In another room he had assembled a small museum of shells and stones, bird’s eggs and curious things found. Rows of jugs and pots lined the shelves—a collection of earthenware of Latgale, some simple and beautiful, some crude, some amusing like the jug which whistled for more beer. In one corner of the room a pile of grain spilled across the floor.
‘Why does one collect all this? I don’t understand the craving for ownership. It is a difficult subject—du point de vue métaphysique, vous comprenez. We must discuss this later when we have more time. See all these jars. I collect them, and at the same time I kill them. When a thing is withdrawn from real life it is dead. Look at this belt. I bought it from a peasant, but he should be wearing it, not me.’
‘But the peasants are selling their beautiful old things to buy new. They no longer want to wear them.’
‘Yes, the present generation has lost the light. They have no faith. Children no longer even believe in the authority of their parents.’
‘But nor do I.’ De Roemer looked startled. ‘I believe in my responsibility. Any authority which I have comes from my children’s belief that I am searching, with them, to find the right way in life. It seems to me that the accident of parenthood gives no automatic right to obedience.’
‘But Madame, what you say is wrong, absolutely wrong.’ De Roemer held the lamp high above his head and the deep lines from nose to chin were carved in shadow. ‘The authority of the parents is laid down in the Bible. But in Europe today there is chaos. Family life is no longer stable. Some children cannot even distinguish between the authority of the father and of the mother.’
We were in the hall. He bent, drew the heavy iron bolts and opened the big front doors onto the portico. Three feet of snow had piled up against them and an even colder air swept in. ‘We used this entrance door once ...’
Figures of knights on prancing horses cut out of black sheet iron were fixed to the walls of the hall. ‘Weathercocks made by my father,’ de Roemer explained. Beside the door stood an immense chest, large enough for four men to lie stretched out side by side on its floor.
‘In the old days there were two of these, but the Bolsheviks took one. Perhaps they cut it up for fuel, but it just vanished, with everything else that was movable in the house. Not a spoon, not a book remained. When I returned after the war I had to start from the beginning. But I was young then. Now I am too old. I couldn’t begin all again.’ Canada was too distant, and his arrival there too problematical, to be envisaged as a fresh challenge.
We were walking along a dark passage. The flickering light of the lamp showed at one point emptiness above our heads and the distant rafters supporting the roof. A door from some upstairs room opened abruptly on this gulf. An eighteenth century oubliette, I wondered, or some damage that was never repaired. But I was too chilled to delay our progress by asking for an explanation.
De Roemer opened a cupboard in the wall. Inside were rows of dust-covered bottles, some holding only strange dregs. ‘Schnapps and liqueurs which I make myself,’ he explained. ‘Some are precious. The best is made from a young viper. You catch him in the forest in March and leave him for a week in a bottle to starve and purify himself. After that you wash him in salted water, being careful to keep him alive up to this point—a dead snake is absolutely useless. Then you cover him with 80% spirit and cork him up. The flavour is very delicate. How can I describe it? There is a hint of fish, of earth, of putrescence, in fact, un bon petit goût de serpent. I had the recipe from an old Jesuit father.’
But the precious serpent in his bottle was now in the basement of the Legation in Riga, packed up with other special treasures for transport to Canada. ‘But I have mixed some into the schnapps you will drink tonight to give it a more interesting flavour,’ said de Roemer consolingly.
Back in the kitchen we found that Jola had been busy. A pile of wizened boiled potatoes filled the centre of the table. Beside them was earthenware bowl of chopped fried bacon mixed with scraps of blackened onion, part of a large home-made loaf occupied a wooden platter, its texture heavy and sodden. De Roemer tapped it. ‘Jola made this, but it hasn’t turned out quite right.’
Jola hurried in with a bowl of cold crackling and a dark, stringy piece of sausage. There were several enamel plates and a couple of forks and some knives.
‘Sit down on this bed, Madame. Monsieur too. It is the most comfortable. I shall sit on the other one.’
The two children perched on stools, the lamp with its improvised shade casting a broken shadow across the table. De Roemer bowed his head and crossed himself. The children’s heads bent too and their worn young hands followed his gesture. ‘Help yourself, Madame.’ De Roemer pushed some potatoes across the table. ‘You can peel them with your fingers. Take some bacon. We smoke it ourselves. We buy hardly anything but sugar and salt.’
This was real food, the fruit of hard labour, and satisfying after work. So we helped ourselves to the potatoes and ate them with the charred onions and salty hot bacon, and from the rows of dusty bottles de Roemer poured glass after glass of schnapps. ‘That is wormwood which grows in the garden. This one is zubravka sent by my aunt from Poland. It is the favourite grass of the buffaloes.’
The schnapps ran in aromatic fire right through one’s veins and up into one’s brain, lighting little flames of awareness and sharpening the hunger that had been deadened by fatigue. The two children ate quietly, watching us with large eyes. ‘Oui Papa. Non Papa. Mais si Papa.’
‘And now we’ll have some tea—not China tea but wild rose hips.’ Here was self-sufficiency, purposeful and constructive, not the hampering autarchy practised by the dictators. The earth and the animals living from the earth supplied the basic wants of Janopol—and many of the graces too: preserves made from wild berries, bright vegetable dyes, soft wool combings for the loom, leather maturing from year to year and serving the family with an almost animal fidelity; pungent grasses, fine-grained woods, and flax for weaving the household linens.
The brass nails in Jola’s belt gleamed dully.
‘What a beautiful belt. Did you make that too?’
De Roemer bent down and pulled a small chest from under the table. Tools were fitted in rows round the sides and graded nails lay in little boxes one above the other. He lifted out a block of wood dented with the impress of hollow metal studs, and a pair of dividers.
‘You see, this is sole leather. One cuts a long strip, then takes the dividers and marks the intervals so. Then one pierces a hole, slips through it the double shaft of the stud, cuts it and hammers it down on this block. These nails are pure brass. One can’t buy them here. My wife brought them from Belgium. And look what the children have done today.’ He pointed to a stencil of an R surmounted by a coronet. A row of potato sacks with the design painted on them in black hung from a rod balanced across the open cupboard doors.
In the small circle of light thrown by the lamp Christophe’s fair head was bent over a piece of wood which he was branding in a formal pattern with a thin poker thrust into the glowing fire on the hearth. The smooth wood shrank and hissed under the searing iron and small puffs of acrid smoke brought tears to the boy’s eyes.
‘The evenings are long in the country. One uses one’s hands. On réfléchit.’ De Roemer showed us brushes made by Christophe with hair from the horses’ tails, and mittens knitted in traditional patterns by Jola. Then he brought out a bundle of photographs showing copies which his wife had made, throughout the length and breadth of Poland, of portraits of de Roemer ancestors, some miniatures, others life-size.
‘Twenty years’ work.’ He looked at them sadly. ‘I wonder if any of the originals will survive.’
We glanced at our watches. It was ten o’clock.
‘It is time to go back to Rezekne.’
‘Why? Stay here if you are not afraid of the cold. Take our beds. We will lie down in the next room.’
To protest that they would suffer hardship sleeping on the floor a
t an indoor temperature of –20°C was unavailing.
‘Hunger and cold are no longer important to us. If the children feel the cold it is an experience for them.’
So Jola found somewhere two sheets, the colour and texture of brown bread. A couple of extra sheepskins were thrown on the beds and the flickering light beneath the door of the next room showed that the family was settling down for the night. As we stripped off our boots and coats there was a timid knock and Jola’s face appeared in the doorway. ‘I am afraid you will not be able to sleep Madame. Our beds are so hard.’ She picked up her father’s glasses and his rosary. ‘We shall be going to mass at eight tomorrow morning. Do you mind if we wash our faces in here? There is only one basin and jug.’
The fire had died down and we could see our breath, filmy in the light of the candle. My bed was made of planks covered with old sacks from which the straw had oozed in places, leaving just thin hessian over the wood.
Next morning the jug was only half full of brownish water, scummed so that I thought it had come from the slop pail. Water was precious because at this temperature all sources of it were frozen solid, and it needed an axe to chop ice which could be melted down.
As we got ready the family drifted in and out. I found a mirror, smaller than a saucer, and propped it up to give a mottled reflection. De Roemer picked up a comb and ran it through his drooping hair.
‘We don’t eat anything before mass,’ he told us. ‘Afterwards we will go to the hotel and meet you there.’
Two sledges were waiting by the door, the double bed of the night before and a small two-seater with up-sweeping prow, pulled by the mother of the other horse and driven by Jola. By the time the red brick towers of the church appeared the cold had bitten through all our felt and sheepskin. Jola, struggling to control the older horse, stopped from time to time to rub her cheeks. ‘My face freezes so easily,’ she said.
The horses were tied up in the churchyard and we wandered down the wide ugly street looking for the Hotel Casino. The dining room was empty and the shabby waiter told us that there were no eggs, but when the others arrived we could have bread and coffee and fried ham.
After nearly an hour the de Roemers appeared.
‘We have ordered some coffee and there is ham.’
‘Merci, non. We will eat nothing. I have a piece of bread here.’ He slapped the pocket of his sheepskin coat. But the coffee was already steaming on the table, and the waiter brought the ham, so we were spared further argument, and the children’s cheeks lost some of their pallor.
About half past ten we went down to the frozen lake. Races had already begun, six sledges at a time round a circular track marked out with broken fir branches and numbers scrawled on pieces of cardboard. Officers in uniform shouted instructions from a rough-hewn stand. Small sausages and hunks of bread, and thick glasses of vodka, were being sold from an improvised buffet.
Friends and backers of the racing drivers, muffled in sheepskin, bulged against the ropes on the edge of the track. Bearded staroveri, the horse traders of the district, flicked their whips and paced their animals up and down. ‘All these horses work in the fields,’ said de Roemer. ‘They may be worth thousands of Lats, but they have to work.’
Beyond the course, sledges waiting for the next race paraded round and round on the level surface of the lake, the horses breaking into a trot from time to time to shake off the cold. A race was in progress, the sledges rounding the far bend of the course. The favourite, a gipsy dressed in a tight-waisted mustard yellow sheepskin, suddenly ran into the bank, overturned his sledge and fell out. He was up again in a moment and finished second, but he was greeted by a shower of curses from his backers and in a moment the whole group was embroiled in a savage fight.
By now, it was one o’clock and de Roemer suggested that we should go out into the country and visit some peasants he knew. ‘We won’t stop to eat. I’ve got something here.’ He pulled the bread from his pocket and turned for our assent, the inevitable ‘Qui Papa’ of the children being taken for granted.
‘I think we had better have some soup,’ I ventured, and so we went into a small restaurant, warm at least, but reeking intolerably of boiled cabbage and stale food.
‘The proprietress is a very nice woman, the widow of a Polish officer,’ said de Roemer.
A tired-looking woman brought a large bowl of broth and some hot piroshki. The children ate hungrily, being allowed to finish the vegetables that lay in the bottom of the bowl.
When we reached the peasants’ house a savage dog sprang at the horses and held them at bay, its teeth bared. At last de Roemer, having cowed the dog by threatening it with a stone, tramped through the snow and knocked on the door. Two minutes later we were warming ourselves at a huge stove. The walls were hung with musical instruments made by hand, even to the screws, by the sons of the house. A loom filled nearly a quarter of the room. The old woman opened a chest and lifted out stuffs home-dyed and hand-woven from the wool of her own sheep.
Presently the peasant came in, his little eyes twinkling with pleasure at the sight of de Roemer. Then standing with his back to the stove he launched into an endless lament.
‘He’s telling the story of the horse they lost last autumn,’ explained Christophe. ‘For them it’s almost as bad as losing a child.’
When we returned to Rezekne, de Roemer at last suggested eating. The widow of the Polish officer, now wearing a Sunday dress trimmed with greasy frills, offered us fish or pork. The tablecloth was stained with food which had slopped over from well-filled plates. In the poorer parts of the world one so often finds small plates piled high to suggest abundance. For me, to swallow each mouthful was a discipline, but there was no escape since stale cooking smells and soiled linen were everywhere, and food was too precious to be slighted.
When we reached the train we uncorked yesterday’s bottle of soda water, crushed an aspirin each and swallowed it. Then, lying at full length on the wooden seat, my head on Kenneth’s knees, I let the hours pass, dimly conscious of movement and noise, and the jar as the train stopped and started.
