Freedoms Candles:

From Tiananmen to Vilnius

Jytte Holst Bowers

Table of Contents
Table of Contents... 1
Foreward..3
War, Peace, Marriage. 5
From South to West...17
Return To Fatherland.25
Settling Down32
Finnish Customs....49
Return to America.29
Elder Care..64
A True Friend70

Russian Trains..79
Czechoslovakia Again... 91
Freedom.110
A Folk Tale141

Foreward
Sometimes, at night, our sighs wake us up. Sometimes
they are loud so we wake up one another.

Those are our

Chinese sighs, depressing, so deep, that only a Chinese would

recognize them. They began with the massacre at Tiananmen;
for the Chinese, however, they began way back in history-maybe when they dragged the first stones for The Great Wall.
We returned from China with scars, which never seem to
heal, just like my childhood scars, they are always sensitive to
touch.
3

Every time I read my countrys history, I cry, our friend,

Chiang, said as we sat in a teahouse overlooking the hills around
Nan king, watching a magpie fly back and forth with twigs for
its nest. It is so sadso very sad.
In 1989 we left Chiang. We do not dare to write, lest
someone, someday, wants reprisal; but when we wake up in the
middle of the night and have nothing else to do with those quiet
hours we think of him and the many who touched us the years
we chased the revolutions from Tiananmen in China to Vilnius
in Lithuania.

War, Peace, Marriage

We were the last children of the Victorian age who

curtsied to our parents.

We never saw them in their

underwear, and we put sugar in the window for the stork

so he would bring us a little brother or sister. We were
the children of a Second World War, who learned to hate
and mistrust before we learned the rules of grammar and
the multiplication table.

When we are free, we will travel. We will cross

borders, my grandfather said. Oh, Little Heart, you
shall behold sights you wont believe.
My grandfather and I often walked down to the
harbor of Copenhagen, and like the Little Mermaid on
her rock, we looked longingly across the water toward
the Swedish coast where the lights, so close, but
forbidden to us, were sparkling.
So much freedom, my grandfather sighed. He
dreamed of coffee and butter. I dreamed of chocolate and
bananas.
In May of 1945, after five years of occupation, we
lit candles to celebrate our freedom. They glowed and
flickered into the early hours of the lovely spring night,
sending the long shadows of war back into the far corners
of childhood.
6

After years of hardship I wore my first pair of

nylons, ate my first grapefruit and went to my first ball in
a dress made out of our kitchen curtains. Most important
of all I took my first trip out of Denmark to Norway,
where I marveled over clouds that cast shadows on the
mountains.
We danced to jazz bands while the bells of freedom
still rang in our ears, lengthened our dresses to fit The
New Look; seams which already had been let down
several times were camouflaged each time with bright
silk ribbons. We chewed gum and collected pictures of
Hollywood stars, while we solemnly promised one
another that we had seen the last of wars.

The words au pair had not entered the dictionary

when my friends and I went to England to learn the
English language. We were simply called the maids and
learned to scrub floors and pansalthough we didnt
learn to pronounce the TH sound.
Oh, oh, there she sinks again; go and rescue her,
my employer used to say. T-H-I-N-K, my dear. Think,
is that so difficult? Yes, it is, I thought, as I stood in
front of the mirror and tried to put my tongue up in
between the gap in my front teeth.
After two years abroad I returned to Copenhagen.
I stood at the rail of the ship and waved to my waiting
family on the pier.

I recognized them all.

No one

recognized me with the thirty pounds I had gained the

two years I was abroad. One of the last things taken off
the rationing in England was the chocolate. I was there
8

when it happened, and looked it! The death of King

George failed to touch me, but the lifting of the chocolate
rationingoh, la la.
I didnt learn the TH sound; I never did. But the
years abroad gave me enough confidence to apply for a
degree in nursing.
My dear Miss Holst, the matron looked at me over
her gold rimmed glasses, your record in Physics and
Biology leaves a lot to be desired. Hmm, shall we say,
quite a lot? Then she patted my hand. Your own
physics, however, look strong enough. I sent a grateful
thought to Cadburys and the hundreds of hours I had
spent polishing pots and floors.
I will give you a try. With a curt nod she handed
me over to the instruction nurse so I could try out a
uniform and have a view of my room.
9

The following six months were a probation period in

which our academic work, as well as our performance on
the medical floor, was evaluated.

I struggled in the

classroom, but at the bedside I was in my element.

Eventually I was able to put the anatomy, biology and
physics together to match the diagnoses, all written in
Latin on a small blackboard behind the patients beds.
One morning during the professors rounds I
touched my head nurses hand. Yulitis, I whispered and
pointed to the word encircled by a small pine branch on
the blackboard over a bed where a shriveled up old man
lay with the sheet

pulled up to his chin. His eyes

anxiously followed the professor, who gave him a

reassuring pat on his hand.
Shh, Miss Holst, the head nurse hissed as we
passed to the next patient, I will tell you later.
10

Later I sat at her desk eager to take notes.

Miss Holst, she said, you may never interrupt a
professors rounds. I nodded. We had outgrown the
curtsying to our parents and our teachersbut to the
professors the democratic ways had yet to break ground.
Now, for yulitis, my dear girl; you will not find that
word on the test tomorrow. This little old man visited his
doctor a few days ago.

His cough was minimal, his

throat slightly red; but when the doctor found he had no

family, no one to give him a Christmas dinner, he
admitted him to the hospital. Then, at least, he could get
some food and warmth during the season.
Ten years ago while you were still playing hopscotch, all of our beds were filled. All kinds of diagnoses
were dreamed up during the night as ambulances darted
in and out of Copenhagen picking up the Jews. They
11

occupied the beds until they could be brought down to

the fishing boats which took them to Swedento safety.
In 1956 I graduated. We were handed our diplomas
by professors who thought up words like yulitis,
professors who thought up diagnoses for hundreds of
frightened Jews. We curtsied deeply as we received our
diplomas.

A World War, peace, and then one more war called

the Korean War. As we graduated a Cold War between
super powers threatening one another with total
destruction had left us restless and vulnerable; our
idealism had turned to cynicism.

12

I took a leave of absence from the hospital as I

found myself wishing that my makeshift bookshelves
warped under the weight of medical books were filled
with poetry instead.

I traveled to a Folk College far

away from the hectic life of Copenhagen to take a three

month course in the liberal arts. I loved every minute
literature in the morning, art in the afternoon. Poetry and
painting, music and politics filled the three months of the
summer when Denmark is most beautiful.
Every afternoon, an hour before dinner, the recent
happenings in world politics of was unfolded up to the
very minute. The lecture hall was crammed. One day I
found myself sitting beside a student filing his nails.
How rude! Why dont you listen? I whispered.
His Mao jacket and Red point of view bore me.
He looked at his hands and continued to file.
13

That

evening I was late for dinner. The only place left was
beside that rude student.
You seem quite nice, I heard a girl on the other
side of the table say to him, but I cant understand why
you put on such an act when you speak. Do you want to
sound different?
Maybe it is because I am different, he said and
laughed.

Allow me to introduce myself.

I am an

American. My name is Jim, and I have only spoken

Danish for eight months.
The professor continued to wear his Mao jacket.
Jim continued to file his nails. His accent became less,
our friendship greater, but when the three months were
over we parted. He was going back to his divinity school
in America and I to my job at the Childrens Psychiatric
Ward in Copenhagen.
14

I thought you loved him, my friend said and

turned to me as we saw him off.
Could you ever imagine me married to a
Congregational ministersmiling and baking cookies in
America? I hissed.

Dont tell me, I said when I answered my doorbell

eight months later and found Jim standing outside. Let
me guess. Your theology professor bored you, so you sat
and filed your nails and they threw you out of
Cambridge.
Cambridge is in England, he laughed, I was at
Yale.
Thats a key, not a school.
15

Its a school.
I wouldnt know that.

Its ten thousand miles

away, on the other side of somewhere. What brings you

here?
I changed my course of studies. I decided to study
literature instead, and when I left the divinity school, then
I had to serve in the army.

Im on leave from

Germany.
We spent the day walking up and down the streets
of Copenhagen, as easy with one anothers thoughts on
the cobble stones as we had been last summer on our
walks in the forest.

Our weekend was followed by

letters. In turn they were followed by a spring wedding

in Copenhagen.

16

From South to West

Fayetteville, North Carolina presented, at least to me, the

darker side of America. It was not the place I would have
chosen as the introduction to my new country. The government
chose it.

Fort Braggs psychological warfare unit was a

dumping ground for U.S. soldiers who had married European

women and therefore become a security risk.
We were the women known as war brides. I detested the
word, and whenever the question Are you a war bride? was
asked, I came back with a long explanation of how Jim and I had
17

met, courted and fell in love. For me, it seemed a war bride was
a woman who tries to escape from something unpleasanta
war, a defeator in search of a richer future. None of these
things fit me. My childhoods Copenhagen was a city I loved
and had left with great reluctance.
Besides making me a happy mother-to-be, Jim spent his
remaining ten months in the military picking up pine cones.
With wars now history what else could one do, according to his
general who detested pine cones. Jims friend, an artist, was
given the job of making Valentine invitations for the generals
wife.
Jim had enrolled in a masters program in California when
he was finished with the service, and I worked at a hospital
outside Fayetteville to help to support our future dream of
education and parenthood.

Every morning I took the bus to

18

work, where I sat in front of the white line while Joe, the black
janitor on the floor, sat behind.
Jytte, when in Rome do as the Romans do my charge
nurse said when I protested all the division lines. Not only
wasnt I Roman; I hesitated to become an American. I worked
on the second floor at the hospital, the floor where only white
people were admitted.
Jytte, the charge nurse said to me one morning, go in
and admit the woman in 120.

She claims she is a Native

American. I bet she is nothing but a nigger. Whatever she was

didnt matter much. She had vomited blood all over the bed. It
was obvious that she was dying. Would there be divisive lines
in heaven, I wondered?
Joe helped me to clean up. Later I heard him whisper to
another janitor, I feel sorry for that foreign nurse. This work is
too hard; she is expecting her first baby. Oh Joe, I thought later,
19

has the white man ever really been concerned about the black
mans babies?

California was all sunshine and fruit and a farewell to the

secluded life of North Carolina, the life where we had only had
one another.

Jim was asked if he would substitute for the

campus minister, who had taken a position overseas for two

years. And we were both asked if we would like to be house
parents in a mens dormitory which had just been finished. So
the very day Christine, our first born, arrived in our lives we
became parents of 100 freshmen! I was shaking hands with a
parent when my water broke. I excused myself and gingerly
inched into our apartment without anyone noticing

20

Whereas I had first been introduced to poverty in America I

was now introduced to wealth. The private university seemed to
have grown right out of a big orange grove, which incidentally
belonged to the university president.

I was introduced to

mothers in mink stoles who sat on bleachers cheering their

hopeful sons in 100 degree Fahrenheit. I presided over Sorority
rushes and advised young men who could have been my
younger brothers whom they should date. Once a week we had
open house and tea for eight freshmen. I divided my parenthood
between making formulas and baking Danish pastries.
Our first year Jim taught and studied for his masters
degree was delightful. With one hundred men brought up to be
gentlemen, our little Christine bounced through the year on one
knee or another, making our days exciting, and also very busy.
In the second year, however, the winds of the Sixties blew
over the campus and into the hallways of the dormitory. It was
21

no longer the orderly haven it had seemed. Graffiti appeared on

walls, and I realized my English was not as comprehensive as I
had thought. It was no longer the organized dormitory of our
first year. The formal suits, usually worn on Sundays, were
replaced by jeans and T-shirts. The month after Jim received his
degree and a notice he had earned a Fulbright Scholarship to
study in Denmark, one of our students lost the sight of his right
eye in a water fight.
In our last month at the university, which was also the last
month of my second pregnancy, we lost a student. They woke
us up in the middle of the night. It was three a.m. Bill, now a
sophomore, could not understand why his roommate, Jack, had
not returned.

Jack had wanted Bill to take a ride with him into

the canyon, but Bill had excused himself. We notified the police
and settled down with a cup of tea, expecting Jack to pop his
head in any time. At

six a.m. they found him. His car had

22

intentionally rolled over a cliff. Jack no longer had to worry his

parents about his wish to become an artist. They had advised
him to forget those notions.

An artist, they said, had no

moneytherefore no future!
It was an ordeal to pack his things. We found all his art
work and discovered it had become more morbid as the time for
his planned suicide neared. We also found the Mothers Day
present he had bought and wrapped in advance.

In the

relentless California sun I shivered. What kind of parents would

we be? And in what kind of a world?

23

Return To Fatherland
Once again Denmark. As we were descending, the plane
cast shadows on the green summer land.
Imagine, Jim, that I come from a place so small that the
shadows of an airplane span the whole country. Its mine, I
whispered. Its mine.

Maybe, right then, I realized that

America, so large and complex, would never be mine.

My

husband, yes, my children, yesbut not the country.

After the reunion with my parents we drove out to Lyngby,
my childhood town north of Copenhagen.
pale.
25

Jim was unusually

Do you want to rest before dinner?

