Welcome to Sudbury

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By Ed Staskus

   When my mother, Angele Jurgelaityte, first saw my father, Vytas Staskevicius, at the Nuremberg Army Hospital in Germany, he was 23 years old and out cold on a surgical table underneath a white sheet. She was 19 years old and wearing a starched cotton nurse’s uniform with a button-on apron. They were both refugees from the Baltics. It was 1947. Everybody in Nuremberg was regrouping and rebuilding, especially the refugees, who had lost even more than the losers of World War Two.

   The military hospital had been built in 1937 and personally dedicated by Adolf Hitler. Just like 90% of Nuremberg, the city that was Hitler’s favorite city and the ideological capital of the Nazi’s, it had been hit hard by strategic bombing. One night more than five hundred British four-engine heavy bombers blitzed the city, and the six-story central section of the hospital was badly damaged.

   By the time Angele and Vytas met it had been taken over and rebuilt by the United States Army. He was living in a refugee camp near Hanau, a hundred and twenty miles north of Nuremberg, and Angele was a nurse trainee at the Army Hospital. She shared a single room, with a bath down the hall in an adjoining building, with three other young women. They were officially known as displaced persons, displaced from Lithuania, which had first been annexed by the Russians in 1940, then invaded by the Germans in 1941, and finally re-occupied by the Russians during their summer offensive of 1944.

   They both fled Lithuania like jumping out of the window of a house on fire. He was jump started by a truck-full of Wehrmacht soldiers, stationed at a nearby Russian prisoner-of-war camp, who stopped at his family farm and told him he had five minutes to decide whether to come with them as they retreated from the rapidly advancing Red Army.

   “I was born in Siauliai. My father was the Director of the Department of Citizen Protection there. He was the police chief,” he said. “We had a farm, too, in Dainai. It was a model farm. We had all the newest tools, cutting and sowing implements. Excursions would come to our farm from all over the country.”

   Angele woke up the same morning while babysitting her aunt’s children to find her aunt hitching a horse to a cart, tossing in rucksacks, clothes, a small trunk of valuables, tying the family cow to the back of it, and jumping in. They plodded away, one grown-up and five children going as fast as the cow could go.

   “I was from Suvalkija, in the southwest, from the farm of Gizai, five kilometers from Marijampole. My family was all still there, but I couldn’t go back, there was no time, so I went with my aunt. There wasn’t anything else I could do. On the way we had to sell the cow for food and jump into ditches when planes bombed us.” She never saw her parents again and only re-united with any of her family more than forty years later.

   Angele lost her parents to the vagaries of a world war and Vytas lost his parents to persecution as the Nazis and Communists traded ideological body blows. Ideology has never solved any problems, although it has never lost its bad temper. After they fled the Baltics they were cut off from what was left of their homes, family, and culture by what was fast becoming the Iron Curtain.

   “The Communists took my father in 1940 because he was a government official,” Vytas said. “They took him in the summer just as he was, with only the shirt on his back and wearing sandals. He was sent to Krasnojarsk and starved to death in a labor camp there in 1942.” Anton Chekhov, an acclaimed writer of short stories, once wrote that Krasnojarsk was the most beautiful city in Siberia. Vytas’s father never got on board the tour bus. “The mass deportations started later and my mother was arrested. She spent twelve years in Siberia and when she was released after Stalin’s death wasn’t allowed to return to Siauliai.” 

   Three years after fleeing Lithuania they were both in central Bavaria, biding time, looking for a new life, like almost ten million other Eastern Europeans who had decamped to Germany in 1944 and 1945. Vytas had severely injured his right hand in a hay mower accident in 1942, when he was 18 years old and had taken over the operation of the family farm. He was at the Nuremberg Army Hospital for a series of what would be mostly successful operations to restore the use of the hand to him.

   “In 1940 in Siauliai the mood was very bad,” he said. “We felt that something terrible was going to happen. After my father were sent to Siberia I had to run the family farm. I was on a horse drawn mower cutting hay when I saw that rain was coming, so I jumped down and walked with the horses so they would pull the mower faster. As we went, I tripped and fell down right on the blades.” The horses stopped. Blood gushed from his wrist. It started raining and blood mixed with the soil. “My hand was almost cut off. The farmhand who was helping me ran over, and seeing my injured hand, passed out.”

   One of Angele’s nursing roommates in Nuremberg told her there was a new arrival, teasing her that he was a good-looking man from Lithuania, but it wasn’t until she was transferred to the bone section of the hospital that she met him. When she finally saw him, he was in an operating theater, having a small bone taken from his leg and put into his hand.

   She saw him every day for the next three months on her rounds as he recovered, fully conscious, and more than ever conscious of her. “She took care of me,” he said, while she remembers that, “It felt so right to be with that guy.” As winter gave way to spring, they began to take walks on the hospital grounds, and in the nearby wooded parks, and then into the city to look at animals in the zoo and to watch American movies.

   Vytas was eventually discharged and went back to Hanau, where he gave up black-marketing cigarettes and chocolate in the American Zone and found work as a bookkeeper for the International Refugee Organization. They stayed in touch, writing letters. In the middle of the year, he returned to Nuremberg for more surgery, staying two months while he recovered, as well as romancing Angele with long walks and talks. When he went back to Hanau, they continued to write one another, dating by mail.

   By 1948 Europe’s refugee camps were rapidly emptying as people left for Canada, Australia, the United States, or anywhere they could get a visa and a fresh start. “No one knew where they would end up,” Angele said. “You couldn’t go home and there was no future in Germany. We had nothing and there were no opportunities.” She got a work contract to enter Canada, sponsored by a French-Canadian family in Sudbury, Ontario, to be an au pair for their brood of a dozen. She sailed in December 1948 and after arriving wrote Vytas about where she was, what she called “the rock pile,” although she added there were many lakes like in Lithuania.

   He already had a visa allowing him to enter the United States, a visa that had been hard to get. He had an uncle and friends there and was tempted by the prospect. His best friend wanted to emigrate to Australia and suggested they go together. He debated with himself about what to do. Angele won the debate. He wrote her a letter in early 1949 and proposed he come to Canada, they get married, start a family, and try their  hands at a chicken farm, since they had both grown up on farms. She knew how to get dinner started by breaking bird necks. That had been one of her chores as a child. “I had to swing the chicken around in circles by the head, snap it in mid-air breaking its neck, and pull all the feathers out of it.”

   Two months later he got her answer by return letter and started looking for a way to get to Canada, rather than the United States. Angele was sure she had made the right decision. “He wasn’t a lady killer and I liked that,” she said. “He was a steady man. And he was interesting. I didn’t want a boring man. He was the right guy for me.” Once Vytas secured a visa to go to Canada, he took a train to Bremen in northwestern Germany, but couldn’t get on a boat, passing the time in a boarding house in the Altstadt. After several more dead ends he found himself traveling back through Bavaria, across the Alps, and south of Rome to Naples. He waited there for three weeks, living on espressos and cheap Neapolitan pizzas, and finally managed to secure a berth on a tramp freighter going to Nova Scotia.

   “There were millions of us trying to get out of Europe,” he said.

   He arrived in Sudbury after a seventeen-day boat ride across the Atlantic Ocean and a two-day train ride from Halifax. He got there early on the morning of September 7, 1949, with the clothes on his back, five dollars in American money in his wallet, and a small suitcase. There were two changes of clothes, a sweater, a Feldgrau tunic stripped of insignia, underwear and socks, an extra pair of shoes, some family letters and photographs, a straight razor, shaving cream, and comb, a bar of soap, and a prayer book in the suitcase. When no one met him at the train station he asked a policeman for directions to where Angele was living and working. He walked the three miles from the Canada Pacific terminal to her doorstep.

   He found the house, stepped up to the back door, and knocked. “What are you doing here so soon” she asked opening the door, wiping her wet hands on a kitchen towel, surprised to see him. She hadn’t been expecting him until the next day. Standing on the steps, looking up at her, nonplussed, he said, “I came to marry you, the sooner the better.” The next day he moved into a nearby one-room apartment, sharing it with another man. There was only one bed, but the other man worked at night and slept during the day, while he worked during the day and slept at night, so they made an arrangement.

   His first job in Sudbury was making cement cinder blocks for the LaPalme Cement Works, which was owned and operated by the large family for whom Angele was the domestic. The day after his initiation into cement-making he showed up at her door again and told her he ached from tip-to-toe and was going back to Germany. “Save your breath to cool your soup,” she said. She sat him down, gave him a back rub, and sent him back to the cement factory.

   They were married two weeks later, on a Saturday, on a sunny day in what was usually an overcast month, in a ceremony presided over by two Catholic priests, one French-speaking and the other Lithuanian-speaking. The following afternoon they went on a picnic and took a room at the downtown Coulson Hotel for their honeymoon. The hotel was operated by John D’Arcy Coulson, a Sudbury native who had played in the National Hockey League for the Philadelphia Quakers one season, where he scored no goals while ranking third in the league in penalty minutes. Neither Vytas nor Angele spent a minute in the penalty box that night. First they celebrated with a dinner of roast beef, mashed potatoes, and a bottle of champagne. Then they went upstairs to their room and spent the rest of their time at the hotel scoring goals in private.

   Monday morning both of them went back to work. Within a year they bought a house on Stanley Street and started a family, but set aside their plans for a chicken farm, since Sudbury’s landscape was more suited to rock collecting than farming. Vytas went to work in the city’s vast network of mines, judging the work easier than cement making. It wasn’t, at first, but he eventually rose in the ranks, from black powder blaster to driving underground loaders and ore trains.

   “I worked in the nickel mines for seven years, thousands of feet underground,” he said. “There were many Lithuanians working in Canada. Some cut down trees in the forests, which was very hard, and some worked in the mines, which wasn’t as hard but more dangerous. I started as a dynamite man, then laying track for the trains that carried the rocks, and later I got an easier job driving the tractors.”

   Angele became her own au pair within a few years, at the end of the day taking care of three children of her own. In 1957 they left Sudbury behind and emigrated to the United States, settling in Cleveland, Ohio, where they lived together for the next fifty years before Vytas passed away.

   “Most of the Lithuanians we knew in Sudbury started in the mid-1950s looking for better work,” Vytas said. There was only so far anybody could get in the company town. “Many of us left for Montreal, Toronto, and south of the border. We all started to go our separate ways. As soon as our turn came to go to the United States, Angele and I started getting ready.” Once in Cleveland he went from being an elevator operator to earning a degree in accounting from Case Western Reserve University. They bought their first home. He got a good job with TRW and later in the early 1980s helped found Cleveland’s Taupa Lithuanian Credit Union.

   In 1979, after almost four decades, he saw his mother again. “It was the first time I went back to Lithuania. She was living in Silute, and we tried to travel there secretly, but were caught by the Russians in Ukmergemade and ordered to return to Vilnius. The next day I got permission to go for one day and I was able to get a car. I visited my mother, who barely recognized me, and we spent three hours together.”

   Angele and Vytas went back to Sudbury several times in the following decades to visit their sponsors the LaPalme family. They went to Lithuania to join in the celebration surrounding the country’s declaration of independence in 1990, but never again to the Army Hospital in Nuremberg, which had survived the war but was closed and torn down in 1994, there being no further need for it. The grounds were used to build apartments and homes for the burgeoning populace. A new generation had come of age.

   “We never forgot where we met, all we had to do was close our eyes to go there,” Vytas said. “But, where we were going, our family, home, and community, was always more important to us than the past. That was all gone. We had our own place now.”

   Home is where you hang your hat. It isn’t something we buy. It is something we make.

   A version of this story appeared in Bridges Magazine.

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

“Hell’s Kitchen”

New York City, 1956. Times Square, Coney Island, and the World Series. A high profile Mob contract in the works. Stan Riddman, a private eye working the edges, stirs up the shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

On the Town

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By Ed Staskus

   I was three years old before I got my first good look at Sudbury. I didn’t know the place had started life as a railroad outpost in the nineteenth century before rapidly expanding when vast mineral resources were discovered. I didn’t know what it had become seventy years later, which was “Nickel Capital of the World.” I knew it was springtime on our street. When I looked around I thought it was the best place in the world, a place where everything was new. I later learned, no matter how old anything looked, everything had once been new.

   My brother had been born in the fall and had been crying at night lately, keeping us all awake. My father was a miner, working day shifts for two weeks and then night shifts for two weeks. He was one of the black powder men, setting explosive charges more than a mile down. He needed his nerves to be rock solid. He needed to sleep like a baby. He didn’t need crying rattling around in his brain.

