Book 154: Lithuania (English): Between Shades of Gray (Ruta SEPETYS)

My stomach burned with hunger and my head throbbed. I missed drawing on real paper and longed for light to sketch properly. I was sick of being so close to people. I felt their sour breath all over me, elbows and knees constantly in my back. Sometimes I had the urge to start pushing people away from me, but it was no use. We were like matchsticks in a small box.

I feel a special link with Lithuania since I was lucky to visit straight after its birth (or rather rebirth) in 1992. The visa stamp I’m most proud of is from Lithuania, numbered no. 75. (I suppose visa stamps aren’t much longer for this world – nor, maybe, physical passports, although that won’t allow us to travel as freely as Marco Polo or Ibn Battuta…) Personally I’ll miss them, and the relieving thunk of the bureaucrat’s stamp into your little book (before which I always feel slightly nervous, as if I must have done something wrong…) Like my other most prized stamp, Liechtenstein, it couldn’t have been easier to escape from Vilnius station into newly minted Lithuania after the long train trip from Moscow (ultimately Tashkent), but finding the downtown office where I could get the sought-after stamp was not so easy. The country’s independence from the USSR (gained along with Latvia and Estonia in the amazing Singing Revolution) was still very tentative (the parliament building was ringed with defences against Soviet tanks which fortunately never arrived) and I was still shaking my head that they’d gotten away with it. And I felt myself privileged to have ‘discovered’ the lovely Baroque city of Vilnius and to be able to wander it with not a single other tourist.

Lithuania’s independence has always seemed precarious. In the Middle Ages in union with Poland it was one of the most powerful and advanced states in Europe. For most of its existence it has been swallowed by one or other of its neighbours. The Baltic States managed a fragile freedom between the World Wars, until betrayed and swallowed up by Stalin and Hitler. The USSR invaded, which is where this novel begins in 1941, and deported large segments of the population, especially the intelligentsia. The Vilkas family are put into freight cars and shipped to Siberia. The father has already been separated from them at the outset. The horrible journey is harrowingly described by 15-year-old budding artist Lina.

No matter what random cruelties are done to them (and Lina comes to realise that random cruelty is all of Stalin’s plan, hard as that is to grasp for humans who can’t help looking for patterns and reasons), the family and most of the Lithuanians maintain their dignity and morality. The NKVD (Stalin’s secret police, predecessor to the KGB and Putin’s FSB) is inexplicably and unnecessarily cruel to them, just as history has been to Lithuania. Not only must they survive against the vicious Russian guards, whose only vocabulary is “Davai!” (”Come on!” though it literally means, appropriately enough for Communists, “Give!”)

The exiles spend months at a labour camp in the Altai Mountains, then end up at an unbelievably bleak camp at the mouth of the Lena River on the Laptev Sea, north of the Arctic Circle. They are given nothing – not even food on days when they can’t work because of storms – and have to build everything themselves. The environment is so harsh that whether your door opens inwards or outwards becomes a matter of life and death. They have to struggle to stay positive in the face of not only the environment and the Russians but also one of their own (the ‘bald man’) who is unfailingly morbid and pessimistic.

Between Shades of Gray is an enthralling story, despite its simple writing. Few names are given, not only of the Russians but also of the Lithuanians, who instead are described (’the man who wound his watch’). It makes it easier to remember the characters, anyway. There are some beautiful images too, like the comparison of a dead person’s spirit to a kite disappearing into the sky. Despite the traumatising theme, I loved this book.

SEPETYS, Ruta (1967 – ), Between Shades of Gray, London, Penguin, 2011, ISBN 978-0-14-133588-9