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We shepherds too,
not only the kings,
are in the carriage.
We are going with the musicians; let us make merry
in the cold!
*
The tinsel is thick, luxurious, and properly gold. As if it’s actually gold-leafed, which of course it isn’t. It can’t be. That would be insane. It’s tinsel. Unless. This is Harrods, London, after all: exactly the sort of place where they would make tinsel with actual real gold. That might explain the price, which is definitely insane.
Poland is only here to browse. Now the EU is his oyster he can do his Christmas shopping anywhere he wants, but it’s mostly window-shopping. He’s not going buy this or anything. He’s just going to let it flow through his hands like water or fur or some very tolerant cat. He’s not going to…
…He reaches the front of the queue, and pays with two twenty pound notes.
The sales assistant wishes him a Merry Christmas.
He tries not to hyperventilate as he says it back.
Germany would never sanction such extravagant decoration-buying. But then, Germany has France to live vicariously through these days, and maybe it wouldn’t have taken them so long to get together anyway if one of them hadn’t been so darn cautious. Understandable, of course, but still.
Poland floats back to his hostel feeling like a bank robber or someone who’s just broken a curse. Feeling like if he can do this, he can do anything.
He takes his mobile into the old payphone booth in the hall, closes the door, and calls Lithuania to invite him over for Christmas Eve.
*
“Merry Christmas, Poland!”
Lithuania presses a bottle of fizzy wine into Poland’s hands as they embrace loosely in the doorway and kiss both cheeks. It feels like they’ve been doing this with everyone in the EU, all year long.
“Aww, thanks! Merry Christmas to you too, and also happy friendiversary.”
“Happy what now?” Lithuania says as he takes off his coat, and Lion, Poland’s Pomeranian-mystery-mix, bounds over on his tiny legs.
“Friendship Treaty, remember? We’ve been friends for ten years. And seven months. Down, Lion.”
Lithuania laughs. “A whole ten years we’ve been ‘friends’, huh?”
Lion whines and rolls upside down as Lithuania bends down to pet him.
Lithuania is wearing a suit jacket under his coat, over a neatly pressed dress shirt. Lithuania has never understood about smart-casual. Lion is helping with that though, covering his trouser legs with dog hair.
It’s also maybe so he can wear the silver cufflinks Poland bought him.
And Poland is wearing his amber earrings.
“You look great,” Poland says warmly. “Hey, grab an apron from the thing and you can help me roll herring.”
“Now there’s an invitation no one could refuse.”
*
It’s an abridged form of traditional meal, barely five courses, but Poland is still super pleased with how it goes. They had fish, and bakery bread, and cider – what more could anyone want on Christmas Eve? And it’s just the two of them. And they don’t run out of things to say.
Their dessert plates still sit in front of them, and Poland’s refrigerator is full to bursting. He’s going live on this meal til Tuesday, and then have soup.
Lithuania has unbuttoned the top buttons of his smart dress shirt. He still doesn’t look smart-casual exactly, more like smart-dishevelled. Sexily and naturally ruffled like a prince from a period drama, Poland catches himself thinking a little tipsily.
“What are you smiling at?” Liet asks, smiling back.
“I’m really glad you came tonight.” Maybe not precisely what he was smiling about just then, but something that makes him smile. Something that’s been keeping him smiling this whole month.
“Thank you for asking me.”
Did you this miss this? Poland almost asks. Did you miss me?
This time, might you want to stay?
But the urge to ask, the anxiety, is only fleeting. Lithuania is here now, and right now that’s all that matters.
*
“Time for decorations!” Poland announces. “Only, we gotta make them.”
He gets out a basket with crafting supplies, scissors and glue. Sugar paper which they will make into flowers, and white straws into snowflakes, and meanwhile scatter the floor with offcuts, like multicoloured snow.
Lithuania picks up a couple straws. “I’m not sure I can remember how…”
“I looked up some instructions, cos, yeah, fair point. Plus I got some baubles and stuff and… this.”
“Ah! Is this the famous tinsel?”
