KASPARAS AND BIRUTÉ
I didn’t work at Kasparas and Birut
’s house for long. Kasparas and his mother sailed to New York from Plung at the beginning of the century. Probably it was only a few days later that he sat on his mother’s lap and had his picture taken, holding the end of his mother’s bead necklace in his little hand as if it were the rope of a swing. Now a ninety-four-year-old man, he walked by that photograph every day, paying no more attention to it than to a doorknob. The old couple were both Lithuanian, but they only remembered a few words of Lithuanian now and were only distantly aware of Draugas, the Lithuanian-language paper published in Chicago. Their American daughter-in-law and their remaining son looked after them. Their other son had died in the Vietnam War. And Birut’s leg had developed gangrene. She was diabetic. Her leg was the color of a plum. A nurse who had come to the United States from the Philippines visited every day to change the bandage. She told me Birut’s leg would be amputated in a month, but the old lady didn’t need to know that yet. With all her relatives left in the Philippines, what the nurse missed most was a particular fruit. She said it resembled an apple. No one in Chicago had ever heard of it. And in her parents’ garden, she said, avocados would fall from the branches like pocked black grenades. The nurse didn’t want to return to the Philippines, however. Her daughter had been born in the States, and there she’d just be met by a group of poor relatives with no more to offer her than a basket of that special fruit.
One evening Kasparas asked if I would like some Portuguese wine. He searched for the bottle in a clothes closet for a long time; then we drank it and listened to Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night.” The port was pressed from grapes grown on the steep granite banks of the Douro River. Over there, far from both America and Lithuania, the summers are hot and the winters very cold. That’s what gives the grapes their special character. Fresh wine is the color of plums. Which made me think of Birut’s leg, which was supposed to be cut off. I broke out in a cold sweat. Kasparas was looking at one wall, Birut another. They hummed Sinatra from memory (the way eighty-year-olds back home hum folk songs). On the wall there were photographs of them dancing in some restaurant several decades earlier.
By the time they amputated that leg, I wasn’t working there anymore. The old couple’s daughter-in-law called and said they’d died within two weeks of each other. Then she asked me how well I knew the woman from Lithuania from whom I’d taken over the weekend shift. I said she was only a casual acquaintance. The American daughter-in-law didn’t know that in Chicago weekend work like that is found over the telephone, that is, “virtually,” without ever meeting the patient, even though you have to interact on such an intimate basis with their memories and their body soon thereafter. She threw that woman from Klaipda out. One evening, stopping in at her in-laws by chance, she found the old people alone, and Birut with her amputated leg had wet the bed. The woman from Klaipda returned five hours later, drunk. Before leaving, she took revenge on her employers by making four hundred dollars’ worth of telephone calls to Lithuania. The old lady’s daughter-in-law didn’t take her to court over it because she found it too humiliating. Sometimes, when I arrived on Fridays to relieve the woman from Klaipda, I would find her in her room eating Lithuanian herring out of a jar and drinking bubbly pink Italian wine. Her denim shirt would be tied in a knot under her breasts — she was prepared for a wild weekend with other Lithuanian immigrants who were free for a few days from their American patients. Before getting into the car, she would show me the latest photographs her loved ones had sent from Klaipda. She said she missed her son and husband a great deal. She hadn’t seen them in three years. (Still, of all the men she had to leave behind, the woman from Klaipda would clearly miss Ben Franklin — he of the hundred-dollar bill — most of all.)
ALICIJA
Alicija came to Chicago when she was six years old. Her new surroundings bore no resemblance to her native land. Though, actually, there was the Bobak’s Sausage Company store not far away, where you could buy cream wafers, pickles, cabbage, all kinds of herring, and a lot of other familiar things. The names of the children in her class were Mexican. The old Americans who had remained in the neighborhood were called “white trash.” When her mother walked her to school and turned to go home, Alicija would start crying. She didn’t know the English for left or right, up or down, black or white. The world, as if it were made of rubber, threatened to shrink to the size of an eraser. Every morning before class, standing with the other students, she would recite the Pledge of Allegiance without understanding a single word. The teacher smiled. She smiled even when Alicija cried. Every couple of months, in some public school, children would shoot other children. On the television Alicija would see mothers hugging one another and weeping in front of the camera. The locals would leave flowers on the school fence where the shooting occurred. There would be a very long close-up on those flowers. Alicija thought that the children in those schools shot the other children because they had to smile when they wanted to cry.
Broad-faced Mexicans with carts would drive by Alicija’s house. They would sell mangos full of juice as sticky as honey, corn mounted on a stick so it would be easier to gnaw, and sliced papayas, whose black seeds shone like giant caviar. A small truck playing music would drive by from time to time as well. You could stop it anywhere and buy yourself ice cream. On warm nights lightning bugs flew about in the dark street next to the house. It seemed to Alicija that her invisible aunts and uncles from Poznan, with cigarettes burning green in their mouths, were zooming up and down the sidewalk. Her mother missed those aunts very much. In the evenings her mother would be in a bad mood. Because she cleaned Americans’ houses, and her back hurt, and because she had nonetheless to write only cheerful letters to her relatives. “Be glad you decided not to return …” “Since you left, nothing has changed in Poland …” “I’m blind with envy for you …” That’s more or less how her relative’s replies would begin. One time her mother cried while talking to someone back home on the telephone. An aunt had died in some village. She couldn’t go to the funeral because she had only seven hundred dollars saved up, and wouldn’t have been able to fly back to the States. Later, Alicija would learn that almost every immigrant fails to bury their loved ones. Later still, she’ll be in an American funeral home: everything will look like a birthday party, at least the way they were celebrated in Poznan, except that the birthday boy or girl is lying in a coffin. Her mother will tell her that when the old lady, the American she took care of on weekends, was dying in her arms, she yelled for her relatives on the second story of the house to come down, but they were too afraid. Her mother will say that to stand next to a dying person and afterward close their eyes is called “old-fashioned” here. Alicija will then get upset that her mother can’t pronounce such ordinary words without an accent. Even the word “water” would give her mother away as a foreigner. After two years of school, Alicija will learn how to fold a paper flower in class. Her mother will ask Alicija to demonstrate. Alicija will say, “You take the paper, fold it in half, turn up the corners, and even them out.” Her mother will ask her to say it in Polish. Alicija will say, “You take the paper, take it in half, take it like this, and then take it like that.” After a few years it will seem to Alicija that speaking Polish is like climbing into the house through a window when the door is wide open.