From Russia with Lunch (8 page)

A pair of whirlpools awaited outside the saunas as did a chilled pool into which Vivaldi was piped as you lay submerged and tempered your salt-stained flesh. Just as with the first pavilion the central pool was dominated by fibre-stone cliffs but this time half a dozen spa baths had been carved into the ‘rock' at varying heights. At the swim-up bar, eight young women were throwing back vodka shots while dispensing ones of withering disdain to a few brave beaux who tried to make their acquaintance. Above the bar was a stage area where a program informed me that sporting events were projected onto a big screen. On a cold winter evening, with beer in hand, a cracking match and mates in tow, it would have made a fine night out. I'm not so sure about the strip shows that took place at midnight every Saturday. Any man who has suffered the indignity of an unbidden public Speedo erection will know what I'm talking about. So why invite trouble, let alone willingly enter a pool of submerged tumescence?

Fancy facilities aside, Druskininkai was a spa town so I booked in for a massage at the Aqua Park. Where I was a little disappointed to be ushered into a room that would not have looked out of place in Ubud, Byron Bay or Phuket. Stone Buddhas abounded, as did river stones, tealights and Enya. The only weirdness to report was a spa bath filled with thumb-length fish which apparently feast on one's dead skin cells. I demurred on the piscine exfoliation. My rubdown was a treat but it was delivered by a skilful Thai masseuse.

I returned to my hotel both chuffed and chafed from a marvellous day out, but also feeling slightly duped. I had wanted the traditional Lithuanian spa experience. I wanted to dehydrate in a rust-weeping steam bath that had seen better days. I wanted to be pummelled and birch-slapped by a woman with a surly demeanour and drill-sergeant facial hair. So it was that I presented myself at the distinctly old-school Druskininkai Health Resort, which I will forever associate with the adage ‘Be careful what you wish for'. On the outside, this stout neoclassical building was painted pistachio and adorned with festive bunting plus dozens of national flags. On the inside, it was pure clinic, with dank strip-lit corridors and rows of consulting rooms, the doors of which were covered in blistered wood laminate.

Having paid a modest entry fee, I was then presented with a list of the medical treatments on offer. Apparently carbonic acid and turpentine baths were big favourites. As was the intestinal bathing treatment administered by an onsite proctologist. After which you could indulge in a ‘12th derivation electrocardiogram with or without analysis' and top things off with a ‘mud application for gums'.

Suitably trepid, I decided to examine the ‘preventive care procedures' listed. Steering clear of the ‘salty moments', ‘sweet salty moments' and ‘golden moments' packages, I opted for the chap-friendly ‘force of Apollo' experience. This began with a soak in an indoor kidney-shaped pool whose water was tepid and imbued with a mineral cocktail that scorched my shaving rash and leeched the colour from my boardshorts. At one end was a trio of apertures from which ‘massaging jets' of water exploded at a speed and volume usually reserved for G8 protesters. These were not controlled automatically but rather by a switch flicked in an antechamber screened behind one-way glass. Venture too close and some invisible sadist would send a torrential projectile ricocheting off your skull. I swear I heard muffled laughter from behind the mirrors the second time they got me.

It was then time for my mud bath and an order which would become a refrain for my time at this facility: ‘BIKINI OFF!'

‘Excuse me?' I replied.

‘BIKINI OFF,' restated a dumpling of a woman, the cheeriness of whose daffodil uniform was in inverse proportion to that of her demeanour.

I don't know what I was thinking, but it seemed prudent to give her a moment to leave the room while I nuded up. Alas not. She stared me down with the nonchalance of someone who had seen a million willies and was not impressed by one of them.

The mud bath was apparently meant to be bursting with a host of rejuvenating properties but all I can report is that it was warm, goopy, drowsy fun. Until Corporal Punishment came in to direct me to the showers. Allowing me to once again pull on the boardies, she then blasted the mud off me with a high-pressure hose prison-movie style. Some respite was offered in the hands of a far gentler staff member who half-heartedly went through the motions of a salt scrub and honey massage before ushering me into a sauna in which I was to marinate for fifteen minutes before another thudding appointment with the master blaster. My penultimate treat was the ‘ascending shower'. I had pictured some sort of vertical Vichy with streams of soothing wall-mounted sprays. Instead, I was presented with a cubicle in which a lone hose – which was unnervingly reinforced by bolts to the floor – stood cobra-like mere inches below a toilet seat attached to the wall.

‘BIKINI OFF!'