“Yup.” Poland holds it up and shakes it. Lion gives a brief suspicious growl. “Oooh, and he’s been so good about the tree so far. Not a dog toy, Lion. I felt like I was gonna black out in the shop while I was going up to pay for this.”
“Oh no, why?”
Poland spins wraps the tinsel around his neck like a scarf and poses. “Oh, deep-seated psychological wounds, stuff like that. You can’t just spend money on frivolities.”
“Heh.” Lithuania nods understanding. “That’s a good look, by the way.”
“Thanks. Bit ticklish.”
“So—worth it?”
“For my spiritual healing and the breaking down of barriers? Totally. Plus—” Poland drapes the tinsel around his tree, steps back and shrugs, “I really like it.”
*
Candlelight twinkles in the glass baubles, off the expensive Harrods tinsel, and casts flickering shadows over their new paper decorations.
Poland has gone a bit mad with candles this year. Totally addicted, all winter. Every colour and size and scent. The walls and ceiling will probably need a real go with sugar soap come spring.
But his apartment doesn’t have a fireplace these days, and so they’re flopped out on the couch in front of the TV. Which is a playing a DVD of a roaring fire that Poland ordered online.
Which Lithuania has been staring at super intently for the past couple minutes.
“What?”
“It’s amazing.”
“Well, it’s – I mean I like it, but they just filmed a fire. And it must be on loop, or skipping parts, or something, because I’ve watched it all through and you never see them add wood.”
“No, I mean fire, inside. Civilised. There must have been a time that was incredible, before it became a chore, and I can’t remember the moment of change.”
“Memory’s funny like that,” Poland offers.
“I must have set the fires in Russia’s house thousands of times.”
“Ugh, same,” Poland groans, “at Austria’s. Well, hundreds, anyway. I slept in a lot.”
“The most restful form of resistance!” declares Lithuania, who can’t imagine daring to sleep late whilst living at Russia’s house, ever.
“I know right? John and Yoko got nothing on me.”
Lithuania chuckles.
Poland looks at him and chews his lip a second. “But you did, uh. Set a bigger fire that one time, didn’t you? You burned down the whole place.”
“Mmm,” says Lithuania.
"I would have loved to see that. What was it like?"
Because that would have been glorious. Terrible, and glorious.
"Orange," Lithuania says. "Hot. You realise very quickly how out of your control a fire gets. I saw varnish on the bannisters crackling and peeling, like it was decaying in time-lapse. And those oil paintings, you remember? I remember standing there, watching them laughing while their faces split open. I remember fibres from the carpet rising up through the air."
"You stayed?" Okay you couldn't die, he thinks, but did you not have places to be?
"I wanted him to see me. I wanted him to know who had done it and why."
So Poland knows he isn't the only one who tended the rage in his heart-fire through the centuries, kept it white hot to forge only weapons, weapons that broke in his hand.
Lithuania shrugs like it’s no big deal now, like if anything he’s slightly embarrassed about the whole thing.
“He could have just, like, shot you." Poland says reasonably. "Wait, did he? Is that where you were? Or did you shoot him?"
“Oh… I can’t remember really. It all blurs together after a while.”
Poland gives him a skeptical look, but doesn’t press it. He changes the subject to more pleasant matters. “They’re still saying Russia burned down his own house, you know, in ’91.”
“Has anyone asked him?”
“Nooooot me, that’s for sure,” says Poland.
“Me either,” says Lithuania and they both burst out laughing. “Can you imagine? Did you hear that other story though?”
They say Russia locked himself away all that winter, with either a case of vodka or a violin that he played until his fingers froze, like that time in Leningrad, or both.
"Yeah. I mean I think that's more likely, right? When they dug him up and dragged him out to the world meeting, his face was grey."
Grey like the first purest snow becomes, grey like a statue, like a dead man. Grey as the ashes of his old house might have been, but there was no smell of kerosene or smoke about that coat he always wore.
Thirteen years and none of them have asked him. Poland could almost feel bad about that, but the guy doesn’t make it easy. In the spirt of the season, though, it’s about time to consider thinking about possibility of, sometime in the future, when convenient for everyone…
Things, the way things are going, can only get better, right?
