Chapter 4
Episode 4
Paper trail
The paper trail began, as these things often do, with a single sheet. I found it tucked inside a book my mother had given me years ago—a worn copy of Balys Sruoga’s Dievų miškas, the pages soft as fabric from decades of handling. The sheet was a receipt, yellowed and brittle, from a bakery in Trakai. Dated 1989. The handwriting on the back was my grandmother’s: Duona, sviestas, pienas. Prisiminimui.
I stared at the words for a long time. Bread, butter, milk. For memory. It was a grocery list, nothing more. But it was also a key, a tiny fragment of a life I had never known. My grandmother had died before I was born, a ghost in family photographs with sharp cheekbones and eyes that seemed to look past the camera. I had never heard her voice. This was the closest I had ever come.
That evening, I sat on the floor of my Vilnius apartment, surrounded by the chaos of unpacked boxes, and I began to sort. Not the practical things—plates, towels, the unread mail—but the paper. Old letters my mother had sent from Kaunas in the ’90s, postcards from friends who had scattered across Europe, a faded map of the city with annotations in a language I was still learning. Each piece felt like a thread, and I was desperate to weave them into something whole.
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