How wholly typical it was of his luck, then, that before he could enjoy even two good months in Vilnius, both his father and Lithuania fell apart.
Denise in her e-mails had been hectoring Chip about Alfred’s health and insisting that Chip come to St. Jude for Christmas, but a trip home in December held little attraction. He suspected that if he abandoned the villa, even for a week, something stupid would prevent him from returning. A spell would be broken, a magic lost. But Denise, who was the steadiest person he knew, finally sent him an e-mail in which she sounded downright desperate. Chip skimmed the message before he realized that he shouldn’t have looked at it at all, because it named the sum he owed her. The misery whose taste he thought he’d forgotten, the troubles that had seemed small from a distance, filled his head again.
He deleted the e-mail and immediately regretted it. He had a dreamlike semi-memory of the phrase fired for sleeping with my boss’s wife. But this was such an unlikely phrase, coming from Denise, and his eye had brushed over it so quickly, that he couldn’t fully credit the memory. If his sister was on her way out as a lesbian (which, come to think of it, would make sense of several aspects of Denise that had always puzzled him), then she could certainly now use the support of her Foucaultian older brother, but Chip wasn’t ready to go home yet, and so he assumed that his memory had deceived him and that her phrase had referred to something else.
He smoked three cigarettes, dissolving his anxiety in rationalizations and counteraccusations and a fresh resolve to stay in Lithuania until he could pay his sister the $20,500 that he owed her. If Alfred lived with Denise until June, this meant that Chip could stay in Lithuania for another six months and still keep his promise of an all-family reunion in Philadelphia.
Lithuania, unfortunately, was rattling down the road toward anarchy.
Through October and November, despite the global financial crisis, a veneer of normalcy had adhered to Vilnius. Farmers still brought to market poultry and livestock for which they were paid in litai that they then spent on Russian gasoline, on domestic beer and vodka, on stone-washed jeans and Spice Girls sweatshirts, on pirated X Files videos imported from economies even sicker than Lithuania’s. The truckers who distributed the gasoline and the workers who distilled the vodka and the kerchiefed old women who sold the Spice Girls sweatshirts out of wooden carts all bought the farmers’ beef and chicken. The land produced, the litai circulated, and in Vilnius, at least, the pubs and clubs stayed open late.
But the economy wasn’t simply local. You could give litai to the Russian petroleum exporter who supplied your country with gasoline, but this exporter was within his rights to ask which Lithuanian goods or services, exactly, he might care to spend his litai on. It was easy to buy litai at the official rate of four per dollar. Hard, however, to buy a dollar for four litai! In a familiar paradox of depression, goods became scarce because there were no buyers. The harder it was to find aluminum foil or ground beef or motor oil, the more tempting it became to hijack truckloads of these commodities or to muscle in on their distribution. Meanwhile public servants (notably the police) continued to draw fixed salaries of irrelevant litai. The underground economy soon learned to price a precinct captain as unerringly as it priced a box of lightbulbs.
Chip was struck by the broad similarities between black-market Lithuania and free-market America. In both countries, wealth was concentrated in the hands of a few; any meaningful distinction between private and public sectors had disappeared; captains of commerce lived in a ceaseless anxiety that drove them to expand their empires ruthlessly; ordinary citizens lived in ceaseless fear of being fired and ceaseless confusion about which powerful private interest owned which formerly public institution on any given day; and the economy was fueled largely by the elite’s insatiable demand for luxury. (In Vilnius, by November of that dismal autumn, five criminal oligarchs were responsible for employing thousands of carpenters, bricklayers, craftsmen, cooks, prostitutes, barkeeps, auto mechanics, and bodyguards.) The main difference between America and Lithuania, as far as Chip could see, was that in America the wealthy few subdued the unwealthy many by means of mind-numbing and soul-killing entertainments and gadgetry and pharma-ceuticals, whereas in Lithuania the powerful few subdued the unpowerful many by threatening violence.
It warmed his Foucaultian heart, in a way, to live in a land where property ownership and the control of public discourse were so obviously a matter of who had the guns.
The Lithuanian with the most guns was an ethnic Russian named Victor Lichenkev, who had parlayed the cash liquidity of his heroin and Ecstasy near-monopoly into absolute control of the Bank of Lithuania after the bank’s previous owner, FrendLeeTrust of Atlanta, had catastrophically misjudged consumer appetite for its Dilbert MasterCards. Victor Lichenkev’s cash reserves enabled him to arm a five-hundred-man private “constabulary” which in October boldly surrounded the Chernobyl-type nuclear reactor at Ignalina, 120 kilometers northeast of Vilnius, that supplied three-quarters of the nation’s electricity. The siege gave Lichenkev excellent leverage in negotiating his purchase of the country’s largest utility from the rival oligarch who himself had bought it on the cheap during the great privatization. Overnight, Lichenkev gained control of every litas flowing from every electric meter in the country; but, fearing that his Russian heritage might provoke nationalist animosity, he took care not to abuse his new power. As a gesture of goodwill, he slashed electricity prices by the fifteen percent that the previous oligarch had been overcharging. On the resulting wave of popularity, he chartered a new political party (the Cheap Power for the People Party) and fielded a slate of parliamentary candidates for the mid-December national elections.
And still the land produced and the litai circulated. A slasher flick called Moody Fruit opened at the Lietuva and the Vingis. Lithuanian drolleries issued from Jennifer Aniston’s mouth on Friends. City workers emptied concrete-clad garbage receptacles on the square outside St. Catherine’s. But every day was darker and shorter than the day before.
As a global player, Lithuania had been fading since the death of Vytautas the Great in 1430. For six hundred years the country was passed around among Poland, Prussia, and Russia like a much-recycled wedding present (the leatherette ice bucket; the salad tongs). The country’s language and a memory of better times survived, but the main fact about Lithuania was that it wasn’t very large. In the twentieth century, the Gestapo and SS could liquidate 200,000 Lithuanian Jews and the Soviets could deport another quarter-million citizens to Siberia without attracting undue international attention.
Gitanas Misevičius came from a family of priests and soldiers and bureaucrats near the Belorussian border. His paternal grandfather, a local judge, had failed a Q&A session with the new Communist administrators in 1940 and had been sent to the gulag, along with his wife, and never heard from again. Gitanas’s father owned a pub in Vidiskés and gave aid and comfort to the partisan resistance movement (the so-called Forest Brothers) until hostilities ceased in ’53.