Between Shades of Gray

Lina wonders where her father is as she runs back to her room to pack. Her mother comes in and tells her to pack “all that is useful but not necessarily dear” (26). She sees the bread and money that has been left on Lina’s windowsill and pulls it onto her desk, closing the curtains, and tells the children to ignore anyone who tries to help them so that no one else will be pulled into their predicament. Lina starts packing, placing a framed portrait of their family into her suitcase, while her mother runs around, frantically pulling clothes from their places and shoving them into suitcases. Lina is more concerned about finding her sketchbook, but manages to pack her “writing tablet, the case of pens and pencils and the bundle of rubles, along with two books, hair ribbons and [her] hairbrush” (27). When Jonas comes in dressed for school, Elena must take him back to his room to help him pack his suitcase. Lina puts on her summer raincoat and leaves her room, leaving the loaf of bread behind.

The loaf of bread recalls Lina’s visit to the bakery, where the bakers refused to allow her to pay for her bread and indicate, without exactly saying so, that her father has done something important for them that bread alone does little to repay. Lina recalls that, later on, when she asked her father about the bakers, he would only tell her that it’s important to do “what is right,” “without the expectation of gratitude or reward” (28-29). 

Jonas’s suitcase is so big he has to carry it with two hands. The children walk down the hall together to find their mother in the dining room, smashing crystal and china so the things she loves will not fall into Soviet hands. The NKVD men come in to stop her and she goes to put on her hat. As she walks past him, the officer hits her in the shoulder with his rifle, telling her she won’t need a hat and smashing her into the mirror. She responds calmly, and Lina realizes she is trying not to draw attention to, or jeopardize her access to, her long gray coat, which has “jewelry, papers, silver, and other valuables” sewn into its lining. In order to divert the officers’ attention away from the coat, Lina asks to use the bathroom, catching a glance of her reflection in the mirror and not realizing then that it will be the last time she sees her own face for many years.

Outside, the streetlights have been extinguished and the streets are dark. They are herded into a waiting truck already filled with fifteen other people, and it’s then that Lina realizes she is still in her nightgown. She sees Miss Grybas, a teacher from the school, in the truck, as well as the librarian, a hotel owner, and some men she has seen her father talking to. When the truck gate is slammed shut, a bald man moans that they are all going to die. When the truck begins to move, he jumps out, screaming in pain when he crashes onto the roadway. The truck stops and the NKVD officers throw him back into the truck with a badly broken leg. They move on, traveling to the hospital, where they stop for several hours, leaving the bald man to suffer with his broken leg while they wait for a pregnant woman laboring inside the hospital. As soon as her baby is born, they are both to be arrested.

They wait outside the hospital for almost four hours. The bald man asks Jonas to suffocate him, saying that “this is just the beginning” (34). Elena tries to make him comfortable, and ignores her cousin Regina’s whispered greetings from outside the truck. Lina tries to get her mother to pay attention to Regina, but Elena only loudly calls her cousin crazy and tells her to go away—trying to protect her from guilt by association. Regina throws a bundle onto the truck anyway, which the bald man tries to steal. One of the men in the truck then identifies Elena as “the wife of Kostas Vilkas, provost at the university” (35). Elena nods in agreement, “wringing her hands” (35), which reminds Lina of another time her mother wrung her hands: when she sent Lina into the dining room to offer her father and his university colleagues more coffee. They were talking about “repatriation” (35), and one of the men asked Lina what she thought of “this new Lithuania” (35)—the one being occupied by the Soviets. Lina’s father interrupted her, trying to head off the conversation, but Lina answered that she thinks Stalin is a bully. Kostas dismisses her, saying that she is “so headstrong” (36) that it “scares [him] to death” (36). When the bald man hears that Kostas works for the university, he says that “he’s long gone then” (36). Lina tells him to shut up, and her mother begins to scold her, but just then “a barefoot woman in a bloodied hospital gown” (37) is thrown into the back of the truck and her newborn baby handed up to her, despite the protests of the doctor who followed them out.

Elena tries to comfort the new mother, whose name is Ona and whose husband, Vitas, has already been taken. They attempt to make a splint for the bald man’s leg, with Jonas offering up his school ruler and Elena, Miss Grybas, and the librarian offering their scarves. Soon they arrive at a small “countryside depot” (39) in “a deserted area” that is “surrounded by dark woods” (40), and Lina imagines “a rug being lifted and a huge Soviet broom sweeping [them] under it” (40).

They are pulled out of the truck and Elena tells them they must stay together. They find a nurse who can tend to the bald man and to Ona and her baby, but the train yard is chaotic and dusty. Elena asks an officer for a stretcher, but he laughs at her request. So they carry the bald man, and upon reaching the train platform, watch families being torn apart. They look for their father, and Lina wonders when and where he was arrested. An officer begins to drag Jonas away. They all scream, and Elena begins to beg in “pure, fluent Russian” (43), which causes the officer to stop and listen. Lina grabs Jonas’s arm, the one not being held by the officer, and Jonas sobs, wetting himself. Lina watches her mother, now speaking calmly, give the officer a wad of rubles, her amber pendant, and her husband’s engraved pocket watch. Finally, the officer lets go of Jonas and moves on to the next family.

Elena holds Jonas, soothing him, and tells Lina to give him her coat to cover his wet pants. Miss Grybas calls to them, urging them to come with her so that their group does not get separated. As they step into the livestock car, Lina hears Ona’s baby crying and the bald man groaning and begs her mother to find them a different car. Elena insists that these people need their help. Lina looks around the platform, searching for her father and thinking about running away, but her mother pulls her in, kisses her forehead and reminds them that they must stay together.

