Everything I know about teaching a foreign language, I learned in Lithuania.
It was 1998. I was nineteen, unready for university, full of wanderlust and good intentions. I enrolled in a government-run volunteer program that sent young men and women overseas. I could have been sent to Poland to nanny little Mateuszes and Weronikas or to a clinic in Russia short of file finders or to wash dishes in a hotel who knows where in the Czech Republic or to the British embassy in Slovenia, whose front desk needed manning.
Instead I was dispatched to Lithuania, to the city of Kaunas. I couldn’t speak a word of Lithuanian. My innocence of the language didn’t seem to matter, though. A young Englishman with passable French and German (Lithuanian bore no relation to either) was apparently sufficient for instructing the job-seeking inhabitants eager to learn English.
I remember taking the airplane from London to the capital city of Vilnius. The thrill of takeoff. To feel airborne! No one in my family had ever flown before. “Head in the clouds,” my father had sometimes said of me. And now his words, once a mere expression, had come literally true.
The nations of the former Soviet Union were shown to us in Western newscasts as uniformly gray, dilapidated, Russified. But the Lithuania I arrived in, only a few years after Moscow’s tanks had slunk away, had reason for optimism. The population was youngish, new shiny buildings were sprouting up here and there, and, despite fifty years of foreign occupation, Lithuanian habits and customs had lived on.
It took time to adjust. Little shocks of unfamiliarity had to be absorbed. October in London was autumnal; in Kaunas, the cold reminded me of a British winter. Snow was already in the offing. And then there was the funny money, the litas, in which my volunteer stipends were paid. But strangest, in those first days, was the language, so unlike the sounds and rhythms of any other language I had heard. An old man in my apartment block stops me in the stairwell to tell me something keen and musical—what is it? Children in the street sing a song—what is it about? Unintelligible, too, were the headlines and captions the inky newspapers carried. They looked like a secret code. How I wished to work out the cipher!
A code breaker. But the Lithuanian learning kit the program’s staff had given me was small. In less experienced hands, the kit—really a pocket dictionary and phrasebook—would have seemed futile; there was nothing an imagination could fasten onto. I knew better. I sat at my apartment desk, opened the dictionary, about the size of a deck of cards, and flicked the wispy, nearly transparent pages to the word for language: kalba. As words went, it struck me as beautiful. Beautiful and fitting. Suddenly other words, in other languages, swam in my head: the English gulp, the Finnish kello (“bell”). Less the words than the various meanings behind them: gulp, a mouthful of air; bell, a metal tongue. In this way, kalba I understood intuitively as something of the mouth, of the tongue. (Like language, whose Latin ancestor, lingua, means “tongue.”)
Fingering the pages again, hearing them crinkle, I turned them at random and read puodelis, cup. If kalba was a word to savor, puodelis, I felt, belonged between the palms. I closed my eyes and rubbed my hands together as though palping the syllables: puo-de-lis, puo-de-lis.
I roved five pages, ten, as many as I could soak up in a sitting. My eyes went from entry to entry. I was looking for the kind of wonderful juxtaposition you otherwise see in the fairy tale and the surrealist poem, the kind at which the unwitting lexicographer excels. Cat hair and cathedral. Mushroom and music-hall. Umbrella and umbilical cord. Lithuanian, in this respect, can be just as Grimm or Dada, let me tell you. A short way into the D’s, I hit on the Lithuanian for thistle and combustible—in the words of my dictionary, dagis and dagus—two ordinarily distinct ideas only a vowel apart. They recalled Exodus, put a Baltic twist on the story of Moses and the burning bush. Musing over this, I could not help asking myself, what sermon would a desert thistle have spoken?
What surprises this pungent little dictionary contained! What pleasure! And the more pages I turned, the more my pleasure in its company grew. In the excitement and anxiety of those first days in Kaunas we became inseparable.
A week after my arrival I was already on the job, teaching for two hours Monday through Friday at a women’s center in the city’s downtown, a trolleybus ride away from my apartment. In the classroom, the dozen women in front of me didn’t look at all like the squat, kerchiefed babushkas I scrimmaged with each morning on the bus. They wore smart skirts and makeup and their hair in varying degrees of stylishness. And when, during our first lesson, I introduced myself and tried out some words of Lithuanian, they chuckled good-naturedly at my accent—the women had never heard their language in a British voice before. I asked them their reasons for coming. One student, Birutė (a common name, I learned), turned into something of a spokeswoman for the others. She stood up and said, in excellent English, “We want to improve our English. Because English has become the language of skilled employment here. If you speak Lithuanian and Russian and Polish but no English, you are worse than illiterate. Look at the job advertisements in the newspapers! Anglu¸ kalba reikalinga, ‘English required.’”
