The Byelorussky Railway Station had the usual atmosphere of railway terminals: the islands of baggage, the loaded barrows, the groups around the cigarette kiosks, the last minute arrivals pushing their way through to catch the rear coach at least, before the whistles blew. A woman with a bag of oranges puffed like a steam engine through the entranceway; young people in summer casuals and haversacks shrieked with excitement. We made it fairly easily, although our carriage was far down the train to Vilnius: the motors of the locomotive were humming, and the grey-uniformed women waited at the carriage steps. Soviet railways seem to be run by women; at least they blew the whistles, waved the flags, slammed doors and administered the journey, attended to the restaurant cars. Probably, they were locomotive engineers too.[1]
A young devushka in the grey railway uniform examined our tickets and showed us where our sleeper was. In front of our compartment a man who would share it with us was already sitting on the tip-up seat in the corridor, reading a Nero Wolfe detective story in the English language.[2] The doors were slamming, and we were off, dragging slowly along the station, out into the yards which looked like any in the world of railroads except for the Cyrillic alphabet signs, the wheels clack-clacked below us, and the blocks of flats in the distance passed from view, a frieze of cranes along the Moskva River and the city skimmed back out of sight as we gathered speed.
I prefer trains to airplanes—perhaps, I am secretly terrified of those giant birds, wondering how on earth they managed to keep us in the sky. But you can ponder in comfort in a train, stretch out on a bunk or gaze through the window and watch terra firma pass by, the buildings, fields, smoke in the distance like Amerindian signals, faraway villages, mountains, life; time meant nothing, you need not hurry. In the Soviet Union the best train journeys I had made had been to Samarkand and once to Leningrad and Kiev.
A woman brought the bedding. There was another man besides the Nero Wolfe fan, who shared the compartment with us, but I saw little of him. The countryside swept past to the sound of quiet music from the radio fixed somewhere in the compartment.
You have to take your chance in the restaurant car on Soviet trains, it is a matter of first come, first served. We waited among the tables and crates of beer—now I knew where the pivo went that one found so difficult to acquire at hotels.[3]
The first stop was Gagarin, the birthplace of the late cosmonaut.[4] In the morning, when we were awakened by the young lady in charge of the carriage, the radio was broadcasting the seven a.m. news, and Byelorussia was passing by outside, flat and green, farmhouses and barns, a woman leading a cow in a field. The devushka of the Soviet railways brought us chai from the samovar that boils over a coal fire at the end of each carriage. The flat green fields swayed by, and we were crossing into Lithuania, but the landscape took no notice of borders and did not change—after all it is all the USSR.
The narrow end of Lithuania in the west bumps into the Baltic Sea, between Byelorussia and Latvia, and looking carefully at its map, it looks a little like a squashed version of the African continent. There is a horn in the east that looks like the shape of the coastline of the Red Sea and Somalia, and to the west Klaipeda might be Dakar. But this is the Western edge of the USSR. “You must see one of our Western republics,” my hosts said. “It will round off the trip, sort of achieve balance. . . .”
Lithuania is called the land of three thousand lakes. The country has no dizzy peaks, no precipitous cliffs, only ranges of softly undulating hills, forests that cover one-quarter of the territory, and the quiet Niemen River, which is as close to the Lithuanians as the Volga is to the Russians, the Mississippi to the Americans.
