vilnius and on
moving on | september
2009

September Exhibits


TIMELINE

The National Theater School | Copenhagen, Denmark
Sept. 10th - October 9, 2009

Statens Teaterskole | Per Knutzons Vej 5 | 1437 København K

teater@teaterskolen.dk

The National Theater School

PAPERLESS

Photo 612
Sept. 13th -Oct. 6th, 2009
Opening Reception Sept. 13th 1pm

612 Station Ave. | Haddon Heights, NJ 08035 | 856.429 2304

Photo 612

LITHUANIA | COPENHAGEN

A photography project with the Summer Literary Seminars brought me to Vilnius, Lithuania.  Enclosed are snippets that detail the final weeks of my experiences in the city.

Summer Literary Seminars  |  Photographs from the Baltics

August 2009

The Yellow Balloon

Here in Japan exhibits at the Contemporary Art Center, a modern museum behind the town hall and central square.  A stiff blonde woman sells me a ticket and points up.  A leggo like land of rails, grass, and plastic homes line the stairs and walls of the second floor hallway.  Photographs of Japanese women painted in powder appear on lithium sheets, illuminated on light boxes attached to the wall.  The adjacent room consists of huge yellow balloons with black poka-dots.  The central balloon is a capsule of small balloons that hang from the top.  I take off my shoes and walk inside where mirrors and circles surround on all sides.  The wooden floor is tacky beneath my bare feet.  In the final room, a video installation plays in a large dark room.  Seven screens appear before a sitting area.  To the right, one show an old clock, tick tick tick, playing in succession with ethereal tunes and the sounds of nature - water, air, waves crashing.  One screen depicts views of the ocean where a moon rises and fireworks explode.  The piece in all flows like a fantastic dream.

In a black walled café I drink white beer, Baltas.  Two men play chess in an intense competition.
“Ohhh!” belts the first competitor with sandy blonde hair and a straight back.
“A ha!” returns his bald partner, cloaked in a grey suit jacket.

What do you not like

“Where are you from?”  Two thick boded men ask from across the aisle at a touristy wine bar in Vilnius.  Caron, a young actress and writer from New York City and I are celebrating her final night in the city with garlicky tapas.
“Where do we look like we’re from?”  Caron returns.
“You from the States.” A balding blonde man in plaid says to her with a smirk.
“You’re right.”
“I lived in Brooklyn,” the man says.
“Did you like it?” I jump in.
“Not really.  It was dirty, hard.”  The two men sit with a young, polite girl dressed similarly in plaid and blue jeans.  The three speak fluent English.  She is a PR rep for Apple; the two men seem to be writers.
“So, what do you two not like about Vilnius?” A man in an indigo shirt asks.
“What do we NOT like?” I repeat alarmed.
“Yes, what do you not like?” He says matter-of-factly.
“Yeah, yeah,” Caron responds nonchalantly, “I know what you’re asking.  I always wonder what people don’t like about New York.”  We sit there for a moment in silence.  I am debating how to respond.  Should I say what I want to say - the underlying anti-Semitism that I have heard about through writers’ experiences during the trip.
“The lack of diversity.” I say.
“The lack of diversity?”  Thomas’s eyes narrow.
“Yes,’ Caron agrees, “Coming from the States, I noticed as well, there is not much diversity here.”
The mood at the table changes.  The men joke around, “Not enough colors, eh,” and we return to our respective corners.

…..

Gray looms over the jumbling rows of stained brick buildings.  Wires string along the streets of the former Jewish Ghetto.  The clouds close in on the busy road, just above the bus lines.  The scene is a colorless circus of trams, tours, and drunken men gripping black bags of beer.

The Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum of Lithuania | The Greenhouse

On Pamenkalnio Street there is a wide empty space between rows of concrete buildings.  I walk past building number 10 and 14.  A bucket of pink paint sits beside a pink concrete façade with a Rastafarian sign in the window.  Building number 12, the edifice known as The Greenhouse is absent.  The Greenhouse is the one Jewish Holocaust Museum in Vilnius.  This is where the Yiddish Scholar Dovid Katz has urged me to go, and where Faye Ran spoke of the tiny “nothing” of a Holocaust memorial.  Instead of building number 12 there is a hill that leads toward dapper brick apartment complexes.  I walk up what feels like residential property to a green cabin.  This is the Green House, a museum tucked away, up on a hill surrounded by white brick complexes and apple trees.  An old man sits alone on a concrete fence that surrounds a long courtyard.  At one end of the space is a stone sculpture of a menorah.  At the other is a memorial to a Japanese diplomat responsible for saving six thousand Jews.  It reads, LET THE MOONLIGHT GLANCE TO THE NOBLE MAN.  CONSUL OF JAPAN IN LITHUANIA CHIJUNE SUGIHARA WHO IN 1940 ISSUED 2139 VISAS TO JEWISH WAR REFUGEES END THUS SAVED THOUSANDS OF LIFES.  AUTHORS: GOICHI KITOGAVA AND VLADAS VILDZIUNAS 1992.
Sempo Sugihara was a Japanese diplomat who saved six thousand Jews.  In Kaunas, he issued visas to Jews so that they could escape.  After he returned to Japan, he continued to issue visas from his hotel.

I ring a doorbell and a kind elderly woman with dry auburn hair opens the door.  Her name is Rachele Kostanian.  She is co-founder of the sole Jewish Holocaust museum in the city.  When she retires, there will be no one to take her place as director, and thus the museum will then be in danger of closing.
She smiles.
“Where you from?” she asks in a heavy Lithuanian accent.
“Philadelphia, the US.”
“Oh, wonderful.  Here you go, an English copy.”  She hands me a tattered typed guide that supplements the displays in six small rooms.   A mystery contributor has added notes in pencil along the sides of the text blocks on my copy.  I see that words are crossed out and the word ‘No!” has been added to segments of information.

Before World War II, around 240,000 Jews lived in Lithuania.  In 1940 when the Soviets invaded, the Jews suffered under the Soviet regime, correspondingly to all religious factions. The Soviets nationalized all property, including businesses, and closed all religious institutions, banning any kind of religious or social gathering.  On June 21, 1941, Nazi Germany invaded.  This is when the War officially began in Lithuania.  They seized Lithuania from Soviet control, and thus began a three-year period of mass genocide of the Jews.  By the end of 1941, the Nazis had murdered 130,000 Lithuanian Jews.

A photograph depicts a scene from Paneriai forest.  Three men stare ahead.  Soldiers point guns at the back of their heads.  They wear wool caps and long jackets.  Beneath I read that bodies were thrown into ditches and covered with light sand, or other dead bodies.  Pictures show the remains — mangled, skeletal, eyes empty beneath thick black beards and open mouths.

Minus the glam of the KGB museum, the Green House recreates the history of the Jewish Holocaust through the few remaining photographs, objects, and written accounts.   A blue carpet surrounds white walls of a green painted home.  In the final, sixth exhibition room is a powerful display.  Large photographs portray children smiling, playing, studying and sleeping - wrapped in the arms of elderly women.  These images line barbed wire fences that recreate the coldness of what ensued.

The doorbell rings.  A couple from New Jersey enters with a young Lithuanian woman.  They speak to a red haired boy from Austria.  He explains in brief, “I am doing my civil service to Austria with twelve months work at a Holocaust Museum.”

Cat-sitting in the Old Ghetto

I live in an apartment in Vilnius with a small cat that likes to purr on my lap and chase butterflies that occasionally sneak in through the window.  Along my block appear the faded symbols of Judaism.  Amidst the main streets, packed with whimsy and summer celebration, lies a complex, largely unknown history.  The story of the Jews exists beneath the surface, in the underbelly of the city, which now seems so rich in progress.  I walk the streets of my new neighborhood, an area that was once the Jewish Ghetto.  I see signs, faded, crumbling, displaying Hebrew letters and Stars of David.  My interest lies in the remains of Jewish Life.  I see the absence through the Jewish emblems that barely survive.
Jewish partisans fought.  They hid in bunkers in the woods and some even escaped eventually.  In all, twenty ghettos and five concentration camps saw uprisings.   I walk past courtyards, filled with laundry and trash.  My courtyard is spotless.  Central stone spaces lead down corridors, jumbled with debris, beneath buildings decorated with fading Hebrew Signs.  Rain pounds on stone buildings where families once congregated in cold, over-packed rooms.  A wake up and feel the weight of history.