Birutė was by far the strongest student. She was in her forties, very slim and elegant, her dyed black hair cut boyishly short. “I studied English at university. But that was long ago.” Her confidence in her English sometimes wavered.
Aida, Birutė’s friend, wanted to say something as well. She was younger than Birutė, and shyer. Her voice was soft and hesitant. Understandably so. All she had for English were a few scattered phrases. Birutė intervened. “She says she hopes you will do better than the last teacher. An American. She says she could not follow a word he said.”
At Aida’s comments the other women in the class began shouting all at the same time, apparently eager to join in the criticism of my predecessor. Their shouts held months of accumulated frustration, annoyance, despair. Down with boring textbooks! Down with pedagogic jargon! We want to learn English, not a bunch of useless rules!
I was taken aback. I had expected the calm of a classroom; I hadn’t expected this brouhaha. To tell the truth, I started to feel a bit afraid. And I was embarrassed by my fear. I thought, I’m nineteen. I don’t know what to tell them. I’ve only just arrived here. I was of two minds whether or not to walk out.
Just then Birutė waved her arms and hollered something at the room. An awkward silence came over the women.
“Atsiprašau [‘excuse me’],” she said. “I should not [have] let Aida say what she said. She becomes excited and excites the others. We are very happy and we thank you for teaching us your language.”
We spent the rest of our first encounter looking at the textbooks provided by the center and trying to get some sort of discussion going. But the women were right. The pages were soporific beyond any teacher’s skill or enthusiasm. If I continued to work from them, as the volunteer before me had, whatever remained of the women’s hopes of speaking serviceable English might have been crushed for good. I resolved to drop the book. To teach differently. How? I did not know. Even so, my attitude was that I would find another approach in time for the next lesson.
I racked my brain to find a more natural, more enjoyable, method.
It came to me late that evening at my apartment while I sat in an armchair reading from the little Lithuanian-English dictionary as had become my habit. I was up to the letter O when the entry obuolys (“apple”) made me stop and put the book down. I closed my eyes. Suddenly I recalled the moment, ten years ago, when I discovered the existence of non-English words, that is to say, other nations’ languages.
Back in east London, exceedingly shy, almost housebound, I had gotten to know one of my kid sister’s girlfriends, who lived a few doors down. The blond mother of this blond girl was Finnish (I had no idea what Finnish meant), and, to teach her daughter the language, one day she gave her a bright Finnish picture book. The gift, as it turned out, went unopened; the girl had no interest in words my sister and her other friends would never have understood. She left the picture book with us.
Cover-wise it looked like any other unthumbed picture book, but once inside I sat astonished. On every page, below the colorful illustration of an everyday object, a word that didn’t quite look like a word. A word intended for another kind of child. Finnish!
Of all the impressions this book made on me, the red apple accompanied by the noun omena left the deepest. There was something about the distribution of the vowels, the roundness of the consonants, that fascinated. I felt that I was seeing double, for the picture seemed to mirror the word and vice versa. Both word and picture represented an apple by means of lines.
The next day, on my way to the center, I stopped in at a grocery store and bought a bag of apples. When the women filed into the classroom and saw the pyramid of red and green apples on my table, I said, “Yesterday some of you said you knew no English. That’s not true. You know lots of English words. You know bar.”
“Baras,” Aida said.
“Right. And restaurant.”
One of the women at the back shouted, “Restoranas.”
“Yes. And history, istorija, and philosophy, filosofija.”
Birutė, sitting near the front, said, “Telephone.”
“Telefonas. You see? Lots of words.” I turned to the apples.
“Taksi,” someone said.
“Yes, well, the list is long. What about these on my table?”
The women replied as one, “Obuoliai!”
Apples.
I told my students about the picture book, and the story of the red apple. Birutė translated for me. I said, “If you can draw an apple, you can learn the word apple.” After I had asked them to take out their pencils and paper, I went to lift and give out the pile of fruit; but I misjudged the gesture and heard the hapless apples slip from my grasp and roll off along the floor.
Women’s laughter.
I bent down and picked up the apples and put one on each of the student’s desks. I was laughing, too. But concentration quickly replaced the levity. Heads were lowered; brows were creased; pencils were plied. A quarter of an hour or so later I told the students to stop. Their drawings ranged from colored-in circles to Birutė’s delicate sketch, complete with shading.
