have led to the same disastrous career consequences. For Ciurlionis, however, reputation was negated by expression. His first images were produced in pastels, although he later switched to tempera. Classified as a symbolist – a tag which only applies to his early work – many Lithuanians believe Ciurlionis rather than Kandinsky was the first truly abstract artist. It's a long bow but one which is plucked with grim determination.

Rooted in the Lithuanian folk tradition, he then turned to creating designs for stained glass and book covers in the art nouveau spirit and in 1906 decided ‘to dedicate all past and future work to Lithuania'. If that wasn't enough to earn him eternally beloved status, he helped organise the first exhibition of Lithuanian art in 1907. The combination of his prolific output across five media, savage depression and a lifetime of financial problems in which his talents rarely elicited monetary rewards saw Ciurlionis' health spiral into decline. In 1910, broke and frail, he returned to Druskininkai. A year later he was dead at thirty-six.

Imagine Mozart, Monet and James Dean rolled into one and a clearer picture emerges of what Ciurlionis means to Lithuanians. On the day I visited the four buildings that comprised his childhood home – whitewashed, wooden and with shingled roofs – several of his pastoral and romantic piano pieces were being performed. This is where things got a little wacky. Splayed out on the lawn beside one building were two dozen picnic blankets on which vodka-happy locals sat expectantly. I asked a guide where the concert was taking place. She said, ‘Here.' I said, ‘Where?' She said, ‘Here,' again, only this time with what my mother would call ‘a tone'. Turns out that the pianist sits inside while the audience enjoys the tunes via an open window. Somehow, it works out just fine. In fact, there's much to be said for soft lawn, tree-cast shadows and live music that is heard but not seen.

Feeling suitably cultured and ecologically sound – pretexts which I would later use to rationalise the following day's escapades – I set about finding a room for the night. The best rate in town, brokered by the local tourist information bureau, was offered at an establishment called the Meduna. It featured, according to one guide book, ‘somewhat over the top rooms possibly decorated by Flash Gordon's mum'. Which didn't daunt me in the slightest as 1970s and 1980s white South Africa was characterised by a style of décor my cousin Howard once succinctly described as ‘Jewish rococo on Broadway'.

With a shy smile, the manager on duty apologised for not speaking English. I did likewise for not speaking Lithuanian and so ensued a telephone conversation with her husband – distant in both geographical and emotional terms – acting as translator.

When one first hears Lithuanian, it sounds much like Russian, a rapid-fire onslaught of glottals and fricatives. When one first sees it written, the accents on the characters – the graves (such as à), the macrons over the u's (ū), and the háčeks over the c's, s's and z's (č, š, ž) – make it seem even more forbidding. But, just as New Zealand and Australian pronunciation veers apart with sustained exposure, so do Lithuanian and Russian. The former sounds softer, its rougher edges buffed by consonants with blurry edges that tumble into constellations of vowels.

Within Lithuania, its Indo-European tongue is popularly believed to have its roots in the ancient Indian language of Sanskrit. A matter of some pride, this claim is not without foundation. In common with the 140 or so known Indo-European idioms, Lithuanian derives from a now extinct parent tongue from which Sanskrit exhibits the most complete surviving system of nouns, verbs and consonants. It's in the vowel sounds, however, that Lithuanian is believed to be closer to the parent language than even Sanskrit. The same goes for much of the basic vocabulary. It's for these reasons that the Lithuanian tongue can be said to retain more of its archaic character than any of the other surviving Indo-European lingos. Yet it was not until the sixteenth century that it became a written language, and it wasn't until 1918 that it was used for official purposes for the first time. Under Soviet rule, it was essentially the muted vernacular of dissent and rebellion.

Toying with the idea of learning some of the basics before I visited, I was overwhelmed by the complexity of Lithuanian and decided that if worst came to worst, I could rely on dodgy mime skills. Although there are several dialects of Lithuanian, that of Suvalkija has been adopted as the standard form. The alphabet runs to 32 letters – with the combined ‘ch' sound acting like a Powerball supplementary – while the national dictionary contains 400,000 words. Verbs have four tenses and nouns, which are divided along gender lines, have seven cases. Each with a different ending.

Now let's talk proper nouns. In this part of the world, surnames are adapted to signify a person's sex and a woman's marital status. Which means a husband, wife and unmarried daughter can all have similar but not identical last names. Making this grammatical Rubik's cube even more perplexing is the trait among Lithuania's more overtly feminist to use male suffixes. Famous foreign names are also given the local treatment with William Shakespeare known in Lithuania as Vilijamas Seskpiras. Dodgy mime then? You're preaching to the choir. Fortunately, none was required for the following day's silliness: the Druskininkai Aqua Park.

