Authors Kazimieras Barėnas
Kazimieras Barėnas (Barauskas) (born 30 December 1907 in the village of Stanioniai in Panevežys Region, died 17 March 2006 in London) was a Lithuanian emigree writer in Great Britain, a translator and press officer.
Mr Barėnas finished Panevezys Gymnasium in 1929 and graduated with a degree in social science from Vytautas the Great University in Kaunas in 1933. During his first year at university he began working at the university office. His first work of literary fiction was published while he was still a student ‒ the short story Neisbrista dumblyne (Unpassable Sludge) in Kultura (Culture) magazine.
At the end of 1943, when they closed the university, Barėnas went to work at the Ateitis (Future) newspaper. His editor-in-chief did not only value his gift for writing, but also his tidiness and pedantism. There were a number of writers there and Barenas made several new friends, who became very useful when he later began working in London. In Ateitis he published a number of creative profiles of Lithuanian artists. No less memorable are his essays on the Lithuanian writers Maironis, Žemaitė and Šatrijos Ragana, which he wrote during the Second World War.
Forced to flee Lithuania following the invasion of the Soviet Union, he settled in Great Britain in 1947. Initially unable to work as a journalist, he worked in a textile factory for nearly a decade. He found that his work in the factory helped him to write, and he was encouraged to continue by his wife, Marija. It was during this period that Barenas wrote his first well-known works, published later as Giedra Visad Grižta (Clear Skies Always Return, 1953), Karališka Diena (The Day of Kings, 1957), and a collection of short stories, Kilogramas Cukraus (A Kilo of Sugar, 1978).
Barenas had joined the Lithuanian Writers’ Union in January 1949.
His debut book, Clear Skies Always Return, a collection of short stories, was published when Barėnas was 45. The critics noted that despite the book’s classical themes ‒ it is set in a village in pre-war, independent Lithuania ‒ the writing was more interesting than that produced by younger writers. In many of his later novellas and short stories his characters would settle in Barėnas’ town of Panevežys, which in his writing became the town of Gulbinai. There he depicted the everyday life of its citizens, and the mundane life of the provincial authorities; his writing was characterised by interesting plot lines, imagery and vivid character portraits, written with translucent humour. Many of these works were written at the textile factory, scribbled on the other side of thread ball labels. When he got home after his shifts, he would copy the texts onto proper sheets of paper.
His life changed when he was invited to edit the newspaper Europos Lietuvis (The Lithuanian in Europe) in 1957 and when he moved to London. There he took charge of the publishing house Nidos Klubas (The Nida Club), which published more than a hundred emigree writers. It also published Sauja Derliaus (A Handful of Grain), a solid (558 page) collection of texts for young adults.
For nearly three dramatic decades Barėnas’ life revolved around editing and publishing. He was known for his tolerance and cultured nature. Europos Lietuvis became a popular newspaper with him as editor. Barėnas also championed his fellow Lithuanian writers’ work; his own reviews of their new books would appear in the newspaper as well. A number of works of fiction by writers living in Lithuania were introduced to the emigree readership by publishing extracts, short stories and poems. Thanks to Barėnas, the readers of Europos Lietuvis were introduced to the novels Tiltas į Jūrą (The Promenade, 1964), by Romualdas Lankauskas, Kaimas Kryžkelėje (A Village on the Crossroads, 1966) by Jonas Avyžius, and the works of Bite Vilimaite, Mykolas Karčiauskas, Vytaute Žilinskaitė and others.
Barėnas founded the literary annual Swath (1964–1980), which was original and well received. He was already a well-known editor and publisher when he decided to publish it, and the experience he had gained at the Nida Book Club was especially useful. When the annual was first published, there was not a single other literary publication being published by the emigree community: Gabija had ceased printing, as had Literaturiniai lankai (The Literary Bow). All in all 102 authors were published in Swath, including many from the other side of the Atlantic. The ten published volumes of Swath comprised 4195 pages. At some point the annual featured almost every Lithuanian emigree writer.