“When you put pencil to paper you don’t draw the apple as such, you draw its shape and texture and color,” Birutė translated. “Each aspect is proportional to the drawer’s experiences. So one apple might be round like a tennis ball; a second, glossy as plastic; a third, baby-cheek red.” I said the word apple was another form of drawing. “You draw a-p-p-l-e.” As I spoke, I wrote the letters in red on the whiteboard. “An initial A, consecutive P’s, an L, and a final E. Your imagination can play with them as it plays with shape and color. Mix them around. Subtract or add a letter. Tweak the sound of P to B.” In the way that an apple can make a sketcher think of a tennis ball, or plastic, or a baby’s cheeks, an apple can bring to an English mind a stable, or a cobbler, or pulp, I explained.
Then I told the women to take out their dictionaries and find other apple-like words.
Birutė’s face lit up: she understood. Her pen, busy with words, ran quickly across the sheet of paper. The others wrote more tentatively. Empty lines glared at the women with least English.
“Turn the pages of your dictionary in the direction of the letter P,” I encouraged. “Look for possible words in combinations like P something L, or PL something, or P something something L, and so on. Or turn to the front and search for words that begin BL. Or think about how English words handle a pair of P’s or B’s, how they push them to the middle—apple and cobble—or out to the extremes—pulp. Birutė, can you translate that please?” Birutė repeated my words, but in Lithuanian.
When the students had finished writing down their findings, they took turns reading them aloud to the class. One lady came up with bulb; another, appetite; a third, palpable. A fourth in the corner, relishing the sudden attention of the room, shouted, “Plop!” Just the sound conjured apples falling out of trees from ripeness.
“Apple pie,” Aida suggested suddenly.
I nodded. On the whiteboard appeared apple pie.
Out of her store of words, duly put to paper, Birutė joined in: “Pips. Peel. Plate. Ate. Eat.”
I was delighted. She had let the language think for her.
We stayed with the exercise for the following lessons. We found car in chair and wet in towel, and window brought us, word by word, to interview; and as the students’ vocabularies filled out, so did their confidence. The mood in the classroom lightened; betterment seemed only another lesson away. Even those with the least English found themselves writing and speaking more and more. Enthusiastic students don’t make good dunces.
Some English words, my students and I decided, are diagrams. We looked at look—the o’s like eyes; and at how the letters in dog—the d like a left-looking head, the g like a tail—limned the animal. We admired the symmetry, so apt, of level. Other words are optical illusions: moon, after you have covered the first or third leg of the letter m, turns night into day: noon. Desserts is a mouth-waterer of a word, or a mouth-dryer, depending on which direction—left to right, or right to left—the reader takes it in. Still other words are like successive images in a flip book. See how the T advances:
Stain
Satin
Saint
I spent a whole lesson explaining a type of word I might have classified as impressionistic. They are the words that most sway the eye, tease the ear, intrigue the tongue. Those that give off a certain vibe just by their being seen and heard and repeated. Consider slant, I said. I wrote the word on the whiteboard. Did Birutė know it? No, Birutė didn’t know it. None of the students had read or heard it before. That could have made them tetchily impatient, but it didn’t. With my new teacher’s nerves abating, and Birutė translating, I felt sure I wasn’t in any danger of losing the room. I was in complete command. So I said, “Let’s stay a few moments with slant. What kind of a word picture is slant? Do its letters, their corresponding sounds, give the impression that the word refers to something light or heavy? Or to something opaque? Shiny? Smooth?” (Part of teaching a language is educating your student’s guesses, taming them.) Opinion in the class was divided. A good many of the women, though, said the sight and sound made them think of something negative rather than positive, something on the heavy side. I went to the spot on the board beside slant and continued writing: sleep, slide, slope, and slump. What did they all have in common? Visually, and audibly, lots. The words were the same length; they had the same onset—sl; they closed on a p, t, or d. And their meanings? I raised my left hand to eye level and lowered it. Sleep: a stander or sitter lies down. Slide and slope: a descent. Slump: a company’s stock plummets. The words formed a polyptych, a series of interrelated pictures. Slant, then? The women raised their hands and lowered them. “Like this,” I said, raising my left hand again and lowering it diagonally: my hand, a translator of slant.
