Nexus

Sometimes, history and the individual collide. Or at least the divergent strands come together. I'm writing this in Vilnius, which for nearly 20 years now has been the capital of an independent state of Lithuania. Prior to that, it was a regional capital of the Russian Empire, in its Soviet and Tsarist forms, although there were intervals when it was a regional capital of Poland.

Yesterday I visited two cemeteries here, the Bernardine and the Rossa; in both places the vast majority of the residents were of Polish culture, to judge by their names and the baroque sensibilities of the gravestones, tombs, mausolea and columbaria in which they were buried. It was noteworthy that the few Lithuanians buried there seemed to have chosen very artistically different gravemarkers for themselves, one or two of which displayed influences from the wood-carving folk culture I'm familiar with from the Hill of Witches and the Hill of Crosses, not to mention some of that inter-war vaguely Bauhausy look which can be seen in the Contemporary Art Centre just up the hill here.

It was strange to see those few Lithuanian graves among all the Polish ones, a reminder that historically, in this region at least, ethnic Poles outnumbered the local Lithuanian population; over half the city's population in 1931, and Lithuanians only 2% – behind Jews and Russians. (Even today, Vilnius is supposed to be home to a native Polish population of about 19%, readily distinguishable by their characteristic 'eastern' accents from their brethren of the modern Polish state.) So the Lithuanians were a minority in these cemeteries among the Poles, who themselves are now a minority within this new Lithuanian state. Not long ago, of course, all of these communities were subjugated to the Empire, based in faraway Moscow, plenty of whose children are to be seen and heard in Vilnius today.

My knowledge of the Lithuanian language is limited, principally based on knowing how to say a couple of verbs ("I'd like", "you have", "where is") and an ability to mispronounce nouns from the dictionary with preternatural confidence. My knowledge of Russian is slightly better, though; a combination of learning the alphabet at my grandparents' farm one bored summer millennia ago, together with recognising those words which have cognates in Czech and Polish, means I can avoid starvation or imprisonment in desperate situations. More than once here, when my Lithuanian nouns have run out and there isn't time to dive for the dictionary, I've resorted to this makeshift Russian to obtain food and directions.

But I always insist on trying a little bit of Lithuanian first, just to make it clear that I am historically sensitive to the recent past, and I do not assume that all the former subjects of the Empire know the Imperial language. Plenty do, of course, although those tend to be adults in their thirties at least; and even here in the capital city one finds old people who still know nothing but Russian. (When talking to the young, though, I normally go straight to English after my four Lithuanian words run out; as is often the case in this part of the world, the young know that escape from the cultural ghetto of a language whose total number of speakers is less than the population of a large average Western city lies in English. Not the political hegemony of Russian or Polish, then, but another kind.) That's my gesture of political correctness, you might say. And certainly, the overwhelming insistence that only Lithuanian be used in signs and public writing demonstrates that there is no place for either Russian or Polish, even though these are the mother tongues of almost 40% of the city's population. Yesterday I passed by an office which was a publishing house for Russian literature; the sign on the door announced this fact in one language only. Guess which one. Taip.

But even though the formerly oppressed culture is reacting to its former oppressors in such an uncompromising way, it itself is shifting with the times, too. The Lithuanian language has traditionally always marked a distinction in women's surnames between married and unmarried. Mr Surblys' daughter is Miss Surblytė, and his wife is Mrs Surblienė. (This is even more confusing for us poor foreigners than the Slavonic 'Kowalski'/'Kowalska' doublet. "Are you two father and daughter or not? Then why've ya got different surnames?") Recently, though, shades of Anglo-style feminism have started to manifest themselves here; a woman campaigned to have her name on her ID card changed to a form which did not reflect her marital status at all, and after a struggle, she was granted this request. Now it is acceptable to choose such a variant, and a couple of public figures have chosen to do so. It's not a tidal wave yet, and my local lady friend Neringa tells me she's quite happy to change her name when marriage comes calling. But it's a start, proof that nothing is fixed forever, especially not in matters of culture.

'Neringa' is a classic Lithuanian feminine name, originally that of a giant sea goddess who created the sand bars of the Baltic coast, for reasons which escape me, but which were undoubtedly very important in that particular myth. After all, the sand bars had to be created so that Russians and Germans would have somewhere to go for a cheap seaside holiday; ask Thomas Mann or the Soviet Baltic Fleet. (Rich Lithuanians go to Turkey, Egypt or Spain now, like everyone else.) And my 21st-century Neringa herself could be a goddess – not a giantess, but one of the small cheeky ones who hide behind trees and stones and make unexpected suggestions to travellers in an innocent voice and cute accent.