How to describe the experience? Perched naked and fearful above a device that seemed designed to extract confessions from the recalcitrant, let's just say the water slides felt like velvet in comparison. Administered with an intensity that could have been utilised to remove oil from concrete, alternating volleys of hot and cold water delivered the kind of scrotal pummelling experienced by a porn star on honeymoon. It was at this point that my ‘therapist' slid the door open, poked her head round the corner and in a tone more commonly associated with the McQuestion ‘Would you like to upsize your combo?' said, ‘You want enema?'

Too late, I'm afraid.

Making a gingerly retreat towards the mineral bath, I encountered a woman who was wearing the same ‘you won't believe what just happened to me in there' look that I had on. Biologist Debbie Makin is one of those inveterate Australians who spend years travelling, picking up work in their specialist fields or winging it. It was seven years since she had been home and Poland was next on the agenda. Without saying as much, I think she too had been hydrated then violated and we swapped war stories while waiting to be summoned for our respective massages.

For all our topless summers and tanned flesh, Australians are a rather conservative lot when it comes to nudity and pseudo-medical procedures overseen by those with dubious qualifications and personalities to match. We figured the massages would once again involve the dreaded order and decided that we would employ the tactic used by S&M couples the world over. Should either of us hear the word ‘billabong' uttered, we were honour bound to come to the other's rescue. An unspoken agreement had been reached that personal safety was far more valuable than modesty. As it turned out, no such intervention was required, but we each waited to see that the other had made it out okay before going our separate bandy-legged ways into the night.

4

You must remember this

Two old Jews are walking past a cathedral when they stop to admire the architecture. By the door, Sydney sees a sign that reads ‘Convert to Catholicism and receive $50'. He turns to his friend Simon and announces, ‘I'm going to do it.' Simon is shocked and replies, ‘Really? You're going to turn your back on your faith and that of your people for $50?' Sydney answers in the affirmative and tells his ashen friend to wait outside for him.

An hour later, Sydney emerges beaming. ‘So,' Simon asks, ‘did you get your $50?'

Sydney sneers at him dismissively then spits: ‘Is that all you people ever think about?'

In 2002, Harvard University hosted a glittering celebration of irrelevance known as the Ignobel Awards. Patterned on the more vaunted Swedish equivalent, the medicine award went to Peter Barss of McGill University for his paper ‘Injuries Due To Falling Coconuts'. In the public health sphere Chittaranja Andrade of Mental Health & Neurosciences Bangalore took out the gong for his groundbreaking research into the prevalence and motivations behind nosepicking among adolescents. Then there was the physics award, which was proudly claimed by David Schmidt of the University of Massachusetts, who devoted a significant chunk of his life to uncovering why shower curtains billow inwards.

The grand prize of the evening is the Ignobel Peace Prize, but to build suspense even further a couple were married on stage prior to the announcement. With the crowd beside themselves in anticipation, a Lithuanian farmer by the name of Viliumas Malinauskas, who had travelled to the United States especially for the ceremony, took to the stage. At which point, all the other prize recipients gleefully donned paper Stalin masks.

The achievement for which Malinauskas believed he was being lauded is officially known as Grutas Park but referred to locally as Stalin Land. Located eight kilometres from Druskininkai, Stalin Land is Lithuania's first theme park and was financed by the enormous profits Malinauskas – a former wrestler and collective farm manager – has generated exporting fresh and pickled wild mushrooms to the west. The park officially opened in 2000, but had its genesis in the 1991 independence declaration. Both the people and government of the newly autonomous nation had little time and even less regard for the Soviet statuary that dominated public spaces, houses of worship, government institutions and education facilities. Those featuring prominent communists such as Lenin and Stalin were ritualistically decapitated and wrenched from their plinths while scores of others were gleefully defaced.

Confronted with the question of what to do with these pieces, authorities put their future out to public tender. Historical societies offered some solutions but these were based on substantial government assistance. A retrieve and destroy program was also financially prohibitive. Enter Malinauskas, who offered to transport these metal and stone reminders of oppression to Grutas Park free of charge and in so doing established the largest private collection of communist era paraphernalia in the world. It was a process that cost him over $2 million.

Malinauskas was determined to make these figures available to the public and they now dot the brook-flecked woodland around the fortified concrete and glass abomination he calls home. ‘It is impossible to forget the Soviet era,' he has said. ‘We can't pull down these statues and pretend the past didn't exist.' Few could argue with the sentiment, but great tact would have to be employed in exhibiting sorrows of this magnitude. ‘This will be no Disneyland,' said Malinauskas when the park was being planned.