In the far past the Roman Tacitus wrote about the Asiatic tribes living on the coast of the Baltic Sea.[5] The name Lithuania also occurs in writings of the eleventh century. The first half of the thirteenth century, under the Grand Duke Mindaugas, witnessed the emergence of a centralized Lithuanian state, and for two hundred years they fought side by side with Poles and Russians against the invaders of the Teutonic and Livonian Orders.[6] At the end of the eighteenth century, the country was attached to the Russian Empire, and though the economic relations with Russia favored the development of industry and the growth of towns, the national aspirations of the Lithuanian people were cruelly suppressed by the tsarist autocracy. Together with the other peoples of the Russian Empire, Lithuanians rose time and again against oppression, fighting for national and social independence. The victory of the October Revolution in Russia had a great effect on the revolutionary movement in Lithuania, then occupied by the Kaiser’s army. In December 1918, Lithuanian workers and peasants rose in revolt and proclaimed a Soviet republic, but by 1919 the foreign interventionists who backed the reactionary elements succeeded in crushing the young socialist state. A regime of terror and suppression followed, especially after the coup d’état of 1926, which introduced a fascist-type dictatorship. In the historic summer of 1940, the socialist revolution once more swept away the reactionary regime, and on July 21 of that year the People’s Seimas (Parliament) proclaimed Lithuania a Soviet Socialist Republic, and in August it was accepted into the USSR. The new life was again interrupted by the Hitlerite invasion, until in 1945 the Soviet Army whose ranks included the Lithuanian Division liberated the country, and for the first time in history all Lithuanian lands were united in the Lithuanian state.[7]
In the foyer of the Hotel Gintaras in Vilnius, local people waited with bouquets and tapestry scarves for relations who were about to arrive on visits from America. During the period of reaction thousands of Lithuanians had emigrated to settle abroad, and nowadays they or their children make a point of returning to their native home, if not to stay for good, at least to look and see, to touch the soil, tread the old streets. Tearful reunions took place around us, receptions, hugs, kisses, the twang of the newfound North American accent mingling with the Lithuanian. A custom seemed to be to decorate the old relation with the embroidered sash or scarf. The decorative art of Lithuanian women artists includes the famous tapestry work. The women of Lithuania have been weaving since time immemorial, and the process of preparing the flax or wool for weaving took up much of the women’s time, so that poetry and popular song actually arose out of this occupation. To this day in some villages it is the custom for a bride to present all wedding guests with linen gifts woven with her own hands. Modern artists owe their ability to harmonize contrasts of dark and light, smooth, rough, closed and open work to the ancient craft of their ancestors. The refined colors in tapestries spring from the ancient ability to make natural dyes from flowers, leaves, roots and bark, and metal ores.
Now even parcels in modern stores in Vilnius, I found, are tied with embroidered tape instead of ordinary string.
From this association with color also, I daresay, springs the famous stained-glass work of Lithuanian artists, in both their formal and modern designs. It is impossible not to be attracted by the blaze of Lithuanian stained-glass work, the gifts of the hands which stretch back to the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the stained-glass work in Kaunas must be seen to be believed: Mother Earth by Stoškus, Harvest Home by Galeškas, Spring by Morkūnas.[8]
Vilnius itself is a combination of old and new: the medieval city with its narrow cobbled streets and courtyards flanked and surrounded by old buildings, the archways casting shadows, the dim interiors of old inns and wine cellars, cafés. The Nazis destroyed a lot of this, but the old city was built again as it had stood in the centuries old past. You can still climb the hill to Gediminas Tower that overlooks Vilnius, pass under ancient gateways, rub against old city walls.
At the shrine of Mater Misericordiae, Catholic old women knelt on the hard pavement to pray at matins and vespers in St. Anne’s Cathedral. Over a medieval gateway an altar of gold is open to full view through plate glass so that the faithful who cannot get inside may pray before it in the street. The curious, like ourselves, climbed the narrow stairs to see it close up: religion’s golden-wrought images are not interfered with, the Catholic Church continues in its old way, as do others.
Around all this old history the new closes in; not only in the modern blocks of flats, the parks, and hotels, but in industrial and agricultural development. In the Soviet period entirely new branches of industry came to life: instrument-making and machine tool industries, radio and electrical engineering and electronics. Lithuania produces computers and electric meters, radio and TV sets, vacuum cleaners, car compressors, agricultural machinery, and ship propellers.
In one of the squares we went to see an open-air production of Verdi’s opera Aida. The whole front of a building, which we learned had been an army barracks, had been turned into a reproduction of ancient Egypt, all the color and pomp of the opera was produced under the open sky. One evening we went to see an American film at one of the local cinemas—actually I had missed the film when it had been shown in London: They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?[9]
The road to Kaunas wound through low hills and forests. Over a bridge a slogan proclaimed: “The eternal friendship of all Soviet peoples is the foundation of all our achievements.” We went past the fields of yellow-green with the farmhouses in the distance, a red brick church. Halfway to Kaunas lies the youngest town of Lithuania-Elektrenai. The biggest electro-thermal power station in the Baltic republics went up here, and the surrounding town seemed to have been sparked off by its electricity.
According to old records, the Vilnius-Kaunas highway had been a very busy road as far back as the fourteenth century, starting as a cobbled street in the latter town. The road had been pounded by the invading Teutonic Knights, the coaches of nobility, and long caravans of merchants, people setting out on their way to other countries to escape intolerable hardship and oppression.
