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CHAPTER 1
Part I
Anthony
1
Someone always pays. The question is who. And the question is how.
2
Saint Catharines, Canada, 1979.
Anthony is tall, broad, with large feet. He has huge hairy hands and shaves his head bald with an ivory-handled straight razor. On Sundays he and his wife pile into the backseat of their daughter's family car. The two aging bodies rise gently over bumps in the road and then slump to one side in unison when the sedan turns a corner.
Though he shuffles from Parkinson's disease when he walks and his hands tremble, Anthony's mind is sharp. It will never betray him. His wife's is another story. After his death six years from now, Ona will leave Saint Catharines and spend her final days in a nursing home more than a hundred kilometers away, close to her elder daughter. There, she will walk the halls, gesture to nurses and other residents, and say, "Tell them I was in Siberia."
Whenever my brother and I come to visit, Anthony teases us. He tells old-fashioned jokes we don't understand.
"How do you recognize a Russian spy?" opens one of his favorites.
"He speaks Russian?" I try. I am seven.
"No, he drinks his tea like this!" Anthony takes a cup and closes his right eye as he sips. "You see? He's removed the spoon, but he can't break the habit of closing his eye to avoid its getting poked. That's how you know he's Russian. Russians never take the spoon out."
Bewildered, I force a laugh. Truth be told, I am afraid of my grandfather. Anthony retains a hardness that served him well as a young man in the military. Even the framed photograph from his and Ona's fiftieth wedding anniversary shows him stone-faced. He proceeds to tell us children how he, a Lithuanian, used to drink tea in the Old Country — never after the (according to him) Russian fashion, with the spoon still in the cup, but through a hunk of sugar held between his teeth. He snorts, and his face softens into a rare smile.
Every family tells its children the story of who it is. Our story was of proud people forced from their homeland when the soldiers came. They took my father's mother and shipped her east of the Ural Mountains, alone. They took her by mistake. It was all a mistake, or so the story went. Her husband, Anthony, had been the target. But he had escaped, to the safety of the West, by luck and through cunning with his children.
Our job, as kids, was to learn this story and remember it. To master our grandparents' language so that, one day, we might return home from exile. The first problem in taking on this latter task was that we had never seen this home to which we were to repatriate. The second was that the story we'd been told wasn't strictly true. Important pieces of it, the complicated bits that made it hard to narrate, had fallen away.
In The White Album, Joan Didion writes that "we tell ourselves stories in order to live." But we also come into the world with stories — some of them distortions or even lies — tattooed on our skin. I always wanted to believe that these histories connected me to the land of my ancestors. And I have always imagined that my rightful place lay at the end of a long chain of whispering ghosts and spirits.
One of these spirits was my paternal grandmother, Ona. A deep desire to tell Ona's story has inhabited me since childhood. Even back then, I had a sense that her tale of injustice and survival was fragile and vulnerable to oblivion. And even though I knew far less about her deportation and exile than I wanted to or perhaps than I should have, I sensed that one day I would sit down and write it. She would whisper her story to me somehow, I was sure of it. This desire to record her life grew to an urgency when I myself became a mother. I wanted to pass her story on to my son, so he too could know where he came from and who he was. So that he could take his place in the string of whispering ancestors.
But we know there are no actions without consequences, that no good intentions go unpunished. When I began reconstructing Ona's life, I imagined I was doing, for lack of a better term, a mitzvah for my family. From the wound that had shaped all of our lives so decisively — my grandmother's decades-long Siberian exile — I hoped to make something redemptive. I now see that I was naive in embarking on a project that flirted dangerously with hagiography. The universe decided to teach me a lesson by handing me a truth I neither expected nor desired. Perhaps the discovery I made about who my grandfather Anthony had really been and how my grandmother had unwittingly paid for his sins is my penance for taking a kind of pride in Ona's victimhood. Maybe it was a warning against claiming an ancestor's pain and survival as my own.
But I think my greatest sin was to believe that this journey would or, worse, should be easy. My mistake was to think that I had something to teach my son rather than to learn myself. Before I could begin to tell him who he was, I had to rewrite the narrative my family had given me. And before I started to dictate my child's story, I had to ask whether I had the right to do so in the first place.
Here in North America, on this land taken through massacre, disease, expulsion, and rape, we believe in fresh starts. We pretend that everyone gets a fair shake. But not in the Old Country. There, as the Book of Exodus tells us, the sins of the father shall be visited upon the son; a boy born of a sinner will pay for his forebear's transgressions. Perhaps a girl will too, but the book doesn't specify.