Once inside the stuffy, smelly car, they begin to organize themselves, making space on large wood shelves for Ona and her baby and the other children. The car is full of women, children, and the elderly—there are no able-bodied men to help move the injured. The librarian introduces herself as Mrs. Rimas and asks Ona if her baby is a boy or girl.  It is a girl, one who will need to eat soon. A “small girl with hair the color of pearls” (51) introduces her doll to Lina and asks her if she is going to sleep soon, since Lina is still in her nightgown. Lina then asks her mother if she and Jonas can change their clothes, so Elena tries to negotiate with a woman for a space in the corner with a bit of privacy. The woman refuses, so they go ahead and get changed, crowding her until she protests. Once they have changed, they move back toward the door. A gray-haired man offers Elena his suitcase to stand on so she can look for her father in the crowd. He asks her about Kostas, he recognizes his name, and tells Elena she has beautiful children. Elena replies that they look “just like their father” (52), reminding Lina of the day they had their family portrait taken, when the photographer told her father that she looked just like him. Her father had teased her, saying that he hoped she’d “grow out of it” (53), to which Lina responded, “‘One can only hope’” (53). They all laughed as the photographer’s flash went off.

All together, forty-six people have been crammed into their cattle car. They meet a mother and her son from Sanciai. The son seems about Lina’s age and he introduces himself as Andrius Arvydas. Andrius’s mother tells Elena that she gave the NKVD everything she had and told them that Andrius was “feeble-minded” (55) so they could stay together. Then Mrs. Rimas comes over to tell them that Ona’s baby has been unable to breastfeed. Hours pass, and no one is allowed to leave the overheated car. Someone discovers that the woman who would not move to allow Jonas and Lina some privacy is hiding a hole in the floor “and the fresh air that came with it” (56). Eventually, Mrs. Rimas gathers the children and tells them stories, reminding Lina of the time when she drew the stories while the librarian read, sketching “the dragon” (56) and “the princess running, her beautiful golden hair tumbling down the mountainside” (56).

The sun goes down and people eat the food they have brought with them. Lina talks more with Andrius, and finds out that he is seventeen. She chides him for smoking and he asks her if she is the police, which is what she asked him earlier when he warned her not to speak out against the NKVD. Later that night, Andrius wakes her up, and Jonas tells her what Andrius has told him: another train has pulled into the station—one that is full of men. They want to go and look for their fathers but argue about who should go. In the end, all three sneak out of the train car just as the sun begins to rise. They see “thieves and prostitutes” written in Russian on the side of their car, and Lina is glad Jonas cannot read Russian and doesn’t hear Andrius translate it for her.

They go to the second train, whose cars are shut and locked, and knock on the underside of each, near the toilet hole, asking for “Petras Arvydas and Kostas Vilkas” (60). At the seventh car, Kostas’s battered face appears through the hole, lit by a match. He hands down extra clothes and a piece of ham, along with his wedding ring for Lina and Jonas to give to their mother. He tells her that the NKVD is attaching his train to theirs and that they’re all headed to Siberia. Andrius asks about his own father, and Kostas tells him he’s not there. He urges them all to go back to their train, and Lina begins to cry. He tells her to be brave, to remember that he will always recognize her art, and that she can help him find them through her drawings. The children start to move away, and Andrius tells them to go back to the car without him; he will continue to search for his own father.

Lina and Jonas are nearly back at their train car when they are stopped by a guard. Lina lies and tells him they are retrieving a bundle they accidentally dropped through the toilet hole. The guard peers into Lina’s bundle and searches Jonas’s pockets before forcing them both to the ground, waving his gun in their faces. Then he orders them back into the train car. They tell their mother about finding their father and give her the ham and wedding ring, telling her that Kostas told her to “remember the oak tree” (65). They tell Mrs. Arvydas that Andrius is still out looking for his father, and Mrs. Arvydas, sighs, saying that she’s “told him again and again that his father…” (65). Elena tells Lina to give the ham to Mr. Stalas, the bald man, but he refuses it, asking more about the train cars full of men and agreeing with Kostas that they are probably headed to Siberia. Lina tries to explain to the sobbing Mrs. Arvydas once more why Andrius did not come back with them, and feels guilty for having left him behind. She looks for him outside the car, but sees only the guards abusing a priest.

While they wait for Andrius to return, the sun comes up and the car becomes overheated. The guards feed them from buckets of gray slop, and Elena shares her last scraps of food she—from the bundle her cousin Regina tossed into the truck outside the hospital—to supplement their meager rations. Lina and her mother discuss her father and how he looked when Lina saw him. Her mother tries to explain why they are being deported and how Stalin “wants Lithuania for the Soviet Union” (69). Afterwards, Lina dozes off; she remembers a class trip to an art museum and the first time she saw the work of Munch and then her thoughts turn to how she can leave a trail of artwork to help her father find them.  

When Lina wakes up she discovers a beaten and bloody Andrius underneath their train car. She sneaks out of the car to go to him, and taps on the floor of the train car, telling the grouchy woman who appears at the toilet hole that they will need to pull Andrius through the hole. With Lina pushing from below, they are able to pull him through, but before Lina can sneak back into the car herself, the guards approach. She suspends herself from the undercarriage of the car, waiting with straining muscles for the guards to move on. When they finally do, Lina’s mother and the gray-haired man pull her back inside. As she recovers from the ordeal, she stares at Andrius’s bruised and swollen face and feels her hatred for the Soviets grow. She vows to “write everything down, draw it all” (74). Andrius whispers his thanks.

Lina falls asleep again, and is awakened by the sound of the car doors being closed and locked; the train begins to move. With the doors closed, the car’s interior is completely dark, especially at night, but through a small slat, Lina can see the deserted station platform strewn with the luggage and food people were forced to leave behind. She also sees a priest, praying, flinging oil, and crossing himself, issuing last rites to those leaving on the train.