As a goddess, she'd be in good company, because wow, are there some goddesses here on these streets. I'm sorry, Poles; I'm sorry, art girls of Berlin; I'm sorry, Romanian girls from mid-size provincial towns, but the women of Lithuania have got you all beat. Whether they're tall, lissom, blonde or sandy-haired, with those cute Scandinavian-style bob noses (often the native Lithuanians), or small, dusky-eyed, full-lipped (often the Russians), they all dress in as alluring a way as possible, carefully accentuating whatever needs to be emphasised. This is a very fashion-conscious town, and much effort has been expended on buying (probably by parents and boyfriends) and selecting (in cabal with trusted girlfriends and cable TV) the most drop-dead (drop-deadest?) fashions available – heels of Alpine height, skirts which are basically belts with attitude, accessories which cost more than their mother's salaries. At this moment, jeans so tight they'd make a Scotsman feel generous are the mode; one feels that the actual nakedness beneath them would be something of a letdown, as not even the fittest skin could surely be so taut. Although I guess it would be so hard to remove said jeans that this is merely a theoretical consideration anyway.

They wouldn't get those jeans off for me, though, no fear. The halcyon days of the early 90s, when any podgy idiot with a Western passport and no criminal record could have his pick of the East's lovelies, are long, long gone. A renaissance in national confidence – most people in England probably have at least an idea where Lithuania is, even if it's only as the place where one's barmaid or au pair comes from, or a nation which beats us in Eurovision – plus open borders, rising living standards (there are a lot of expensive cars in the streets, the Trabants and Ladas are absent from all but the poorest areas now) and the realisation that Western women's dedication to parity and equality have given the smart, sexy and nominally more household- and husband-oriented Eastern woman an advantage, all mean that tubby old Jimbo-likes would not find a future bride on the endless sunlit catwalk that is Gedimino prospektas, the main drag and shopping street leading to the touristy heart of Vilnius' old town.

No, if a foreign lecher was to go babe-hunting in this place, he would have to search among the projects surrounding the town centre, the shabby, untidy blocks of stack-a-prole housing which characterise so much of this region. I got pleasantly lost in these districts yesterday morning, changing buses almost at random as I tried (without too much urgency) to get back to the town centre after an excursion. These are the areas with Socialist-style names of sadly heroic aspirations, like 'Brotherhood', 'Mercury', 'Victory', or named after fraternal comradely places like Vietnam or Nicaragua; where the 'poliklinikas', the adminstrative offices, the supermarkets (more like 'below-average-markets') all look identical, where the balconies are falling off; the paving stones are uneven; the older women all wear babushka-style headscarves; the manhole covers bear Soviet Cyrillic lettering rather than posh modern Lithuanian words; the mobile phones are older and more battered; the hair dye more obvious; the skinny men in car parks try to roll their own smokes from discarded butts, and the power antenna which links the trolleybus to its overhead supply cable quite frequently falls down, requiring its driver to jump out and pull it back up again using a line in the back of the bus. People here know fewer languages, earn less money, have to work harder to make an impression, to achieve anything, in fact, presuming that the challenges of life outside the golden circle haven't ground such ambitions out of them completely. These would be the girlfriend farms for the unscrupulous, perhaps.

But I have other motives for being here, personal in a different way. I grew up listening to short-wave radio, one of the many ways I found for experiencing the world outside the rural/suburban comfort zone I came from. The interval signals of Radio Moscow, the two versions of 'Podmoskovnyje večera' which announced their presence – the eerie electronic version played on Eduard Artemjov's homemade synthesisers, and the odd big-band supper-jazz version – are forever part of my mental landscape, burned into my mind over endless nights under the sheets with the radio. But as a kid I never paid too much attention to the political messages which they were carefully designed to transmit; the cultural stuff was more interesting to me. One heard something of the individual 'republics' of the Soviet Union in this way, but somehow it never really struck home that these were nations, as individual and independent of Russia as Scotland, Wales and Ireland are of England. (Being English myself, though, and thus part of my own imperial culture, I didn't think too much about those nations then, either.)

