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Baltic Place

Never Look Back

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By Ed Staskus

   The blitzkrieg that started World War Two in 1939 won the Third Reich most of Europe and substantial parts of Russia. Five years later the Red Army was poised to take revenge on its enemy. When the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front tried to weather the storm and fight out of encirclements, the Russians did what the Germans would have done, fed armor into the attack, maintaining mobility, and forcing the issue deep into rear areas, faster than the enemy could respond. Their M4A2 Sherman tanks, built by the United States, could be replaced when destroyed faster than German factories could take a breath.

 “Gute trauer” was all the Third Reich’s war machine could say while falling behind.

   “The Russians came fast,” Angele Jurgelaitis said. “We listened to the radio every day. We could hear booming in the distance, the bombs and cannons. The Germans were all over the roads. The Russians were to the north and the east of us. Everybody knew they were coming.”

   The youngst of her aunt’s family, the family Angele was child minding near Alvitas, in southwestern Lithuania, didn’t know, but everybody else in the Baltics knew the Red Army was coming back and there was going to be hell to pay. “Everybody was worried and unhappy.” Most Lithuanians had sided with the Germans. The Russians were implacable imperialists. There were centuries of enmity between Vilnius and Moscow.

   It was in the summer of 1944 that Soviet forces went on the offensive. The Germans were pushed back on a shifting front. Armored tank columns from both sides advanced on Vilkaviskis, four miles away from where Angele was. If it wasn’t for land mines she could have walked there in an hour. The Russian 33rd Army entered the town a few days later and then secured the rail depot at Marijampole. The Third Panzer Army mounted a counterattack, but after several grim tank battles was finally forced to retreat to Kybartai, rolling back to a last-ditch defensive line. Neither the Germans nor the Russians listened to a single Lithuanian who said the land wasn’t their land to begin with.

   “It was one day in the afternoon that a lady, a teacher, who was one of my aunt’s friends, with two kids, a small boy and a small girl, came to our farm from Vilnius,” Angele said. The woman and Angele’s aunt, Ona Kreivenas, had studied and graduated together from a teacher’s college. She was in a horse drawn wagon with her children and what chattels and valuables she could  carry. She had come from Vilnius in a hurry. She told them there was Russian armor hiding on farm tracks in the woods.

   The next morning Ona, Angele, and the children, Mindaugas, Carmen, and Ramute, loaded their wagon with clothes, blankets, food, and the two year-old Gema. They hitched two horses to the wagon and tied a cow to the back. “We took milk with us when we left, for Gema, and hoped we would find more when we were gone.” They took whatever they could carry. They left their Sunday buggy behind and let the riding horse, the rest of the cows, and all the pigs and chickens loose. The friend followed them.

   “My aunt had to let all the animals go. What could we do? The Russians would have just stolen all of them.”

   Ona Kreivenas took all her money and what jewelry she possessed with her in a handbag that she could keep close to the vest. She and the children filled a trunk with her sewing machine, china, vases, and family heirlooms. They lugged it behind the barn, where the remains of months of potato scraps thrown down to feed the pigs were piled up.

   They cleared a space, dug a four-foot deep hole, and buried the trunk. They threw scraps over the overturned ground. When they were done, they left with their friend. They were two wagons, two women, seven children, and a cow on the move, suddenly homeless in their own homeland.

   “We moved back about fifteen miles.” They went southwest towards East Prussia. “We stopped at a big farm. When we got there, there were already hundreds of people in the fields, with their wagons, and their families. The farmer slaughtered and cut pigs up for us. All the women made food. Everybody was talking about the war, about what to do.”

   There was heavy fighting between German and Soviet troops in the Baltics. As the fighting raged, more than a hundred thirty thousand Latvians escaped to Sweden and Germany. In total, the country lost almost 20% of its population during the war, either dead or gone. The ‘Great Escape’ in Estonia started in the summer and continued through the fall. It is estimated eighty thousand Estonians fled from the Red Army to anywhere else. Almost one hundred thousand Lithuanians joined them, clogging the roads to Poland, Prussia, and Germany.

   Ona Kreivenas crept back to her farm during the week the Panzer divisions were holding their own. The countryside was a ghost town. She discovered the trunk they had buried behind the barn had been dug up and was gone. “There was just a big hole. The Russians took it. They used metal sticks to poke into the ground. Her sewing machine was gone, all gone, everything gone.”

   They slept rough, out of doors, like everybody else. “We slept on blankets on the ground. When it rained, we slept under the wagon and stretched a tarp out to keep the water away.” Every day it got darker. Over the course of September, the length of day in Lithuania rapidly decreases. By the end of the month the daylight is two hours less than it was at the start of the month.

   Their encampment stretched out for six weeks. They dug latrines and filled barrels with water. They picked apples off trees and blueberries from bushes. They took especial care of their horses. They greased the axles of their wagons, making sure the grease bucket was always full of animal fat and tar, and making sure they had a spare axle. Without one a broken axle would be a disaster, bringing them to a standstill.

   The children played games whenever they had idle time. “We played the ring game,” Angele said. “We all sat in a circle and passed around a pretend ring, like a twig or a pebble. Sometimes we passed it, but other times we didn’t. We just pretended to give it to who was next to us. One of us was it, like in tag, who had to guess who had the ring. If they were right, they got a prize, like a pencil. If they were wrong, they had to sing a silly song or do a dance in the middle of the circle.”

   When they finally left, they left in the early evening. They had heard over the radio that morning that the Russians had come closer. They spent the day packing and preparing. It was now or never. “Most of us left, although some stayed. Some of the farmers wanted their land back. They didn’t want to leave.” It was all they had. It was all they had ever known. They were loath to give it up. “My aunt had to go, no matter what. The farm didn’t matter. Her husband had already been taken by the Communists. She knew they would take her, too, if they caught her, send her away to Siberia, and her children would be left behind, orphans or worse.”

   It rained that day and the rest of the night. “The road was crowded on both sides. There were thousands of wagons, wagon after wagon, all going one way. There wasn’t a single car or truck, just horses. We knew the Germans were somewhere ahead of us and the Russians somewhere behind us, but we didn’t see any soldiers anywhere”

   Ona Kreivenas was at the reins of the two-horse team, her seven-year-old daughter Ramute holding the baby, and the rest of the children walking. Most of the refugees were walking, their wagons jam-packed with possessions and provisions. Their friend from Vilnius with her two small children stayed in line behind them.

   Before the war, Lithuania’s population was almost three million. After the war it was closer to two million. Some Lithuanians were killed. Many were deported. Others ran for their lives. The displaced were forced to make new lives in different countries all around the world, whatever country they could get to, whatever country would take them, whatever country they could sneak into.

   When the second Soviet invasion of the 1940s happened, some Lithuanians tried to flee across the Baltic Sea to the Nordic countries, but only a few were successful. Patrol boats apprehended them and they ended up hauled off to labor camps. Most fled west, while others went south to Hungary, Romania, and the Balkans.

   “On the way we met my uncle on the road, Uncle Jankauskas and his family.” Her uncle’s wagon fell into line with them. The progression of wagons stretched as far as the eye could see, ahead and behind. They soon crossed into East Prussia. There were no guards. They had all fled. The borderland was a mess.

   “I was so sad leaving Lithuania,” Angele said.

   Russian warplanes strafed and bombed the column of evacuees several times. The Red Air Force was bombing and strafing at will, both German and refugee columns alike. Forest and brush on both sides of the road were on fire. There was smoke in the sky day and night. Wagons and carts slowly wended their way around craters.

   “It was all just wagons. They knew we were refugees They dropped bombs and shot their machine guns. I don’t know why they did that. Whenever we heard airplanes, we all ran and jumped into ditches beside the road. I was afraid, but somehow I knew I wouldn’t be hurt by them.”

   What was called the Baltic Gap had grown so menacing to the Third Reich that Adolf Hitler moved his headquarters from Berchtesgaden to Rastenburg in East Prussia. The German situation on the Eastern Front was desperate. The fighting was hard. It was a fight to the finish. The hinterland was torn up, abandoned and forlorn.

   “Most of the people on farms had run away. We would go into their houses and find dried fruit, pickles, mushrooms, pork, and wine.” They ransacked barns, pantries, and root cellars. “We took all the food we could find, all of it. It rained most of the time, it was cold, and we walked and walked. Everybody was hungry.”

   The hard road were hurtful to their cow. The animal was careful as could be on the poor traction of the road, wet and slippery, stepping timidly with its hind legs spread wide. It compensated by walking with an arched back. They finally had to do something. They knew the long miles and pavement weren’t good for it. They thought she might be going lame. Angele’s uncle looked at the cow’s hooves and saw lesions. An ulcer was forming on one hoof.

   “Mindaugas and I found a family that hadn’t run away. We went to their farmhouse and sold the cow to them.” They gave the money to Ona Kreivenas and she hid it on her person with the rest of her money. She had plans for it. Her plans were all about survival.

   One cold night when they stopped to rest her uncle said, “Kids, jump up and down to warm yourselves up.” When Angele stopped jumping, he grasped her under the armpits. “He grabbed me. We were jumping up and down and he dropped me by accident.” She broke her wrist. “It hurt bad, but there were no doctors to help me.” When they got to a town with a railroad station, there weren’t any doctors there, either. The smart and the skilled had already left. Everybody else was hoping against hope. Angele’s wrist had to take care of itself.

   After the New Year the German population of East Prussia, most of whom had not yet cut and run, began to evacuate as the Red Army rapidly advanced. Within weeks it turned into  a helter-skelter flight as more than two million of the two-and-half million men, women, and children of the enclave bolted into the Polish Corridor heading for Germany. The winter weather was bad, the roads were caving in, and the civil authorities were overwhelmed. There was panic and quagmire and many thousands died, some caught in combat, others swept away in the chaos.

   But before that happened, Ona Kreivenas had already sold their wagon and horses and everything they couldn’t carry and managed against the odds to get passage on a train going to Berlin. The Prussian Eastern Railway connected Danzig and Konigsberg to Berlin. A month later, the last week of January 1945, the last train to Berlin ran the rails. There was no traffic on the line after that.

   “The train was completely full. The corridors were full, too.” They stood clumped together in the corridor. The passenger cars were red and had ten large windows on both sides. They were pressed against one of the windows. Some of the windows were broken and the passageway was as cold as the outside. “We had a pillow for Gema, who slept on the floor, but we stood that night and the next day.”

   The twin locomotives pulling the long line of passenger cars and baggage cars were in camouflage livery. On their front was painted the Hoheitsadler, an eagle, Germany’s traditional symbol of national sovereignty, holding a swastika in its talons. By the time they crossed Poland and entered Germany the talons and swastika were obscured by coal soot.

   Lehrter Bahnhof was the Berlin terminus, adjacent to Hamburger Bahnhof, built in the late 19th century just outside of what was then Berlin’s boundary on the Spree River.  It was built in the French neo-Renaissance style, the façade covered in glazed tiles. The station had long been known as a “palace among stations.” But it had been severely damaged by Allied bombing and was near to being a shambles.

   When they finally got off the train in Berlin they were met on the platform by Bishop Brizgys. The clergyman was Ona’s husband’s cousin. Vincentas Brizgys had been the assistant to Juozapas Skvireckas, the archbishop of Kaunas. During the summer of 1944 he and the archbishop and more than two hundred other Lithuanian priests fled the country with several retreating German army divisions. Ona Kreivenas had somehow located him by telephone and he arranged to meet them at the train station. He was wearing a dark suit and a homburg and carrying a basket of hot buns.

   “He gave one to each of us. I was so happy,” Angele said.

   She was sixteen years-old, somewhere between childhood and adulthood. She was very tired. In the meantime, hope in tomorrow was the only thing keeping her on her feet.

   The Third Reich’s war economy was on the verge of collapse. The whole country was a sinking ship. There was a shortage of bread, sausage, cabbage, and everything else. When they looked around, the buns the bishop had brought were the only cheer they could see. There wasn’t going to be any traditional roast goose during the holiday season.

   Angele looked at the four children and her aunt. She looked up and down the platform. Their friend from Vilnius and her uncle were long gone, lost in the fog of war. Bishop Brizgys led them out of the station into the city. The Red Army numbering over four million men was massing on the Vistula River and along the East Prussian border. Their superiority was ten to one in infantry and twenty to one in artillery and planes. They would be coming soon. Berlin and its three million residents were already a wreck, the day and night Allied bombing taking a monstrous toll. She thought she wouldn’t be able to stay long.

   The early afternoon light was a gray haze. There was smoke in the sky. It was a kind of darkness at noon. She saw heaps of rubble in the street. When she looked all around she knew in her bones it was going to be a bare-bones winter on German soil. There was no looking back, not today. She walked towards what was left of Berlin.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street at 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.”

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

“A Cold War thriller that captures the vibe of mid-century NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP

The end of summer, New York City, 1956. Stickball in the streets and the Mob on the make. President Eisenhower on his way to Ebbets Field for the opening game of the World Series. A killer waits in the wings. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye scares up the shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Baltic Place

No Place Like Home

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By Ed Staskus

   Sigitas Kazlauskas didn’t know J. Edgar Hoover from the man in the moon. He didn’t necessarily want to make his acquaintance, either. He wanted to go home, even though he knew he didn’t have nearly the funds for the passage. The passage was across the Atlantic Ocean and over the North Sea. His home was far away in Lithuania. He didn’t know the Justice Bureau man was going to be his ticket back.

   Sigitas was living in Cleveland, Ohio. It was Thanksgiving week in 1919. He had left home in late 1914, dodging forced conscription into the Czar’s Imperial Army. He knew being drafted meant the meat grinder. He also knew his socialist views were hazardous to his health. The Czar didn’t brook his kind of man. He made his way to the United States on a tramp steamer. He was living in Dope Town, a neighborhood west of East 9th St. and north of Superior Ave. Suicide Pier on the Cuyahoga River was down one end of the street and the town dump was down the other end of the street. Lake Erie was on the north side and Little Poland was on the south side. 

   None of his friends called him Sigitas. Everybody called him Dave. When he asked why, they laughed and said, “David and Goliath, like in the Bible.” They didn’t bother with his family name since they weren’t his kith and kin, although they were Eastern Europeans like him who had ended up in Cleveland for the same reason as him, which was opportunity. His opportunity had come and gone, which was why he was living in Dope Town. It was the only place he could afford a furnished room. The wrist a Cleveland policeman had broken with a truncheon during the May Day Riot six months earlier had gotten him there, making him unemployable for three months and draining his savings.

   Since then he had been living on homemade bread and homemade beer. When the beer was ready he called his Polish friends, “Hey Polska, come get your right piwo.” He was well-known for his beer, attracting friends who were as friendly with his brew as they were with him, maybe more. They sang, “In Heaven there is no beer, which is why we drink it here.” He was hoping somebody would invite him to their turkey feast on the big day. He needed a square meal to go with his barley pop.

   Cleveland was going strong in 1919. It was the fifth largest city in the country. Iron and steel dominated the economy. Foundries and machine shops were everywhere. Skyscrapers were being built. The population was nearing one million. A third of the population was foreign born, working in the steel plants and garment factories. They worked long hours for low pay, but it was better than where they had come from, where they worked longer hours for even less pay.

   More than a quarter million Lithuanians left the Russian controlled Baltics between 1900 and 1914. When World War One broke out all immigration from Europe to the United States was brought to a halt. The new labor force that came into being was from the American South. There had been fewer than 10,000 Negroes in Cleveland in 1910. Ten years later there were nearly 40,000. There was enough work for everybody, though. Commercial construction was booming. The problem Sigitas had wasn’t finding work. The problem he had was keeping the work he found.

   He was a socialist, which was his problem. He believed in social ownership of the means of production. He didn’t believe in private ownership of it. The word socialism comes from the Latin word “sociare” which means to share. The modern use of the word was coined by the London Cooperative Magazine in 1827. The First International was founded in 1864 in Great Britain. After that it was off to the races. The Second International was founded in 1889. Anarchists were banned as a practical matter. Socialists didn’t want bomb throwers in their ranks, if only because bombs can be unpredictable about who they blow up.