   At first, my mother thought it was a passing thing. When it didn’t pass, she took to sleeping in the living room, on the sofa, with my brother on the floor beside her in a small rocking cradle. Whenever he started crying she reached down and rocked him, settling him down. She didn’t get much sleep, although my father and I got all the shuteye we needed.

   One day a year-and-a-half later, when my father was at work, and my mother had an appointment with the family doctor to check my brother’s tonsils, my godfather Joe Dzenkaitis showed up to babysit me for the afternoon. He was on the night shift in the nickel mines and had time to kill. He showed up on a 1948 Vincent Black Shadow motorcycle.

   “My neighbor asked me to watch it,” he explained. “He’s up in Wawaitin Falls hunting bears for a week.”

   Most of the Lithuanian immigrants who came hat in hand to Sudbury in the late 1940s and early 1950s worked in the mines. They got out of the black hole that Europe was after World War Two and ended up in another black hole. Most of them were saving every penny they could so they wouldn’t have to work in the mines a day more than they had to. Many of them had clawed enough cash together to buy their own homes, but didn’t own much in the way of wheels.

   The Vincent had a black tank and a black frame. The pipes were nickel chrome steel. The nickel came from Sudbury. The city, south of North Bay and north of Lake Huron, sat on top of a big hole in the ground overflowing with ore. Some people called it the “Valley.” Others called it the “Basin.” Still others simply called it “Paydirt.” An asteroid smashed into the spot in Ontario hundreds of millions of years ago with a cargo of must-have metals. Nickel took the blue ribbon.

   During the Korean War, which had ended two years before, nickel was regulated. Whenever there was fighting anywhere in the world Sudbury boomed. Nickel was vital for making modern warfare. When the fighting stopped Sudbury went back to scuffling. It wasn’t boom or bust, but it was a one horse town, so it was boom or bust.

   After World War Two the open pits were almost exhausted and new underground mines were being dug. Nickel was increasingly being used for civilian purposes. Technologically advanced smelters started seeing the light of day. While Sudbury slowly progressed from being one of the most polluted cities in North America, cleaning itself up, I was just getting my legs under me. My friends and I played on the outcroppings behind our house all the time and never noticed the ever-present haze of ash and smoke. 

   We played Man on the Moon. Astronauts from the United States played the same game on the rocky wastelands surrounding Sudbury in 1971. They were part of the Apollo 16 mission. More American astronauts trained outside of town a year later, for Apollo 17, for the moon landing in December of 1972. They were practicing for the real thing.

   I didn’t see much of my hometown after I was born. I was homesick for my old home, which had been warm and fluid. Sudbury was frozen solid, the winter one severe cold snap after another. After I was squeezed out into the new world I saw a lot of my crib and the kitchen. I only spoke Lithuanian until the spring of 1954, when I started meeting kids my own age on the street. They all spoke English and French although none of them spoke French among themselves. English was their language on the street. They said French was for talking to their parents and to girls.

   The Vincent motorcycle my godfather was riding was plenty fast enough, but it wasn’t the Black Lightning, which was the racing version of the Black Shadow. Every steel part on the Lightning that could be remade in aluminum had been remade in aluminum. Everything not essential was removed, reducing the weight by almost a hundred pounds. It had a single racing seat and rear footrests. In 1948 Rollie Free broke the motorcycle land speed record riding a Black Lightning on the Bonneville Salt Flats. He did it wearing a bathing suit, laying like a swimmer flat on his stomach, his legs dangling off the back end, and hanging on to the handlebars for dear life. When he finally rolled to a stop he was coated tip-to-toe with sand and salt.

   I sat on the motorcycle behind my godfather, who I called Uncle Joe. I couldn’t get my arms around him and had to hang on tight to his shirt. He burped the motorcycle down Stanley St. to Elm St. and took a left towards downtown.  My friends and I had been to an arcade downtown and ridden Roy Roger’s horse Trigger, which was made of laminated wood. Roy Rogers was “King of the Cowboys.” Even though he was a buckaroo hero, he was from Ohio, where our family was going to end up in a few years. The only cowboys I ever saw riding horses in Cleveland were Shriners in parades, when they weren’t driving miniature cars.

   We lived on a new stretch of Stanley St. Houses were being built as fast as could be because Sudbury was the most congested city in Canada and needed housing. The Dominion Bureau of Statistics reported there were “42,410 people jammed into 9,450 units.” More than a third of the housing was officially designated as “overcrowded.”

   We glided past the Regent Theatre where my parents went to see movies on weekends. My father learned to speak English in Lithuania, but my mother had lived on a remote family farm of pigs and sugar beets near the East Prussian border. The mother tongue was all she knew. The movies were a way for her to learn English. A twin bill was showcasing “Creature from the Black Lagoon” and “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.” I made a mental note to see the monster movie.

   The movie house was operated by Herbert Sutherland. By the time I was old enough to go see movies it was home to a colony of rats. It got so it was hard to tell if somebody was screaming because of the scariness on the screen or because of a rat biting their ankles. Herb Sutherland found some homeless cats and invited them to make his movie house their home. The city sent him a letter saying, “We do not feel the use of cats is sufficient to eliminate the menace.” He threw the hired guns out and deployed poison traps, making the problem disappear. 

   We went past the new Sudbury Arena which had replaced the old Palace Rink the year I was born. Uncle Joe rode carefully, watching for mud, threading the needle. The Junction Creek overflowed its banks every year, flooding the northern and central parts of Sudbury. We rode around the General Hospital where I was born. Outside the Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes we stopped for ice cream cones. I snuck a look over my shoulder for spirits, saintly or otherwise.

  Frederic Romanet du Caillaud, known as the “Count of Sudbury,” had a six-foot tall 1500-pound bronze statue of the Virgin Mary erected at the mouth of the grotto in 1907. “Queen of the Gauls” was inscribed on the statue. At first, an Italian family by the name of Drago took care of it, wiping off grime and bird shit every spring and autumn. In the 1950s the Rosary Club was formed. Omer Naqult. a local barber and devout Catholic, watched over the pilgrimage site from then on.

   One year earlier almost 10,000 people had gathered at the site, coming from all the various parishes of the Sault-Ste-Marie diocese. New lighting was installed to light up the shrine at night. At the start of the next summer a throng of residents of Sudbury took part in the Procession of Corpus Christi that ended up at the grotto. My parents were not able to go to the parade, no matter how devoted to Catholicism they were, so I didn’t know anything about it at the time.

   The statue was an inch or two shorter than Uncle Joe, who wore his hair wavy and was strong as an ox. He could bend galvanized nails with his fingers. He and his wife Brone didn’t have any children, but I saw plenty of them, anyway. My parents had a good-sized living room and our house was where card playing, dancing, and carousing took place on many weekends. There was always a spread of Baltic foodstuffs, like black bread and smoked eel, at the kitchen parties, as well as plenty of booze.

   We set off for Ramsey Lake. Before there ever was a Sudbury the natives called it Lake Bitimagamasing, which means “water that lies on the side of the hill.” Everybody agreed Ramsey was easier to pronounce and that is what everybody called it. Everybody also agreed the lake was dead as a doornail. Sewage from Minnow Lake drained into Ramsey Lake. Open roast emissions had been going on for so long and led to so much pollution that the lake, which had few flow outlets, had given up the ghost. Even though it was still the largest lake in the world located entirely within the boundaries of a single city, it was a shell of its former self.

   There weren’t many fish in the lake. By the 1950s, despite three decades of persistent stocking, angling was still bad. Besides the pollution, fishermen had long since been dynamiting for fish, wiping out some species like bass. When Lands and Forest biologist R. E. Whitefield went survey netting, it took him four full days to catch five pike and one yellow perch. Lake trout were re-stocked in 1952, but when they disappeared that was the end of stocking for the next twenty-five years.

   Before my father showed up to sweep her off her feet, my mother’s then Canadian boyfriend often took her out on the lake in his speedboat, until the day he started showing off, racing and zig zagging, and she fell off the back of it without him noticing. An evil-looking northern pike watched her bob up to the surface. By the time her boyfriend thought to look for her she was floating on her back waiting for him, hoping the weight of her wet clothes wouldn’t drag her under.    

   The lake is named after William Ramsey, who was the chief of a surveillance party in the late 1800s and who got into the weeds in heavy fog. After finding himself he named it Lost Lake. Others more civic minded decided it would be better to name it after him but misspelled his name, calling it Lake Ramsay. Forty years later somebody noticed the mistake and corrected the spelling.

   When we got to the lake I begged Uncle Joe to let me go swimming, but there was a greasy purple substance on the surface of the water as far out as we could see. “It’s probably some poisonous waste, or something Inco is up to,” he said. I had no idea what Inco was, but I had heard “What are you up to?” from my mother often enough to know it couldn’t be anything good. We went for a walk instead. When I got tired my godfather carried me sitting on his shoulders, my hands gripping his thick head of hair.

   It was an early fall day and trees were starting to change color. There weren’t many of them, but the yellows and reds got me going and I asked my godfather to take me to a forest. He said there weren’t any left, but finally relented when I wouldn’t leave it alone. We rolled slowly out of town on the Vincent. Uncle Joe flat-hatted across the hinterland.

   It turned out he was right. There were hardly any trees anywhere, at all. The first thing to happen to them was the Great Chicago Fire in the 1870s. Lumber camps popped up all over Ontario providing wood for the American city’s reconstruction. Then the ore discoveries and smelting got going, the fires releasing sulfur, which combined with water forms sulfuric acid, leading to acid rain. Saplings struggling to reforest the landscape didn’t have a chance and died by the millions. The back country of Sudbury looked like a wasteland by the 1940s.

   Our street on the west side of the city had trees and grass and gardens but the only vegetation I saw outside of the city were wild blueberry patches and paper birch trees. What other trees were still standing were giving it their best shot against long odds. They were like the crippled kid on Pine St. we sometimes played with, although never for long. He couldn’t hop, skip, or run. He couldn’t keep up with us. He sat under a tree watching us hop, skip, and run. None of us knew what he did when he was by himself.

   When my godfather checked his watch, he suddenly said we had to go. We raced back to Sudbury, to Stanley St. and our house. My father wasn’t home from work, yet. Neither was my mother. Uncle Joe indicated that was a good thing.

   “When she asks you what we did today, just tell her we went sightseeing, OK?” he said.

   “OK,” I said.

   After my mother came home I told her we had a great time, and while she and my godfather had coffee on the back porch, I watched my baby brother crawl around the yard. He was making progress, gurgling rather than crying. Our street dead-ended in a dark face of pitted rock. I was forbidden to climb it because it was steep, and Canadian Pacific trains hauling ore ran along the top, even though I had already gone up and down it many times with my friends. Sometimes rules are just a moot point, especially when the ground rumbles under your feet while standing near the tracks and the suction effect makes it seem like the train is trying to pull you towards it.

   When my friends ran into our front yard after dinner and asked me where I had been all day, I told them all about it, all the places I had been to, and how Sudbury was bigger, better, and more exciting than I had ever imagined. After that Stanley St. was still our whole world, but we couldn’t wait to see more of the world. We ran up and down the street that evening pretending to be riding motorcycles. The sunset was a gleaming orange. We were spent and sat down on a boulder watching night happen. When my mother put me to bed, saying I looked tired, I slept like the rock of ages.

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

“Hell’s Kitchen”

New York City, 1956. Times Square, Coney Island, and the World Series. A high profile Mob contract in the works. Stan Riddman, a private eye working the edges, stirs up the shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

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 at http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland at http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com., Down East at http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal at http://www.lithuanianjournal, com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.” His books can be found on Amazon and Apple Books.

“Hell’s Kitchen”

New York City, 1956. Times Square, Coney Island, and the World Series. A high profile Mob contract in the works. Stan Riddman, a private eye working the edges, stirs up the shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Yankee Doodle

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By Ed Staskus

   “Yankee Doodle went to town a-riding on a pony, stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni.”

   Michael Radzevicius had a bad feeling. He looked towards the Savannah River from where he was, which was a hillside north of the British fortifications, but couldn’t see it. There was a full moon somewhere but he couldn’t see that, either. It was a murky dawn. It was October 9, 1779. It was more than four years into the American Revolution. The British called it “The Present Unhappy Dispute.”