With the forefinger of my left hand I drew a circle around my nose and mouth. “Smell,” I said. “Smile.” I smiled. “Smirk.” I made a face. “Smoke.” I brought an air cigarette to my lips. “Smother.” I clapped a palm over my mouth. “Sneeze.” I pretended to sneeze. “Snore.” I pretended to snore. “Sniff,” I said, sniffing. “Sneer,” I said, sneering. Another polyptych in words.
“Snail,” Birutė said. “What about snail?”
“Like tongues,” I said. “Tongues with shells.” And added, once the laughter had subsided, “Of course, not every word fits into a particular frame.”
But many did. Our imaginations, during part of the rest of the lesson, painted in thumps and stomps and bumps and whomps the colors of a bruise. Next, the broken, kinetic lines of z’s—like moving points which have lost their way—excited in us a sensation of perplexity: ears buzzed as though filled with jazz, eyes were dazzled, heads felt fuzzy and dizzy. At the end of class, the other side of drizzle and blizzard, the women left with their senses thoroughly soaked.
Always I situated the words the students would learn in sentences. Every sentence was an experiment in composition; I was less interested in realistic description. I wanted the women to view the words from different perspectives, to study the effects of layout on meaning, to understand grammar as the arranging and blending of sounds and letters.
“Wind down the window!”
“The secondhand watch’s second hand has stopped.”
“Her teacher’s smooth ink taught thought.”
Winter came, Lithuanian style. It snowed and snowed and snowed. (Snow. What does it have to do with the mouth or nose? Some memories of my childhood in winter are of tasting snowflakes melt on the tip of my tongue.) Ground-floor homes were up to their windowsills in snow. I shivered, one floor up, in my drafty apartment built before double glazing, on a street that is forgivably forgotten by tourist maps. Under a blanket I curled up with the pocket dictionary and watched the weather on TV. Compared to Britain’s and the female forecaster’s long trim outlines, Lithuania appeared somewhat bulky and flat. The temperatures in every part of the country were all preceded by minuses. I had never before seen the numbers go so low.
To take my mind off my shivering, I turned to a page near the end of the dictionary. My Lithuanian was coming along. I was finally able to understand the old man’s neighborly banter when he stopped me as I carried my groceries up the stairs. The headlines on display at kiosks had become as mundane to me as any in London. And my feel for the language was improving; I noticed myself noticing more and more, making more and more connections—like the entries on this page under the letter V. They were loud words, those that began with var-. The sounds they depicted were predictable, repetitive. I looked at the words of this polyptych and heard the caw of varna, a crow; the ribbet of varlė, a frog; the ding-dong of varpas, a bell; the chug of variklis, an engine; the drone of vargonai, an organ; the squeak of vartai, a gate. I heard someone shout my vardas, my name, over and over again. I listened to the verb varvėti, “to drip,” its familiar tin drumbeat.
Jo vardas Valdas. (“His name is Valdas.”)
Iš variklio varva benzinas. (“Petrol drips from the engine.”)
Soon my Lithuanian outgrew the pocket dictionary. I was hungry for other books. But on the shelves in the apartment’s living room stood only black-and-white photos: a thin man in a dark suit, a thinner woman in a pale dress. The landlord’s family, I presumed. No novels. Zero stories. Years of communism had been hard on language. Schoolbooks singing the praises of Comrades Lenin and Stalin had given the printed word a bad name. I turned the apartment upside down. I pulled out drawers: buttons, discontinued stamps, a sprinkling of rusty coins. I opened the cupboard abutting the bedroom: a bottle of vodka, four-fifths bottle, one-fifth vodka. In the closet, beneath a spare bedspread, I dredged up only a yellowing telephone directory. I thought, if I want to read, I’d better join the city library.
At the library I had to fill out forms. “Vardas,” the top of the form asked. I wrote my name and, under it, the apartment’s address. I gave the women’s center as my employer. The muted man at the desk exchanged my responses for a pass and watched the library’s newest recruit set out among the aisles. I roamed from bookcase to bookcase, pausing here and there to sample the pages. Quickly, however, my initial excitement shriveled. So dull, the Soviet-era books, so very dry. So full of the words for work and happiness. Work, work, work. Happiness, happiness, happiness. As the Lithuanians say, thanks for the poppies, but I would like bread. I almost gave up.