“There wasn’t much of that house left to burn anyway,” Lithuania says dispassionately.
*
Later, Poland says:
“I remember when we burned a piano.”
We—Poland and his people, not Lithuania; he isn’t a part of this story.
“For the warmth, you know. In a siege you get to doing anything for firewood.”
(They both know.)
“Better it die than us! It was good wood. A totally worthy pyre for all those memories.”
(In the smoke engraved all the melodies it would never give voice to. The ghosts of all those it had.)
“I mean it wasn't new, obviously. This was someone’s family thing.”
(The keys were worn down like the kitchen flagstones in their old house in the Commonwealth.)
“I have this memory of the high strings snapping – ping! Stretching in the heat until they broke.” (Could have used those to hold airplanes together—) “—But that can’t be right. That must have been another time. We would have chopped it up first. We wouldn't have just set fire to the whole piano like that, what a total waste. A whole piano! That's warmth for days.”
*
“Hey.”
Poland blinks.
Lithuania is holding his hand, in both of his.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah. I’m sorry. Are you? Do you mind? I just wanted to tell you. I know a piano is just, well, a thing. It’s something I never did tell you about. Not that we have to tell each other every thing that happens ever,” he adds hastily, not wanting Liet to think that it's a deal and now he has to share something personal.
(This is a strategy of the spy or con artist: one way you get other people's trust is by letting them tell you secrets. It makes them feel closer to you, and you lose nothing. So Poland is totally playing himself right now, laying himself open. Setting a snare in Lithuania’s hands into which he will walk with eyes wide open.)
Lithuania gently strokes his knuckles and he shivers. “I don’t mind,” he says, “I don’t mind at all. You can talk about whatever you want.”
How could Poland have gone so many years without this man’s kindness, and without even knowing what it was he lacked?
“When you burn a piano,” he says at last with an effort, no whit of a strategy anymore, even a self-defeating one, “it does feel like, though… It feels a hundred times worse than just admitting you’ve lost. It feels like you’re admitting there’s no possibility that you have a future. When you burn your piano it’s like you're saying there's nothing after this, nothing to survive for. And that’s, like, a paradox, isn’t it, because without the warmth there certainly wouldn’t be. It’s like, I know that the future starts with living through this night, but I can’t believe the future exists.”
“But still, it did.”
“Yeah. Every time.”
The fire on the screen crackles gently.
“Anyway, point is you burned down Russia’s house, which was much cooler and more productive.”
“Heh. Thanks, I guess.”
“’Course, I wasn’t about to freeze, or starve, anyway, at least not permanently.”
“But the people you’re with... oh, I know.”
“And let me tell you, when you do burn to death, you feel nothing like a phoenix.”
The moment holds for just a moment, like a soap bubble or a smoke ring, then Poland snorts with laughter.
“Okay.” Poland wipes his eyes. “That was a bit much.”
Lithuania smiles too. “And a fine topic for a Christmas Eve night, to be sure.”
They look at each other, candlelit smiles, flushed cheeks, untucked shirts, little triangles of paper still adhering here and there.
“Actually,” Lithuania says then, “isn’t that what Advent’s all about?”
“Always darkest before dawn and all that,” Poland says wisely, and then with a sincerity that never would have dared show its face by daylight, “I love that we can talk like this.”
“Me too.”
Lion, who has been pacing around between his bed and the sofa for a few minutes now, trots up to them, stretches, and barks twice.
Poland shakes himself. “He needs to go out. Hey, pupper, you want to go out and do your business? I’ll just—”
“I’ll come too.”
*
They walk around the block and it’s freezing, and they mostly talk to or about Lion. Even with the shock of the cold air, Poland feels pleasantly vague, milky-tired.
The night is clear. He can’t tell, now, which was the first star to rise, the little star that is supposed to bring the gifts, and to remind them of the greatest love-gift of all.
Just before they get back to the building, Liet gets this furtive look, glances around, in a way that Poland recalls vividly from centuries ago, and so he knows Liet is going to kiss him just an instant before he does.
His head spins, his lips tingle in every nerve, and a shock of heat courses through him, and it’s over in half a second.
“Is that alright?” Liet asks.
“Yes,” Poland whispers, giddy and breathless, keenly aware of his blood flickering in his veins,“yes, I mean dude let’s get inside,” (even in the big city on Christmas in the freezing cold this isn’t something you chance in public, not really), “but YES.”
*
Some little while later, they’re back to holding hands. Holding and touching and pressing fingertip to fingertip, kissing each knuckle; absurd, tender gestures they can’t find an end to and don’t want to.
“Happy thing—friendiversary,” Liet says for the fifteenth time; intoxicated with mirth, it is his favourite joke.
“Happy thing to you too, you great silly.”
“I want to explain,” Liet says a little later, when he’s calmed down.
“You don’t need to explain anything.”
“Well. I don't regret the last five years. I needed time on myself before I could be with you. I think we both did.”
“If you put it like that…” Poland had been thinking: if you'd have given the word, at any time, I would have come running. But there’s a future now, lots and lots of it. So he doesn’t regret the past decade either.
“Shall we do presents?” he asks, jumping up.
“Presents?”
“It’s after midnight, and we’re not doing the sixth of either December or January, right? And I don’t have much hope for tomorrow morning before lunch at this rate, I gotta say, good thing we’re going out, so… presents?”
Lithuania has brought him music. Two CDs. He must have gotten advice, from Latvia or who knows who else, because it’s Peteris Vasks, some pieces Poland knows and knows to be good, and ‘3 Poems by Czeslaw Milosz’, and then a compilation of violin and piano music by Vasks again, and Pärt, and he just knows this will be a favourite, and it’s so thoughtful, and so daring, to buy someone books or music.
And then, Lithuania has made him a mix tape. An actual cassette tape. With a handwritten tracklist in the insert. It’s a good thing his stereo still has a tape player.
“It’s mostly from the radio,” Lithuania explains, trying to explain away this best of gifts, “it’s half from last year I’m afraid,” like he’s ashamed of spending a year on a Christmas present!, “mostly all Christmas, and some Chopin I caught, and some random baroque.”
“Baroque is Christmas,” Poland declares. He loves his present. Loves both of them.
He fetches his own gift to Lithuania. “It’s just a small thing,” he can’t help saying.
Lithuania unwraps it: wrapping, box, and tissue paper, and gives a little “oh” of pleasure and surprise.
“I hope it’s okay,” Poland says nervously, clasping his own hands in his lap. “I’ve never given anyone anything so breakable.”
*
He didn’t make it himself of course, he couldn’t. But he remembers Czechia showing him how it was done.
She has hair the same mouse-brown colour as Liet’s, and similarly looks good kind of dirty, workshop-dirty, like now, blue jean overalls and a smudge of smoke over one cheek. She shows him how you put your lips to the pipe, steady breathing out like playing a musical instrument. You breathe shape to the impossibly hot not liquid not solid (that is what glass always is, neither one thing nor another). Liquid that you cut and twist with scissors and pliers, solid that pours and flows.
And after heating the fires super-hot, after spending all day sweating in the dusty mineral-stinky workshop, astonished incidentally that Health and Safety allows this, after shaping glass with your breath, air kisses… After all this, all you get at the end is a—a soap bubble, fired and frozen in time.
A nothing, a beautiful beautiful perfect nothing. Furnace and flame and kiln produce no weapon this time. It can do nothing but charm.
And it's as fragile as a bubble.
Don’t say as love, because – it turns out – your love is rather durable than otherwise. But as fragile as the hope that swells your heart as you offer your love out to another. As your heart in his hands now.
So you give Liet a blown glass wolf. Sleek, unreal; it’s dancing with the moon. Purely ornamental, and the sort of gift you haven’t dared for many years. It has less utility even than the cufflinks.
*
“I’ve never given anyone anything so breakable.”
Liet puts the gift, his soap-bubble of a hopeful heart, gently down on the side table, and puts his arms around Poland once more.
“I'll take good care of it. I promise.”