By Ed Staskus

   When Wally Jogaila wrapped up his work several days early he decided he would do what he had promised his mother he would do, even though at the time he hadn’t been sincere making the promise. His mother was dying slowly but surely and it mattered when she asked him to do something. Most of the time whatever she asked him to do was easy enough, especially when she asked him to stop by, stay and sit, and talk about something she wanted to talk about. It was usually about the past. The present meant less and less to her. The future meant giving up the ghost.

   “Go see your father when you are in Poland,” she asked when he told her he was going to Gdansk. “It’s not far.”

   Wally was a chemical engineer in Cleveland, Ohio and was going with an American and British team to Gdansk to help expand the capacity and product range of Nitro-Chem S.A. in the Zarnowiec Economic Zone. It was near what had been the Lenin Shipyard, where in1980, 16 years earlier, a series of strikes and demonstrations led by Lech Walesa sparked the Solidarity movement, eventually leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

   When he decided to go see his father in Lithuania he took a bus from the Dworzec Autobusowy in Gdansk to the Autobusu Stotis in Vilnius. The ride took 12 hours, even though the distance was less than 400 miles. The roads were bad from one end to the other end. He could have driven the same distance when home in Ohio in half the time.

   He checked into the Hotel Karolina, overslept, had a late breakfast of beet pancakes with farmer’s cheese and sour cream, and half a cup of bad coffee. He sent the coffee back and ordered black tea. It was very good. He asked at the front desk about hiring a private driver to take him to Kairivaza.

   “I don’t know that town,” the clerk said. 

   “It’s somewhere near Siauliai,” Wally said. It was where his mother had told him his father had moved to after the Russians left Lithuania and he was cut loose from their boot strings.

   His father had joined the Communist Party in the 1950s and risen in the ranks to become the top apparatchik of the Siauliai District. He arrested and executed so many resistance fighters, subversives, and intellectuals that he came to be known as the Hangman. He was proud of the sobriquet. He never considered that hangmen might also die.

   The more he liked his job the less his mother liked him. She fled the Baltics in the mid-1960s, evading border guards, their dogs, and machine guns. She made it over barbed wire to West Germany with him in tow. He had been a child. A distant cousin in the United States sponsored them and they emigrated there.

   The clerk went outside and came back with a private driver.

   “How much will you charge to take me to Kairivaza?” Wally asked.

   “I’m not sure I know that town.”

   “It’s near Siauliai.”

   “Are we staying overnight?”

   “No.”

   “I charge you sixty litai.”

   “Round trip?”

   “No, that is the price one way and the same price the other way.” 

   What Wally didn’t know was that private drivers earned between a hundred and two hundred litai a month. What he did know was that one hundred and twenty litai amounted to about thirty American dollars. He could easily afford it. 

   “All right,” he said. “When are you available?”

   “Right now.”

   “I want to explore Vilnius today. Is tomorrow OK?”

   “Yes.”

   The driver picked Wally up at the front door of the Hotel Karolina at six thirty the next morning. He was a bony man with a round head and a meager chin. He wore a wedding ring and leather fisherman’s sandals. There was a tin statue of St. Christopher taped down on his dashboard.

   “What is your name,” Wally asked.

   “My name is Zenius.”

   He smoked incessantly. They were Bulgarian cigarettes. Wally rolled his side window down to vent the poisonous smoke. The car was a Lada. It groaned and rattled in its old age. Zenius drove like he was making a getaway from an insane asylum. They were stopped twice on the way by policemen who demanded a cash payment on the spot for his bad driving. Both times they were reluctantly allowed to go free when Zenius explained he had an American in the back seat on an important mission for the American Embassy.

   “Kairivaza is not on the map, but there are many towns and villages in Lithuania not on the map,” Zenius said. “I have a nose for forgotten places and even places that never existed. I will find it.” He drove through the middle of the country and past Siauliai, a city founded the day after Lithuanian knights defeated the Livonian Order at the Battle of Saule in 1236. A wooden church was built there in 1445. A stone church replaced it in 1625.

   Zenius was as good as his word. He found Kairivaza north of Siauliai and dropped Wally off at a crossroad in the middle of town. It was very humid. Wally’s armpits were soon sopping and started smelling like onions. The wind was no help. It felt hot and sticky on his face.

   “I am going to drive to the Hill of Crosses and pay my respects,” Zenius  said. “I will be back before nightfall. Meet me here. Don’t be late. It would not be wise.” The Lada burned oil as he accelerated and sped away.

   All the houses were empty in every direction Wally looked. Some of the doors flapped open and shut in the wind and most of the windows were heartsick. The front yards were choked with bindweed and stinging nettle. A woman wearing an old dress and a babushka stretched her long neck out of one of the windows. He walked over to her. The skin of her face was translucent. Her veins were bluish purple, He could see the bones of her jawbone.

   “I am looking for my father, Andrius Jogaila,” Wally said. He showed the woman a black and white photograph of his father. It was a square Brownie camera kind of snapshot, worn and creased. His mother had given it to him the night before he left for Poland. He had never seen the photograph before. He had never seen any photographs of his father before he saw that one.

   “Yes, he lives here in Kairivaza, although nobody lives here.”

   “What do you mean?”

   “Nobody has lived here for one hundred years.”

   “But my father lives here?”

   “Yes, I am his housekeeper.  My name is Irena. He went for a walk. It might be all day before he comes back. Most of the time he does not come back at all. He never says what his plans are. He has a bad temper. He thinks he is a Perkunas but he is a devil.”

   “Perkunas?”

   “Yes, the Thunder God.”

