At the Mendel Foundation dinner for past Fellows, I line up with a plate behind the woman with Botticelli hair. Someone in front of us is slow, she half turns round and I introduce myself, “I used to work here before I retired.”
Justina introduces herself. Not a Fellow herself, she is here as the Affiliate with Casimir, both geneticists from Lithuania.
“My grandparents lived in Vilnius and I visited last year. I didn’t expect the beautiful wildflowers” – barley fields thick with white daisies, blue cornflowers, orange poppies, fragrant thyme, campion, vetch, and more than I can name.
I felt I’d strayed into a past era. Walking near the inn and fields of barley and wild flowers I came on a hamlet of houses with steep roofs and saw a black cow tethered to a tree in a back garden. American cows live in herds. Near the cow, one row of beans. Ready to spring up overnight into a vine for Jack to climb? Will a nearby ogre say, “Fee, fi, fo, fum?” Does that dark forest over the hill hide a witch ready to stuff children into her oven?
Auschwitz and its ovens about one day’s drive away, no fairy tale.
I do not tell Justina about my family, some perished in Auschwitz and some buried alive in flowering fields. I tilt our talk to her fellowship in America.
She loved her year here and sounds infatuated with America, a community of free and equal people. “Say what you like, read anything, go anywhere, speak with anyone.”
I’m finding this a harrowing time in America, vulnerable to monsters and ogres I used to think vanished.
She’s been working on interspecies genetics...
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