We Have Been Waiting for You
I grew up with one mother and two grandparents. I grew up with a grandfather who told me the sea was the only border I could trust, who told me the people who stay behind die or hide and about the pyramid dunes he ran across as a child. They were Catholic. We were Catholic. I thought the smell of incense was the smell of God, but other than that, I didn’t know what it meant.
It was when we tried to discover more about my grandpa and chisel into a past he did not wish to go there was tension. I always knew I was not to ask as a child – it was only when he wanted to tell. No one ever told me this; it went unspoken. I must have realized it before I could formulate the feeling into words. It had taken mum and grandma years to collect enough murmurings about Lithuania before he fled, to assemble some timeline of his past. The memories he chose to share were controlled and sparse.
I was born and raised in London, as was my mum. We were both only children. I don’t like the term, differentiating those who don’t grow up with a sibling as “only.” It sounds akin to loneliness, and there is a difference between this and solitude. Mum was a working, single parent. My father and I are estranged. He came with his baggage, brooding and Welsh. I leave him plotted firmly across a border, buried beneath a fat mound of paper daffodils. He flecked my childhood with some visiting spells, but it became clear there was not much interest there. My grandpa gave me everything the man who made me couldn’t. He gave me what I chased from a distant father. It wasn’t going to be the same – it was sepia.
I was in the care of my grandparents for much of my childhood, spending evenings, weekends, and much of the school holidays with them until I was old enough to do otherwise.
I was grandpa’s little friend, his little ghost, he would say, and I would spend hours on weekends looking through his scrapbooks filled with old cutouts of Lithuania’s vast forests and sand dunes. The pictures were from old travel magazines he may have collected through the ’60s and ’70s. He had collated pages and pages of it, Lithuania, a place that always sounded mystical to my eager ear. The echo of his words, most is gone, remained with me. The country is still there, but he held remembrance for the more transcendental, the people who lit candles under sacred oaks and the shtetls you wouldn’t enter. He held in his memory an existence that has now disappeared. I started to know what pages my dead family would appear on in the albums and which people he claimed to not know the names of.
His mother, Alina, and her sister, Lucja, were teachers. There were two more sisters. Danuta, who started as a teacher but became a secretary to the prime minister in Kaunas, then the capital of Lithuania, and Maria, who married well, her husband was in steam. Railways. The inception of connectivity. Grandpa couldn’t wait to see where the tracks would lead. Somewhere greater than his small seaside town, timber huts and salty air. And yet there he was, making scrapbooks with images that enshrined the rural and folk dress of the region.
She was a teacher, my mother. Very good one. They can take away your home, your money, your clothes. They can never take away this, lightly stabbing the side of my head with his sturdy index finger. Education. He said this frequently, which he often accompanied with the belief that education in this country was verging on the inane for secondary school children. There was no weight given to culture, the arts, or philosophy. Education here is silly.
My grandparents pruned the past for me. I absorbed them both, willingly, lovingly. They tenderly coiled around me with their voices, creating a world with their memories that littered my dreams with black and white scenes. Grandma’s childhood in Yorkshire was for bedtime, and grandpa’s Lithuania was for every other time. Lith – u – a – ni – a. The five syllables weaved throughout my days in stubby Lon – don.
Grandpa said my great-grandmother would swim in lakes with water so clear you could count the pebbles below. They were special lakes, he said, where women would sing and wash themselves. I had swimming lessons every Saturday and would imagine I was spying pools of rocks at the bottom rather than the chipped tiles of an inner-city pool. I would ask grandpa on the drive home where he used to swim when he was young. Rock pools. Why did you leave? War.
I would prop myself at the top of the stairs after my bedtime to watch The Bill, a popular police drama, considered too mature for my eight-year-old self. The staircase led into the open plan living room, the TV just visible when I contorted my small body at its summit. Grandma would indulge me, ignoring the odd socks that creeped at the top stair. Grandpa would say, I think there is a little ghost tonight. Either way, they let me stay until the end credits would start, when I would hurry back into the dark.