   The May Day Riot in Cleveland on May 1, 1919 pitted trade unionists and socialists against police and military troops. The city was bursting at the seams with blue-collar foreign-born laborers. The activist Charles Ruthenberg got it into his head to organize a mass demonstration on Public Square on International Workers’ Day. He had run for mayor of the city on the Socialist Party ticket two years earlier, polling nearly a third of the vote. He was well-known among the disaffected. He marched at the head of the assembly.

   Sigitas and his friends heeded the call. They joined the more than 30,000 men and women who showed up for the demonstration. They marched from Acme Hall on Upper Prospect to Lower Prospect to Public Square. The marchers wore red shirts and waved red flags. A parallel procession of army veterans in full uniform clashed with the socialists. Fights broke out and the police were called, who then quickly called for reinforcements and mounted forces. Harry Davis, the city’s mayor, called for the National Guard, who mustered in front of a beer hall before going into action with fixed bayonets. Tanks led the way, even though the socialists were unarmed. When Sigitas’s wrist was broken a woman standing beside him used the 8 inch ivory hatpin holding her hat to her hair bun to stab the policeman who had broken it in the butt. It was how Sigitas managed to break loose and not get arrested. 

   Several marchers were killed, nearly a hundred were injured, and many hundreds more were arrested. The Socialist Party headquarters at Acme Hall was ransacked by a “loyalist” mob. The next day all of Cleveland’s newspapers blamed the marchers for the riot, labelling them as “foreign agitators” even though most of them were native-born or naturalized citizens. The fourth estate demanded their deportation. The Immigration Acts of 1921 and 1924 later restricted immigration of “undesirable” Southern and Eastern Europeans, whether they were socialists, or not.

   It was at Thanksgiving dinner with his friend Teodor Wojcik and his family that his friend hatched a plan about how to get Sigitas out of the United States and back to Europe. Agnieszka was Teodor’s wife. They had two children and were moving up in the world. Teodor went by Teddy and Agnieszka went by Agnes. They weren’t socialists, but didn’t argue with Sigitas about it. They believed the United States was a free country where everyone was free to believe what they wanted. They weren’t foolish enough, however, to say so in public.

   “There’s a man at the Justice Bureau who is heading up the new Radical Division,” Teddy said. “He’s already gone after the Negroes.” J. Edgar Hoover was the new man. He was after what he called “terroristic and similar classes.” He was a law and order man schooled in bigotry. “Something must be done to the editors of Negro publications as they are beyond doubt exciting the darkie elements of this country to riot,” he said in the summer when white soldiers and sailors rioted in D. C., killing more than a dozen darkies, after a rumor spread that a Negro man had raped a white woman. The rumor was fake. The Negro deaths were real.

   J. Edgar Hoover turned his attention to anarchists and communists at the end of the summer. He got busy sending the notorious Emma Goldman back to Russia. He helped engineer the arrest of more than a thousand radicals in early November, with the intent of deporting them. “The Communist Party is a menace,” he said. He meant to send them all back to where they had come from.

   “What does this new man have to do with me?” Sigitas asked.

   “Are you a patriot?”

   “Patriotism is just a way of convincing the poor to die for the rich.”

   “Your views about that are what that man has to do with you.”

   Agnes brought a plate of paczek to the table. They were deep-fried pastries filled with jam, caramel, and chocolate. The outer layer was sprinkled with powdered sugar and dried orange bits. They drank coffee the Polish way, which was strong with full-fat cream.

   “What you have to do is forget about socialism and become a communist,” Teddy said. “Join the Communist Party. Volunteer for the dirty work. Become a firebrand. Make yourself known to the Radical Division. Make enough trouble and you should be on a boat on your way back to Lithuania in no time. It won’t cost you a penny for the fare and they will feed you during the voyage, too, so by the time you get home you’ll be back to your old self.”

   “They won’t shoot me?”

   “Probably not.”

   “They won’t throw me in jail?”

   “They probably will for a month-or-so, but they don’t want to keep anarchists and communists in jail. They don’t want them here. They want to send them somewhere else, anywhere else, which will be easy enough in your case since you were never naturalized.” Sigitas had never forgotten Lithuania and had never become a full-fledged American.

   Becoming an official communist was easy as pie. Charles Ruthenberg had split from the socialists after the May Day Riot and joined several splinter groups to form Cleveland’s Communist Party. They allied with the Communist Party of America. The woman who had saved him during the May Day Riot was a close associate of Charles Ruthenberg’s. She put in a good word for him. He was brought into the circle of fellow travelers. He was given a revolver but no bullets. He gave the gun back. J. Edgar Hoover’s Radical Division had numerous informers and inside men. They put Sigitas on their list soon enough. He didn’t have to wait long for the Palmer Raids.

   Seven months earlier the anarchist Carlo Valdinoci had put a bomb on the doorstep of newly appointed Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s house in Washington, D. C. When the bomb went off no one inside the house was hurt, although the anarchist mishandled the explosive and blew himself up, as well as the whole front of the house. Across the street where Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt were sleeping the blast shook them out of bed. The attack was coordinated with  attacks in eight other cities on judges, politicians, and policemen. The Attorney General had his eye on the White House. He got to work hyping the Red Scare. He put J. Edgar Hoover in charge of identifying and arresting as many socialists, anarchists, and communists as he could and deporting them as fast as he could.

   The first raids in December filled a freighter dubbed the “Red Ark.” It sailed out of New York City bound for Russia. Its passengers were foreigners and suspected radicals. A month later the Justice Department went big. A series of further raids netted 3,000 men and women in 30 towns and cities in 23 states. Search warrants and habeas corpus were an afterthought, if not completely ignored. Sigitas was one of the communists swept up in the net.

   Once everybody was locked up in holding facilities, J. Edgar Hoover admitted there had been “clear cases of brutality” during the round-up. His admission was beside the point. His point-of-view was guilty until proven innocent. Not everybody agreed. “We appear to be attempting to repress a political party,” said the U. S. Attorney for the Eastern District. “By such methods, we drive underground and make dangerous what was not dangerous before.” A. Mitchell Palmer answered that he couldn’t arrest radicals one by one to treat an “epidemic” and claimed fidelity to constitutional principles. The Constitution didn’t necessarily see it that way, but it was just a piece of paper, after all.

   Sigitas knew it was all hot air. He knew letting the cat out of the bag was easier than getting it back in. After he was arrested he couldn’t wait to be frog-marched onto a boat bound for the Old World. The New World wasn’t for him anymore. There was too much capitalism and double-dealing. He was sick and tired of Dope Town.

   He had been rousted out of bed in his furnished room in the middle of the night by two uniformed Flying Squad men and a Justice Bureau man. “Are you the Hoover men?” he asked. “The only Hoover here is the vacuum cleaner kind,” one of the policemen said. “You got one minute to throw some clothes on.” A minute later he was in the back seat of their Buick Touring squad car.

   More than a week passed before Teddy was allowed to visit Sigitas at the Champlain Avenue Police Headquarters, The complex of offices, jail cells, and courtrooms was overdue for replacement. A new Central Station was already on the drawing boards. “The moment the new station at E. 21st St. and Payne Ave. opens for business, the ancient Champlain Avenue mausoleum of crime, rats, and malodors which has been functioning as a police headquarters for perhaps twenty-five years too long will start to crumble before the wrecking engines,” is what the Cleveland Plain Dealer said.

   “How are you doing?” Teddy asked. “They do anything bad to you?”

   “No, except the food is terrible, which is bad enough. There’s no beer, either.”

   “They tell you what is going to happen?”

   “They are taking me to New York City on the train tomorrow. They made it sound like I will be on a boat soon after that.”

   “That’s what you want, right?”

   “That’s what I want, yes. There’s no place like home. It isn’t just a place, it’s a feeling. That’s where I feel the best. It’s where my heart is.”

   “You’re taking a chance,” Teddy said. “The Russians are gone now, sure, but the new Lithuania doesn’t like socialists any more than Americans do here. Socialism is no good. Sooner or later, you run out of other people’s money.”

   “Capitalism is no good, either,” Sigitas said. “Sooner or later all the money has been sucked up by the tycoons.”

   “Good luck,” Teddy said.

   The next day Sigitas was taken to the New York Central depot. He was handcuffed to a police detective who rode with him the full day it took to get to Grand Central Station. A day later, in a courtroom deciding his fate, was the only time he ever saw J. Edgar Hoover, who was sitting with the prosecutors. The man never said a word in open court. 

   He was younger than Sigitas had imagined him, maybe in his mid-20s. His short hair was shaved even closer at the temples. Sigitas was five foot eight and trim. J. Edgar Hoover was slightly shorter and just as trim. He looked him in the face repeatedly, but the Radical Division man never made eye contact with him. He left before the proceeding was over. He knew what the verdict was going to be before it was announced. 

   A week later Sigitas was on board a refitted troop carrier. It was a leaky old tub. It took twenty eight days to get to Finland. The deportees were assigned cabins in pairs. Sentries stood at the cabin doors day and night. Sentries patrolled the deck for the one hour every day they were allowed to walk in the outside air. Once they got to Finland everybody was taken to a special train, guarded by U. S. Marines and Finnish White Guards. They were put thirty men to an unheated boxcar fitted with benches, tables, and beds. Each boxcar had seven boxes of army rations, which included bully-beef and hard bread. They were taken to Terijoki, about two miles from the Russian border. Most of the men were being dumped into Russia like so much garbage. Sigitas was the only deportee going to Lithuania. The Russians dumped him out like garbage, too.

   He took a train from St. Petersburg to Riga, Latvia, and from there he hitched a ride on a sugar beet truck across the border to Lithuania. Sigitas walked the fourteen miles to the farmlands outside of Kursenai. It felt good to stretch his legs. He found his family home without a problem, as though he had never left. “Labas, mamyte,” he said when he stepped through the front door and saw his mother peeling potatoes at the kitchen table. After the kissing and crying, after he had sat his mother back down, and his brothers and sisters were peppering him with questions, he knew he had made the right decision in returning to Lithuania.

   The worst feeling in the world is homesickness. Sigitas felt like a new man. He had shed all his political theories on board the troop carrier. He could no longer determine which political way was the more wrong way. Ideologies were full of lies. “Eik i velnius” was all he had to say about the matter. If he had still been in the New World it would have come out of his mouth as “Go to hell.” Lithuania was a free country again after more than one hundred years. The Russians were good and gone, except when they weren’t. Everybody knew they were land grabbers, unpredictable and dangerous. 

   Sigitas worked on the family farm for the next twenty years. He harvested hay starting on St. John’s Day. He raised his own pigs and brewed his own beer. He broke the necks of his own chickens. He always had enough to eat and drink, at least until before the Russians came back in force in 1944. The politics of the 20th century caught up to him. The Russians weren’t school style idealogues. They were barrel of a gun idealogues. Either you believed in them, or else. 

   He fought them first with the Territorial Defense Forces and later with the Forest Brothers. They engaged the Russians in guerilla warfare in the woodlands surrounding their homes. Sigitas Kazlauskas was shot and killed in the Dainava Forest in late January of 1946. His body was abandoned on the battlefield and decomposed in the spring. He slowly sank into the bloom. He stayed there, at home in native soil until there was nothing left of him but a memory.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street at 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.”

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

“A Cold War thriller that captures the vibe of mid-century NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP

The end of summer, New York City, 1956. Stickball in the streets and the Mob on the make. President Eisenhower on his way to Ebbets Field for the opening game of the World Series. A torpedo waits in the wings. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye scares up the shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Baltic Place

Tailor Made

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By Ed Staskus

   My uncle Justinas was a short man with a long face and a bald dome fringed with tufts of gray hair. He lived in Marijampole, which is in southern Lithuania. Whenever anybody in our family visited the motherland they stayed at his house, even though his house didn’t have an indoor bathroom or running water. He was always in hot water, though. Everybody loved Justinas. That was the problem. At least, that was the way his wife saw it.

   “He’s always coming home with bobby pins in his hair,” his wife Janina complained.

   Plenty of women liked him. He was silver-tongued. They wore their best dresses whenever visiting. Even Rasa Jurgelaityte, his niece, looked swank when she dropped by, clad in a bluish-purple shag sweater, sitting at the table drinking strong tea in the afternoon. There wasn’t anything untoward about it. Justinas had an Andy Kaufman meets Roger Moore vibe about him.

   When he moved from Gizai to Marijampole fewer than 20,000 people lived there. It was a small town. More than forty years later about 40,000 people lived there. It was still a small town. He always wore a sports coat or an old suit jacket. When the weather was bad he wore a herringbone newsboy cap. He was good working with his hands, deft and quick. His face was wrinkled, he could look gnomish slightly hunched over, but he was usually on the uptake.

   Nobody ever told him how young he looked, so he never heard how old he was. He was born a year after World War One ended, on a family farm near the border with East Prussia, one of eleven children, six of whom survived infancy. He was a cavalryman in the Lithuanian Army when World War Two broke out. “He was so handsome in his uniform,” my mother said. In the end, however, his war lasted only a few days after the Red Army in 1940 sent a half million troops and three thousand tanks into the Baltic states. It was Goliath vs. David, except David didn’t have a nearly big enough slingshot.

   He trained as a tailor when he was a teenager. He went back to that line of work after his horse was shot dead. “What did I ever do to you?” the horse wanted to ask the Russian who shot him. After the war, and all during the annexation, he took in or let out seats and waists, replaced zippers, buttons, and liners, and made custom pants and jackets. He got married and raised four children. The Russians controlled the money supply, however, and he was hard-pressed getting ahead, at least in any straightforward way.

   Justinas played the accordion like any minute was a good time for a good time. He couldn’t read music, not that it mattered. He knew what it was supposed to sound like. Squeezebox skills back then were passed on generation to generation, one-on-one. He belted out songs, too, even though his voice was thin and scratchy.  He could be the life of the party. He wasn’t planning on going to the grave with any music left inside of him.

   He was in good spirits most of the time, which was surprising. Until 1990, when the Soviet Union finally got the boot, Lithuania was a gray country, surly Russians and unhappy Lithuanians in the grip of the Russians. Even the post-war reconstruction looked miserable. There were busts and statues of Lenin everywhere. The tyrant didn’t look remotely happy in a single one of them. Justinas was happy enough to be alive, somehow staying on the sunny side of the street behind Lenin’s sour Iron Curtain.

    No matter how affable he could be, if you messed with his private Idaho museum or his pigeons, you would get yours, for sure. He dropped the hammer on the occasional black rat and red fox in the wrong place at the wrong time. When a neighbor’s cat mauled one of his favorite birds, Justinas got his shotgun and hunted the cat down. He shot it pointblank in the street where he found it. The neighbor never said anything about it, either to him or the police. The rest of the neighborhood warned their cats about the madman in their midst.

   My uncle’s home was a small two-story house. It was painted green. It backed up to railroad tracks. They had an electric stove, but no basement or furnace. They heated the house with a fireplace and a Franklin-style stove. They burned coal and dried turf. Justinas said the stove could burn anything with hardly any smell. His driveway and the road in front of the house were hard-packed dirt. The road was slightly higher than the surrounding terrain but there were no side ditches for rainwater to flow to. Whenever it stormed the pathway turned into a quagmire. When it was dry, except for an occasional man-eating pothole, it was like driving on rock bed.

   Justinas owned a four-door early-1970s Lada, manufactured by Fiat in collaboration with the Soviet Union. It was black. Everybody’s Lada’s were black. It had heavy-duty steel body panels and cheap components. It rode like a tank on the bumpy roads. It was a manual four-speed with slightly elevated ground clearance. It was made to be worked on by its owners, which is what my uncle did. The Lada was not a hot car but it ran hot. He changed the oil once a month. He replaced the muffler and the drum brakes when he had to. He installed a rack on the top and kept the outside of the car reasonably clean, although the inside was a dump. It wasn’t filthy dirty, just trashy, like a teenager owned it. 

   Justinas pumped his gasoline from child-sized pumps set on cinder blocks with fifteen-foot long snaky hoses. The concrete islands at their neighborhood gas station were unusually wide. The station looked like it had been built before the beginning of time. Motorists pulled in willy-nilly. They tried to ignore the long lines for fuel.

