by Mark Jenkins
(This story first appeared in the October 2005 edition of Outside magazine and is reprinted with permission from the author.)
It's
one of the great regrets of travel: you meet someone on a journey, come
to know them intimately in just a few hours, then never see them again.
You promise to keep in touch, but it seldom happens. When you get back home
your own life takes over, and so does theirs, and the bond begins to fade.
While researching a two-week family trip to St. Petersburg this summer (part of a piano student exchange program for my two daughters), I happened upon a story in City Paper, a Baltic States online 'zine, about a new theme park in Lithuania called Stalin World. Surrounded by barbwire and guard towers, with a replica of a human cattle car and a collection of enormous Soviet era statues, it was said to combine "the charms of Disneyland with the worst of the Soviet gulag prison camp." I couldn't imagine a more macabre, yet twistedly appropriate, post-20th-century tourist attraction. Reading the article, I flashed back to Saulius Kunigenas.
In 1989 I was part of a seven-person team-three Americans, four Russians (three women, four men)-that bicycled across Russia. Five months in the saddle, Vladivostok to Leningrad, sea to sea, 7,500 miles across the largest country on earth. It was the hardest journey of my life, not physically, spiritually.
I met Saulius Kunigenas on the shores of Lake Baikal. I remember it was sleeting. We spotted a ribbon of smoke in the forest and wheeled off the road up to a campfire around which were huddled six Lithuanians cyclists. We shook hands and they shared their meager food and pushed our shivering bodies toward the warmth of the birch fire. We were kin, members of the fellowship of the wheel.
Saulius Kunigenas was the smallest of the cyclists, a sinewy, bird-like man with a hawk nose and burning, white-blue eyes. Saulius and I had an immediate, inexplicable connection. It was as if our friendship were already there, like a set table, just waiting for us to come from the far corners of the world, sit down, and renew a conversation we'd been having for years.
We talked of the surreal Soviet planet we were experiencing: villages where there was no food, but every man, woman and child was drunk on rotgut vodka. Cities with monolithic concrete tenements, only a dirt road leading into and out of town. Bread lines, vegetable lines, vodka lines, but no telephone lines, no newspapers, no magazines. The ceaseless hagiographic statues of St. Lenin. The big brother billboards extolling the virtues of communism. The KGB trailing us in black Ladas. People so oppressed that they'd lost their dignity.
That evening we all rode together for a stretch, and Saulius and I exchanged bicycles-me struggling along on his heavy, antique velocipede and he piloting my light, modern machine as if it were a glider. While I pounded to keep up with him, Saulius explained to me in broken English the real reason why he had come to Siberia: to find the prison camp where his wife, Palmira, had been interned as a child.
Deportations
of Lithuanians began immediately after the Soviet Union occupied the country
in the summer of 1940. Between 1940 and 1953, Stalin sent some 325,000 Lithuanians
to Siberia. Many never returned.
On May 22, 1948, the KGB set a one-day record in Lithuania: It arrested 35,766 Lithuanians, 10,897 of whom were children, packed them into cattle cars, and shunted them off to work camps in Siberia. Palmira and her family were victims of this purge. Her grandfather was a successful farmer-stone farmhouse, potato fields, bee hives, and a few head of cattle-thus a capitalist, thus a criminal. Palmira was three, her brother, Remigijus, two. Their father eluded capture, but her mother, uncle, and grandfather were deported to the shores of Lake Baikal.
Palmira's father, living under an assumed name, sent them food, and they gardened with fervor, at night, on small secret plots. Were they found to be succeeding in any way, especially if they were caught having improved their lives above the lot of others, they would have been sent even deeper into Siberia.
Somehow everyone in Palmira's family survived. On April 24, 1957, they were released and allowed to return home-not to their farm, of course (it had been siezed by the government and was now the lovely residence of a Soviet oligarch), but to a cramped shack in Kaunus, a small city in central Lithuania.
