CHAR GARDNER

“Only the poor shop at City Market,” says Gabija, as I rave about the fresh garlic I bought last week. She prefers Maxima, the new supermarket. Eastern Europe’s headlong rush to mass consumerism depresses me. Six years ago, when I began working in Vilnius, a few Soviet-style shops could still be found. No one was sorry to see them go. To the new generation, Maxima is heaven: a clean, well-lit, pristine palace of self-service, spread out over vast aisles of neatly stacked goods. Abundant displays of junk food, shrimp from Bangladesh, unlimited toilet paper, cosmetics, and imported alcohol. Cakes, leaden with sugary frosting! Wheeling massive carts through the thoroughly modern emporium is a weekend outing for entire families.

Underpaid Russian women, left behind when Communism collapsed, command the checkout counters, where they visit the fury of their demoted social status on the newly prosperous Lithuanians buying Marlboros and meat.

As church bells ring out over the city, I count my cash, grab my backpack, and set out on foot for City Market. On Sunday mornings the sidewalk along Bokšto Street is often tracked with Saturday night blood.

Opposite my apartment, a high stone wall (remnant of the city’s medieval past) is a gathering place for the young. Boys in fake leather jackets and pointy-toed white loafers and girls in stilettos and impossibly tight jeans make their way on cobbled streets, lugging supersized plastic bottles of cheap beer. Pockets bulge with flasks of local vodka. They hoist each other up onto the wall and settle like birds, singing drunkenly long into the night. Toward morning, fights break out.

But, today, only shards of broken glass and crumpled cigarette packs litter the sidewalk.

The cavernous yellow-brick market resembles a nineteenth-century train station. Inside, a clutch of aggressive women hawk used plastic bags for one Lita each. I point to my backpack and move on. From thirty feet up, sunbeams stream through hundreds of dirty windowpanes into an arena echoing with sounds of commerce conducted in an archaic tonal language. Smells of sauerkraut, warm bread, and the B.O. of secondhand clothing and footwear.

Bent-backed ladies all in black touch and sniff every apple and cabbage, inspect each egg, and haggle over prices. Ragged children swarm the honey sellers for a free taste smeared on strips of paper. A half-naked teenager ducks down between clothing racks to try on a bra, and an overly tanned blonde in a tank top, cigarette pack tucked into her cleavage, waits in line for a bag of chicken feet.

The Lithuanian language, neither Slavic nor Germanic, and nearly eradicated by the Soviets, is hellish to pronounce. I can say ačiū (like a sneeze) which means thank you. The letter S, with a bird on top, is pronounced sh. Šitas means this. I approach the chicken lady, the bacon man, and the mushroom girl with her glorious golden chanterelles. I point and say, Šitas, ačiū, and they slowly pick through my hand full of coins for payment.

Finally, my backpack sags with carrots, cucumbers, potatoes, honey, and fresh bread, and I head out to confront the end of market day. In a row along the curb stand the misbegotten aged. Jobless and bereft without the Soviet bureaucracy, they offer for sale small bouquets of wildflowers tied with bits of curled birthday ribbon, a package of pantyhose, loose tea bags, a can of motor oil. Prašau, Prašau, they murmur. Please.

CHAR GARDNER is a visual artist and a writer living in the Green Mountains of Vermont. For over thirty years she worked internationally as a producer of documentary films. Her essays have been published in The Gettysburg Review, Green Mountains Review, Redivider, and elsewhere. In 2013, she was the recipient of the Carol Houck Smith Award from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Website for visual art: chargardner.com | Facebook: Char Gardner | Instagram: chargardner