Now it is a broad, double-line motorway, and on our trip to Kaunas, we had to slow down. A section of the road had been commandeered for a cycle race, and the starting and finishing point was occupied by the judges and bustling officials. The grass verge on the roadside was scattered with spectators and men in tracksuits looking over their cycles.
Waved on, we eventually passed the distant clusters of pylons—common sights in the USSR—new brick cottages surrounded by fields, and drove into the old suburbs of Kaunas: narrow streets and brown and green wooden cottages with gardens, overhanging oak trees of the Green Hill district. One could see the new features advancing in: the cleared areas and the acres of flats going up in the Dainavos area.
Kaunas lies in the center of Lithuania and is an important railway junction, the vortex of economic life. Kaunas’s industrial production, apart from central heating boilers and ship’s propellers, includes paper that is exported to—among other countries—Mongolia, Iran, and Sri Lanka.
We entered the town; as in Vilnius the Middle Ages lay side by side with the modern and from old market places we went down Red Army Prospekt and Freedom Avenue.
In the Lithuanian language the Latin alphabet is used, and you could read the signs easily: Maisto produktai, Informatija. It was Saturday morning, and the streets were bustling with an almost Oriental fervor. But Asia is behind you now, Soviet Europe starts here, and the old architecture, Gothic, baroque, or medieval, the former Ratũsha, town hall, like a clenched hand and the tower like an extended and pointed thumb, the red brick Perkũnas House with its Gothic top and slender columns poking at the sky; the Vytautas Church; these contrasting with the sleek tower of the History Museum and the drum-like Čiurlionis. But here too the old town is being restored to its authenticity. You can see all this from the top of Aleksotas Hill, which you can climb by the stairway or use the funicular car.
By contrast with the holiday mood, we went to look at Fortress Number Nine. Built by the tsarist authorities originally, it became outdated despite the cost. So, it was then turned into a prison and from there began its notoriety: the victims of the fascist period of the 1920s, then came the Nazis to kill a quota of 600 prisoners a day, Resistance fighters; a total of 80,000 dead. Besides, the gloomy dungeons, the iron cages, the damp and narrow tunnels, the torture rooms, all reminded me of the Roeland Street prison in Cape Town and the Fort of Johannesburg where I had spent some time. I was glad to get out. Of all those who had been put there, only thirty-four had escaped from it to join the anti-Nazi partisans, the rest of them died. But one had to go and look at the monument to the victims of this horrid place. How much mourning does one do in a lifetime? The cause of human freedom extended far and wide; there was too much death.
It was better after our friends took us to lunch in one of those old, medieval taverns which had been frequented by hunters: carved doors, great hearths, stag heads mounted on the walls, the long heavy tables and high-back chairs, the beamed ceilings. On top of the hearty meal, there was a marvelous kvas spiced with aniseed.
Then there is the Čiurlionis gallery dedicated to this artist and composer who died at the age of thirty-six—the gallery full of his weird symbolism and surrealistic fantasies. Did the 400 canvases he had painted represent a subconscious progressiveness, had he been deranged, a degenerate artistic genius? The arguments did not rage, but were whispered from picture to picture in the subdued tones reserved for galleries and museums. He had produced as many musical compositions as pictures, and one imagined him somewhere nearby, straining to catch the murmured debates, smiling slyly over some foolishness.[10]
Kaunas seemed full of surprises. Next we went to look at the collection of devils. You need not be a follower of the devil, of course, but it is something to behold, this collection.
It appeared that at one time there had been this rich man—his name had slipped from my notes—who had devoted most of his life and money to buying, from all over the world practically, effigies, dolls, figurines of His Majesty Beelzebub. They are all there now in glass cases: dolls, dolls, dolls; the devil in porcelain, the devil in clay, stone, wood, beautifully produced devils and crude devils; devils from Europe, Africa, Asia, the Indies, the Caribbean, devils from everywhere—fiends from France and Satans from Scandinavia, devils, devils all round. It must be the only collection in the world dedicated to the devil. Curiously enough, though I have been given to understand that the devil is connected with all kinds of sexual aberrations and ghastly rites, I saw no evidence of this among all the exhibits this strange man had collected for years from almost every part of the world. In any case, I have always considered the devil to be quite a respectable fellow, and always unjustly maligned.