Yes, Im afraid I have to.
He fell asleep immediately. So did Christine; she hadnt
slept since we landed to fuel in Iceland. Benedikte was still at
the age where only sleep counts. A while later when I went into
the bedroom I found Jim thrashing around.

His eyes were

glassy.
I need a doctor, he whispered, right away. I need a
doctor.
You need a hospital, I thought, and then even right away
might be too late. I watched as he arched his back and screamed
all the way in the ambulance, clear indications of meningitis.
Half an hour later two attendants carried him into the emergency
room where my father was waiting.
My dear, he put his arm around me, how long has he
been like that?
26

Never before, but this last month he has been on a heavy

dose of penicillin. Hes has had an infection on his face, which
you can see hasnt fully cleared up. A little later the doctor
came out followed by Jim.
I think your husband has had a severe breakdown. I want
him to see a doctor tomorrow after a good nights sleep.
Did you take a spinal? I inquired.
No, as I said, its a nervous breakdown. He handed me
some sleeping pills for Jim.
I thought that you were going to die, I sobbed.
So did I, Jim held my hand tightly.
Bed rest, absolute bed restand in isolation, strict
isolation, the doctor told us the next day. He believed it was a
staphylococcus infection, upon which the penicillin Jim had
taken for a month had no effect.

27

It is hard to believe that you over there in the United

States with all the advanced science could not discover that.
The heavy doses of penicillin your husband has been taking may
have clouded the whole picture. At any rate bed restabsolute
quiet. Your husband is entitled to that.
Fortunately, he was also entitled to socialized medicine; so
economically we had no worries when he spent the first three
weeks of his Fulbright year in a single room at Hillerod Hospital
with the daily attention of doctors who prescribed a salve for the
staphylococcus infection.
I spent our first three weeks back in Denmark moving into
our home in Fredensborg, around 15 miles north of Copenhagen.
The architect of the housing complex was Jrn Utzon, who later
became the architect for the opera house in Sidney, Australia. It
was surrounded by trees; and like the big seashell on the sandy
beach of Sidney, nature was dominant. We had saved money,
28

literally night and day, just to get a place to live. Housing has
always been a problem in Denmark. The Fulbright year, so
eagerly searched for, had cost Jims health, and the doctoral
degree dreamed about ever since we had met in the Danish Folk
College was now shelved forever.

* * ***

But he doesnt need to get his doctorate in Henrik Ibsens

Use of Nordic Mythology. My cousin, Inger, and I were sitting
in a restaurant on Langelinie, drinking coffee and sipping
cognac. I looked out on the Little Mermaid, so small, so simple,
and so beautiful. He can get it in the Value of Using Real
Christmas Trees Contra to Using Plastic Trees, Inger said. She
laughed when I dropped my desert fork on the floor. Just

29

kidding, she continued, but seriously you can get a degree in

almost anything over there, even by mail.
Inger had recently returned from a Fulbright year in
Connecticut. You have to remember that America is a country
of instantaneous happenings, she said. You dont waste your
time waiting for your soul to catch up with your intellect so you
can defend your dissertation. People are much younger when
they add a Ph.D. to their name. Why, think of it; is it really that
important to ruin your health to get it?
No, it isnt, I thought, as I began to pack our things to be
sent back to Americanot for me, at least. But I knew that for
Jim, an American, he wouldnt stop short of anything.
He had received a few answers to his applications for a job,
and one was from Maple View College in Michigan. He was
told that since we were so far away, they would hire him for
summer school. That could count as an interview.
30

If

satisfactory, they would then proceed to hire him for the

following year, teaching Freshman English.
Once again farewells. Farewells, though we didnt know it
then that the comings and goings to and from America were to
be our life. The seed was planted the day Jim accepted that job
in Mapleville, a town so small it hadnt even made the map.

31

Settling Down

Against my will I froze as we drove through the Main Street

of Mapleville. The center of town wasnt more than two blocks
a grocery store, two gas stations, a drugstore, a clothing store, a
hardware store and a bank, and the bar into which, in deep
depression, I walked 15 years later and ordered a glass of
Burgundy, served to me over crushed ice and with a straw.
You must be kidding, I said to Jim. Is this where we are
going to live?

32

Well, lets say its a stepping stone to something bigger and

better.
I knew so little about America, so little that I didnt know
that all those obscure Main Streets in America make up the
backbone of the country.

The Maple trees supplied the only

beauty lining the street all the way to the college, adding grace to
the campus, a conglomeration of buildings with one towering over
the rest reminiscent of both Disney and Queen Victoria. It was
the administration building where we met the dean of the faculty.
He took us over to our new home, a two story house which a
professor in the math department had rented to us for the summer.
It was a rambling white house with many doors and windows,
shaded by pine trees. On the first floor lived an art professor and
his family. They took us up to our quarters on the top floor, a two

33

room apartment with a bathroom and a makeshift kitchen. There

was a small wall papered attic where we would put the girls.
Its only for the summer.

Jim must have seen the

despairing look in my eyes.

Then what?

The sticky humid Michigan climate had

gotten to me. The girls had begun to wail and sulk, and I had just
come from a house built by a young man who had a dream of an
opera house in Sidney gleaming in his eyes.
Oh, well, you saw the grocery store? I asked Jim. Why
dont you get us a couple of steaks and a bottle of Burgundy so we
can toast to it all. Ill get the children settled, and well have a
candlelight supper. (I must have had a least one strong ancestor
whose genes had been passed on to me and who knew, as I did,
that a bottle of red wine could expel any depression.)

34

The girls were exhausted, and after the bath I put them to bed
in the attic. Then I unpacked Ingers farewell present, a couple of
pewter candle holders and two dozen candles.

It is an

underdeveloped nation, she had said of America. They put

candles on the table, but they never light them.
The table was set and the candles lit before Jim returned with
the steaks and wine.

We toasted the job, which was more

important than the look of a town. We raised our glasses to the

hope of finding a house. Skaal to usmost of all, though we did
not know it then, to Michelle, our third daughter on the way.

* * * * * *

It was less than fifty feet away, just across the street, that a
couple of weeks later I found my dream, an odd-shaped wooden
35

house. Light green paint was peeling from it, and the entrance
was covered with weeds six feet tall. But the window with all its
small glass panes held me spellbound. I had a weakness for small
windows and French doors.
I looked for a For Sale sign and couldnt see any, but as I
peeked through the windows the sight delighted me: a large oak
floor and a wooden staircase leading up to a balcony under the
peak of the roof. A large fireplace finished it off. I whispered
sold to myself just as someone patted me on the shoulder. I
jumped.
I am so sorry, I said as I looked into the eyes of a very
lovely woman who appeared to be a little older than I.

Is it

yours? Excuse me for trespassing.

No, goodness me, she laughed. Nobody wants it. It was
taken off the market long ago. Are you interested? I happen to
36

have the key if you want to look at it. The last buyer stayed two
nights and then left.
Is it haunted? I asked.

She laughed a pleasant throaty

laugh.
Oh no, I dont believe it is; on second thought, who knows?
It was an old Scotsman who built it for his retirement. Yes, why
not. It might be haunted. He died long ago and the family has
tried to get rid of it.

I am the neighbor.

I get a small

commission.
What a wonderful neighbor to get in addition to the house, I
thought.
Well, if youre interested, then Ill get the key.
Ill bring my husband over later. We might be interested. I
waved to her.

37

By the way Im Margaret, she said, and I replied,

Im

Jytte.
Can you spell that please.
Id rather not. It usually spells disaster. We laughed, the
first laugh of the many we were going to share over the years.
I ran home to Jim. I found it. I truly did. I found the
houseas a matter of fact, The House.
Where? You only left ten minutes ago.
Right across from us. It looks like a dump, but it is a
castle.
Within a week we had moved all our belongings into our
new home. Mapleville, which had yet to make Rand McNallys,
was no longer a stepping stone to something bigger and better. It
was home. We could walk everywhere, up to the college, down
to the town, and we never needed to lock our door. People were
38

friendly and honest, and the pressures which wed been under on
both coasts werre absent. America never became home to me;
Mapleville did.
Yes, the house displayed the frugality of a Scotsman who
had built it for his retirement. The balcony overlooking the living
room, just like our balcony in Denmark, became mine. It was
here I had my desk where I read, sewed and later nursed my baby.
Under the balcony was a small kitchen, the size of a walk-in
closet, graced by a French door. Next to the kitchen was the
bathroom with a toilet and a shower. Finally, a few steps led
down to a landing under which were the gas heater and a washing
machine.
It was the constant quarreling between the old Scotsman and
his wife which had made it possible for us to buy the house.
Margaret told us that in their last years it had become so intense
39

that they decided to add another two rooms to the house where the
wife could live with the right to use kitchen and bathroom.
However charming the front of the original house was, it would
have been too small for our family, soon to be extended. The
price was right: $5000, half the cost of a car.
Maybe the strain of moving had been too much. Halfway
through the pregnancy my water broke, and the doctor, a man I
later would work for, didnt believe the baby would live. I was
ordered to stay off my feet completely for three weeks, and it was
then I discovered the most admirable characteristic of the
American peopletheir helpfulness executed in an amazingly
organized way. Our meals were brought to the house every day
for over three weeks by faculty wives whom I did not even know.
The presidents wife, Mrs. Brown, was the organizer and was
constantly concerned for my well being.
40

I found my friends in that group, as Jim found his in the

faculty lounge. The little girls played with the neighbors children
on our street, so everything seemed to fall into place. It was a
college where the different departments interactedand generally
agreed. Jim, as always, enjoyed the teaching.
Dr. Brown, the president, was a graduate of Maple View
College. A few of his old teachers were still teaching. He tried,
and succeeded for the most part, to maintain in the college the
spirit he had found there as a young man.

Like any other

administrator in such a position, he was liked and disliked. He

seemed to treat everyone fairly, even the ones he knew did not
like him. He respected them for their work. I had little to do with
him, although I never forgot his kindness toward me. He took a
long walk every morning and invited students along. Through
them he kept a finger on the pulse of the college.
41

Finally I was back on my feet, arranging and rearranging our

house, an everlasting hobby of mine. My due date was three
months away, but the doctor had said that he would induce labor
in two months. The baby would then be large enough. I was on
the balcony reading; the little girls were playing in the bedroom.
We all knew, later, exactly where we were, exactly what we were
doing.

Jim returned from his class, his face white as a sheet.

My God, Jim, are you all right? I feared there had been a
reoccurrence of his illness in Denmark. What is wrong?
The President has been shot. Hes dead, I suppose.
Dr. Brownwho would do a thing like that? I asked,
disbelieving.
No, no, the President of America, President Kennedy. Jim
fell down on the sofa.

42

My God. I put my hand on my stomach. Oh God, I

thought, dont let the baby come now. It might be cursed instead
of blessed. We had been in Denmark when the President had
given an ultimatum to Russiaand won. I remember that my
uncle had been visiting with an American.
What do you think of your young President? my uncle had
asked.
The American had been quiet a moment, and then replied,
He is my President.
Imagine being that noble, my uncle had said later. Those
Americans are really special.
And that very specialness, I later thought, was buried with
President Kennedy at Arlington.

As always, when sadness

overtakes me, I became furious. As the days passed it looked to

me as if it was a crime committed by Americans, his own people.
43

How can the young people of this country recover, I asked

Jim. Their leader is mercilessly killed; not only that, they cant
even find the murderer? Little did I know that it was but the
beginning. The students hardly recovered before their next hero,
Robert Kennedy, was shot. And then it happened again with
Martin Luther King.

* * * * * *

Probably we were the last women of our generation who

stayed at home with our children and, quite possibly, why we
welcomed any opportunity to attend a party, or give one.
America was still trying to keep up with the Russians lead in
space. The money for education was flowing.

44

Maple View

College competed for the best lecturers, poets, dramatists and

politicians. There was enough to celebrate. We did itand how!
It was a totally new world, in more than one aspect, for me.
In Denmark we served afternoon coffees or small dinners for
family or a few friends. We served sherry or port; whiskey or
brandy was for the few. Cocktail parties had not arrived on the
European scene. I had to learn to attend them and to give them
and never felt quite at home. I admired the easiness with which
the Americans were able to walk around, converse, balancing a
plate and a glass, even to smile; to pass, gracefully, on to the next
person when one got bored, and to wake up the next day without a
hangover.
Jim once again tried to pursue his doctoral degree and had a
slight setback in his health. I tried to convince him that it wasnt

45

worth the price. He loved his teaching, and at that time at least no
one at the college was pressured to publish or perish.
I helped the college nurse with her office hours on her day
off. I loved the students. It amused me to see how many diseases
they could dream of in order to avoid classes. They were allowed
three before they were dropped from the course. In Denmark we
would have attended the university with a bottle of aspirins in our
pocket. Education was not something you could get an excuse
from. You either got itor you didnt.
Maple View College had been one of the first colleges in the
States to admit blacks, although at that time they were called
Negroes, and they mingled easily with the whites. I preferred our
Negro babysitters. They seemed to be more affectionate with our
children, loved them more and were loved in return. One day
Benedikte had smeared herself in coffee grounds so I can be
46

beautiful like Monique. I hoped she would always keep that

attitude.
The dividing line, although not visible like the line in the
Fayetteville bus, came after the killing of Martin Luther King.
The genuine ease on campus which we had enjoyed so much
disappeared.

