The lesser Polish nobility didn’t make itself loved around these parts, but today its absence is noticeable. Mr. Edward’s hay is mowed very badly. With the passing of the club-wielding lords and the passing of Communism, life has been reduced to small things. It is spent fishing, smoking a cigarette, sipping a beer.
“Ours,” he says, offering me a glass, “you absolutely have to taste it. Since independence it has gotten much better.” Yevgeny weighs in on the subject. He wants to know how much beer and vodka cost in France, Italy, and Poland. His geography is all alcoholic. He writes down scrupulously with pencil and paper the Italian prices. Mr. Edward: “Things have gotten better. The stores are full. You used to have to get in line for meat, and when you got to the head of the line, the meat was all gone. To buy something decent you had to be a friend of the store manager.” Grigori laughs. “Today the stores have everything. The only thing lacking is money.”
Yevgeny tells us that after independence in 1992, he got in his car and started heading west nonstop. “I put it in first, second, third, fourth, and I kept going, going, going. Without stopping, without sleeping. Poland. Germany. Just about all I saw was gas stations, but I was hungry for space, I was euphoric like an escapee. I wanted to go all the way to the Atlantic. But in France, they stopped me. The police said to me, ‘Monsieur, your tires are bald. You can’t drive like this.’ So I spent all my money on new tires, and I came home.” I ask if things have gotten better since 1992. “The country is emptying out. At the time of the USSR, there were two hundred kids here in the elementary school. Today less than half. People aren’t having children—the cost of living is too high. Private businesses do whatever they want; they’re buying up everything. They tell me it’s like that in Russia, too.”
Monika asks if there used to be Jews around there. Grigori: “Sure there were. They were rich and poor, like us, but people hated them. And when the Germans came in 1941, the Lithuanians turned into animals. The Germans gave the signal and then they just stood and watched. Meanwhile, the Lithuanians slaughtered the Jews and the Gypsies with whatever weapons they could get their hands on. Saws, hammers, clubs.” Mr. Edward has finished weaving his wicker cage for the catfish. “There’s a place on the river, twelve miles from here, where before they killed them, they forced them to dig a common grave with their own hands.
People were drunk with blood. Svincane is the name of the place. It’s a huge cemetery like the one in Ponare, the old quarries just outside of Vilnius.” I ask him if the old owners of his house have ever come back. “One day a woman came, maybe the daughter. She didn’t do anything. She looked around, didn’t say hello to anyone, and then she left.”
After the Neris River, we give a lift to Artur and Derek, two cheerful twenty-five-year-olds who are hitchhiking to Vilnius. Only one of the two has a girlfriend there, but they’re traveling together. The stuff of days gone by. Their dream is to work in the West because in Lithuania “it’s all a fraud.” Derek tells us that he’s a bricklayer who used to be paid €1,200 a month, and now he gets €300. “The Germans are the only ones who pay for the work you do.” Artur works as a carpenter and a welder, but now he’s unemployed. “My last job was building a church. The priest got some funding from the EU and came up with the idea of a nave in the form of an overturned boat. I made him the vaulting ribs to hold up the roof.” Monika whispers to me: “He’s the modern version of Väinämöinen, or maybe the latest version of Hephaestus.” But anyway, the onion spires of Vilnius, lit up at night, come into view on a horizon of hilltops.
The legendary city of Judaism and of Catholic Poland begins with our first Italian tourists, in front of the station, where we drop off our rental car. They are three men from Puglia, judging from their accent, obviously on the hunt for women. One is obese, one skinny as a rail, and the other incredibly nervous in what looks like a bulletproof vest. A scene from a comedy. They think they’ve arrived in the Third World, that they should be able to go to the airport by taxi for a euro and seventy cents. An enraged taxi driver explains that the closest place where they can buy something for a euro seventy is Ulan Bator, in Mongolia. They play the tough guys, bother a few more cabdrivers with their arrogant behavior, but in the end they retreat. They’re behind the eight ball. They’ve got all the cabbies against them, and they don’t know what to do. They consider taking a bus, but they don’t speak English, let alone Lithuanian. So they go back humiliated to Canossa and get in the first cab at the head of the line.
The cabdrivers in Vilnius are phenomenal. They talk loud, bicker, argue continuously, and make you feel that you’re definitely in the South. The world of the mute Finno-Ugrics is gone forever. Lithuania is the southern Italy of the Baltics. The driver who picks me up at the station is upset with himself because he can’t guess my nationality. “You are surely not Lithuanian, surely not Russian, and surely not Polish.” I keep him in suspense for a while. My Istrian-Balkan-Mitteleuropean face is tough to figure out. His, on the other hand, is unmistakably Mongol. Eyes wide apart and small, nose minimal and pug like a boxer’s, face wide like a nocturnal bird’s, cheeks enormous and bony. “I’m Italian, but a little Slav and a little German,” I tell him. And he, proudly pointing to himself: “Polish surname, Russian language, Tartar mug.” And to say “mug,” he uses the Polish word morda, disparaging, animalesque, and frankly untranslatable in Italian.
To seal his friendship with his bastard cousin from Italy with his aquiline profile, he takes his hands off the wheel and, without stopping the cab, turns around to shake my right hand vigorously. The car swerves but imperceptibly.
When I notice that he’s controlling the gear shift with his knee, I understand that I am hostage to a grandson of the Golden Horde, the band of knights from the steppe. He’s certainly one of them. Once quartered in Poland, in the time when Poland also included Lithuania and ample slices of Ukraine and Belarus, they—Muslims—put themselves in the service of the Catholic king and became the most feared defenders of the realm. It was they who brought about the overwhelming victory of Jan Sobieski against the Turks, outside the walls of Vienna, they who galloped against the Soviets in the Russo-Polish war of 1920, and they yet again who launched themselves with their swords drawn in the charge against Hitler’s panzers. That’s why my cabdriver is beating the steering wheel as though it were the halter of a horse, making it move in a terrifying manner, herky-jerky, braking on the curves, accelerating wildly, cursing, furiously denying the right of way to all comers.
Ah, Vilnius, the Vilnius of the Jews, wellspring of kabbalah and culture, how you sparkle today with fast-food chains. You’ve already become an amusement park. In just a few years, you, Athens of the Baltic, seem already to have lost much of that fascinating nineteenth-century mold that during the terrible time of the Soviets, you had somehow managed to conserve.
By now it’s dark, and tired as I am, I’m not ready to go exploring. But Monika, who as a Pole knows each of the city’s stones one by one, won’t give in. She takes aim at the hill, sniffs out some tracks on the old pavement, and thus meets Mr. Jan Pogrzelski. He’s a Greek Catholic, a member, that is, of that Orthodox confraternity that, to get out from under the repression of the Kremlin, subjected itself to the pope of Rome. A mild-mannered man, polite, well dressed and subtly possessed by his religious persuasion. He accompanies us up the hill to show us the church that once conserved the relics of a certain Saint Jouzapatas (something similar to Jehoshaphat), which were in danger of being “deported” to Moscow in the eighteenth century—and he underlines several times the term deported, as though he were talking about a living person.