    There was a murder of crows in a nearby tree cawing every minute like clockwork. He would have liked to have eaten them for breakfast, but there was no time. When he was a child, working with his father fishing off the Baltic Sea’s Curonian Spit, he had caught and pickled crows for their winter rations. He had been known as a krahenbeiber for his skill in catching the birds and killing them by biting their skulls, which was quicker than trying to find a stone to bash them with.

   He didn’t like the gloom. Neither did his master’s horse. The horse flared his nostrils, snorting sharply. A flock of swallows was flying low to the ground. It meant it would probably rain soon. He looked up at the crows. There was only one left in the tree. Two crows meant good luck. One crow meant bad luck. Death was nearby.

   Michael was twenty two years old, fair haired and gray eyed. He was a Lithuanian who had grown up in the village of Juodkrante under Prussian overlords. He spoke Lithuanian and German, as well as some Polish. He was good with languages. His father didn’t understand where his son got his facility for speech. He only spoke one language and only spoke it when it was absolutely necessary. 

   Michael Radzevicius’s master was Casimir Pulaski, a military man from Warsaw, the capital of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth. He came from one of most prominent szlachtafamilies in Poland. They were a warrior caste who rivaled the monarchy in power. He was seventeen years old when he entered military service. Two years later he got involved with an independence movement opposing Russian hegemony in the Commonwealth. He fought in several battles, eventually being captured. He was released in exchange for a promise that he would not again take up arms.

   He retracted the promise the second he was out of sight of the “predatory claws of Moscow.” In the spring of 1769, when he was twenty four years old, he defended the fort of Okopy Swietej Trojcy against numerically superior Russian forces, forcing them to lift their siege. That fall he left for Lithuania with six hundred men, hoping to incite further revolts against Moscow. He returned to Poland with four thousand men. One of the men was Michael Radzevicius.

   “I took up arms against the Czar to let him know a crown is just a hat that lets the rain in,” Michael said. He had nothing to lose. The Curonian Spit had slowly but surely been deforested in the past one hundred years. One day very strong winds and shifting sand dunes buried his village. His father suffocated inside their house. Their fishing boat sank in the storm.

   He fought with Casimir Pulaski at Jasna Gora Monastery and the Battle of Lanckorona. “He wasn’t interested in women or drink. All he wanted to do was fight.” Casimir Pulaski’s fighting days unraveled when he became involved in a conspiracy to kidnap Stanislaw August, the King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania. The plot was compromised and failed. He fled Poland and sought refuge in France.

   “I had become his second by then, like a squire from the past. I made sure his weapons and horse were ready when needed. I had my own horse. I always fought beside him.” Casimir Pulaski spent 1775 in France. He was thrown into debtor’s prison, unable to pay his bills. When he was released he met Benjamin Franklin. “I am a soldier,” he said. “I fight when I am told. I win where I fight.” Benjamin Franklin recruited him to go to North America and fight in the Continental Army for the American Revolution.

   “Count Pulaski of Poland, an officer famous throughout Europe for his bravery and conduct in defense of the liberties of his country against the three great invading powers of Russia, Austria, and Prussia, may be highly useful to our service,” Benjamin Franklin  wrote to the Continental Congress.

   “We sailed from Nantes up the Loire River into the Bay of Biscay. It only took us six weeks to reach Boston. There were no storms that summer.” When they got there Casimir Pulaski wrote a letter to George Washington. “I come here, where freedom is being defended, to serve it, and to live or die for it. Know that as I could not submit to stoop before the sovereigns of Europe, so I come to hazard all the freedom of America, and desirous of passing the rest of my life in a country free, and before settling as a citizen, to fight for liberty.”

   His first fighting was at the Battle of Brandywine in September 1777. When the Continental Army faltered, and a British battalion cut off George Washington and his staff’s retreat, threatening capture or death, he rallied a ragtag group of horsemen, charged the British, and averted a disaster, saving the commander-in-chief’s life in the process. A few days later he was commissioned as a brigadier general.

   “We fought in the Battle of Germantown, but after the weather got bad we found ourselves at Valley Forge for the winter.” Michael said. “It was a very hard winter. We were always hungry. There was never enough food.” There wasn’t much to forage in the surrounding valleys. Nothing quartermasters did was enough. The Continental Congress was robbing Peter to pay Paul.

   “We want wine above all things, for our sick are numerous, and our cases generally putrid,” James Fallon, a commissary agent, wrote to Jonathan Potts of the General Hospitals of the Northern Department. “We also want shirts, sheets, candles, soap, pots, horn-spoons, and every other kind of utensil.”

   Most of the sick were tended at a nearby hospital in Yellow Springs. George Washington visited it in May 1778 and “spoke to every patient there, which pleased the sick exceedingly.” More than two thousand of the troops at Valley Forge died of disease that winter. Dr. Samuel Kennedy, the surgeon in charge of the hospital, died in June, just before the Continental Army left Valley Forge.

   Casimir Pulaski was put in charge of the Continental cavalry, an untrained and neglected branch of the army. Before his taking command they were only scouts and skirmishers. He reorganized and reformed them, organizing a training regimen and establishing a riding school. Pulaski’s Legion was made up of Americans, Germans, Frenchmen, and Poles. Their standard was a red banner. He wanted his men to be armed with lances. His request was denied. Swords and pistols were the order of the day.  Their first action was at Egg Harbor on the New Jersey coast in October 1778. It didn’t go well.

   One of the Legion’s men had deserted to the British and given them intelligence about Casimir Pulaski’s movements and location. The British surprised them in their camp at the break of day and inflicted heavy casualties. The Legion retreated to Delaware, licking their wounds.

   “I learned to speak English soon enough, which pleased the Count.” It pleased Casimir Pulaski because he barely spoke a word of English. He spoke French, which hardly anybody in the Continental Army understood. He also swore in French. He was bull headed and swore a great deal. His men understood the vehemence, if not the words.

   “I became his interpreter. It was a thankless job more often than not. I didn’t translate what the men said about him.”

  Casimir Pulaski grew restless in Delaware. “He was angry about not being in the fight. He quarreled with his officers, usually about small matters, court martialing one of them over what he believed was an insult, even though it was nothing. He got into a face-off with our commanding officer, Anthony Wayne, who was just as quick to anger. The general, George Washington, finally sent us south where the British had shifted most of their forces.”

   They joined colonial forces defending Charleston, South Carolina. The city was in crisis. Pulaski’s Legion attacked the British but were outnumbered and mauled. Retreating to the city, Casimir Pulaski put his bad temper to work and rallied the city’s militia. They held out long enough to be reinforced by Major General Benjamin Lincoln. The British lifted their siege.

   “He got the lake fever while we were camped outside the city,” Michael said. Deaths from diseases like malaria, dysentery, and smallpox far exceeded combat deaths during the war. “But he stayed in the saddle. We were ordered to retake Savannah.” 

   The British had captured the  city in late 1778 as part of their Southern Strategy. Savannah was a crucial port city, vital to Georgia’s cash crops of rice and tobacco. The Legion rode to Augusta where they were to join forces with the French, who had entered the war on the side of the Americans. Casimir Pulaski took command of the combined calvary forces.

   The Franco-American siege of Savannah was intense, one of the bloodiest battles of the Revolutionary War. It was marked by trench warfare and  artillery duels. The French unloaded cannons from their ships and bombarded the city for a week. “The appearance of the town afforded a sad prospect. There was hardly a house that had not been shot through.”

   The British were offered terms of surrender but politely refused. “The women and children have suffered beyond description,” an aide to Augustine Prevost, the general in command of the garrison, said. “Many poor creatures were killed trying to get to their cellars or hiding themselves under the bluff of the Savannah River.”

   Against advice from the Americans, and some of their own officers, the French launched a frontal assault on the morning of October 9th. Everything went wrong. A heavy fog rolled in. Troops got lost in the swamps. The redoubts outside the city, which the French believed to be defended by militia, were instead defended by British regulars. Redoubts were strongpoint fortifications lined with ditches and sharpened stakes. The Royal Engineers had put eight hundred slaves to work day and night constructing a twelve hundred foot long defensive line. 

   Before the assault Casimir Pulaski said, “I long to die for such a true cause. I wish to expire on a bed of glory. I wish to perish at my post.” The frontal assault was a disaster. The attackers never got beyond the defensive line.

   “He was rallying French troops who had gotten disorganized,” Michael said. “He rode up and down the front line, shouting and waving his sword. He got too close to one of the redoubts where they had six-pound field guns. They were firing grapeshot.” It was ammunition made up of small iron balls packed into a heavy cloth bag and rammed down the barrel of a cannon. When the cannon fired the bag disintegrated and the iron balls, like a giant shotgun blast, shredded everything and everybody in its path. “He was struck in the leg and groin.”

   Michael Radzevicius wheeled his horse around and galloped to the fallen Count, scooping him up. “He was bleeding like a stuck pig.” He carried him off the field of battle. He got him aboard the Wasp, a merchant privateer’s ship. “He never woke up. He died two days later. We buried him at sea.” The Father of American Cavalry was dead at the age of thirty four.

   The Americans and French suffered nearly a thousand dead and wounded at Savannah. The British suffered less than two hundred dead and wounded. They held on to the port city until the end of the eight year conflict. They left after they lost the war.

   “I left the next day. It wasn’t my war. The only pay I had ever gotten was useless Continental script. There wasn’t any reason for me to stay. There was land to be had for the taking in the west, the kind of land I would never have come by in Lithuania. It was the future for me.” The Proclamation Line of 1763 had been drawn by the British, using the Appalachian Mountains as a boundary to restrict colonial settlement, separating them from Native American territories after the French and Indian War. Michael meant to cross that line.

   “The British beat us at Savannah, but they were going to lose the war. It was plain as day. Every time one of their redcoats or Hessians was killed, their replacement had to come from across the ocean. Every time a colonial was killed his replacement came from over the next hill. Their Proclamation Line was going to come to nothing.”

   Michael rode away from Savannah leading Casimir Pulaski’s horse, which he was using as a pack animal, panniers filled with gear and supplies. He had a compass and followed its needle pointing westward. He left his master’s sword and red banner behind. He became his own master. The road leading away from the battle was littered with dead men. He knew the crows would be at them the minute he passed by. He put their croaks out of his mind as he rode towards the back country.

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

“Hell’s Kitchen”

New York City, 1956. Times Square, Coney Island, and the World Series. A high profile Mob contract in the works. Stan Riddman, a private eye working the edges, stirs up the shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Independent People

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By Ed Staskus

  When my wife’s cousin messaged us about Lithuanian Independence Day being celebrated at Cleveland’s City Hall on March 13th I was struck by two things. The last time I had gone to City Hall had been more than thirty years ago to get a marriage license. When I got there I found out I was in the wrong place. That was my chance, of course, but I didn’t take it. I was told to go next door to the Cuyahoga County Probate Court. The license cost me $60.00. It meant the loss of my autonomy but it was money well spent.

   The second thing that struck me was that March 13th wasn’t Lithuanian Independence Day. It had always been February 16th  for as long as I could remember. What had changed?  Were there two of them now?

   When I asked a friend of mine about it he said there are two such days, one dating from 1918 and the other one dating from 1990. “Two for the price of one,” he said. He was a funny fellow and I wondered if he was horsing around. It turned out he was right, although the second holiday was officially Lithuanian Restoration of Independence Day. Lithuania is forever breaking free of the Russians, who think any land the Neman River flows through is their land to have, even though the river doesn’t originate in Russia. It comes from Belarus. Close enough is what the Kremlin seems to think. The Dnieper River, which does originate in Russia, unfortunately for Ukraine flows through their country into the Black Sea.

   I found out some other countries have two and even three Independence Days. Latvia, Slovakia,  Azerbaijan, Turkey, and Rwanda all celebrate twice. Belarus celebrates three Independence Days, even though there is precious little freedom to be found in the Soviet-style country. The Belarusians probably pour down the vodka on those three days, tossing their empty bottles into the Nemen River.

   It is never easy finding a parking spot in downtown Cleveland, unless one is willing to pay parking garage prices. Since the fine for getting ticketed when the sidewalk meter hits zero is $50.00 we forked over what the parking garage wanted. We parked in the Willard Garage behind City Hall. Walking from where we had parked we passed Free Stamp on our way to the front doors. The art sculpture is on the lawn next to City Hall. It is very large. The stamp says FREE. We stopped in its shadow and looked up.

