Author’s Note: In 1929, my Grandfather, at 16, came to the United States from Lithuania. He could already speak and read English, in preparation. He corresponded by mail with his friends and family. He received a letter during WWII that all his buddies, all the men of his village, were lined up against a wall and shot. His buddies, their fathers and sons were gone. This story is inspired by that event.
Grandfather’s Story
THE IVANS KILL OUR COW, even after I name her Ivan.
I ask my grandfather how to spell Ivan, in Russian. He shows me with his cane in the dirt. I throw my coat on it, so the wind won’t take it and run for the paint.
I run fast, my long stick in both hands, sometimes a cane, sometimes a sword. My grandfather watches me run against wind and dust, past roofless walls, around the one shell-crater that lands in the village, and past doorways where the sick inside make my legs a little shaky.
Boom-pop-pop-prack—in the distance.
I run up the hill home, for Ivan, for glory, to be able to read.
My grandfather is the most important man in the village. He reads Russian and Lithuanian. People stop him while digging his root cellar, and Grandfather stretches the small of his back and takes their pieces of paper. I walk around a lot, stretching the small of my back. My mother asks me what is wrong, and my sister laughs.
I am not allowed to come near my grandfather when he reads to people. No one is. My best friend Mykolas and I flop on our bellies from a distance like soldiers to see what we can see. Grandfather looks upon the paper, and his lips move. People hold their hands together respectfully, bowed heads, nodding. Some cup their hand to their ear, afraid a word might get away. People gratefully take back their letters, folding them like priests, putting them back inside themselves. They talk with Grandfather a long time until Mykolas wants to do something else.
The last is Mr. Binkus’ daughter, Janina. I look up from the root cellar we are digging and see women coming with shawls on their heads from the village, very serious, like a funeral. The women are close around her, supporting her, as she walks from the gray-brown walls of the village to my grandfather in the green grass. When Grandfather sees them, he looks the other way, and I can tell, for a moment, he wants to run.
By the color and size of the paper, her husband is dead. But he can’t be dead until my grandfather says so. Grandfather has to be there for people to die.
Supper is late this day. Grandfather sits in a dark kitchen, not wasting a candle. He smiles at me.
“Grandfather, teach me to read.,”
“Do you remember Gediminas Grebelis?”
He is the blacksmith.
“When Gediminas was no larger than you, he waited for me at the foot of the hill by the creek, and I put him on my shoulder and ran up the hill with him, toolbox and all. He always shouted for me to run faster, faster. Who is left who would remember?”
“Grandfather, teach me to read.”
His eyes glitter. He pinches my cheek, “Antonus, not today. There is nothing, really, for you to read anymore. For now, you play. Go on.”
I want to read the newspapers. Someone comes to Grandfather with a newspaper, everyone gathers around, and my grandfather talks about fighting in Vilnius and Poland, North Africa, other villages and towns, the shortages of food, the marriages of royalty, and the deaths of famous people. My grandfather is so respected, that people tell him things before he reads them in the newspaper. It makes me tingle to know something before the newspaper is read. The paper looks very small in my grandfather’s hands, those days.
I run back with the white paint. I run past the Janulises. Their house is three walls. Most of the roof is left.
Mother Janulis is very ill, in a big bed, with her mouth open. When the east wind blows her white hair too much, Adolph Janulis puts on the rope harness tied to the foot of the bed—the bed Mother Janulis slept in since her wedding night—and drags his mother to the other side of the wall. I often help. She begs every day to not leave her home. It is strange to watch her travel that way, like a puppet, stiff and lifeless and yet moving. When the west wind blows, we do the same.
I have a plan to make Grandfather proud of me. On one side of Ivan’s bell, I write the name, Ivan so the Ivans won’t kill our cow when they pull back. When the Ivans or Fritzes pull back, there is a lot of damage, beaten men, crying women, and much livestock killed. After the Ivans leave, I will ask Grandfather to spell Fritz with his cane in the dirt, in German. He will know. I will put Fritz on the other side of the bell. This will save our cow and show Grandfather how smart I am and make him to teach me to read.
But, the Ivans, they kill our cow, even after I named her Ivan. They stick a bayonet in her side, and my mother screams. The cow jumps, trots, limps, and moans, and finally, legs buckle, and down and over Ivan falls, her huge side rising up and down, blowing great gusts of air and blood out her nose. One of the Ivans cuts the bell from her neck and reads it. He yells something in Russian and throws the bell as far as he can into the horizon. All the Ivans laugh. When they leave, my mother runs out and falls to her knees next to Ivan. People gather around and try to comfort my mother. They stand around, looking at each other, shaking heads, and looking at each other. Some men take off their caps. Some people bring paper, and roasting pans.
There is a silence, and my grandfather’s limp is heard. In his hand, is the longest knife we have in our house. The tip is broken off. The people make room for him to come through. My grandfather looks at the wound on Ivan. The people around him bend nearer and look again. Grandfather scratches his beard. Everyone can hear the scratching, the wind through the grass, and the buzz of black flies moving back and forth over Ivan’s black blood. Then Grandfather grits his teeth, puts the knife to Ivan’s throat, and I turn away. Ivan is dead.
Grandfather gives the knife to Mr. Vitas, the butcher. My mother stands first in line, holding her apron out.
My grandfather is furious with me when I come back with the paint for the bell. He is holding my coat in his arms. It looks like me, sleeping in a tree, one sleeve swinging back and forth.
“Crazy! Madness! Why have you done this?”