Dovid Katz

The red haired boy working at the Green House appears again later the same day.  A Yiddish scholar named Dovid Katz invites me to his presentation on what he terms his Double Genocide Theory.  “Hi Julia of Glenfiddich and Glenmorangie!” he writes in an email, “I am giving the power point tomorrow night at the flat being rented by Daniel who is from London and taking the summer course.  It’s kind of a “marrano presentation” because the directors of the Yiddish summer program (which I am proud to have founded 27 years ago) banned me this summer only because they didn’t want the foreign participants to hear this lecture.  Hope to see you tomorrow!”

In the evening I walk up five flights of stairs through a coral painted hallway to the top floor flat where a large group of students are feasting on plums and borsht.
“Ah, Julia of Glenfiddich and Glenmorangie!  Welcome!”  Dovid stands in the middle of an amber sunlit room.  Students from a summer program on Yiddish language fill the living area and kitchen.  On the floor are various piles of èssays that Dovid has photocopied for the presentation.  I gather the handouts, most of which are copies of articles that Dovid has written on the subject, anti-Semiticism in Lithuania.

Jewish students of all ages, from throughout Europe, America, and Israel, pass a bowl of grapes and plums around the room while Dovid begins his power point presentation.

“Now I will begin by saying that this presentation does not speak to all Lithuanians.  I love Lithuania and feel this small country has been wronged in many ways.  I have had nothing but good overall experiences with the people of Lithuania in my day to day.  I am speaking to the State of Lithuania.  The Lithuanian government, I believe, is trying to issue a State History, which is utterly ridiculous.  History must be free, free for teaching in school, free for interpretation, Free!”  His voice rises.
Dovid is a character.  He has a long, wild black beard and long hair.  Beneath the fuzz are think rimmed silver glasses and dark set eyes.  He dresses in a dark suit held with black suspenders.  Dovid speaks expressively in a heavy Brooklyn accent.  He grew up in New York, and now divides his year between Vilnius and Wales.  Dovid founded the Yiddish Studies program at Oxford as well as the Yiddish language summer program at Vilnius University.  He has published numerous books on the subject.  The students fill the couches and floor space of the small apartment.  They look to him with admiration.  They are awe struck.  He is a famous Yiddish scholar.
“I prefer not to get involved in politics,” he states, “I am just a scholar, not an activist.  But now, I cannot be silent.”  He turns on the presentation and beings.

“Over the past ten years that I have lived in Vilnius, I have had very little problem with anti-Semitism.  But, beginning in 2008, a number of incidents have occurred that I will share with you tonight.  The State sponsored history I am going to speak about is what I call Holocaust Obfuscation -this is the State sponsored movement to delete the Holocaust from history.  How are they trying to do this?  By mixing the history of the Jews with that of the Soviets — by aligning the Jews with the Soviets as an excuse for killing the Jews during the period between 1941 and 1943 when the Nazis took power and obliterated 94 percent of Jews from Lithuania!”
“One of the myths, the excuses, is that the Jews were all communists.  Many Lithuanians believe that the Jews supported the communist Soviet invasion in 1940.  The fact is that one percent of Jews were communists.  One percent!  And, ironically, those that were Communalists fled with the Russians in 1941 when the Nazis invaded.  The Jews that remained, those that were sanctioned and killed, were not the communists.   What the Lithuanian State is trying to do is termed the ‘equality of evils’ interpretation of history.  It is dangerous, and, what I have seen take place over the past two years is frightening.  A number of atrocities have occurred, with no or little reaction from the State, the majority of local intellectuals, nor other Western countries, until pressured. ”

The room is completely silent.  Dovid begins a lenghthy power point presentation.

“More recently alarming is what has been released in the press.” A press clipping appears on the screen.  “This was on the cover of Respublika, a mainstream newspaper.”  A caricature of a Jewish man wearing a long shirt, dark curly sideburns and a rounded hat holds the globe alongside a muscular man with almond eyes and long wavy hair.
“The subtitle reads, The Jews and the Gays control the world.”  Dovid reads in a flat tone.

