Fatigued and anxious, we arrived in a wintry-stark medieval city to meet a dark stranger who would take us to the orphanage. Silently driven on muddy roads, obscure images of ancient European trees ebony-bright in the headlights, scratches on a blue-gray moon. Inside the home, antiseptic odor, threatening Soviet-style structure, shadowy and narrow, we emerged over a threshold to a tiny corridor. Small bench with rows of soiled, worn shoes underneath; spikes of coat pegs climbed halfway up the wall, tattered coats hanging still, possessing the smell of someone else somewhere else. Small room whispered to our right, packed tightly with cubbyholes and drawers of used clothing. Hiding behind a flimsy curtain a kitchenette, merely a loaf of dark rye bread and a jar of salt on a distressed countertop. Silence like earth-clay. Then our escort announced, Gervakaras!

Bursting out of a dim, cold room at one end of the corridor popped a scrawny little boy, no pants, sitting on a potty and moving forward by scraping the porcelain container across the invisible grit on the floor. Tiny white hands gripped the dirty, chipped sides for support, bony knees, sinewy flanks, and sharp elbows pumped to propel him anxiously. His amber, sunflower face screamed in delight, hard syllables of k’s and t’s bouncing around d’s and long, deep vowels embedded in zh’s. Remote and tentative, we did not understand the words or actions. We were strangers, estranged; we were the foreign element introduced into a little garden of life, this apparently insignificant children’s home in a seemingly inconsequential country in a frigidly-remote corner of north-eastern Europe.

Pot second emerged, supporting another little bare bottom, and then another, a chorus of sing-song eastern European words lisping inflected sounds jumping from one dingy dark wall to another in the narrow, unheated gloom. At our feet lay a field of wildflower forest creatures. We stood mute, cornered and confused, unsure and waiting, indecisive. More children followed, some walking without pants, creating an orchestra of chaotic cacophony, hungry for attention and treats, their round bright faces staring up at us like tiny, pale-frosty moons with blue eyes. In this ritual, we entered as stiffly-apprehensive gods; emboldened spirits, they stirred in us heaving emotions. Bend down and pick up one and then another and rub their innocent-scented flowery-creature faces into your own.

Timid, we followed a worker to a brightly-lit adjacent room. Empty—but no: chaos of stumbling perceptions, a little girl rushing toward us murmuring mama. Small creature, with hair like a rosebud and ladybug face, a forest-spirit who had waited so she could emerge from her rook. Frowzy, light-colored hair cut petal-short; cold red-speckled alabaster cheeks. Uneasy eagerness and restive anger coruscated in her blue-gray eyes. The lithe body appeared chunky, layered under tattered patches of pied leggings and sweaters, someone else’s old clothes. Americans would be surprised to see such a waif, a Dickensian character grubbing life in a distant cobblestone past. Aura of the unfamiliar was exuded. The smell of coarse, brown soap. Yet what pleasure to catch the girl with outstretched arms—to collect her presence into one’s own bodily space, to touch the fair skin of her face with one’s chapped lips, to hug her tiny form, to press gently one’s biceps against her shoulders and back in this first organic embrace. A natural feeling, a comfortable fit into the form of one’s body and soul.

Little arms and fists suddenly fluttered in the space around. Yelling and screaming in a child’s language (vaikų kalba), and we fended off our attackers by clutching possessions, secreting them within pockets in bulky winter clothing, shouting mano, mine. Hard candy is proffered to stall aggressive behavior. Flashes of confused excitement. Joy as if in a woodland cottage of childish bliss—but edges of this delightful bright spot loomed, a real shadow of darkness underlining the children’s eyes. Haunting ghosts. One girl stared at me in greedy wonder, love in need.

Hungry tap of spoons dug and scraped in bowls for any remnant of košė; tiny hands lifted, like pagans in ritual form, bowls for tongues to lick out the invisible grainy film of leftover porridge. How to conjure and multiply the loaves. We had entered the Lithuanian wood; now what? Our daughter, by virtue of our presence, received a second bowl. Hunched at a little table with voracious mates, disarrayed, she spooned mush in her quick mouth. Fury was in her eyes while her free arm (fist clenched) protected that second bowl of kasha. Extraordinary extra, papildomas. Knife-blade split a rather ordinary, barrel-bruised apple. Halving of the blood-red whole; seeds and fruit exposed; robust hands of the dark-browed worker touch Kucia’s tiny fingertips as the harvest is handed down. Caravaggio’s wounded Christ lifted down from the cross.