Gradually the images of the day returned—Jola quietly submissive to an iron discipline; Christophe absorbed in the delicate work of his long thin fingers; de Roemer, a stone figure carved on a tomb with five diminutive obedient stone children kneeling at his feet. Catholic Belgium, Poland and the Teutonic Knights; cold, hunger and weariness.
‘I am a soldier of the church militant,’ he said. ‘What is the flesh but weakness.’
Chapter 14
In the grip of the bitter winter of ‘39 to ‘40, man-made misery was extending in all directions. Germany decided to consolidate its hold on the more prosperous western areas of Poland and decreed mass transportations of peasants to the lands bordering the new Russian frontier. Their holdings were to be taken over by peasants from Bavaria and Silesia.
In Finland, disregarding President Kallio’s appeal for an honourable peace, the Russians launched a massive attack on the Mannerheim Line. The Siberian ski battalion was wiped out and the 34th Moscow Tank Brigade annihilated in the fight for Viipuri, but Russian reserves were inexhaustible.
Britain and France offered war materials to Finland, but with German vessels now patrolling the coasts of Denmark and Norway, delivery was not easy. Twenty-eight thousand Danish families offered homes to refugee children and Swedish municipalities adopted neighbouring Finnish towns, sending administrators to replace the men who had gone to war. But all the goodwill, and desperate bravery of the Finns were of no avail against the overwhelming weight of the Russian attack, and on March 12th Finland was obliged to capitulate, yielding to Russia the defences of the Mannerheim Line, the Karelian Isthmus and Viipuri, the fortified town on the coast between Leningrad and Helsinki. The Russians returned the port of Petsamo on the Arctic Circle to the Finns, but claimed right of passage through it to Norway and put a limit on the number of vessels the Finns could keep there. A special railway was to be
built along the shortest route from Russia to Sweden, over which the Russians claimed right of way.
The Finns, with one-eighth of their population already homeless, were to re-house 400,000 people, mainly refugees from the lost lands of Karelia which had provided one tenth of Finland’s arable land. It was a bitter harvest from an unprovoked war.
Meanwhile, although Roosevelt declared that the ‘moral embargo’ against Russia was still in force, it was clear to Italy that strong-arm tactics paid off, and Mussolini and Hitler met on the Brenner to discuss future collaboration.
The United Kingdom had so far suffered nothing more serious than the bombs planted by the IRA. In early February five IRA members who had been responsible for the deaths of five people and the wounding of a hundred more in Coventry the previous September, were condemned to death at the Old Bailey.
In Riga, the snow continued to fall and finally defeated the efforts of the municipal cleaners to clear it away. The problem was temporarily solved by pushing the surplus snow into a ridge down the middle of the road, creating a miniature two-lane highway. Notices were posted everywhere warning people to keep their distance from the houses as great masses of snow frequently slid down, jumping the snow-guards and landing on the pavement with a thumping flurry.
During the previous summer the Latvians had made a film called ‘The Fisherman’s Son’ which was now on show, and so popular that one had to book days in advance. The story, which Lotte explained to us, was simple but the photographs of the beach and forest and the river mouth near our dacha were hauntingly beautiful. On the first night the people showed their appreciation by forcing and breaking the glass doors of the cinema, and the police reported finding seventeen goloshes and fifty-eight buttons when the crowd had dispersed.
As the ice sealed the Baltic to shipping and the crippling cold interrupted air line schedules, diplomatic Bags became rarer and the intervals between letters from home longer and more nerve-wracking. The search for alternative routes for mail became an obsession. A notice appeared in the Riga Post Office that letters to England would travel via Poland and Romania. This had probably been printed before the collapse of Poland, and was quickly taken down. Rumour had it that letters addressed to neutral countries would go in sealed mail bags through Germany so we decided to write to a Swiss friend living in Davos and ask if she would forward letters to England and vice versa. She agreed warmly, but only one letter came through. The rest, having made the double journey through Germany, were returned marked ‘No Postal Communication’.
Baltic Countdown: A Nation Vanishes Page 10