Dovid flashes to an image of a rowdy parade.  A skinhead holds the Lithuanian flag.  A brown haired man in a black jacket screams.  On his sleeve is a patch, the swastika with daggers.
“The police stood aside as they marched, laughing.   It took them twelve days to react.  This march was along the main street!”

“Of course, this happens all over the world.  But what I find most alarming in Lithuania is that there is no counter reaction.  It took the government twelve days to react to the supremacy march.  The intellectuals that so bravely react are often silenced by threats.  When people do speak, they are threatened.  They could lose their jobs.  So we know, it is not so simple to just speak out.  These people have families.”

“Now what are my hopes for the future?  I would like to see separation of communist victims and Jews.  This is quite simply put, not direct Holocaust denial, but Holocaust Obfuscation.  This is a way to relate issues of the Holocaust with those of what is called the New Cold War - issues with today’s Russia.”

Laima Vince

Throughout the morning, rain pounds on the skylight.  Pelts bang over my head.

Laima Vince returns on a Wednesday afternoon.  Laima is an elegant, well-spoken writer with dark hair and a warm smile.  A frenzied father and artist mother raised Laima and her five siblings in New Jersey.  To escape Jersey, she studied at the American High School in Germany.  Her parents immigrated to the States from Lithuania.
“They are American through and through.” Laima explains.  “I speak Lithuanian fluently because I studied it.”  Laima studied in Lithuania for a year during college.  At this time, in the late 1980’s, the country was under the Iron Curtain - occupied by Russia, “The Big Bear to the East.”  She published a book about her experiences in a book entitled, Lenin’s Head on a Platter.

“The period that occurred after I returned home to the US in ‘89, those were the roughest times here.”  Laima shakes her head somberly.  She returned in the mid-90’s as a Fulbright scholar, after the country claimed independence.  Her three children lived in Vilnius for those two years with her.  Now, in 2009, Laima lives in Vilnius, again as a Fulbright scholar.  Her fellowship has just ended.  The International School in Vilnius offered her a position as an English teacher, which she took immediately.

…..

It is August 23rd, the anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the devious agreement between the Soviets and the Nazis that sealed the fate of occupation for the three small Baltic countries.  Incidentally, it is also the commemoration of the United Way, when citizens in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania formed a hand locked human fence stretching through the States.  We run to the parliament building, a Soviet style government center at the end of Gedimino Road where a memorial service is taking place.
“Oh no!”  Laima walks faster.  “I think we missed it!”  Elderly men and women in pressed formal wear stream down Gedimino holding Lithuanian flags.  We race by the opposing current of post-Partisans.
“In the news,” Laima explains, “The State reported that they will no longer treat this day as a memorial.  It’s time to move on, stop looking back at the bloody history, and commemorate freedom and hope instead.  I can’t believe we missed the memorial service!  The partisans always commemorate this day.”  Laima and I walk through the Parliament center.  Beside the large concrete building is a small glass box museum.  Inside hang black and white photographs from the 1970’s and 80’s depicting Lithuanian protests, battles, riots, and defiant students.  The images are printed on canvas.  On the surface are marks in ink and harsh dark splotches.  The remains of thick concrete walls stand outside the Parliament center.  Painted in graffiti on the front are the words of freedom - FREE LIETUVO!

On the walk home, Laima notices a friend, a tall, handsome man in a black pinstripe suit.  His eyes brighten as we approach.  The two speak in Lithuanian and the man grabs my arm in a friendly, forceful manner, leading us back toward the Parliament building.
“Do you want to go to a Parliament meeting!”  Laima asks excitedly as we head back.
“Uh, yeah, sure,” I yell over the mounting crowd.  I am not quite certain what she means by Parliament meeting.