The Blacks, and now they wanted to be called

Blacks, kept by themselves, separated from the white students in

their sadnessin their anger.
Jim had enlarged our house. It still seemed a little too small
for our growing family. We liked the nature and wanted more of
it. We found a vacant lot at the edge of town, backed with a copse
of pine trees and once again began to dream. In the midst of our
planning came a call from the State Department. Jim was away
for the weekend, so I answered the phone.

47

Mrs. Bowers, your husband has applied for a Fulbright

Scholarship to Denmark. Would he consider Finland? You are
Danish, I understand. Would it be a disappointment to you to go
to Finland instead?
Oh no, sir, not at all. How wonderful, how different from
Denmark, I thought. I will let my husband know. Thank you, oh
thank you so much. In my mind I was already sitting in a sleigh
pulled by reindeer
.

48

Finnish Customs

There were dark nights and cold nights. There were light
nights when the sun barely dips below the horizon.

It was

Scandinavia at the hardest time of the yearand Scandinavia at

the most glorious time of the year.
The language was so difficult that only Christine and
Benedikte learned it from their friends in school. I learned to ask
for one beer at the beginning of the first week. In my mind a cold
49

beer is a must after a hot sauna.

I could ask for twelve beers by

the end of our stay.

Our girls walked to school in darkness and returned in
darkness. I marveled over how they stood up against the bitter
wind from Siberia without shedding a tear. Or maybe the tears
had frozen on their way home from school. I just remembered
how bitterly I had cried as a child in Denmark, but the dry cold of
Finland was preferable to the dampness of Denmark.
Then in the beginning of December when Finland was
darkest, I placed candles in our windows.

The Finns were

commemorating their freedom from Russia in 1920. In a city

without a single electric light except for the streetlights thousands
of little flames in every window flickered into the night,
reminding me of the candles which lit up my childhoods
Denmark in 1945 after we had regained our independence. In the
50

winter war of 1938-1939 the Finns had fought the Russian army
to a standstill, so determined were they to keep their freedoms
candles burning.
The girls went skating. Jim taught, and I played the violin to
shorten the coldest time of the year. We lived in a comfortable
three room apartment, this time provided by the Finnish
government in contrast to our stay in Denmark six years earlier.
A friend of mine, a violinist in a small town close to
Mapelville, had bought me an old violin. An old woman close to
ninety was selling it for twenty-five dollars.

In addition she

related its story. At the end of the nineteenth century her father
had bought the violin for her and her sister to share. It was bought
in New York from a street urchin who was under ten years old.
Was he Polish, Czech or Hungarian? I would never know. What
I did know, or thought I knew, was that his family was hungry and
51

had sent the boy out on the street to get some money. Friends
who saw my violin told me I should have it appraised. I never
did. I guess I didnt want to know the true value of an heirloom
brought to The New World by a Slavic family, then sold in order
to put food on their table. More than half a century later it would
be back in Europe permanently, a gift to my Finnish music
teacher.

I never learned to play it, but feel it is in its right

environment. The friend who had bought it for me said, No one

can play the violin as can a Finn. No one can rustle the leaves
like the Finns.
Herr Raulamo, my teacher, certainly could rustle the leaves
and once slapped my hand with his bow, not because I was
incompetentI wasbut because I had played Grieg at home
without having reached the point where I could truly play his
wonderful music. The whole eight months with Herr Raulamo I
52

played Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star (a little tune by Mozart, its

only saving grace as far as I was concerned.)
In the darkest months I read to the girls about Finnish trolls
and mischievous Swedish children, while Jim drew plans for our
new home. In the early spring Jim was asked if he would like to
teach one more year at Oulu University. He wrote a friend at
home and found that Dr. Brown had resigned as president.
Another had taken his place and, as always in those cases, knew
how to sweep better and cleaner. You had better return, Jims
friend wrote.
When Jim returned the final papers to his Finnish students
they curtsied as I had done to my professors in Denmark. Jim, of
course, was not used to that. He was rather embarrassed. I have
never told him that I have often mentally curtsied to him.

53

Return to America
Yes, Maple View College had changed while we had been
away. Dr. Brown was no longer its president, and with him had
gone the genuine feeling the administration had for the faculty. I
remembered the day long ago when I had met Dr. Brown on
campus and he had asked me how long it was since I had been
back to Denmark for a visit.
Seven years, I replied.
Too long, too long. We will have to look into that. When
Jim a couple of months later received his Fulbright scholarship,
29

the college had promptly granted him a sabbatical with half pay,
which made our stay in Finland quite comfortable.
The cornerstone for our new home in Mapleville was laid the
fourth of July, 1970. The Vietnam War was still raging; the floor
in our basement would always be a reminder of that. The mason
who poured it, highly recommended for his excellent work,
arrived a couple of hours later than the appointed time. We were
irritated. The construction crew had only one month in which to
build the framework of the house; then Jim would take over and
finish the interior.
My God, not only is he late, but he dares to come with a
hangover, was my first thought. Then I looked at him again;
something was very wrong.

30

I spent all weekend with my brother and his wife. They

received a telegram Friday that their son, their only son, was
missing in action.
Would you rather come another day? Jim ventured.
No, I'm already late. He poured the cement. The floor was
not level. It never would be, just as his nephew would never
return.

Our year in Finland had almost made us forget that we

were in a war. We were rudely awakened!

We moved into our house in the beginning of September.
Only the sub floor was down, and we could walk through the
walls. Our greatest souvenir from Finland arrived the following
week, a sauna stove. It was promptly put in place. That was the
beginning of ten years of cleansing body and soul.
I can't put a date on when the college began to decline.
Neither could I say that it was the fault of the president. He
31

seemed a progressive and amiable man.

Maybe it was the

Toyotas and Hondas which had taken over the roads while Detroit
suffered. More Japanese cars, fewer American students--and now
they had to be pampered.
The foreign languages disappeared from the curriculum. The
president was present the day the faculty voted for dropping the
language requirement. Jim abstained, and I think our time at
Maple View was determined from that moment.
The English Department had to cut one person. The last
hired should go. The department chairman fought for the faculty
member, and in the midst of the discussion he had a heart attack
and was dead before the doctor arrived. Jim, now the oldest in the
department, was appointed to be the chairman.

Twice in his

career would he hold that position. He didn't want it. Someone

else always did. Jim was content to teach.
32

* * * * * *

A new house had always meant a new baby and, true to

tradition, Eric arrived on December 19th of 1971. But Eric was
different. He had Down Syndrome. My doctor, who had stayed
with me eight hours through a breech delivery, told us right away
to put him in an institution.
He will never talk, most certainly never walk. At any rate
do me the favor not to ask me to be his doctor. I know nothing
about Down Syndrome babies. He had been our family doctor
for years. He was the doctor for Maple View College. I was his
nurse and felt little rewarded by his attitude.
Jim's parents, when we called, said, We could have told you
so, but my mother wrote from Denmark that since Eric was born

33

on a Sunday he would be able to see all the little fairies in the

woodland.
He is our Christ Child, said Jim, sitting by my bedside at
the hospital, and patted my hand. A true Christ Child.
I could have stayed in the hospital forever. I was heavily
sedated and floated in and out of dreams, dreams of life before
Eric.
But you have to come home and find the star for the
Christmas tree. We can't find it. Dont ever think of sending our
little brother away. We will help you with him. Those were our
daughters, on whom I grew quite dependent in the years to come.
So Eric spent his first Christmas with a reluctant mother, a
concerned father and three doting sisters.
I didn't see the Fairy Godmother standing behind his little
bed, whispering, Forget your worries, your sadness.
34

Sixteen

years hence this little boy will stand in Nan king at the first school
in China built by the World Health Organization for teachers of
the handicapped. He will tell them about his school in America.
He will give them hope for what can be done. No, I didn't hear
nor see the fairy. My mother, had she been there, would have.

* * * * *

They were a colorful group, the students of The Sixties, so

different from my childhood and youth when I artfully mended
any little flaw in my clothes. We were not well-to-do, but that
was disguised from the world in countless small stitches. These
students were well-to-do but disguised themselves in frayed Tshirts and torn pants.
What a strange world you brought me to," I said to Jim. "I
don't understand it, but I will try to cooperate. Why don't we
35

invite your students home for a sauna and conversation?"

remembered all the gatherings we had back in Denmark during

the war, held by people who had wanted to expel our worries and
fears--their own worries and fears.
Thus began a period a student later described as "a school
within a school." Every Friday we fired up the sauna stove and
had open house for students. True to Finnish traditions the men
went into the sauna first, much to the dismay of the female
students who were testing their newly found women's liberation.
They complained until they got their way and forgot to put wood
on the fire. It went out, so that was the end of that.
After the sauna we met in our living room for discussions,
mostly about the war in Vietnam, so unlike the war of my
childhood in which there had been a beginning and an end. Right
or wrong had not been a question.
36

The girls often arrived with home-baked bread, the men with
beer. No special rules about a sauna. We never made it co-ed to
the annoyance of some. Neither did we allow them to smoke pot
to the annoyance of others. In Finland a sauna is treated like a
religion; we will continue that in America, we said.
Jim held his seminar classes in our home. They were such an
interesting and interested group. We, including myself, discussed
Herman Hesse, Henrik Ibsen and Dostoevsky. The students had
to keep up their grade average or they would find themselves in
Vietnam. Under such a threat they had to learn, and they did.
The bill for the education of the handicapped was passed in
those years, and Eric was one of the first students to reap the
benefits. In our home he was in the hands of devoted sisters and
students, and in the school he was in the hands of devoted
teachers.
37

At the end of the school year Jim's students wanted to give a

dinner provided they could cook it in our kitchen. I thought we
should contribute a little, and they agreed that we could give the
wine.

At the eve of the dinner one of the students had

misunderstood and arrived with four bottles of French wine. I hid

our Gallo in the cupboard and didnt know whether to laugh or cry
for "the poor little rich kids."
* * * * * *

When the Vietnam War was over those colorful students

faded. They disappeared like the shadows of the war they didn't
understand. Their siblings now entered Maple View College and
other institutions across the nation. They didn't go to college to
qualify themselves. They went in order to be able to land a wellpaying job.

Philosophy and religion, language and mythology,

38

became obsolete; they were replaced with courses in education,

recreation and business.
We had changed college presidents twice, and also a handful
of deans, everyone with newer and better ideas about how a
college should be run. Jim was no longer department chairman;
that job had also shifted hands twice to people with doctorates
who knew better. They annulled the tenure given Jim and his
colleague and required that both men present a program for
professional development every five years. If approved, their
contracts would be extended. Rumors sprang up like mushrooms.
Old faculty members were being let go, and since it wasn't us, we
didn't question the fairness of the procedure.
Someday it will be your turn, Jim, said his second cousin
from Ohio. Tom had just been laid off from one of the largest
companies in America. He was three years from his retirement.
39

What a strange country you are, I told Jim over our dinner.
I bet Tom is right; it will be you someday. Then the college can
get a man with a bachelor's degree fresh out of the university.
Why, it really would be much better economically.
I hadn't brought any understanding of economics with me
from Denmark. I had failed that subject in school. I lost every
single game of Monopoly I played with our children. I blame that
as the reason why I never became American along with the fact
that I never have been able to finish Moby Dick, I never knew the
make of our cars, and I drove them with very little respect.
But it wasn't Jim who was the target for the chilly winds
blowing over campuses. It was Ed, his friend and colleague for
seventeen years.
They want me to sit in on his classes--to evaluate his
teaching, Jim told me.
40

Preposterous, he has a Master's degree. Doesn't he also hold

a degree from the Sorbonne?
They say that he attracts too few students.
What of it. He attracts the best. Maybe that doesn't count
anymore? Come to think of it, I met the young man in your
departmentDr. Thompson, isn't it? He is staging a pie eating
contest in the same week we are commemorating World Hunger. I
think it is time to go, darling.
The president thought the same. If Jim wanted to support his
friend they would give him a one year rescindable contract.
Should he change his mind, they would renew his tenure. Yes, it
certainly was time to go, but there were all the memories. It had
been our children's childhood. And there was the house.
Do tell me, dear, the lady in a pink pantsuit with hair to
match asked. Is there any poison ivy? I was showing her the
41

house. I felt like running down the steps and tearing the For Sale
sign out of the ground. Yes, they creep up the walls and into every
little nook and cranny and through the windows, I thought.
Are you all right, my dear? She patted my arm. You look
terribly pale.
No, Im fine. I really am. Im feeling fine. I must have
become American after all.

They are always fine. I bid her

goodbye and closed the door to our bedroom. Then I cried.