   The 35-ton, 28-foot-tall, 49-foot-wide sculpture is known as the world’s largest rubber stamp. It was originally commissioned by Sohio for their headquarters on Public Square. Claes Oldenburg and Coosie van Bruggen fabricated the thing. When Sohio became BP they decided they no longer wanted it. Free is a dirty word in the oil and gas business. They gave it away to the city and wrote it off their taxes. It was installed on its side, as though it had been thrown down from the top of the 45-story BP Building.

   City Hall is a 5-story Beaux-Arts style building. The exterior is Vermont granite. It was built in 1916 as part of the 1903 Group Plan. It was the first building built for and owned by the city. The entrance hall features a mahogany-beamed ceiling. There are natural light wells. The vaulted ceiling of the rotunda is a series of skylights. The walls of the rotunda are creamy Botticino marble, gotten from northern Italy, and the floors are Tennessee pink marble. We looked the place up and down. It looked historic because it is historic. City Hall was designated a landmark in 1978. 

   The event was sponsored by the Cleveland Chapter of the Lithuanian American Community and the Lithuanian Consulate. The Lithuanian flag was flying in front of City Hall. It was a blustery  day and the flag in the wind was flapping horizontally to the ground. The first person we bumped into inside City Hall was Gaja Bublys. She was dressed in native garb.

   “I’m dancing with  Svyturys after the speeches,” she explained. 

   Svyturys is a Cleveland-based folk dance group. Its name means beacon. They perform in traditional costumes, their dances revolving around folklore, courtship, and country life. One of their best numbers is the Dance of the Little Witches. The group is comprised of about fifty dancers, ranging from youngsters to adults. They perform throughout North America and have appeared in Europe. The program at City Hall featured twelve adult dancers.

   Gaja was the master of ceremonies as well as one of the dancers, welcoming the gathering and introducing the speakers when their turn came to come to the podium. She stepped up to the microphone.

   “Tonight, together, we celebrate a nation, Lithuania, where history has been shaped by courage and an unbreakable commitment to liberty. Today, Lithuania is free, democratic, and firmly rooted in the community of nations. We are reminded that our two nations, Lithuania and the United States, are separated by an ocean but united by their shared affirmation of liberty.”

   When she was done everybody stood up and sang the national anthem of Lithuania, in the Lithuanian language.

   “Lithuania, our homeland, land of worthy heroes, may your sons draw strength, from your past experience, may your children always choose the paths of virtue, may they work towards your good, and that of all people.” 

   Then everybody sang the national anthem of the United States, in the English language.

   “O say can you see, by the dawn’s early light, what so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming, whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight, o’er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?”

   Ingrid Bublys, Gaja’s mother, who is an Honorary General Consul of the Republic of Lithuania, and a leader of Cleveland’s Lithuanian community, was one of the organizers of the gathering. “As we come together to celebrate Lithuania’s restored independence, we are reminded that freedom is both precious and hard-won. Our community comes together not only to honor our history, but to reaffirm the enduring spirit, resilience, and unity of the Lithuanian people, here in Cleveland and across the world.”

   The invocation was by Father Andrew Markunas of St. Casimir’s Church in North Collinwood. He sported a pony tail, which surprised me. Lithuanians are by and large conservative, if not very conservative. When I was growing up a pony tail was anathema. It meant you didn’t believe in decency and the Republican Party anymore. It meant you had gone off the rails. The landscape, at least sartorially, has changed. Ponytails are accepted. Decency is the same as it has always been. Haircuts never had anything to do with it. The Republican Party is different, like chalk and cheese.

   “Brothers and sisters, as we celebrate independence, please join in prayer,” Father Markunas said. “Let us ask for our Lord’s blessing, trusting in God’s mercy on the homeland and all its people. Let us pray. Merciful God, hear our prayers that we raise up to you, with trust in Christ our Lord and the intercession of St. Casimir, the patron saint of Lithuania.”

   I grew up a Roman Catholic, which is a monotheistic religion. Lithuanians were the last European pagans to convert to Christianity. Before they did they believed in a pantheon of nature gods. When I grew up I began to wonder about Rome’s singular and supreme deity. Why was there a Holy Trinity? It seemed like two too many. Why did everybody pray to saints when interacting with Heaven about their practical problems? That’s what the pagans used to do when they appealed to the lesser gods. I soon realized I was no philosopher and gave up asking twenty questions.

   A representative of Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb said a few words. A representative of Ohio Governor Mike DeWine said a few words. Michael Polensek came to the podium. He is the longest-serving member of City Council in Cleveland’s history, serving since 1978. The elder statesman is known as the Dean of Council.

   “Labas, hello, and welcome to my home away from home,” he said. “Having Lithuanians here is always a special occasion because I have the pleasure of representing the largest population of them in the city in Ward 10. I was in this very building in 1990 meeting with the Lithuanian community doing everything we could to support Lithuania’s independence. Thirty six years later we all know what threats we face. Lithuania never gave in, never gave up.”

   Lithuania was controlled by the Russian Empire from 1795 to 1918 and by the Soviet Union from 1944 to 1990. The country endured social, cultural, and political oppression. The Soviet Union engaged in mass deportations and effacement of the country’s national identity. They tried to rub the identity out but the communist eraser got worn and stale. Lithuania was the first Soviet Republic to declare its independence from Moscow in 1990.  It was a black swan event. The dominoes were about to begin falling. 

   Mikhail Gorbachev denounced Lithuania’s declaration of independence. He called it “invalid.” Lithuania ignored the denunciation. Some said Mikhail Gorbachev was invalid. The Soviet Union cut off most of its oil and natural gas deliveries. Lithuania soldiered on in the cold. A year later, during the Vilnius Massacre, fourteen Lithuanians were killed and hundreds more injured by Russian armed forces. Resistance only intensified. The other Baltic nations joined the cause. More Soviet republics began to clamor for freedom. Separatist movements sprang up everywhere in Eastern Europe. When liberation happened it happened fast. The Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991. The Iron Curtain was drawn back for all to see what had been going on in the shadows.

   Joe Cimperman followed Michael Polensek. A former 18-year member of City Council he today is President and CEO of Global Cleveland, which focuses on supporting refugees and immigrants in conjunction with fostering economic growth. Born into an immigrant family, he is known for encouraging diversity in northeast Ohio.

   “I was raised in the Slovenian St. Vitus community. A few blocks away was the Lithuanian St. George community. We are here tonight because the people of Lithuania have always been the people of freedom. They were the first nation to tell the Soviet Union, no, and had the courage to break away. Most people thought they would be crushed under the heel of communism, but not the Lithuanians. To our Ukrainian friends who are here tonight, I say, in the end the good guys actually win. God bless you, may Lithuania and freedom live forever.”

   The keynote speaker was Regimantas Jablonskas, General Consul of the Republic of Lithuania. There are three general consuls in the United States, one in New York, one in Los Angeles, and one in Chicago. They promote trade and foster commercial cooperation, as well as issue Lithuanian passports and offer legal aid to the diaspora. Regimantas Jablonskas had come to Cleveland from Chicago for the occasion.

   “Dear friends, it is an honor for me to be here. After fifty years of Soviet occupation the day we declared independence opened opportunities for freedom, dignity, and self-expression. The news about what happened in Lithuania spread throughout the world. It was an historic moment in the belief in democracy, the belief of a people to rule themselves, to think freely and speak freely   It remains one of the greatest victories of our society. This year America celebrates the 250th year of its independence. The principles expressed in the Declaration of Independence, liberty, equality, the right to self-determination, inspired many nations in the world, including Lithuania. Today the voice of our country is alive. The next generation has been born into freedom. We are proud of our journey. Let us resolve to always support democracy.” 

  Svyturys performed four dances, one of them a sutartines, solemn walking and precise patterns, the men carrying faux torches, and another one of them akin to a barn dance. The footwork was lively. There was a hors d’oeuvres buffet afterwards, traditional food catered by Gintaras, the restaurant at the Lithuanian Club in North Collinwood.

   We drove home on the Shoreway instead of I-90. The road runs along the south coast of Lake Erie. We circled Public Square first, to see if the Terminal Tower was thematically lit up. The building is often bathed in custom colors for special occasions. When we drove past it was lit up in yellow, green, and red, the colors of Lithuania’s flag. Yellow represents the sun and goodness. Green represents the countryside and hope for the future. Red represents love of home and the bravery of those who have fought for the homeland.

   As we turned to get back on Superior Ave. I tooted our car horn to salute the Terminal Tower. It was a busy Friday night downtown. A car full of party people going the other way tooted their horn in response. We slipped into a stream of traffic headed for Ohio City, the same way we were going to reach the Shoreway, and under a windswept sky that had opened up and was full of stars over the dark lake made our way home.

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

“Hell’s Kitchen”

New York City, 1956. Times Square, Coney Island ,and the World Series. A high profile Mob contract in the works. Stan Riddman, a private eye working the edges, stirs up the shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Shopping a Baby

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By Ed Staskus

    I was taking a walk around the perimeter of Madison Park across the street from the Lake Erie Screw Building when my Nokia rang. I was on my lunch break. It was practically the first call on my first cell phone. One of the guys in the warehouse called it a candy bar phone because it looked like a candy bar. All the top salesmen had  gotten a cell phone earlier in the year. I wasn’t one of them. I wasn’t especially good at slapping backs and kissing babies.

   My brother, Rick, was the top salesman at Light Bulb Supply. Kevin and John were officially the barrow boys, but they were that by reason of being brothers of the woman who married the man who owned the company. It pays to be who you know.

   Rick was the moneymaker because he would do or say anything to make a sale. We sold everything related to light bulbs, from illumination to disinfection, from grow lights to tanning bulbs. Sales of tanning bulbs were going through the roof. Rick parked himself on that roof. He refused to take any calls that weren’t for tanning bulbs. When they came in he jumped on them like a hophead.

   I was taking a walk partly because I always did when the weather allowed and partly because I needed to cool off. Rick had told a tanning bulb customer who had come into our Will Call, a customer I had developed by phone, who was placing a seven thousand dollar order, that he was me. He wrote up the order and got the commission. The owner of the company didn’t care whose name was on the order so long as the check was made out to Light Bulb Supply.

   “I didn’t know he was yours,” Rick said.

   “Whatever you say.”

   I was rounding the swimming pool at Madison Park, on my way back to the Screw Building, when my new cell phone rang. I sat down on the lip of a water slide and answered the call. It was my sister Rita. She was calling from Born to Travel, the travel agency she worked at.

   “Can you drive dad and me to the airport tomorrow?”

   “Sure, I can arrange that.”

   “Thanks so much.” 

   “Where are you going?”

   “Lithuania.”

   “Who is he visiting this time?”

   “He’s not, he’s going to buy a baby.”

   “He’s buying a baby?”

   “Not exactly, although he is going there to arrange for one.”

   “Mom and dad are a little old for a baby.” My mother was nearly seventy years old while my father was definitely in his early seventies.

   “It’s not for them.”

   “Is this like the head of Lenin that dad got for Russell Bundy?”

   “Kind of, but it’s not for him, it’s for his daughter.”

   Russell Bundy was a businessman from Urbana in southern Ohio. He operated a large manufacturing business, which was Bundy Baking Solutions. He had seven children. One of them, Beth, had married, but when she and her husband Joe decided to have a child, discovered they couldn’t. No matter what they tried they couldn’t negotiate a bun into the oven.

   Beth and Joe had tried finding a newborn to adopt in the United States, but it had proven to be difficult. There was a low supply of them and a high number of prospective parents. There was a long waiting list. They thought it might be easier to accomplish in Eastern Europe. Russell Bundy hired my father to smooth the way.

   Russell Bundy, my father, and my mother had made an exploratory visit to Lithuania a month earlier. My mother took an extra suitcase stuffed with jeans and cartons of cigarettes for our relatives. Russell Bundy took an extra suitcase full of candy. He passed the candy out at the orphanages they visited. The kids liked the candy, but he wasn’t able to strike a deal. My father found someone who could make it happen. He had been born and bred in Lithuania and knew his way around.

   “Dad calls her the Baby Middleman.”

   “l let you know when I have baby for you,” she told Russell Bundy.

   “How long will it take?”

   “Not long, you will see.”

   Russell Bundy flew back to his corner office in Urbana. My parents flew back to Cleveland.  My father was tasked with seeing the business through. It didn’t take long. “I have baby for you, born yesterday,” the Baby Middleman told my father three weeks later. “You must come right away.”