The dark man exuberantly hurries us into the Parliament lobby.  He takes our identification cards into a small office and returns with bright green guest badges printed with our names.  We push past a crowd, file through a metal detector and fly up stairs bordered by a large yellow stained glass wall, into a huge room.  In moments, a memorial service will come to session.
“Memory, here, take a picture,” the man who I quickly realize is an actor, runs me around the gigantic room.  The day becomes a circus.  I snap photographs thoughtlessly at the actor’s command.  He points, “Memory! Photo!”
“That is the president of Lithuania!” Laima exclaims.  “The first woman president - get her picture!”
“That is a former partisan - keep photographing - He was the head of the post-partisan independence fight.  I used to translate for him!  Get his picture!”
The actor leads me up to a row of straight-backed yellow seats.  Laima remains on the floor, trading phone numbers with a white-haired partisan fighter.  The room stirs with press, ambassadors, and politicians from the Baltic countries, including the Lithuanian president and Prime Minister.  We sit above the crowd.  Before each seat is a CD of Lithuanian music and headphones for speech translations.
The memorial begins.  The Prime Minister, a bald man with thin spectacles, gives a brief speech, followed by the President and two representatives from Latvia and Estonia.  The famous partisan leader, a pudgy, grey-haired man with large wire glasses and a folk, knit tie speaks the longest.  A stiff voiced British woman translates on the microphone.  As the session closes, the actor jumps up.
“Feel free to run around and get photographs!” Laima rushes down with the actor.  “We can wait in the hall!”

Outside the sky is deep grey.  A huge glass façade reveals reflections of umbrellas and thick droplets.  Old Partisans congregate in a fluorescent yellow courtyard.  Inside, they pose for photographs in front of a large Lithuanian flag and rows of documentary protest photographs.
“Now that was the right way to commemorate the day!”  Laima is ecstatic.  We hop in a cab and circle through sopping streets back to her home.

Lithuanian freedom fighters remember the events throughout the weekend.  The previous night, Laima drove her Swedish friend Jonas and myself down a forest road to a campfire congregation.  Around the flames, peaceful pagans sang folk songs and shared stories.   A child-like man wore a wreath of flowers around his head.  He baked potatoes in silver foil for the group of middle-aged men and women.  At midnight, women brought us tomato salads and the man through around hot potatoes.  The group passed sour cream and butter in the orange light.  An old man poured sour milk from huge plastic containers.  We stayed until 2AM.
“He told me it was his 45th birthday,” Laima recounted on the dark trip home.  “He said everyone was going to sing around the fire until 5AM and then run up the hill to see the sun rise and then go swimming in the huge well.  He was like a child - so excited about his birthday!”  Jonas cut in coldly.
“He is helping me with my film about the Partisans.  His family was hit hard by the Soviets.  He has almost no one left.”

Dancing

In a cave club, macho men and dolled up women stand awkwardly sipping twenty-dollar mojitos filled with mint.

“Let’s go dancing!” Laima’s eyes light up.  Hiro, a new friend, a photographer from Japan, and I follow.  Two beefy-armed men stand at the door.  They check out bags and we slide in through dark hallways to a dimly lit, blue toned bar.  Liquors of all sorts lean against dark sloping concrete walls.  Women dressed in tight skirts wait for men to arrive.  At midnight, the dark cellar club is silent.
“That’s the make-out room!” Laima laughs.  We run through the dark nooks of the bar.  The dance floor is empty, but for a few awkward and horny couples.  A boy in black waits to make his move.  A trio of Swiss men in fancy suits arrives.  They immediately surround two women at the bar.  The three of us drink large mojitos.  In an hour, bodies begin to surround us.  Our glasses empty and the room is packed.
“C’mon, let’s dance!  Maybe others will follow!”  We follow Laima up diligently.  Two girls swing around a blonde-haired boy in a dress shirt.  A couple sits in the corner.  The man moves in and she smiles.  Like kids, we bounce around the few teenagers in the dark cave dance club.
“Alright, have you had enough?” Laima laughs.  She is dressed in a light pink button down blouse and flower print skirt.  With a leather pack purse on back, she looks like a librarian next to the dark, scantly clad women.  We run up laughing.  At two in the morning, people spill out the front door.

Tallinn, Estonia

Birds perch on the top of the waiting room - pigeons fly through the dingy room that smells of pastries and cigarettes.  A drill pounds through tile.  A baby stares at a machine selling purple stuffed animals with popped-open eyes.  LATVIJA, a magazine cover reads.  A basketball player waves to a crowd.  SPORTA AVIZE!  The baby giggles.  The Riga Station stirs with the frothing of milk and tapping of heels.

