Free From Russia with Lunch by David Smiedt Page B

‘a tone’. Turns out that the pianist sits inside while the audience enjoys the tunes via an open window. Somehow, it works out just fine. In fact, there’s much to be said for soft lawn, tree-cast shadows and live music that is heard but not seen.
    Feeling suitably cultured and ecologically sound – pretexts which I would later use to rationalise the following day’s escapades – I set about finding a room for the night. The best rate in town, brokered by the local tourist information bureau, was offered at an establishment called the Meduna. It featured, according to one guide book, ‘somewhat over the top rooms possibly decorated by Flash Gordon’s mum’. Which didn’t daunt me in the slightest as 1970s and 1980s white South Africa was characterised by a style of décor my cousin Howard once succinctly described as ‘Jewish rococo on Broadway’.
    With a shy smile, the manager on duty apologised for not speaking English. I did likewise for not speaking Lithuanian and so ensued a telephone conversation with her husband – distant in both geographical and emotional terms – acting as translator.
    When one first hears Lithuanian, it sounds much like Russian, a rapid-fire onslaught of glottals and fricatives. When one first sees it written, the accents on the characters – the graves (such as à), the macrons over the u’s (Å«), and the háčeks over the c’s, s’s and z’s (č, Å¡, ž) – make it seem even more forbidding. But, just as New Zealand and Australian pronunciation veers apart with sustained exposure, so do Lithuanian and Russian. The former sounds softer, its rougher edges buffed by consonants with blurry edges that tumble into constellations of vowels.
    Within Lithuania, its Indo-European tongue is popularly believed to have its roots in the ancient Indian language of Sanskrit. A matter of some pride, this claim is not without foundation. In common with the 140 or so known Indo-European idioms, Lithuanian derives from a now extinct parent tongue from which Sanskrit exhibits the most complete surviving system of nouns, verbs and consonants. It’s in the vowel sounds, however, that Lithuanian is believed to be closer to the parent language than even Sanskrit. The same goes for much of the basic vocabulary. It’s for these reasons that the Lithuanian tongue can be said to retain more of its archaic character than any of the other surviving Indo-European lingos. Yet it was not until the sixteenth century that it became a written language, and it wasn’t until 1918 that it was used for official purposes for the first time. Under Soviet rule, it was essentially the muted vernacular of dissent and rebellion.
    Toying with the idea of learning some of the basics before I visited, I was overwhelmed by the complexity of Lithuanian and decided that if worst came to worst, I could rely on dodgy mime skills. Although there are several dialects of Lithuanian, that of Suvalkija has been adopted as the standard form. The alphabet runs to 32 letters – with the combined ‘ch’ sound acting like a Powerball supplementary – while the national dictionary contains 400,000 words. Verbs have four tenses and nouns, which are divided along gender lines, have seven cases. Each with a different ending.
    Now let’s talk proper nouns. In this part of the world, surnames are adapted to signify a person’s sex and a woman’s marital status. Which means a husband, wife and unmarried daughter can all have similar but not identical last names. Making this grammatical Rubik’s cube even more perplexing is the trait among Lithuania’s more overtly feminist to use male suffixes. Famous foreign names are also given the local treatment with William Shakespeare known in Lithuania as Vilijamas Seskpiras. Dodgy mime then? You’re preaching to the choir. Fortunately, none was required for the following