   The baby cost twenty one thousand dollars. It amounted to eighty four thousand litai. The litas was Lithuania’s currency. The average annual wage in Lithuania was three thousand litai. The baby was costing twenty eight times the average annual wage in Lithuania. Russell Bundy wired the money. 

   I drove Rita and my father to Hopkins International Airport. They flew off without incident. I went back to selling light bulbs. A month later Rita and I were at our parent’s house having dinner. My mother had made koldunai, which are Lithuanian dumplings smothered in bits of bacon and spoonfuls of sour cream. They were what we had grown up on.

   “Did you get a baby for Bundy?” I asked.

   “It wasn’t easy, but we got her,” Rita said.

   “What wasn’t easy about it?”

   “Dad and I flew to Vilnius and we went straight to the hospital. Beth and Joe were coming in a few days so we wanted to get everything arranged. The hospital was Soviet style, shabby and depressing. We parked in the back.”  A group of male nurses were smoking Balomorkanals outside the door. The cheap tobacco was at one end of the cigarette and at the other end was a hollow cardboard tube through which to suck the smoke. 

   “They looked me up and down. I remember thinking, I’m just going to act cool. We asked for the doctor we were supposed to see. She was small, gray haired, with lots of wrinkles. She told us the mother had given birth one day and slipped out of the hospital the next day. She left the baby behind. Dad and she talked some more and then she asked me why I hadn’t made a baby for our American friends.”

   “That’s a strange question to ask a total stranger.”

     “I didn’t know what to say, so I said, I’m only along for the ride. Dad asked to see the baby but the doctor said no.  I thought, uh-oh, there is no baby. It was tense but she finally brought it. She was wrapped up like a mummy. Only her little head was sticking out. The doctor wouldn’t let us hold her. Maybe she thought we were going to run away with her. Then she started telling dad that another couple from Denmark wanted the baby and they were willing to pay extra. They had volunteered to buy some equipment for the hospital. Dad didn’t like that. He said, wait a minute, but she wouldn’t let it go.”  

   “How much do you want?” my father finally asked. Before he retired he had been a certified public accountant. He knew when to get down to brass tacks.

   “She wouldn’t say it out loud, no matter how many times he asked her, so dad pushed a notepad towards her.”

   “Why don’t you write down how much this equipment is going to cost,” he said.

   “She wrote it down, dad looked at it, stood up, and slammed the notepad down on the table. No, that’s not right! We agreed on a price. We paid the price. We’re not paying any more. He was so angry.”

   They were staying at the Sarunas Hotel in downtown Vilnius. The recently opened hotel was launched in 1992 by the famous Lithuanian basketball player Šarūnas Marčiulionis. It was where many foreign businessmen stayed when doing business in post-independence Lithuania. The country was busy transitioning to capitalism. 

   “When we got to our room dad called the Baby Middleman but she didn’t answer her phone. He called  over and over, pacing back and forth. He wore out the carpeting. He finally reached her late at night and told her what had happened.”

   The money Russel Bundy had wired had been wired to her. She was supposed to pay the hospital when the baby was delivered to Beth and Joe. My father reminded her that they had an agreement and that he had done his part. It was up to her to do her part.

   “Meet me at ten o’clock tomorrow morning at Canteen Broth,” she said. “It’s a café. Come alone.”

   The next morning, one of our uncles at the wheel of his car, his son beside him, and my father and Rita in the back seat, were sitting squeezed together in the small car at the curb of Canteen Broth. It opened at ten o‘clock.

   “The lady walked up to our car and dad rolled his window down. She looked at us one at a time. She pointed to dad and said ‘Just you.’ They went inside. They were inside so long I fell asleep. When they came out they were smiling. When they shook hands I thought, good, it’s done.”

   “Was it done?” 

   “Yes, they got the baby, no problem. Dad didn’t tell me how it got accomplished.” Our father often kept things close to the vest.

   The next day, while Beth, Joe, and my father took care of the red tape, Rita went for a long walk around Vilnius. It was a cloudless day, warm and sunny. In the summer the sun sets at around ten o’clock. In the winter the sun sets at around four o’clock. It was summer.

   “Our uncle said to call him if I needed a ride back to the hotel. I walked all around the Old Town.” She went to see the Gediminas Castle Tower and the Gates of Dawn. The gate is one of nine leading into the city. It features an icon of the Virgin Mary and is a major site of Catholic pilgrimages to this day. Gates of Dawn is also the name of a classic Pink Floyd album. Fans of Pink Floyd make their own idiosyncratic pilgrimages.

   Rita asked two men standing on a street corner where the Church of Sts. Peter and Paul was. “One of them said it was that way. He turned to point that way and lost his balance. He reeked of vodka.” It was the middle of the afternoon. “He fell over and passed out. His friend stood there smiling and looking down at him.”

   She took a break and sat in the silence of the airy and bright nave. It was a classic Baroque church. Lithuanians were the last Europeans to convert from paganism to Christianity. It happened in the late 14rth century. Grand Duke Jogaila ordered it done for dynastic reasons. Nobody believed in the powers of the White Christ, at least not then. Monks and priests eventually put the fear of God in them. The church was built in the 17th century to commemorate a victory over the Russians and their expulsion from Vilnius. There were two thousand stucco figures inside the church. They glowed in the light pouring in through the high windows. None of them ever said anything about anything.

   “When I went to call our uncle I didn’t have any money for a pay phone. All I had was my credit card. I stopped at a shop. It was called Kavine.” The word means coffee in the native tongue. “I asked if I could use their phone, speaking in Lithuanian. The man behind the counter was reading a newspaper. He didn’t even look up when he said no. I went to another place, same thing, except this time the woman there said they didn’t have a phone, even though I could see a phone behind her. When I stopped into a third place I spoke English instead of Lithuanian. The man there said, ‘Anything you need.’ I was offered complimentary coffee and a pastry while I waited for the phone to become available.”

   Beth bought two pairs of footsie pajamas and a hat for the baby. Joe packed for their return trip. Rita packed her clothes and some souvenirs. They drove to Vilnius Airport. The terminal dated to the 1950s, built in a drab Stalinist style. There was already talk that it was a symbol of the past and had to be updated, the sooner the better.

   “Dad stayed in Lithuania for a few days while I flew back with Beth and Joe.” They flew from Vilnius to Helsinki to New York City to Cleveland. “Crossing the Atlantic I happened to  be in first class with the baby. Beth and Joe were just behind me in coach. I could hear them. They were arguing about what was packed in their suitcases. It was one thing or another the whole flight. I found out later they argued all the time.”

   “What did they name the baby?” I asked, putting my fork and knife down and pushing my empty plate away. I dabbed a spot of sour cream from the corner of my mouth.

   “Hannah.”

   The name means grace in Hebrew and bliss in Arabic. It doesn’t mean anything in the Lithuanian language.

   “That’s s fine name,” I said.

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

“Hell’s Kitchen”

New York City, 1956. Times Square, Coney Island, and the World Series. A high profile Mob contract in the works. Stan Riddman, a private eye working the edges, stirs up the shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

The Day Before Siauliai

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By Ed Staskus

   It was the morning of the equinox, the halves of day and night balanced. The sun was exactly above the equator almost four thousand miles away. It was the end of summer. The Azores High might be coming back soon, auguring an Indian summer, but for now the outdoors was wet and cold. It was once thought otherworldly things happened on the equinox, things like Gediminas, the Grand Duke of Lithuania, dreaming about an iron wolf foretelling the building of Vilnius. Since then residents of the capital celebrated the equinox and Duke Gediminas Day, the birthday of Vilnius, on the last weekend of the month. On Sunday night, at the end of the festivities, a straw billy goat, a symbol of fruitfulness, was ceremonially burnt.

   It was the first anniversary of his wife’s death and Ignas Petrauskas had gotten up early, ordered flowers, eaten breakfast, and drank a cup of strong coffee while skimming through the national newspaper, Echo of Lithuania. When he was done with his second cup he would go to the Rasos Cemetery and lay the flowers at his wife’s grave. The coffee was good. The newspaper was filled with bad news. He put it aside. He looked out the window at the Vilnia River.

   He lived in Uzupis on the east side of the river across from the Old Town of Vilnius. It was a small apartment on the riverbank, but modern, unlike most of the neighborhood, which was the worse for wear, although it was slowly being gentrified. In the meantime it was filled with bohemians and artists from the nearby Vilnius Academy of the Arts. A statue of the American musician Frank Zappa was around the corner, erected by local artists proclaiming the spirit of the place. They called their place the Republic of Uzupis.

   There was a plaque on nearby Paupio St. that read, “Everyone has the right to hot water, heating in winter, and a tiled roof. A cat is not obliged to love its owner, but must help in time of need. Everyone has the right to be unique.” Most of the inhabitants of Uzupis, which meant “beyond the river”, lived there because the rent was dirt cheap. Some squatted free of charge anywhere a landlord was non-existent. Ignas wasn’t a bohemian or an artist. He was a police detective assigned to the General Prosecutor’s Office. 

   He wasn’t bothered by the idiosyncrasies or rough and tumble of Uzupis  He had served as a military policeman with the Komendantskaya Sluzhba in Afghanistan in the mid-1980s during the Red Army occupation of the Central Asian country. A yellow letter “K” on a red patch worn on his right sleeve made sure everybody knew what his job was. He had not been able to settle the question during his two-year tour of duty of who was worse, the Mujahadeen or the Soviet Armed Forces. He finally resolved the question by cursing the both of them.

   “Velniai griebtu” is what he said. He meant “May devils grab you.”

   He got married soon after returning to Lithuania, to Birute, a girl from his hometown of Kintai on the east side of the Curonian Lagoon. When the Russians were uprooted after more than four decades of occupation, and a new Law on Police was enacted, providing a legal basis for a Lithuanian police force, they moved to Vilnius. It was at the other end of the country from Smiltyne. He joined the force, making his way up the ladder to the Criminal Police. He briefly worked with the Organized Crime Bureau before being assigned to the General Prosecutor’s Office..

   Ignas bought his new apartment after Birute’s death. He sold their house. It had become lonely, full of nothing but memories. No matter how good the memory it was like the flake of a broken mirror. His marriage to Birute had been good. They understood each other. He liked the way she smelled. They liked getting into bed together at night and getting up together in the morning. They went for walks on summer weekends to Story Park where there were wooden sculptures based on folklore and Hill Park where they picnicked at the Hill of Three Crosses. They made each other laugh. Now she was gone forever. A long year had gone by but it still seemed like forever.

   He visited her grave once a month. Rasos Cemetery was the oldest graveyard inside the city limits of Vilnius, going back to 1801, when the first person, Jonas Muller, the Burgomaster of the city, was buried there. New burials were restricted to family graves, but since one of Birute’s grandfathers was buried there near Jonas Basanavicius, editor of the first Lithuanian-language newspaper and one of the signers of the Act of Independence in 1918, Ignas had been allowed to bury his wife there.

   Somebody had swerved onto the sidewalk outside their house late one night when Birute was walking home and struck her. It was a hit-and-run. She might have lived if she had been found sooner and treated. She died of internal bleeding. The car was found a week later on the grounds of the abandoned ELFA Electro Technics factory. It had been reported stolen two weeks before, by a professor in the Centre of Oriental Studies at Vilnius University. He had been in Paris the night of the hit-and-run. There were no fingerprints of any kind on the steering wheel and no fingerprints except those of the owner anywhere else. 

   A blonde hair was found on the driver’s seat head restraint. DNA testing wasn’t available in Lithuania. The hair was sent to Interpol in Lyon, France, which had begun standardizing DNA techniques in the early 1990s. “We’ve been quietly sending saliva samples to them since then,” the chief of the Organized Crime Bureau told Ignas. Interpol came up with a match, but the match didn’t make sense.

   “The DNA matches Boris Dekanidze, even though the analysis shows it came from a female’s head.”

   “How can that be? He’s been dead since 1995.”

   Ignas had worked on the case that led to the gangster Boris Dekanidze’s arrest and execution. He had been the one on the team who apprehended and handcuffed the man and delivered him up for interrogation.

   “Could it be somebody from his family?”