* * * * * *

It was early morning when we left Mapleville. Our friends

were still sleeping, as was Eric. We carried him into the car.
With him and Michelle in the back seat, a few pots and pans, our
mattress on top of the roof, and the receipt for all the bills we had
paid off, I felt free for the first time in America. The Americans
42

always puzzle me when they say that they are so free--free to do

whatever they want. But if freedom is linked to a chain of credit
cards, does that not become slavery?
Mapleville, I sighed. Jim took my hand.

43

As we drove through

China
China! Was it where the sun went up when ours went
down, as my father had said--or was it the other way around?
Maybe the three Chinese who met us in Shanghai at the airport
also wondered about that. They had been waiting for twentyfour hours and thought that we had changed our mind.
It was ten p.m., we had hardly slept for excitement, and the
trip through Shanghai in a taxi didn't leave room for relaxation.
Bicycles all over ringing their bells, cars tooting their horns,
people in the middle of the street, and on the side walk men sat

under sycamore trees absorbed in card games, fanning away the

heat of August before they played their cards on the table.
When we reached the University of Technology where we
would spend the night we couldn't get to bed fast enough. We
each had a room in the guest house of the university. I marveled
over plastic wrapped tooth brushes, combs and soaps in the
bathroom. It could have been an American motel.

I was

however too tired to switch on the colored T.V.

Everyone was sleeping when I came down to the dining
room. A couple of men were having their breakfast; they didn't
seem to recognize me, so I gathered that they were not our
welcoming committee. I walked out and found an enclosed
terrace with all kinds of beautiful colored mums. A large
shadow hovered over the place, and I looked up at a huge statue
of Chairman Mao.

It was cut out of stone, marble maybe.

Later, much later, I thought that the Chinese might have been
45

happier if they had made their statues more human in sizes. It

would not have taken so much dynamite to destroy them.
I walked back into the sunshine and found Jim and Eric
waiting for me at the breakfast table.
"I found him, their national hero, humongous, large enough
to cast a shadow on anyone's day." Jim hushed me as our three
new friends came into the restaurant.

They ordered our

breakfast and placed themselves at another table.

"How odd,

why don't they sit with us? I have begun to feel different and
lonesome." The oddity had just begun.
But lunch was a feast, a banquet where the Chinese were
hosts and at the same table. We feasted on frogs' legs, turtle
soup, shrimp, crab and barely made the train which left for
ZhenJiang at noon.

Another six "Mao Jackets" were awaiting

us at the station in ZhenJiang.

46

The guest house, our new home, was separated from

campus by a gray wall. I knew it must have been aeons ago that
colorful ladies twirled colorful parasols. Now everything was
gray, the walls, the new buildings which hovered toward the
sky, the statues of Mao so overwhelming that only sticks of
dynamite could bring them to the ground two years after our
arrival when he fell from grace. Pants were worn by both men
and women. Most miserable of all were their homes where,
with memories of a Cultural Revolution still fresh, they did not
dare to put one dab of color on their gray walls or a bright rug
on their cement floors to let you know that somewhere, some
day a stripe of sunlight would reach China.
But their welcome and smiles were warm as they showed
us to our quarters, two bedrooms at the end of a hallway which
they had separated from the other rooms in the hotel by an
artificial wall made of wood and painted white, making a small
47

entrance way between Eric's room and ours. It remained so until

I couldn't handle the rapeseed oil any more and converted it into
a small kitchen in which I had several shocks from electric
plates so that I still wonder I am around to write about it.
Ah ja, to write about it. A Westerner once wrote: the first
week you want to write a book, after one month an article, after
a yearnothing. The impressions were overwhelming. I looked
around our bedroom. A bed was made up with white bedding in
which a diamond shape was cut out in the center revealing a
colorful silk quilt.

The walls were painted grayish green.

Against the wall stood a couple of plastic chairs, and a big T.V.
dominated the other wall.
"Why did you come to China?" our interpreter, Pan, asked.
"To get electricity and a T.V.," I promptly answered.

48

But it was the third room, the room outside our little private
hall, which became home. The Chinese called it our office. It
was much, much more.
I looked despairingly on the yellow and burgundy checked
linoleum floor, the two easy chairs in yellow plastic pushed up
against the wall. Two cone shaped wall lights cast a dim light
on a little wood table which looked like glorified plastic. A
bookcase with glass doors and a desk stood against one wall,
and in the corner stood a green refrigerator. It was the new
China at its best. We smiled and declared it comfortable.
Within a week it became home for the Wues and the
Wongs and many other names and faces, hard to pronounce and
even harder to forget. It was in that room where I listened to
stories about

grandparents and

girlfriends, their once-in-a-

lifetime child and endless dreams about getting away from

49

China; going somewhere, going anywhere where they did not

need permission from authorities to cross provincial borders.
I sewed four grass mats together to cover the linoleum and
viewed my work proudly.
"But Mrs. B.," said Mae, one of the English teachers, "this
is our bed. We use those mats to sleep on. How can I walk on
them?" It didn't seem right, but neither did the linoleum. My
first break with Chinese traditions stayed.
"You and I," I had told Eric before we left America, "will
be the Gypsies of the Orient. While Dad teaches we will wander
in and out of temples and courtyards. We will balance on the
walls and, like Mao, swim in the Yangtze River.
Where exactly had I got the ideas about Gypsies?

suppose a gypsy life meant freedom--and I intended to have that

in China. The Chinese thought differently.
"We would like it if you also will teach."
50

"I am not a teacher. I can't even spell correctly. Ask my

husband. He has corrected my English for twenty-five years,
and then some. My Danish also, as a matter of fact."
"They are talking about English Conversation right here in
our home. Over a cup of tea, darling."
"What about Eric."
"He can sit in. He can answer their questions."
"You're right, and probably better than I."
So twice a day I received two groups of teachers with
dreams of America reflected in their eyes. They gave me China
while I gave them Denmark and America. We traveled across
borders: their favorite tales of childhood, the value of natural
medicines, and the right of America to interfere with Chinese
politics in Tibet.
I had all the fun Jim did not have when he taught the
methods of teaching English to teachers of English.
51

So one

Sunday at the English corner in the park when a group of high

school teen-agers asked me what I could do for them, I invited
them home to practice English on Friday evenings. We called
them our teeny-boppers. I loved them and now saw the new
China, the ones who, although they in general respected their
elders, were not about to move in with their mothers-in-law
when they married. I secretly wondered if that ancient tradition
was not the spark which ignited revolutions. Their parents were
not to arrange their marriages.

Where the teachers of the

institute were careful with their words, the teeny-boppers

blabbered. The world would dance to their music. If not--well,
we saw that later!
Everyone who visited had to write down his or her name in
a book at the gatekeeper's small glass booth right inside the wall,
not always without complaints. I wondered if all those books in
institutions where there were foreign teachers were kept for later
52

use should the necessity arise. Chiang was a mathematics

teacher anxious to come to America who walked up to me after
a class period during which I had talked about South Dakota.
"Excuse me, Mrs.B., but I do believe Pierre is your state
capital, not Sioux Falls!"

* * * * * *

Jim was right; Eric would embrace the Chinese. He did not
have our disbelief in their system. He was void of our cynicism;
he traveled with love. The evening news on the T.V. began
with the Chinese national anthem, and Eric stood in front of the
screen with a raised arm and his fist clenched. He would have
made a wonderful Little Pioneer.
After the two hours I had set aside for him daily during
which he practiced writing and arithmetic, we were "The
53

Gypsies of the Orient" who explored the State stores and the free
market with large bamboo baskets on our arms.
We were novelty, the only blond and blue-eyed in a city of
three hundred thousand Chinese. One day I viewed a blonde
down the street. I ran after her. Finally I would meet someone
from our part of the world. I tapped her on the shoulder; she
turned, and I looked into the colorless eyes of a Chinese Albino.
The Chinese were as curious about us as we were about
them. They smiled, looked into my basket, discussed with one
another about the wisdom of my purchase, I assume. On days
when confusion overtook me I covered my basket from curious
eyes. I called those days "my punishing of the Chinese day."
There were only a few of those.
Eric and I walked on the streets amongst the rubble of torn
down buildings and bricks for new dreams, in a maze of tractors
with two-cylinder motors and carts with big cement slabs pulled
54

by Chinese as they had been centuries and centuries past. More

delightful was it to observe the bicycles with newly slaughtered
pigs hanging over the back wheel. The wife or mother-in-law sat
on top guarding their dream of wealth.
It was Eric who made friends. It was he who got the dinner
invitations. For Jim and me it was different. We also received
invitations. More than once we stood ready to go, waiting for
our host to pick us up. Then there was a knock on our door.
Our host stood outside with a lot of delicious fooda lot of
excuses. There was a wedding they had to attend, a funeral or
someone in the family had taken ill. They hoped we understood
they had to cancel the invitation. We understood. They were so
wonderfulso apologetic. They were being watched. After all
we represented the Bourgeois they so desperately wanted to
keep away from the Chinese shores. This was 1986, Orwells
1984.
55

If Eric did not make history on his fifteenth birthday, China

did. Before we had even left for China we had promised Eric a
three piece suit, tailor-made.

We had also promised him a

hamburger, which was more difficult as McDonald's had not

made its entrance into Chinese culture.

In pursuit of the latter

we had traveled to Jiaotong University in Shanghai.

Chinese

busses are so crowded it is impossible to turn; one is squeezed

up against the others, and if one happens to be a foreigner one is
lucky if purse or passport has not been removed. Jim would
have his wallet with money, and what is more important with his
passport, taken twice. I had already had my purse slashed in a
bus. Now two hours after our arrival by train we were still on the
way to the same guesthouse at Jiaotong University where we
had stayed our first night in China. I looked out on the masses
on the street. This cant be right, I said.

"My, my, Eric,

Shanghai is celebrating your birthday. What a parade."

56

"It looks more like a demonstration to me, said Jim, but I

do think we have reached our destination." With the help of
elbows we finally stood on the street, only a block from the
university's guesthouse.
We were too tired to think of hamburgers but went down to
the dining room and were thankful for noodles.

We had

indulged in two big birthday cakes presented to Eric, one from

the administration of the Shipbuilding Institute where we taught,
decorated with dragons, the other from our guesthouse, with
flowers. Both later helped to produce a poem written by Eric
which ended with:
The Chinese people are very kind
But not to themselves.
The next morning we left right after breakfast and saw why
it had taken us such a long time on the bus the previous night.
The Chinese were on the march, mostly the young people,
57

students with some older Chinese scattered in between and also

a few Westerners.

They carried big banners with Chinese

characters and waved us into the midst of their demonstration.

"Better not," said Jim and gave them the V sign. "No need
to give the authorities an excuse to put the blame on some
foreigners."

Finally we reached the Peace Hotel where we

found the closest imitation to the dreamed about hamburger.

"What do the students want?" I asked the waiter.
"I don't know, he said, rather curtly. "You do it all the
time, over there."
He was right. We did it all the time, sometimes for reasons
irrelevant to people who want only a smidgeon of freedom and a
fuller stomach to enjoy it.
Back at Jiaotong University, when we finally reached it,
they would not let us into the university. It was from there the
demonstration had begun.

Finally they opened the gates when

58

we showed them our keys to the room and our papers. We were
just in Shanghai for a birthday celebration and a hamburger!
In Zhen Jiang we found a birthday card from his sisters. It
was a mask of Mao Tse Tung which just fitted Eric's petite nose.
On the back it said, "You are one in a billion." "I don't think this
is a time to fool around," I whispered to Jim and did away with
the card after Eric had gone to bed. We could not risk Eric
putting it on in front of his Chinese friends. When they said,
"Our Chairman Mao," it was with apparent reverence and
disguised fear.
The students and some teachers had also demonstrated in
Zhen Jiang.

The administration hoped a healthy time had

arrived in China as the government had not risen up against the

demonstration. It was after all only ten years after The Cultural
Revolution. Only a week was left of 1986. The following week
the student body and faculty would be called together. The
59

healthy time the administration thought had arrived in China

would not last long. All would have to sign a declaration from
Beijing that they were in full agreement with the ousting of heir
apparent Hu Yaobang from the Communist Party.

He had

supported the students.

Mr. Fang, a senior, came to visit to give us the good news.
I had helped him to study for the TOEFL test, a test given in
order to evaluate students' abilities to study abroad. He had
passed it with the highest scores and had been promised a job
teaching in Beijing where his parents were also teachers. It was
the normal procedure to send students back to their home towns
for jobs in the field in which they had graduated. Later we heard
that Mr. Fang had been sent to do janitorial work in a factory in
Shanghai. He and fellow students of China who one afternoon
had marched in a demonstration should be punished; Beijing
knew how.
60

It was our first demonstration in China. After the second

we left.
* * * * *
It was not their religion or belief, so it could not really be
their Christmas. It was ours, but they were determined that it
should be good.

For days Chiang had made roses from red,

white and green tissue paper.