Riding beside me, Saulius relayed this story with quiet gravity. The next morning he and his Lithuanian teammates rode eastward along Lake Baikal, and I and my team rode west.
It would take us three more months to reach Leningrad and become the first to bicycle across the USSR. It was such a long journey it wasn't a journey at all, it was just life. We rode and we ate and we slept, and then we got up and rode and ate and slept. Our bikes became our friends and we gave them Russian names. Tom Freisem, the leader of the trip, named his Blagarodnaya Sabaka - Noble Dog. Torie Scott, the only American female, named hers Zaftra - Tomorrow. I named my bike Svabodny - Free.
By the time we dipped our front tires into the ice blue Baltic, fall had come to Russia and it was snowing and we were so exhausted we could have slept for a year. Instead, we threw a party, each of us inviting someone who had meant something special to us during our ride. I invited Saulius. We sang hard and drank hard and danced hard as if it were our last night on this earth. It was the end of 1989 and the Soviet Union was imploding.
In the melancholy hours of the morning I gave Saulius my bicycle, Svabodny.
I never saw Saulius again.
I wrote a book about that trip, Off the Map. I now pulled it from the shelf and read the opening passage about Saulius:
"Sometimes you meet someone you know.You have spent nights together. You've camped together beneath the sky and sung songs together and drunk beer in each other's homes. You have hugged and cried and laughed together. And you've never met.
There are few such people in the world, but they are the ones you will always know and who will always know you. They are living in parts of the world where you haven't been. They are living lives you cannot know. They have kitchens with bright windows you can't imagine, where you had coffee. These are the people you meet, and know, before you speak."
Sixteen
years later they sounded presumptuous. How could I have felt that I really
knew this man? We'd spent so little time together. Were we really that close,
or was it just the time and circumstances?
I was leaving for St. Petersburg in two weeks. On the off-chance they could help, I dialed the University of Wyoming International Studies department and asked if they knew of anyone in Laramie who spoke Lithuanian. They did: Rimvita Dreher, a Lithuanian American who worked as a business manager at the university. Lithuanian was her native tongue. Her father had been in the Lithuanian Resistance before escaping to the U.S. in 1951.
I explained the task to Rimvita. I had only his name: Saulius Kunigenas. I didn't know where he was or even if he was alive. Amazingly, after multiple on-line searches and a half dozen dead-end phone calls, Rim found Saulius.
The connection was so staticky she could barely hear him, but she managed to catch an e-mail address. It felt strange---email didn't exist when I first met Saulius---but I wrote and got a response from Laima Kunigenas, Saulius' daughter. I hadn't even known he had a daughter. She was 23, spoke English, had worked in California, and had just finished her Masters in Economics at Kaunus TK. Laima wrote that of course her father remembered me.
"He says for you to come to Lithuania. Bring your bicycle. He will be waiting for you.
"A month later I was on the night train south from St. Petersburg to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, then west to Kaunus, Saulius' hometown.
Lithuania today is a country of 3.5 million on the Baltic Sea. Roughly the size of West Virginia, it's bordered on the east by Belorussia, on the north by Latvia, on the south by Poland and an inholding of Russia.
Rumbling through flat pine forests in a sleeper, watching the sun sink at midnight then bounce annoyingly back up at 2 a.m., the enterprise suddenly seemed mad.
Would we even recognize each other after so long? And if we did, what would it be like to see each other again? I remembered an agile, athletic man, but what is memory?
Mostly what you want to remember, heedless of reality. I'd imagined that perhaps Saulius and I could bicycle across Lithuania together. But was he even still cycling? So much happens in 16 years. Unnervingly, it occurred to me that I actually knew very little about Saulius. I never knew how old he was or what his profession was. We'd just clicked on an emotional level. Our shared landscape had been the brutal, irrational Soviet empire, but now the USSR was dead.
