It was the midwinter of 1999. School was out, but I wasn’t heading home. Me and my best friend walked to the bus stop and got on trolleybus 19 to take the new route Pašilaičiai–Antakalnis, which had been running for only a few months. We were headed to Žvėrynas, up to this day considered a prestigious neighborhood in Vilnius. The 20 minutes on the trolleybus went by unnoticed, and here we were trudging through snow on an unshoveled sidewalk until we reached a freshly built, gray apartment building that had risen above the surrounding wooden houses – pretty soon, they would all be demolished. We got to the fifth floor – the penultimate floor in the building. My friend found the key in his pocket and unlocked the apartment door, and we stepped inside. Inside his brand new home.
During the first decade of independence, some of my classmates’ parents made an early switch from a planned to a market economy and became rich enough to move out of Soviet housing – their income might have been legal but mostly wasn’t, and it made the dollars that could afford newer, nonstandard apartment complexes (some years later, these would be exchanged for private homes in the suburbs). My friend’s mother, who worked at a bank, did the same thing – she moved her family out into a different area in the city, into a house that epitomized the promise of a better future, into this awkwardly silent and vast apartment with high ceilings and impeccably white walls, very much unlike the cramped reality of my Soviet residential block. Just now it seems we sat there on an oversized sofa, eating grilled sandwiches and thinking of stuff to do.
I tell my friend, “Maybe we should go somewhere?” He says, “Maybe the attic?” I wink at him, as we’re not supposed to go up to the cold and dark attic stocked with building materials. My friend nods and we start putting our jackets and shoes on. But the attic, even though quite a bit more interesting than the apartment, doesn’t capture our attention and presence for long. We’ve got a better plan: to shift our playground one level up, literally. We find a small door in the attic and climb outside onto the flat roof of the building.
It’s late in the afternoon, but already dark outside. The streetlamps are on, illuminating the pretty flurry of snow. Standing on the rooftop, we observe the wintry panorama of a rapidly changing city. I get closer to the tin, snow-covered ledge of the roof, wanting to look down and see how high we are, but before realizing what’s going on, my body follows my gaze and dives forward. I am lucky that the six-story fall is broken by a terrace roof one floor below us that leads to my friend’s apartment. I’m lying face down in the snow. From the corner of my eye, I see my friend gracefully descending down the roof of the terrace. He rushes over to me and asks if I’m okay. I’m okay, I tell him, trying to get up on my feet. But not everything is okay. Pain pierces my right hand when I lean on it. Later, in the hospital, I discover that the things that aren’t okay pertain to my fractured humerus and broken wrist.
However, as the proverb goes, every cloud has a silver lining. Fracturing the bones in my arm proved to be profitable. Lithuanian engineer-turned-businessmen believed we would shortly become the United States (this belief was ultimately shattered during the 1998 financial crisis), so during the first years of independence, various bureaus started popping up and offering with great enthusiasm a whole spectrum of insurance services. One such service – accident insurance – was sold to my mom. Since bone fractures were covered precisely under the clause of accidents, I received a fabulous compensation of close to one thousand litas (for comparison, my daily allowance was 1 LTL).
Me and my parents agreed that I could spend the insurance money however I saw fit (since all of my savings would usually be spent on books, they were pretty confident I’d act responsibly with the money I pulled out of thin air, too). So as the winter thawed into the 20th century’s penultimate spring, and as I eagerly awaited the removal of my cast, I kept racking my brain on how to spend my new funds. This quandary, again, was resolved by my mother – as the thaw of March approached, she suggested that I go on a trip with her.
After independence, Lithuanians gradually acquired another way to spend money that was also characteristic of consumer societies – tourism abroad. No longer did people require special permits, as they did in the Soviet Union, to travel beyond national borders; all they had to do was have enough money to purchase a travel package and, of course, a passport proving that they, as citizens of the Republic of Lithuania, are fully within their rights to cross most imagined and real borders, but most importantly – the border to the West, because everything in the general direction of the East still wasn’t considered foreign.