He would support my hockey matches dressed in a trilby hat, long black coat, and cravat, a mirage of Le Carre’s George Smiley, standing away from the clusters of other parents on the sidelines. He stood with hands in pockets, eyes magnetized on wherever I would be, with or without the ball. He sat alone at my school plays while grandma would attend with her group of “girls”: Susan, a Hungarian revolutionary who came over to England after the 1956 uprising, and Agnes, a warm, bird-like Polish lady who would walk and crochet – both wore berets. I was later told grandpa sat alone at the back in case he needed the loo.
During my university years, he read every book on my reading list, surprising himself on his enjoyment of Latin American literature. He would email me over his thoughts, glad he had read Jorge Lois Borges, finally. His short story “The South” stood out to him, and he sent me emails I have now lost analyzing the treatment of memory in the story, how the protagonist inherits a place in the south of Argentina he has never been to but acts as a conduit to his past; it offers memory a home.
He never went back to his “south,” not even after the fall of communism and the three Baltic states became independent once more. It’s best the dead are not disturbed, he told mum.
A small passport picture of his mother, Alina, was pinned to his writing desk where I would do homework after school. The desk now mine, she remains. She is older in the photograph than other pictures of her in the albums we looked at together. He would never have met her the age she was in this passport photo. He never went back. She must have sent it as an update. Look, this is what I am now. Her hair is off her face, maybe in a plait. She wears a black and white polka dot shirt. We have the same hairline, a widow’s peak softening into the skull.
There was a photograph of four women on my childhood wall. I now know they were sisters, one of whom was Alina. I dreamt about these faces, in different windows of a timbered house behind translucent sheaths, their eyes blinking, heads puppeteered left then right.
We moved to the flat next door to my grandparents when I was seven, during which time the photograph disappeared. When I asked, mum said there never was a photograph, not that she had put up, at least. Maybe grandpa did, the go-between. It may have been wedged between books I never read and rocks I had collected from the English coast. I don’t know where it went.
*
The school Alina taught at would have had two floors built from brick, two Grecian columns at the entrance. The students would have sat at wooden desks in rows of eight, the classrooms long and thin. The floors were made up of wooden slabs which creaked on entering – a welcoming and a warning to anyone inside who shouldn’t be. The Palanga Progymnasium was built when Lithuania was under the Russian tsar’s rule, but would continue in a new era of teaching beyond the Russian limits of before. Lithuania is an independent country now. It is 1924. They will teach in Lithuanian again, not Russian anymore. The church is near, a red brick structure which welcomes crowds on feast and name days year round. The surrounding area is treacled with compact wooden homes, painted muddy shades of yellow or red, others a rich, nutty brown, and beyond these, deep forests and farming ground to the east and the Baltic sea to the west. Some trees are never felled, protected by folklore, sacred oaks nestled within blackberry bushes and nettles, where locals place crucifixes, light candles, and bury written prayers into the creviced bark.
Grandpa was raised believing the forest that grew on the outer edges of his hometown held the spirits of those who had departed this world for the next, a select few trees needing to be tended to with the utmost care so as to act as portals to those who had left. Even now as a Catholic nation, the forests are still sacred to many throughout the Baltic states, Lithuania the last pagan state in Europe. For almost 1,000 years after Christianity became the core religion of the continent facilitated by the Roman Empire, Lithuanians continued to exercise ancient rituals and worship gods aligned to their natural surroundings.
Catholicism was eventually sewn into every aspect of their lives, as present in the Palanga community as the spit from the sea. Christmas and Easter were huge festivals, with strict fasting during Lent and Advent. Mum always observed how depressed grandpa became each Good Friday. When asked, It was day of doing nothing. You could not eat, read, or exercise. All you could do was observe how Jesus gave his flesh for the life of others. It had left its repressive mark on him. He would exist in silence, and he wouldn’t eat. Often, he would sit in his armchair, watching shadows play across the wall.
Still, pagan beliefs lingered even within the most devout of Catholic homes, crucifixes decorated with wild flowers were propped against effigies on All Souls’ Day, fires burned with doors left open to wash out malignant souls. The family’s connection to Catholicism was passed down through the Polish paternal line, which settled in Lithuania due to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth forged centuries ago. It was once the largest state in Europe – a federal union between the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, a substantial power through the 16th and 17th centuries. It held a diverse population of around 12 million. The story goes that the family tree held root as the black sheep of an aristocratic Polish dynasty that went astray. They came to Lithuania to breed their horses for Napoleon’s army, but someone ran off with a stable hand, and so our offshoot of the tree was excommunicated as middle-class intelligentsia. Rumors I heard as a child of ancestors fighting in the Napoleonic Wars made grandpa’s eyebrows raise with excitement as he repeated what he had heard as a boy to me.