   Lithuanians are keen on wolves, bears, and moose. According to legend, Grand Duke Gediminas dreamt an iron wolf told him to create Vilnius and make the city his capital. The bear is a symbol of Samogitia, one of the country’s regions, and is part of the coat of arms of Siauliai, another region. The Lazdijai region features a moose as its hero, although when it shows up uninvited townsfolk stay behind closed doors. Birds don’t take a back seat. Everybody likes the cuckoo because its call is said to sweep away the last bits and pieces of winter. The pigeon, which is called balandis, gets its own month, which is April, or balanzio menuo.

    There was a barn-like garage behind Justinas’s house. He kept his old sewing machines and tailoring goods on the ground floor. Upstairs, up a ladder, he kept a coop of rock pigeons. Even though they can always find their way home, even when released blindfolded from no matter where, navigating by the earth’s magnetic fields, and even though they had carried messages across battlefields for armies during both world wars, Justinas never let his pigeons go anywhere without him. They weren’t prisoners, exactly, but they were there to stay.

   He loved his birds and they loved him. He fed them as well as he fed himself. He and his friends bred and traded them. Thieves sometimes tried to steal the pigeons, so there was a padlock fixed to the garage door. He kept a dog on a long leash chained to a stake in front of the garage, just in case. The dog was ready to bite whenever strangers approached.

   Behind the garage was a chicken wire enclosure brimming with white rabbits. My uncle raised them for the family’s dinner table. When the time came he would catch and pin one of the rabbits to the ground, put a stick across its neck, step on one side of the stick, quickly step on the other side of it, and pull the rabbit upward by its hind legs, breaking its neck. After cutting off its head he hung it upside down to clean it. Janina seasoned and cooked the bunnies, frying and braising them and mixing them into stews.

   His private Idaho museum was on the second floor of their house. Nobody had ever stolen anything from it, but God pity the fool who tried. Justinas might have committed murder in the event. The door was never locked, but you had to be invited to get in. He never gave anything in his museum away, either, not even to his own children, although he traded with his friends, just like he traded his birds with them.

   There was a glass case filled with gold and silver coins, military medals, and men’s pocket watches. There were framed pictures of Catholic saints, Lithuanian kings and politicians, and British luxury liners on the walls. He had carved figures, including an eagle, talons and wings outstretched and its head thrust forward. He had a restored Victrola with a new needle, new springs, new crank and motor, and a burnt orange sound horn. There were a dozen clocks, which were his prized possessions. They were grandfather wood wall clocks with pendulums and chimes. Every one of them was set to a random time of day. They all worked whenever he wanted them to work.

   Two smaller rooms adjoined the museum on the second floor. They were bedrooms where his four children had grown up. Both of the rooms had pint-sized windows. The rooms were stuffy, filled with dust motes and memories.

   Justinas and Janina were always accusing each other of having extra-marital affairs. She made great-tasting potato pancakes morning, noon, and night. One day while they were having a pancake lunch with two neighborhood widows in the living room, since there wasn’t a dining room, she told her husband to go outside for a minute. 

   “Oh, my God, he’s such a womanizer, always chasing women,” she said out of the blue. The two widows didn’t know what to say. She was in her late 60s and he was in his early 70s. He never talked about his wife, but she talked about him constantly. Somebody said she was the one having all the affairs. Nobody knew what to believe.

   When he walked back into the living room he was smiling. “What were you talking about?” he asked innocently enough. He wasn’t planning on living a century-or-more and giving up all the things that make you want to live that long. He believed it was best to die in the prime of life at a ripe old age.

   Justinas had a water well operated by a wheel pulley in the backyard. There was a red plastic bucket to get water and bring it into the house. Whenever anybody wanted to brush their teeth or wash their face, they took from the bucket. The outhouse was beside the garage. Everybody called it the little house. They kept cut-up scraps of Russian newspapers on a ledge inside the side door of the little house. Whenever relatives were visiting Janina gave them a vessel to keep beside their bed in case they needed to go in the middle of the night and didn’t want to go outside. Everybody made sure to not drink too much too late into the evening.

   They didn’t have a tub, either. They went to a nearby public bath to take showers once a week. Once when my sister was visiting she declared the outhouse was more than enough. She wasn’t going to any public bathhouse. Justinas told her he had a lady friend who had a bathtub. When they got there, it was full of turnips. The lady took them all out, but the water never warmed up above tepid. She took a bath anyway, since it was better than nothing.

   Even when Justinas retired from tailoring he was always out doing something, up to something. ”I have responsibilities,” he would say. It was never clear what those responsibilities were, although he stayed busy fulfilling them.

   My uncle Sigitas and his wife Terese had a pig farm near Gizai, near where my mother’s side of the family had originally come from. Terese worked for the Russians in a building supplies warehouse. She smiled politely and stole them blind. Nobody knew what my younger uncle Juozukas did. He had a truck and could fix anything, including stoves and electric circuits. He never got up in the morning at the same time and never went to work to the same place.

   He had patched together a kiosk and attached it to the side of his house. The hand-painted sign said, “Odds and Ends.” He and his wife sold soft drinks, chocolate bars, gum, and cigarettes. On the first of every month he had to pay off the local Lithuanian mobsters. They demanded a cut of everything, including gum. It was like Spanky and Our Gang.

   Everybody in Lithuania complained about everything and they especially complained about money. It was easier and more prudent to never ask anybody what they did. “This and that,” is what many of them said. They were always going to Poland and across the Baltic Sea to Sweden and bringing back clothes, food, prescription drugs, as well as cigarettes and more cigarettes. They smuggled contraband goods across borders without declaring anything, traversing forests and crossing rivers on the sly. Whenever they bootlegged cars or trucks they drove the long way around at night with the headlights off.

   After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the resumption of Lithuania, we collected financing from family members and sent enough to Justinas and Janina so they could get an indoor bathroom built and running water installed. The lady of the house absolutely wanted a toilet and faucets. She was more than happy when she got the funds. She even stopped complaining about her supposedly over-sexed husband for a while.

   When Justinas found out about the proposed toilet he said thanks, but no thanks. He said he had grown up and lived his whole life without the modern convenience. “What was good for my father is good for me,” he said. He wasn’t hidebound but wasn’t going to change anything more than he had to after all the years of his life. “I was coming down the ladder from the coop just now carrying a drink in one hand and a pigeon in the other hand,” he told anybody who asked about his reasons. “Don’t try that when you get to be my age.” His explanations were often elliptical.

   He was swimming upstream with Janina about the plumbing. She eventually got what she wanted. Over time, given Lithuania’s long and cold winters, he learned to like the indoor bathroom more than his wife or anybody else. He was an old dog who had sussed out a new trick. He never gave up visiting his lady friends, though. He didn’t forget how to make hot water.

Photograph by Rita Staskus. Juozukas Jurgelaitis, Justinas Jurgelaitis, and Rasa Jurgelaityte, 1994.

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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A Crying of Lot 49 Production

Baltic Place

Mystery Street

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By Ed Staskus

   I was ten years old the first time I saw a dead man. It was the morning of Holy Saturday. The sky was low and thick with clouds. It looked like it might rain any minute. My best friend Feliksas, a Lithuanian kid like me who everybody called Felix, and I had walked to the VFW hall behind the Gulf gas station at the corner of Coronado Ave. and St. Clair Ave.  It was a log cabin-like building with dusty windows. We didn’t have anything in mind except seeing the sights and messing around. We liked to slip behind the steering wheels of unlocked cars waiting to be repaired in the lot next to the gas station and pretend adventures on dangerous roads.

   When Felix noticed flashing lights on St. Clair Ave. we went around the corner to the front of the gas station. There were two black and white Cleveland Police Department prowl cars and an ambulance there. We called their rotating lights gumball machines. We called the sirens growlers. The black and white ambulance was a Ford station wagon that was both a police car and an ambulance. A policeman was standing around doing nothing while another one kept the crawling traffic on the other side of the street on the move. The traffic on our side was filtering down side streets. The ambulance men were standing beside their black and white station wagon smoking cigarettes.

   We stood to the side of a cluster of grown-ups who were tossing glances at the dead man on the ground. Nobody was saying much. We stepped closer to the man until we were standing over him. We looked down at him. He was lying on his back, partly on the sidewalk and partly in the street. He was wearing a white shirt and a plaid jacket. One of his shoes was missing. The other one was a tasseled loafer. One of his front teeth was cracked from when his face hit the concrete going down.

   The front of his white shirt, open at the neck, was a blob of red. Some of the red was damp while the edges of the blob were going lifeless. Flies were buzzing around him. We  jumped when the dead man moaned.

   “Do you need some help?” Felix asked

   “Getting bumped off is the only help for being alive,” the dead man said in a low tone of voice.

    Felix stepped up to the stone-faced policeman doing nothing. “That man is trying to say something,” he said.

   “That man is dead,” the policeman said. “Leave him alone.”

   “Who is he?” I asked. I had never seen him in our neighborhood before.

   “He was a hoodlum.”

   “Did you shoot him?”

   “No, not us. He spun the big wheel and lost.”

   “What’s the big wheel?”

   “Never mind kid.”

   There was a dark green car parked between the gas pumps and the station. It had white wall tires. We went over to look at it. The windshield was smashed, like somebody had thrown a rock through it. We looked inside. There was dried blood on the front seat. When I looked up I saw ‘Happy Motoring!’ stenciled on the plate glass windows of the station. We turned back to the street.

   “Tell them not to bury me in the Glenville Cemetery,” the dead man said.

   Glenville Cemetery was a graveyard next to the New York Central railroad tracks not far away. It lay in a triangle of land between St. Clair Ave. and Shaw Ave.  We could walk there down E. 129th St. in ten minutes. We always passed it on our way to the Shaw Hayden Theater where we went to see  monster movie matinees.

   “Too many Jews,” the dead man said. “And now they’re burying niggers there.”

   What does it matter, I thought, even though I didn’t know very much about Jews or niggers. I didn’t know much about graveyards, either.  I always wondered what my father meant  when he said he had to work the graveyard shift. How much work do the dead need done for them? I had never been to a funeral, except for two funerals at St. George Catholic Church, where I was training to be an altar boy. I had sat in a back pew those two times and observed the goings-on as part of my training. I dozed off during the second service.

   I noticed the knot of grown-ups was gone. The stone-faced policeman and the ambulance men were still standing around waiting for something. The other policeman was standing on the corner waiting for the traffic light to change, except there weren’t any more cars. There wasn’t anybody in sight. There wasn’t a single person going into a single store even though it was shopping day. St. Clair Ave. was usually busy with women shopping at the A & P and all the other stores. Nobody seemed to be going home with a ham for Easter. Where was everybody? 

   A young woman came running down the street, pushed past the policemen, and threw herself on top of the dead man. Her hair rolled down her shoulders. The curls of her hair smelled like wet ashes. She started to cry, quietly rubbing the tears off her face with the sleeve of her dress.

   The dead man wiggled a forefinger and motioned for me to come closer.

   “Do a pal a favor, kid,” he said. “I don’t want her to cry over me and I don’t want her asking me for anything. Get her off me and help her home. It’s just around the corner. I was on my way there when I got mine.”

   The two ambulance men lifted her off him, got her steady on her feet, and Felix and I helped her back to her apartment. She lived on the second floor of a two story brick building on Dedman Ct. a block away on the other side of Lancelot Ave. It looked like nobody lived there. Most of the windows and the front door were broken. The roof was partly caved in. The lawn was choked with weeds.

   “Nobody lives here except me,” she said.

   “Was that man your boyfriend?” Felix asked.

   “No, my boyfriend disappeared two years ago, on the second day of 1959. I heard he joined the merchant marine, hauling ore on the Edmund Fitzgerald.” The Edmund Fitzgerald was the biggest boat on the Great Lakes. “Whoever that is lying on the cement over there looks like he’s got a free pass to the graveyard down the street.”

   “He asked us to make sure he wasn’t buried there.”

   “I don’t know why. He always said he was Italian, but he was half Jewish and half Negro, too.” 

   She turned to Felix. “Isn’t your name Feliksas?” she asked.

   “Yes, how did you know?”

   “Do you know your name means lucky?”

   “No, I didn’t know, nobody ever told me. How do you know my name?”

   “I know everybody’s names, everybody in this neighborhood, everybody on their way to the boneyard, where everybody is going, sooner or later, trying to not hear their own hollow footsteps. Forgiveness of sins and resurrection of the flesh.” Felix’s eyes got wide. I was getting spooked. A crow on top of the roof cawed three times.

  “What was your boyfriend’s name?” Felix asked.

   “I don’t know,” she said. “I think it was Frankie Paramo, but I’m not sure anymore. I’m starting to forget what he looked like.” She leaned against a shadow. Her face was going limpid. “May he rest in peace,” she said. Her voice was a thin lament. We went down the front walk to the sidewalk. When we turned to wave goodbye she wasn’t there anymore, like she had never existed.

   The gas station was in front of us before we knew it. I felt torpid and restless at the same time. The dead man was where we had left him. We took a step over to where he was. He looked up at the sky and said, “Life, what did you ever do for me? It’s my turn now. I’m not going to do anything for you anymore.”

   His words were muffled. His eyes were like dull marbles. Felix yawned like he was nervous. When we glanced at the dead man again he was blurry like there was an eclipse of wet moths around him flapping their wings. A dog barked monotonously in a backyard on Coronado Ave.

   A four-door Oldsmobile raced down St. Clair Ave. “What the hell does he think he’s doing,” one of the policemen groused. Not everybody saw the big car go past. It was like trying to see a falling star during the day. Felix said it was his Uncle Gediminas. Most of the Lithuanians in Cleveland lived in Glenville, although all of them were moving to North Collinwood. I had heard my father tell my mother one night they would have to start looking for a new house soon, or urban renewal would make our family home worthless. I didn’t know what urban renewal meant, although it sounded bad. I knew worthless meant bad. 

   Uncle Gediminas was an middle-aged undersized man with an old man’s turkey neck. He was an accountant and could afford a new car whenever he wanted one, even though he unfailingly bought used cars that burned oil. “He’s always staring down his kids,” Felix said. “All his kids are afraid of him. He bosses them around day and night.” 

   The street was full of echoes, even though the few people on the street weren’t saying anything. It felt like somebody was following us. We looked everywhere but couldn’t spot anybody.

   “Do you want to wait for him to die?” Felix asked.

   “I don’t think he has much time left even though the policeman said he’s already dead.”:

   “Not dead enough,” said a man walking past. His hair was shiny with Brylcreem and he was wearing a bowling alley shirt. He spit in the gutter before crossing St. Clair Ave.

   “Let’s wait,” I said to Felix.” I don’t want to just sneak away.”

   “You found out I’m not long for this world?” the dead man said. “I’ve known that for a while now, since the beginning. I don’t like it when people talk about me like I’m not here. You kids should go home where you belong.”

   “Is your name Frankie?” Felix asked.

   “Yeah.”

   “Do you believe in Heaven?”

   “I believe in Hell.”

   The sky got dark. It started to rain. It was a steady rain. The ground got full of worms. The dead man started to melt. When he started melting there was no stopping him. Five minutes later he had come undone and was a pile of mud. One of the policemen stepped up to him. “There’s no sense in getting worked up about it. Call off the pathologist. Call the fire department instead. They can hose him down the drain. It will save the taxpayers the trouble of an autopsy and a burial.”

   We were soaking wet after a minute of rain. We got chilled and goosebumps popped up on our arms and legs. Felix ran home down Coronado Ave. and I ran home down Bartfield Ave. Even though it was storming and had gotten darker, none of the houses were lit up. They were all shade and shape. We lived in a side-by-side Polish double that my parents bought on the cheap with my father’s sister and her family when they had emigrated to the United States.

   Our front door was locked. I ran to the back door. It was locked. I knocked but nobody came to the door. I kicked at it but still nobody came to let me in. I went into the backyard to the tornado doors. They were never locked. One of the doors had a handle. I pulled on the handle. The doors were locked.