Peer over the end of the earth. Narrow room (corridor of abyss) lined with nothing more than tiny beds side-by-side, breathing in consanguine unison. Skinny, deprived legs could twist in-between, and no others. Strange stillness; unsettling order. Coldest room. Together yet solitary confinement. Veritable corpus callosum: demarcation of left from right, dark from light, east from west, a callous sliver of body bodiless; paradox of connected separation, common boundary where only edges touch. Dilapidated door-less armoire shelved stiffly-silenced teddy bears, solitude’s recompense. Ragged toy to clutch during the icy night-void. Sadness recognized. Stand by, grief and alienation.

Departure. Unable to communicate, the parting is made, leaving a part of her there, while she moved with us gracefully and willingly but yet was not part of us, was in some way, beyond the understanding of others, forever, separate. Little compact world of broken toys and antiseptic smells, lumpy porridge and cold baths, chipped rows of cubbyholes and broken pegs for tattered leggings and worn coats, all familiar, to be all forgotten. Quietly and softly, simply the slow sound of heavy winter shoes on linoleum floor, the wooly fluster of coats, mittens, caps, and scarves. Woolen fibers from our three coats float and join. Absence becomes presence.

Handrail gripped. Moment of departure constituted and consummated, her loss, her separation, her parting. She paused momentarily with head bent forward, desiring the dream of her own room and toys, supplied to her in ample photographs and preparatory explanations, but with a tentative withdrawal, courageously without looking back, her little heart beat fast and in some unconscious archetypal way realized that by going to the base of the steps and outside the door she would leave her homeland (tėvynė) and friends (draugai). For good. Here, not in the court, we became her true parents, tėvai, holding her tiny-stout hands, rankos, leading her trembling-sure body. Comfort her.

Home. Three weary mannequins, estranged. Cold rooms quiet from chilly dormancy. Old parquet floors creak aloud from weeks’ silence. Sleepy air settled by frost rolls unsure. Imagine her early days. She awakens. Maybe her room (maybe the house) yields a semblance of familiarity. Yesterday’s curtains and walls, same as last week’s. Reciprocate the feeling warmth of the wooden floors. Saturday, play with stuffed animals, toy horses, or dog figurines. We in the downstairs smile to hear her movements. Tiny plastic hooves prance on the wooden floor-boards; little voice acts out neighs and barks. Sounds of nature become her, play chatter a rocky brook of long Lithuanian riffs naturally onomatopoeic, punctuated by tiny blurts of new-found English. Speak to Kucia about breakfast; she stares blankly. Attempt Lithuanian and extrude pusryčiai. Still, nothing. Cutely her tiny voice, smiling. How do we reach across?

Enter her warm room, world in miniature, soft and fuzzy haven where unarmored child and man, daughter and father, become playmates, hands animating toy caricatures of dogs and horses. Here a stable with Pinto, conversing with wild horses in neighs while dogs romp and bark. Here a pack of wolves, threatening the safety of the stable, but then white-knight Balto intervenes to rescue. Heroics. Variations of this game: lost child (or dog or cat) who must be found by her parents. Mysterious tales such as Red Riding Hood, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty penetrate Kucia’s being, analogies she draws intuitively. Her primary hero, Peter Pan: leader of the lost; powerful, magical creature between nature-childhood and city-adulthood.

Each day and the next, commedia dell’arte as we endeavor to mimic each other, to discover unison and reveal the rhythm of feelings, not words (yet).

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Gregory F. Tague is an Associate Professor of English at St. Francis College (NY). Also, he is the author of two books: Character and Consciousness (2005); Ethos and Behavior (2008). His literary non-fiction has been published (or forthcoming) in: Mars Hill Review; Lituanus; The Midwest Quarterly; The Healing Muse; The Arabesques Review; Cezanne’s Carrot; Cell2Soul: Humane Health Care.

Rosset, at Ease in the Underground

Lately it seems anniversaries have people talking. There’s the moon landing, of course, and Woodstock. This July also marks the thirtieth anniversary of Disco Demolition Night at Cominsky Park, as well as the year Saddam Husein became the President of Iraq. 200 hundred years ago Napoleon made mince meat of the Teutonic Knights, and not so long ago, in 1999, Microsoft sent its first public message via MSN. All well and good. These events duly deserve our reflection. But the one we really want to talk about took place in 1959, the year in which the United States Post Office deemed Lady Chatterly’s Lover a pornographic offense, and spurred a trial that would ultimately shape the future of American publishing. The publisher was Barny Rosset of Grove Press, the author, D.H. Lawrence; the issue at hand: the First Amendment.

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