   “If it’s a woman’s hair it wasn’t his father. He’s as corrupt as all that gold he wears, but he’s a gray beard, and besides, I can’t see him doing anything like that himself. It couldn’t have been a sibling, there are none, not that we know of, and he was too much of a playboy to ever have had children. Even if there was a sibling, or a child, the DNA match wouldn’t be one hundred percent. It would be more like fifty percent.”

   “So what are we looking at?

   “I don’t know.”

   Birute’s death eventually became a cold case, although it never became that in Ignas’s mind. There will be blood is what stayed on his mind. He knew bad thoughts bore bad fruit but he meant to have an eye for an eye.

   He always walked to the cemetery. It was less than a half hour from his apartment. He put on a pair of boots and a leather coat. It was a utility coat with snap closures and front flap pockets. He positioned a hat with a downwards-sloping brim on his head. As soon as he stepped out the door, however, it started raining harder. It was much windier than he thought it would be. Heavy rain drops drummed on the crown of his hat. He walked across the bridge to the Old Town and caught the No. 89 bus to the cemetery.

   Rasos Cemetery was located on two hills with a valley separating the hills. Birute was buried on one of the hills. He took a footpath he knew by heart. By the time he got to Birute’s grave the wind had died down. He pulled his flowers out of the plastic grocery bag he had brought them in. They were rues with bright yellow cup-shaped blooms, tied together with a black ribbon. The flowers were believed to ward off evil. He lay them down.

   Ignas stood in front of the headstone quietly for ten minutes. He didn’t notice that it had stopped raining. When he was ready to leave he stepped up to the headstone and laid his hand on top of it. He had often rested a hand on Birute’s thigh when they were together on the sofa in their living room, she sewing and he reading. The memory made him feel empty as an echo. 

   He took the same footpath leaving Rasos Cemetery, but since the bad weather had taken a break he walked back to Uzupis instead of taking the bus. He put his hat, boots, and leather coat away. He mixed a drink of vodka. honey, and cinnamon in a water glass to warm himself up. He sat down. Heavy clouds shortened the afternoon. He watched the rain coming back through the glass door leading to the balcony. He made another drink. It got dark the minute sunset happened and he got sleepy. He fell asleep.

   Ignas woke up to the sound of the telephone ringing. He was surprised it hadn’t stopped ringing by the time he got to it. It was past nine o’clock. He lifted the receiver, wiping away a soggy spot from the corner of his mouth.

   “Labas,” he said.

   “Labas,” the voice of his boss in the General Prosecutor’s Office said.

   “How is everything?”

   “As good as can be expected.”

   “Is something going on?”

   “Yes, I need you to go to Siauliai.”

   “What’s happened?”

   “An American has been found dead.”

   “That’s not good.”

   “No, it is not. An agreement on investment with the United States has just been arrived at and now this. Their embassy has been informed about the death, but we are leading the investigation.”

   “What about the Criminal Police?”

   “They are deferring to us on this one. They suggested you.”

   “Why me?”

   “You have experience with criminal gangs and the Russians.”

   “Are they involved?”

   “Siauliai seems to think they might be, one of their dirty tricks, although I don’t know. It might be they’re playing pin the tail on the donkey.  I don’t put it past the Russians, but they’ve got their own problems right now, what with Chechnya and the ruble going downhill. The whole country is a petrol station run by gangsters pretending to be a nation.”

   Ignas laughed to himself. He thought that without their oil and natural gas they would be back in the Middle Ages.

   “Was it murder?”

   “I  can’t say for sure, but, yes, it seems so. The local police aren’t saying much, although they did pass on it was the third such death recently. The other two were residents.”

   “Are they saying the deaths were similar?”

   “Yes.”

   “How soon do you need me there?”

   “As soon as possible, Go as soon as there’s light.”

   Siauliai was two hundred-some kilometers from Vilnius, which meant between two and three hours of driving, as long as the road hadn’t caved in somewhere along the way. Sunrise was at about seven o’clock. If he was on the way by then he would be in Siauliai no later than ten in the morning.

   “Am I going alone?”

   “For now, yes. If you need help, call me, I’ll send a second man.”

   “All right.”

   After Ignas’s boss hung up he went to the bathroom, washed his hands and face, brushed his teeth, and slipped into a pair of pajamas. He got into bed. He lay there unable to fall asleep. He had spent many sleepless nights since Birute’s death. He missed the smell of her and the sound of her breathing. He missed the feel of her pressed up against him. He missed her heartbeat. He felt lonely in the dark. He got up and sat on the side of the bed. 

   He took thirty steady breaths and then another thirty. It was something he had learned to do. He wasn’t going to be any good in the morning if he didn’t get some sleep. There was a framed photograph of Birute on the dresser. He got it and put it face up on the other pillow. He got back under the covers and soon fell asleep.

   The rain stopped sometime before dawn. On the heels of the rain the rest of the cold front blew in from the Baltic Sea. The wind got gusty. It snapped tree branches. When the alarm clock went off Ignas turned it off. He got up, shaved, brushed his teeth again, and put together his two travel bags, one of them toiletries and clothes and the other one his investigation kit. The tools in the kit included measuring tape, a flashlight, magnifying glass, notebooks and pens, a recorder, binoculars, a fingerprint kit with lift tape, tweezers, forceps, glass vials, a scalpel, chalk, evidence bags, and a 35mm camera loaded with color print film.

   He checked his Browning Mark III. It was a 9mm pistol with a thirteen round magazine. He packed an extra magazine. When he was working he carried the black pistol in a hip holster. He attached the holster to his belt. He turned off all the lights and locked the door of his apartment. When he got into his Audi five-door wagon he saw he needed fuel. There was a Statoil station two or three minutes away. He drove to it and filled up with diesel. 

   He pulled over to the side and unfolded a road map. The A2 would take him to Panevezys. From there he would take the A9 to Siauliai. He would stop along the way for coffee. He had neglected to bring a hat. He would have to buy a new one. He might look for a flat tweed cap like men in Scotland wear. There they say “It’s Baltic today” whenever there is bad weather. He didn’t think the weather was going to get any better where he was going anytime soon.

Excerpted from the crime novel A Murder of Crows.

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

“Hell’s Kitchen”

New York City, 1956. Times Square, Coney Island, and the World Series. A high profile Mob contract in the works. Stan Riddman, a private eye working the edges, stirs up the shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

A Song is Born

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By Ed Staskus

   The Terminal Tower on Public Square was all lit up the day it was dedicated in 1930. An oversized strobe light on top of the tower went round and round in circles. All through the decade the light helped ore freighters find their way to the Port of Cleveland. Airplane pilots used it as a beacon to locate the Cleveland Municipal Airport.

   All the external lights were turned off at the start of World War Two and not turned back on again until 1974, nearly thirty years after the war ended. Nobody knows why, although it was most likely to save money while the city’s post-war economy struggled. Today the landmark skyscraper’s lights are hundreds of LED’s that can be configured into all kinds of color schemes.  The week leading up the 11th International Lithuanian Song Festival the lights were configured in red, green, and yellow. They are the colors of the Lithuanian flag.

   The earliest Lithuanian flags were war flags in the 15th century. They were red banners usually depicting an armored knight on horseback. He bore a shield and an upraised sword. The tricolor flag goes back to 1918, during Lithuania’s first period of independence in the 20th century. After 1944, when the Russians again occupied the country, it was changed to a garden-variety Soviet flag. The tricolor was resurrected in 1988, two years before the re-establishment of the country’s independence. The Russians didn’t like it, but by then they couldn’t do much about it.

   The first Lithuanian Song Day was staged in 1924 in Kaunas, then the capital of the country. Choirs advertised for new members, stipulating that they “should have good voices so as not to take up unnecessary space.” They were instructed to pronounce sounds clearly and not tap their feet to the beat. Three thousand singers eventually sang and ten thousand listeners listened. 

   The event unfolded on the Square of Games and Parades, which was a field where units of the Lithuanian Army often marched around. Wooden towers resembling ancient castles were built. Two holes were dug and made into ponds so as to improve the acoustics. An Agricultural Fair was held the same weekend. There were plenty of cured sausages and there was plenty of vodka. When the singing was over men and women belted out the national anthem in the night while “walking away staggering and holding on to each other.”

   Afterwards one of the organizers said, “As long as I have been alive, and I have been alive for a very long time, I have not heard anyone sing the national anthem so perfectly.” It was unclear whether he meant the choristers or the late night revelers.

   Song Day moved to Vilnius in 1946, which had been restored as the capital, where it remains to this day. It has become a major cultural event known as the Lithuanian Song and Dance Festival. It is produced every four years. The event in 2024 featured twelve thousand singers in four hundred and fifty choirs. More than one hundred thousand people attended. The live stream was viewed by three hundred thousand people. It is on the UNESCO list of the Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. 

   The international version of the song festival continues the tradition among the diaspora in North America. It has been staged twice in Toronto and eight times in Chicago since the 1950s.The 2025 host city was Cleveland, after ten years of there not having been a festival. It was the first time the songfest was staged in northeastern Ohio.

    “It’s just amazing,” said Festival Artistic Director Kristina Kliorys. “I’m so proud as a native Clevelander that it’s finally come here. It’s very central to a lot of these Lithuanian communities in Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Toronto.”

   The festival brought one thousand five hundred choristers in sixty five choirs together to celebrate Lithuanian musical heritage. They were joined by an orchestra of traditional Lithuanian folk instruments as well as performances by one hundred folk dancers. “Our song festival is the literal coming together of a nation in song,” said co-director Aleksandras Stankevicius. “Choirs of many ages gather to perform a single, coordinated repertoire, expressing their shared love of music and the vitality of their culture, nationality.”

   The choirs came from all over. “We come together in both small and large groups,” said Nijole Benotas, a Toronto-based media liaison. “We call ourselves a choir and we sing. Our soul feels a goodness, a peacefulness, as though through song we have returned home. Perhaps some outsiders will think it is strange to see a singing group with five members, or a choir where adults, youths, and children sing together as though they were a family. For those of us living in the North American diaspora, such groups are not uncommon and cause us no surprise. The festival organizers have welcomed everyone and are delighted to have enthusiastic performers and choir leaders. And especially important, our school and youth choir singers are the new generation. They will be the creators and singers of future Song Festivals, and, like us, will continue to carry the legacy – traditions, language, song, and Lithuanian identity – for many years to come.”

   The theme song of the Song Festival in the Rock ‘n’ Roll Capital of the World was “One Family – One Nation.” It was composed by native Clevelanders, the music by  Rita Cyvaite-Klioriene and the lyrics by Nijole Kernauskaite. The through line was “Our homeland will live on, across the seas the earth cries out to us to be strong.”

   “We’re very excited that Cleveland was chosen as the host for this Song Festival,” said Ingrid Bublys, a Clevelander who is an Honorary General Consul of the Republic of Lithuania. “Since 1993, Cleveland and Klaipeda, Lithuania’s seaport, are sister cities. Many Lithuanians in Cleveland contribute to the community’s artistic, cultural, and commercial scene. Song is the mother of all languages. Just to experience the voices of all those choristers and Lithuanian national instruments is a gift rarely available. We’re proud to showcase our culture and celebrate together in song. Our songs speak of the beauty of our country and the yearning to be free. Through song, we hope to introduce others to this ageless country by the Baltic Sea.”

   The festival ran for three days. There was a welcoming party at Windows on the River on Friday. There was a separate Voices of Lithuania concert on Saturday. There was a Roman Catholic mass performed at Public Auditorium on Sunday morning. When the festival closed there was dinner and dancing. Toasts were made and glasses hoisted. The festivities lasted past midnight.

   There were thirty seven songs sung during the culminating show on Sunday at Cleveland’s Public Auditorium. “We also had translations on screens and in a printed program so folks knew what we were singing about.” Kristina Kliorys said. The show started with a  prayer and the national anthems of Canada, the United States, and Lithuania. The program was in four parts. The parts were: We Were Born Lithuanian; The Place of My Dreams; And the Sun Rose, Again Awaking the World; and Let’s Open the Hope Chest of Song and Dance.

   “When the displaced people fled Lithuania, they hoped to return,” Ramute Kemežaitė-Kazlauskienė said. “They didn’t want to leave. But once they arrived in the United States or Canada, preserving their Lithuanian identity became paramount. I got chills from head to toe during the festival. Lithuanian song lives in my heart and in my home, passed down from my mother.” Songs can be a lifeline. They vibrate in memory, like time capsules.