   A German widow lived next door to us. Her husband was dead and her children had moved away. She was alone in the world. In a week she would be one hundred years old and her solitude would be full-fledged. I ran to her house. She was sitting on a lawn chair in the middle of her basement. A small storage room was where she kept her canned goods. She kept carrots, radishes, and potatoes in bins. She was writing in a spiral-bound memo pad. 

   Her memory was on the fritz. She wrote notes and Scotch taped pictures in her pad. There were pictures of my father, mother, brother, sister, and me, and our names in the pad. There were pictures of her fridge and stove and what they were called, which was fridge and stove. There were diagrams of all her rooms and everything in the rooms, what they were for and what they were called. There was a scrap of paper pinned to the front of her house dress. Her name, Agatha, was written on the paper in block letters.

   “My stomach is shriveled up from hunger,” she said, even though she had enough food stored in the basement to last a year. She often forgot to eat. My parents checked up on her every few days.

   “Where is everybody?” I asked.

   “Your family is all in the house. They are watching the TV. They will be sorry if a tornado comes. I told them so, but they wouldn’t listen.”

   “Can I borrow the key to get into our basement?”

   She had it in a pocket of her apron. She handed it to me. I unlocked the doors and swung them open. The concrete steps led to the cellar. They were slippery with slime. It was where our father told us we had to go whenever there was a tornado. He told us about the last one in Cleveland in 1953 that killed nine people, injured three hundred, and left two hundred homeless when their homes were blown away. “The cellar will protect us from high-speed winds and flying debris,” he said.

   I ran up the stairs to our kitchen. All the lights in the house were on. My  brother and sister were arguing on the living room floor while my parents watched the weatherman on the TV. We had an old Zenith. The only time it worked right was when there was a clear sky. There was a clap of faraway thunder. The TV went fuzzy. I couldn’t understand a word the weatherman was saying.

   “Where have you been?” my mother demanded. “You’re all wet. Go change your clothes before you catch your death of cold. And don’t touch the Easter ham. That’s for tomorrow.”

   “I didn’t know you were home,” I said. “The house was dark and locked up.”

   “What do you mean dark and locked up? Your father and I went grocery shopping but got back an hour ago. It was so busy out there. What with this gloom in the middle of the day, the house has been lit up since we got home.”

   My brother, sister, and I slept upstairs in the front bedroom. Our sister slept in a corner. Our parents slept in the back bedroom. They needed privacy by night. There was a bathroom and a linen closet. I dried off with a bath towel. I changed my clothes and sat on my bed looking out on Bartfield Ave. All the houses on the street were suddenly bright in new sunshine. The police cars and ambulance in front of the Gulf gas station were gone. The pile of mud that had been the dead man was gone. A firemen had a hose on the ground, where he had flattened it, and was rolling it up to put back on the pumper. 

   I ran up the street and found Felix on his way to meet me. We got our bikes and rode down Eddy Rd. and through the village of Bratenahl to Gordon Park on the Lake Erie shoreline. The sun made the mist in the air sparkle and bent the light. We sat on the edge of an overhang on a steep bank of the lake and watched a rainbow hover in the sky until it vanished off the face of the earth.

Photograph by Fred Lyon.

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. 

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

“Captures the vibe of mid-century NYC, from stickball in the streets to the Mob on the make.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP

Late summer and early autumn. New York City, 1956. President Eisenhower on his way to the opening game of the World Series. A hit man waits in the wings. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye scares up the shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Baltic Place

Knife in the Water

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By Ed Staskus

   The Germans called the town Memel. We called it Klaipeda but only among ourselves. The Germans were in charge. They had been in charge for hundreds of years so we didn’t argue with them. They lived in the town. We lived on the flatlands outside of town, although some called it the bogs. They had built a railway station of yellow brick not long ago. The town was spreading out. None of us ever rode on the trains. We worked on the docks. The port was on the mouth of the Neman River and was the gateway to the Baltic Sea.

   The Curonian Spit shielded the harbor from storms. Dunes soaked up wind and waves. The Neringa Fortress had been built fifteen years earlier to protect the harbor from marauders. A hospital was built to treat sailors with infectious diseases. It was the last resort for ailing seadogs. Most of them died there. There were buried in a back corner of the Municipal Cemetery, as long as they weren’t Jewish.

   We spent our days loading grain and lumber for export. After work we stopped in at the taverns and bawdy houses up and down Heydekrug Strasse. It was mostly us single men. It was a bad neighborhood to be living in if you had good intentions. We stayed in shabby boarding houses, two men to a closet of a room, during the week and only went home on weekends. We walked home on Sunday mornings and walked back to town Monday mornings.

   It was on a Friday night in the middle of summer that I first laid eyes on Ignas Radzvilas. He was known as the Pig Sticker. Everybody knew all about him. He was rumored to have killed two or three men in knife fights. It was the same night that Dominykas Norkus left town and never came back. It was the last time any of us ever saw the back of his head, his hair limp and shiny with fear.

   I was smoking outside of Grazina Kleiza’s place, leaning against a brick kiln, when I saw Ignas Radzvilas come marching up the street. His face was set in stone and he was dressed in black like an undertaker. His belt buckle was silver. I couldn’t see where he kept his knife. I knew it had to be somewhere handy, but couldn’t spot it. I thought, maybe it’s hidden up his sleeve, but I knew that couldn’t be right. Ignas Radzvilas didn’t hide his reputation. He wore it on his sleeve for all to see.

   Grazina Kleiza was part Lithuanian and part Tatar. She traced her ancestry to Grand Duke Vytautas the Great, who brought more than ten thousand Tatars back from a campaign in the Ukraine in the early 15th century to serve him as mounted fighters. They were small dark men who knew how to raise hell. Grazina Kleiza’s eyes were the color of river rocks in a cold stream. She wore lace-up boots and kept her hair loose. Nobody knew what kept her dress in place. A red light burned at the front of her business building, which looked more like a warehouse than a pleasure house. It was as much about loaded dice on the gluckshaus board and cheap moonshine as it was about anything else. Her pleasure house was in the shadow of the ruined Klaipeda Castle. The castle was where the dead went to cast shadows.

   Ignas Radzvilas walked past me without seeming to notice I was there. I could tell he had something on his mind. I tossed my cigarette aside and followed him through the door. What he had in mind was Grazina Kleiza. She had once been his girl. What he didn’t know was that she was another man’s girl now, not that it mattered even if he had known. Dominykas Norkus could have been a Polish prince and it wouldn’t have mattered.

   When I went through the door behind him, the door bumped him on the backside. He reached behind him without looking and swung the door back into my face. I reached for the knife I kept in the lining of my vest. “Don’t,” he said, slapping the knife out of my hand and brushing me aside like I wasn’t any more than a sand beetle.

   Grazina Kleiza was dancing a polka with Dominykas Norkus. An old bag wearing a magpie feather hat was on a piano and a skeleton of a man was on an accordion. We all made the sign of the cross when walking past the piano. The woman believed wearing magpie feathers was a sign of fearlessness. We knew it was a sign of witchcraft. Dominykas Norkus was known as the Brakeman. He worked for the Germans. Nobody ever insulted him to his face since he was the best man with a knife in our neighborhood. When the Pig Sticker walked up to the Brakeman and took Grazina Kleiza’s arm, pulling her away, the dancing and music stopped. The piano player turned on her stool and scowled.

   “I’m all done hating you,” he said to Grazina Kleiza. “Saying goodbye is like dying a little. When I said goodbye to you I died a lot. Pasiklydau ta diena. It was a mistake.” The couples on the dance floor near them moved away, shuffling their feet and staying quiet. The talk at the bar drifted off. One man made a quick grab for more krupnickas and poured it down his throat.

   “I’m looking for the man I hear is the best with a knife in these parts,” Ignas Radzvilas said, looking straight at Dominykas Norkus. “I am probably not as skilled as him, but I’d like to find out what I’ve got.” He didn’t say anything about love and hate, but everybody knew what he was talking about. In the next instant everybody saw the knife in his hand, although nobody knew where it came from. We couldn’t take our eyes off it.

   The Brakeman had a smoldering butt held between his thumb and forefinger. He took a drag on it. It burned down and he let it fall to the plank floor. We thought he was going to fill his hand with his knife any minute, but one minute after another passed and his hand stayed empty.

   “Do you know I’m talking to you?” Ignas Radzvilas said, stepping closer to Dominykas Norkus. If it was a question, the Brakeman didn’t have an answer. The Pig Sticker’s breath was sour in his face. The deaf geezer in the corner, the corner that was reserved for him, was listening closely like everybody else.

   Grazina Kleiza stepped up to her man. She reached for where he kept his knife and put it into his empty hand. “This is what you’ve been looking for,” she said and stepped aside. He looked at the knife in his hand like he had never seen it before. Was he playing the fool to buy time? The knife slipped from his fingers, hitting the floor with a thud, playing dead. The air went out of the room.

   “I thought you were a man, not a yellow dog,” Ignas Radzvilas said.

   Grazina Kleiza wrapped herself around the Pig Sticker’s arm. “Forget him,” she said. “He’s got a white liver.” They walked arm and arm to the back and through a private door. We watched them stroll to the room of the rising sun. When we turned back to Dominykas Norkus, he was gone. The window behind where he had been standing was wide open.

   We all hated him from that moment on. He hadn’t just let us down. He had betrayed us. The skeleton pumped up his accordion and the magpie hat began banging on her piano keys. The drinkers went back to their drinks, pounding the bar for doubles. On the dance floor the polka dancing was frenzied, like everybody was trying to burn something off.

   I got overheated dancing with one girl after another until I finally had enough. I shrugged the last girl off me and went outside. I stopped at the well for a cool drink. The water tasted hot. I spit it out. The dirt street and the clean sky were the same as they had always been, but everything was different. I heard a horse snort softly. It was asleep on its feet at the front of the gate into Klaipeda Castle. 

   Somebody almost knocked me over. “Stay out of my way, half-wit,” Dominykas  Norkus said walking towards his horse. I stayed out of his way. He wasn’t worth the trouble. I watched him riding away until I saw Ignas Radzvilas and Grazina Kleiza come out a side door. I followed them past the brick kiln down the street toward Wilhelm Strasse. The moon lit my way. They were talking in low voices. She laughed and he gave her a pat on the behind.

   Later, when I got back to the bawdy house, everybody’s spirits were low. What dancing was still going on was at a crawl. The piano player was slumped over her keyboard. A group of men were playing cards, trying to make out who had the more crooked cards. When Grazina Kleiza came back in through the door she was crying. She looked over her shoulder like she was being followed by a ghost. The ghost was Ignas Radzvilas. His face was the washed out color of dried mud. He stumbled onto the dance floor and fell down on his side. We rolled him over and when we did our hands came away wet with blood. 

   “You’re looking at a man doomed to hell,” he said and groaned.

   “What happened?” everybody asked Grazina Kleiza.

   She said Ignas Radzvilas and she were walking past the Church of St. Jacob when they saw somebody coming towards them from the far side of the bell tower. “I couldn’t tell who it was,” she said. The Pig Sticker waited for the stranger to approach him.

   “Oh, it’s you, the nobody,’ he said, his thumbs hooked on his belt buckle.

   “He was young, I could tell that, but his face was hidden by the darkness,” Grazina Kleiza  said. “He said to Ignas, ‘I hear you’re looking for a fight.’ He walked right up to my man and before I knew it he stuck him with a knife, just below the heart there. A Jew ragman was passing in a wagon. We got him into it and brought him here. I didn’t want him to die in the street.”

   Everybody could tell Ignas Radzvilas was going fast. His breath rattled in his throat. The knife must have cut into his lungs. There was a froth bubbling on his lips. He asked Grazina Kleiza to cover his face. When he took his last breath her handkerchief went limp. It was stained a bright red. A handful  of flies began buzzing around him. Somebody said we should send for the police. “Don’t be a damned fool,” somebody else said. Somebody with one eye said Grazina Kleiza must have done it. That man was even more of a damned fool. I couldn’t take what they were saying since I knew they were wrong.

   “Look at her,” I said, stepping up beside her. She was trembling. “Does she look steady enough to kill a man. Her heart was his to take. She didn’t want to stop his heart from beating. Whoever killed the Pig Sticker must have been a real knife fighter since he didn’t want to get into a real knife fight. Those kinds of bona fide men only want to cut you. They will do anything to take you by surprise and finish you off before you even know what is going on.” 

   A stranded Argentine sailor killing time in town lifted his glass and saluted my little speech. He went by the name of Jorge Borges, although we called him Luis. As soon as was I finished we heard the sound of horses. When we looked we saw the police coming, even though none of us had hailed them. Maybe the Jew ragman told them what had happened. It didn’t take long for everybody to be gone in all directions through the back doors and windows. The only one who stayed behind was the deaf man in his corner. He had fallen asleep, stuck in a dream that was lost in a labyrinth.

   I walked back to my boarding house, slow and easy. I was in no hurry. The dark town was quiet as a windowless room. The moon had slipped behind a cloud. When I got to the front stairs I stopped before going up to my room. I pulled out my knife. It wasn’t a big knife but it had a stabbing tip and a sharp edge. I gave it a close look-over by the light of a stick match, rinsing it in a cistern at the corner of the house. I dried it on my sleeve, making sure there wasn’t the least drop of blood on it.

Image by Gustav Klimt.

A version of this story appeared in Cowbell Literary Magazine.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Atlantic Canada http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. 

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

“Captures the vibe of mid-century NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP

Late summer and early autumn, New York City, 1956. Stickball in the streets and the Mob on the make. President Eisenhower on his way to Ebbets Field for the opening game of the World Series. A killer waits in the wings. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye scares up Cold War shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Baltic Place

Breaking the Waves

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By Ed Staskus

   Even if it is a 500-foot long 12-thousand-ton carrier like the Marine Flasher, sailing the North Sea in late fall is sailing those waters at the wrong time of the year. Daytime temperatures average cold-and-worse and it is gloomy and foggy. There are about seven hours of daylight. If it’s not raining, it will start raining soon. Sometimes it is so foggy that ships have to slow down to less than 5 knots with horns blaring non-stop. Windy skies and strong swells make plowing through the cold water like trying to plow through month-old mashed potatoes.

   “I was on the boat for nine days and I was sick for nine days,” said Angele Jurgelaitis about her crossing from Hamburg, Germany, to Halifax, Nova Scotia, on the Marine Flasher, converted from a troop ship to hauling DP’s. Not only were big waves breaking over the sides of the ship, in the aftermath of the war, hundreds of thousands of tons of chemical weapons had been disposed of by being dumped in the North Sea.

   “The ocean didn’t leave a good impression on me. Whenever we threw up, we called it ‘Going to Riga.’” What they meant was that the water flows north, so when they threw up over the side, the vomit went north up the Baltic Sea past Poland and Lithuania to the mouth of the Daugava River, where Riga the capital of Latvia is.

   The Marine Flasher was built at the Kaiser Shipyard in Vancouver, Washington. She was launched for the United States Maritime Commission in May 1945. The ship sailed to San Francisco, Okinawa, Korea and returned to Seattle. The next year it sailed to New York City and from there to Bremen. For the next three years she ferried refugees from Europe to North America, by way of Canada and New York City, and then went back to Germany.

   Angele shoved off from the Old World for good on November 17, 1948. The next day ration scales for IRO refugees became uniform in the British, French, and American zones. It didn’t matter to her anymore. She ate better on the boat, no matter the seasickness, than she had in a long time.

   “There was a canteen on board, and we all got two dollars a day,” she said. “The food was very good. I didn’t think about IRO. We ate well.”

   There were widespread food shortages in Germany following the end of the war. The supply of food was impacted by the prolonged warfare, including the destruction of farmland, silos and barns, livestock, and machinery. Many Germans were forced to live on less than 1,500 calories a day. The average adult calorie intake in the United States at the time was more than 3,000 and in the overseas U.S. Army it was more than 4,000. 

   The civilian population suffered hard times during the severe winter of 1946, exacerbated by shortages of fuel for heating. Displaced persons got somewhat more generous rations, supplied by the Army, the UN, and relief agencies, but even they averaged less than 2,000 calories a day.