Housed in a building dating from when the Soviet authorities were obsessed with all things futuristic, the Aqua Park is justifiably one of the city's most highly rated attractions. Sprawling over two circular pavilions – from which numerous alcoves radiate – the park's most popular area is what management enticingly refers to as the ‘complex of aqua entertainments'. Inside the four-storey dome it is a consistently balmy 31 degrees and palm fronds watch over two circular swimming pools. Both have a circumference of around 50 metres but rather different personalities. A portion of the first contained an exercise area where aquarobics classes were held on the hour. The participants seemed like regulars who grimly sloshed about to Cliff Richard and Boney M. The rest of this pool was dominated by a rocky island plus a communal spa that hovered like a spacecraft tethered to a concrete pylon. Floor-to-ceiling windows bathed the place in pallid sunlight and there must have been a dozen people in the bubbling cauldron – all of whom had mastered the ability to utterly ignore one another.

The second swimming hole in the complex of aqua entertainments was a wave pool in which a dozen teenagers tried to look cool while being tossed about amid a one-metre swell on inner tubes. Its periphery was formed by a ‘river' whose currents took you on a meandering 360-degree paddle of the facility. Banks of white sunloungers looked out over a deserted outdoor pool and the pea soup Nemunas River. But what's a tropical idyll without a tan? The Aqua Park's designers have solved this problem by rigging a series of ultraviolet lights to the walls. Melanoma: 1. Drus-kininkai: 0.

Still, the place seemed to have been brilliantly formulated to provide for almost every possible age and interest of client. A neon-sprayed paddling area with a fifteen-centimetre-deep pool and cheerful fibreglass elephants was filled by the delighted squeals of toddlers accompanied by mums and dads in their honeymoon bathing suits. Next door was a buffet of taps, pumps and sprays where a cacophony of under-tens – that is the correct collective noun, I believe – delivered delirious drenchings to one another.

My favourite diversions, however, were the water slides, which I christened – or should that be baptised? – Wedgie World. Half a dozen of these tubular plastic serpents spiralled their way to the ground floor where they terminated in two-metre-deep troughs designed to absorb momentum. Which wasn't much if you were on an air mattress and had descended one of the milder rides. Six storeys up – no lifts – were the entrances to the chutes. These coiled out of the building and back in again with one covering 120 metres from top to bottom. This was to be the main course. My entrée was a ride called ‘Adrenalin', which rocketed you through a blinding white chasm of twists and turns. It was like a damp extreme version of a near-death experience. Juiced on adrenalin, I bounded up the half-dozen flights of stairs to the mouth of the beast known as ‘Extremis'. With friction negated by water, gravity's work was almost unimpeded and I hurtled through a series of circles, whooping with glee. After which I had the distinct impression that my boardies were rubbing against the back of my tonsils.

I tried every slide twice then ate a plate of nachos the size of my head without having to change out of my Mambos. It was like being a ten-year-old with grown-up pocket money. The second half of the facility is known as ‘the complex of the baths'. This is a bit more la-di-da and requires an additional fee but no bathing suit if that's your wont. It wasn't mine. This was a temple of sweat. Sauna options were manifold. The entry level perspiration pavilion occupied 105 square metres and was regulated at 50 degrees. Next was a Japanese-style sauna – read images of geishas pouring water from amphoras and calligraphic characters painted on the walls – that was somewhat snugger, a little darker and exactly the same temperature. Third up was a daubed Moorish affair that beaded the skin at 75 degrees. And so it went until you braved the so-called ‘village-style' sauna that topped out at 100 degrees, featured 300 kilograms of searing volcanic rock and three stoves. I believe the village concerned was located on the outskirts of Hades. Inside of a minute, I felt like all moisture had been stripped from my lungs while the distinct sizzle of metal on flesh was emanating from my wedding ring.

Thematics continued in a series of Roman baths where both the temperature and humidity varied along with the décor. There were desert scenes with inbuilt plasmas, an outdoor reed affair that was supposed to evoke rural Russia, and a luridly illuminated cloister named Eros which looked like a third-rate Studio 54 facsimile – complete with the lolling scrota of men you really didn't want to see naked if you had a bellyful of nachos. I was the only one who seemed to notice as the menopausal women who drifted in and out in their reinforced one-pieces seemed utterly blasé about the periodic nudity they encountered. Perhaps they were distracted by the ever-changing onslaught of eucalyptus, honey, cedar and citrus scents that clicked over on the hour.