Like most of eastern Europe, borders have been paved and then redrawn while the people and language remain – occupation is a loaded term. Even after the commonwealth disintegrated, the family were resolute in their Polishness, and grandpa grew up speaking it as his native tongue entwined with Lithuanian words. Alina and her sisters, grandpa too, were also fluent in Russian and German, able to shapeshift according to the political tides. I asked him to teach me Polish or Lithuanian when I was young. He said these were not useful languages and he would teach me another language he knew well, so I learnt French with a Baltic burr between my vowels.
It was a land of overlap, nations, and creeds depositing themselves into the strata of an ever-shifting core. Lithuania was a newly independent country when Alina gave birth to a son, a land trying to reaffirm its grounding after two centuries of rule by Russia’s tsar once the commonwealth with Poland was no more. It was a land finding its way back to nationhood. The country also had one of the largest Jewish populations in Europe, 90% of which were murdered in the coming decades. Palanga was home to a healthy Jewish community with a school and synagogue. North of the river was referred to as “Jewish Town.” Grandpa always remembered two Jewish girls in his class who would have been taught by Alina. Both had long dark plaits either side of their face. They were pretty, we were friends. They sat together in row behind me. The when Germans came, as quick as next day even, they were gone. This is not to say the community didn’t know what was going on. There were Lithuanians who contributed to the rounding up and murders of the Jews under Nazi rule, burying the bodies in the once sacred woods. I went to Auschwitz in Poland at 17, and he couldn’t bring himself to look at the only photograph I had taken of the infamous train track leading up to the entrance of Birkenau. He had asked to see it, but as soon as it was there, he whipped the micro Nikon out of my hand and switched it off. I cannot, he said, handing the small, cheap camera back to me.
The forests of Lithuania were to be riddled further with death once the Nazis were expelled by Soviet Russia and the Lithuanian resistance known as the “forest brotherhood” were hunted through the trees, shot like game. A German will tell you he will shoot, a Russian will just smile, he always said.
He created a pristine Lithuania for me, his granddaughter, void of pain. Yet I knew his memories were wounds, from the shape of his eyes to the strain between his fingers and palm when speaking. The perceptiveness of a child can absorb multitudes. The real Lithuania he experienced was bound by his childhood, twisted with secrets and the debris of war. It was push and pull. He indulged in the spectacle of his heritage, the stories and sand, but he spent his whole life processing the acts of others that tore apart his trust – in people and nationhood. By the time I was born in the ’90s, Lithuania was not a neutral zone for him, even in reference. It was embellished into folklore and myth, the truth obscured from view. Growing into adulthood I began to see why he would not return, the world he knew was destroyed, but the ghosts remained, waiting.
A ghost he never could name was his father; he was never told. Alina was unmarried and remained so all her life, so there was never any trail of who it could have been. We have only guessed the possibility of a travelling soldier or a school master his mother worked with. Alina gave birth to him in Kaunas, then returned to Palanga without him so as not to draw attention to herself or bring the family into disrepute. Her father was the town doctor and had a reputation to uphold but also knew what could be done to terminate a pregnancy. Whether it was faith or fate as the reason Alina kept the child, we do not know. It was never spoken of. He was not to ask. He was only told Alina was his mother when he was 15, on the eve of war. He was passed off as a cousin’s child, parentless the majority of his childhood, joining Alina in Palanga at 9 months old. He left Lithuania at 18 and never returned.
When he is born, no one is to know this land brimming with cultural intricacies is soon to be culled. For now, there is hope. There is want for an established home. A school mistress will return, hungry for the routine and solitude she previously owned.
When Alina travelled back from Kaunas to Palanga, the ice must have been cruel.
She would have seen fields raised with several feet of snow. The setting sun casting shadows so the land resembled burial mounds stretching far into the horizon, the wind pushing glacial crystals that had settled on the surface to skate on. A deep indigo darkening above, blotched with a rosary of stars.