Most authors in the Nida Club only ever published one book.
There are 53 short stories in Barėnas’ five published books of novellas. He was one of the most important Lithuanian chroniclers of emigree life in Great Britain, portraying the lives of people who had been exiled from their homeland, in his case Lithuania. His childhood and youth, left far behind, seem, in his stories, to have been mysterious and exceptional. His works are realistic, colourful and full of intrigue. He was a poet of the everyday.
His trilogy of novels deserves attention; they tell the story of the dawn of Lithuanian independence, and the fate of Lithuanian peasants during a complex time for the nation. In the novels we see the bright Aukstaitian spirit of an authentic people. The trilogy is elevated by the writer’s love for humanity and his lyrical nature. They are full of intrigue and light, social interaction. The trilogy depicts not just one man’s life, but the whole era that he lived through.
The novels were awarded the Vincas Krėvė Prize for Tūboto Gaidžio Metai, and the USA Lithuanian Society Prize for Beragio Ožio Metai. Barenas was twice awarded prizes by the Lithuanian Writers’ Union (for 21 Veronika and Pati Apatinė Pakopa).
Barėnas compiled the encyclopedic works Britanijos Lietuviai 1947-1973 and Britanijos Lietuviai 1974 – 1994. Looking through their 774 pages, it’s hard to believe that they were put together by just one person. These books record the history of Lithuanians in Great Britain over almost 50 years. They are packed with information, as well as commentary and fascinating detail. Barenas is worthy of praise as a critic, as a book reviewer, and as a translator.
In London Barenas acted as a cultural ambassador for Lithuania. For many years, despite the material cost to him, he did not exchange his Lithuanian passport for a British one.
Two of his books were published In Lithuania: 21 Veronika (LRS publishing house, 1997) and a collection of his short stories (Varpai publishing house, 2004). In 1997 he was awarded the Order of King Mindaugas the Great of Lithuania, 4th degree.
In 2005 a monography of Kazimieras Barėnas was published by Varpai.
Barenas was a humble man. If it were not for his wife, Marija, we would not know that the then Prime Minister of Great Britain, Tony Blair, invited him to take part in an event to mark Lithuania joining the European Union in April 2004. Only four Lithuanians were invited to attend this event.
Awards
1970 Vincas Krėvė Prize
1982 USA Lithuanian Community Art Board Prize
1992 and 1997 Lithuanian Writers Union Prize
1997 Gediminas medal, 4th degree
In 2008 the K. Barėnas Literary Prize was inaugurated.
A Kilo of Sugar
I cracked the horse whip, having already rattled out of the pine woods. I am going to whizz past my uncle’s farm: Na, naa-na! I am going to kick up the dust and disappear in its cloud. Na, naa-na! At the first crossroads I am going to turn and ride back. Na, naa-na! With each kilometre the decision grew inside me. Uncle’s wife was nobody to me! Neither she nor her home! I didn’t know any of Uncle’s six daughters as I had lived for years in town; apparently, they had all grown up now. They were alien to me. As alien as the piece of land that Uncle bought for his eldest; though he didn’t manage to build a house on it before, as they say, he got put in the ground himself. Poor man. I didn’t want to hear anything about the land either. I don’t have any land, so all their talk about the widow’s twenty hectares would only make me angry. Look how wealthy we are; look how much we have, look what else we acquired! And Uncle’s wife - who is she to me, that nosy, screeching woman?
I wouldn’t have left the house at all if it hadn’t been for Ma. I wasn’t even aware that Uncle had died, and then Ma made up some lies. Uncle’s wife had sent her daughter with instructions to invite me to the funeral. It was only later, from a letter, that I found out about his death. When Ma arrived at the funeral, Uncle George’s wife stared up and down the narrow road as far as the woods, surprised.