"You are so far from home. We will make a good evening.
A happy evening."
A week before Christmas a couple of teachers had marched
right into our home with a six foot cypress tree, planted in a big
ceramic pot. The city was otherwise devoid of trees. Where
they got this one we will never know.
"Now Christmas begins. We will have another tree, a big
tree with lights, and we will dance! It will be as if you are
home."
61

Our small room was so cold that we had changed several

times for the party. Jim and Eric were wearing suits, and I had
put on my Danish national costume. We were contemplating
putting our down jackets on top of our outfits when they
knocked on our door.
"We are ready for you." Chiang took our hands and walked
us into the big conference room where so many meetings were
held, where so many fates had been decided. Now all those
ghosts had been pushed into the dark corners, had given place to
a Christmas tree glittering with colored lights and paper roses.
"What do you think?" Chiang whispered. All the teachers of
English, about twenty of them, awaited our judgment.
"Oh, it is beautiful!" We had no words as we linked arms-Buddhists, Taoists, Maoists and those who, two years hence,
would become known as the contra-revolutionaries. It would be
the only time we would disco around a Christmas tree. In order
62

to make it reach the ceiling they had used three trees held
together by wire.
"What do you think?" Chiang whispered again.
"Oh, it is beautiful, very beautiful. What is it? A cedar
tree?" The branches didn't look familiar to me.
Oh, that is Lius work. He said Americans trim their
trees, so he came with a pair of scissors and cut all the branches.
What do you think?
Dear, dear Chiang, we couldnt have made it more
beautiful at home.

63

Elder Care
In the late spring of our second year in China we received an
emergency call from my mother-in-laws doctor. She was 87 and
very ill; he was not certain that she would live much longer.
Since Jim had a month to go before finishing his job, it was I,
together with Eric, who flew immediately to her home in
Connecticut to care for her during her last days. In fact, she lived
to be 103.
64

Jim's mother was recovering from her pneumonia, and I, was

I recovering from China? I was sitting on her porch listening to
the waves from Long Island Sound hitting the large rock
formation below.

Eric and I had been back for a week, and he

had already departed for Michigan where he was going to live

with Keith and Benedikte. I felt lonesome and, after a week of
nursing my mother-in-law back to health, rather useless.
Did I miss China? One year had been too littletwo years
too much. We had lived as if on the brink of an abyss, where
even if the tomorrows were ours, what about the Chinese? After
we had been in China for a week, Jim had had a nightmare from
which I had to wake him.
"We were trapped," he said. "I think it was this building.
They were chasing us down one hallway and up the other,
screaming, cheering, goading one another on. Then there was
65

firewe were trapped. It was chaos!" The dream became reality

three years later.
Yes, it was chaos, total chaos, at least to us. Now they
counted themselves in the billions. One Chinese more or less,
what did that mean? We saw a man dying on the street, utterly
helpless. We did not know the language to help him. And the
bloated bodies floating down the Yangtze after a flood when we
sailed up river, who would miss them?

The old woman our

chauffeur hit on another pleasure trip? He did not even stop the
car to inquire if she was hurt.

Who would cry for her?

Nevertheless, it was necessary to have all the names of those who

visited us on record. Would these people someday disappear, not
missed by anyone?

A shadow fell on the porch and made me

shiver.

66

We had been treated so well. We had received so many gifts,

some of them bribes from hopeful Chinese who thought that their
gifts were passages to a better future, a future we could not give
them and told them so. The small paper cut-outs and folded bags
made by students were my treasures, as was the memory of paper
roses on a Christmas tree.
The postman came up the steps and handed me a package for
my mother-in-law and a letter from Jim. "Darling, how would
you like to go to Canton? I have applied for a job at Zhongshan
University (Sun Yat-sen University.)" I don't think I would like it
at all, my dearest friend. I am tired, tired of being a foreigner in a
culture I every day will have to struggle to understand. Your
mother might need me. Eric might not fit into Benedikte's life,
even though she told me that everything was fine and that Eric

67

was trying hard to be independent. I looked for something, any

excuse to stay in America!
By the time that Jim himself returned, the culture shock,
which somehow always seemed greater when we returned to
America, had passed. We relaxed on the porch, and every evening
after dinner we took a walk around the neighborhood and looked
on manicured lawns into manicured homes and tried to guess how
many Chinese we could fit into them. We were amazed over
space, over the omission of walls. Amazed that people did not
seem to appreciate; we stood and looked at their homes, their
yards, as they rushed off in their cars. We had returned from a
people who had nothing, a people we hardly ever heard complain,
to a nation who had everything but to whom everything was not
enough.

68

When Jim's appointment to Sun Yat-sen's University in

Canton arrived we were ready to travel to China once more.

69

A True Friend
If I had said No to accompanying Jim to Zhongshan
University in Canton I would have missed out on two very
important experiences. The first was meeting a woman named Fran,
who became the instigator of the second, a job as a nurse for the
American consulate in Canton. The second lasted three months;
the first will last till death does us partand then beyond. She
was all the fairy tales in my life collected in one small gray-haired
woman.

Fran had paid her own fare. Jim and I had received ours from
Zhongshan University and therefore had been subject to the
atrocities that only C.A.A.C., the state-owned Chinese airline, was
famous for. A passenger waiting in line with us at Kennedy airport
said that C.A.A.C. stood for China Airline Always Cancels. We
had been accustomed to indifferent treatment of customers the last
two years and thought it a sign of progress when we were met by a
smiling petite stewardess as we entered the plane. She handed us a
pillow and said, Make yourself uncomfortable. She must have
practiced for hours to get her English that wrong, but her smile was
lovely and genuine.
China was on her way to capitalism, although the Chinese did
not believe in anything stronger than orange juice on their flights.
If there is any place where one could use a double martini it is on
board C.A.A.C. They did not believe in gradual descents either but
dropped suddenly into the polluted sky over Shanghai.
71

There were no smiling men in Mao Jackets to bid us welcome

to China.

Neither was anyone at the airport in Canton the

following day. Maybe they thought us old China hands. Finally

we got them on the phone. They told us that they would be there in
half an hour. To every half an hour one can add another hour. Our
two years had given us some understanding of Chinese time. We
arrived at the guest house of the university late in the afternoon,
and there was Fran standing at the reception desk reading South
China Daily.
Dont they know, she said before we were introduced, that
we have an election in the U.S.? Nothing in this paper at all.
Oh brother, I thought. One of those who think America is
the hub of the universe. We were taken to our apartments. Frans
was on the first floor, ours on the third.
We met her again at supper. She told us she was a widow.
Her husband had been with the World Bank; they had always loved
72

to travel.

Later in our friendship I got to know that he had

proposed to her at the Taj Mahal; I had thought when Jim proposed
to me in a vineyard on the bank of the Rhine it was the epitome of
romance. Now at the age of seventy-two Fran thought that she
would get out of the hair of her children. She had settled for China.
America was not the hub of the world; Fran became the center
of mine.

She had friends all over the globe.

I count myself

extremely lucky to be one. We were together for less than a year, a

time in which we laughed and later cried together in the birthing of
friendship.
* * * * * *

The American consulate needs a nurse; why dont you

apply? Fran said one morning when we were doing our Tai chi.
Impossible, I am not a citizen, and I am sure there are better
qualified candidates.

Nevertheless a couple of weeks later I

brought my vita in to a search committee of six people.

73

Where havent you been; what havent you done? they

asked.
I have been to too many places in too short a period, I said
to Jim later.
Nonsense, you will rise to the occasion, he replied.
I waited for their answer from October to the end of February.
So much red tape, Fran sighed. She had worked for the
State Department.
By now they know that my father once voted for the
Communist party, that I sucked my thumb and wet my bed until I
was six and that ten years later I failed an examination in advanced
economics.
By now they have already spent too much money on you not
to hire you, Fran said dryly.
Nevertheless, I felt relieved that afternoon when I walked into
the consulate in Dong Fang Hotel in the center of Canton.
74

I have never waited so long time to get a job. I am here to

withdraw my application.
We understand, Mrs. Bowers. They shook my hand. I left
the consulate lighthearted.
It feels good to stand up against the U.S. government.
Good for you, Fran laughed.
When it looked as though I could care less whether I had a job
with them or not they became interested. On my way to Hong
Kong a couple of days later I was approached by their Liaison
Officer.
Mrs. Bowers, you have been treated badly; wont you
reconsider? I was about to open my mouth when Jim nudged me
in my side. Do, he whispered. Youll be paid in dollars.
I really dont know.
We will give you a call next week.

75

I met an overseas Chinese, Doctor Ye, with whom I would

share the job. It was a great relief. I would not be alone in a job
where I did not know what would be expected.
One thing would be expected, the doctor from the Embassy in
Beijing told me when I was called in for an interview, and that was
to try to discourage the personnel from going too often to Hong
Kong for consultation. Those trips usually end up in nice little
lunches and cost our taxpayers far too much money, he laughed.
Oh yes, I will certainly try, I smiled. But had I not once
looked across the water to the shimmering lights on the coast of
Sweden?
Dont worry; you will be fine, he continued. Remember, I
am only a phone call or a fax away.
Man, where have you been? I was about to burst out, then
remembered that I was now working in diplomatic circles.

76

Thank you, Sir. I will remember that. I also remembered

one could count oneself lucky if anything electronic worked on the
mainland of China.
They held a lovely lunch for us in one of the hotels many
restaurants overlooking a waterfall running between rocks and
bamboos. Ah, father, I thought, now I believe that in a few
minutes colorful ladies will appear in between the cedar trees.
They will twirl their parasols and we will be in the China of your
dreams. Every Chinese delicacy had been ordered; only one thing
was missingDr. Ye.
Where is the doctor? My voice reached an alarming pitch.
Ah, you havent heard yet. She was taken back to the States
this morning in an emergency. She had developed a blood clot in
her leg. She will not be back.

77

Well, dont you worry, smiled my employer, Mr. Dunn.

You have Dr. Baker in Beijing. He is only a phone call or fax
away.
Welcome on board, Mrs. Bowers. They raised their glasses
and smiled to me. We didnt know then that three months hence
we would be sailing in very rough waters.

78

Russian Trains
My childhood's trains always ran on time.

They were

dependable. They were also kind. The Chinese, the Czech and the
Russian trains ran on time, but they never seemed kind; usually one
was confronted with a conductor, a customs officer or a border
guard determined that it would not be so good a trip as one had
anticipated. I cannot think of any trip Jim and I took while we were
abroad which did not run into complications, however nicely they
started.
Frau Maria helped me with my luggage and made sure I got in
the right compartment and, since it was the last time we were going
to meet, kissed me. I wiped it off as a Russian soldier helped me to
put my suitcase up into my berth.

79

"He comes from Leningrad," said the young Lithuanian

woman across from me.
"Good, she speaks English. I smiled to her little daughter.
"I will have nothing to do with him." The mother frowned at
me receiving help with the luggage. I understood, but he had been
very helpful and he could not help the situation he had been put
into. At the first stop he got out and bought an ice cream which he
handed to the little girl. Her mother made her give it back. I took
the ice cream. "Spasibo, I smiled. He smiled back at me. So
young, probably away from his mother for the first time. I thought
of the young German soldiers in Denmark during the war. We
would never have taken an ice cream from their hands either!
The Ukraine did not seem so foreboding as in January. The
birches with a light green tint and the flowering fruit trees made the
small wooden houses with their ginger bread trimmings

80

picturesque.

And I, I was on my way home, home to

Czechoslovakia.
As usual in the trains going through Russia tenseness prevails
until the customs officer has been there. Everyone seems to have
something to conceal: a picnic basket packed in a richer country,
too much money or worse, too many suitcases with this or that to
be sold somewhere for western currency.
With my Danish passport, Russian visa, an American green
card and a bottle of Slivovic I could enjoy in lonesome moments, I
felt uneasy. The Lithuanian woman realized she had too much
money and tried to stuff it anywhere in her dress where she could
find an opening. The Russian soldier was relaxed. He was at
home. I thought back to our first trip on a Russian train.
"Does it work?" the customs officer had asked on our way to
Lithuania.
"What works?" I asked Jim in Danish.
81

"I think he means our marriage," he answered.

"You bet it does," I smiled.
Of course it worked. The last years had been the litmus test.
Already I was homesick for Jim. We had shared the laughs and
frustrations passing through strange territories. He had cared for
both passports as I always in the last moment when confronted with
the officials somehow lost mine. Which pocket held the passport?
Which purse the money? An important paper used for a bookmark
was retrieved in the last minute. Jim's patience had no boundaries.
I was scrutinized, cleared and finally could settle for the night
with the delicious thought that when I woke up I would be in
Czechoslovakia. But, no, the train suddenly stopped with a jerk,
started, and proceeded a couple of hundred yards before it stopped
for good. I looked; the soldier had left; so had the mother and
child. I was all alone. How far would Spasibo take me? The
conductor came in, switched on the light and motioned me out.
82

"Czechoslovakia?"
"Nyet." I realized that it was as far as I would go as I stood
shivering on the platform, still trying to put on my clothes.
"Czechoslovakia?" I tried once more as a couple of men went
by.
"Nyet." One took my suitcase, the other my arm and led me
along the platform.
"English speaking? Deutch sprechen?" I fumbled for words.
My first thought was Siberia. All the stories I had heard began
with: "and then, in the middle of the night."
Two hundred yards further was a large lighted building with a
big sign LVOV. LVOV, LVOV, where was I? A map of Russia
would have helped. The men left me right at the feet of a statue of
Lenin. Is this a hoax, I thought, but realized that I was in the same
predicament with hundreds of others who were quite resigned to

83

travel under those circumstances, for whom Russia held no

surprises.
A man came and motioned me up a large staircase to a
balcony, which still possessed some grandeur from Czarist Russia.
Over in the corner was a large glass booth with a sign
"International" over the window. I was pushed into the queue and
had difficulties holding on to my luggage.

