fieldus

work in progress………

“I looked around me and realised that if I didn’t do something, I would die here. I knew that I didn’t want that.”

Gitana was 38 when she left Lithuania, the only country she had never known, for a country she had never seen. The decision to move to London was made at a rock concert outside the capital city of Vilnius on a balmy summers day, which she had attended in order to keep a watchful eye over her then-teenage daughter and her friends.

Short, pretty and patient looking, she described the urgency of action once she had decided to move. Her husband was working with his brother in Spain at the time, and it transpires that she more or less made the decision to move unilaterally. Not as forthcoming about her husband by half as about her life here, (what does your husband do? Oh, nothing very interesting. Something quite boring, actually. Yes, but what? He’s a warehouse man.) I began to doubt the health of her life, and her choice. I probably never will resolve the doubt and realised that she herself probably doesn’t know if she in moving was escaping an old life or moving to a new one.

I would imagine that the motivation of the former leads to the manifestation of the latter. I asked her what made her want to move, and how Lithuania is different to England. You can imagine my surprise when she declared how warm and friendly Londoners are. “Here, they all smile at you!” She must have been smiling at them. Apparently the average Lithuanian is a very angry, bitter and jealous individual. I saw none of this in Gitana. I did see resilience and courage.

She came here alone, in 2002, before her country was adapted into the EU, not knowing a single Lithuanian soul, nor seeking one out. About this she was adamant; she wanted to build an integrated life as a Londoner. And life as a Londoner usually has quite an international flavour to it. She explained the Christmas tradition in Lithuania. As on the mainland continent, the festive meal is eaten on the 24^th December. Departing somewhat from better-known customs, the Lithuanian meal consists of 12 courses. Last year she and her husband had invited eleven of their friends over, and asked each to contribute a course. Twelve national cuisines were sampled that evening, though Gitana admitted coyly that she preferred her home fare.

Working as a confident and excellent court interpreter here ( that is how we met ) I wondered whether she had always worked with language. I must confess, the story of Marijana from Croatia in Coetzee’s SLOW MAN (and less so, the doctor in DIRTY PRETTY THINGS) was in my mind when I asked this. It is often that highly regarded professionals from abroad work as menial, manual workers in order to bridge the transition from immigrant to citizen. She had taught English for all of her working life (unlike here, school-leavers there do not yet have the luxury or the agony of choice. They make a decision and they are stuck with it.) but when she arrived here she found herself wandering up and down Croydon High Street enquiring in myriad shops and restaurants. After two weeks of relentless searching, she walked into a Chinese restaurant (“but owned by a Pakistani guy”, she adds, without pausing to register my surprise) and was told yes, they did have a vacancy for a waitress, and could she please go home, change and be back within the hour.

This she duly did, full of enthusiasm and not much else; she had never waited on anyone in her life. After a month she found a job working thirteen hours a day for six-and-a-half days a week at a hotel in Richmond. For the princely sum of £150 a week. No, she did not realise at the time that she was being grossly underpaid. This question of mine she answers without any bitterness or anger. I could see why on her account, she did not feel such kinship with her fellow Lithuanians. The exploitation, which lasted for over a year, she dismisses with a shrug of her shoulders and a smile, as if she should have known better.

Curiosity got the better of me and I enquired as to which creed of boss had so unfairly extracted her labour. A Pakistani owner of several hotels who clearly knew the system, for Gitana learned later that he had been paying an English girl almost double to do the same job. I wondered if the Pakistani had once worked as a manual labourer and whether immigrants conformed to the same cycle of ‘abuse’ which often perpetuates through generations. Which nationality of immigrant bring Gitana her food, and clean her hotel room, in years to come?