   “I was born in Kaunas just before the end of the war. My family fled, and I grew up in America,” Sister Ignė Marijošiūtė said. “When you lose a part of your cultural identity, you long for it. In the diaspora, you must choose to preserve it. Song and dance are essential.”

   “This is the biggest event every Lithuanian chorister waits for,” Asta Vaičekonienė, director of the Seattle Lithuanian Choir, said. “We sing with deep emotion, because through song we touch the soul of Lithuania, even its very soil.” It’s been said that music and song are the speech of angels. The songs of Lithuania are songs of love for the land on the Baltic Sea.

   “People scattered across North America come together at these festivals, whether for song or dance, to celebrate and reconnect,” Darius Polikaitis, a conductor and choir master from Chicago, said. “There’s a kind of spiritual uplift in that shared experience.” 

   Kristina Kliorys said the Song Festival fit in perfectly among Cleveland’s melting pot of ethnic communities. There are more than a hundred such communities in Cleveland, from Hungarians and Armenians to Arabs and Puerto Ricans. The Cultural Gardens along a two-mile stretch of MLK Jr. Drive are one-of-a-kind, the only public garden system of their description in the country.

   “It is just so powerful and moving to have the synchronicity of that many people just making music together at the same time,” Kristina Kliorys said. “It’s just so uniting and so beautiful bringing us together. We really need peace, unity, and togetherness these days.”

   When people get together to celebrate togetherness, great things can happen.

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

“Hell’s Kitchen”

New York City, 1956. Times Square, Coney Island, and the World Series. A high profile Mob contract in the works. Stan Riddman, a private eye working the edges, stirs up the shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Bring Me the Head of Lenin

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By Ed Staskus

   When my sister Rita told me our father was going to Lithuania to bring back the head of Vladimir Lenin, I was astonished. Lenin, who had died seventy some years earlier, was far more reviled than revered among Lithuanians. Most Lithuanians saw him as a callous ideologue whose policies led to another Russian occupation of their country in the 1940s. He was as bad as the Tsars. They blamed him for Josef Stalin, who ordered mass deportations whenever it suited him. They blamed him for the personal and political repressions that lasted nearly fifty years.

   “You mean, like a memento?”

   “No, more like a boulder-sized bust of Lenin’s head that weighs more than two thousand  pounds.”

    The boulder was the size of a Kamchatka bear. The face had been carved out of one side of the rock. Lenin looked untroubled. The boulder looked indifferent.

   “What is he going to do with a head of Lenin once he gets it back to Cleveland?” My parents lived on the east side of Cleveland, near Lake Erie, a couple of blocks from the Lithuanian Catholic Church. They had a one-car  garage that barely fit their car and a lawnmower. “Where are they going to put it?”

   “It’s not for dad, it’s for Russell Bundy.”

   “Who’s Russell Bundy?”

    Russell Bundy was born during the Depression, the youngest of seven children. He would go on to have seven children of his own. At first, in the 1950s, he worked for a baking pan manufacturer but soon started selling pots and pans on his own out of the back of his car. Russell T. Bundy Associates was formed in 1964. They bought and sold refurbished bakery pans and equipment. They moved into what had been the Urbana Tool and Die Company building, about forty miles west of Columbus, Ohio, in 1972.  They soon expanded their services and product lines, getting into pan-coating . Ten years later the American Pan division was formed to manufacture custom baking pans. In the 1990s what was now Bundy Baking Solutions added Dura Shield non-stick coatings to its family of brands.

   As time went on Bundy Baking Solutions came to operate twenty six facilities in seven countries and employ more than one thousand people worldwide. The entrance to their headquarters was guarded by two grim looking stone lions. The beasts weren’t going to need a freshly baked hot dog bun if they decided to eat you.

   “He’s helping this Russell Bundy person get his hands on a bust of Lenin in Lithuania and get it delivered to Ohio? How did that happen?”

   Our father was born in Lithuania in the 1920s. His father was their district’s police chief. Our grandfather was swept up by the NKVD early during World War Two and transported to Siberia, where he was forced to work in a slave labor camp and died of starvation. Our grandmother was transported to Siberia in late 1944, for no apparent reason, and spent more than ten years trying to survive. When she was finally released she wasn’t allowed to return to Siauliai, where their home had been.  She was forced to live in a one-room cinder block apartment in the middle of nowhere.

   There was no love lost when it came to my father and the Russians. For all that, he was a retired certified public accountant and knew the value of a dollar. He was being well paid by Russell Bundy to go to the Baltics to help achieve his goals, although it was unclear what his goal was when it came to Lenin. 

   “Russell Bundy called me at the travel agency to get tickets to go to Lithuania.” My sister worked at Born to Travel in Beachwood, not far from where she lived in Cleveland Hts. “He asked me a hundred questions about towns and places, so I finally told him to call dad. He hired him go with him, to interpret, to navigate regulations, and find the right people.”

   “Find the right people for what?”

   “He was thinking of expanding into Eastern Europe.” It was the mid-1990s. He said Lithuania is ripe with business opportunities, the exchange rate is great, and there are lots of abandoned Soviet factories that could be converted to his use.”

   “He’s probably right about that.”

   They spent a week driving from the Zemieji Panieriai district in Vilnius to the Naujamiestis district in Kaunas to Klaipeda. The Baltic Sea port city of Klaipeda had become a major industrial hub during the Russian occupation of Lithuania from 1944 to the last troop withdrawals in 1993. In the end, Russell Bundy didn’t find what he was looking for. He did, however, find something else.

   “He met an older Lithuanian man in Vilnius who had been a general in the Red Army,” Rita said. When the Russians left, he stayed where he was. He wasn’t a true-blue Communist, after all. A truckload of Red Army paraphernalia stayed with him. “He had a whole bunch of uniforms, medals, and military watches.” He had an assortment of gear and ephemera. He also had a big bust of Lenin that nobody in Lithuania wanted.

   The day Lithuania declared independence in 1990 was the day they began to expunge the Russian legacy. They condemned the occupation as an illegal act. The display of Russian symbols and  imagery was officially banned. They started removing Moscow’s monuments, including all the busts and statues of Lenin. 

   Nobody knew how many there were, but since the Russians had been the controlling colonial power in Lithuania for almost five decades, everybody knew there were plenty. The busts and statues were a big part of the Communist Cult of Personality and their propaganda machine. Everybody knew where at least one of them was. They got pulled down, smashed to bits and pieces, and thrown into the dust bin of bad history.

   The Lithuanian general had hedged his bets and it was paying off. He sold everything he had to Russell Bundy, who had taken a great interest in the memorabilia. “He saw the bust and it was love at first sight,” Rita said. “He never said why, at least not to me. I don’t think dad knew, either. He took the collectables back to Urbana, got lots of mannequins, set up a room for them, dressed them in the Russian uniforms, and displayed them in the room. It wasn’t public. It was private. You had to be invited to see it. I saw it once. In the meantime, he waited for dad to bring the head of Lenin to him.”

   Our father got the necessary export papers rubber stamped and got the bust crated. It was taken by truck to Hamburg, Germany. From there it was loaded onto a freighter. When the freighter docked in Philadelphia it was unloaded and taken by truck to Urbana. Once there it was uncrated and set up for display. 

   I met Russell Bundy once, by accident, at my parent’s house. I had driven there to drop something off. He was talking to my parents about his daughter Beth, who was married to a man named Joe. They lived in Pennsylvania, where Russell Bundy was originally from. They wanted to adopt a child. Beth wasn’t able to have one herself. She wanted a newborn baby. It was proving difficult to find a newborn in the United States. It was much easier finding one in Eastern Europe. They were thinking of trying to find one in Lithuania.

   When I saw him my first thought was he looked like Robert Preston in the movie “The Music Man.” He had a similar manner, too, lively and engaging. “He has a huge personality,” my sister had already told me. He had a terrific, sincere-looking smile. He was wearing a sleeveless argyle knit sweater and a bow tie. He was also wearing  a wig, the kind of wig, like the kind Andy Warhol used to wear, that was obviously a hairpiece. 

   “His daughter Beth told me she never saw her father without his wig,” Rita said. “She said none of her brothers and sisters ever saw him without it, either.”

   “What about his wife?’

   Russell Bundy and his wife Elizabeth were married for fifty two years. “No, I never wanted to ask her about that and I never did.”

    Some people wear wigs to dress up their hair, which is in bad shape. Others wear wigs because they have gone bald. I didn’t know what it was with Russell Bundy, but since he was a salesman kind of man, I thought he probably lost his hair at an early age. The wig helped keep him looking young and vibrant. I couldn’t help wondering, since he was a big time businessman, if he ever flipped his wig like other big time businessmen are prone to do.

   The bald headed pate of Lenin wasn’t the only large object on display at Bundy headquarters in Urbana. There was the World’s Largest Loaf of Bread Sculpture, too. It is made of steel and fiberglass. “It’s exactly as it’s touted,” said Daniel Kan from Dayton. “It’s a large loaf of bread that is lit up from the street. You can pull in and take pictures. It’s definitely a two picture moment.”

   There are actually two monumental loaves of bread. “Formerly displayed upright, the larger of the two is now lying behind one of the factory buildings,” according to World’s Largest Things. “It attracted a lot of attention, painted with the package design of one of their customers, which you can still see on the leftover loaf. The second loaf acts as a sign for the factory itself, displayed by the entrance door. The larger of the two is a little more interesting, as the plastic bag is more irregular, and the twist-tie looks as if it’s been used a couple of times.”

   Russell Bundy had meant to deliver capitalism to a recently Communist country, but instead had brought a bit of Communism to a capitalist country. He was a dyed-in-the-wool entrepreneur but had paid good money for and transported a collectivist icon more than five thousand miles to Ohio, one of the more conservative states in the country. Urbana is in the 4th Congressional District. It is a Republican town. The combative MAGA man Jim Jordan represents the district in 2025. The locals call their home Mayberry as in TV’s once popular “The Andy Griffith Show.”

   Most Westerners have a negative view of Lenin, seeing him as the initiator of Soviet totalitarianism, political repression, and a failed economic system. He created the Cheka secret police force, which is considered a foundational instrument of state terror. There wasn’t much to like about Vladimir Lenin.

   Everybody liked the bust, however. There was something heroic about it, just like there was something heroic about Lenin. His early aims were rooted in the ideals of equality, freedom, and brotherhood. After his older brother was executed for his part in the attempted assassination of Tsar Alexander III in 1887, Lenin made a commitment to revolutionary change. He kept at it for thirty years. Then, to his surprise, just like that the Russian Revolution happened, ending centuries of imperial rule.  He embraced terror and violence to get what he wanted. He came to believe the ends justified the means. In the end what he achieved was a one-party autocratic state. By the time he became the top dog of the Bolsheviks, who became the Communists, he didn’t believe in equality, freedom, and brotherhood anymore. He believed in every man for himself and the state against all.

   The bust might have been a remarkable thing, but I never saw it. I wasn’t especially interested in looking at a boulder depicting a dead Big Brother. I asked my sister what she thought of it, since she had seen it.

   “I thought it was ridiculous,” she said. “But Russell loved it. He stood beside it smiling like the cat who swallowed the canary.”

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.”

“Bomb City” by Ed Staskus

“A police procedural when the Rust Belt was a mean street.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F1LM1WF9/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2MYAQAOZIC2U9&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.hTm7BGbiQbSe5ZapFwYPPfcwOpTe-Vdg6VLE4aGyTyk.Z0R-VNBWWEcvKcNaO9LdCOUnNIOOXgvYkRS_FXiXuHk&dib_tag=se&keywords=bomb+city+ed+status&qid=1742136726&sprefix=bomb+city+ed+staskus%2Caps%2C84&sr=8-1

Cleveland, Ohio 1975. The John Scalish Crime Family and Danny Greene’s Irish Mob are at war. Car bombs are the weapon of choice. Two police detectives are assigned to find the bomb makers. Revenge is always personal. It gets personal.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Saving Ernest Hemingway

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By Ed Staskus

   The day Frank Domscheit pulled Ernest Hemingway out of the de Havilland Rapide, the day it crashed and caught fire, he didn’t know who the man in the airplane was, although he knew who Ernest Hemingway was. He had read one of his books before the war and liked it. It was about bullfighting. The man he pulled out of the airplane was covered in blood and babbling. Frank beat out the flames on the man’s arms and hands. He pulled him away from the airplane as fast as he could. The man was big and heavy but able to stumble forward with his help.

