Above Us Only Sky (22 page)

“I am a friend of the family.”

“I don't know you,” Daina said. Her face was weathered from walking the sea, but her eyes were as big, as filled with orange starbursts, as Frederick remembered.

Daina wore her hair long, how Frederick remembered it. She had it plaited beneath a red kerchief.

Frederick said, “I am pleased to meet you.” He rubbed his palms down the front of his slacks. Despite the damp cold, he was sweating. Addressing Daina, he said, “I saw a photograph of you. I'm traveling here with my wife, and when we were in Vilnius, there was a picture of you and your wings, and I knew your wings.” He hadn't known what to say, where to start. Despite his nerves, he hadn't rehearsed what he'd say as he thought he should've because it seemed a jinx, like if he imagined seeing her again, it would not come true.

“What do you mean you saw a photograph of her? What do you want with us?” Stasys asked the Old Man. “How do you know about my wife's wings?” His face reddened.

“He doesn't know about anything,” Daina said. “No one knows.”

The Old Man couldn't hold it in. He was desperate. “I am your brother, Daina. It's me, Frederick.” He hadn't meant to confess his identity so suddenly.

“You are a liar.”

“I met the photographer. He will be so happy to know that you are well.”

“I am making dinner.” Turning to Stasys, Daina said, “Please show this gentleman to the door. I am making dinner.”

“And I met the captain at the jail. He said to tell you that he is sorry.” Frederick followed Daina into the kitchen.

Stasys said, “You need to leave,” and tried to block the way. Frederick was stockier and nudged him to the side. Frederick continued, “I'm sorry, but please, Daina, this is important.”

Daina's wings, which hadn't extended in years, pressed against the wool fabric of her blue shift.

Stasys said, “Are you all right, darling?”

“I don't have a brother,” she said, adding a pinch of salt to the boiling pot. “And I'm fine except for the stranger in our house. He should leave.”

“I am your brother,” Frederick said. “I can prove it.”

“He should leave now.” She turned to the stranger in her house, her expression like a wild animal about to pounce. “The Russians shot my brother alongside my father.”

“No, not me. The Germans took me,” Frederick said. “Everyone said that you had died. Everyone said that the whole family was murdered.”

Daina's wings pulsed against the blue shift.

Frederick said, “I knew you by the orange starbursts in your eyes.”

Daina picked up two plates, one in each hand.

“I'd know you anywhere, Daina.” Frederick showed her his palms. “Do you sing like Mother? I don't know why I was surprised to hear that you were in Palanga. I remember how much you loved the sea. I still remember that first time the sun shone on your wings, and we all saw them move. Do you remember?” He could show her his family portrait. It was in his back pocket.

Daina held on to the plates even as she trembled, pink water creasing her brow, potatoes sliced, piled on the counter, a pungent cheese beside them. On a wood block, a sheet of pastry and pile of red currants waited to be wrapped and baked. Daina's blue shift was stiff and suffocating, the room warm with steam. The window ledge, piled with snow, insulated them from everything beyond.

“You should go now,” Daina said.

“Do you remember Nelly? She was our neighbor. She was your age. You must remember her, Daina!” Frederick dug through his pockets. “I have a photograph.” He couldn't find it. “Nelly brought me potatoes and broth, some bread. The family hid me before the Nazis came for them.”

Daina looked pleadingly at Stasys. She held on to the porcelain plates embossed
Made in Klaip
ė
da
as if they were her hands.

Frederick said, “I didn't know you were alive until we were in Vilnius. I brought my son and my granddaughter to see where I am born, where we are from.” He was still searching his pockets, sweating more profusely in the warmth of the kitchen.

“You aren't from here,” Daina said. She slammed the plates into the sink. They splintered and cracked, the name
Klaip
ė
da
remaining among the shards. “You don't know what it's like.”

Stasys's voice boomed: “Get out!” He took hold of the Old Man's wool collar. “You have to leave. Now.” Stasys was a slight man, but his stature belied his strength and love for Daina. He practically carried the Old Man down the steps and onto the street. “Leave her alone,” Stasys said. “She doesn't want you here.” He locked and chained the door, turning to rest against it. He could hear Daina crying upstairs.

On the street, the Old Man was crushed. He pressed his palms to the latched door. His sister was beyond that door. His sister was beyond his reach.

26

Prudence

T
he Old Man returned defeated to the hotel room in Palanga's resort district where I was waiting. Ingeburg, Freddie, and Veronica had gone for a late lunch, but I'd remained behind, anxious to hear what the Old Man had discovered. My Oma had tried to convince me to go with them for a bite. She kept saying that this was a time for champagne and parties. Didn't I know that the wall was coming down?

When he returned, the Old Man's look was one of resignation. He explained that as much as he wanted his sister to know him, to see beneath his white hair and lined brow, he would not persist. After all these years, he could not defy her wishes. She did not want him there. She did not want to know him. He claimed that it should be enough for him to know that she had survived the war and an iron curtain. It ought to be enough to know that she was well, that she'd married and returned to her beloved seashore.

I had only known my grandfather since June, but this was not the man I knew. “No,” I told him. “You can't just give up.”

