Giedra Radvilaviciute - Those Whom I Would Like to Meet Again

I asked why she hadn’t wanted to stay in Italy. Candy answered that it was very beautiful in Italy, but that the country had seemed like a completely foreign place to her. In a church there she met Father Pio, who was later canonized. He gave the young tourist from the United States one of his gloves. That glove, bearing brown blood spots from one of his stigmata, now lay on Candy’s dresser. It was the most important thing in the house: I was supposed to rescue it if a fire should start over the weekend. Even though Candy had been born in America, you could feel her “double identity” in the house. It consisted of random elements, not uncommon in other American homes, but here they existed in a particular combination. Sundays there were always Domingo arias. And then there was the basil and rosemary in the garden. The garden itself. (Banal association with Corleone dying among his tomatoes.) Olive oil. Thin old-fashioned stockings and Italian swearwords. The swearwords are always the last to die. In Lithuania, you could figure out the length of the Soviet occupation by counting the number of Russian curses still in use. And thereby possibly demand accurate compensation. (In Lithuanian coinage, naturally.) One time Candy swore in Italian for a very long time while she was watching a story about Clinton on the television. Then she asked in English: “All right, so he screwed her, she screwed him, why is CNN telling us about it?” Then she also asked: “Does the president of Lithuania sleep around too?” Even though I find it difficult to trust anyone or anything, I said no, he’s an upright family man. “By the way,” I said, “we elected him just a little while ago. Before that he lived some six miles away from you, in Hinsdale.” Candy was shocked at what I’d said in my stumbling English: to the old lady it was perfectly clear that Lithuania, which is in Europe, next to Poland, couldn’t possibly elect a president from the same town where her daughter bought her fresh cookies on Saturdays.

KASPARAS AND BIRUTÉ

I didn’t work at Kasparas and Birut ’s house for long. Kasparas and his mother sailed to New York from Plung at the beginning of the century. Probably it was only a few days later that he sat on his mother’s lap and had his picture taken, holding the end of his mother’s bead necklace in his little hand as if it were the rope of a swing. Now a ninety-four-year-old man, he walked by that photograph every day, paying no more attention to it than to a doorknob. The old couple were both Lithuanian, but they only remembered a few words of Lithuanian now and were only distantly aware of Draugas , the Lithuanian-language paper published in Chicago. Their American daughter-in-law and their remaining son looked after them. Their other son had died in the Vietnam War. And Birut ’s leg had developed gangrene. She was diabetic. Her leg was the color of a plum. A nurse who had come to the United States from the Philippines visited every day to change the bandage. She told me Birut ’s leg would be amputated in a month, but the old lady didn’t need to know that yet. With all her relatives left in the Philippines, what the nurse missed most was a particular fruit. She said it resembled an apple. No one in Chicago had ever heard of it. And in her parents’ garden, she said, avocados would fall from the branches like pocked black grenades. The nurse didn’t want to return to the Philippines, however. Her daughter had been born in the States, and there she’d just be met by a group of poor relatives with no more to offer her than a basket of that special fruit.

One evening Kasparas asked if I would like some Portuguese wine. He searched for the bottle in a clothes closet for a long time; then we drank it and listened to Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night.” The port was pressed from grapes grown on the steep granite banks of the Douro River. Over there, far from both America and Lithuania, the summers are hot and the winters very cold. That’s what gives the grapes their special character. Fresh wine is the color of plums. Which made me think of Birut ’s leg, which was supposed to be cut off. I broke out in a cold sweat. Kasparas was looking at one wall, Birut another. They hummed Sinatra from memory (the way eighty-year-olds back home hum folk songs). On the wall there were photographs of them dancing in some restaurant several decades earlier.

By the time they amputated that leg, I wasn’t working there anymore. The old couple’s daughter-in-law called and said they’d died within two weeks of each other. Then she asked me how well I knew the woman from Lithuania from whom I’d taken over the weekend shift. I said she was only a casual acquaintance. The American daughter-in-law didn’t know that in Chicago weekend work like that is found over the telephone, that is, “virtually,” without ever meeting the patient, even though you have to interact on such an intimate basis with their memories and their body soon thereafter. She threw that woman from Klaip da out. One evening, stopping in at her in-laws by chance, she found the old people alone, and Birut with her amputated leg had wet the bed. The woman from Klaip da returned five hours later, drunk. Before leaving, she took revenge on her employers by making four hundred dollars’ worth of telephone calls to Lithuania. The old lady’s daughter-in-law didn’t take her to court over it because she found it too humiliating. Sometimes, when I arrived on Fridays to relieve the woman from Klaip da, I would find her in her room eating Lithuanian herring out of a jar and drinking bubbly pink Italian wine. Her denim shirt would be tied in a knot under her breasts — she was prepared for a wild weekend with other Lithuanian immigrants who were free for a few days from their American patients. Before getting into the car, she would show me the latest photographs her loved ones had sent from Klaip da. She said she missed her son and husband a great deal. She hadn’t seen them in three years. (Still, of all the men she had to leave behind, the woman from Klaip da would clearly miss Ben Franklin — he of the hundred-dollar bill — most of all.)

ALICIJA

Alicija came to Chicago when she was six years old. Her new surroundings bore no resemblance to her native land. Though, actually, there was the Bobak’s Sausage Company store not far away, where you could buy cream wafers, pickles, cabbage, all kinds of herring, and a lot of other familiar things. The names of the children in her class were Mexican. The old Americans who had remained in the neighborhood were called “white trash.” When her mother walked her to school and turned to go home, Alicija would start crying. She didn’t know the English for left or right, up or down, black or white. The world, as if it were made of rubber, threatened to shrink to the size of an eraser. Every morning before class, standing with the other students, she would recite the Pledge of Allegiance without understanding a single word. The teacher smiled. She smiled even when Alicija cried. Every couple of months, in some public school, children would shoot other children. On the television Alicija would see mothers hugging one another and weeping in front of the camera. The locals would leave flowers on the school fence where the shooting occurred. There would be a very long close-up on those flowers. Alicija thought that the children in those schools shot the other children because they had to smile when they wanted to cry.