"Glasnost," said a

woman and shrugged her shoulder. She smiled to me and pointed

at the masses. "Glasnost, this time with contempt.
"Spasibo," I said and did not think my one Russian word
fitted. A young girl, as pretty as the Russian women become when
they are young, took my hand and led me up through the throng of
arguing, pushing people. It looked as if the word "Glasnost" had
set it off. A man dealt a blow to one in front. "Oh, My God. I am
caught in a revolution, without Jim, and only one Russian word and
a couple of rubles to my name. I followed the girl up to a window
84

with a sign German Spoken." With no other help but the girl's
reassuring hand in mine I showed my ticket, visa, passport and
green card. With a minimum of German I finally understood a
train to Czechoslovakia would come at 8 p.m. on platform number
three, but I had to return to the office and have my ticket stamped at
five p.m. "Glasnost," I thought, "a help or a hindrance?" as I fought
my way through the angry mob.
One seat was left in the waiting hall. I squeezed myself down
by a man and his wife and once again faced Lenin. His statue, like
Mao's, was humongous. Would it someday suffer the same fate, a
fate determined by sticks of dynamite? A couple of small boys
were playing hide and seek around the statue. I watched them for a
while and then continued with my book. One thing I was sure
about; I was not going to move until it was time to have my ticket
stamped twelve hours hence. The man beside me left his seat and
returned with an ice cream which he handed to me, none for
85

himself or his wife, but for me. I smiled and once again "Spasibo."
Had I but other words to let him know how thankful I was. How
simple kindness brought people closer while their governments
fought their senseless wars.
By five p.m. I knew all the creases in Lenin's pants and also in
his face. I had left my luggage twice, which I never would have
done in New York, for coffee and pastries. To my astonishment
the young girl from the morning appeared again to take me to the
right queue for the stamp on my ticket. I had a small calendar
bound in leather which I pressed into the girl's hand. She smiled a
sweet warm smile but rejected my little appreciation. Why is it we
do not fill history books with people like her?

* * * * *

The train arrived at 8 p.m.

I had been so worried about

missing the connection to the outside world I had sat on my

86

suitcases for three hours on platform No. 3. Once in a while I

walked up and down to stretch my legs.
A beautiful woman accompanied by a gentleman with a row
of medals on his jacket was also walking up and down the platform.
Inside the station everything had seemed so gray, so dismalChina
once againgray suits, gray skirts, gray faces and a gray Lenin,
but this lady with her Slavic features barely visible under a broadbrimmed, leopard-spotted hat wore a tailor-made light brown suit
set off by purple accessories. A pair of light purple kid gloves was
constantly in motion while she was talking, swinging a rainbow
colored umbrella.
Ah, Anna Karenina, I thought, but she was laughing too much
to fit that picture. She placed her feet, in a pair of leather pumps,
firmly on the platform. There must be another Russia, a Russia
where people are still dancing. She had to be a Bolshoi ballerina.

87

The couple got into the train which would take us far away to a
country with colors and dancing people.
"Czechoslovakia?"

I asked a young couple in the

compartment.
"Yes," they smiled, "you are on the right train." My sigh must
have vibrated through the trainsuch a Chinese sigh.
"We speak English no good." All foreigners seem to begin a
conversation that way. I did not speak their languages at all and
was happy just to be able to understand and be understood. They
were not a couple but friends who were returning from a medical
conference in Crimea.
We were joined by two Russian women. They whispered
together and looked at me.
"Would you be able to help these two ladies by taking one of
their suitcases?" The young man whispered. "They are on their
way to Prague to do business." I nodded but then thought of Jim.
88

"I am very sorry, but we are on a Russian visitor's visa; I am

afraid I don't dare." The women understood. The young man had
helped them anyway by taking one of their suitcases. We chatted; I
had not had such a relaxed time since I parted from Jim. For the
last time I had to show my papers. The Russian women had to
show their luggage which contained all kinds of goods to fill any
dream of western currency.

They were both literally thrown off

the train at the next station.

"What will happen to them? Will they be shot or deported to
Siberia or what?" I asked anxiously.
"Oh no," the young man laughed, "not in these days in Russia.
They will bribe the officers with some of their goods; then they will
jump into the next train and proceed."
"Oh," another Chinese sigh.
"Well, let me see what they left for me."

He carried the

suitcase down to the seat and opened it. He blushed. His friend and
89

I peeked curiously into masses of women's underwear, panties in

all colors of the rainbow. "What will I tell my fianc in Prague?"
His face was beet red.
"Just say that you went on a panty raid in Crimea." My
remark was lost on him. For me it was the laugh of the summer.
"We are changing to the train for Prague." They woke me
early in the morning. We will ask the conductor to tell you where
to change." I smiled and thanked them. From my berth I looked
out on the Carpathians and felt a lump in my throat, the same lump
I used to get in the old days when I returned to Denmark by ship
and caught the first sight of Hamlet's Castle in Ellsinore.

90

Czechoslovakia Again
The hundred and some steps leading from the station up to
the school were still there, as was the run down house of the
Gypsies half way up the steps. They were still shouting at one
another. Czechoslovakia had in our absence transformed herself
into a free market society with small private enterprises,
transforming living rooms into small cafeterias and back yards
into beer gardens.

There were flowers on our coffee table, and

91

the pictures we had left behind were still on the walls. I had
hardly taken off my coat before Eva Frankova stood in the door.
"Ah, this time it is the old gentleman who is left behind."
"Yes, I'm terribly sorry." I gave her a hug. "I'm sixteen
hours late. I've been in company with Lenin, trying to straighten
out a panty raid in Crimea and am finding the Russians lovely, as
human as we imagine ourselves to be."

She laughed when I gave

her the account of my trip and said I needed to go to bed to rest up

before next morning when I was expected at the examination table
at 9 a.m.
It was green, a big felt-covered tabletop, just like my own
earlier examination table had been, except there was a great
difference. At our examinations the professors did not interfere
unless we came to a point where we had no words. Then they
helped us along. Here the teachers interrupted the students. Was
92

it Czech, was it Communism, or simply an attempt to throw the

student off balance? At the end of the 15 minute examination
period when I was asked if I had any questions, I was speechless.
They had been through enough. I smiled and shook my head.
I had been called here to ask questions. But I missed Jim
terribly.

Would he have acted differently?

Would he,

relentlessly, have tortured the students; I doubted it. The last day
of the examinations brought my frustrations to a head. Veronica,
one of the most promising students, had drawn the question
"William Shakespeare." She had memorized summaries of his
plays and told a little about each.
The professor interrupted, Julius Caesar was not written by
Shakespeare." My mouth dropped. I was ready to retort, but in
time remembered I was a guest in another country. As Veronica
left the table I turned the week's frustration on him. "How can
93

you tell a student that Shakespeare didn't write Julius Caesar? He

did. Oh yes, I am sure there must be several plays, several books
and several articles but I think only one Caesar keeps an audience
spellbound when he whispers, 'Et tu, Brute,' and he is
Shakespeare's Julius Caesar."
The examinations were over. If I had failed my friends,

don't think I failed the students. Jim's arrival was two weeks
away, and I was invited to student homes for dinners.
"Oh," called Ludmilla, interrupting her setting of the table.
Come, isn't it Lithuania where your husband is? This is terrible;
they are killing the border guards." I rushed into the dining room
where six Lithuanian border guards sprawled across the TV
screen. Once again I was back at Tiananmen Square: "They are
killing them, they are killing them." I could scarcely sleep that
night.
94

Next morning after I had attended Mass with the family

Father Benedict greeted me. "The nuns of The Sacred Heart
would like to meet you."

Ludmilla and I walked across the

church yard and right into a twelfth century convent where a

dozen nuns stood around a long oak table in a beautiful room with
whitewashed walls and vaulted ceiling. Ludmilla introduced me
and told the nuns that my husband was back in Lithuania where
they had just killed six border guards.

The nuns looked

sympathetic and after a little whispering produced a bottle of

Slivovitz and a glass on a silver tray. Perplexed, I looked at
Ludmilla. "Drink," she whispered "or you will disappoint them."
So in the name of the Father and... I drank two glasses.
For three mornings in a row I had been waiting at the station
for Jim's arrival. The fourth day, when I decided not to go, he
arrived. I had tried to forget the news from the Baltic. I could not
95

get a telephone call through to Jim anyway.

My friend had

wanted me to join the graduating class on a trip in rubber boats

down the Moldau.

Then I decided I was too old for that

adventure, which was not quite without danger. I could have

stayed in Lithuania to experience that.
Oh My God, I have been waiting for you the last three
days." I looked at Jim and began to feel that I really would like to
go back to America.
"Yes, I was afraid of that, but I couldn't get away earlier, and
I have been sitting for twenty-four hours at LVOV station in
Ukraine. I don't want to see a statue of Lenin ever again." He
gave me a letter from our good friend, Fran. She was visiting her
son at Oxford. She would arrive in Prague in the latter part of
August and hoped we would meet her at the airport.

96

"And, by the way," Jim gave me my students' evaluations.

"I think you should have been a teacher instead of a nurse."
"No chance." I told him about the examinations in which my
performance had been nil; then I told him about Julius Caesar.
"And what would you have done, had you been me?"
"Left the examination table." Ah, ja, he was an American all
right.

* * * * * *

Our walks in the foothills continued.

The grain was

ripening; so were the farmers' plans for privatization in that

summer of 1991. We walked along the old Slovakian border, a
mound of dirt where pine trees and low brush covered what
division there had been between the states. But in the corridors of
parliament, where the future of Czechoslovakia was discussed, it
97

became more and more clear that Slovakia wanted to secede from
the union.
We were not there when it happened, but we were there
when the last Russian soldier left. It was on Jim's birthday; we
had celebrated with our usual Wiener schnitzel in the Wine cellar
and were in bed when we heard a little sizzle and a small bang as
a firecracker was set off.
"That's all? Their occupying forces are leaving, and they
throw one little firecracker up into the air." I shook Jim.
"I heard you, dear.

They are probably celebrating in

Prague." Jim turned his back to me and was soon asleep.

We sang and danced the summer away with our friends,
debated the wisdom of the Slovaks, and finished off the last drop
of the last crop of Slivovitz.

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Two of my Danish friends visited. They always tried to

catch us on the runin America, in Lithuania, even in China.
Every time they brought what we came to call our "Red Cross
Survival Kit:" smoked salmon, sausages, herring in all kinds of
sauces, rye bread and cheeses accompanied by a bottle of Danish
Aquavit. I was in heaven. Our friendship went all the way back to
the beginning of the Second World War.

It never tarnished.

When our speech ceased, our thoughts communicated.

After they left I played again and again the video tape they
had brought. At midnight when the gymnasium was quiet, I
walked through the long corridors into the library where the VCR
stood. The tape was an interview with the Danish queen upon the
occasion of her fiftieth birthday. Her reminiscences were about
Denmark's occupation and the years after the war. It was her

99

history; it was mine. It was Europe's: a struggle over power, over

bordersover peace.

* * * * * *

And then came Fran. It was the highlight of the summer.

We met her in Prague, one of the most beautiful places one could
celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Mozart, if one
could not be in Salzburg or Vienna. His music was played in
narrow alleys, on plazas, and even on a harpsichord which had
been placed on the steps of the Charles Bridge.
We indulged in the city, in one another's company and in
nostalgic memories of China. At the end of the day, true to
tradition, Fran gave a scrumptious dinner. Decades ago an old
aunt, Aunt Doris, had left Fran a sum of money. I also was an
heir.

Lunches at the Swan Hotel in Canton or at The Bear and

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The Bull in Hong Kong ended with Fran picking up the bill. "It is
on Aunt Doris." Back in our hotel we delighted in a Christmas
fruitcake Fran had brought. Christmas in Augustas a matter of
fact in the company of Fran Christmas became a daily event.
We enjoyed showing her our apartment in Uhersky Brod.
For her who had seen so many places in the world, who had been
living under so many different circumstances, things never
seemed too small, too inadequate or even, as in China, too dirty.
At the age of seventy-five she still indulged in new experiences, in
the mere excitement of being!
As for excitement, my God! The following morning, after we
had arrived home very late from Prague, Jim and I happened to
turn on the radio. It was six a.m., about the same time two years
earlier we had learned about Tiananmen. Gorbachev, the president

101

of the U.S.S.R., had been overthrown while we were listening to

Mozart.
Are you up, Fran?" we knocked on her door. She was up. I
suppose anyone used to being caught in revolutions always sleeps
lightly.
What is happening?"
A coupGorbachev has been overthrown."
Here we go again. Well, I am leaving for Paris in three
days. How about you?"
I looked at Jim. We will go back to Lithuania. They need
us there."
I recalled the official who came to Kaunas from the
American Embassy in Moscow. You should not be here. We
cannot offer you any protection." Then, vaguely, I remembered
my superior in the Consulate of Canton after blood was spilled in
102

Beijing, Mrs. Bowers, we have to find a hospital here in Canton

as soon as possible."
Well, Jim, I am not going.