But chance intervened. I had wandered out to the dust-collecting reaches of the library. I stumbled on a slim volume—very old to judge by the worn, flaky cover—by a poet named Kazys Binkis. Suddenly my imagination woke up. Clouds that sauntered like calves along fields of sky; forests in May colors; recipes in which thoughts were measured out in grams—I instantly decided not to hand in my pass. “Was there perhaps a bilingual edition?” I asked one of the librarians. I was thinking of using it in my class. The sallow, gray-haired librarian (he didn’t look like he had ever tasted a snowflake) shook his head. He pointed at a remote bookcase—foreign literature; foreign here meaning English, mostly—where I found an anthology of British and American poems and checked it out with the Binkis. The library’s poetry section henceforth kept my students and me in texts.
I was coming out of the classroom one afternoon when I heard the director’s door open, heard my name called in her stentorian voice, and her jewelry jingle as she stepped back inside her office. It wasn’t the first time that the director had asked a staff member into her office, but until now, if her voice resounded in the center, it was never with the curiously accented syllables of “DAN-i-el.” When I tapped at her door and went in, she was at her desk leafing through the English textbook. The impressive perm made her head look very big. She said, “I hear strange things about your class. I don’t understand. What a secretary of bees? What does it mean?” My students had steadily been working through the library’s anthology, and in the past few lessons we had been looking at the poems of Sylvia Plath. “Here is the secretary of bees” is from “The Bee Meeting,” I explained.
“But there no such thing. No such thing as secretary of bees.” Incomprehension aged her. She was suddenly all frowns and worry lines. “It not correct English. The center has textbooks to teach correct English. See?” Her ringed finger tapped a sentence on the page in front of her. “Here. Like this.” She read aloud from the textbook: “John’s secretary makes coffee in the morning.” She read the sentence as crisply as a prosecutor putting her case to a court. “Why not use this sentence instead?”
“John’s secretary makes coffee in the morning.” It was a grammatical sentence. But then so was “Here is the secretary of bees.” And without any of the textbook’s blandness. Only the latter induced the students’ attention. I spoke carefully.
“The textbook’s sentence is, shall we say, factual. It contains a lot of facts. There is someone called John; John has a secretary; the secretary makes coffee; the coffee is made in the morning. One fact after another and another. They make no pictures. Everything is simply assumed. The world is the world. And in the world Johns have secretaries, and secretaries make coffee, and coffee is drunk in the morning.”
“What wrong with that?” the director demanded. Her accent was Russian.
“Memory—for one thing. Lots of facts go forgotten. No fact, no word. The student’s language becomes full of gaps. Whereas the other kind of sentence is different; it doesn’t assume anything. It’s not a fact; it’s a picture. The students can imagine what a secretary of bees would look like. And imagining, they understand and remember better.”
As I spoke, I sensed that the director and I had irreconcilable differences concerning how a language ought to be taught. Even so, she heard me out. I said that each word in a textbook, being a fact, could mean more or less only one thing. A word in a poem, on the other hand, could say ten different things. When Plath writes of hearing someone’s speech “thick as foreign coffee,” coffee here means so much more than it does in the hands of John’s docile secretary. The line stimulates the reader’s interest. Thick and foreign are lent an aura of unfamiliarity. Questions begin to multiply. How can a word be thick (or thin)? Why describe the coffee as foreign? Were the words Plath heard like coffee because they were bitter? Did they give her black thoughts? So that instead of repeating a word—coffee or thick or foreign—ten times over in ten different sentences (“Can I have a cup of coffee please?,” “My favorite drink is coffee,” “His wife is foreign,” “This cinema shows foreign films every other week”), hammering it into the memory, the same word can be understood in ten different ways in a single reading and absorbed instantly.
For the director, poetry was only a side effect of language, peripheral; for me it was essential. A student would learn phrases like “arrange hair” or “arrange an appointment” far more easily, I thought, after reading Plath’s line “Arranging my morning.” Not the other way around. Grammar and memory come from playing with words, rubbing them on the fingers and on the tongue, experiencing the various meanings they give off. Textbooks are no substitute.
The director relented. It wasn’t as if she could fire me; labor cannot get any cheaper than free. But before I went, she had a job she needed doing. The European Union money on which the center depended for its annual budget was fast disappearing; and in order to acquire new funds, the director had drafted in English a project proposal that she wanted me to look over. I read the printout. The old Soviet way with words! Bureaucratese. Syntax minus meaning—every second word replaceable, every third or fourth dispensable. An Amstrad’s pride. What could I tell her? I thought of my students. I bit my lip and said it should be fine.