   Frank was in the Upper Nile lands of Uganda the last week of January 1954 tending to the wife of an Egyptian businessman, getting her ready to fly back to Cairo, when Ernest Hemingway’s airplane crashed and caught fire. It was more bad luck for the writer. It was his second airplane crash in two days. The Cessna 180 he and his wife had been on the day before, sightseeing the wilds surrounding the Great Rift Valley and Murchison Falls, encountered a large flock of birds. The pilot dove to avoid them but clipped an abandoned telegraph line, lost control, and crashed. Mary Hemingway, the writer’s fourth wife, suffered two cracked ribs, and Ernest Hemingway’s head got banged hard. Roy Marsh, the pilot, was unhurt. 

   They couldn’t send a distress call. Their on-board radio was broken. They walked away from the airplane where it was wedged in scrub trees. They walked to the Victoria Nile River. When night came they built a fire. They had some apples and biscuits. They had bottles of Carlsberg beer and  a bottle of Scotch that survived the crash. The men drank warm beer while Mary eased the pain of her cracked ribs with whiskey. Elephants trumpeted and hippos snorted at the waterline.

   “We held our breath while an elephant twelve paces away from us was silhouetted in the moonlight, listening to my wife’s snores,” Ernest Hemingway said.

   The British Colonial Administration sent search planes. They found the Cessna 180 soon enough. “One wheel of the undercarriage was broken, but otherwise the plane appeared little damaged,” said Capt. R. C. Jude, the pilot of the British Overseas Airways Corporation plane that circled the crash three miles below Murchison Falls. “The chap did a neat job getting her down.” When a ground rescue team reached the airplane, however, they discovered the Hemingway’s and their pilot were not there. 

   Uganda was more than 2,000 miles from where Frank Domscheit lived and worked in Cairo. He wasn’t an Egyptian. He was a Prussian Lithuanian. He had settled in Cairo after deserting the Afrika Corps. During World War Two the Afrika Corps was the 15th and 21st Panzer Divisions. There were some Italian armored and infantry divisions, as well. The Germans were highly skilled at desert tactics and noted for their esprit de corps. The Italians didn’t want to be in North Africa, surrendering whenever they could. When the British Eighth Army broke through the Axis defense lines and minefields at El Alamein, forcing General Erwin Rommel to withdraw, the war ended for Frank. The Afrika Corp went west, retreating to Tunisia. Frank went east, escaping to northern Egypt. 

   His family were fish merchants south of Klaipeda in Lithuania Minor on the Baltic Sea. They were herring wholesalers. He had been conscripted by the German Army in 1940, ending up as an ambulance driver. He served during the assault on France until France fell. After that he stayed in Paris. It might have been the best year of his life. He shipped out to North Africa in September 1941. The next year was the worst year of his life.

   Soldiers desert for many reasons, including home sickness, harsh conditions, and fear of combat. Frank deserted because he was sick of the day-to-day bloodshed. He didn’t know enough about why the war had started or why it was still going on. He didn’t disagree with German military policies or the leadership of his superiors. But he wasn’t invested in the war like they were. He didn’t care anymore. It seemed like a pointless struggle. He was sick of stitching some men up and burying the rest of them.

   When Ernest Hemingway, his wife, and their pilot were reconnoitering the morning after the crash, the writer spotted a launch on the river. “We had seen mirages when the sun got high, and at the sight of the launch, I thought, I must check my eyesight,” he said. “I called Mary and told her it looked like a launch was coming up the river. She looked and said it was.”

   The launch was the SS Murchison, the same boat that had been used in the 1951 movie “The African Queen.” It was piloted by Edwiges Abreo, a Goan from the west coast of India. “It was an excellent launch, fairly old-fashioned in lines,” Ernest Hemingway said. The captain told them it would cost one hundred shillings per person for the rescue. The writer paid the captain and they set off downriver to Butiaba on Lake Albert.

   When they got to Butiaba they disembarked and sat down under a silky oak tree to keep the sun off them. They waited for another airplane to arrive and take them to Nairobi for medical attention. It was a little-used airstrip. It was very hot and humid. When a de Havilland Rapide arrived they boarded it with their pilot and a policeman. They were near the end of the runway, a few seconds from liftoff, when the airplane hit an anthill, lost its balance, and crashed. The fuel tank exploded and they were engulfed in flames.

   Frank was watching the take-off from a thatched-roof hut. His Egyptian patient was napping in a folding canvas chair. She had fallen off a horse while on safari and hurt her head. When she didn’t improve, but rather got worse, Frank was eventually sent for. He was a neurologist, some said among the best in Egypt. He had studied medicine at Cairo University, starting before the war ended. He spoke German, Lithuanian, and English. He learned to speak Arabic. He became a doctor and trained at the Qasr El-Eyni Hospital. He was going to take his patient there for treatment.

   When he saw the airplane crash and explode he leapt to his feet and ran towards it. By the time he got to the airplane the policeman had gotten out, the bush pilot was dragging Mary Hemingway out through a broken front window, but Ernest Hemingway was trapped. The doors were jammed. He was banging on a side window with his head, trying to break it and get out that way. Frank could see that he would never get through the window frame, being too large of a man. He found a stick, jimmied the door with it, and when the door popped open, quickly frog marched Ernest Hemingway to safety. 

   He sat him down on the dry Nile mud. The writer had a scalp wound and burns up and down his arms. A part of his face was scorched. Frank found out later he had suffered a crushed vertebra and damage to his liver, spleen, and kidney. Their passports, all their money and clothes, and three pairs of the writer’s glasses were lost in the fire.

   He removed the rings on Ernest Hemingway’s fingers. He carefully cut away his shirt. He cooled his burns with water and covered them loosely with gauze. He checked him for shock, but his skin wasn’t clammy and his pulse was good. He thought the man might be in his 60s, although he seemed strong enough. He later found out he was in his 50s. His eyes were glassy. He was disoriented. There was something wrong.

   “How is your head?” Frank asked.

   “My head hurts,” Ernest Hemingway said.

   “You might have a concussion.”

   “I probably do.”

   “Have you had one before?”

   “I’ve had half-a-dozen, maybe more. I  tore my shoulder and banged my head yesterday when we went down at the falls. My head hasn’t killed me yet. I’m a writer. I need my head on straight. My luck is still good.”

   What he didn’t know was his luck was running out fast. It wasn’t ever going to be as good as it had been. His luck was getting worse and worse.

   “Do you have a headache?’

   “Yes.”

   “Are you dizzy at all?”

   “Yes.”

   “I want you to look to the right of the sun.”

   The African sky was clear and the sun was high. When Ernest Hemingway looked in the direction Frank indicated, he quickly looked away.

   “Are you sensitive to the light?”

   “Yes.”

    “Let me stand you up for a second.”

   “All right.”

   “How’s your balance?”

   “Not very good.”

   “That’s fine, let’s sit you down again.”

   “I need a drink.”

   “That would be a bad idea.”

   “My father was never the same after those two plane crashes,” Patrick Hemingway said. “When he visited me in Shimoni afterwards the atmosphere was bad.”  Patrick was Ernest Hemingway’s second son. Shimoni was a small village on Kenya’s south coast, popular with divers and fishermen.

   “It was like King Lear. He would shout, ‘What’s going on here? Aren’t I king?’” Ernest Hemingway had been a heavy drinker most of his life. He was drinking heavier in Shimoni. “I sympathized with his problems but you have to show some restraint. The last few weeks in Africa, he lost all restraint. I finally had enough. We never saw each other again.”

   The policeman who had been on the de Havilland Rapide stepped up and stopped beside Frank. He was a native. His black face was shiny with sweat. There was blood on his shirt.

    “How is he?”

   “He’s got some burns that need to be treated as soon as possible. I think he’s got a concussion. He needs to be examined in a hospital.”

   “Are you a doctor?”

   “Yes.”

   “He’s a famous writer,” the policeman said.

   “That’s what he said, that he’s a writer. I once read one of his books.”

    “I don’t read anything. I don’t know how to read.”

   A dark green Land River pulled up beside them. Two British Colonial Police Officers stepped out. Uganda was a British protectorate. They were wearing khaki jackets and short pants, black knee-high boots, black Sam Browne belts, and shiny billed black caps.

   “Is he fit enough to travel?”

   “Yes,” Frank said. “But he needs a hospital.”  

   One of the policemen led Ernest Hemingway to the Land Rover. Frank walked beside the writer, offering his arm in support. The native policeman helped Mary Hemingway into the back seat next to her husband. They were both quiet. They looked very tired.

   “I liked your book about Spain, about the bullfighting,” Frank said.

   “Thank you but I’m not getting into the ring with Tolstoy,” Ernest Hemingway said. “I love bullfighting, have for a long time. Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is always in danger of death.”

   The Land Rover took them to Masindi, which was on the road from Murchison Falls towards Entebbe. They stayed at the Masindi Hotel, the oldest hotel in Uganda. That night the bar ran short of gin while Ernest Hemingway entertained a pack of reporters with tales about his near death. “I’ve never felt better,” he said. “It’s just a bump on the head.” When they got to Entebbe he was admitted to a hospital where he stayed for several weeks. His head was leaking cerebral fluid. Doctors told him he had fractured his skull.

   Three months later Frank got a hand-written letter from Ernest Hemingway thanking him for his help. He opened it while having lunch at the Tahrir Café opposite the Egyptian Museum. He had a bowl of koshary, which was vermicelli, fried rice, and brown lentils topped with garlic vinegar. He read the letter while he was eating.

   “I want to thank you for your help, even though I can’t write letters much on account of right arm which was burned to the bone third degree and it cramps up on me. Fingers burned and left hand third degree too, so can’t type and can’t get any work done. The big trouble is inside where right kidney was ruptured and liver and spleen injured. I am weak from so much internal bleeding. Being a good boy and trying to rest.”

   Seven months later Frank was at the Tahrir Café again reading the International Herald Tribune when he saw a news item about Ernest Hemingway. He had won the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature. The prize cited “The Old Man and the Sea.”  As it turned out, it was his last novel. He never wrote another book.

   Frank bought a copy of the book and read it. He didn’t like it. It seemed solemn and maudlin. The old man was a Christ-like fisherman. The book was full of Christian symbolism. It was about redemption, as if there were such a thing. The only parts of the book he liked were the parts about Joe DiMaggio. Baseball players weren’t symbols. They were like the bullfighters in the other book he had read.

   He had seen the flesh and blood of Ernest Hemingway in Africa. The only sense of it in “The Old Man and the Sea” was the sharks who devoured the marlin the old man had landed. The book didn’t feel true to him. The writer had once been able to take the bull by the horns. He had been a correspondent during the Spanish Civil War and World War Two. The writing was clear-headed and hard-eyed. Frank wondered if the man’s concussions had made him sentimental. He wondered if his pen had dried up.

   When he had been talking to Ernest Hemingway in Butiaba, leaning into the Land Rover, he heard him say, “I never knew a morning all my years in Africa when I woke up and was not happy. I’m always happy to be alive, but I’m not happy about anything else anymore.”

   It was a broken-hearted thing to say. It ached of loneliness. Frank had never gone back to Lithuania, even though he was lonely for it. He couldn’t go even if he wanted to. The Iron Curtain was securely in place. Eight years after helping save the writer, when Frank read about him again in the International Herald Tribune, he read that Ernest Hemingway had committed suicide. He wasn’t surprised. Committing suicide is braving death, although there is rarely anything brave about it.  It is a desperate act. 

   “There is no lonelier man in death except the suicide,” is what Ernest Hemingway said. It was a desperate man’s way of escaping ills that had no remedy. There were no more i’s to dot or t’s to cross.

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.”

“Bomb City” by Ed Staskus

“A police procedural when the Rust Belt was a mean street.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F1LM1WF9/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2MYAQAOZIC2U9&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.hTm7BGbiQbSe5ZapFwYPPfcwOpTe-Vdg6VLE4aGyTyk.Z0R-VNBWWEcvKcNaO9LdCOUnNIOOXgvYkRS_FXiXuHk&dib_tag=se&keywords=bomb+city+ed+status&qid=1742136726&sprefix=bomb+city+ed+staskus%2Caps%2C84&sr=8-1

Cleveland, Ohio 1975. The John Scalish Crime Family and Danny Greene’s Irish Mob are at war. Car bombs are the weapon of choice. Two police detectives are assigned to find the bomb makers. Revenge is always personal. It gets personal.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication