Episode 2off dalytes triudikux ktidtina jsip mrile off perdaug sirdis karti likus

“Kodėl tu dainuoji taip liūdnai, Močiutė?” I asked one afternoon, my head resting on the cool linoleum table, watching the steam rise from a cup of weak tea.

She didn’t look at me, but her needles paused for a breath. “Ne liūdnai, vaikeli. Atsargiai. Dainos žino per daug, kad būtų linksmos.”

Songs know too much to be happy. I didn’t understand then. I thought songs were just melodies, like the ones Steve would play on his old guitar in the living room, his fingers fumbling over chords he’d learned in some Dublin pub before he ever crossed the sea to our small Lithuanian town. Steve—my father—was a man of two worlds, forever split. He’d come to Lithuania chasing a ghost of his own making, a story about a grandfather who’d left Ireland in the twenties, leaving behind a fiddle and a promise. But the ghost had led him to Onutė’s kitchen, to my mother Kristina’s fierce, quiet eyes, and to me. He was a debugger by trade, a man who fixed broken code, but he could never quite fix the broken seams between his own histories.

That winter, the seams began to fray in earnest. I heard it first in the kitchen, not in words, but in the clatter of a spoon against a pot, the too-sudden scrape of a chair. Kristina’s voice, usually a low, steady river, had developed an edge, like ice cracking on the Nemunas. Steve’s replies, always gentle, had grown thin, stretched taut over something unsaid.

“You’re not listening, Steve,” Kristina said one night, her back to him as she scrubbed a pan with unnecessary force. “You’re always here, but you’re not here.”

“I am, Kris. I’m trying to be,” he said, his brogue thicker with fatigue. “But you won’t tell me what’s wrong. You just expect me to know.”

The silence that followed was a living thing, filling the room with a pressure that made my ears pop. I was in the hallway, pretending to tie my shoe, my heart a frantic drum against my ribs. I wanted to run in, to say something, to be the bright thing that could cut through the fog. But I was frozen, a small boy caught between two continents of feeling.

Onutė found me there, her hand light on my shoulder. “Eime,” she whispered. “Let them have their storm. We’ll make bread.”

In the kitchen, the air was thick with flour and the sweet, yeasty smell of proofing dough. She worked with a rhythm that was older than any argument, her knuckles dusted white, her face a map of lines that told stories I would only later learn to read. She didn’t speak of my parents. Instead, she told me about the winter of 1944, when the hunger was so deep it was a physical presence, a fifth child in the family. She told me about her brother, Jonas, who had hidden a Jewish family in their cellar for eleven months, and how the neighbor, the one who later became the village head, had smelled the cholent and said nothing, but had taken their last cow as payment for his silence.

“You see, Algridas,” she said, her voice a low murmur, “we all carry a ledger. Some debts are paid in gold, some in silence. Some are paid with a piece of your heart that never grows back.”

She looked at me then, her eyes the color of old amber, holding a sadness so vast it felt like a landscape. “Your mother, she carries her father’s debt. And your father, he carries a debt to a place he’s never truly seen. They are trying to pay each other, but they are using the wrong currency.”

I didn’t know what she meant. I only knew that the bread she made that night was the most comforting thing I had ever tasted, and that when I finally went to bed, the shouting had stopped. But the silence that followed was worse. It was a silence that had teeth.

The next day, Steve took me for a walk along the frozen river. The air was so cold it felt like a blade, and our breath hung in plumes around us. He was quiet for a long time, his hands shoved deep in his coat pockets.

“Do you know why I came here, Al?” he finally asked, his voice rough.

“To find your grandfather’s ghost?”

He gave a dry, humorless laugh. “Aye, something like that. But I think I was really looking for a place that felt like home. A place where the noise in my head would quiet down. I thought if I could find the root, I could fix the whole tree.”

He stopped, looking out at the white expanse of the river. “But you can’t fix a tree by looking at its roots. You have to feed the branches. You have to be present in the leaves.” He turned to me, and for the first time, I saw a crack in his steady facade, a raw, unguarded fear. “I don’t know if I know how to be present, son. I’ve spent so long debugging the past.”

That night, the fever hit me. It came on like a wave, hot and relentless, pulling me under into a world of fractured dreams. I saw Onutė’s amber eyes, but they were floating in a dark sea. I heard Steve’s guitar, but the strings were made of barbed wire. I saw Kristina’s hands, but they were covered in flour and then, suddenly, in blood. I woke in a sweat, my throat raw, to find my mother sitting beside my bed, her face pale in the lamplight.

“Mama,” I croaked.

“Shh, aš čia,” she whispered, pressing a cool cloth to my forehead. “I’m here.”

She stayed with me all night, and in the half-light, she sang a song I’d never heard before, a song in a language that wasn’t Lithuanian or English. It was a strange, keening melody, full of longing and a fierce, protective love. I didn’t understand the words, but I understood the feeling. It was a song about carrying a weight you never asked for, and about loving someone so much it hurts you to your core.

I fell asleep to that song, and when I woke, the fever had broken. The house was quiet, but it was a different kind of quiet. It was the quiet of a held breath, a pause before a decision.

I found Onutė in the garden, despite the cold, her hands buried in the frozen earth, pulling up the last of the dead marigolds. She looked up as I approached, and she smiled, but it was a tired, knowing smile.

“The fever cleanses,” she said, brushing dirt from her hands. “It burns away what is not essential. Now you can see more clearly.”

I didn’t know what I was supposed to see. But as I looked at the house, at the light spilling from the kitchen window where my parents sat at the table, their heads bowed together in quiet conversation, I felt a shift. The storm hadn’t passed, but the lightning had struck, and something new was growing in the scorched earth. The ledger was still open, the debts still unpaid, but for the first time, I understood that the accounting was not mine to do. My only task was to bear witness, to carry the songs, and to hold the space for the branches to grow.