The streets of Tallinn smell of roasted ginger.  I sit in a low-lit restaurant.  A friendly man wearing glasses serves a steaming hot portion of tofu stir-fry.  He is amenable and pleasant, like everyone in Estonia.  This country is cared after.  Finland, just a short trip by boat, looks over the home of 1.3 million.  For dessert, he brings a wine glass filled with the monthly special, a carrot cappuccino, which consists of soymilk, coffee, cardamom, and minced carrots that sink to the bottom like sediments.
“There are not so many restaurants like ours in Tallinn,” he admits.  “We are all organic.”
On the old concrete walls, gold frames show digital screens depicting fine art.  Classically painted scenes fade in and out.  Dark landscapes with Grecko like emotion slide into portraits of old women, gripping fingers into tight knots.  Works of art play like still movie scenes.

Tallinn’s small streets fill with progressive character, sleek fine art, and clay crafts.  Deep red stone fired bowls and hand woven pullover shawls line shops tucked in century old edifices.  Sloping cobblestone walkways slide into one another like a skateboard gymnasium, bridging artful home boutiques and cafes.  The main road is congested with restaurants, tourist shops, banks offering unfair exchange rates, and beer garden with signs that read, “happy hour everyday, noon - 1400.”  Thin, silent streets trail to small churches and embassy offices.  The hidden throughways are less frequented.  Here, elegant galleries sell handmade prints on Tibetan paper and glass pendants.

…..

“Excuse me.”  A splotchy skinned, bald man stumbles into the fancy hotel lobby.  I am working on the computer, on a sunken, plush ruby couch.
“Excuse me.”  I overhear.  “Do you speak Russian?”
“No.” a young, blonde haired man answers at the check-in desk.  “I’m sorry, I don’t.”
“What! How can you not speak Russian!”  The bald man hollers.
“I never learned,” the blonde man answers defiantly.
“How could you have never learned?”
“I never wanted to,” he says steadily.
The bald man screams in Russian and storms out.

…..

In the evening I walk down dark streets to the apartment of a cheerful woman with light dyed hair and a persistent grin.  She runs a bed and breakfast in her small home, offering a simple room with a television that plays both BBC and movies with Estonian voice-overs.  In her kitchen are bright red cabinets, yellow walls, and bouquets of pink flowers.
“Hello!”  She greets me from the living room at all times of day.  She watches T.V. until late in the night when I hear her stumble to her small bedroom with gold sheets and orchid pillows.  I take off my shoes at the door and slip my dirty feet into sea foam green fuzzy slippers that sit on top of a pile of soft, pastel pairs.

A thirty-minute walk away is a garden courtyard that leads to Kumu, a fabulous art museum featuring both early and contemporary Estonian art.  Under Soviet occupation, Estonian art exudes the spirit of rebellion.  A grainy black and white photograph shows a beach, covered with rolls of newsprint - letters tucked in to the sand.  Spoken poetry blares from the speakers, “… he refuses to justify himself,” a British voice announces, “He uses art to express…”
An artist named Eduard Wiiralt depicts hell in wonderfully gruesome ink scenes.  A white wall room features talking heads.  Sculptures of heads line the walls and sit garishly on pedestals.  Peasants, leaders, and ambiguous characters with smooth skin and small glasses surround the bright space.  On the speaker, voices jumble together in an orchestra of words.

…..

I wander through a market filled with piles of potatoes and barrels of berries.  A blonde girl with a pierced lip sells me a bag of fresh blueberries.  Barbie doll manikins model colorful blouses.  Novels with graphic text in Russian, Estonian, and German scatter across tables adjacent to stretches of foil-wrapped candy and loose nuts.   Men in light shirts with dark mustaches gossip at a table of pickled vegetables.  A hunched-back woman sells mushrooms with wide tips and slimy stems.

…..

The road back toward Vilnius is soaked in gold.  White fields span between cone-shaped homes.  Black birds fly in V’s above the green-patched fields.  An old man snores two rows ahead.  On the ride from Riga to Vilnius, the sun sinks and paints the countryside.  Squeak squeak squeak.  The bus sails beneath a half moon.  A boy bangs the window beside my head.  An old woman swivels her loud chair back and forth.  People chatter in Latvian, Polish, and Russian.  A chatty blonde-haired boy buys a young, Polish student cans of beer from the skinny female agent.  “It will put us to sleep, ok?”  They heckle the young girl.  The only language they share is English.  The blonde boy asks the student about his favorite seaside town - “How is nightlife?” I overhear, “Oh- it fantastic,” the young Polish boy answers.  “Lots of women, clubs, and music.  My friend is repper, no, rapper - he play at clubs.”  A toddler wails in back.  The moon is dressed in burnt umber.