Those of us born in the New World tend to reject this ancient view. The Nile may have turned to blood, we say, but here our rivers run clean. They wash our grandfathers' and fathers' sins away.
Or do they?
3
I grew up not far from Toronto, on the banks of the Credit River. By Canadian standards, it's a shallow and minor tributary, whose small delta has created fertile wetlands. My most vivid memories of time spent with my father are of the long walks we used to take surrounded by bulrushes and songbirds. Rivers marked his childhood too: my father was born on the Lithuanian banks of a waterway similar in size to the Credit. The Scheschuppe River (Šešup? in his — our — first language) appears as two lines that snake along the edges of a Lithuanian border city on the map that hangs on my office wall. The town once served as a gateway from Lithuania to East Prussia (today's Russian region of Kaliningrad). Its name translates as Newtown (Naumiestis, Neustadt, Naishtot) from the various languages that are now or were once spoken there.
Every day, when I get to work, I read the family names plotted on the map: Salanski, Kaplan, Silberman. I trace its carefully rendered streets, named for landmarks like the bathhouse and synagogue. Next, I follow paths that go beyond the paper's limits to territories that ancient cartographers described as belonging to dangerous creatures. Here be monsters, they wrote. Out beyond the known world lay the realms of fast-running, backward-footed Abarimon and dog-headed Cynocephali. But monsters can be deceiving. The Eastern monks who painted Saint Christopher as he carried the young Christ across a river sometimes portrayed him as a giant Cynocephalus. Storybooks tell us that monsters can be humane. History books and archives remind us that humans can be monstrous. And, yes, beyond Newtown's edge once lurked the cruelest creatures of all, men with guns.
I've hung the map despite my husband's warnings. "It's in bad taste," he says. "Macabre." When colleagues pop their heads in my doorway, they instinctively grin at it above my head. It's rare to see a document so large, so detailed, and so obviously handmade. But once their eyes settle on the block letters printed at the bottom right-hand corner of the map, they understand what they're looking at:
MASS GRAVE OF ALL WOMEN AND CHILDREN 3RD DAY IN ELUL-5701 SEPTEMBER 16TH 1941
An arrow points to a place beyond the paper's edge.
They see this, and a shadow descends. Conversation cuts short. My colleagues excuse themselves and take their leave. Though I respect their discomfort, I leave the map on the wall, because I need this object of contemplation. For me, it serves as proof of how much I still do not know. Of how far I must go to finish what I've started.
Hand drawn in ink, the map of Newtown measures almost one square meter. It came to me via a friend many months after I first opened my family's files from the Secret Police Committee (KGB). She found the map while digging in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC and sent me a digital copy. I had it printed onto a huge sheet of paper.
The creator of this document was a native of the city he drew. A young man in 1922, Ralph Goldberg left Newtown for Chicago and thus escaped the fate of so many. Almost fifty years later, he began to plot his childhood streets from memory.
The map pleases me because in it I recognize something I do too — that is, meticulously piecing together detail upon detail. I like the way the mapmaker has sketched a plan and pondered what's absent. But the thing I love most about this rendering of Newtown is that it remains a work in progress. At the bottom of his map, Goldberg has extended an invitation to collaborate:
There is enough space for anyone to write in a missing name in his proper place or to correct any error.
The plan of Newtown also includes a dedication, which I read and reread:
My intention in making this map is — perhaps in the future generations, a grandchild or a great-grandchild will, out of curiosity, unfold [it]. He may accidentally recognize a familiar name that he heard years ago in his parents' or grandparents' home. He will also read about how and when the terrible Holocaust happened. It is my hope that this will remind him not to forget and not to forgive.
The friend who sent me the map believes I'm the heir its maker had in mind.
"You are the grandchild," she writes. "He drew this thing for you."
I, however, am not so sure. Yes, I am a grandchild of Newtown. But surely I'm also the wrong one. The wrong kind. The mapmaker's last sentence, in particular, fills me with dread.
4
The words "Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic's Secret Police Committee (KGB)"run across the document's forest-green cover. A stamp declares its contents "Top Secret." The file was opened in 1949 and closed in 1985, the year of Anthony's death. Beside the heading "Storage Term," I read, "Forever."
There can be no doubt that the record is my grandfather's; the date and place of birth are his. I open it to find a wallet-size military portrait of Anthony mounted onto a manila-hued page and outlined in blue pencil. The pages that follow, most of them typed in Russian, lay out the basis for a criminal indictment. This document is a search file. It outlines the identity of — and the evidence against — a wanted man.