Wednesday evenings we were usually five or six at my apartment: me, Birutė, Aida, and two or three of the other students. Conversation practice. These no-pressure sessions over tea were my way of reciprocating the women’s regular gifts of food and advice and hospitality, and the respect with which they dealt with me, a young man—young enough to be, for some of them, a son—living alone in the snowy depths of a post-Soviet country, a thousand miles from his family. To Lithuanians, Birutė confided one sleety evening, such informal gatherings were still rather new; they had only in recent years started to forget to close their curtains, to talk without fearing walls with ears, and to not jump when a drunken neighbor bangs at the wrong door. I discovered then why the apartment, which had been vacant for some time before my coming, contained no books.
During the decades of Soviet occupation, an army of censors had stalked Lithuanian for the tiniest inkling of protest, of satire, of ambiguity. Back then every word was a potential suspect, every misprint a potential crime. Up and down the country, millions of books were hauled away from homes and pulped. Book inspectors could turn up on your doorstep at all hours. Why is this Cyrillic-print paperback propping up a table? How come Comrade Stalin’s Dialectical and Historical Materialism sits in your bathroom? Who spilt tea on the novel (by an author awarded a state prize) here? In this climate of trepidation many readers chose to take precautionary steps. Children’s books, Russian-language bestsellers, popular stories and novellas, and even works signed Vladimir Lenin were all fed to stoves. It would take days, sometimes weeks, for the odor of vanished words to lift.
What a difference, then, for the women who freely fraternized every Wednesday evening, the five or six of us speaking English (and me, my best Lithuanian) to our heart’s content. Cradling the poetry anthology on her knees, one of the students, like an inexperienced reader, would turn the pages gingerly and read a few lines or verses aloud. Then the others would describe a memory that the picture made by the words had dislodged. Sometimes the women’s memories were of nursery rhymes they had learned as a little girl from a mother or grandmother. Lithuanian words of course, but the same sorts of rhymes, the same rhythms. The iambic beat of the heart.
Musė maišė, musė maišė, [“The fly mixed, the fly mixed”]
uodas vandens nešė, [“The mosquito carried water,”]
saulė virė, saulė virė, [“The sun boiled, the sun boiled,”]
mėnesėlis kepė. [“The little moon baked.”]
It was Aida, if I remember rightly, who sang. She might have been our mother, gently lulling her children to sleep. Her voice was warm and soft.
It was not unusual for my apartment to ring with the nation’s songs and sayings, for the English the women conversed in was often supplemented by Lithuanian puns, asides, exclamations. They were like the compositions I taught in class. In a little notebook, I entered my gleaned favorites, with the odd doodle of a comment:
“Buckle rhymes with night: sagtis/naktis. Think ‘black buckle.’”
“Rankų darbo sidabro (handmade silver)—said when describing a wedding ring. Similar effect in handmade diamond.”
“Crust on bread is ‘pluta’—froth on beer is ‘puta’—‘alus be putos, duona be plutos’ (beer without froth, bread without crust) = ‘good as nothing.’”
“Nettles are compared to wolves: they bite. ‘Wolf’ = vilkas, which rhymes with šilkas (silk). Glossy leaves. Nettles—nets—threads.”
The flashes of native wit elated me; the words of a riddle or proverb could make my Wednesday. They were the words of Lithuanian’s infancy, the forefathers around fires, faces lit up and colored amber—words so musical and picturesque that I listened and blinked with pleasure. They made me wonder who was truly the language teacher—the women or I? They seemed to me to be troves of knowledge. Inestimable.
In April, the last of the snow turned to slush, then to water, then to an increasingly distant memory. Snow—and its Lithuanian counterpart, sniegas—returned to the dictionary to estivate. The Wednesdays were getting longer; the women arrived at my apartment looking less tired, and stayed later. They read the poems aloud and spoke in English more easily. Assurance rejuvenated them, made their skin shine. I had never seen the women look as beautiful as they did then.
Two months later my class broke up for the summer. After making my goodbyes at the center, I had a little time on my hands before the flight home. Birutė, considerate Birutė, took me to the theater. As luck would have it, a Lithuanian-language production of My Fair Lady (Mano puikioji ledi) was running. I hadn’t read the original play; I hadn’t seen the film or musical. Everything—the songs, the set, the curious clothes—was new to me. Or nearly. Halfway through the spectacle, my reserve of patience ebbing since the actors rushed their lines, or so I imagined, all of a sudden I found I understood:
“Daug lietaus Ispanijoje!”
“The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain.”
Triumph was in the young actress’s voice. She repeated the line, as if savoring every word.
“Daug lietaus Ispanijoje!”
I could hardly contain my joy.