At night, past the windows of the dormitory where I lived with my husband, Soviet tanks rumbled into the city. The dormitory was a five-story building standing on a hill; the ground would shake so much from the passing of those tanks that our windowpanes would rattle as though it was hailing, and in the mornings we’d often find dirt on our windowsill blown up to us from several floors down. My husband, like so many other people, went to stand vigil by the Parliament night after night. I begged him not to. But every morning — he’d return. Setting an empty thermos on the table, he’d pile some tattered books not of this century into his briefcase and leave for work. As I learned later, women with small children, even a pregnant woman, were seen walking around inside the Parliament building during those days. They would put on their makeup every morning, and it seemed they weren’t at all afraid of death. As for me, at night, I would turn on the radio. At first, before the radio station was occupied, I’d listen to the local news; later it was Radio Free Europe, and then those broadcasts that began, “The Voice of America is speaking” … Both here and abroad, Lithuanians were waiting for something — a very ordinary thing, in fact, that they might well have considered their due: namely, that the great countries of the world would, and as soon as possible, officially recognize Lithuania’s independence … but instead the pleasant voices of all those men and women on the radio kept going on about the US president’s important meetings with X or Y, and his concerns about Kuwait. True, he frequently said that the United States’s relationship with the Soviet Union was important, not just to his country, but to the entire world. And then sometimes some other important person — not the president — would declare that those same relations could be damaged by recent events in the Baltic.
After the night of the massacre, a neighbor who’d seen it all from close up stopped in to see us. While telling us about it, he looked at my husband and me as if we were glass goblets from a set that had never been used. At night, when a song about freedom would occasionally interrupt the news, I would run to vomit in the shared toilet at the end of the dormitory hall. I tried very hard to retch quietly, so the neighbors wouldn’t hear. I vomited every night, even though the child was already moving around inside me, and I ate only fruit, because everything, even bread, looked like meat to me now. Feeling sorry for myself, I was sorry for Gvidas too, sorry that he, coming from Philadelphia, had never suspected what sorts of inconvenience were awaiting him here. The trolleybuses ran infrequently; there were barricades made out of building materials standing in the streets. At night, factory sirens would go off without warning. Much later, I saw a documentary film about those days. They filmed everything, even what was going on in Parliament. The sequence where a priest blessed everyone who refused to leave seemed masterfully performed. And I was intrigued by the episode during which the leader of our country was waiting for a long-distance connection to America. When he spoke to the crowd through his window, he always stayed calm, but there in his office, when the call came through, he shouted into the receiver like everyone else. Not that I think I’d have done any better. How does one politely tell the president of the Freest, Most Just Nation — quickly, succinctly, and in a language not your own — that there are tanks running through your country crushing women, men, and children? On the other end of the line, it might have come through as a sufficiently proper request for aid, but in the office there reigned an absurdly industrious willingness to die.
It was around that time a friend at work loaned me a book of short fiction by a Lithuanian émigré—but she would only let me keep it for a couple of days. I managed to skim through only one story, but felt it suited the Easter issue of the journal perfectly. Since, in the January issue, we’d run interviews with the close friends and family of the victims of the massacre, in white letters on a black background (so that they were as difficult to read visually as they were emotionally, as it were), a change of pace seemed desirable. Even though the book of stories had been published in Chicago, and a very long time ago — long enough, according to Soviet copyright, that it was in the public domain — I decided to write to the author, who was still alive, to ask for her permission. A month later I got a package in the mail. It came from the very place where, when I was a child, it had seemed my grandfather was pointing at with his bent forefinger: Florida, a town not far from Miami. Along with the letter, the writer had added two photographs and a cassette of her own reading of a different story. One of the pictures was of her, the other of the town where she lived. The woman’s dress was exactly the same color as the ocean in the other photograph. She was smiling — the way both ordinary women and the president’s wife smile in that country. As I looked at those two pictures, it seemed completely clear to me that in resort towns like that there were people walking around who weren’t at all like us — people with different biographies, different experiences. When they come here, you recognize them immediately because of their brightly colored clothing and the aspirated consonants in their speech. Without reading her letter, I put the cassette into my tape recorder. (The story was suitable for both children and adults.) The woman had written about “the old days,” when she lived in Kaunas before the Second World War. At first glance (or hearing), the story seemed fragmentary, but all of the impressions were unified by a child’s perspective: these were her everyday experiences. The girl in the story was then hardly bigger than the poppies growing next to her parents’ house … Her dead grandfather lay in a coffin. His shirt was exceptionally white, and a rosary drew a dotted line between his frozen fingers. To the girl, her grandfather wasn’t at all frightening. No, books of fairy tales were much worse … not that she read them, really; she much preferred looking at the colored pictures, even though, when no one was at home, it got scary: The witch with orange hair and the dragon with three heads on its disgusting neck seemed to come to life; they would sneak away from their pages in the book and stand behind the girl, staring.