Saulius Kunigenas spotted me, and I him, the moment I stepped off the train. He ran toward me, gripping my hand and hugging me at the same time. He looked just as he had a decade and a half ago-Roman nose, deeply tanned, the wiry body of a Tour de France rider. In the strength of his handshake alone, I knew that our friendship was still alive. We threw my collapsible bicycle into the back seat of his car and drove to his home.
The awkwardness I'd feared lasted only moments, then we were excitedly shooting questions back and forth trying to catch up on each others' lives. He was 55 now, had survived stomach cancer, and was still cycling hard, having put over 125,000 miles on his 1975 racing bike. He was delighted to learn that I too was still cycling, and surprised to discover that I was a journalist, had a wife and two daughters, and had traveled extensively. I was intrigued to learn that he had visited Australia, Brazil, Iceland and most of western Europe.
"Everything!" Saulius said happily, practically shouting. "Everything different now."
Even with the ascendence of computers and the internet, even with 9/11, Afghanistan and two Gulf wars-in the past two decades life for ordinary Americans has hardly changed at all, compared to life in Lithuania.
The solemn intensity Saulius had exhibited when I met him in Siberia had been transformed into the energy of hope. Pre-independence, he'd worked in a Russian construction firm as a poorly paid mechanical engineer. Post-independence, he went back to school, got an MBA, became a general contractor, and began building small, efficient custom homes in Kaunus, now a city of 400,000. After five years he and Palmira had saved enough to leave their dismal, Soviet block apartment and build their own home next to a forest on the outskirts of the city.
As we pulled up to his house, a modest brick home with cherry trees in the backyard, I wondered whether he'd kept Svabodny. Back in 1989, along with the bike, l'd given Saulius a crate of spare parts, so he could have kept it rolling indefinitely-but maybe it didn't mean to him what it meant to me.
Yet there it was, hanging in the garage, perfectly maintained.
"No bike like this in all Lithuania before independence," said Saulius, explaining that he used to ride Svabodny through Kaunus to show people what was happening beyond the Iron Curtain. After independence, Saulius rode right across the borders, touring through Finland and Germany and all the Baltic States. "I ride and ride. It's a special bike-your gift to me."
He reached for Svadbodny, I assembled my bike (a folding Dahon), and away we went for a ride, cruising the streets of Kaunus for hours. It felt natural to be on bikes together, our fundamental connection.
That night, in a kitchen with bright windows, I met his wife Palmira, a retired professor of textiles, and his daughter Laima, a fledgling economist. Over after-dinner coffee, conversation inevitably fell to geopolitics.
"The only way to enslave a country," said Palmira in German, "is to cut off the head. Stalin understood this, that's why he deported the teachers, the engineers, the government officials, the officers, the successful farmers, the businessmen-all of us."
Over 20 million people died in the Gulag. The post-Stalin decades were less violent, but citizens were still compelled to operate inside the tiny box of Marxist/Leninist doctrine. Many resisted in small, private ways, but it was still an effective form of intellectual footbinding that eventually crippled the entire country. Gorbachev the first communist leader to admit this. He began the process of liberalization that quickly gave 15 Soviet states their freedom. The new constitution of the Republic of Lithuania, a parliamentary democracy, was ratified by referendum in 1992.
"But that is all past," Palmira said, waving her hand and smiling at Laima, her daughter who will never be sent to Siberia. "Tomorrow you shall see Lithuania today."
The next morning, just as I'd imagined, Saulius and I rode off on what he dubbed the Democratic Tour of Lithuania. We would pedal from Kaunus to the sea and back, a 400-mile loop, camping wherever we found ourselves at the end of the day and living off local markets.
That first morning we slid west along the Nemunas River, Saulius showing off the medieval castles and gothic cathdrals that overlook the sleepy green waterway.
"Lithuania was independent country for 500 years," he stated proudly from the top of one castle turret.
