Regina
75, Kaunas, Lithuania
The first time I heard about the “Soviet amusement park” in Vytauto Garden, I thought it was an oxymoron.
It felt like the first day of winter. The clouds were low and ended in a thick fog that covered most of Kaunas. A few hundred uneven stairs, mostly too short, climbed up to the top of a hill, where I expected to find rusty, gray and broken Communist machines.
An old lady wrapped in winter clothes was holding on to the metal fence of a merry-go-round. It spun flashy red, green and yellow chairs, throwing kids’ laughter in the air. I asked her who was taking care of the park. “I don’t understand — but I don’t want to disappoint you,” her smile said.
The park and its dozen attractions were mostly empty. Only a few scattered kids, muffled up in jackets, hats and scarfs were chasing dead leaves blown by the wind. Two couples near a giant swing were waiting for their daughters to decide who would go first. I asked them to help me translate a few questions.
The lady left the fence to take position behind a green rusty control panel and gradually slowed down the spinning. The buttons, levers and gauges looked like those of an old train station, with the labels worn away.
Regina had been taking care of the park for twenty-four years, and switched effortlessly between controlling the machines and playing with the kids. After every turn on the merry-go-round, they ran back to her, asking for more. Her eyes shined the kindness of old people who haven’t gone mad. Her smile betrayed a tenderness that had survived decades of life in the gulag.
She had left Kaunas in her twenties to live with her husband in a Siberian camp, where they lived more than thirty years. “It was better than living without him,” she said rearranging the scarf around her neck.
He died in Lithuania, a few years after the fall of the Soviet Union.
After twenty-four years, today was the last time Regina would look up at her group of flying kids. The municipality was closing the park down permanently at the end of the day.
I felt mute, standing in front of a woman who’d had two loves and was about to lose the last one.
I asked what she was planning on doing next. “Nothing,” she smiled again. “I’ll do what grandmas do: knit and watch TV”.
There was no sadness in her eyes or the tone of her voice. She had kept the same smile all along. After single-handedly keeping the kids’ laughter alive here for so many years, it was just over.
I paid one euro to take a ride on the smallest attraction. While I spun around aimlessly, Regina was meticulously sweeping the alleys of the park, relentlessly building a dozen piles of dead leaves, that she knew would be carried away by the evening wind. As if there was a tomorrow. As if nothing was ever going to change.
In the distance, someone started blasting Eminem’s last album ‘Kamikaze’.
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