At 10:30pm the bus pulls into Vilnius station.  I walk back to Laima’s apartment in low-lit streets, passing a skinny black haired prostitute and light-skinned couples.  The buildings at the corner of her road crumble in the dim, rosy street lamplight.  A pudgy man with long, ragged sandy locks paces back and forth in a drunk stupor.

…..

During my last day in Vilnius I pack.  Laima, alone, has to move from her apartment on Zemitijos street to a new place near the main tourist way.   At night we celebrate the final eve with a trip to the T.V. Tower.  Here, in the 1980’s young people protested.  Now, it is a disco-like bar and restaurant.  High up on the nineteenth floor of the tall concrete rod, neon lights illuminate a round swiveling level of dinner tables that feature an incredible view of Soviet style housing and green fields.  Pop music plays overhead.  We drink baltas beers with lemon and carefully crafted salads until 10pm when the lights lower and the music ends.

Twenty-two hours in a bus

Rain paints the windows.  A character from a Kafka novel sits beside me.  He wears a blue down vest and faded jeans.  He has just been interrogated by the Polish Security Guards at the checkpoint leaving Lithuania.  The bus passengers sit impatiently, waiting for him to run back to the bus in the rain.  After thirty minutes, the guards release him.  He races back and plops down next to me.  Water streams from his vest.  “Ugh,” he signs the rest of the way.

I am on a bus traveling from Vilnius to Amsterdam.  I left the city at noon.  In twenty-two hours I will arrive in Amsterdam.  The smell of cigarettes looms over the old cushions and crumb covered tables.  At each rest stop men drink cans of beer and women wait in long lines for public toilets.  A red haired girl with a silver lip ring listens to music.  The sky is white.  Rain persists.  We pass green fields scattered with neatly rolled haystacks.
The Kafka character snores.  The bus is quiet, but for light pop music streaming from the curtained drivers quarters.  A young steward hurries by with milky coffee and sausages.  The bus flies through Poland, passing an amber lit grocery market lined with coca-cola signs and super-store shopping centers.  A young woman smokes a cigarette in the golden glow of a concrete bus stop.  “Europa Motel” flashes by in green.  The neon sign reflects on the empty highway.  Annapolis plays on a small screen, dubbed over in Polish.  At 10pm we arrive in Warsaw.
“Dear passengers, our next stop is in four and half hours.  Please be reminded, hard alcohol and smoking are forbidden.  Thank you.”

I sleep through Poland and Germany.  I create a pillow out of a soft, reusable brown bag filled with rice cakes.   This impulse buy keeps m head warm and allows me to doze.  In the early morning I wake to see the awkward head of Kafka man snoring in my face.  His mouth gapes open and his long legs bend over the plastic table.  He wakes and retrieves his passport at the Holland border.  Georgia reads across the front in fancy gold letters.  The rain begins again.  The sky is grey.
“Did you have a good night?” I ask the cat-faced steward.
“No.” She answers bluntly.

Nijmegen

Three hours after the scheduled time, the double decker bus arrives in Amsterdam.  I hop on a train to Nijmegen, a charming old city where my friend Ineke lives on a small houseboat with her husband Pim.
“You don’t mind spiders, right?” Pim laughs.  The home is cozy.  He makes vegetable curry with rice and we drink hoegaarden above board in a little lookout area.  Ineke compares the river to a big puddle.  It’s the dry season and the sea is murky.  I wake to the smell of salt and grease.  The home is a work in progress.  The couple are renovating the long back end of the boat.   For now, the living area consists of a tiny bedroom, living room, office, bathroom, and kitchen filled with plants and books.  In time, they will create an entirely new living section and then, when the work is through, learn how to ride.

Upcoming…

A solo exhibit in SoHo, New York City
Opening October 10