Chapter 10
Episode 10
Parent company
The Parent Company letterhead was a pale blue, the kind that promised stability and tradition. I found it buried under a stack of tax forms, a relic from a lifetime ago, when my father still believed in the permanence of paper. The address was in Vilnius, on a street I knew well, but the company itself—UAB Senoji Sodyba—had dissolved years before, its assets scattered like ash.
I ran my finger along the embossed logo: an oak tree, roots deep, branches wide. It was the same logo my grandfather had used for his small construction firm, the one that built half the dachas in Trakai before the war. My father, in a fit of optimism after independence, had resurrected the name. He thought it would mean something. He thought the roots would hold.
But the roots had rotted. The parent company had been a shell, a holding entity for debts and dreams. I remembered the phone calls, the hushed negotiations, the way my mother’s hands trembled as she signed documents she didn’t understand. The paper trail led nowhere—just a series of losses, each one a small death.
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