He kept insisting that he couldn't bother her if she did not want him there. He would not do that.

“But you have to try and know her,” I explained. “She's your sister.”

He sat on the bed, dropping his chin to his chest, and started to cry. “I am a fool. I left her behind.” He wiped his face with his shirt's collar.

I didn't know it at the time, but a few short blocks away, Daina was confessing to her husband that she shouldn't have sent her brother away. She told Stasys, “What if he doesn't return? How will I find him?”

The Old Man told me, “She doesn't want to be found. She doesn't want to know me. Can I blame her? I am her big brother, and I do not see her for forty-eight years. Why should she know me? I failed her. I failed all of them.”

“You have to go back.” I was going too.

While I knocked, the Old Man looked skyward. From the force of my knock alone, the door blew open. The Old Man remained beyond the threshold while I entered, perching on the bottom step and looking up. Daina and Stasys were poised on the top step. I saw them. In the darkness, I couldn't see her eyes. Nor could I see her wings, but I knew her. I even felt that I knew him. It made no sense, but often life is like that. That's the miracle of all this.

I didn't think. I didn't have to. I remember saying, “I'm Prudence. I'm like you.” The Old Man came up behind me. In Lithuanian, he told his sister, “This is the granddaughter who wants to meet you. She was born with wings.”

Daina descended one step and I saw her eyes in the dim light. Over and over, I'd been told that my eyes resembled hers, first from the Old Man and then from Lukas Blasczkiewicz, but now I could see for myself. Except for my hair, which I got from Freddie, I resembled no one in my family. But now I did.

I moved behind the Old Man to pull the door shut. We were letting in the cold. “Go on,” I told him. “They haven't told us to leave.” I nudged him, but he was a stalwart, and he didn't budge until Daina said, “Please come upstairs.”

“I don't want to bother you,” the Old Man told her. “Are you sure it's all right?” Later, he would translate everything spoken between them.

On the landing, Stasys reached out to take our coats. I handed him mine and hugged the old woman I knew through the Old Man's stories. I felt her stiffen. I had her gooney legs and starburst eyes, but she was sixty-four and not the young woman who'd freed me from the piling.

She turned toward the kitchen, and we followed. Stasys pulled two chairs out from a round table indicating for us to sit. In Lithuanian, the Old Man told Daina that he was sorry, that he hadn't known she was alive.

Steam encircled Daina's face. She was making dinner, pounding dough for currants, small beads of sweat at her temples.

The Old Man asked if she recognized him now. He wanted to know if that was the reason she'd changed her mind and let him in. He began to cry. “I wanted to save you. I wanted to save everyone. I failed you. I went for help, but Father was killed.” The water on the stove boiled and bubbled up to the edge of the stainless steel pot.

Even without knowing the language, I could infer what Daina said next. She asked the Old Man if he'd abandoned them. “Did you run and hide while I watched Audra and Danut˙e die?” Her voice cracked. “Did you leave us to die, brother?
Mirtis?
” She bent forward and I saw serrated tips, sharp as knives, cut through the blue shift she wore.

The Old Man was Frederick now, a poor beast, and for the second time in less than a week, he tried to get to his knees, but off-kilter, he fell over. “I didn't run away. I didn't know. I would never run away,” he told her.

I got up from the chair.

Stasys returned to the kitchen. “Daina?” He was scared. His wife's wings were like two fat butcher knives cutting through her shift.

From the linoleum, Frederick said, “Father was killed. I tried to save him. When I came home, the neighbors told me that they'd taken Mother away and that your bodies had been put in a wagon.” Pressing his palms to the floor, he got to his knees. “I went to the house. There was no one there.” He folded his hands together. “I beg you to forgive me.”

Daina went to Frederick and placed her hands on his shoulders. With her wings extended in the warm kitchen, she looked like a visiting angel. “Nothing is your fault, brother.”

He pressed his tired face against the inside of her forearm. She told him, “I hid. I built a nest and waited. And then I met Stasys. Remember your story about the bear? I thought that Stasys was a bear. Do you remember your bear, brother?”

Of course he remembered his bear. He kissed the inside of her forearm. Daina turned to me. I stood beside her kitchen chair.
I have wings like you
. Five syllables, thumb to pinky.

Her hands fluttered above her chest like she was trying to keep her heart in place. Her wings unfurled even further, like her father's accordion, a sweet, high timbre, the glint of a stainless steel knife spreading layers of steam through the kitchen. She stroked my cheek. Her rough fingertips reminded me of Freddie's, but their coarseness was not from music, but from labor—needle and thread. She felt my face, my jawline, the swoop of my nose and the shape of my eye. Everything was new and strange. I told Daina that I had scars but no wings.

The Old Man used a cabinet to rise to his feet. He repeated to his sister what I had just said. “Prudence has scars. The doctors removed her wings.”

I reached back, rubbing my thumb between my shoulder blades, beneath the cotton of my sweater. “I have the scars where my wings used to be.” Inching my sweater and thermal undershirt up my back, I asked her, “Can you see them? The scars?” I didn't consider it at the time, but thinking back, there was no one in the room who hadn't been scarred. In that way, I was the same as everyone else.