‘And where’s the student? Hasn’t he come home yet?’ she asked, and from the disgruntled tone of her voice, Ma realised that nothing good would come out of it without a lie; George’s wife might have started shouting, especially seeing that she was in her own yard. Perhaps she wouldn’t have shouted, a reprimand might have been enough, but the severity of her tone and that voice dripping with displeasure forced Ma to lie.
‘He’s ill,’ Ma replied swiftly, casting a glance at the daughters stood next to her.
‘His uncle died, and he’s too ill, is he? So what’s now?’ Uncle’s wife said, her eyes piercing Ma.
‘So, he probably won’t be coming, not if he’s ill. He sent a telegram saying he was ill, that’s all.’ Ma sank deeper and deeper into her muddy lie. And as if that wasn’t enough, she promised, without being asked, that I would visit them in the summer.
‘What will I do there? What’s there for me?’ I bridled at her request, but she was resolute.
‘You just go and sit there for a while and then come back,’ she said. She placed her hand on my shoulder, seeing that words would not be enough. ‘We can’t do much about it now that I’ve already opened my big mouth. I really shouldn’t have promised.’
‘You shouldn’t,’ I said, but the horse was already being harnessed, I could see it through the window. I would have to go. For a couple of days I had been resisting the idea of this journey, but it was clear that I had lost. Just the day before we had all recalled the tale of the sugar when Pa died. That kilo of sugar weighed heavier and heavier on me with every kilometre I travelled along the road from our house.
Since I was a child I had known that Uncle George was stingy. When he came back from America, young and single then, he came to see us, had a meal and stayed the night. As a present he gave me a Russian kopeck and a husk of corn. He probably gave my brother and sister a kopeck and corn husk too, but for some reason, every time conversation turned to Uncle George and his stinginess, my family remembered only his gift to me. If it hadn’t been for those regular reminiscences, I would probably have forgotten about that kopeck. I don’t have a clear memory of it, only what I have been told by others: You see, he took out this kopeck and said, ‘Here, a present for you’, and when they tell it like that, it seems to me that that was what happened, and I could even imagine that I could still hear his words spoken so many years ago. What I do remember was the unforgettable smell and the taste of the corn, so ripe it was beginning to fall off the husk.
As for Uncle’s stinginess, we got used to it. Stingy as he was, though, he managed to buy a large piece of sandy land. In fact, if he hadn’t been so stingy, he would never have been able to buy it and would have continued to scrape by like all his other brothers and his sister. But now he was a farmer. And, with the passing of time, any mention of the kopeck he had given me no longer signified some eruption of humour, some attempt at ridicule, nor was it just a crumb of memory in this empty life, but simply a means of defining Uncle’s character.
I’m pretty sure that it was these occasional reminiscences about Uncle George that fixed that abiding image of him giving me the gifts in my memory. Even now, it’s almost like I can see him rummaging in his trunk, the type people would have when going to America, and straightening up, and saying to me:
‘Come here. Here, this is for you.’
‘Now, Uncle….’ Ma starts.
And I, blushing, squeeze the coin he has given me into my little palm, because I have to make room for the husk of corn too. The coin doesn’t sit well in my palm, and the husk of corn trembles, because now everybody is watching me and smiling, rather than holding their comments back behind their teeth, and I still have to take Uncle’s hand and kiss it. That was probably the most important part of the whole affair. I would have been under a cloud for a long time if I had focused on holding that kopeck, while thinking about how I could hold the husk of corn more comfortably, and if I had not kissed Uncle’s hand, Ma would have said later, 'You see what an ungrateful child he is.’
‘He couldn’t manage it,’ Pa would defend me. ‘His hands were full.’
‘It wasn’t much of a present anyway,’ Ma would say. ‘He could just as easily have got a coin by begging. He could have just run over to Gervydas’ farm, said a prayer or two – and see how many kopecks he could collect for himself. And from Seberkstys’ too; he might give you a coin, though he doesn’t have much himself.’
‘Still, you have to be polite,’ Pa would say. And not just because Uncle George was his brother. Of course you have to be polite. And with these last words, Pa would put an end to the conversation, and then my rudeness would have hung over the whole house, polluting the place like bedbugs.
