A Guest at the Shooters' Banquet by Rita Gabis

Author:Rita Gabis [GABIS, RITA]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620401293
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-07-03T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 27

* * *

DEVIL IN A GLASS JAR

Gedmino Nr. 11, my grandfather’s address; I finally discovered it in a 1942 German census of Švenčionys.

I wish I could bend time the way Madeleine L’Engle made it seem possible in her book. Senelis isn’t in the elder care facility in Kansas. The dementia hasn’t set in. He’s not buried under the open Midwestern sky. The questions I have are more detailed than they were a year ago, and perhaps less bifurcated. Were you enemy or hero? No, that’s not the way I think of him anymore. I want to ask him about certain names: Beck and Wulff, of course. But others, too. The Polish translator my mother remembers—he must have heard of her, maybe knew her, would know her name. Mirele Rein. I won’t accuse him. I won’t shut him down. I’ll say, “There was a girl who spoke perfect Lithuanian.” Pause, add, “She was beautiful.”

He’s tough, my grandfather, even with all his sweetness and smacks of kisses on my cheeks. The best I’ll be able to do is look at his face for the tell: Does he look down? Does he shift in his chair? The historian Christoph Dieckmann notes that almost every movement of the Germans in Lithuania can be traced through records kept, scrupulous reports that document, minute by minute, who was where when, what they were doing, documents that were carbon-copied ten, fifteen times, sent to the Ostland command and back to Germany to all the various departments whose job it was to issue a status report and perhaps make another copy of a copy and send it to someone else. Or if the document or circular was top secret, burn it, or consign it straight away to a lockbox to which only a few possessed a key.

But there are no such records in the micro world of Švenčionys and Švenčionėliai. There are memories, histories, burned-down houses, a dinner in the one café in town held after a funeral, the soup I ate (made in the same way, I wagered, since the café opened decades ago) in a cordoned-off part of the small restaurant, where I put the potatoes aside and Rose took them, shaking her head. It’s a good potato. What’s wrong with you?

I have four hundred pages of archival material from different sources. Each tells a different narrative, a different truth or half-truth, a different lie. There is a set of thin files in the Lithuanian archives, created by the KGB for those who escaped Lithuania at the end of the war, those, like Senelis, for whom an investigation would be a waste of time. (Though you could torment his family members; send his brother and his family, for instance, to a work camp in Siberia.) I have to create my own record of him, my own file, my own murder book, the cold trail, a dead end at every turn. It’s impossible not to try. Impossible in a way I don’t understand.

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