Lithuania smelled of apples at the end of summer. The apples were everywhere you looked, and I couldn’t get enough of them. Even imagining leaving home felt painful, and that end-of-August pain I can still feel in my chest every time I think back to those days.
In my garden, there are only two apple trees. One of them my grandmother planted and particularly liked. The apples on it are ripening late; each gets a bright red side in late August or even September, and that is how you know it is time to pick them.
You need to pick them carefully and put them in boxes – this way they can stay fresh into the late autumn. If they fall, the side gets damaged, and you need to eat them right away.
Another apple tree we picked and planted much later with my husband. We bought it in a little nursery in the woods near Tapeliai lake, from two brothers, the owners, who were known for curious experiments with the trees. We call this tree Frankenstein because it has three branches grafted on one trunk, each bearing a different sort of apples. At first, we watched it with curiosity, but recently it has just given us many small sour apples.
But these are just the two trees in my small garden. My parents have six more, each tree full of apples. And then, when you walk in the suburbs of Vilnius, it turns out that so many of the trees you wouldn’t otherwise even notice are apple trees. So you can pick fruits from any of them, too.
I feel I don’t want to leave anything behind – my house, my garden, my river, my city – but that time of the year, I mostly feel sad about leaving all those apples. There are too many, and it feels wrong to me to just abandon them all, especially those wild, homeless apples, and drive away to the country where I can only get identical, round, waxy apples in a plastic bag from the shop.
So I try to use and preserve as many apples as I can. I bake pies and freeze cubes of apples for the pies to be baked in winter. I pack my grandmother’s apples into boxes, even knowing most of them won’t survive until Christmas, when I come back again. I make jams – the biggest pot is boiling on the stove every day, a section of a wardrobe in the kids’ room filling up with rows of bigger and smaller jars.
I prepare a big jug of wild apple juice and put the airlock on it, so it would ferment (while I am away) into a cider. I cut apples into thin slices to dry and put plates around the house. From the neighbours, I bring a full black plastic bag of antonovka apples – the sour ones no one wants to eat – and try to make apple cheese from them. The mass never reaches the right consistency, and I abandon the project, but only until next year. Among all these products, the apple cheese would be the best, with the highest concentration of apples I can think of.
And so the smell of apples fills my house, my own little Lithuania, as I prepare to go to continue my life abroad, the life I once chose and now feel trapped in and unable to unchoose.
Whenever we come home and leave home, the road we take is called the Black Way – Juodasis kelias. When I was little, I asked my grandmother why it was called this, and she explained how people from Lithuania would be sent to Siberia by the Soviets, leaving towards the trains on this road. My grandmother was sent to Lithuania from Ukraine during the time of Soviet occupation. It was not an exile; she said she was excited about how modern it all was here in Vilnius, how Western compared to her home village of white-painted clay houses and sunflowers.
It wasn’t a choice either, and so my grandmother tried to plant corn, aubergines and sunflowers, all the plants she liked, even though they didn’t grow very well in Lithuania and needed a greenhouse. Her Ukrainian neighbour here in Lithuania – a fellow expat? occupier? – Dyadya Vanya also brought a little mulberry tree from Ukraine by train. Mulberry was not typical there and almost unheard of here – and he planted it on the border of his and my grandmother’s gardens. The mulberry tree grew huge, and I used to eat the fallen berries until my hands and mouth turned dark blue, but somehow it also felt somewhat exotic and out of place among those apple trees around.
Newton, who also found apples important, formulated that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Sometimes, when the pain in my chest gets stronger before leaving, I wonder if this love and pain are some kind of recoil for the occupation.
Now, all the love I feel for these apples and this house, the river, and the city, brings me so much pain, leaving them behind again and again. When I leave in the end of August, I think about those families leaving Vilnius via Juodasis kelias. Of the people passing my own home, carrying the memory of the smell of the apples with them, while my relatives, my ancestors, came in and settled and took their land, houses and apple orchards.