A carriage led by two horses, maybe three. They tire quicker with cold air in their lungs. A window webbed with ice. The gentleman in the seat opposite has a nose which comes so far out the remainder of his face is in shadow. His thin lips have coughed puffs of cold into the compartment since Klaipeda. A fur stole covers Alina’s nose and mouth, cloistering warm breath, hiding the bitten lower lip, the skin beneath it red raw. Since the baby was born, her own teeth and nails have been pestering it, both working the patch of dry skin under her lower lip, kneading the sore. She bites the inside of her cheeks, dead white skin collecting into spindles within her mouth.
The road becomes smoother as they approach the sea town, her eyes searching for the forest she knows. She squeezes her eyes, trying to find it, the male passenger opposite wondering what she has lost. She wants to see the trees surrounding her black lake, the clear glass she would break with long, striding limbs.
She only manages to find the horizon separating the sky from the earth, gradually interrupted with the silhouettes of houses she will know.
The procedure at hand, as her papa would say to his patients, is a straight one, which we shall navigate together.
She is returning to keep it straight, linear, clear.
Once the carriage door opens, the wind punches deep into her lungs. Other than the coachman’s lantern, darkness, her vision blurred by gale and cold. His cape wraps his body like a bat wing, his long arm beckoning her out of the coach door, onto the step.
Alina is home.
However sturdy she remembered the broad timber and yellow panels of the house, tonight it will appear delicate, cut from paper, light as the powdered snow. A burning glow is pulsing through the lace curtains, figures shadowing themselves.
The door will open.
She will see Lucja, her sister, and immediately think of her newborn, how he looked at her with eyes as blue as the periwinkle ribbon she tied onto the railing of his cot that morning. Tiny fingertips capable of nothing but innocence, twitching towards her hand hovering above his. A distant shape blurs from the center, spooling out into a dark, oily liquid. His eyes become the color of coal.
Her papa will smell of tobacco and the starch on his woolen suit. He will look at the space next to where her bags are dropped, as if one of the two cases should be something else. He seeks more than tired greetings, an explanation for the lack of a baby by her side perhaps, although he already knows she will have left it with the midwife in Kaunas. Her sister will save her, whisking her though to the kitchen for goulash prepared by Bogna the housekeeper, who now carries her two leather cases upstairs to her room. Alina will cup the steaming bowl like a sacred orb, weighted by its heat as she hurls it down her throat, coughing through the paprika as a sage leaf catches on her tongue.
Alina and Lucja will sit together in the kitchen at the back of the house. The snow a freshly laid quilt, the silence giving life to the fire, a broth held on an iron hook above. Lucja fiddles with Alina’s ring, their mother’s ring, a gold setting with an oval amber jewel. Alina watches the two hounds by the hearth, heads on their front paws, black eyes restless as the floor above creaks.
“I thought it was a shadow, but your lip, Lina,” Lucja says, pointing softly with an upward curve to her index finger, approaching to stroke the wound. Alina tells her it is a burn, nothing more, from their elder sister Danuta’s curling rod, with whom she stayed in Kaunas with these past six months.
“Danuta curls her hair now?” Lucja’s glare thaws into a smile.
“Shh, she wants those curls to seem inherited,” Alina whispers before forcing her changed body out of the chair. “I need to sleep, my love.”
On her first day back at work, Alina may be presented with some dried flowers by the young student Gosha. The girl will tell her that there were fern leaves in the poesy to keep it as green as possible, but they wouldn’t keep through to winter. She hands them over to her with a compact courtesy, Alina spying traces of dried mud on her fingers and forearms. Gosha will be one of the few church students, fees fully funded by the Catholic parish. She has problems with her blood – Alina’s father, the town doctor, has been to treat her more than once. The smell, he says, and they sleep on straw.
“We missed you, Miss Kulwiec.”
“We can refill it together with the flowers next spring.” And she places them on the windowsill as the polar white of the snow outside silhouettes the skeletal thing. She takes a moment to look at it, propping the gift against the corner so it stands with grace. Then she will turn and strike a slash of chalk beneath the date, riled by whispers from the back of her classroom.
