Antanas Miškinis (1905–1983)

Chapter 1. The Boy Who Remembered the Wind
In a small village surrounded by meadows and dark pine forests, there lived a boy named Matas who could remember sounds better than anything else in the world.
He remembered the creak of his grandmother’s gate, the rhythm of rain against the roof, and the song his father hummed while mending a broken chair. Most of all, he remembered the wind.
The wind spoke differently in every season. In spring, it whispered through the birch trees. In summer, it ran laughing across the wheat fields. In autumn, it knocked on windows as if asking to be invited inside. And in winter, it sang so softly that people sometimes mistook it for silence.
“Every place has its own song,” his grandmother told him one evening. “If you listen long enough, you will learn it.”
Matas believed her.
He lived in Lithuania, in a village where people knew one another’s footsteps and where the church bell marked the hours. His favourite place was a hill overlooking the fields. From there, he could see the roofs of the village, the river shining between the trees, and the distant road that disappeared into the forest.
He carried a little notebook everywhere. Whenever he heard a beautiful sound or remembered a phrase, he wrote it down.
But one day, soldiers arrived in the village.
Doors closed. Conversations stopped when strangers passed. Some people left and never returned. Others learned to speak in whispers, even inside their own homes.
Matas noticed that the village was becoming quieter.
One afternoon, he opened his notebook and discovered that several pages had turned completely white.
The words he had written were gone.
He ran to his grandmother.
“Someone is stealing our songs,” he said.
His grandmother looked at the empty pages for a long time.
“No,” she answered at last. “Someone is trying to make us believe that the songs never existed.”
She placed her hand over his.
“Do not let them teach you to forget.”
That night, Matas heard a strange melody coming from the old forest. It was not the wind, nor a bird, nor any instrument he knew.
It sounded like someone calling from a great distance.
He took his notebook and followed it.
Chapter 2. The Door Beneath the Roots
The melody led Matas to the oldest oak in the forest. Its trunk was so wide that five children holding hands could barely circle it.
At first, he saw nothing unusual. Then he noticed a small brass key lying among the roots.
The key was cold, although the night was warm.
When Matas picked it up, a narrow door appeared in the tree.
He turned the key.
Behind the door, a staircase descended into the earth. Blue lights floated along the walls, and from somewhere below came the sound of hundreds of voices singing different songs at once.
At the bottom, Matas found a library unlike any he had imagined.
There were no shelves of ordinary books. Instead, thousands of small glass jars stood in endless rows. Some glowed gold, others silver, and a few shone with a deep, peaceful blue.
Inside every jar lived a song.
Matas approached a jar that trembled with the sound of a woman laughing. Another contained the rhythm of a blacksmith’s hammer. In a third, he heard children running through autumn leaves.
An old librarian emerged from behind a tall desk. Her hair was white as birch bark, and tiny letters seemed to move across the sleeves of her dark green coat.
“Welcome,” she said. “I wondered when someone would come.”
“What is this place?”
“The Library of Unwritten Songs. Here we keep the songs people have forgotten, the stories they were afraid to tell, and the words they never had the chance to write.”
Matas looked at the endless shelves.
“Why are they here?”
“Because a song does not disappear when its paper is destroyed. It disappears only when nobody remembers it, nobody carries it forward, and nobody believes it deserves to exist.”
The librarian gave him a small empty jar.
“This library is in danger. You may be able to help us.”
“How?”
She pointed toward the far end of the room.
A dark shadow was slowly spreading across the shelves. Wherever it passed, the jars became cloudy and their songs grew faint.
“That is the Quiet,” she whispered. “It feeds on fear. And it has learned to imitate silence.”
Chapter 3. The Keeper of the Quiet
Matas followed the librarian through the library.
They passed jars containing lullabies from mountain villages, sailors’ songs from distant seas, and stories told by people whose names had been forgotten. Some jars held only a few notes. Others contained entire symphonies.
But everywhere, the Quiet was advancing.
“What can stop it?” Matas asked.
“Long ago, the first keepers believed that every song needed a written page. When the pages vanished, they thought the songs were lost. But the oldest keeper discovered something they had forgotten.”
“What was it?”
“A song can live inside another person.”
The librarian led him to a small room. In its centre stood a jar made of dark glass. Unlike the others, it contained no visible light.
“This jar holds a song from a village that no longer exists,” she explained. “Its people were scattered across the world. The last person who knew the song died many years ago.”
Matas pressed his ear against the glass.
At first, he heard nothing.
Then, very faintly, came the sound of a woman singing while rocking a baby to sleep.
He closed his eyes.
He imagined the woman’s kitchen, the fire in the stove, the little wooden cradle, and snow falling outside the window.
Without knowing how, he began to hum.
The jar glowed.
A thin golden line appeared inside it, then another, until the whole room was filled with warm light.
The librarian smiled.
“You did not know that song. You listened to it, imagined the life behind it, and gave it a place in your heart.”
“But I only hummed a little.”
“A little is sometimes enough to begin.”
Then the lights flickered.
From the corridor came a sound like a thousand pages being torn at once.
The Quiet had found them.
Chapter 4. The Market of Lost Words
The librarian hurried Matas through a hidden passage to the library’s oldest chamber.