Another feature of Kaunas is the ringing of the bells, or one should say the playing of bells, by the campanologist, seventy-four-year-old Viktoras Cuprevičius. Crowds gathered in the little park and streets around as he mounted the tower—he is usually accompanied by his son, whom he had taught, but this time he was solo. Everybody waited in fidgety suspense. It was a warm day, the sun bright everywhere, on the tower of the History Museum. Then, clear as-well-bells, the music tinkled, boomed, and clanged across the square, the gardens, the town.[11] A master musician of bells, and he played Tchaikovsky, Brahms, folk songs, the Italian O Sole Mio, and his own Happy Bells: a concert of bell-ringing. Afterward he came down to meet the waiting crowd that pushed around the tower door to greet him: a white haired, lean, and shy man who smiled at everybody and welcomed all strangers and hoped they’d enjoyed his performance. Kaunas is certainly full of surprises.[12]
That Sunday we drove down to Trakai with its old castle on the lake. It was a long drive, and on the way we turned off toward the Rũdininku forest area. On the way our driver made the mistake of overtaking another car on a bridge, and there was the militia up ahead in their yellow squad car that some of the people call “canaries,” to wave us down.
The militiaman was very polite, saluting and saying, “Good morning, comrades.” He called the driver out and said something about there being traffic laws in this republic that had to be obeyed. After this lecture he let us go on. You can get your license clipped by the militia, and after three clippings you have a lot of explaining to do to the traffic authorities, and they might make you do your driving examinations all over again. In serious cases, of course, they might suspend a driver for a period, or for good. But the militia on the whole is never harsh, and I never heard anybody refer to them as the equivalent of “fuzz” or “pigs” or “scuffers,” as the police are called in some countries. Once I asked a friend to warn a slightly tipsy man on the street, and the man laughed and said, “No, no, they’re alright. They are our militia, people’s militia.” Once I even proposed a toast to the militia—but one cannot push one’s luck too far. Another friend told me: “Why, if we had no militia we wouldn’t be able to read or write our own detective stories!”
We drove on to the Rũdininku area, and came on the site where the old village of Pirčiupis had stood—the Lithuanian Lidice. In the summer of 1944, the Nazis had swept down on it and mercilessly burnt down the whole village and all its 119 inhabitants with it. In the nearby museum one saw the relics of such barbarism, kept as a reminder of man’s inhumanity to man: the charred remnants of coats, a burnt shoe, a belt buckle, a bent and blackened fork, bridle bits, a bible with a bullet hole. One was aghast at the ravages of fascism, preserved under glass in the little museum.
Over all this stood the very sad statue of a mourning Lithuanian woman called simply Mother; a masterpiece of sorrow, the inspired monument sculptured by the Lithuanian Gediminas Jokubonis, who was awarded the Lenin Prize for this work.[13] All over the Soviet Union stand the symbols of sadness over its lost children.
The driver dropped us off at the lakeside resort and had to return to Vilnius. We would make our own way back. It was hot and pleasant, and the massed trees around the lake cast a pleasant shadowiness, while all over the water launches putt-putted, and youths punted and rowed to the shrieks of merriment.
In the middle of the lake rose the castle of Trakai, like something out of a children’s fairytale or a Walter Scott novel: battlements, towers, barbicans, portcullis, walls and gatehouse, drawbridge and central keep. It was one of those castles out of fiction, but it was real enough, having withstood the Teutonic invaders and the rampaging Knights of the Cross, who used to be called “Crusaders.” Boyhood crept up on me—Quentin Durward, Ivanhoe—as we crossed the long wooden causeway and crossed the drawbridge.[14] The rest of the hundreds of sightseers followed like advancing men-at-arms: one expected to hear the clank of armor, the twang of crossbows.
Nobody resisted the invasion. We bought our tickets and explored inner baileys and outer, courtyards and fortifications, climbed narrow staircases inside round towers and walked along the battlements where guards had once looked out across the water and called the hourly “All’s well.”
We had lunch in the local tourist restaurant at a table on a balcony shared with what appeared to be a courting couple: they whispered together and avoided our eyes. Down below, parties were singing at tables. After that we lazed by the shore of the lake, wandered under the trees, killing time before the folk-dance concert back at the castle.
The Liandies Muzikos Teatro Trupe performed a program of folk songs and dances, all decked out in the traditional clothes of old Lithuania. Performed in one of the great halls of the castle, the concert was in a perfect setting.
