Between Shades of Gray

A week later, Jonas falls ill. Miss Grybas tells Lina about it while she’s at work, but Kretzsky will not allow her to leave early, and by the time she gets home, Jonas is unconscious. Lina goes to get their bread rations, but they will only give her two portions because Jonas did not go to work. The bald man and Ulyushka think that Jonas has something contagious, but the gray-haired man identifies it as scurvy. Elena runs out to beg people for help while Lina stays with her brother, placing the stone that Andrius gave her under his hand. She tells him stories and prays and then begins to draw his room at home. Andrius arrives with a can of tomatoes that he pours into Jonas’ mouth. Lina’s mouth waters at the sight of the tomatoes, and she asks Andrius where he got them. He scornfully tells her he stole them. Then Elena arrives with one of the Siberian women that Jonas worked with making shoes. She agrees to make a tea for him that will help him recover if Elena helps her gather the ingredients.

As Lina sits with Andrius at Jonas’s side, she apologizes for being “an idiot” (196) for thinking he had betrayed them, and she tells him she is sorry about his mother. Andrius does not respond except to say, “Okay, you’re sorry” (196). Lina goes back to drawing of Jonas’s room, thinking about how much they both miss their books and remembering the time she brought home the books on Edvard Munch that her teacher had ordered from Oslo for her. She knew that many people did not like his work and that her parents were unlikely to appreciate it, but she was “fascinated” (197) by his “wrenched and distorted” (197) works, “as if painted through neurosis” (197). When she arrived home that day, she saw a letter from Joana waiting for her. In it, Joana told her about her father boxing up his books, though she doesn’t understand why, and asks Lina to draw her a picture of the cottage they stayed at over the summer. At this point, Andrius interrupts her thoughts by pointing to the picture of Jonas’s room and saying that it is good; he then asks to look at her other drawings. She gives him her drawing pad and tends to Jonas. Andrius sees one she has drawn of him while looking up at his face. Then Elena returns with the tea for Jonas to drink. Andrius leaves, and when Lina lays down to sleep, she can only see Munch’s The Scream when she closes her eyes.

Jonas’s recovery takes two weeks, and Lina and Elena grow weaker during that time because they share their bread rations with him. Though other people try to share, they are all hungry, and Elena has nothing left to barter with. Still, they decide to have a Christmas Eve celebration, a Kucios, in the bald man’s shack. During the twelve-day seasonal celebration, they gather each night to reminisce about past Christmases and the food they ate. Lina begins stealing wood from the NKVD to keep their fire going, and one night she meets Andrius outside the bald man’s shack. He says that he stands outside and listens to them about Christmas. Lina tells him he should come inside but he says they wouldn’t want him; he only listens in so he can relate the stories to his mother. Three days later, both Andrius and Mrs. Arvydas arrive at the Christmas celebration with a bottle of vodka to share. Lina wishes her father could be there with them and imagines him trudging through the snow to get there. Then she remembers another Christmas when she waited for him to arrive home, standing in the street while it snowed, watching as he walked towards her, carrying the hay for their Christmas table.

When Christmas Eve finally arrives, everyone brings photographs of their families to the celebration, along with the extra food they have saved up to share. The bald man contributes a bar of chocolate that Andrius and his mother have sent over, and then says he wants no part of the celebration since he’s Jewish. Elena asks him why he didn’t say something sooner. Everyone is uncomfortable until Jonas begins to laugh. Then they all join in, including the bald man. After a few hours of celebration, including a Hebrew prayer recited by the bald man, the NKVD burst into the shack to break up the party and take the group to the office for another attempt to get them to sign the papers. Kretzsky stares at all the family photographs that people have brought.

Christmas Day is a difficult workday, as no one has had any sleep. When Lina returns to the shack, she sees Ulyushka smoking by the stove and wonders why Elena has given her a pack of cigarettes for Christmas, given how unkind she is to them. Andrius arrives with Jonas, and Elena thanks him for the chocolate. Then Jonas and Lina give him presents—Lina a new portrait of him she has drawn from a different, more flattering angle and Jonas “the stone with the sparkles inside” (208) that Andrius had given Lina and which Lina had given to Jonas when he was ill. Jonas thanks him for the tomatoes, and Elena offers to walk back with him to wish his mother a Merry Christmas. The children go to sleep thinking about their beds back home and wishing their father a Merry Christmas, wherever he is.