There, he discovered a strange marketplace. Stalls stood beneath a ceiling full of stars, and silent figures in grey coats offered invisible goods.
One stall sold forgotten names.
Another sold the last words of people who had died far from home.
At the largest stall sat a tall figure wearing a silver mask.
“I am the Keeper of the Quiet,” it said. “I can give you what you want most.”
Matas held his notebook tightly.
“What do you mean?”
“I can return every word that disappeared from your pages. I can give your village back its songs. I can make certain that nobody you love ever suffers again.”
For a moment, Matas wanted to believe it.
He thought of his grandmother, the empty pages, and the people who had vanished from the village. He wanted to return home and find everything as it had been before.
“What must I give you?” he asked.
“Only your memories of sorrow. Forget the faces of those who left. Forget the fear in your grandmother’s voice. Forget the things you cannot change. In exchange, you will never feel pain again.”
The offer sounded almost kind.
Matas imagined a life without nightmares, without longing, without the ache of missing someone.
Then he remembered his grandmother’s words: Do not let them teach you to forget.
“If I forget the people I lost,” he asked, “will they come back?”
The figure said nothing.
“If I forget what happened, will it become right?”
Still, there was no answer.
Matas understood then that the Keeper was not offering him peace. It was offering him an empty room where peace could never grow because nothing meaningful remained inside it.
“No,” he said.
The silver mask cracked.
“You choose suffering?”
“I choose to remember,” Matas answered. “Even when remembering hurts.”
The marketplace shook. The silent figures turned toward him, and the stars above began to disappear.
The Keeper raised its hands.
The Quiet rushed forward like a storm.
Matas ran.
Chapter 5. The Song Nobody Could Steal
Matas reached the main hall just as the darkness swallowed the nearest shelves.
The librarian was waiting beside a large, empty lectern.
“There is one way to save the library,” she said. “But you must understand what it means.”
Matas looked at the fading jars.
“What must I do?”
“You must carry one song out of here. Not in a jar, not on a page. You must remember it so completely that you can pass it to someone else.”
“Which song?”
“That is for you to discover.”
Matas listened.
He heard thousands of melodies, but one was almost hidden beneath the others. It was simple and imperfect. It began with three notes, paused, and then continued with a melody that seemed to turn toward the listener.
He recognised it.
It was the song his grandmother sang while kneading bread.
He had not heard it for months. Yet he remembered how she always changed one note when she was happy and slowed the ending when she was tired.
Matas sang it aloud.
His voice shook at first. Then he remembered the warmth of the kitchen, flour on his grandmother’s sleeves, and the way she smiled when she thought nobody was watching.
The melody grew stronger.
One jar began to shine, then ten, then a hundred. Across the library, the fading songs awakened.
The Quiet roared.
“You cannot save every song!” cried the Keeper.
“I know!” Matas shouted back.
He continued singing.
“I cannot save every song. But I can save this one. And I can teach it to someone else.”
The melody passed through the library like sunlight through a forest. The shadow broke into thousands of tiny fragments, each one carrying a sound: a laugh, a whistle, a lullaby, a line of poetry.
The fragments rose toward the ceiling and disappeared into the world above.
When the last note faded, the Keeper of the Quiet was gone.
The librarian placed the empty jar in Matas’s hands.
“Take it,” she said.
“But there is nothing inside.”
“Exactly. It is for the song you have not learned yet.”
Matas climbed the staircase and stepped out beneath the oak tree.
Dawn was spreading across the forest.
He opened his notebook. The missing pages were still white, but he no longer felt that they were empty.
He began to write.
Not the song itself, because he knew it by heart, but the story of the library, the silver mask, and the songs that had survived.
Chapter 6. The First Imperfect Morning
When Matas returned to the village, the world had not magically changed.
The road was still guarded. Some houses remained empty. His grandmother still worried when footsteps sounded outside the door.
He could not bring back everyone who had disappeared, and he could not promise that the days ahead would be easy.
But that evening, he sat beside his grandmother and sang her song.
She stopped kneading the bread.
For a moment, she stared at him as though she had heard a voice from a dream.
“Where did you learn that?” she whispered.
“You taught it to me.”
“I thought you had forgotten.”
“So did I.”
His grandmother sat beside him, and together they sang the melody to its end. She corrected one note, and he corrected another. They laughed when neither could remember exactly how the last verse went.
The next day, Matas taught the song to a neighbour.
The neighbour taught it to her children.
One child changed the rhythm. Another added a line about a bird that had lost its way and found the village by following the sound of people singing.
Soon, the song no longer belonged to one family. It belonged to everyone who carried it.
Matas kept the empty jar on his windowsill. Whenever he learned a new song or heard a story that deserved to survive, he imagined placing it inside.
Years passed. Matas grew older, and his notebook filled with poems, memories, and stories. Some pages were lost. Others were copied by people he would never meet.
He discovered that words did not have to be perfect to be precious. A song could survive with a missing verse. A story could travel with a different ending. What mattered was that someone cared enough to pass it on.
And sometimes, on quiet evenings, when the wind moved through the old oak tree, Matas could hear the library beneath the roots.
Thousands of songs were singing there.
Not because nobody had forgotten them, but because somebody, somewhere, was remembering.
The End