Those Lithuanians who were mollified by this statement were soon horrified by its implications. Re-creating the full-scale horrors of the Gulag seemed paramount for Malinauskas. Visitors to the park would be herded into a marshalling area beneath a phalanx of watchtowers where actors in Soviet uniform waited with authentic weaponry. Next, punters would be crammed into an equally authentic railway cattle truck, used to transport Lithuanians to Siberia after World War II, and shuttled to the centre of the park. Here, in a cafeteria, thin gruel made according to the original recipe would be slopped out. This vision naturally prompted outrage among those Lithuanians who had been deported, not to mention the estimated one in three families who had been affected by this policy.

To say their vehemence was justified is an understatement of staggering proportions. After a period of independence that lasted from 1919 to 1939, World War II saw Lithuania occupied three times: first by the USSR in 1940, then by Nazi Germany in 1941 and finally by the USSR again in 1944. It was during these years that a foundation was laid for deportations on a mammoth scale. Between 1940 and 1953, 132,000 Lithuanians were forcibly sent to Siberia, the Arctic Circle and Central Asia. Travel was primarily by train in a packed freight carriage with no toilet. The journey usually lasted a week but could extend for a month. Desolate compounds awaited. Over 70 per cent of those who left Lithuania in this manner were women and children. In excess of 30,000 deportees eventually died through starvation and exhaustion with another 50,000 never allowed to return to their homeland.

The first wave of exiles, who left in 1940 and 1941, were mostly drawn from Lithuania's cultural and political elite. These included not only the nation's prime minister and foreign minister but those who spoke Esperanto, collected stamps, were prison officials or worked in finance. Clergy of all religions were also on the hit list. The standard sentence was twenty years. Between 14 and 18 June 1941 alone, 16,246 Lithuanians were sent into the unknown. If the transport conditions were inhumane, their categorisation of ‘cargo' was barbaric. Moscow issued instructions to separate men from their families, with 3915 of the former dispatched to the Krasnoyarsk territory while 12,331 women and children were split among the Altai Mountains, Komi Republic and Tomsk regions.

Regaining control of Lithuania after World War II, the Soviets resumed these deportations. Only at a higher rate. On 22 and 23 May 1948, 41,000 people were seized from their homes and exiled (among them Malinauskas' father). Their crime? Owning property which would later be collectivised. By 1950, 90 per cent of Lithuanian land had been acquired in this manner.

The experience Malinauskas had his heart set on recreating was horrific in the extreme. Deportations usually began with the NKVD, Lithuania's equivalent of the KGB, smashing down the door of a home in the dead of night and arresting the inhabitants. They would be given a few minutes to pack a bag after which a truck would transport them to a railway station. Here, they would encounter a platform heaving with the panic-stricken, the numb-shocked and Russian guards brandishing semiautomatics. Each family was theoretically permitted 100 kilograms of baggage but if the trains became congested – a frequent occurrence – their belongings were merely left on the platforms for the guards to rummage through.

Awaiting those who survived the journey was a frozen hell. Women and girls were dispatched to timber forests where temperatures dipped below – 45 degrees Celsius. They constructed huts from offcuts and some reported being frozen to the ground upon awakening. If they didn't make it back after a day's work, many were left to die where they fell. The deportees were remunerated in bread, with a full day's hard labour equating to 500 grams. Which would be shared with those who were young, old or infirm. Bread was, however, rationed on a sliding scale and physically weaker prisoners could only get 100 grams. Former deportee Jane Mesklauskaite – whose father had been a member of a political party which favoured Lithuanian independence – recalled how food became the currency of survival in these remote camps:

My father once bought some meat from a local crook. He and a friend hid in the woods to cook and eat it so thugs wouldn't steal it. They found out later that they were eating a friend of theirs who had just died.

People in our village were allotted 300 grams of flour a day. Once the flourmill broke down so we were simply given whole grains. People were so hungry that they would just eat them uncooked. Of course, most had bad teeth and couldn't chew them so they would end up undigested in the latrines. Many people would collect them, wash them and make porridge.

Harbingers of starvation, such as distended bellies and seeping boils, stripped away individual characteristics and populated these camps with emaciated caricatures of humanity. Archived photographs show women mending fishing nets with frostbitten hands and weather-beaten faces. Swathed in layers of whatever fabric they could find, some even muster weak smiles but it's hard to tell whether they are eighteen or eighty. Others were sent down coalmines, to brickworks and timber yards. Anywhere cheap labour was needed. The work itself was often backbreaking. One photograph reveals two teenage girls with ancient eyes dragging a 20-foot log across a snowy field with ropes. ‘Two young Lithuanian girls doing the work of a horse. Exhausting work. I am not yet 17', wrote Elena Ilginaite-Miezetiene on the back of this image which she sent to a friend during her decade in exile.