I'm tired of fighting on

everyone's barricade. I'm going home."

Fran concurred. I'll take Jytte with me to Paris; she'll be
welcomed by my friends. From there we'll go back to America."
I glanced at Jim. Why in the world was it so important to fight on
the barricades along with the Lithuanians; then again had we not
been talking the last six years about freedom and open borders,
about being able to go wherever one desired?

* * * * * *

It was all over in three days; another man in Russia would

try, with or without Glasnost, to bring Russia into the 21st
century. We waved to Fran as the train took her toward Paris and
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a week later boarded our train toward Lithuania.

We were

exhausted and fell asleep immediately. A couple of hours later I

noticed a young girl in the opposite berth. In the lower berth was
an older woman, maybe the mother. Both were sleeping; the girl,
however, tossed restlessly. When had they come in? We must
have been tired not to have wakened up.
Jim was also awake. Pst." I motioned him to get out into
the corridor.
Let's find the dining car."
Where do you think you are? In the Orient Express on your
way to Istanbul? We are in Ukraine, darling. There has been a
coupremember?"
When did the girl and her mother come in?
I was sound asleep. Probably in Lvov. Did you want to say
'Hi' to Lenin, Jim laughed.
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The dining car was empty but for a few railroad personnel.
They were eating some potatoes swimming in grease. A woman
got up from her seat.

We ordered coffee, such a wonderful

international word. Then Jim remembered a few words from the

Russian he had taken in college.

"Bread, please."

Nyet.
Cake?
Another Nyet. The waitress dug deep into her pocket and
produced a walnut which she put into my hand.
My God, she is telling us that it is all she has. My thoughts
took flight to over-filled grocery carts in America pushed by wellfed people striding up and down aisles, grabbing this and that.
Jim put a couple of rubles on the table.
Back in the compartment another table was set. The woman
sat on Jim's bed, the girl across from her. They rose to leave. We
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shook our heads and smiled, the only language we knew. The
girl, dressed in a blue sweat suit with white stripes, could have
been a teenager from anywhere, but she was Alla, Alla from
Leningrad, a city still waiting to reclaim its former glorious name.
I speak no English good, no? I speak to you, yes? She
looked much like the girl who had led me through the turmoil in
Lvov. The elder woman motioned us to share their meal. I
rubbed the little walnut in my hand.
No, thank you very much. I smiled to Alla, who told us that
they had been on vacation in Hungary. It was the first time she
had been outside of Russia.

The first two days had been

wonderful, then came the coup. The woman, who was not her
mother, had kept calling Leningrad but could not make
connection. Yesterday had been the first time they were able to

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talk to their families. They were all right. Alla told us they had
not enjoyed their vacation very much.
The older woman, a friend of Alla's mother, swept the
crumbs off the table, folded the little tablecloth neatly and put it in
the wicker basket. I smiled at her. She returned my smile and
shrugged her shoulders; she knew what we had been talking
about.
A woman from the compartment next door came in; they
whispered at length. Alla looked at us and told us that they would
move into the other compartment. There were two empty beds
and this woman was alone and needed someone to talk to. We
understood. It had been a very hard week, their first trip out of
Russia. We settled down for the night. Russian trains at the
speed of fifty miles an hour could easily lull you to sleep. The

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clickety clackety of the wheels were singing Back-To-Lithuania.

I liked it better when they sang Home-To-Czechoslovakia.
We were only an hour away from Lithuania when Alla stood
in the door.

I am sorry we moved; I would like to speak

English.
Come in. We have a little time left to practice. I learned
that her mother was a French interpreter, her father an engineer
who had to hold a second job as a night watchman so they could
get enough to eat. She herself attended a school for guides who
wanted to show tourists around. She needed a lot of practice in
English.
Imagine, she said, in my school we were taught to hate
you. The teachers, everyone, said that someday you would throw
an atom bomb on Russia. We were always scared.

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We all were, Alla. In Denmark where I grew up we felt we

were caught between two super powers, Russia and America.
How utterly senseless that so many years of our lives should be
shadowed by distrust and fear.
Once again we stood in Lithuania. This time it was warm,
the sun was shining and two young men from the foreign office of
the university greeted us.

Alla waved.

welcome in St. Petersburg, she shouted.

109

Youll always be

Freedom
We moved into the apartment, the first one in Lithuania
where no one was observing us, no Big Brother. I felt free. The
young woman we were going to rent from apparently must have
felt less so.
But I do not understand, I told the two young men fetching
us in Vilnius. We were told that the apartment would not be

110

ready for another month, and that the university was going to put
us up at a hotel.
That's changed, was all they said and put us into the
university car. We had heard that our landlady was going to
America to study for one, maybe two semesters. Her fianc was
to be our landlord, to look after our needs, and to receive the
money for the rent from the university.
He awaited us with coffee and delicious pastries. However
small the Lithuanian food ration was, their hospitality was
genuine.

I walked around in the two bedroom apartment, in

which one room was locked. We were not allowed to use it, and
because of that it was naturally a must to see what was hidden
behind the door with a frosted glass window. I pressed my nose to
it, but it was impossible to see anything except an outline of
boxes.
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Oh well, it would have been nice to be able to use it as a

guest room or a little hide away, I said. As I looked around it
became clear that the owner had left in a hurry, unexpectedly,
before she had planned to go.
Of course, the coup! This was the apartment she had
inherited from her grandmother. She had probably sat on the
small, upholstered chair when she was a little girl, listening to
stories about a strange, cruel and cold place called Siberia. Over
the sofa hung a large picture of a smiling young girl. It must be
herher grandmother's treasure. With all those stories in her
memory she must have decided to get out of Lithuania the very
minute she learned about the coup, leaving behind her dirty
clothes which her fianc picked up and dirty dishes which I
washed.

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An English teacher told us that her own grandmother had

come to her home the first day of the coup. "Where are all the
warm clothes?" she asked. "You must have warm clothes for the
children. Never mind you, but the children. You must have warm
clothes." It was still sunny and warm in Lithuania; the old woman
must have recalled a time when she had been pushed out of a
cattle car and had to stand up against a freezing Siberian wind.
In the kitchen's old cupboards I found all the spices dried and
stored in old tin cans, in small linen sacks of days long past. In
the dining room we found traces of the younger generation, a bar
stocked with Vodka and Cognac.
Just help yourself, said her nice fianc, and we did. Since
they had a cupboard full of toilet paper, we could later, when we
had to move, use our A coupons to replenish the bar.

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We made it our home. It was full of luscious plants.

An

Hibiscus, probably the same age as the girl, was constantly

blooming the four months we lived there. In the bedroom the
window sill was full of blooming cacti. I brought slips back with
me to the U.S., but they have never bloomed. If it could talk,
however, would it be able to tell me some Siberian tales?
While abroad I adored our home in Czechoslovakia most. It
was light and airy, the furniture small and modern. In Lithuania
we moved from one apartment to another amongst large
upholstered furniture. Crystals adorned shiny mahogany tables.
The apartments were clean, but the cleanliness did not reach
beyond the threshold. The public staircases were another story.

* * * * * *

114

Across from the university was a lovely park with statues

commemorating Lithuania's famous sons, writers, musicians,
painters and politicians.

Above them all rose the statue of

freedom, a magnificent angel casting off the chains of slavery,

raising the Lithuanian flag toward heaven.
This wonderful sculpture had not always stood that tall, but
after the Russians cut it down, the Lithuanians built it on a pillar
of granite, impossible to reach, always adorned with flowers
placed by young and old, by students and workers, and by young
girls who brought their wedding bouquets to their altar of liberty.
The Lithuanians were waiting for that moment of freedom.
Was it as the students had told me, an illusion? Russia would
never give up Lithuania.

Crosses were constantly raised in

gratitude toward nations whose governments had recognized

Lithuania's right to self-government. Iceland was the first nation;
115

my pride was boundless that day when I saw the flag of Iceland
waving from one of the houses on the Avenue of Freedom. I was
home.

A couple of days after Iceland came recognition by

Denmark. I was hugged and kissed, but I was no longer Danish.

What was I?
everything:

Our experiences had made me a little bit of

a communist, a capitalist, a socialist and a

revolutionary.
At the university Jim had been appointed chairman of the
Foreign Languages Department.
But you don't even speak their language. How can you
possibly share their souls? I protested.
There is no one else, and it has to be done. He followed in
the footsteps of an overseas Lithuanian who had annoyed the
students and the administration as well. She was present at the

116

first department meeting Jim held, and the flowers which the
department handed her she threw back into his face.
Another Lithuanian had been mentioned for the job, but the
Academic Dean told me, He is too young. They will cream him
in no time. What about Jim, I thought. He doesn't even speak
the language. He will be caught between yours and the rector's
endless, senseless feuds. If the Lithuanian Americans brought
freedom to the university, they certainly did not bring harmony.
I had stopped teaching but was available if a teacher was ill.
I also had a couple of conversation classes and otherwise shared
the experience of lining up in queue. A long line usually meant
that something was being sold worthwhile standing for, even if
one did not know what.

The commodities were scarce.

Lithuanians braved it. It had been their life as far back as they
could remember.
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And then one evening came a message over the radio we all
had been waiting for, a voice that announced that the Baltic States
had finally got their freedom from Russia's domination. I looked
out the window, past the houses across the street, into a light
summer evening in Denmark. My father had taken my hand.
Come little heart, it is the biggest moment you will ever
encounter.

We ran into the streets; everyone, the whole

population of Denmark, was singing, dancing, waving the flags.

Little by little small candles of freedom were lit in every window
in Copenhagen. A German plane flew over our heads. Instead of
bombs it threw Roman Candles into the sky.
But they lost, they lost, I stammered.
When a war is over, my father said quietly, everyone is
happy, even the losers. Now they can go home. Few memories

118

are etched in my mind like that evening in the early summer of

1945.
We have to be on the street, I took Jim's hand. We have to
meet the students.

I promised we would light the freedom's

candles with them.

It is raining, dear.
What? A little rain can't stop a people who have been
occupied for fifty years.

Yes, fifty years, and there lay the

answer to the great disappointment I encountered a few minutes

later when we stood on their beautiful Freedom's Avenue.
Where are the people? They are free! They are finally
free! They should have been on the street.
Remember, Jim put a comforting arm around my shoulder,
you were occupied for five years. They have been occupied for
fifty. Most likely they are in a state of shock, of numbness. We
119

walked back home. All the way I looked for one little flickering
candle.

* * * * * *

A few days later the people were ready with their

celebrations. Jim and I stood at the feet of the Freedom statue and
waited for a choir to perform. A small man was already standing
on the steps in front of the Historical Museum. He began to sing.
I strained my ears.
Why don't they give him the microphone so we can hear
him? A little unassuming man in a frayed overcoat, he was not
on the program, merely singing to himself, singing fifty years
away, many of them probably spent in Siberia.
The embassies were waiting to move in. We had our
Thanksgiving dinner in the American Embassy, a place too small
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to hold the American Dream, and then again because it was

American, held them all. The ambassador was in the kitchen
peeling potatoes, as he had taken his shift during the night to put
the turkeys in an oven which could only take one turkey at a time.
All the food was kept hot in the sauna, and precisely at 2 p.m. the
dinner was served.

Ambassador Johnson read the first

Thanksgiving prayer offered by the Pilgrims in the New World.

Were we not all pilgrims in a strange new world?
Jim's ambition was to satisfy sixty teachers for whom the
doors to opportunities finally had opened.
How I wish I could get them abroad to see the world outside
their borders. How well I understood that feeling, so the dining
room table in our third and last apartment was filled with
application forms, maps of Scandinavia and letters to different

121

organizations. Our students were planning trips to Prague and

Paris. We began to see the gleam of hope in their eyes.
It was then, when they were about to begin their adventures,
I tired of mine. During the winter I had had bronchitis. It seemed
as if I never got rid of the cough, always a little hanging on. One
of the teachers went with me to the doctor.
I wish that he would prescribe me some effective
medicine, I told my interpreter.
The doctor says you need a hospital bed; he wants you to go
there right away.
Jim was teaching so I wrote him a note and packed my bag.
It was a wish coming true. While we had been abroad I had
wished to get inside a hospital, taking into consideration that my
illness was of a minor sort, so I could lie in the hospital bed and
observe. I was shown into a two bed unit and smiled at an old
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woman in the other bed. In white cotton pajamas I climbed into

my bed and waited for the doctor who had admitted me. She
arrived a few minutes later, a young, pretty intern who even spoke
English.
You have had a heart attack. Now the English must have
failed her, I thought.
Oh, I don't really believe so. I am coughing a little; I am
tired. The winter got the better of me.
Well, maybe, but we will treat it as a heart attack. You can
take your temperature; the nurse will come in and attend to you.
I fell back in bed. A heart attack! It was something which
happened to others, to somebody I was nursing, for whom I
ordered strict bed rest and a no salt diet.