But the winds of change (down in Gorky Park, etc.) blew, and as I became able to afford better shortwave receivers, so the information they brought me changed rapidly in nature. In 1990 I bought a Sony ICF 2001, at that time pretty much the best commercially available non-specialist shortwave radio there was. And among the crackle and static of the African stations and a live rant by Fidel Castro, the formerly state-sponsored stilted speech of Radio Vilnius suddenly took on a life of its own. Names like Landsbergis and Sąjūdis were heard, the transmitter signal suddenly louder, a little distorted, as if the engineers were trying to make their station audible at all costs, even that of sound quality – something an engineer would traditionally sacrifice his life for. Which of course, some people there ended up doing.

I followed the news of the assault by Soviet troops on the television transmission tower in Vilnius, the news of the deaths. Most shockingly, my new friend Radio Vilnius reverted to type, briefly mentioning 'disturbances' before returning to the bromides of Gorbachev, 'reconstruction' and 'dialogue'. In the famous short story 'Flowers for Algernon' by Daniel Keyes, a mentally subnormal man is given the powers of a genius; but as they wear off, his fall from the heights of mental achievement to his previous condition is heartbreakingly described. That's what this felt like.

On that radio, I followed the news of the August coup attempt against Gorbachev; Yeltsin's rise to power; Lithuania leading the way in simply saying they weren't going to listen any more; and the end of the Soviet Union, just in time for Christmas. I took that radio with me to the newly free countries of Czechoslovakia and Poland, this time as my link home via the BBC World Service. And in 1995 I took that radio to the international students' hall of residence in Lodz, Poland, where I met a group of Polish Lithuanian girls, studying English at the university. At that time, the Polish government offered study and job opportunities to citizens of other countries who could demonstrate Polish origin; this generous offer was exploited to the hilt by many people from the former Soviet states, many of whose Polish roots extended merely to a vaguely Polish-sounding surname, and whose given names were usually Sasha, Olga, Natasha, and who knew fewer Polish words than the average Briton. But there were real ethnic Poles there, too, including one called Ewa in the group I just mentioned.

Ewa was a brunette of average height who looked vaguely melancholy, not a great beauty but distinguished by large, soulful eyes. (Polish women's beauty often lies in the eyes, along with a certain modesty of bosom.) And it turned out in conversation that her father had been the director of the Vilnius TV tower during the Soviet armed assault in 1991. As she told the story, she had been home alone that day when the KGB came looking for her father; she claimed not to know where he was. He managed to evade arrest at that time, although he was later detained; the experience disturbed him, and he later left his family altogether. She too had been marked by that time, and later had her own personal troubles. I lost contact with her, but recently through mutual friends I established that she'd overcome her woes and had ended up in Ireland.

Coming to 'Eastern' Europe had provided a succession of shocks to me, as I saw places and met people who had lived through the history which had seemed so abstract to me back in England. But for some reason, the story of this one girl and her experience resonated with me, as I had been listening 'live' on my radio to those events as they unfolded; now I was face to face with a participant in those events. At this point, the story of history, the experience at a distance of that history through media, and the presence of a real person who had lived through that history personally came together in a nexus of life/media/life which has remained with me ever since.

I've been to Vilnius several times since then; this may well be my fourth time here. I have visited the television tower already, too; the errant bus journey I wrote about earlier was made yesterday, while trying to escape from the unremarkable suburb in which the tower is located. (To be fair, some of the surrounding blocks have seen a lick or two of paint since I was last there, and there are a couple of new supermarkets. Oh boy, the supermarkets, and most of all the shopping malls! The latter, particularly, have multiplied like the proverbial mushrooms after rain, and you can now orient yourself within the city with reference to any one of eight or ten major malls. The locals seem to have taken to consumer culture with gusto.) So I can't really say that I experienced a particular epiphany this time, as I sat in the revolving restaurant in the dome 160 metres/525 feet above the ground, looking at the clouds slowly rise from the city, the house-islands surrounded by a sea of forest, while groups of schoolchildren zoomed about joyously, glad of a day away from classes, and unburdened by history.

But it's been eight years since I was last in Vilnius. When I came down from the tower and made my way past a shiny new memorial slab commemorating the names of the Lithuanians who were crushed under Soviet tanks in 1991, I noticed that one of the surnames was the same as that of a student who I had taught a couple of years previously in Warsaw. The dead man's Christian name was defiantly Lithuanian; my ex-student, very much alive, a small, ebullient and pierced blonde lady, has no knowledge of having any roots other than Polish. But somewhere in the joint Polish-Lithuanian history those families had a common root, and in a distant way, I had a connection between both of those people, both of those cultures, and the history which had shaped them, and brought me here.

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14.59 val., 5. birzelio 2010 m.