Clouds like white whales -- or zeppelins, if you will, in the way of an uncomplicated jocular reference, considering the specific locale under discussion. Countless, they stand immovably above your head, as if watching you, coldly, dispassionately. The Baltic sky -- a gelled reflection of itself in the sea below -- is unlike any other you'll ever see. There is no way to describe it with any greater specificity. In a country too small to define its various geographic regions in terms of the old compass points, that skyful of infinite cloud count is a country unto itself. One could say, at the risk of sounding somewhat excessively literary (but then again, why not), that the said metaphoric land of the immovable white clouds above is where the dead, and especially those unjustly killed in great numbers, dwell in uneasy peace.

Those discrete dispassionate white clouds above your head: they make you feel vulnerable, somehow -- and vaguely guilty, too, for being alive -- as you near the large village/small town of your destination, the site of the memorial-in-progress to the many hundreds of its Jews (*all* of the place's Jews in presence at the time, to be more emphatic abut it) killed in the course of a couple of days for the only reason, well, of their being Jews, some seventy-plus years ago (which is not even a nano-second on History's stopwatch, to state the obvious); as you cross a large segment of the said tiny East-Central European country, in the company of a local journalist, smart and cool. and a bearded young logistics fellow affiliated with the memorial, along the diagonal distance of some two hours from the country's capital, in a car driven by the genial man responsible for the implementation of the entire project on the ground.

And then, via a minor time lapse, you are there. It is a large village/small town like many others in this country, where virtually all of the Jews who had lived there for centuries were exterminated (not merely killed, mind you: exterminated, as some subhuman vermin variety) by the Nazis and a considerable number of their eager and enthusiastic local accomplices and collaborators during the Holocaust. Now those exterminated Jews are being restored, via a memorial of an impossible-to-ignore scope, to the status of unjustly and brutally murdered human beings.

The memorial under completion has several parts and aspects to it: it is a complex, multi-dimensional project, whose single objective is to honor the terminated, exterminated lives of the local Holocaust-era Jews at the three sites of their extermination, as well as the lives and deaths of the Jews who had been living and dying there for centuries, eons ago -- by bringing back to life the sprawling and long-decimated local Jewish cemetery (indeed, bringing it back to life is the most important thing one can do for a Jewish cemetery in the small country in question) -- and finally, building from scratch, for the first time ever in country's history, the museum of local Jewish life as it once was and will never be again.

Those clouds stand above you head, and above the tall treetops, silently, in the dense and quiet local forest, where one installation in the multi-part memorial represents a large black door, pushed half-ajar, standing in the exact spot where the town/village's Jews, all of them, were brought over and exterminated, quickly and efficiently and dispassionately, with a hail of bullets. You stand on one side of the door, and you're alive... for now, at least. On the door's other side, however, the same slice of sylvan vista represents death, and the passage between life and death is a hauntingly narrow and cruelly arbitrary one -- almost an accident, an afterthought.

And it is, of course, but an accident of fate, a quirk of your minor personal, private little destiny, that you, while being essentially the same as them and effectively one of them, are standing now, seven-plus decades later, on this, sunny, safe, life-tethered side of the door... while those unlucky to have been born some two-three-four decades before you and in a slightly different geographic locale (in this East-Central European town/village, instead of, you know, Leningrad, USSR... which last is no picnic either, in terms of an enviable birthplace, to put it mildly; but at least they weren't killing Jews pointedly there circa the time of your birth), were brought here, the spot in which you're standing now, in backs of lorries, and were forced to line up and round together over there, just a bit yonder, on the other, deathly side of the then-unseen door, where they were then exterminated.

A shiver goes down your spine. You can see them, huddled, terrified people, having been forced to strip naked, the grown men and women, young and old, and children, too, of course. One girl asks her mother in a small voice if it hurts when they kill you, and her mother says, shaking, that no, honey, it does not hurt, or maybe just a little, just a tiny bit, but then it will all be over very quickly and we'll be together again, forever, my love, and we'll forget all about today then. And we'll be happy.

You can see them, standing there, on the other side of the imaginary (and now, brutally real) door, where the light somehow seems darker, starker, more severe, and the vegetation looks sparser and crueller -- although it is, or course, the very same day, and the same spot in the forest: just an optical illusion of purely psychological provenance.

A shiver goes down your spine. And the clouds above your head just keep watching you, dispassionately.

Such a thin line of fate's random drawing separates us from not-us, life from death, the horror of being exterminated like lowly vermin -- from the comfort of peaceable and slightly mundane perhaps and boring routine of our gradually accelerating progress from birth to death!.. But then, of course, what else is new.

So you just stand there, and the time, which is unaware of its own existence, pauses in its passage. Time stands still, to use the egregiously overused literary trope. Right behind you, the local contractor for the project -- a highly educated and worldly man, responsible for the timely completion of all the multifaceted concrete construction works involved -- continues his unhurried disquisition about the difficulty of managing workforce made up of local young people, who have fallen out of the habit of diligent, conscientious work and are prone to heavy drinking and suicidal tendencies. "Vodka and killing yourself -- those are two main fashion trending here," he says. "Some of them announce in advance their intent to kill themselves, and they discuss the future details with their friends and coworkers, with visible pleasure, over a lot of vodka. It's perfectly routine here."

Those clouds above your head. Immovable, they accompany you almost all the way back, to the country's capital. Shortly before your reach the latter, though, they disappear.

You think that some day, you should write about this, and about those clouds, however perfunctorily perhaps. Because you were there and you owe it to those, vastly indifferent clouds. You think, ever so abstractly, of how the most essential of things (*things," you know -- or else, *non-things*) always weigh nothing yet weigh down on one's shoulders in the heaviest of ways -- memory, for instance. Take memory. It can be done without, too. One can spend one's life in the absence of one just fine. Sure, why not. Of course, it would hardly be a life worth living or mentioning after the fact, but a person void of an ability to remember himself and others wouldn't know it. So he'll be down with that. He'd be perfectly fine in his incognizance, thank you very much. But then, people without memory have nothing to do with you life, for one, so God bless them and good riddance... You think of how essential it is for us to commit to the ephemeral things of this world: above all, the memory of those who were just like us and had gone before us into the land of those immovable white clouds. Because -- well, we'll also end up going there, in our own due time, and they would be the one showing us the ropes up there, in the clouds. So we really should be keeping them on the front burner of our memory.

You think that if you were to write about them, those clouds, one day, then that hypothetical piece would not be able to exist entirely on the plain plane of a metaphor. Metaphors, no matter how evocative and stuff, don't cut it, when it comes to the concreteness of death. You would have to name the town/village under description: Šeduva, Lithuania. And you would have to give name to the good forces behind the memorial's emergence, such as the the anonymous mitzvah-doers who underwrote the undertaking; and such as the person who conceived of the entire thing, and set it in motion, and made it possible for you, the writer of these lines, to have those few long moments of sheer timelessness and cosmic lonesomeness in that verdant Šeduva forest, a mere few steps away from the giant black ajar door into emptiness, connecting life with death -- that man would be my friend Sergey Kanovich, a Lithuanian poet and a Jew with a keen sense of history, and a man of memory.