“I always loved you, Elena,” he said. Then he stepped out from the underground and turned to face the street.
TWENTY-SEVEN
CANADA – LITHUANIA
AUGUST 1989
THE OLD STORIES stayed underground in Lithuania, and others like them in Estonia and Latvia, in Poland and Ukraine and other places. As for knowledge of them in the West, they were forgotten in the malls, suburbs and high-rises of America. A generation of immigrant children grew up and joined the mainstream, forgetting their sources, the springs and rivulets they had come from, except for a few who were caught in the eddies, turning endlessly, in neither the present nor the past, mulling over the unknowability of history and the banality of the present.
By 1989 the Soviet Union was collapsing, although no one guessed it at the time. As the restrictions eased, every trembling mole was digging its way out of the underground and brushing itself off. Seeds long dormant began to sprout and reach out for the light. Messages began to travel again. Many went to addresses where no one lived any longer, but some found their way to the proper destinations.
In early spring of that year, a letter arrived in the mailbox of Luke Zolynas, a high school French teacher who lived in Toronto, Canada. He was a tall, gentle man with eyeglasses that slipped down his nose when he was in a rush, to the amusement of his students, and he was always in a rush because he had three children between the ages of two and eight and his wife worked in a bank and he ran both the drama club and the chamber quartet after school. His father had died young of lung cancer and his mother in a car accident a few years after that. Luke would have liked to know more about his past, but his parents were dead, his one aunt lived far away, and anyway, he was busy with everyday life.
The letter came from Jonas Petronis in Lithuania, and it explained that the Lithuanian basketball coach had discovered they were half-brothers. Could Luke come for a visit?
Luke was startled, then curious, and eventually ambivalent about this alleged half-brother, who appeared to disrupt the busy flow of his life. Everyone came from somewhere, and memory was a mixed blessing. Look what happened to immigrant kids who didn’t forget: they became enthusiastic ethnics, slightly comical figures in folk costumes, objects of derision. Or else they nurtured ancient hatreds and let them fester.
Luke Zolynas loved Canada, in a way, not that he would ever put it in those words. But to him it never felt altogether like home. Sometimes he wondered if he’d landed in the wrong country, and now this letter confirmed some complications about his origins.
Luke’s father had been a very discreet man. His one weakness was cigarettes, which he sometimes held, maddeningly to Luke, between his thumb and forefinger, as if he were a villain in a European movie. He smoked a pack and a half each day, never leaving home without a spare pack in his briefcase. He’d worked for a couple of decades as a clerk at city hall. He didn’t talk a lot about his own origins.
Luke’s mother was a nurse who was often out, working shifts. His mother and father had always had a cordial if slightly cool relationship, unlike the relationships of most of his parents’ friends, who bickered passionately. His parents had had separate bedrooms for as long as Luke could remember. They even took their vacations separately.
It had never occurred to Luke that the man who helped raise him, whom his mother had always called Zoly, was not his biological father. But after he received the letter from Lithuania, when Luke phoned his French aunt in Lyon, she confirmed that Zoly was his stepfather, and told him a whole series of stories about his mother’s first husband. In a second letter from Jonas Petronis, Luke learned the outlines of another part of his father’s life.
In late June of that year, after school was out, Luke flew to Vilnius, where an athletic man with curly brown hair and thick eyeglasses as well as an atrocious plaid suit met him at the airport intending to drive him by car to the town of Merkine, where he lived.
Jonas Petronis was not exactly warm but not exactly hostile either. He was ambivalent too. He seemed to study Luke’s good shoes and luggage too long, to resent him a little. On the drive to his hometown he explained that any such visit would have been against the law a year earlier, when the old travel restrictions were being enforced and tourists were not permitted to leave the capital. It was still against the law technically, but no one was really paying attention anymore.
The countryside they drove through was made up primarily of pine forests that had been planted because the Soviet planners decided the sandy soil was too poor, and so the old farms had been liquidated, the fences dismantled, the houses bulldozed and the people resettled; geography was a slate that could be wiped clean, within limits. The rivers still flowed in their courses, but the farms that had once hugged their banks were gone, their people scattered. History, like geography, could be wiped away within reason as well, but like shards of pottery from ancient settlements it had a way of working up to the surface. A determined man or woman could piece some of it back together.
Jonas Petronis wanted to get to Merkine before dark. His eyes were poor because he’d suffered malnutrition as a boy in a Siberian work camp. But they were unavoidably delayed by road construction, and so they drove slowly down the empty country roads by night, where the darkness of the forest beside them was greater than the slightly less dark night sky above them.
They talked awkwardly about the past, two strangers trying to reassemble the stories of their parallel lives. Jonas Petronis had not known a great deal about the past either until, after the funeral of the aunt who raised him, his uncle Povilas had taken him aside at a place far out in the country, in order to fill him in on a little family history. Povilas was not really an uncle, just a family friend who had started hanging around with his aunt in the sixties.
Povilas had a half-acre garden plot in the country and a storage shed that he had enlarged until it was more like a small cottage. There, over shashlik cooked on an open fire and a few glasses of Armenian cognac, he’d told Jonas some surprising things. Povilas told him that his aunt was not really his aunt, but his mother.
The information was all a bit much for Jonas. He only half believed what he was told. He remembered Siberia from his childhood— the fleas the children played with, the potatoes that were sweet because they’d been left in a heap in the fields to freeze. Jonas had half thought Povilas was beginning to lose his mind. But some renegade historian, calling himself an “underground” historian, had looked up Jonas Petronis and asked him questions about his father, about whom Jonas knew nothing yet others seemed to know something.
It was all very unsettling, and it all became more unsettling. Jonas found out that his story had layers, and one of them lay in Canada.
For his part, Luke would have doubted the story even now if not for a pair of letters on the dashboard, which he read by the overhead light. They were from his mother, Monika, to Jonas’s mother, Elena, and they had been written in the late sixties.
Jonas had ferreted out a few more details from his uncle Povilas, once known by his code name, Lakstingala, stories about their father, who had been executed some months after his capture in 1950.
Down through the tunnel of darkness the two half-brothers drove, on the road to Merkine, Jonas’s home, where soon monuments to the Lithuanian partisans would join the monuments to the Red partisans and the Red Army. There was no shortage of cemeteries, for the Polish partisans who had fought in the region at various times, for German soldiers in the First World War and Napoleonic soldiers before them.