Therefore, it wasn’t long before we picked a destination and purchased our travel packages, and I applied for my first-ever passport – it had a green cover with the gilded coat-of-arms of Lithuania. I spent the rest of my money on an Olympus point-and-shoot film camera and eagerly awaited the Easter holidays, knowing that was when I would get on a bus and listen to a tour guide presenting the journey ahead of us, sit through a several-hour ride on the highway toward Poland (the road is still as bad today as it was all those years ago), and stop on the border crossing near Lazdijai, where the Polish border guard would stamp my passport, confirming the first border I ever crossed, and then I would know that my journey had truly begun. A journey that, in retrospect, was bound to become a turning point in the life of a 13-year-old boy raised in a country that, according to one Lithuanian poet, stretched from the Blue Baltic to the Far East. After all, it was the first time I was heading precisely to the West, and more specifically – to Europe.
My “first” Europe, meaning my first true visit abroad, was Prague (for us, Poland was merely a transit country back then). I doubt that an inhabitant of Rome, Paris, or Madrid would have considered it a true capital city of Western Europe, either in terms of culture, politics, history, or especially geography, but compared to my native Vilnius, Prague to me was the great Western metropolis whose bewildering streets hid surprises on each corner that were sure to leave lasting impressions, even frightening ones. Therefore, I kept up with our guide at all times, who led a group of Lithuanian tourists from Charles Bridge to the astronomical clock in Old Town Square, from St. Vitus Cathedral to Prague Castle, while I kept barraging her with questions and, as a 13-year-old boy, devouring this majestic city through all of my senses.
I remember one particular evening when we were done for the day and had returned to our hotel, an establishment reminiscent of an era of failed socialism in one of Prague’s residential neighborhoods. I dared to explore the vicinities alone – after asking Mom for permission, she said, “Just don’t get lost, or we won’t be able to find you in a big city like this.” But how could I ever be lost in a place where I was supposed to be, being who I was supposed to be? A little European who knew nothing of the wall that separated the East from the West 10 years ago, and who was surely dressed for the occasion, wearing the best knock-offs available from the biggest market in Vilnius – Adidas sneakers, blue jeans, a Nike jacket. That’s who I see in the pictures I took home from Prague – a city that became my gateway to Europe and gave me the idea that I was a part of something greater, something I could be proud of – that now I, too, was European.
Of course, my trip to Prague was merely the first step to discovering my European identity (the teenage me was least concerned with the question of who I was – it was merely enough that I was). Many other trips followed – shorter or longer stays and temporary habitations in European cities, during which I became a firm believer in what German philosopher Jürgen Habermas described as the modus of a cosmopolitan European identity, which allows a person to challenge the limits of a purely national identity and cultivates solidarity among the different European nations. For this reason, whenever I traveled outside Europe and people asked me where I was from but had never heard of Lithuania or knew where it was, I never got upset. I always had a backup answer: “I’m from Europe.” Occasionally I would skip saying that I was from Lithuania altogether – “Europe” was my magic word. Moreover, during my travels across Western Europe, I always made a point of harassing the French, the British, or the Italians who still hadn’t heard of Lithuania. After all, Lithuania had already been a member of the European Union for many years, which is why I would ask them, “So, if I’m European, what does that make you?” Overwhelmed by pride, in some way I felt as if I were better than them because I knew my European geography and could name all the countries with their capitals in a heartbeat, and these were cities I had all visited at least once, by the way. I felt like a truer European than them.
At some point, especially after war broke out in Ukraine, I realized that not only was there no such thing as a “true European,” the very idea of European identity was not a self-explanatory concept, passed down from generation to generation, established once and for all in some document or declaration. The idea of European identity is constantly recreated and reconsidered. It is broken and rebuilt and broken again. French philosopher Étienne Balibar once said that the idea of a European identity is essentially a contradiction, always stuck between inclusion and exclusion, and therefore it takes shape in environments where it may be both confirmed and challenged at the same time. These environments happen to not be the luxurious retail stores on the Champs-Élysées or the stylish cafés near Piazza San Marco, not somewhere among the pints at Oktoberfest or along the route of Camino de Santiago, but by the concertina wire on the Polish-Belarusian border, in a refugee camp on the Island of Lesbos, in the Kunstraum Kreuzberg, or amid the ruins of Chasiv Yar on the front line in Donbas.
Fortunately, I did not need to fall off the roof of a building again to realize this. One time was enough – a healed bone is nevertheless still broken.