I was lucky: I kissed his hand.
Later, Uncle left, bought some land, got himself a wife and dropped out of my life, leaving behind the memory of the kopeck and husk of corn.
I don’t know which came first, Uncle buying his land or getting a wife. It’s quite possible that he bought the land straight away with all those kopecks he had brought back from America. I think there must have been a lot of them. The one he gifted to me must have been no more to him than a poppy seed dropped in the sand in a garden – unimportant and unnoticed.
The thing was, though, that the land that was Uncle’s was never that important to him either, or for others, like Karuse, Uncle’s chosen one, into whose hands he gave away both the land and himself. It was a big patch of land, but it was just sand on sand, the yellowness and blueness of which seemed to merge and flow into the purple of the radishes and the heather. Or perhaps not. The greenish colour of the kopeck had the same yellowy blue tone as Uncle’s sand. The soil itself, though, seemed to have no distinctive colour of its own, and if the rye ripened there in the summer, it was only thanks to the blueness of the sky, which lent some colour to the earth and to the rye. And if by harvest time the ears of rye and the straw had turned yellow and born him some seed, and perhaps a bit more on top to bring in a few extra kopecks, one might feel like raising one’s hands to the sun and thanking it for being so overflowing with yellowness that it could afford to share some of it without request or appeal and giving it to Uncle.
But there was no escaping the fact that right from the very beginning Uncle grew smaller and more and more insignificant beside Karuse, just like that kopeck he had given me and I had pressed into the palm of my hand to keep it from dropping and disappearing. It was Aunt Karuse herself, with her shouting and screaming, that managed to wrest from the earth some of the blueness of the sky and the yellowness of the sun. Without her, it could well have been that Uncle wouldn’t have grown anything on the land; I would probably have had to give him that kopeck back to help him to make ends meet. So what if Uncle had to plow and sow the fields himself? So what that he had raised himself above all the other uncles and aunts with his wealth and the grandness of his land? Now, it seems that it was not down to his merit, but due to Karuse.
It was true that for us Uncle George was no more important than any of the other uncles; we ate our own bread and lived in our own house. If he ever dropped in, the dogs barked in the same way they did at the others. Nobody cared for that kopeck any more. His land was not important to us when we were settled in our yard. When he entered our house, Ma used to say: ‘Do come in. Take a seat.’ But she didn’t just say that to Uncle George. She said that to everybody.
It seems to me, though, that Uncle George stood out from the others not by the grandness of his land, but rather by his very smallness. He had been of average height, but look what happened to his face. Even his sparse, droopy moustache seemed to accentuate his smallness. Karuse was a queen, but he… Yes, cowardliness seeped forcefully from his every pore. He was no longer the man who had given me that stingy little kopeck and husk of corn, and putting his hand on my shoulder, had said proudly, ‘Hey, come here. This is for you.’
His moustache alone showed how small he had become. Karuse had him wrapped around her little finger, and all that was left of Uncle George was the rattle of that kopeck and the others he had exchanged for his patch of sandy land. It seemed as though his legs and his torso had grown shorter. Once Uncle’s wife had been the same height as him, but later when I looked, there was no way that he was as tall as her! It wasn’t just her shouting and screaming, or the force of her will, but even in appearance she made him look like a grim shadow of himself, which if you give him a drop of life, might melt one afternoon into the land he had bought by the rye field as the sun set.
Even of his stinginess there was left only the watery fog of a memory. Uncle’s wife outdid him there too.
When you think about it, why did Uncle trek all the way to the other end of the county, to the village of Barschakloniai? And who was it that had told him about that Karuse? Was it just his fate? Or did Karuse come as some part-payment towards Uncle’s sandy bit of land? I don’t know. And I don’t want to enquire. I prefer the fog that shrouds the picture of Uncle’s past. If it was evident, as clear as day, that Uncle had slung Karuse over his shoulder motivated by greed, my heart would not be able to sing his praise. The kopecks he had earned would have been enough to buy a smaller patch of sandy land, and then, perhaps, there would have been another Karuse, or indeed no Karuse at all, and his life might, perhaps, have been a little brighter, and then perhaps his sparse moustache wouldn’t have revealed the extent of the man’s sadness, the heaviness of his unhappy life, and the kind of hopelessness that made him seem to be clinging to the last straws and about to burst into a heart-rending wail.
