Five years ago I sat, in a packed bus in a pouring rain on an expressway, through three of the longest minutes in my life.
The bus was a Volvo, or a Saab; the road ran from Stockholm north toward Uppsala, to the airport at Arlanda; the passengers, from what looked like every continent north of Antarctica, were shuttling to their afternoon flights.
At 6 AM EDT on September 14, 2001--noon in Sweden and most of Europe--the driver pulled onto the gravel verge and turned off the motor. As did most every auto on the road. On every road in Europe. And we listened to the rain tindrumming on the roof. For three minutes. As wordlessly, all of Europe and most of the world said, Three days ago we all became Americans...
Return with me now to those strange days of yesteryear, a lone stranger on holiday so far from home...
The bus southbound from Riga, Latvia, dropped me in Vilnius, Lithuania, early Monday morning, September 10, 2001. I made for the offices of Litinterp on Bernardinu gatve, a short stroll from the cathedral and the ruins of the Grand Ducal palace. The kids at Litinterp---not one of them looked a day over 25---were all fluent in English; many had spent serious time in the States, mainly in Chicago (which may be the largest Lithuanian city on earth). They ran a bed and breakfast above their street-level office, brokered private rooms for rent around the city, provided translation services, ran an unofficial taxi service...pretty much anything to earn a few
litai.
They had a room free that night but not the following. "How about Wednesday?" I asked. Yes, but not Tuesday-- "If your office in Kaunas finds me a room for Tuesday, I'll leave a bag here, stay there tomorrow & come back Wednesday. OK?" Quickly the arrangements were made.
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Ninety minutes west by bus or train, Kaunas is slightly smaller (population about 400,000) and far more Lithuanian than Vilnius, which before World War 2 was a major center of Ashkenazic Jewry and housed a substantial number of Poles. Between the world wars, when Vilnius was called Wilno and lay in Poland, Kaunas was the capital of Lithuania. In Naujamiestis--"New Town"--in the eastern part of the center, one finds a museum filled with the works of the nation's most famous painter and composer, M. K. Ciurlionis, another that houses over 2,000 devils and demons in various shapes and sizes from around the world, and one holding one of the most revered bits of Lithuanian history--the wreckage of the single-engine monoplane "Lituanica", crashed in eastern Germany while attempting a non-stop flight from New York to Kaunas in 1933.
On arrival Tuesday morning, I hiked west past the museums on tree-lined pedestrian Laisves aleja (Freedom Avenue), then doglegged onto Vilniaus to Senamiestis (Old Town) and, just north of the Cathedral, the Litinterp office. Its only occupant locked up and drove me to a crumbling stucco ruin between Rotuses aikste (City Hall Square) and the Nemunas River. "Don't be afraid of the outside," he said, leading me up a dusty flight of stairs, and opening a door into a large refurbished "bedsitter" with varnished wood floors, a modern bath and kitchenette, a spanking new washing machine, even a cable feed for TV---but no receiver; I'd be without television for the first night since I'd arrived in Europe at the end of August. A deal at $20. He left me with the keys at about noon---6 AM in New York City. I would not hear or speak another word of English until late that evening.
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When the first plane struck the World Trade Center I was probably on one of the several levels of Velniu muziejus, the Devils' Museum. When the second plane hit I had likely crossed Putvinskio to examine Ciurlionis's delicate watercolors under dimmed illumination in the museum named for him. Through the afternoon I toured museums, wandered the squares and bridges, collected a meal wordlessly via point-pick-&-pay in a cafeteria, and returned to the flat for a nap. About 9 PM I searched out a shiny new supermarket that turned out to be not far away, where I collected and paid for breakfast fixings and two cups of sherbet for a bedtime snack, stuffed them into my rucksack, and headed back by a different route. At Vilniaus I stumbled onto the Kavine Internetas--no translation necessary--and stopped in to check on how our Baltimore Ravens had fared the Sunday before in their NFL opener. I hardly noticed the TV on a bracket above the reception counter---what looked like a wrecked building, a voice-over in Lithuanian of which I could understand nothing---as I asked for "Internet, coffee?", sat down at a PC & fired up the Baltimore Sun website---
AMERICA UNDER ATTACK
The page read so much like Tom Clancy that my kneejerk reaction was What idiot hacked this site? When the waitress brought the coffee I pointed at the monitor, shrugged & spread my hands; she pointed back to the TV above the counter; I saw the wreckage...& the cosmic axis spun and clicked into its new alignment. It was 3 PM in New York; the Towers were down, the Pentagon gashed, Flight 93 shattered across a field in Pennsylvania. What most Americans suffered through in real time, blow by blow, caught me all at once, five thousand miles from home, with no idea when or if the next shoe would drop--or when I'd make it home.
I fired off an e-mail to my brother in Maryland: Where I was, where I would be, not to worry as I had plenty of cash (or would so long as the ATMs worked and the currency didn't collapse). I found out how lucky I'd been to have the Net at hand when I tried to phone home from a booth outside, with circuits jammed up and down the East Coast.
When the Kavine staff realized they had an American there, they switched the channel to BBC. It was the first of many small, unrequested kindnesses in the days to come.
The next morning I had planned to visit the military museum where the "Lituanica" was displayed. Instead I rinsed two cups of forgotten liquefied sherbet out of the rucksack & caught an early bus back to Vilnius, to be near the embassy, just in case.
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From the next few days I remember mostly people. The stunned faces of the Litinterp kids in Vilnius when I returned. The hotel clerk in Stockholm two days later, who informed me the Internet facilities were closed, & then, when I said I had a friend in New York I hadn't heard from, sprang out from the desk, opened the room, fired up the PC & said, Take as long as you need. The 50 or 60 people in the shuttle bus. The hotel service at Leif Ericsson airport in Iceland, scrambling to find rooms for the stranded---and the hotels that cut their rates in half for us. The girl in the Subway shop in Reykjavik who handed me my sandwich & said , "You are American? We are so sorry!"... And the dozen Air National Guardsmen, their C-141 mobile hospital just in from the States, camo flight suits marching into the hotel lobby in Keflavik where we strandees were trying to organize supper plans. No one knew whether to laugh, cry, salute, or hug them as we burst into fervent applause.
I remember my last day in Riga, standing beneath a rare bright sun & blue sky, looking up at the Stars and Stripes snapping in the breeze above the U. S. Embassy, and thinking that for all our faults and all the world's grumbling, we are, or ought to be, as Abraham Lincoln said, "the last, best hope of Mankind."
I remember a packed bus, a wordless rain, a French headline: Aujourd'hui nous sommes tous americains...