At twenty to six in the morning the road out to the port at Klaipeda is empty except for gulls and a refrigerated lorry, and the only building with its lights on is a two-storey brick shed at Naujoji Uosto 12 with a plume of steam coming off the roof. From the taxi it looks like a laundry. It smells, when you get out, like hot plastic and coffee.
Rimas Vaitkus has been inside for forty minutes already, because the boiler needs an hour and he does not trust the timer. He is 71. He started here in 1974, when the building was a state pressing works employing 140 people and turning out lacquer-coated propaganda alongside licensed jazz. Today the payroll is three, all of them drawing pensions, and the machine they came out of retirement for is a hydraulic press built in 1971 that everyone refers to, without affection, as press four.
"You want to see it start," Vaitkus says. It is not a question. He puts a mug down on the housing, waits for the steam line to settle, and pushes a green button the size of a fist. Something under the floor thumps twice. Then the room fills with a sound like a slow train, and the last record pressing plant on the Baltic coast begins its day.