I told Daina that the man who'd taken her photograph had also taken mine. “He's still alive and he lives in Vilnius.” She pressed her fingers to my scars and said, “I remember him. He was in the room when Saint Casimir came.” Her wings opened and closed more quickly. As she took her hand from my back, I pulled my shirt down. She said, “I wanted to live.”

The kitchen pulsed with steam. She continued, “Our mother brought us here to the sea every summer. She doted on us. Do you remember, Frederick?” In Daina's Palanga kitchen, the Old Man was just a boy. His sister was playing angel or bird—flapping her wings, momentum building. Steam rising. Her blue shift split horizontally at her shoulder blades and vertically down her back, the sign of the cross, the fabric dropping to the floor. Wrinkled skin sagged from Daina's triceps and forearms, the curse of age. She reached to feel the fullness of her own glorious wings, turning her head to admire them, knocking over a kitchen chair. She was giddy. In Lithuanian, she told Stasys that everything was changed. She knocked a sugar bowl and fancy cake plate to the floor. At first, it was an accident, but then she used her wings to whack commemorative Soviet Union anniversary plates, gifts from the propaganda offices, off the wall. It was heavenly to hear them shatter. Daina sent copper pots rattling to the floor and toppled a rose vase and pot of coriander from the windowsill to the sink.

I covered my mouth, my hands fluttering, how Daina's hands had fluttered to keep her heart from departing. How her sisters had kept silent lest they murder the world with their voices. But this time the fluttering hands were different, because this time no one had to hold anything captive. No one feared for her life. Because this time, the fluttering hands mimicked freedom and flight. They were their own. I stepped forward to feel one of Daina's wings and as my hand made contact, the wing swelled. There were no feathers. Fully expanded, the wings were soft and malleable like cartilage, like the rays I'd witnessed flopping on the Los Vientos pier, slick like a waterbird's, but bigger. Daina went to the window and pressed her palms there. The glass was cold. She flapped her wings deliberately, knocking pans and pots, bread and muffin tins, a metallic symphony, a cacophonic reprieve. Aunt Daina turned to face me, her wings silenced, pressed against the glass window. We met in the center of the kitchen, where she wrapped her sinewy arms around me. We were chest to chest. I felt Daina's sagging breasts against my full ones. Her arms were at my waist. The wings pulsed and flapped and quickened, and is it any wonder after all of this that I am an ornithologist? Bird girl. Girl bird. I felt something in my chest, something bigger than my heart. I felt my own ghostly wings struggling to emerge. I felt Daina's heart. The two of us were seamless now, each full up and spilling into the other. Then my big feet and Daina's small feet were off the floor, and Stasys, who apparently never used bad language, did just that, cursing out of surprise before dropping to his knees. Men are always falling to their knees around strange birds like us.

The window's frost cast a blue hue, dreamy and musical, Daina's wings, our wings, flapping, pulling down ancient cobwebs. The old woman and the young woman hovering beneath the ceiling. There was nothing but air beneath my boots. Nothing but air under Daina's slippers. Frederick sat entranced, a boy before a purging and a world war, a man on the verge of everything.

We stayed aloft for as long as Stasys could hold his breath.

The flapping slowed. Our feet touched down. The wings folded in like a Chinese paper fan, the tips touching. I fell in a heap to the floor while Daina pulled her ripped shift from the linoleum and covered her breasts. “To be born a bird,” she spoke in Lithuanian, “doesn't mean you get off any easier.”

I understood. Life would be life for anyone who felt different, apart from the pack. Wings or not. Life would be no better and no worse, but perhaps more inspired, but that was up to the individual, not a pair of wings. On my hands and knees, I crossed the floor to my messenger bag, returning to Daina with the gold timepiece. “My dad gave it to me, but I think it belongs to you.”

“T
ė
vas,”
Daina said, admiring the timepiece, “Father.” She cupped both hands around the watch. In Lithuanian, she said to Frederick, “How?”

“Father hid it between his bound wrists. He kept it from the Russians.”

Unlike her, the watch had not aged. Unlike her, all its parts still worked the same. I imagined the Old Man's father. He used to slide the watch from his waistcoat and flick it open with his thumb. I wondered if this timepiece had foretold how much time was left. I imagined a candle burning, the wax dripping, the wick shorter. Had Petras known how much time they had left? Had anyone known what was coming for them?

Daina pressed the timepiece to her lips before passing it back to me. “This is not mine. It is rightfully Frederick's.” On the stovetop, the potatoes had boiled to soup. The dough rose halfway to the ceiling. The steam spread like so many layers of cake throughout the house.

Daina later told me that she'd glimpsed her mother dancing atop ceramic shards and popping red currants from the countertop into her mouth. Daina had been longing an entire lifetime to see her mother, so it was no wonder Aleksandra had chosen this time to make herself known. Probably the kitchen was crowded with the Vilkas clan, but it was just like Aleksandra to steal the spotlight.

Palanga, Lithuania, November 1989. Kitchen. This is where I was born.