   There were 535 refugees bound for Canada on board the Marine Flasher. There were almost 3,000 more bound for the United States, men, women, children, and baby carriages. They steamed into Halifax the afternoon of November 26 and spent the night on the boat. It tied up at Pier 21. Angele hadn’t been able to get into the United States, but she had been able to get to the next best place, Canada.

   She wasn’t stuck behind the Iron Curtain, she wasn’t stuck in Nuremberg, and two days later she boarded a train for Montreal. It took all day and all night and part of the next day to get there, but she wasn’t stuck going nowhere.

   “It was almost 30 hours, but the train was comfortable, with beds,” she said. When they arrived, everybody designated as a nanny or a domestic was segregated. “Those who already had sponsors left. The rest of us, about a hundred of us, boarded busses and they took us to a camp.” They were housed two to a room and interviewed. “They wanted to know what we had been doing in Germany.” They had to fill out one triplicate form after another. 

   One of her roommates at the Army Hospital in Nuremberg had emigrated to Canada a few months earlier. She was working and living in London, Ontario. It is in southwestern Ontario, just north of Lake Erie. The city is a hub for education and healthcare. There are parks and greenways where it lays along the Thames River. It was a military center during the first and second wars, but the wars were finally over.

   “My roommate Ele wrote me that I should ask to go to London, or second best, Toronto,” Angele said. “I started thinking I would join her in London. When I filled out the forms that they gave me I wrote down where she was and that I wanted to go there.”

   Three days later she was presented with a Canadian visitor visa and found out where she was going. She knew she was on the list for the Lapalme family. She hoped she wasn’t going there. An official gave her their address in Sudbury, Ontario. They were Florence and J. A. Lapalme, a prominent family in the mining town. They were known as “’The Largest Family in Sudbury.’ Their children numbered fourteen, although Angele would only be responsible for five of them. Since she had worked in the Children’s Ward at the Army Hospital in Nuremberg, she was seen as the kind of nanny capable of caring for multiple boys and girls.

   “They were so young,” she said. “The youngest was 9 months and the oldest was only 7 years old.” Francois was the youngest, Aline the oldest, Gilles Muriel and Marcel in the middle.

   The domestic woman who cleaned and helped in the kitchen was Lucille Pharand. She worked in several big houses. Lucille was well known as a hard worker. She was built like a fireplug. In the spring of 1949, she and her husband Leo built a house in in the new town of Minnow Lake, three miles from Sudbury. The first few years there was no indoor water and there were no sewer lines to the house. Leo drove to the nearby lake every day with a neighbor, carrying a tub and pails, where they collected water for dishes, laundry, and bathing. They got their drinking water from a well a couple of houses away. In time they gave the Lapalme’s a run for their money, making a large family for themselves. They were known as ‘The Second Largest Family in Sudbury.’

   “I asked again to go to London , but again they said no,” Angele said. “They said nobody was going there.” She wasn’t sure if it was true or if they were just telling her that. In the end not a single refugee went to London or Toronto.

   She didn’t complain. There wasn’t anybody to explain and complain to, anyway, nobody who was going to change the destination that had been determined for her. If you were a European refugee, you were going somewhere where there was work. Men punched a clock mining ore, cutting down trees, and laying roads. Women knuckled down cleaning, cooking, and caring.

   Angele had struck up a friendship on the Marine Flasher with two other Lithuanian women, Inga and Laime, who were young like her. Laime in Lithuanian means happy. They had their hearts set on going to Alberta. They told her there were many rich men there. 

   When the train reached Sudbury, Angele and six other women, all Russians, and a man, another Russian, got off the train. Everybody else, including Inga and Laime, went on to Alberta and British Columbia. Angele was the only Lithuanian on the train platform, more than four thousand miles and several languages from her home.

   “There was no one to understand how unhappy I was,” she said.

   The end of World War Two saw the movement of people all over the world from one place to another. Between January 1946 and December 1953 over 750,000 refugees went to Canada. In June 1947 the federal government authorized the entry of 5,000 non-sponsored DP’s. Two years later the number rose to 45,000. Ottawa established five mobile immigration teams composed of security, medical, and labor officials. They were sent to Austria and Germany to select refugees deemed acceptable for emigration to Canada. 

   Displaced people from the Baltic countries were ranked high on the list. They had been in UN-run camps after their countries, Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania were caught in the middle of the Russian and German battle zones. Their small countries had become independent after World War One, then occupied by the Russians in 1940, then invaded by Germany in 1941, and in 1944 taken over again by the Russians. In the space of 25 years, they had gone from enslaved by tyrants to enslaved by tyrants

   “When we got off the train there were two men waiting for us,” Angele said. They helped the eight refugees sort themselves out and get to where they were going. One of them told her she was lucky to be going where she was going.

   The Lapalme’s introduced themselves and their children, arranged her living quarters, and quieted her fears about there being no other Lithuanians in Sudbury. They explained there were, and the next day Dr. Valaitis, a Lithuanian doctor and friend of the family, drove to the Laplame home and sat down with her, telling her there were many other Lithuanians in town.

   “Some of them have been here more than two years,” he said. “They make a good living working in the mines.” He gave her the names and phone numbers of several, told her about the Polish church they shared for services, and the local hall where they staged dances and folk performances.

   “The kids I had to care for were so small,” Angele said. She was just 20 years old. Just outside of two years later she gave birth to me, followed quickly by my brother and sister. By 1958 we were living in Cleveland, Ohio, starting from scratch again.

   “They spoke French among themselves and English to me.” She spoke to them more in gestures and pantomime than not. Angele spoke Lithuanian, German, some Russian, but less English. “When Vytas and I were together in Nuremberg he encouraged me to learn English, but I didn’t want to. Whenever I saw him coming with his grammar book I ran away.”

   Vytas Staskevicius was a young Lithuanian man from Siauliai she had left behind in Nuremberg, but who she was waiting for, waiting for him to come to Canada and join her. He had fled the Baltics in 1944, like her, and been displaced in Germany, like her, for more than four years.

   She started taking English classes in Sudbury right away. She wrote her man often, at night, pages and pages in cursive, in their native language. “The Lapalme’s have been good to me They are Catholics and go to church every day, seven days a week. They have a food warehouse, which is their business. We eat very well, so it’s not bad in that respect.”

   Florence was J. A. Laplame’s second wife. He placed ads in newspapers and hired her, a young out-of-town woman, to watch and care for his children after his first wife died. He had seven children, some of them teenagers, some not. It wasn’t long before one thing led to another and he proposed to her. He was nearly thirty years her elder, but she accepted, and over the next decade gave birth to seven children, bringing the family up to record-breaking speed in their part of the world.

   “Florence does the cooking,” Angele wrote. “She has a part-time woman named Lucille who helps with the cleaning and cooking, but Florence does the main cooking. There are usually eleven or twelve of us at the dinner table. She is in the basement every night doing laundry, too. I don’t clean or cook. My job is to watch the children.”

   Whenever Florence was ready to deliver another baby, since her husband had several business interests and was often out of town, Florence usually drove herself to St. Joseph’s Hospital. “If it was a close call, she called a taxi,” Angele said.

   Roger Lapalme, grown-up and the only one of the family who had gone farther than high school, sat next to Angele at the dinner table whenever he was at home. “Roger liked me.” He was barking up the wrong tree. He took her motor-boating on Lake Ramsey until the day he got too enthusiastic at the helm and she fell off the boat. She told him it was enough of that. “Roger was handsome and a lawyer, but I finally told him I already had a boyfriend,” Angele said. 

   One of the LaPalme girls had suffered a nervous breakdown. When her boyfriend, who she expected to marry, killed someone in a car crash, she broke down. She told her father her life was over and went to work in the nickel mines. She was rarely at the house. When she was she slept all day.

   Vytas had a sponsor, an uncle who lived in Boston, but delayed sailing to the United States. He procrastinated about going to Australia with a friend of his who thought they could make passage there. He was determined to go to Canada. J. A Lapalme promised Angele he would give him a helping hand.

   “The year is ending soon,” she wrote her Baltic boyfriend biding his time in Germany. “I have been here more than three weeks. When can you come?” She knew the sailing season wasn’t going to be for several more months. Her man had to break the waves. She knew it wasn’t going to be soon enough. “Be a good boy and write me often,” she wrote him at the start of the new year.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Atlantic Canada http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. 

A New Thriller by Ed Staskus

“Cross Walk“

“A once upon a crime whodunit.” Barron Cannon, Adventure Books

“Captures the vibe of mid-century NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP

Late summer and early autumn. New York City. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye. The 1956 World Series. President Eisenhower at the opening game. A killer in the dugout.

Baltic Place

Farmer in the Dell

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By Ed Staskus

   “I started to help in the sugar beet fields when I was nine years old,” Angele Jurgelaitis said. “My sister Irena started helping me two years later when she turned nine.” The year was 1937 when the sisters worked together for the first time. Seven years later Angele was in a refugee camp outside of Nuremberg and Irena was on her way to a slave labor camp in Siberia. Angele was lucky Americans ran the camp she ended up in. Irena was unlucky Russians ran the camp she ended up in.

   “We worked with our father, who had a one-row horse-drawn puller.” Her father Jonas followed on foot behind the puller, picked up the beets, scalping the tops with a small machete, and dropped them behind him as he went. He recycled the heads for animal feed. His daughters brought up the rear, shaking dirt off the beets, and loading them into a side slat cart. When it was full Jonas hitched up and made his way to Mariampole, the nearest market town, where there was a storehouse and a train station to later take the root vegetables to a sugar beet factory. 

   Their other major crop was cabbage. They could harvest upwards of ten thousand heads an acre. When they cut the cabbage heads off they left the outer leaves and root in the ground. That way they got two crops. Jonas took most of his cabbages to Mariampole, too. The rest went into hanging baskets waiting to be made into soup.

   “My older brothers Bronius and Justinas helped handle the livestock. They did field work and repairs. Something always needed to be fixed. My younger brothers were still growing up. They couldn’t do much. My father did everything outside the house and my mother Julija did everything inside the house. We worked around the clock at harvest time.” Most of the food and drink the family of eight ate and drank came from their own fields and pastures, although most of their sugar beets were grown on land they rented from a neighboring childless widow.

   The farm was along the flatlands of the Naujeji Gizai region hallway between Lake Paezeriu and Mariampole, although it was far closer in spirit to the lake than it was to the city. The land bordered East Prussia and Poland. Some farmers had tractors. Most farmers had draft horses. They preferred tractors, but the Great Depression had put a dent into what they preferred. Some big land owners had cars. Everybody else had a horse and buggy to get the family to church on time on Sundays.

   Jonas kept cows, pigs, and chickens. “We made our own bread and butter, made cheese, gathered eggs, and collected berries.” There were patches of wild blueberries at the edge of their fields. Although they didn’t have a cellar, Julija still canned pickles and beets and stored them in the well. “We raised our own pigs and my father killed them.” When the time came, Jonas selected a pig for slaughter, walked it to a clearing beside the barn, hit the animal between the eyes with a club hammer, and cut its throat. With the help of his two eldest sons he cleaned and skinned the pig with a knife, keeping a knife sharpener at hand.

   Once the skin was separated from the muscle and fat he cleaned out the guts and sawed the pig’s head off. After quartering the animal, Jonas found the hip joints and slid his knife into them, cutting off the two hams. He did the same thing when cutting off the shoulders of the pig. At the center, where the ribs are, he took whatever meat he could find. Julija made sausages, bacon, and cured slabs of pork with salt and pepper. Jonas had built a closet around the chimney in the attic of the house, which could be gotten to by ladder. There were no stairs. He smoked the pork in the closet, laying the meat on grates, opening a damper to vent smoke into the closet. “I was scared to death of the upstairs, of the fire up there, although the pig meat was delicious,” Angele said. “When we ran out of food, my father killed another animal.”

   The kitchen was big enough for all of them to eat together. There were two long benches. There were no chairs. Angele always sat cross-legged when eating. “I was scared that a Jew would sneak under the table.” She was afraid he would bite her legs and suck her blood. “Everybody said the Jews had killed God and they drank the blood of Christians.” Fear and loathing of Jews was endemic in Lithuania.

   One of Angele’s chores was killing chickens for dinner. She didn’t like chopping their heads off, so she grabbed them by the neck instead and swung them in a circle around her until their necks snapped. There were barn cats and a watchdog. They chained the dog up at night. There were potatoes and fruit trees. They grew barley and summer wheat, putting in a barnful of hay every autumn. Sugar beets were Jonas’s number one cash crop, followed by cabbage. He grew some marijuana and tobacco behind the barn. He didn’t smoke marijuana himself. He smoked his homegrown tobacco instead, packed in a pipe, taking a break at the end of a long day. 

   “I let the young men smoke their kanape and get silly,” he said. Jonas got silly in a different way. He brewed his own beer and krupnickas. Julija didn’t smoke or drink. She kept a close eye on her husband. He kept a close eye on her, never smoking his pipe in the house. She suffered from tuberculosis, coughing and running a fever, and wasn’t long for this world.

   Making home brew is the simplest thing in the world. Sumerian farmers brewed beer from barley more than 5,000 years ago. The Codes of Hammurabi, which were the laws during the Babylonian Empire, decreed a daily beer ration to everybody from laborers to priests. Laborers got two liters a day. Priests got five liters a day. In the Middle Ages Christian monks were the artisanal beer makers of the time. Since Jonas had water, malt, hops, and yeast within easy reach, he had beer within easy reach year-round.

   Krupnikas is a spiced honey liqueur. The Order of Saint Benedict whipped it up for the first time in the 16th century. It can be spiced with just about anything, including cardamon, cinnamon, and ginger. If they had them, farmers added lemons, oranges, and berries. Honey was essential, although not as essential as a gallon or two of grain alcohol. There was grain as far as the eye could see, and there was a Copperhead Road around every bend, so making krupnikas full-bodied was never a problem. Lithuanians still pour it down on holidays and weddings. Everybody likes a warm snort of it in the dead of winter, whether they have a cold or not.

   Next to the lowlands of central Lithuania, the carbonate soils of the west are the best. That is where Jonas was. More than half of the country’s land area was farmland. Most of the rest of it was meadow and forest. What was left was where villages, towns, and cities were. The agrarian reform of 1922 promoted farmsteads. Landless peasants got some acres of land, if not a mule. Most holdings, except those Polonized, were between five and forty acres. The Poles were Lithuania’s rural aristocracy. Jonas had been a landless peasant before the land reform. He got twenty-some acres of his own and rented more of it. 

   During the interwar years more than 70% of the population depended on agriculture for its livelihood. In the 1930s Lithuanians fed themselves and were the source of 80% of the country’s export income. Lithuania is roughly two-thirds the size of the state of Maine. The small country was the sixth-largest butter exporter in the world at the time.

   Jonas didn’t know anything about the legality of the marijuana he grew. He didn’t know it was called “Sacred Grass” three thousand years ago in India. He didn’t know Queen Elizabeth in 1563 ordered all English land owners with sixty or more acres to grow it or face a five pound fine. One year later King Philip of Spain ordered it be grown throughout his empire from Spain to Argentina. George Washington cultivated it at Mount Vernon and smoked it when his teeth hurt too much to bear.

   Biology doesn’t care if it’s sugar beets or marijuana. Biology doesn’t judge anything to be good or bad. The only thing that matters to biology is survival and reproduction. It is our own constructed reality that does the judging. After World War One some nations began to outlaw marijuana. It became seriously illegal in the 1930s. The United States led the way. Harry Anslinger, head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, turned the nativist as well as racist battle against marijuana into a war. “Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men,” he said. He believed it had a bad effect on the weak-minded “degenerate races.” He was especially worried that white women might smoke it at parties and consort with the wrong kind of man.

   “Most marijuana smokers are Negroes, Hispanics, and Filipinos,” he said. “Their satanic music, jazz and swing, result from its usage. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, and entertainers, and many others. I consider it the worst of all narcotics, far worse than the use of morphine or cocaine.” Coca-Cola’s secret formula contained cocaine from 1894 until 1929. It was the reason children could walk five miles to school, uphill in knee-deep snow, jumping barbed wire fences along the way.