And now that Uncle George was dead, for the sake of keeping my memory of him unsullied, I found that the memory of that kopeck and the husk of corn were closer to my heart than the thought of him trying to dig the fortune he had brought home into the sand of his farm, along with whatever fortune Karuse had brought to the union. If she brought one.
Uncle George’s ‘kopeck’ scene was repeated at Pa’s funeral.
When Uncle George and Karuse arrived, Pa was already lying in the middle of the room on his plank bed, peaceful and cold, done with all misery and worry. Fortunately he had put by some planks beforehand, so when Samukas, the handyman, came, he made him a coffin in acknowledgment of their long acquaintance. He even used his own nails. We were fortunate enough to be able to bake some bread.
And now, Uncle arrived. While Ma was talking to Karuse, he tied up the horse, quietly greeted everyone and came over to me. He handed me a kilo of sugar in a blue bag.
‘Here, this is for you.’
Even Ma brightened up for a moment. At least now the mourners who had come to sing hymns would be able to have some sugar in their tea. It made her a little happier that the poor, dead man could part with those relatives and acquaintances who had bothered to come in a decent manner.
Here we go – a second kopeck! I took it and thanked him, as excited as I had been when I was a child. But this time I felt the heavy weight of the pittance. Couldn’t we just simply die without that pinch of sugar? Even if nobody had come to sing hymns and see Pa off? Even if we couldn’t afford to treat them to sugar in their tea? What was even more difficult for me, was that it was I who had to take the responsibility of being the recipient of the charity. Couldn’t he have given it to Ma?
I must have blushed. I scanned the room quickly.
‘What did you bring?’, Karuse enquired.
‘Sugar,’ Uncle replied.
‘I had no idea he would bring sugar,’ said Karuse.
Both of my aunts praised George for the sugar. The man has liberated himself from the old witch, they said. Uncle George brought some sugar, even though at home he didn’t usually have a granule of the stuff. They remembered too the kopeck, and the husk of corn he had given me.
After six months or so Uncle George died too. May the earth, which required so much of him, be light upon him. The culprit for his death was that bag of sugar he had handed to me. Karuse never forgave him for that act of disobedience.
‘See, he takes sugar out of the house!’ Zydrioniene from Zvirbliai village heard her shouting at the edge of the elm woods, while she was collecting branches for her broom one spring afternoon. On the other side of the same village Karuse pushed Uncle George out of the cart by the fields near the stream. My grandmother ‒ my Pa and Uncle George’s stepmother ‒ was still alive then. She came and sobbed out the full story to Ma. Uncle George had told her.
Karuse finished the man off when they got home. With her bare hands. She was not big, so she used a log to deal with him, smashing his leg and breaking his nose. The leg healed and so did the nose, but somewhere inside the pain grew, until he finally closed his eyes.
The relatives still talk of it now. They talk and they sigh. There you go then, that Uncle George and his Karuse. Other people talk about it as well. One of Ma’s acquaintances in Pavandene asked her if there was any truth in the stories about Uncle George’s death. Ma washed her hands of all the stories and all that history.
So now, what would I have to say to Uncle’s wife, Karuse? What would I speak to her about? As the kopeck coin turns lighter with the passing of the years, and as the taste of corn grows sweeter in my memory, that bag of sugar weighs down heavier upon my heart and it becomes more and more unbearable.
Na, naa-na! I race past the farm, far away to the crossroads and then I turn back and again, Na, naa-na! I fly by, like the wind. Uncle’s wife is standing in the doorway and watching as I speed by. Na, naa-na!