At the Trakai bus station we waited with the crowd going back to Vilnius and other parts. Everybody seemed to have had a jolly day out, evidenced by the condition of several husbands who were being admonished by their wives. “You were supposed to have come fishing,” a woman told her unsteady spouse. “Well, I did intend to,” he replied. There is always a scramble to get aboard—co-operation broke down; it was every man for himself. We were packed in like caviar in a jar, and the bus crew didn’t seem to bother about the carrying capacity of the vehicle. That is one thing about Soviet buses, they hardly ever leave anybody behind.
We had our last drinks of ale in the underground drinking cellar in the old city, brought by a lad dressed like a medieval cellar man. We had visited the old Peter and Paul Cathedral with its intricate plasterwork and bas-reliefs in thousands of designs and patterns, while from the middle of the cupola of the ceiling God looked down at the marble checkered floor, and the altar shone all gold and silver. At the Young Communist League offices, I was received by young men and stunning girls, and one of the stunning girls was the second secretary or something Comrade Rudakova, who presented me with flowers and the recorded speech of L. I. Brezhnev to the Komsomol congress. I had visited the local newspaper Tiesa and met the editor Albertas Laurinčiukas, and they had published my Vietnamese short story “Thang’s Bicycle” in their Sunday edition. We had visited another old tavern where Prosper Merimée had drunk—that occasion would have come under literary adventures.[15]
Vilnius is an old center of book printing. As far back as the sixteenth century the first Lithuanian and Slavonic-Russian books had been printed there. The book has become an everyday requisite in Lithuania today. And among all the thousands of books printed (there are 7,000 libraries holding fifty million volumes) there must be some from other parts of the world. I browsed at a second-hand bookstall, and there was Akmens Salis by Aleksis La Guma. It was The Stone Country, translated into Lithuanian. I have it now in my bookcase, a touching reminder of the last days of my Soviet journey, like the one wooden shoe presented to me in Vilnius—a custom which means you are invited to return to collect the other.
NOTES
The original sentence ended with “. . . at least they blew the whistles, waved the flags, slammed doors and administered the journey, attended to the restaurant cars, probably, they were locomotive engineers too.” I have corrected it to clarify what I think La Guma’s original grammatical intention was.
Nero Wolfe is a fictional detective created by the American writer Rex Stout (1886–1975), who wrote thirty-three novels and numerous shorter works involving this character.
Pivo is Russian for beer.
Yuri Gagarin (1934–1968) was a Soviet cosmonaut and became the first human to reach outer space and orbit the earth with the Vostok 1 mission in 1961.
Tacitus (56–120 AD) was a historian of the Roman Empire. The text La Guma speaks of is Germania (c. 98), which offered a description and account of the Germanic peoples between the Roman Empire and the Baltic Sea. The rediscovery of this text during the early fifteenth century is said to have contributed to the formation of modern German identity over the next several centuries.
Mindaugas (c.1203–1263) is recognized as the founder of Lithuania and served as its only king from 1253 to 1263. The Teutonic and Livonian Orders were Catholic military orders that became involved in the Northern Crusades (or Baltic Crusades) against pagan peoples along the Baltic Sea during the thirteenth century. The Teutonic Order still exists, though it is solely religious in scope today.
La Guma embraces an oversimplified Soviet view of this history. For more complex accounts of this period for Lithuania and the Baltic region, see Andres Kasekamp, A History of the Baltic States (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), chapters 5 and 6; Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010).
Algimantas Stoškus (1925–present) and Kazys Morkūnas (c.1925–2014) were considered master artists in stained glass.
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969) is an American film directed by Sydney Pollack (1934–2008) that stars Jane Fonda, Michael Sarrazin, and Bruce Dern.
Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875–1911) is a famous Lithuanian symbolist painter and composer, who has been credited with aiding the emergence of abstract art in Europe.
The expression “as-well-bells” is in the original text.
Viktoras Cuprevičius (1901–1992) was a well-known Lithuanian composer.
Gediminas Jokubonis (1927–2006) was a Lithuanian sculptor whose work Mother of Pirčiupis (1960) commemorates the 1944 Pirčiupis Massacre, during which a Nazi military unit nearly annihilated the entire village, as La Guma depicts. This massacre is analagous to the 1942 Lidice Massacre in what is today the Czech Republic.
Quentin Durward and Ivanhoe are the titular characters in two novels by the Scottish novelist Sir Walter Scott, published in 1823 and 1820, respectively.
Prosper Merimée (1803–1870) was a French writer, best known for his novella Carmen (1845), which was turned into the famous opera of the same title by Georges Bizet (1838–1875) in 1875.