Episode 8

The certificates had surfaced in a shoe box my mother brought from Kaunas the summer after my father died. She had meant to throw them away, she said, but an old habit of hoarding documents had stopped her. I had never seen them as a child, never known my grandfather owned shares in anything. The companies bore names like ghosts: the Lithuanian Central Bank of Trade and Industry, the Vilnius Tramway Society, the Agricultural Credit Union of Kaunas. Between the wars, my grandfather, a modest grain merchant in Utena, had believed in these institutions enough to give them his savings. When I unfolded the certificates, the paper was still crisp, the engraving still intricate — a Lithuanian maiden with a sheaf of wheat, a knight on horseback, the Columns of Gediminas. They were beautiful in the way that old promises are beautiful: ornate, confident, obsolete.

Par value, I thought, studying the faded numbers. The nominal worth assigned at issuance. A fiction, but a useful one: it told the holder what the shares were supposed to be worth if everything went as planned. If the railway got built. If the harvest was good. If the state survived. The market value, of course, was the truth — the reality of what someone would pay you at any given moment. And between the par value and the market value lay the whole of history: the Soviet occupation, the nationalization, the exile, the war. My grandfather's certificates were worth nothing. They had been worth nothing for seventy years. And yet he had kept them, and my mother had kept them, and now they sat in a shoe box on my desk in Vilnius, and I could not bring myself to throw them away.