I was in Vilnius in February, without a proper coat and hat. Minus 23, a low, bright sun, Feature Market Focus


the sort of weather where books can seem essential or utterly unim- portant, depending on whether you’re inside. Kristina, my indefatigable guide—a tiny woman in her late 60s, who navigated the gelid streets in her grandmother’s fur coat—seemed genuinely concerned I might die. She was a Vilnius native, and took me on several brisk tours of the city. In one of the churches she told me cheerfully about baptising each of her two daughters in the secret ceremonies outside of the city, necessitated by Soviet rule. We ducked into cafés to thaw out, where we drank good coffee and Kristina checked if I needed to go back to the hotel and get into a hot bath. We passed by the town hall, where Napoleon slept during his doomed


Wyld East


British novelist Evie Wyld reflects on her recent visit to the Vilnius Book Fair, and the bond she struck with her guide to the chilly cit


march on Moscow; past the hill on which the founder of Vilnius dreamt of an armoured wolf, which prompted him to found the city. As always when I’m shown around a city by a guide so educated in the history and geography and cultural significance of their home, I feel that guilt of the complacent ease with which I move through my home city, how I would be hard pushed even to correctly name the bridges I use to cross the Thames. I can just about recognise the shapes of the most famous buildings in London, but that’s it. Gradually Kristina’s family history emerged, a grandfather sent to the camps in Siberia, life in and out of Soviet rule and independence, disap- pearances and near-death experience, all tempered with a shrug and, “But that’s just how it was.” Most of all she wanted to show me the university where she worked, its library, and the mural in the Aisten Hall of the Philologic Faculty, which shows figures from Lithuanian folk tales, nakedly leaping over stars, becoming hares, beheading giants. In the evening we were expected at a fancy reception at the National Museum of Lithuania, and it felt good to be among people who take the weather fully into consideration when dressing up: I’m not sure there was a single pair of heels in the room, everyone wore snow boots and jumpers. The English among us were filling dinner plates with canapes and aggres- sively seeking out the last alcohol in the room while a troop of singers sang something that sounded suspiciously like Enya. I walked back to my hotel a little drunk, and was pleased to note that the temperature had dropped to minus 25 and I was still alive. The book fair itself felt surprising to me. I’m used book fairs that feel


like careers fairs or trade fairs. But this felt as if it had readers and read- ing far more at the centre of it. Families came for a day out, there was a children’s section, a feeling of rediscovering and protecting the storytell- ing history of Lithuania. There was a reconstruction of a mural painted in a children’s sanatorium in the 1960s; Soviet children’s book What the Scissors Did by Ieva Naginskaite—the only Lithuanian children’s book of the 1960s that allowed its readers to change the story—was republished. After three days of getting to know each other, I sat in the authors’ room at the book fair drinking coffee with Kristina and her daughter Ruta. Ruta looked up over the snow-covered hill to the television tower, where it had just started to snow again, and said, “We used to live just there on those hills when I was a child.” “Oh yes,” Kristina said in the particular way she had of dropping huge news with the shrug of her shoulders. “We watched the Soviet army come and kill the people there, we had a view right from our apartment, my daughter was listening to the radio late at night, and she heard it happen- ing and called to us and we saw the men being shot. They stopped at 14, because they would have just had to shoot them all.” In our warm and comfortable room, hands wrapped around my coffee, I struggled to find an appropriate response. To help me out Kristina shrugged her shoulders. “And that’s how it was,” she said, and Ruta smiled warmly.


Wyld pictured for Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists


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