Between Shades of Gray

Lina’s sixteenth birthday arrives, on March 22. Both her mother and Jonas leave the shack in the morning without wishing her a happy birthday; Lina believes they have forgotten it and spends the day thinking about her past birthdays, including the one the previous year when she didn’t receive anything from her cousin Joana and her father was late coming to the restaurant for her birthday dinner. In the ration line after work, Jonas tells her that Mrs. Rimas has received another letter and that everyone is gathering at the bald man’s shack for the news. When Lina arrives, everyone yells “Happy Birthday!” but she is disappointed to see that Andrius is not among them. They give her a present—“a pad of paper and a stub of a pencil” (225). On their way home, Andrius meets them, and Elena and Jonas go ahead without her. Andrius wishes her a happy birthday and gives her a book—Dickens’ Dombey and Sons, in Russian, to replace The Pickwick Papers he had torn pages from to use as cigarettes. Lina kisses him as a thank you and he is stunned. Then, in response to her request, he tells her when his birthday is—November 20.