For all their climatic harshness and geographical isolation, these settlements offered some semblance of individual autonomy. Inside the compounds, deportees could move freely and were granted small plots in which they could grow their own food. They could also send and receive letters, which were censored, and obtain the odd food parcel.

Despite their predicament and often at the risk of fatal reprisals, deported Lithuanians would not forgo their faith or heritage. No one was going to tell them who they were. In these iced-over camps, they gathered for mass, celebrated national holidays and established mutual aid societies. Clandestine philosophical, literary and political discussion groups came into being while handwritten manuscript publications were disseminated via sleight of hand. With their indigenous culture providing some degree of succour, these Lithuanians were steadfast in celebrating what few joyful occasions came their way. At weddings and christenings, women would draw traditional motifs on paper, cut these out then apply them to their work garb. Gifts of needlework were exchanged as were bittersweet home songs.

Life in the ‘special regime' camps – designed for ‘dangerous criminals of the state' – held little such solace. By 1952, twelve of these facilities had been established, each holding between 5000 and 35,000 prisoners in jail conditions. One of those was Vytautas Stasaitis. A member of the resistance movement, he was given a ten-year sentence for sedition. It began with a six-day march to Krasnoyarsk to fell timber. ‘Those who couldn't keep up were shot,' he later recalled. ‘When we got to the labour camp, they clothed us in the uniforms of dead soldiers. They still had bullet holes and bloodstains.'

As a further threat to those who considered becoming a political critic of the Soviet state, authorities routinely threw Russian murderers and thieves into the dissident exile population. Hunger turned gentle men into killers and killers into monsters. ‘As inmates, we were chained in pairs,' noted Stasaitis. ‘Once my partner and I thought a wolf was attacking us. It turned out to be a guard dog that had broken loose from its chain. We killed it with our axes and buried it in the snow. We returned many times to cook it and eat it. Those were some of the best meals of my life.'

Following Joseph Stalin's death in 1953, the Soviets began to reassess the deportation system and between 1955 and 1956 many were released from labour camps. The catch? They were not allowed to return to their homeland and had to live in areas selected by the authorities. By 1958, this stricture had been rescinded and the Lithuanians were free to go home. Here, they faced discrimination they could never have anticipated. ‘We were placed in an impossible situation,' said Stasaitis. ‘The government required us to register with the local municipality or face renewed deportation. In order to register, we needed an employer but no one had the courage to give work to former deportees.' In addition, confiscated property – such as business assets and homes – was not restored to returning exiles. They thus had no means by which to start their own businesses or find employment and many faced the heartbreak of returning to the settlements in which they had dreamt of home through so many winters.

In 1989, the Soviet Union was in its death throes and it embarked on a process of liberalisation which was meant to prolong its life but in fact hastened its collapse. Under this policy, many Lithuanians undertook a grisly journey to Siberia in search of their parents' and grandparents' graves. Some returned with bones, others with a sense of injustice the vehemence of which is distilled in the closing paragraphs of a booklet on the deportations compiled by the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania. Authors Dlia Kuodyte and Rokas Tracevskis write:

Virtually no one has been called to account for what was done. The West has chosen to forget these horrors. Nothing of these horrors is taught in schools there. No community bosses in Russia have ever been made to pay for their transgressions. Not one labour camp commandant has been forced to answer for his inhumanity. There is no talk of reparations. The great crimes of Soviet communism are mostly just remembered in the hearts and souls of the victims.

Aside from the empty cattle cart at the Stalin Land ticket booth – into which toddlers were being hoisted for happy snaps – there was little to remind visitors of the misery inflicted by the Soviets on Lithuania. A few cursory notice-boards compiled by the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania strive for solemnity and perspective amid this paen to Soviet might. Yet even when detailing how Russian partisans would gouge out the eyes and lop off the ears of Lithuanians who were thought to be informers, their message becomes dwarfed in both scale and number by the immense sculptures surrounding them.

The communist glorification continues at the souvenir stand where you could buy Lenin shot glasses, Stalin soup ladles and genuine Russian army medals and clothing from the time when repression was at its fiercest. This tat is all over Lithuanian markets. Despite the fact that it makes many Lithuanians sick to their stomach – as exemplified by a campaign against it which most often takes the form of stickers featuring a figure tossing a hammer and sickle, symbolising Soviet paraphernalia, into a bin – a market obviously exists for these trinkets of pain. Welcome to capitalism.