“Did you all read Flaubert’s ‘A Simple Heart’ or will I have to read it out for you?” Disembarking from her perch from the front and striding towards the back of the room, eyes fixed on the crucifix above the old door. Alina will know how rumors brew in this town – always mouths to lick up the crumbs. Townsfolk of a small community are the worst for those craving anonymity. Eyes collecting as ears pry. She knows the older children will have listened to their parents, who will suspect her absence over the warmer months as something more than tending to a sick cousin. By summer, the one before will disappear, and the one after that. She hopes time will deaden her vanishing act.
Now, she counts the fresh moth holes bitten into the rug which hangs at the back of the classroom to keep the warmth close. She and her sister Lucja, also a teacher at the school, darn the holes each summer when taken down, a red the color of afterbirth pockmarked with peony pink wool. She wants the cold to thaw and thinks of sand in her boots, in her hands, the few granules she has to pick out beneath her nails.
The sand I played in when I was young became tiny castles cemented for those who lived beneath the sea, so at night they had somewhere to hide if a storm came in. The wet sand washed onto the English coastline was met by my cyan blue bucket to make these structures, designs conducted by grandpa. As we’d pat the damp cement together, he would lament about the sand dunes of Lithuania. For miles, mountains on the coast. He told me the Lithuanian myth of Jūratė and Kastytis often, so we’d be assembling a hideout for her, the goddess of the Baltic Sea, if she ever came this far west.
The tale varies, but the one I heard begins with Jūratė, who lived under the sea in a beautiful amber castle off the coast of Lithuania. A young fisherman named Kastytis was fishing in the shallows. She saw him and fell in love, asking him to join her in the amber castle. They were happy here until Perkūnas, the thunder god, found out she had fallen for a mortal man. He was furious and struck the amber castle with a lightning bolt; it exploded into a million pieces across the Baltic Sea. In some versions Jūratė rescues Kastytis from drowning, but in the tale Grandpa told, he was killed by Perkūnas. Jūratė’s teardrops are the amber pieces washed ashore, and you can still hear her sad voice mourning her love in a storm.
Amber is a fossilized tree resin mostly used for jewelry or natural medicine. It is clear and veined, a warm tint between yellow and orange. The amber Lithuania is famous for is torn up from the seafloor by waves and collected by hand. It was produced millions of years ago when the sea was originally a spread of pine forestry, the resin from the pine trees’ sap. After an ice age that created the Baltic sea, the forests were buried beneath. Now the amber floats back up to the surface, sometimes containing fossilized insects and extinct plant materials.
Grandpa’s hometown, Palanga, still honors the legend, the crown on its coat of arms representing the goddess Jūratė, the amber beads below a nod to the Klaipeda region’s ancient business of amber processing. There is a monument to both Jūratė and Kastytis in the town. He would recite their legend to me most days on our Devon beach holiday, a story told to him throughout his childhood. I shared with him how I wished I had inherited the piercing blue eyes of him, mum, and grandma. I didn’t even inherit the deep brown of my father’s. They are a light hazel with flecks of yellow and green, an in-between. Our eyes are the blue of the sea, yours are the amber, grandpa said to me. He always told me how lucky I was, to live like a child. He was haunted by his mother, his aunts, and their secrets, his tales of which haunted me.
See them now: four daughters raised in an out of season seaside town. The wind slashes their skin with sea spit and sand which gets caught in the muscle of the airstream. There is the silence of faith and fluctuating borders, their mother bedbound for years, passing away when the grandchildren start to spring up. They rent rooms in their home during high season to holiday makers, and so they climb into the attic and lay their mattresses down in thin pools of light which strike between the two circular roof windows. At night the stars align in their eternal configurations, the sisters deliberating if it is Orion or Pegasus that floats above. The housemaid Bogna sleeps in the attic room parallel and bangs on the wall when they get too loud.
The breaking waves slow their path along the beach, their bodies wrapped in finely woven cotton shawls with long dark skirts, silhouettes undulating between the shapes of the dunes. All were taught to swim when they were young. They chase each other down to “the crush,” where the sea slips up to meet the land. The girls walk on a quiet stretch of the beach before it arches down towards the Curonian Spit, a thin spindle of land that breaks away from the shore for several miles. They cup the water between their hands, throwing pools into the sky to run beneath their conjured rain.
The sea is the only border you can trust, my grandpa tells me, removing my armbands before I am ready.
