The novel “Birds on Ice” by writer Loreta Jastramskienė has been released, taking readers back to 1993, a year of liberation and internal conflicts.
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The main character of the novel is a music teacher who grew up in a family of parents who experienced Soviet repression. Historical memory, complex relationships, and societal changes permeate the lives of the book’s characters, and difficult experiences teach caution when walking on the ground, as if the ice could crack at any moment.
Loreta Jastramskienė is interviewed by Simonas Vanagas.
– The plot of the book begins when the Russian army, which had stayed for half a century, was withdrawn from Lithuania. Why did you choose this time as the beginning of the novel?
– Many things are quickly forgotten, and later it may seem as if they never happened. Because human memory is not perfect. Dry historical facts are meant to awaken it, but they do not reveal or delve into what a person felt at that time. That is the privilege of other genres, often becoming a literary value.
1993 is called a turning point year in Lithuanian history. After the occupying army left, we became completely independent. However, society was divided; the return of the old regime caused despair among those repressed during the Soviet era, while others felt relief.
The joy that the Soviets were finally leaving was mixed with anxiety about what would come next. The mood of uncertainty and doubts about the future, revealed in the novel, prevailed in those years when emotional disposition was no less important than history itself. I wanted to travel back to the autumn of 1993 and delve into the experiences of that time, which still return in different forms.
The joy that the Soviets were finally leaving was mixed with anxiety about what would come next. The mood of uncertainty and doubts about the future, revealed in the novel.
– The main character of the novel is a music teacher, and the text is consistently connected by musical terms. How did the idea to give the plot a musical line come about?
– You cannot always express in words what you feel, but music can. It speaks without words, and that is an incomprehensible miracle. Music is not subject to human hierarchical games; it is proof of God’s presence, whether you grew up in a tavern or a manor – so thinks the main character of the novel, music teacher Vasarė Žalytė. For her, music became the only way to feel the flow of life without shivers.
For each chapter title of the novel, I searched for a musical term that corresponds to the characters’ inner state, indicating dynamics, tempo, or the character of the performance, giving a unique rhythm to the narrative.
This novel is my sixth book and the first one I read many times before publishing. For previous ones, four or five readings were enough, but this time twice as many. Because music, like an invisible character, settled in the book; it sounds when I read, and then I cannot pull away.
Since childhood, I shared my room with a piano; music accompanied every day. Like the same piano now standing in my room next to the writing desk. It is fifty-five years old. Sometimes, when I finish writing tasks, I open old sheet music books and play.
– At one point, the main character is haunted in her thoughts, or perhaps in reality, by Russian soldiers who should have already left Lithuania. This seems like a survival of the past or even the influence of trauma experienced living under the Soviet system. Why do you think it is important to depict this today?
– It may seem that it no longer matters? But four years ago, the Russian army arrived very close in Ukraine, returning with all its sadistic habits. Living between the fear left by the past and the freedom you are still learning does not promise that the future will be peaceful and sunny.
The novel’s character Vasarė finds it hard to believe that the threat has withdrawn; she has been anxious since childhood about her parents’ experiences in Siberia, which her father sometimes tells her about, withholding important facts. She and her brother Gintaras suspect that something terrible happened back then, which is why their mother sometimes behaves inadequately. The traumas experienced by parents probably pass on to children, but not all parents understand why their beloved children, protected from any harm and devotedly raised, suffer.
Living between the fear left by the past and the freedom you are still learning does not promise that the future will be peaceful and sunny.
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I remember the explanation about literature by Motiejus Miškinis, brother of interwar literary scholar and poet Antanas Miškinis, who said literature is that common language that unites people into one nation’s body. In the article “Why we write so much about literature,” he stated: “In Lithuanian authors’ works, we find a common way of feeling, reasoning, worldview, and similar mental reflexes of people.”
It seems important to me to write about what happened in Lithuania, reflecting historical memory and using psychological storytelling. I doubt anyone could do it better than Lithuanian authors.
– Picking up the book and reading the title “Birds on Ice” can evoke various associations. What main idea did you try to encode in this title?
– My generation grew up in the Brezhnev era, finished Soviet schools, and to young people, we often seem like historical exhibits.
A colleague once said to me: “Young coworkers look at me as if I had seen Lenin.” We certainly never saw him alive, but he hung on all kinds of walls. At school, we were taught to assemble, load, and shoot Kalashnikovs, to properly wear gas masks, participated in militarized “Lightning” competitions, marched in parades dressed in military uniforms, shouted hooray to uncles in fur hats standing on tribunes, tore apart Soviet war songs – there were all kinds of “extracurricular” activities that comforted the young mind. Like all kinds of generations – the Lost, the Great Depression, Postwar, Rebirth, Z, and others.
It seems important to me to write about what happened in Lithuania, reflecting historical memory and using psychological storytelling.
I call my generation birds on ice. When I think about peers who grew up in families with parents who experienced historical traumas, I see birds perched on ice, unable to fly away. Because no one allowed us to fly where we wanted, not even asking if we wanted to.
– You touch on the theme of relationships within a society group transitioning from a totalitarian regime to democracy, especially those persecuted in the Soviet system and those who thrived by adapting well. Is this still relevant to today’s society, which has come far on the path of democracy? The question might be more suitable for a sociologist than a writer, but I have read all your works, and all have a strong social motif.
– I grew up in a town by the Nemunas River, in one of the standard apartment blocks where children from all social strata gathered and played in the yard. There I learned a kind of sociology. The children of judges, cleaners, teachers, or cotton mill workers were equally good friends to me. When we fought, it was not because of social rank.
Although it is said never to say never or always, this time I say – it will always be relevant for all societies to defend democracy.
This attitude has remained to this day – to value a person not by the height of their chair but for who they are and what they do. Perhaps that is why readers find so-called social motifs in my books. They are not important to overly self-concerned, egocentric personalities. I could not say on which side – the well-adapted in the Soviet era or the persecuted – there were more or fewer. But I know that compromises of conscience are more typical of the first group, and those who resisted and suffered will never regain the life opportunities taken from them.
If democracy were an ocean, those who tried to drain it would fail. But democracy is an agreement among people that can be broken by a few signatures on a piece of paper.
Although it is said never to say never or always, this time I say – it will always be relevant for all societies to defend democracy. To preserve it, social motifs in reality and literature will be indispensably important, as will delving into the feelings caused or provoked by these motifs.
One of the meanings of creativity is to try to reveal how historical and social changes affect a person’s inner world, and the question of why this happens is not answered by the writer. That is left to the reader.
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