Indeed, under the reign of the Grand Duke Algirdas (1345-1377), the borders of Lithuania had extended from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. The geographical center of Europe lies in Lithuania, and it has always been a western-leaning country. Unlike Russia, Lithuanian fully embraced the Renaissance. The first book written in Lithuanian, a language all its own, was published in 1547 and Villnius University was founded in 1579.
That night we pitched our tent in a cow meadow. In the morning we cycled along narrow, tree-lined roads through brilliant yellow fields of rapeseed all the way to the coast. A motorboat, owned by a father and son who had started a ferry business after independence, took us out to the Curonian Spit, a 70-mile arm of sand dotted with summer beach communities. We beach-camped on the Baltic, sand in our gears, the sound of the waves in our ears.
Day three we winged north along the spit from the seaside resort town of Nida (loaded with thick-calved Germans), through the port city of Klaipeda and onto Palanga (loaded with mayonnaised-skinned Finns). Tourism was obviously as buoyant as a beach ball.
In the years since independence, Lithuanians, industrious and entrepreneurial, have made their country the most successful former Soviet republic. Privatization of once nationalized businesses is already almost complete. Business is thriving, banking to bio-engineering, exports are robust, and in 2004 Lithuania was accepted into the European Union.
Our fourth day out, we circled back inland, visiting the farmhouse of family friends who had also been sent to Siberia in the late 40s. When I asked Saulius if any of his family had been deported, he said: "No. Shot."
An armed underground Resistance formed after World War II during the first years of Soviet control. Eventually numbering 100,000 partisans, they fought a guerilla war against Russian occupation until 1953 when the movement was crushed. Saulius' uncle had joined the Resistance in 1948 at the age of 24, was caught by the KGB, and later executed in the forest.
That afternoon Saulius guided me to another remote farm he felt I must see-the gardens of sculptor Vilius Orvydas (1952-1992) a deeply religious, mystical man who devoted his life's work to opposing the occupation. The Oryvdas farm was a strange labyrinth of gargantuan logs and monumental religious and anti-Soviet sculptures, the antithesis of the Stalin World theme park. On one heavy slab of black granite Oryvdas had depicted the USSR as a giant spider, its hairy legs reaching into Europe, Asia and Siberia. Across the top of the headstone was inscribed: Communism is the Sorrow of the World.
On the last day, looping back into Kaunus, we rode together without talking, mile after mile. We were in unison and words were redundant. Just riding together again, after so many years, was enough.
Outside of Kaunus, Saulius took me by the castle-like home of a mafia boss, explaining that prostitution, corruption, and drug use has increased in Lithuania in the last decade.
"It is one small bad side capitalism," said Saulius, bounding forward as if he couldn't wait to see what was around the next bend. "But at least we have independence!"
The night before I left Lithuania Saulius and I stayed up talking. I invited him to the U.S., to my home in Wyoming. I spoke of Yellowstone and Devil's Tower and the mountains and deserts.
"Finally," Saulius said softly, "I can come."
After we went to bed, I snuck into Saulius' garage, took down Svabodny, and renamed her. With yellow, green, and red paint-the colors of the Lithuania flag, I painted a new word along the top tube: Laisvé … freedom, in Lithuanian.
I wish this story ended here. But life refuses to fit neatly into a small tale.
The morning I left, Saulius had a stroke. I found him in the garage lying on the concrete below Laisvé. I cradled him until the ambulance came. Palmira would not let me stay. I had a plane ticket back to the U.S. She insisted I return home to my own family. Saulius is in rehab now and it is uncertain whether he will bike again.
Even deep friendships are fragile. Someone you met on a journey years ago is out there. The friendship is not lost, only dormant, waiting for the spark of contact. Go. Find this person.
Mark Jenkins is a critically acclaimed author, internationally recognized adventurer and the monthly columnist for Outside magazine. More information on Mark can be found at http://www.thehardway.com.
[Update from Mark: "Saulius is fundamentally indomitable, just like his little country of Lithuania. After two months of intense physical therapy, he's back to cycling. Yahoo!"]