Secret agents' code names translate to "Captain," "Scout," "Clover," "Dove," and "Falcon." Each reports on what his or her surveillance has uncovered. I find a great deal of material — testimony, evidence — from my great-aunt, Anthony's sister. Agents interrogated her about his movements at the end of the war and whether he corresponded with Ona upon her 1958 return to Lithuania from Siberia.
"Ona receives many parcels from her husband which he sends from England," she told them. "He is very rich."
I've had this file for three years. When I wrote to the Special Archives of Lithuania, I did so on a lark after a conversation with a fellow writer. She had asked me if I'd ever looked at my family's KGB files and suggested I might find materials about Ona's Siberian deportation among those documents.
At the time of that conversation, I was focused solely on telling my grandmother's story. I knew little about Anthony's life and wasn't particularly curious about him. I never dreamed how such a query would change not only the book I was writing but also the understanding of who my family was, who I was. I didn't know how fundamentally it would alter my relationship to the past.
Of the four hundred pages that arrived, almost a hundred were KGB documents from Anthony's search file. The question of why there should be so much material on him crossed my mind but only briefly. Strangely I didn't then ask myself what a "search file" might be, though it was a term I'd never come across before. In fact, naive as it seems to me now, I found myself looking forward to reading the documents.
5
I never knew my grandfather Anthony all that well. The youngest of his five grandchildren, I resided more than an hour away from the town he'd lived in since the mid-1960s. I saw him at family gatherings and can only remember once spending the night on the Murphy bed in the apartment he shared with my grandmother. I don't recall his ever spending the night with us at our suburban home. I have no memory of the two of us ever having been alone together.
The sole member of the family who liked guns, Anthony was an excellent shot. He never learned to drive a car, but before the war, his rifle slung over his back, he used to ride a bicycle back and forth to a shooting range in the Lithuanian countryside where he was born and raised. In Canada, he invariably won the turkeys offered up as prizes for target-shooting competitions at Lithuanian community picnics.
His was a generation whose gender and birth order determined an individual's fate. The first son might inherit the farm, the second would attend the seminary, and the third would enter the military. Only a very fortunate boy would attend university. As for daughters, generally speaking, a life of cooking, of cleaning, and perhaps of fieldwork awaited them. For their part, Anthony's parents sent some of their children to become nuns and priests, since a life in the Church offered a secure future. Anthony's destiny lay with the military. To him, war and uncertainty became more familiar than peace and stability.
So it was that in 1919, at age twenty, he answered a call for volunteers and went to fight in the nascent Lithuanian army. Today the battles Anthony fought are called the Freedom Struggles.
In 1964 Anthony published a memoir about those years. A London press established by World War II exiles published the Lithuanian text. Almost four hundred pages long, Two Wooden and Three Iron Crosses spans two years, from 1919 to 1921. I have a clothbound copy of it on my library shelves. The book opens with his grenade training, setting up field kitchens, and leading battalions through devastated villages. The fighting was between the "Whites" (meaning anticommunist Lithuanians who had apparently adopted the nomenclature of the Russian Revolution) and the "Reds" (Russian Bolsheviks), who, after the collapse of the Russian Empire, sought to reestablish Russian control of the Baltics through Soviet rule. Curiously, there isn't much talk in the book of the primary regional conflict of the time, the Lithuanian-Polish War of 1919–20.
Lithuania had just declared independence from the Russian Empire in 1918 a year before Anthony went to war. For the first time since the days of the Grand Duchy (1341–1795), the people of this land would stand on their own feet. And for the first time ever, their leaders would speak their language, not Polish or Russian as they had done for centuries. To Anthony, a member of the last generation of Lithuanians born under czarist rule, statehood and autonomy were ideals worth fighting for. He did so valiantly, rising through the ranks and earning a chest full of medals for his efforts. In 1920 the Soviet Union concluded peace treaties recognizing independent Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. By 1922 all three countries were full members of the international community.
In the early 1920s, high on national pride, Anthony returned to the place of his birth — the agricultural but traditionally wealthy Zanavykija region of Lithuania on the country's far western edge — a hero.
With his battles behind him, Anthony was ready to settle down. His military prowess had made him more marriageable than ever before, so he had the pick of the region's beauties. A young woman with broad cheekbones and a calm demeanor caught his eye at a village wedding. Though others had courted Ona, it was the young army veteran who won her over. In 1927 the couple married. The bride was twenty-two years old; the groom, twenty-eight.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Siberian Exile"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Julija ?ukys.
Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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