In the Old Country
Jurgita is the only family member here who can speak English. Her grandma and my grandpa were cousins and exchanged letters. Fifty years later, Jurgita and I now correspond over the Internet. Over email, I told her I was coming to Lithuania on a break from graduate school. Her message came back the next day: "what a loverly surprise!" Jurgita is a college student, so over the telephone we settled on meeting after she finished her studies for the day. Our rendezvous point is the Lithuanian Presidential Palace. On the way there, past the central square, I pass through the central market as craft vendors, their day finished, gather up their baskets and dolls and amber jewelry and dismantle their stalls. I turn down another cobblestone street, this one narrow and curvy. As I round the palace corner, I see the back of a young woman in a stylish puffy yellow jacket. Jurgita said she would be wearing yellow.
"Hello! Are you Jurgita?"
Jurgita turns around to reveal a wide smile and big brown eyes. She has pale white cheeks, long straight brown hair, and ballerina legs. She can speak both Russian and Lithuanian, but she she'll use her near-perfect English with me.
"Colleen?"
"Yes!"
She hugs me before she says anything else.
"Wow," she says. "I can't believe it."
We walk together, back up the same street I came, to a cozy pub. It is a University of Vilnius hangout. Both tall and slender and brunette, we might be mistaken as sisters, though neither of us has a real sister. We talk over dinner, talk about the men in our lives, talk about our parents, our friends, college, talk long after the check is paid.
A few days later, after a few more meetings in the city, we meet up in the evening at one of Vilnius' larger bus stations. She wants me to meet her mother, Danguole, and show me the apartment she shares with her parents and younger brother. Until now, it has been just Jurgita and I, meeting in cozy restaurants and cafes, talking. We've been warming up to each other these last few days. Our English conversations attract attention wherever we go. (Though Lithuania has been rapidly Westernizing in the last 10 years since independence, English is rarely spoken outside areas frequented by tourists.)
When our bus comes, Jurgita and I squish into the Soviet-made metal box.
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