   The town of Gizai sits at a crossroad. There was a small school, church, police station, hardware store, and a coffee shop in the 1930s. “We went to church every Sunday and my father went to the store whenever he needed a tool or something he couldn’t make himself, When he took us along he treated us to candy at the coffee shop while he drank coffee and had a slice of lazy cake, talking with his friends.”  

   On the farm everybody slept on the ground floor of the house. The bedrooms were three side rooms. One was for Jonas and Julija. One was for Angele and Irena. The third room was for the four boys. There was no electricity. The house was lit by kerosene lamps. The kitchen was the biggest room. It was lit by a bulbous kerosene lamp that was raised and lowered from the ceiling by a pulley attached to a counterweight. Everybody washed their meals down with tea. Jonas bought tea from a German smuggler to avoid paying  the taxes levied on it. In the winter the fireplace was stuffed with wood and turf. The elder boys had the responsibility of making sure it never died out November through March.  Once a year a chimney sweep came with ladders, brooms, and brushes. The sweep used a lead ball at the end of a long rope for pushing out the soot.  

   Jonas was in thrall to his pens and fields. It was all he knew.  He never took a day off. It would only have meant more work the next day. “I knew growing up I never wanted to be a farmer when I grew up,” Angele said. “Working the earth wasn’t for me.”

   In Washington, D. C. Harry Anslinger could blow smoke with the best of them. “Under the influence of marijuana men become beasts. It destroys life itself,” he declared. Just in case anybody had missed the point, he added, “Smoking it leads to pacifism and communist brainwashing.” He got the Marijuana Tax Act passed in 1937. The Nixon administration dreamed up the War on Drugs. The next president brought out the big guns. “I now have absolute proof that smoking even one marijuana cigarette is equal in brain damage to being on Bikini Island during an H-bomb blast,” President Ronald Reagan said.

  Jonas couldn’t afford a washerwoman, so Julija did all the laundry. She put a tripod inside the fireplace and heated water in a copper kettle. After the clothes were washed she rinsed them in another kettle. She used a mangler to get the wrinkles out. It was a wooden box with rollers like a wringer that squeezed and smoothed water-soaked clothes. She hung clothes on a line to dry. In the winter she hung them in the attic. When she was done she didn’t need home brew or marijuana to help her relax. She took a nap the minute she was done.

   Julija passed away in 1941. She had been in and out of a tuberculosis sanatorium in Kaunas. The disease was the leading cause of death in the country. When she decided to go home for the last time it was to die. Jonas built an addition for her, which was a small bedroom with a window. He knocked together a new bed and stuffed a new mattress with clean straw. He moved their wedding cask to a back corner. He fabricated a coffin when the end was near and stood it up outside the bedroom door. Julija was buried in the local cemetery two months before the German war machine invaded.

   The Russians took the country over in 1944 and collectivized everybody’s farms in 1947. The new authorities told Jonas he could keep one cow and one pig for himself. They didn’t care about his chickens. They told him to stop growing marijuana and tobacco. All his crops had to be delivered to the state and the state would pay him whatever they thought was appropriate. He had differences with them about it, but what’s a simple man to do? What he did was sicken and die of a brain disease. Who wants to be a half-witted slave of the state? His farm disappeared down the Soviet Union sinkhole.

   Lithuania criminalized marijuana in 2017, many years behind the times. The country was going against the grain. Almost everybody else in the world outside of China and Russia was decriminalizing it as fast as they could. They were sick of the drug gangs and lost tax revenue and prisons bulging with one-time losers. By then almost everybody knew marijuana didn’t make anybody sex-crazy or lust after blood.

   Jonas was a good old boy with only a handful of overriding concerns, doing what had to be done, leaving the rest to take care of itself. His concerns were biological, not cultural. He didn’t care about the wider world. He cared about his family and their twenty acres. He cared about some of his neighbors. He might have mulled social and political matters over on his front porch, drawing on his pipe to get it going, but probably would not have paid too much attention to whatever narratives the state constructed about his way of life. He believed heart and soul in his liberty. He left this world before it all went wrong for him. In the event, he wouldn’t have been able to endure many of the next forty five years of the post-war Baltic world unless he had been willing to load his pipe with marijuana and smoke himself silly.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Atlantic Canada http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. 

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

Late summer, New York City, 1956. Big city streets full of menace. A high profile contract killing in the works. A private eye working out of Hell’s Kitchen scares up the shadows.

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Baltic Place

Spoiling for a Fight

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By Ed Staskus

   Even though Ukraine wasn’t Ukraine in the 14th century lots of folks called it that so that is what it was. The word itself means borderland. The Lithuanians visited every summer. They did it for their health, if not for the health of the natives. When they did they had good times marauding and looting and drinking too much whenever the devil got the better of them. They didn’t control the land so much as take advantage of it. The less governance the better is the way they saw it. “We do not change old traditions and do not introduce new ones,” they said.

   They were freebooters who became empire builders. The boyars rode fast horses, big and fit, were outfitted in chain mail, wore conical metal helmets, were armed with lances, swords, and knives, and carried a black shield emblazoned with the red emblem of the Columns of Gediminas. They weren’t draftees or recruits. Those who were, walked and died where they stood. The boyars were tough men who could be dangerous in the blink of an eye. The Golden Horde warned would-be enemies of them, “Beware the Lithuanians.” That was all they ever said.

   They had to be rough and tough. When they went to war they didn’t launch cruise missiles and kill their enemies at great distance, checking the body count with drones. They hacked their enemies to pieces with long swords face to face and watched them bleed to death in the mud at their feet.

   By the end of the 14th century the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was the biggest country in Europe. Today it is one of the smallest countries in Europe. When they were growing fast and furious they didn’t do it by being soul brothers or good trading partners. They did it by getting on their horses and taking what they wanted. They didn’t bother explaining.

   The Grand Duchy got started in the early 13th century when Prince Mindaugas united his Baltic forest clans, swamp tribes, and fiefdoms into a feudal state. They were desperate times. The Teutonic Knights were on a rampage. They wanted to incorporate all of Lithuania into the Teutonic Order. They never stopped trying. Between 1305 and 1409 they launched 300-some military campaigns. They slaughtered more peasants than anything else. The Lithuanians beat them back time and again. Finally, in 1410, at the Battle of Grunwald the Lithuanians and Poles destroyed the Teutonic Knights. Most of the order’s leadership was killed or taken prisoner. The Grand Master ran away. They never recovered their former power. When the carnage was over, the Lithuanian-Polish alliance became the dominant political and military force in the region.

   When I was a kid almost everybody called the Ukrainians Russians. We didn’t call them that because we knew what was up with the Reds. They had done the same thing to Lithuania, enslaving the country, and reaping something anything everything for nothing. Both of my parents came from there after WW2, so we knew what was up. We didn’t have to read between the lines of whatever Washington and Moscow were forever saying.

   Even though Ukraine didn’t become a nation-state until 1991, after getting their feet wet for a few years after WW1, it was extant in the 14th century, and well before that. We all knew about the Ukrainians when I was growing up, The first Ukes came to Cleveland, Ohio in the 1880s. They settled in the Tremont neighborhood. Their idea was work hard in the factories of the industrial valley, get rich, go back home, buy some land, and live happily ever after. Between the world wars lots of former freedom fighters came. They were goners if they had stayed. Stalin was itching to get his hands on them. Most of them settled in Parma, a southwest suburb, where they built churches, schools, and started their own aid associations and credit unions.

   We didn’t live in Parma, but on the east side along the lake. Nevertheless, among the Poles, Hungarians, Croatians and Slovenians, and anybody else who could sneak into the country when the Statue of Liberty wasn’t looking, there were some Ukrainian families in our neck of the woods. One of them operated a gas station on St. Clair Ave. not far from where we lived. One of their handful of sons who was our age messed around with us summers, when we had three no-school months to mess around in. His name was Lyaksandra. It sounded like a girl’s name, so we called him Alex.

   We played pick-up baseball at Gordon Park, from where we could see Lake Erie. We once asked him, taking a break in the action, what he thought about the Russians. He growled, made an obscene gesture, spit sideways, and said, “There are lots of Russki’s in Ukraine. They are liars about everything. They aren’t all bad, but they all hate themselves. We hate them, too.”

   Ukraine is the second-largest country in Europe. It is bordered by Russia and Belarus, as well as Poland, Hungary, and Romania, among others. It has coastlines along the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. It has its own language. Most people speak Russian, as well. The Muscovites are always trying to convince them to drop the Uke talk and speak only Russian.

   “We don’t talk that Russki talk anymore,” Alex said. “Not here, no way.”

   In the Middle Ages Ukraine, which is about the size of Texas, was the epicenter of East Slavic culture. It was, at least, until the Kievan Rus was destroyed by Mongol invasions in the 13th century. Somebody is always trying to beat up on Ukraine. From then to the 20th century Ukraine was variously ruled by the Lithuanian-Polish Commonwealth, the Ottoman Empire, the Austrian Empire, and the Tsars of Russia. Everybody wanted to be the boss of the Ukes. It’s a miracle they have prevailed and are still prevailing, facing the long odds of going against the vaunted Red Army.

   The Russians are finding out what it is like to go toe to toe with somebody who is not afraid of them and has the up-to-date American rockets and artillery to back up their bravado. The Ukrainians are fighting an existential battle. Their backs are against the wall. They have nowhere to fall. The Red Army is fighting to save its skin and make it home alive for Defenders of the Fatherland Day. The soldiers throw their uniforms into the nearest sewer when they desert.

   When I was a boy I played with toy soldiers. There wasn’t any such thing as a Lithuanian mounted  boyar toy soldier, so I pretended that anybody on a horse was a Lithuanian knight. They were always the good guys. They won every fight battle and war. They were my heroes. I didn’t know what sons of bitches they must have been. They weren’t any different than anybody else in power back then. They were all sons of bitches, including the Holy Roman Church, whose popes ruled by the sword whenever the pen wasn’t convincing enough. 

   In the early 16th century Pope Julius I, the Fearsome Pope, imported Swiss Guards to be his personal bodyguards. He strapped on armor and led the Papal State armies against the Venetians, the French, and the Spanish. His armor plating covered every inch of him just in case the grace of God didn’t get it done, including a helmet made to look like a miter. Everybody on his side was allowed to join the Holy League. Everybody else was badmouthed and excommunicated.

  After Pope Julius died a rumor had it that if he was denied entrance at the Pearly Gates, there would be hell to pay. He would storm them, St. Peter or no St. Peter, and never mind his set of silver and gold keys. It was every man for himself and God against all.

   Until the end of the 14th century Lithuanians didn’t give a damn what the Vatican did. They were pagans. They were the last pagans in Europe. The word “Lithuania” is first mentioned in 1009, in an account of the murder of Saint Bruno by “pagans on the border of Lithuania and Rus.” He was trying to convert them. That was a mistake. Their headman, whose name was Dievas, ruled the universe from his kingdom in the sky. He didn’t like anybody popping up with new ideas about Heaven and Hell. Perkunas, the god of thunder and lightning, was his right-hand man and enforcer. The holy fires were guarded by Vaidilutès, the Lithuanian equivalent of Vestal Virgins. They buried their dead with food and household goods. The last pagan grand duke was buried with his hounds, horses, and falcons.

   When they finally joined the God-fearing club it was a political move. They were doing a dynastic union with Poland, and one of the conditions the Poles laid down was that the Lithuanians had to convert to church-going and dump their veneration of the forces of nature. It didn’t change their business plan in Ukraine, other than to make them more organized. They transitioned from frat parties to fancy dress balls.

   The Grand Duchy of Lithuania had controlled Belarus for some time and when they went after Ukraine they got it, extending their control to the open steppe and eventually to the Black Sea. The Ukes learned to “Beware the Lithuanians.” When they started to get what they wanted they left their freebooting days behind and started building castles to keep their loot secure. It was  a ten-day ride from Vilnius to Kiev. Why not ditch the seasonal exploitation and make the most of the four seasons?

   It wasn’t their land, but it is finders keepers. They meant to keep what they had subjugated. The Ukrainians didn’t have a say in the matter. They told the Ukes, “We may not be perfect but we’re Lithuanians so it’s almost the same.” The Ukes said, “We promise not to laugh when your oven is on fire.” The Lithuanians weren’t offended. They just said, “Show us the goats.”

   They built the Lutsk Castle, which later became a museum. They built the Olyka Palace, which later became an insane asylum. They built the Kremenets Castle, which later fell into ruins after the Cossacks sacked the city at the bottom of the hill. In the meantime, the boyars lived the high life. They started with red borscht, green borscht, and cold borscht. They feasted on holubtsi, cabbage leaves stuffed with minced meat, rice, and stewed in tomato sauce. They ate slabs of kholodets, a cold jellied meat broth. They drank vodka between courses. Ukrainians to this day drink more vodka than beer. When they were done with dinner they went to bed, snoring and cabbage farting in their sleep.

   Even though the Lithuanians always said the Ukrainians welcomed them with open arms, they built their castle-fortresses on high hills with steep inclines, the rockier the better, fitted with one main gate and plenty of towers, arrow slits, battlements, and dungeons. They kept big rocks and hot oil handy to toss down on door-to-door salesmen. If you ended up in the dungeon you found out soon enough they weren’t playing Dungeons and Dragons.

   Imperialism is never cozy and consensual. It’s more like assault and battery. The movers and shakers of power politics don’t get thrown in jail until long after they are dead. My friend Alex had never heard of Lithuanians living it up in Ukraine. He was surprised to hear they had once been a super power. He was chagrined to find out there were more invaders of his homeland than he had realized.

   “How come the Lithuanians push us around back then?” he asked. Most of us playing ball at Gordon Park were second generation Lithuanian Americans. We weren’t even teenagers, yet. None of us had a good answer, much less a sensible answer of any kind.

   “Somebody always wants to be the top dog,” Kesty said.

   “No, that wasn’t it,” Arunas said. “They just wanted to have somebody else do all the work, like make dinner and clean the toilets.”

   “It was the Ukrainian girls,” Romas said. “Ukrainian girls are hot.”

   Romas was over-sexed, and everybody knew it. Nobody had any other ideas. We went back to playing ball in the summer sun. When we got overheated we walked to the shore and sat on the edge of a cliff in the breeze. Lake Erie was in front of us, the water rippling, the tips of the waves white.

   “Can we see Ukraine from here?” Alex asked.

   “No, it’s that way,” Arunas said pointing over his right shoulder. When we looked all we could see was Bratenahl, where rich people lived in mansions. They made the rules, for what they were worth. Our grade school class practiced duck and cover once a month, just in case the Russki’s dropped an atomic bomb on Cleveland. We brought our own lunches every day but wondered where our next lunch was going to come from if all the food stores got blown up. Many of the Bratenahl bluebloods had their own fallout shelters. They didn’t worry overmuch about starving.

   All good things must come to an end. The Lithuanians were strong in Ukraine for several centuries, but the deal they made with Poland reaped a better harvest for their next-door neighbors than my ancestors. The Poles say, “A good appetite needs no sauce.” By the mid-16th century Lithuanians were sauce. Their goose was cooked. The dynastic link was changed to a constitutional one by the Union of Lublin in 1569. Ukraine was set free of the Lithuanians but was annexed by Poland the next day.

   The more things change the more they stay the same, until they don’t. The new would-be colonialists calling the shots in the Kremlin are finding that out, to their discomfiture. They make a wasteland and call it New Russia. They have been looking grim lately. The once-mighty boyars are rolling over in their graves, their visions of conquest and glory gone sour, their iron fists gone rusty. Lithuania has gone egalitarian, joined NATO, and gotten out of the plunder and pillage business. 

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Atlantic Canada http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. 

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

“Captures the vibe of mid-century NYC, from stickball in the streets to the Mob on the make.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP

Late summer and early autumn. New York City, 1956. Jackson Pollack opens a can of worms. President Eisenhower on his way to the opening game of the World Series where a hit man waits in the wings. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye scares up the shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Baltic Place

Crossroad at Nuremberg

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By Ed Staskus

   “The holy bishop from Kaunas fixed it up for us,” Angele Jurgelaitis said when she got to Berlin in the middle of the night. There was nothing holy about the last days of World War Two. It was a godless maelstrom. It helped to have a man of the cloth on your side when the devil was doing his best on the other side. There was more than enough hellfire on earth that winter.