I looked at the

thermometer glass in which a cockroach the size of my thumbnail

123

was swimming. The nurse also looked and motioned with her
eyes to a young student nurse to take it out.
I have no temperature. I have no pain and am terribly
hungry, so I guess that I am not on my death bed, I told Jim, who
looked in a state of shock, while we tried to figure out when the
heart attack had appeared. Truthfully, I was not surprised. Six
years of a constant strain had caught up.
My wish to see a hospital from a hospital bed vanished rather
quickly. I had been a nurse in a different place, at a different time
when patients were treated as customers who were always right.
There was a big difference between the care given in countries
performing socialized medicine and a country still operating under
a Communist system.
I had looked down on patients who had food brought in by
their families; now I was one. After the first day when the nurse
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brought me a big slab of bread, no butter, a hardboiled egg and

some warm milk, I was so grateful for anyone who brought me,
despite their own meager rations, some food. Jim brought toilet
paper when the pieces of newspaper were used up, and two lovely
students had their mothers cook a delicious meal. Then of course
there were all the beautiful flowers which brought the Lithuanians
through their most difficult moments. Who was I to complain?
On Sundays I was allowed to go home. It was the doctor's day
off. Jim and I then went into our favorite restaurant in the old part
of the city where I forgot that a no salt diet may have been called
for.
I saw little of my nurse. She did not speak English and
therefore may have avoided me. She brought my medicine in the
morning. It was for the whole day, and I had to keep track of
which was for the morning, noon and night. Then came the night
125

when I thought I had some pain in my chest. I looked at the

apparatus fitted into my bed board. No one had told me how to
use it. I pushed buttons; no one came. Finally I fell asleep. I
gathered it was only my nerves playing little tricks, but the next
morning I asked the doctor to show me how the call lights
worked.
Oh, my, they haven't worked since the Communists took
over; if you feel ill you have to ask your roommate to fetch the
nurse. But my roommate may be worse off than I. We could
both have been found dead in the morning. No one would care. I
felt as if we were back in China where the Communist system had
destroyed all humanitarian feelings.
It was Jim who brought me the medicine I needed.
We are going home.
What do you mean? We are home.
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No, I mean really home, where you can get the treatment
you might need.
I thought we would stay one more year.
Yes, but we're not.
My doctor thought that I should go somewhere quiet for
another three weeks, a place where I could recuperate. She would
fill out a form to a sanatorium out in the countryside. I declared
that I was well and just wanted to go home; my wish had come
true. In my hospital bed I had seen how it all worked, from a bed
I had to make up myself daily, a bed which had not been changed
in the three weeks I was in it.
If you had bribed the nurses they would have changed your
bed, one of the teachers remarked later. Then they would have
cared for you. She sounded somewhat offended.

127

No one told me that. At any rate, isnt that the system you
wanted to change?

* * * * * *

We were packing; from the years we had moved our

belongings across the borders there was a substantial pile of
letters, of clothes not useful any longer and of books, useful
forever. I put the books aside; I would give them to a handful of
my students who I knew would love them.
They go to the teacher's library. Jim took them firmly from
my hand. They do not, I thought. Yes, dear, the teachers are your
great interest; the students are mine. While Jim was out of town
for a week, I gave them to a handful of my students; after all, they
had also been my teachers.

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Of course, it could not have been a heart attack. How

could I possibly have survived the atmosphere in which the
Lithuanians tried to create order out of chaos; in which Jim tried
to organize a Department of Foreign Languages with little
knowledge of any other than English; in which he was caught
between fighting factions in the administration, where the
assumption was that if you supported one you must be the enemy
of the other.
Don't you think that things like that go on in Denmark as
well?
Quite possibly, but I would have known the rules of the
game, I sighed. I am so ready to go home. Jim was not quite
ready, I knew. He harbored a wish to take a group of teachers
abroad.

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Imagine showing them a world they never knew existed. He

had tried to arrange for places for them to stay in the Scandinavian
countries; but with telephones and fax machines not operating
most of the time, the only contact was the University of
Linkjping in Sweden.

Jim was notified that the city of

Linkjping had bestowed a sum of money on the city of Kaunas

for which Jim could apply.
He was turned down by the municipal authorities, who quite
possibly half a year earlier had been leading Communists. The trip
of the teachers was not considered an educational trip, merely a
little tour for amusement, they said. No, the council could find
better use of the money, for their friends.
The Danish ambassador, Dan Nielsen, had suggested Jim go
to The Nordic Council, but although generous their money would
only cover the travel expenses. It looked as though a trip through
130

Scandinavia had been a fairy tale, now only mirrored in Jim's

disappointed eyes.
Then as everything looked the bleakest Jim received a
telegram from the Academic Dean of Linkjping University
saying that he by no means should call the trip off. They had
found room and board and even a little spending money for each
of the teachers. Yes, that was my childhood's dream country all
right, the country with the chocolate and bananas, with beds for
every single Jew who escaped from Denmark. While we lay in
darkness, their lights had been blinking to me across the water
giving me a hope that someday normality would return to the
world.
Jim called a meeting of the teachers to tell them the news and
also to choose which teacher would be chosen to begin a doctoral
program at a Norwegian university in the fall. He placed two
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names in nomination, one of whom he knew to be a former

Communist.

One of the American teachers pulled him apart

completely in front of the department. How could he justify his

choice? Oh dear, I thought, if we had thought of that all the time
we worked in Eastern Europe, we might as well have stayed at
home.
Jim took it quietly, even if I did not. He suggested both
names be sent to the president for his decision. Darling, you
should have been that politician you father dreamed about, I
thought. They also stand quietly while mud is thrown at them;
only in Lithuania can one be so lucky that it also can be flowers.

* * * * * *

It was early in the morning when I waved goodbye to a bus

of eighteen teachers and Jim. Every one of them, despite their
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excitement, I am sure harbored a little uneasiness. This was their

first visit to a western country, another world, after which their
lives would never be the same.
I could have been amongst them. There was room in the bus,
but on the border there were queues where people waited up to
twenty hours to cross into Poland. I decided against it. After all it
had only been two weeks since I left the hospital.
I decided not to go back to the apartment, but instead I
strolled leisurely up Freedoms Avenue where the Linden trees
were at their peak.

Nothing can be more wonderful than

midsummer in the countries at the edge of the Baltic. What a

fantastic street! I had walked it so many times in such different
weather and never stopped to marvel over the people.

The

women, who had nothing, were the best dressed women I had ever

133

encountered. Their flair for elegance never failed to astonish me;

then again, out of hard times grow pride, self-perseverance.
The mannequins in the windows of the department stores
were wearing light summer clothes. When we arrived in 1991
they had been naked, draped in pieces of transparent plastic
awaiting better days.

Small kiosks shot up like mushrooms,

selling everything from health teas to Barbie dolls. I remember

my inner struggle before I let a Barbie doll into our home; now I
only wished that I had money to buy one for every little girl with
dreamy eyes.
Lithuania was celebrating her first summer of freedom, and I
spent my last days in sidewalk cafes sipping terribly expensive
coffees and cognacs. After all, Jim was probably being dined and
wined in Sweden. I purchased the last pieces of amber to take
home. One of them even had the tiniest fly inside, trapped in a
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history of a million years. I imagined Lithuanian children, as I

had many years ago, running up and down the sand of the Baltics,
shouting with joy when they found a small piece of amber, then
polishing it until it shone like gold.
Our time overseas was running out. We had seen the statue
of Mao dynamited to smithereens and the statue of Lenin,
dangling in heavy chains, moved somewhere else. We had seen
the glow of freedom's candles, if not from windows, then in the
eyes of the students. The world was finally theirs; what shape
would they give it? I met them in the small park across from the
university and gave them the books, remembering that there had
been a time in the life of their ancestors when it was forbidden to
read or speak their beautiful language, when Lithuanian books had
to be smuggled from household to household by heroic men and
when no less heroic grandparents and parents in deep secret had
135

taught the children their mother tongue, knowing without a

language you are nothing.
In the cathedral they were playing Mozart's Requiem
commemorating the day fifty-two years ago when the first
Lithuanians had been transported to Siberia. I stood outside and
listened. Then in the evening I went to the opera and listened to
Madam Butterfly, all this without Jim, but the time in Europe, my
Europe, was running out.

* * * * * *

We had never missed a train, a boat, or a plane while we

were abroad, but on our way to the airport in Vilnius Jim had the
notion to double check our departure time.
My God, our plane to New York left two hours ago. I
misread our tickets.
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Well, we can't turn around now. Dr. Sakalauskas is waitng

for us at the airport.

Dr. Sakalauskas, an overseas Lithuanian,

was American enough to walk impatiently up and down the

departure hall until we arrived.
Where have you been? Your plane has come and gone.
Well, he smiled, now we can all attend the Fourth of July party
the American ambassador is giving at noon. Another plane will
be leaving for New York tomorrow morning.
So once again we met Ambassador Johnson. He looked
comfortably at home in the new embassy. A man who stays up all
night to bake turkeys and then keeps a whole Thanksgiving dinner
for the American community warm in the sauna would probably,
like our good friend, Fran, be at home anywhere . The last time
we had seen him was when he opened the new embassy and gave

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a flawless speech in Lithuanian. We shook his hand and wished

him the best of luck.
Jim fell asleep immediately after we returned to the hotel.
He had to clear our suitcases with the customs officer early next
morning. I wandered aimlessly around, sat still a few minutes
with my book.

Prematurely I experienced the culture shock

awaiting us.
Around midnight I fell asleep; that was when Jim decided to
repack our suitcases. About 100 pounds overweight, it would not
be easy sailing. Amazingly, the officer who checked us in at the
crack of dawn waved us along with a smile. Yes, Lithuania was
on her way to capitalism.
In New York I was bawled out.

I had not notified the

authorities that I was going to stay abroad more than one year. I
as an alien resident should know better. They searched for my
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name in their big black book and were probably sorry that no
criminal activities showed up against me.
We are home, I sighed. What is it in our system, so
desperately wished for, that makes people tear down walls to
achieve it? Finally, we were cleared and in the plane to South
Dakota.
Our little grandson welcomed us with a flower and a flag.
When we had left him he had not acquired a language yet. Now
he spoke in sentences. Parenthood became Keith and Benedikte.
They noticed our tiredness and carried our luggage out to the car.
And Eric had grown into manhood. Then excitement took its toll.
Once in the car I kept nodding my head. A Roman Candle fizzled
in the sky, a left over from yesterday's Fourth of July celebration
of freedom.

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Norman, our little grandson, was asleep. Eric was asleep,

and I fought to keep awake. I did not want to miss a single
moment, a single word or a single hill rising up against the
horizon. Home at last. To me, however, would it not always be
home away from home?
We drove into our driveway.

The house glowed with

welcoming lights. Electricity had been installed while we were

away.

I squeezed the hand of Jim tightly, the man who had

bought me a mountain eight years ago. We were home.

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A Folk Tale
Where will you be going next? You are the forerunners of
revolutions. We laughed at our friend's letter. We had not told
her that we were back in America, back in our log cabin far from
any revolution.

We had left those who for half a century had

cried for freedom, and what about us who had had it all the time
and did not seem to know what to do with it any longer? We

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returned to America where everyone seemed to complainabout

everything.
Tell me a story, I whispered and curled myself up against
Jim.
What kind of a story?
One which can carry me awayfar, far away!
All right. Long, long ago, and oceans apart....
Oh, that's a nice one, I yawned and pulled the comforter
around my shoulders.

It sounds like my grandfather's story

about the flounder. There was also an ocean.

Which ocean?
Well, it was my grandfather's story; it couldn't be an ocean,
more likely a lake, maybe a sea.

Probably the Baltic, who

knows?
Then why don't you tell the story this time?
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If only I could remember. I always asked for that story

because I memorized the verse, and now it eludes me. I began to
croon a little tune.
Flounder in the deep, dark sea
Come and listen to my plea.
Lo, my good wife, Ilsebil
Has a wish against my will.
What does she want this time? The flounder rose to the
surface of the water. He flipped his tail back and forth angrily.
Large rings of white foam floated further and further out, out
toward the horizon.
An old fisherman, so the story goes, had caught the flounder
in his net. In accordance with the plea of the flounder, who had
promised to fulfill all the fisherman's wishes, it had been put back
into the sea. The fisherman's wishes were few, his wife's plenty.
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She wanted to get out of the hovel they lived in. The flounder
changed it to a housethen an estate, a castle and finally an
empire.
Now, dear flounder, she wants to rule over the sun and
moon, the stars and all the planets.
My good man, go home, and you will find your wife as I
found her long ago. The fisherman went home and found his
wife sitting not on a golden throne, but back in the hovel on the
old wooden stool with a broken leg.
Greed, my grandfather used to say, Greed, Greed, Greed.
Jim cleared his throat in his sleep.
The flounder is not sleeping. He swims quietly at the edge of
the waters, waiting to grant our wishes.

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