“Done what, Grandfather?”
“Put the coat on! Put it on! Do you think they grow like mushrooms? Stand up straight!”
I stand up as straight as I can.
“And throw that stick away! Are you a soldier? Do you want—,” Grandfather runs his hand through his thinning, hair.
Pop-pop and prack-prack.
“You hear? They might be coming again.”
“Yes, Grandfather.”
“Any louder, go home to Mama. I mean it.”
Mykolas comes walking toward us, hands in pockets, playing a little football with stones in the road, kicking up dust that disappears quickly in the wind.
“And tell Mykolas he must go home to his Mama, too.”
Grandfather limps off, stabbing at the earth with his cane, his arms moving faster than his legs. I watch after him, hoping he will slow down and forget. I want to see an end to his anger.
“Is that it? Is that Ivan?”
I nod, and Mykolas looks at it from one side and then the other and then nods like men do when they fix machines.
“Which way does it go?” “
In my excitement, I forget where Grandfather is standing when he writes it. The I and the N are no help, and the V looks much like the A. It looks pretty much the same either way because we were ignorant peasants. But we know that those little things are important to the educated. The small line in the letter A and the middle of the N mean something.
Which way does it go? I think of Ivan, her importance to the family. I pray fast and make a guess, “This way.” I dip the tip of my stick in the paint.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” I lie. “This is the way.”
I want to go fishing with Mykolas. Everyone is proud of Mykolas because he catches a fish after all the old men had said the river was fished out. The fish is as big as he is. He walks into the village with his arms around it, muddy tail dragging in the dirt.
Mykolas! Look at Mykolas!
Stone faced, Mykolas walks through all the smiling people to his mother and gives her the fish. Then, he hikes up his pants and wipes his nose. All the women are cooing like doves in his mother’s kitchen, and the men outside knock Mykolas stumbling with slaps on the back and shake his hand and arm until his hat falls off.
Mykolas tells me he knows of a place where there is a fish. He stretches his arms out as far as he can and looks even farther. He is going there tomorrow and says we can go there together.
But I can’t go with Mykolas.
“Antonus, wake up. We have to leave.” Grandfather slaps my cheeks. But I don’t want to wake up. He bundles me up in my clothes and overcoat and takes me out into the cool night and crickets.
“Hurry,” I hear my mother say.
Grandfather is running. He runs with a limp to the root cellar and throws me in, jumping in after me. I get up naked, out of the cool dirt, fully awake. “Grandfather, what’s happening?”
“Quiet, Antonus! Go to sleep.”
I fall asleep, and I am in bed with Mother Janulis. The jerking of Adolph’s tugs on the bed throws her head backward and forward. She looks one moment like she is in a great howl of laughter and, the next, pain. The wall we are going around is long, disappearing on the horizon. Mykolas is fishing off the foot of the bed. He disappears in the clouds of dust carried by winds, after shelling.
I wake with sun in my eyes coming through gaps in the thatch covering, making lines of light on the ground. Fritzes are shouting. Machine guns, pop-pop-popping. Women are screaming, Grandfather grabs his head, falls against the wall, and slides down to the dirt floor, “Jezau! Jezau, Maria!”
I put on my pants and shirt. Grandfather is crying. Curled up, hugging his knees with his elbows. He looks no older than me.
“What happened, Grandfather?” Only sobs from Grandfather.
He sits a long time, staring into the past. I can tell. The sounds of the truck engines leave the village. I dig a river with a stick. Curled up leaves are boats, and the rocks I line up are houses. I draw little roads and make a big hill with a big rock on it. That is my house. But I want to go fishing with Mykolas. I slash my stick through the town, crushing two boats and send my house rolling. I slash the other way, some other house.
“Antonus! Come here.” He has a piece of paper like Mr. Binkus’ daughter, Janina Grebelis. It is falling apart at the folds. Someone died for it. I look at it. It is full of words and letters. He points to some of them. “Right here, this was your father’s name. It was my name. It is your name.”
I look at my name.
“Take it.”
“Thank you, Grandfather.” I sit down in the middle of my village with my name and a stick and try to write it in the dirt.
“All the men of the village are gone, Antonus.”
“Where did they go, Grandfather?”
“The soldiers didn’t want to worry about us anymore. We would have been hunted down like rabbits, and what about you? You see, it was too much to ask this time.”
I looked at my name on the paper, then in the dirt.
I am thinking of the day when I can read and cannot remember what all he says. Hours later, my name is everywhere in the dirt of my little village.
“Go home, Antonus. Go on home to Mama. I’m staying here.”
I drop my stick and put the paper under my coat, inside myself.
“I love you, Antonus, my little boy. Forgive me.”
I give my grandfather a kiss. “Thank You, Grandfather,” and leave him behind in the root cellar, to find Mykolas . . .
♦
Richard Sensenbrenner is a writer in Illinois who says he never wanted to be one and considers it a form of mental illness. He works by day in intellectual property law and fights his madness by night. He’s recently published in Ancient Paths, Corner Club Press, Down in the Dirt, EveryDay Fiction and Defenestration. He forgives them all.
The Delmarva Review is a literary journal, published in St. Michaels, Maryland. It was founded to offer all writers a desirable home in print (with a digital edition) to feature their most compelling new prose and poetry to discerning audiences everywhere. This is a time when many commercial print publications (and literary magazines) have closed their doors or are reducing literary content. For each annual edition, the editors have read thousands of submissions to select the best of new fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. The review is available from most online booksellers and from regional specialty bookstores. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org
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