   When Angele, sixteen years old, Ona Kreivenas, who was her aunt, and Ona’s four children got off one of the last trains that the Eastern Railway ran from East Prussia to Germany they were met at the station by Bishop Vincentas Brizgys. The clergyman was Ona’s husband’s cousin. Her husband, a Chief of Police, had been arrested by the Russians in 1941 and deported to Siberia, where he was stuck in a slave labor camp. By the early fall of 1944 Bishop Brizgys and more than two hundred other priests had already fled the Baltics on the heels of retreating German forces.

   Many Lithuanians barreled out of the Baltics in the fall and winter of 1944 as the Red Army overwhelmed the Wehrmacht and overran the land. The fighting was tenacious and terrible. Wartime losses of Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians were among the highest in Europe. They didn’t go down without protest. They were out-gunned, though.

   Ona had somehow located the bishop by telephone from East Prussia and he arranged to meet them at the train station. He was wearing a dark suit and a homburg. He was carrying a basket of hot buns. He looked like the churchman he was. Berlin didn’t look like the city it had once been. It looked like a wasteland.

   “He gave one of the buns to each one of us. I was so happy.”

   What the churchman fixed up for them was passage to Bavaria. They ended up in the north of the southeastern state. Bavaria shares borders with Austria, Switzerland, and the Czech territories. The Danube and Main rivers flow through it, the Bavarian Alps border Austria, and the highest peak in Germany is there. The Bohemian forests are nearby. The major cities of the region are Munich and Nuremberg. 

   “The bishop found a pig farm for us, people he knew,” Angele said. “We lived in a two-room apartment above the slaughterhouse. There was another Lithuanian with us, a woman in her 20s. She was a fancy woman.” One of the two rooms was a kitchen. They lived and slept in the larger room, two adults, a teenager, and four children. The fancy woman kept to herself. 

   There were three cots. “We took turns sleeping on them. We worked for our keep, helping with the cows, and cutting clover. There was no town, just country everywhere. The German family we stayed with fed us. They were good people.” There was no combat in their corner of the world. “We didn’t see any fighting all winter long. The war ended when the Americans came. They wore nice uniforms, not like the Russians, who were filthy and stank. They were friendly, completely different. They threw candy to us as they went past.”

   Bavaria was one of Adolf Hitler’s favorite places during the twelve years of his planned one thousand year Third Reich. He had a lavish residence at the Obersalzberg. Bavaria had been the scene of protests against Nazi rule in the late 1930s, but it didn’t matter to the Fuhrer. He had his own ask no questions security men. Their orders were to shoot first. After the war Nuremberg was chosen for the military tribunals trying Nazi war criminals because it had been the ceremonial birthplace of the party. It was where their annual propaganda rallies were held.

   Allied air forces bombed the hell out of the city in 1944 and 1945. One night in January 1945 more than five hundred British bombers dropped six thousand high-explosive bombs and more than a million incendiary devices. The historic old town was destroyed. Half of the rest of the city was destroyed. What wasn’t blown to bits or burnt down was damaged. Surviving the bombing meant you had to then survive the aftermath. The city was left with practically no heat, no electricity, and  no water supply in the middle of winter. The Palace of Justice and the prison that was part of the sprawling complex were spared. It was a sign of what was in store. It was spared because justice and revenge were in store.

   “In the fall after the war ended, we had to leave the pig farm and went to an American refugee camp near Regensburg. We had two rooms, but there was a Lithuanian man in the other room, so we had one room. We lived there and didn’t do anything. We waited and waited.”

   Before the Russians closed the borders, padlocking the Baltics behind the Iron Curtain, about seventy thousand Lithuanians were able to escape the country, almost all of them ending up in Germany. By the time the war ended nearly eleven million refugees had flooded the country, more than the total population of Austria. Many of them ended up in Displaced Persons camps in Bad Worishofen, Nordlingen, and Regensberg.

   In the spring of 1946, Angele, Ona, and the children moved to a new camp. “It was a castle that you got to down a long road through a forest in front of a lake. There was a big chapel and two big barracks. There were no owners anymore, and no workers, nobody. There were only the Americans and refugees. There were many of us, all of us homeless. We were almost all Lithuanians.”

   The Schwarzenberg castle on the outskirts of Scheinfeld in Bavaria is northwest of Nuremberg. From 1946 until 1949 thousands of Lithuanians were housed at the DP camp there while they waited for their chance to get to Australia, Canada, the United States, or anywhere else. “There was no future for us in Germany,” Angele said. There was flat out no going back. The system of revolving displacement the Russians proposed would have meant the end for many of them and suspicion and persecution for the rest of them. The Russians had no plans of letting repatriated Lithuanians off easy. They had no plans of letting any Lithuanians of any kind, unless they had converted to Communism, off easy. Even then it was dicey. If they wanted you to live and die in Siberia, and got their hands on you, the far east is where you went.

   The camp outside Nuremberg was administered by an American Army officer of Lithuanian descent. The military’s concern was providing shelter, nutrition, and basic health care. Although the Americans looked after vital supplies, everybody in the camp had to lend a hand. The refugees prepared their own food. They sewed new clothes from old cloth. They printed their own daily newspaper. They printed their own money, too. The currency could be earned by working around the camp and spent at the canteen, where you could buy shaving cream, combs, and cigarettes.

   “We had our own doctors, our own church, and even a school. My best friend was Maryte. Her parents were teachers. They taught the high school classes in the camp. Her mother knew how to sew.. She would take hand-me-downs that had been donated to us by the Red Cross, take them apart, and make new dresses. Whenever she made a dress for Maryte she made one for me, too.”

   Angeles’s aunt talked to her about becoming a seamstress. “She wanted me to learn how to sew, like my older brother Justinas, so I would have some way to make a living, but I said no.” She had already turned down her aunt’s advice about becoming a farmer’s wife. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do, but she knew for sure what she didn’t want to do, which was no sewing and no farming.

   After her friend Maryte moved to Nuremberg, taking classes in x-ray technology, and was on the way to becoming a nurse assistant at the Army Hospital there, she wrote Angele. “She told me about it, told me it was a ten month course, and told me to come join her.” Angele packed a satchel with her clothes and slipped away as the weather warmed up in 1947. She waved goodbye to Ona and her four children. “By then my aunt was teaching kindergarten at the camp and she had her kids around her.” The boy Mindaugas had grown a few years older, was now a  teenager, and could take care of his three sisters.

   She hitchhiked the forty miles to Nuremberg. Even though there were travel restrictions, a German government barely existed to enforce its own laws, and the only thing she had to worry about was an over-zealous American officer in a Jeep who might take her back to where she came from. When she got to Nuremberg she asked where the hospital was and found her way there. It had been rebuilt after the bombings two years earlier. She was assigned a bed in a small room, which was twelve feet by twelve feet. She shared it with three other women.

   “There was Ele, who was twenty four and tall, Koste, who was twenty eight and stocky, Monica, who was the oldest and had been a nurse in Kaunas, and me. One of our teachers was Lithuanian and she helped me. We lived in the barracks. I worked in the hospital, cleaned, changed beds, and did whatever they told me to do. I studied whenever I could. There wasn’t time to do much else.”

   They had to do something, though. Most of them were young and raring to go. They staged dances at the hospital. “Somebody would play the accordion and we would all dance. There were never enough men to go around, so many had died.” Whenever they could they went to town on Saturdays. “We took a train, went to the movies, and the music shows. We loved it. Everything was so clean. It was all smashed during the war but two years later you wouldn’t have believed there had ever been a war.”

   There had not only been repeated bombing and shelling of the city, especially the medieval part of it, there had been street-by-street, house-to-house, and room-by-room fighting in April 1945. The city was rebuilt after the war and was partly restored to its pre-war aspect. “The Americans did it,” said Angele. “You could see them doing it every day.”

   The German government was being resurrected, as well, and order was the order of the day. “One day we were waiting in line for the movies, eating grapes, and spitting the seeds on the sidewalk. When a policeman saw us, he came over, and told us it was our responsibility to keep the city clean. He made us pick up all the seeds.”

   The circus was even better than movies or musical theater. It is in the movies and on stage that people fall in love and there is always a happy ending. The boy and girl kiss in a glowing haze. It is the circus, however, that is a live action fantasy. “Whenever it came to town, none of us could sleep,” Angele said.

   The Nazi era was good for circuses since they were not considered subversive. They were left alone by the tyrants. Between the two wars, through the 1930s, Germany was the epicenter of  European circus companies. There were more than forty of them on the road with clowns, acrobats, and animals. They were mostly family-run enterprises with large tents. The last year of World War Two, however, was bad for business. Many circuses lost all their equipment and animals. The postwar roadshows boomed after 1946. Circus Europa toured Germany in 1947. 

   “I loved the circus. I would have gone alone if I had to.”

   In mid-summer 1948 she got a week’s vacation from the Army Hospital. She and her friend Benas, his best friend Porcupine, and two of the Porcupine’s friends took a train the one hundred and seventy miles to Zugspitze on the border of Germany and Austria. On two sides of the Zugspitze are glaciers, the largest in Germany. Mountain guides lead climbers up three different routes to the summit at nearly ten thousand feet.

   “Benas was handsome with dark hair and his father was a minister back home. He was a good friend to me. Everybody called his friend Porcupine because my roommate Koste called him that. Nobody knew why. He thought he was Koste’s boyfriend, although that’s not what she thought.”

   They got to the mountains at night and stayed in a small hotel. “There were two rooms at the end of the corridor. We three girls went into one of them. There were two beds, so we pushed them together and slept together. The boys took the other room. In the morning I went to the window and threw open the heavy drapes. I had to take a step back. The mountain was right there. I was astonished and frightened. For a second I thought it was going to fall in on us.”

   They rode a rack railway up the northern flank of the mountain. “It went around and around.” At a landing they sunned themselves. “Even though there was snow everywhere, and people were skiing, looking like ants below us, we lay in the sun before going farther up.” They took the Eibsee cable car to an observation deck. “The gondola was all glass. You could see the whole world.” From the top a path led to the Cross of God.

   A fourteen-foot gilded iron cross had been lifted to the peak of the Zugspitze in 1851 by twenty-eight bearers under the direction of Karl Kiendl, a forester, and Christoph Ott, a priest. Father Ott was the brainstorm behind the cross, motivated by a vision of the mountain, “the greatest prince raising its head into the blue air towards heaven, bare and unadorned, waiting for the moment when patriotic fervor and courageous determination would see that his head too was crowned with dignity.”

   The Porcupine and his two companions wouldn’t go to where the cross was. They said the path was too icy and narrow. “Only Benas and I went. There was a ladder attached to a rock face you had to climb to get to where the cross stood on a flat space.” In 1888 the cross had been taken down and repaired after being struck by lightning. It had holes gouged out by the lightning bolts. A year later it was taken back to the top, onto the East Summit, where it had stayed ever since.

   The side rails of the metal ladder going up were secured by bolts to the rock. “I was near the top when a bolt came loose and the ladder jerked free,” Angele said. “I stopped and couldn’t go up or down. I stayed as still as I could. I was scared to death.”

   She had survived a Russian invasion, her mother’s untimely death, a subsequent German invasion, followed by another Russian invasion, making tracks out of Lithuania, the invasion of the Reich, the collapse of the German government, landing in DP camps in Bavaria, and finding her way to work at the Army Hospital in Nuremberg, all in the past eight years, all by the time she was nineteen years old. A broken ladder was not going to be the end of her. Benas helped her get down, extending his belt from the top, and another pilgrim helped her from below, coming partway up and carefully easing her down. Benas slid down the side rails without incident.

   Faith can be church-going or it can be personal. Life and death at ten thousand feet is personal, Cross of God or no Cross of God. Who thinks about God when they are about to meet their maker? They took their time on the icy path back to the observation deck. The rest of the week they hiked, took local trains to nearby alpine towns, ate, drank, smoked, talked, and had fun while it lasted.

   At the end of their vacation they went back to Nuremberg. In her room, Angele thought about the men in her life. There were two of them. One of them was Vladas, who was a Baltic soldier. The other one was Vytas, a Baltic civilian, who worked part-time for the Red Cross and part-time in the black market. They were both refugees from Lithuania, like her. Vladas brought her food and Vytas played cards with her. Vladas watched while she made dinner for him while Vytas let her win at the card table.

   Getting married might not be a matter of life and death, except when it is. She thought she was probably going to marry one of them, and thought she knew which one it would be, but knew for sure she wasn’t going to be staying in Europe. She was going to break free of nowhere. Making her way some place where there was a future was the most important thing on her mind. She wanted a bright future, not a dark past. The only way was up the ladder. 

   No matter what, she was going to have to make what lay ahead worth its while. Nobody else was going to do it for her. When she got a visa to go to Canada and work as a nanny for a family of thirteen children in Sudbury, an Ontario mining town, she took the chance. It was the chance she had been waiting for. She didn’t look back.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Atlantic Canada http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. 

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

“Captures the vibe of mid-century NYC, from stickball in the streets to the Mob on the make.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP

Late summer and early autumn. New York City, 1956. Jackson Pollack opens a can of worms. President Eisenhower on his way to the opening game of the World Series where a hit man waits in the wings. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye scares up the shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Baltic Place

Surprise House

1 Comment

By Ed Staskus

   Everything happened when Eva and Nick got out of whack and the adventure rides burned down, although most of it happened before that. It started when Eva Giedraityte, who grew up one of four Lithuanian girls in the family in a two-bedroom house, married Nicolae Goga, a handsome Romanian man. She turned 18 the day of the wedding. He was 28. She made up her own mind about it. They had to elope, crossing the state line, finding a justice of the peace in a used-up roadside Indiana town.    

   Afterwards, the day after the fire, Eva and Sammy and Agnes walked to Euclid Avenue and flagged down a three-wheel bicycle peddling Louie Kaleal’s Checker Bar ice cream. When the skinny black man opened the box on the back of the bike white smoke from dry ice poured out. Agnes made sure she ate all of her ice cream while it was still cold in the sugar cone.

   Two years later on Christmas Eve, while Sammy and she stood on the lip of the front walk, below the light in the window of the upstairs front bedroom, she remembered the night when the Surprise House burned down, and how Sammy and Eva and she looked over the tops of the trees, watching the fire on the far lakeshore.

   They didn’t know what was going up in oily clouds of orange-gray smoke, finding out only the next morning when Eva showed them a front-page photograph about it in the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

   Agnes snuck a peek at her mother getting out of the car across the street where she had parked and let them out, walking flatfooted on the icy driveway, and knocking on Anna MacAulay’s side door. She glanced back over her shoulder, waving them towards the house with black shutters and red front door where she and Sammy had grown up. Eva wanted them to talk Nick into giving her a divorce, even after he had said no more than a thousand times. She wanted to marry somebody else, an ex-military policeman from Rochester who was their father now, more-or-less.

   Eva’s grandparents from the old country didn’t approve of Nicolae from the beginning, even though he got medals for shooting Commie’s in Korea. That’s why Eva and Nick had to elope. Grandma and grandpa were stern and unforgiving. When they made tracks out of Lithuania during the war, not dying of bombs bullets hunger exhaustion, they made it. They never talked much about it, about the hardships they faced. They stayed stone-faced about it.

   When they were growing up, Agnes and Sammy didn’t see their grandparents for a long time. They had disowned Eva. Even when they were finally allowed, they hardly ever saw them because they still didn’t want to see their faithless daughter. It didn’t look like their new man was in the running either, even though he was Catholic instead of Lutheran.

   “Come on, bub,” Agnes said, starting up the walk.

   “Don’t call me bub,” Sammy said, slouching behind her with a long face.

   “I told you I don’t like you doing that,” she said, tugging him up hard by the back of the collar.

   “You’re a stick,” he grunted, pulling away.

   “What does that mean?”

   Agnes was upset when she thought of the Surprise House burning down, the signal flags on top of the roof on fire, and sick to her stomach when she remembered not knowing Euclid Beach Park hadn’t closed for the season when she was ten years old but closed for good. She found out the next summer, the summer before the fire, when school let out and Eva told them, and later said they would go to Williamsburg for a family vacation, instead.

   But they didn’t go to Williamsburg, so they never saw the reenactments she heard about from Sandy next door, who had gone there three times, just like they never went back to Euclid Beach Park. They went to Fredericksburg, instead, where Nick played golf at the country club while Sammy and she dragged after Eva sightseeing sunburned Civil War battlefields and staring up at the fancy plaster ceilings of the Kenmore Plantation.

   When Sammy complained the long four-day weekend that his head was hot and his neck hurt, Eva pointed to the plank floor in a dusty corner of the plantation house beneath a high window.

   “Lay down for a few minutes,” she said.

   When Agnes and she got back from the foursquare garden behind the house, he was curled up on his side asleep.

   “Did you know this was George Washington’s older sister’s house?” Agnes said as they walked to the car.

   “She wasn’t older,” he said.

   He ran after mom, reaching for her hand.

   The winter before Sammy was born her mother told Agnes she was making a little friend for her to play with. By the time summer came she was ready to tell her mother he wasn’t what she really wanted.

   “I can’t play with him. Can you take him back?”

   But Eva never did, even though Agnes asked again.

   “I’m hungry. Can’t we go to Williamsburg? I don’t like it here, eating dried strawberries all the time,” Sammy said.

   “Your father told you it’s too far,” Eva said.  

   Agnes remembered thinking, why are we in Fredericksburg? Everybody goes to Williamsburg, not Fredericksburg. Why didn’t we go there?

   Eva was born in Noorkoping, south of Stockholm, after her parents made their getaway from Lithuania. The Germans were invading and since there was Jewish blood in the family, and since everybody knew what the Nazis were doing to Jews, they stepped on the gas. Their grandfather was an import export up-and-comer and had a car. Their grandmother was a high school teacher. They left everything behind, drove to Estonia in the middle of the retreating Red Army, and from there found a boat to Sweden.

   When the family got to America after the war, they first lived in Pittsburgh, but it was too dirty. They had to keep all the windows in the house closed all the time. They moved to Cleveland the next year. Grandpa got a job in the Collinwood Rail Yards and worked days there the rest of his life. Grandma got a job at Stouffers making frozen food and worked nights there the rest of her life.

   One of them was always at home to watch the kids.

   Nick worked for Palmer Bearings, downtown on Prospect Avenue, on the backside of the angle before E. 46th St. He was vice-president of sales, which meant he went to all the steel factories in the Flats and to lunch most days on Short Vincent. When he wasn’t working, he was on golf courses on all three sides of town. He played afternoons with clients and weekends with clubhouse men and his private friends, but not with their neighbors. 

   He said they were different, the neighbors. Eva didn’t know what he meant. He never invited them over for dinner, either.

   By then Eva’s first-born sister was getting to be a big wig around town, but she never invited them over for picnics or holidays. She had grandpa and grandma blood in her. They had four children, all around Agnes and Sammy’s age. They hardly ever saw them. One day Eva went to their house to pick something up and she took Sammy and Agnes with her in their Mercedes convertible. It was a fun ride, the ragtop down. Their aunt made them wait in the garage, shuffling in the half-light, while she found whatever she was looking for. It turned out to be a Lithuanian relic she wanted Eva to deliver to an old lady who lived near them.

   When Agnes saw her at the door, Eva handing her the box, she thought, “She’s like a relic herself, why does she need more old stuff?”

   Eva got married on the first day she could, the year after she was Miss Boat Show of 1959. She and Nick met on the main stage of the Karamu House, auditioning for an amateur production of a play called “The Glass Menagerie.” They didn’t get the parts but got each other.

   She got hitched because her three sisters slept in the second bedroom while she slept on a daybed in the kitchen, because her mother was always telling her what to do, and because she was a free spirit. She had to get away from it all. She meant away from her stiff-necked mom and dad and her no bedroom and the old neighborhood, the church, and the community hall where she wasn’t happy anymore.

   Sammy and Agnes hardly knew their grandparents, although they knew a little, about how grandma’s sense of humor was top-secret, and grandpa was missing in action because he worked nights for the New York Central.

   Eva loved Nick the minute they met, and only waited until the day she was one minute older than she had to be to get married. She wanted her own bed in her own room. She wanted her own family.

   Nick’s parents weren’t alive anymore. His father was shot dead by robbers and his mother died after Eva put her foot down and she had to move out of their house to an old folk’s home. They were buried in Woodland Cemetery where Nick left plastic flowers every spring.

   The summer Sammy and Agnes started going to Euclid Beach Park, their grandparents went on vacation, and when no one else could watch their dog, Eva volunteered. She fed watered walked the dog every day. One day her older sister stopped by and when she opened the side door, the dog, surprised, ran out. Eva chased him down the street to Lakeshore Boulevard, but it was too late. A car hit the dog and he died. Her parents didn’t speak to her even more than they hadn’t before that for even longer.

   When they went to Euclid Beach Park, racing down Lakeshore Boulevard since Eva had a lead foot, she dropped them off, and told them exactly when she was going to be back. They were to wait for her just outside the main entrance gate arch, which looked like a gigantic letter H, so she could pick them up without having to get lost in the parking lot.

   The arch was underneath an old dusty giant pin oak tree. They knew it was an oak because acorns littered the grass, and knew it was a pin oak because it had pointy leaves. Sammy said it was five hundred years old, but what did he know?

   Admission into the amusement park was free. They just walked in, like magic. Eva always gave them enough money for fizzy drinks, popcorn balls, and two-dozen rides. She gave them bananas, too.

   “A banana is the best snack,” she said, pushing them down into their pockets with quarters dimes nickels.

   The first thing they did was run through the park to the Rocket Ships. Moving fast through the arch, they could see the tops of the cranes above the shade trees and hear the band organ that was beneath the second-floor platform.

   “Just in case we lose all our money, or something bad happens, this way at least I’ll know I was on my favorite ride,” Sammy always said.

   The Rocket Ships were three shiny aluminum spaceships that flew fifty feet up in the air over Lake Erie as they whirled around a twice high tower. Sammy said it was a great view and cooled you off on hot days, but Agnes wouldn’t ride the silver ships because she heard one of them had broken its support chains once and been hurled into the lake.

   None of the riders was ever seen alive again.

   After Sammy was finished flying around and cooling himself off, they rode the coasters together, starting with the Thriller. At first, Agnes was afraid of them, of the sickening hills and valleys, until the VW bus neighborhood hippie boys took them to the amusement park one afternoon.

   “It’s not what you think, it’s not the giant slide,” they said. “On the slide you can see everything ahead, everything that might happen, and that’s scary. On a roller coaster you never know what’s going to happen next. You can’t see that far ahead. It’s like a Zen pop. It’s the best ride because it’s always right now.”

   The Thriller was an out-and-back coaster with part of it running along Lake Shore Boulevard. They could see the tiny roofs of the cars on the road from the top of the first rise, just before they tipped plunging and screaming. The last hill was so steep they couldn’t help not standing up as they careened down, pressing against the lap bar.

   It was hair-raising because it might crash anytime. Everybody knew so. Coming into the station once the train behind came in too soon and rear-ended the other, and the cargo of boys and girls got banged up. The next day the platform was fixed, and it looked like nothing had happened. Sammy and Agnes found out they stored different shades of secret paint so that when they repaired the coasters and tracks, they could paint them so they all looked worn the same way, and no one could tell that anything bad had ever happened. 

    The more Agnes rode the coasters the more she liked them. They were like the peanut butter maker at Holiday Sands, twisting in the sky but bigger. She loved the sound of the wood trestles groaning and heaving on the turns. Even though she thought the riding might take her somewhere, it only ever took her back to where she started.

   The Racing Coasters were next to the Thriller. They were a double out-and-back, running beside the first leg of the Thriller, and there were two separate continuous tracks, the blue cars racing against the red cars. The ride ended on the other side of the station, everybody screaming their last go-go-go’s as it slowed down.

   The Flying Turns were the highest of the rides. They were scary loose nerve-wracking. The trains were freewheeling. “It’s a coaster without tracks!” Sammy liked to tell anyone who would listen, even though he had to sneak on, since he was smaller than the yardstick beside the gate.

   The cars weren’t attached to the track. The train careened in a bobsled trough, threatening to overturn at any second. There were only three toboggan-like cars for every train and only two rode in any one car, one directly in front of the other, white-knuckling the snap-of-the-whip turns.

   On “Nickel Days” they rode the Tea Cups between turns on the coasters, which were a four-table cup ride, like a Crazy Daisy. They spun in circles and looked like they would slam into each other any minute, but always missed by a sliver. Getting into a teacup one day Sammy found a plastic baggie tucked into the bench seat. A man with a ponytail came back before the ride started and asked if they had found anything.

   “It’s my happy weed,” he said when Sammy handed it to him.

   Walking around the park they munched on Humphrey’s Candy Kiss salt-water taffy and bought pictures of their favorite stars at the movie star photo booth. They yukked it up riding the black-light Laff-in-the-Dark and got soaked to the bone on Over the Falls.

   They steered clear of the Surprise House until the end of the day, not because it was bloodcurdling, which it was, but because of Laffing Sal, right outside the entrance, cackling her face off inside a glass case. Her hips gyrated like a hula hoop and she never stopped her nutty squeaky helter-skelter laughing talking.

   She had blazing red hair and shiny dead eyes in a head that jerked side-to-side back-and-forth. They tried to not look at her bloated painted face. It was too much.

   The front of the Surprise House was painted lime green and purple. It glowed lurid-like in the sun. The sign above the arch framing the doors was yellow with black letters. They had to give seven tickets to the bow-tied operator at the booth. He put the tickets on a conveyor belt that carried them to a chopper that shredded them.

   Once they walked in, through a fog cloud, right away around the corner was a screen door puzzle. Only one of all the doors was really a door and while they searched for it, all the doors banged open and shut so loud all around them it was baffling.

   When they found the right one, they walked into a narrow room full of rock formations and wild animals running up-and-down the rocks. The floor suddenly became a moving floor, zooming up and down and sliding side to side. The wall beside the moving floor was glass and people outside the Surprise House watched and laughed as they struggled to not fall down, much less walk.

   At the far end of the floor was a giant Grandfather Clock. When they got to it a spotted snake sprang at them from cuckoo doors beneath the clock face. Jumping away sideways from the ugly thing they had to run through a rolling barrel to get away.

   Most of the Surprise House was a maze of moving floors and stairways leading to elevated platforms, creaking doors, and dead ends. One room was so weirdly slanted sideways that just standing was all-in-all defying gravity.

   Pitch-black hallways led from one room to the next. Excruciating screams filled the air and loud knocking on the floors and ceiling overhead drummed in the darkness. There were siren whoops and unexpected clangs near and far. Blasts of air from secret holes hit them in the face coming around corners, and they never knew when a wind gust would blow up their shorts from the floor.

   At the end of one passageway were three porky sailor boys with tin whistles in their mouths. When they stepped up to them, they blew their whistles in their faces. When they stopped at a window to see a fireman with a hose, he whirled around and sprayed, except the spray hit the window, not them, jumping back in alarm. At a wishing well when they looked down into the water, they could see themselves as though they were looking at themselves from behind. 

   At the far end was a distortion mirror maze they had to find their way through to get out of the Surprise House. The curved mirrors stretched and squeezed them like screwball bubble gum.

   After all the strange moving floors and dark and noise it was a shock to step through the exit on the quiet side of Laffing Sal and suddenly stand blinking in the sunlight with people strolling by not knowing anything about what they had just been through. Sammy and Agnes were sad and excited at the same time, not sure what to do next.

   When the park announced closing time and everyone was on their way out an army of skunks came waddling up from the beach palisades, hard on their heels, eating the litter and discarded goodies. They threw banana peels at them and watched the skunks drag the peels away. They meowed like cats with sore throats.

   They didn’t know the last time they stumbled out of the Surprise House and tossed their leftovers away as they walked to the arch and Eva’s convertible that it was the last closing time at Euclid Beach Park. They didn’t know Eva was going to leave soon and not come back, either

   She and Nick started arguing when she started going to college. When she got a job, it got worse. After that it never got better.

   “Why do you need to work?” he asked her. “We have enough money. You don’t need to work. Stay home and take care of the family, for Christ’s sake.”

   But Eva was sick of asking him for money all the time, not just for groceries, but for everything, for her clothes, nice things for the house, and just everything. She got sick of him, too, of him always telling her what and what not to do.

   They argued more and more that winter, even in the morning at breakfast and over dinner and late at night when the Sammy and Agnes were supposed to be asleep. One night they had an argument in the living room because Eva had stayed out the day before until four in the morning.

   “We were at Reuben’s house,” she explained. “Nothing happened. I just lost track of time.”

   She meant Reuben Silver, who was the showman at Karamu House, where Nick and Eva had first met. He was a friendly man with a black beard and slicked-back thinning black hair. His wife wore purple turtlenecks and always took Agnes’s hand when she saw her backstage.

   “Nothing went on,” Eva said. “We went to the Playhouse and saw “Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds,” that’s all, and then we were at their house afterwards, talking.”

   “Gamma Rays? What are you talking about?” Nick went to the movies sometimes, but he didn’t go to theaters anymore. That was all over.

   He thought Eva had done something behind his back. He didn’t say what, although Sammy and Agnes could tell from his face it must have been wrong. When Eva went into the kitchen Nick followed her.

   She stepped into the hall and went up the stairs. They could hear them in their bedroom, screaming at each other in different languages. Suddenly there was a loud crash. Eva came running down the stairs out the front door and to Anna MacAulay’s house. Nick came downstairs after she was gone and told them everything was all right. He sat by the back window the rest of the night and stared into the ravine. He looked unhappy, like he had lost his golf clubs and fancy spiked shoes.

   When they went upstairs, they looked into their parent’s bedroom and saw a hole in the wall. A potato masher was lying on the floor. They found out later Nick had thrown it at Eva but missed. It lay on the floor until the next day when Eva came home. She cleaned up the dinner table, did the dishes, and put the potato masher away. Agnes liked that about her mom, keeping the cleanest house anyone ever saw. She vacuumed twice a day and they could eat off the floor if they wanted to.

   Their father said he was going to call Sears about fixing the bedroom wall, but he never did. He just left the hole to fester. Maybe it was like their marriage by then, not worth fixing.

   Anna MacAulay came over the next day when Nick was at work. She always just walked into the house. Nick hated that. She and Eva talked for a long time. When they were done talking Eva packed her bags.

   Looking up across the sidewalk at their house on Christmas Eve, Agnes thought she had probably known all along that her mother was going to leave her father, but back then surprises still upset her. Eva was going to marry the new man from Rochester, one way or another. There was no surprise about that. Agnes was going to do her best to help out.

   “If I can get my divorce,” Eva said, “we’ll have enough money to send you to Germany when you’re done with junior high.” Agnes hated her junior high and was sure she would hate high school. One of her aunts had gone to Vasario 16-osios, the Lithuanian high school in Germany.

   “You can stay summers with your grandfather’s sister in Diepholz,” her aunt Banga, Eva’s youngest sister, said. “She enjoys bringing food to the table. She’ll fatten you up a little. You can go to Italy with your friends. You’ll love it. When you come back, I’ll take you to Dainava.”

   She could go to summer camp the talk of the town, not a nobody, not like the first time, when they told her to leave. Agnes knew she would keep her word. She was her favorite aunt. She was her mother’s favorite sister. Banga means “Little Wave,” washing over you but not knocking you down.

   Going to school in Europe would be the kind of surprise Agnes could handle.

   “Come on, bub,” she said, taking Sammy’s hand when he reached for hers, and they started up the chancy sidewalk.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Atlantic Canada http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. 

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

“Captures the vibe of mid-century NYC, from stickball in the streets to the Mob on the make.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP

Late summer and early autumn. New York City, 1956. Jackson Pollack opens a can of worms. President Eisenhower on his way to the opening game of the World Series where a hit man waits in the wings. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye scares up the shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication