There are only five people living here now. This place is even hard to find on the map, but this makes it even more special. It’s strange to come back here after such a long time. My sister and I used to spend summers here with our granddad. I remember that the rhythm of life in the village seemed to be very natural and ordinary. We would take the train from Vilnius, then wait for the bus that took us to the other nearest village and then uncle Juozas would come to pick us up with the horse and a cart. Sometimes there would be some hay left on the bottom of the cart – so that we might sit more comfortably.
A visit to Dubininkai after quite a long brake left me a different impression, everything looked exotic and unique when compared to everyday life in the city. It was exceptionally quiet. Most of the older people, who I remember from my childhood, passed away, the younger ones just left for bigger cities or abroad. Now there are only other three people living in the village together with Maryte and Gintaras: Roze, another Maryte and her husband Vytas.They seem to live in their own little world. Maryt? now stays in the same cottage only with her son Gintaras. Less than a hundred years ago this house was filled with more than ten people- families used to be much bigger then.
It was strange to come back here after such a long time. It seems that everything and everyone has changed everywhere in the world, except in Dubininkai. The guest room in Maryte’s cottage still has the same cold smell. And then there’s the same old clock on the wall that doesn’t tell time next to Maryte and Juozas wedding picture.
Only much later did I realize that not all the villages in Lithuania are as archaic as Dubininkai. It would be hard to find a place where a telephone line or water supply doesn’t exist. But for us, city kids, it was a big fun to go and draw buckets of water from the river for washing, or check how many eggs the hens have laid, or help our grandfather to tie up the cow somewhere in the shade so that she wouldn’t get too hot in the sunshine.
There were a lot of animals kept at the time. Nobody could manage without keeping a cow and a horse; yards were full of hens, pigs and sheep. “If you didn’t keep any animals, other villagers called you idle.”- Gintaras remembers- “…if you lived like I do now, you would be called terribly lazy. I didn’t even have time to forage for mushrooms. I was so busy, because, you know, you have to take care of the cow- feed her, give her water. You are walking in the forest foraging for mushrooms and think about the cow. If she gets too hot in the sunshine, she howls. What will people say then, he’s just running in the woods and doesn’t take care of his animals…”
Now the village of Dubininkai looks like a little oasis of peace where time goes by much slower. Not so long ago, maybe fifteen years back, the villagers lived in a rhythm that was dictated by nature. All of the work depended on the weather: if you saw rain clouds gathering in the sky, everyone had to leave their work and rush to pile the hay in the barn. If it was a really hot summer, everyone was getting up very early in the morning (no alarm clocks were needed, because roosters would wake up everyone just before sunrise), leaving to the fields and then coming back for a nap in the afternoon.
On Sundays we would go fishing with my grandfather and uncle Juozas. There are plenty of trout in the river Skroblus, which runs through the village. My sister and me tried to spy their spotted backs in the cold sparkling water of the river, waiting for the rod to move. Granddad knew best places for foraging for mushrooms; we would usually find a lot of boletus mushrooms under the old linden tree, which was one of his special places.
In the evenings, when everyone returned from the fields, we would sit on a bench under the apple tree and clean the mushrooms that we had collected, and talk to neighbours who would come to see the 'guests from the city'. Aunt Maryte would milk the cow and even though I would love to say that its fresh warm milk was the most delicious thing I had tasted, in reality, we just tried to avoid drinking it as much as possible.
I remember, how happy the villagers were when they got their first and only phone line in Dubininkai, just nine years ago. The phone was located in Maryte’s cottage, so if a phone call was for one of the neighbours, we would go and get them.
(more text in the book)