   Perkūnas is the Baltic god of thunder, lightning, mountains, and oak trees. He is often represented as a medieval warrior, armed with an axe or a war hammer, and riding in a chariot drawn by goats.

   “Do you know where he went?”

   “He walks in the boglands. He stays in the shadows. Don’t search for him. You will get lost in the teeth of the alders.”

   “I’m sure you’re right,” Wally said.

   “Would you like to take a nap after your long trip?” Irena asked. “Your father always kept a spare room ready for you, with clean sheets and a brand new pillow.”

   Before Wally could say he was ready for a nap a man stepped up behind him. The man tugged at his sleeve. Wally turned around. The man had one glass eye. The glass eye was the most alive thing about him.

   “Don’t listen to her,” he said. “The Hangman hanged himself four years ago, right here in this house, in the spare bedroom.”

   “How did my father know I was coming?”  Wally asked the woman in the window when the man had gone.

   “He knew you would come sooner or later.”

   “Did my mother call and tell you I was coming?”

   “No, we don’t have telephones here.”

   “Did she write to you?” 

   “No mail has been delivered here for a very long time.”

   Wally took a nap in the spare bedroom. It rained while he slept. The water gurgled on the window sill. He heard a voice say “Forgiveness of sins and resurrection of the flesh.” He couldn’t tell if the voice was in his dreams or if it was his father’s voice, which he had long since forgotten the sound of.

   When he woke up his dreams disappeared into thin air. There wasn’t anybody in the room. The air felt cooler after the rain. He washed his face and hands in a basin of water which was next to a pitcher on a stand beside the window. He went into the front room. He could hear Irena in the kitchen. There was some ham, black bread, and butter on the table. Irena buttered the bread and laid slices of ham on it. She stood beside the table while he ate.

   “Please sit down,” Wally said.

   “I would rather stand,” Irena said. “Besides, it is almost time for you to leave.”

   “What about my father?”

   “Do not concern yourself about him. He is not a good man. He will never be informed by God’s grace, even if he lives until the end of time. Nothing will come of seeing him again, even if he does return, which is uncertain.”

   “You sound like you hate him.” 

   “I knew you for almost a year before you took your first breath and I knew Andrius long before that,” Irena said. “I love you but I hate him with all my heart. He betrayed himself  during the war, betrayed his  marriage, and betrayed his homeland doing the devil’s work in Siauliai.”

   Irena talked as though she was his mother. He could see her heart beating in her thin chest. Her voice was wheezy.

   “It is important to my mother that I see him,” Wally said.

   “I heard from your mother this morning. She now thinks it best you leave Kairivaza without trying to see him. It would be foolish. He can be dangerous, even though he is powerless. Don’t forget to latch the door on your way out.”

   Wally heard a car’s gears grinding and smelled oil burning. He went to the front door. Zenius was holding the passenger door of the Lada open for him. A lazy Bulgarian cigarette was stuck between his lips. Wally looked back to say goodbye to Irena, but she was gone. He latched the door and slid into the car. They drove south towards Siauliai.

   “I met your father at the Hill of Crosses,” Zenius said.

   “Take me there,” Wally said.

   The Hill of Crosses is a pilgrimage site outside of Siauliai. There used to be a hill fort there. The first crosses and statues of the Virgin Mary appeared after the failed 1831 Uprising. It became a place of remembrance. Rosaries, medallions, effigies, and carvings  of Lithuanian patriots were brought to the hill. The Russians repeatedly removed them, only to find them repeatedly brought back to life. There were so many crosses bristling on the hill in 1996 nobody knew how many there were.

   Zenius stopped the Lada at the bottom of the hill beside a ditch that went nowhere. He set the parking brake so the car wouldn’t roll into it. A man was in the ditch shoveling dirt out of it.

   “What is that man doing there?” Wally asked.

   “That’s your father,” Zenius said.

   “A man with a glass eye in Kairivaza said he hung himself not long after the Russians left the country.”

   “That may be, but he lives here, although he is more dead than alive,” Zenius said. “God spared him from hellfire in return for setting the crosses back upright when they fall over and keeping the paths in good repair. He sleeps in the ditch. Every morning it fills itself up and every evening he has to dig it out again.”

   Wally turned in the car seat to open the car door and go see his father. Zenius put his hand on Wally’s shoulder.

   “Your father doesn’t want you to see him making ends meet in a hole in the ground. It would be better if you didn’t go over there. Besides, he has it on his mind to run away any minute to Kaliningrad, where everybody is an atheist. He thinks he will be safe there, but he is mistaken. What he doesn’t know is that God will find him and he will then wish he was more dead than he already is.”

   Wally’s father pulled himself out of the ditch and wiped his brow. He moved as quietly as mercury in a thermometer. He wrapped himself up in a wool blanket and lowered himself back into the ditch. He looked in all directions over the lip of the hole in the ground. His eyes were black dots. He lay down and started snoring, long in the tooth.

   Zenius turned the key in the ignition of the Lada and drove away. He kept his eyes on the rutted road. He was a bad driver but didn’t want to break an axle. The car was his livelihood. A thunderstorm had blown in from the Baltic Sea. He turned on the windshield wipers. Rain filled the ditch Andrius Jogaila was sleeping in. Wally sat quietly, listening to himself breathing. He didn’t look back. There wasn’t anything for him to see.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

“Made in Cleveland” by Ed Staskus

Coming of age in the Rust Belt in the 1960s and 1970s.

“A collection of first-person street level stories blended with the historical, set in Cleveland, Ohio. The storytelling is plugged in.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

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