I study the front door, which still hangs easy in its jamb. It feels as if it could have just been slammed shut—maybe on an angry tom, tail switching, stolen milk still wetting his chin, or maybe on a man off to negotiate the exile of his cousin and his chickens from the land.
And I’m thinking how remarkable it is that the house still appears to hold the shape of its memories, when I begin to register that something is, in fact, off, like a person who tells a passable story, only to repeat the same story a few minutes later, unaware of what he has forgotten, of what is skipping inside him.
I skirt the edge of the house, and as I approach its flank, that’s when I see what has previously remained hidden: something has gored the roof. Slivers of wood, greasy strands of insulation dangle at the edges of the hole like flaps of cartilage.
Back here, it smells of larvaed water, steaming animal.
All the while, the family leaves me alone to my discovery.
They stand at a respectful distance, at the edge of the property, where the last of the unmelted snow has drifted into swells, rock-studded and stubborn, resistant to the thin sun.
I’m grateful that they didn’t try to define the scope of the loss for me.
And I can feel myself crying before I can register why.
At first, I think it’s because I’m mourning the fact that I’ve come too late, that I will never step into a real-life version of my grandmother’s re-created idyll.
But then it occurs to me that I am, in fact, crying in the way someone does when she is relieved of a burden.
What had Ausma said?
Your grandmother’s stories aren’t my stories.
And when she’d first said it, it had made me sad, frightened even, that there would be no way for me to make the pieces of the past fit together in any kind of way that would return it to something whole.
EACH SUMMER when I was a child, my grandparents sent me to the forest to search for a way back to our lost country. For two weeks, every year, until I was in my midteens, I attended a camp designed to immerse the children and grandchildren of the local Latvian refugees in a living version of the refugees’ collective memories of home.
Conjured from the woods of Washington State, the camp sat on property purchased with pooled funds—a real estate transaction within the local refugee community’s reach because the land, while beautiful, abutted a state correctional institute.
There, in cool stands of evergreen, I dressed in folk costumes and learned traditional folk dances and wove bookmarks by hand in the colors of the Latvian flag, which we raised each morning while solemnly singing the national anthem. English was prohibited. I remember doing a spirited session of aerobics one afternoon—all the instructions yipped in Latvian. On this subject, camp rules were strict: each English word uttered meant ten push-ups on the spot, and we all lived in fear of being called out in this way, of ending up facedown in the dirt.
Occasionally, exceptions were made, such as for the music to which we learned to dance, my hands on a boy’s bony cow-hips, our teachers shouting one, two, three, one, two, three, in Latvian, as we twitched a dizzy polka to Abba’s Greatest Hits.
At the end of each day, after the sun had set, we circled the dying campfire, clad in our Nikes and OP shorts and stinking of bug spray, and we clasped hands and swayed and sang a sad, slow folk song begging the wind to carry us back to the shores of Latvia. Then we crawled into our beds in dormitories built to look like replicas of the old wooden houses of the countryside, like Lembi, that the refugees had abandoned when they fled.
The camp’s lake held crawfish in its shallows, their shed skins skimming the shore, cracking beneath our curled toes; but also, leeches, which we learned to unlatch from our bodies with the touch of lit matches.
Inara loves summer camp, my grandmother wrote to the relatives in Latvia, but she says her least favorite thing is swimming.
On land, there were lessons in how to identify old farm implements, oral histories of the proper mounding of hay, instruction in the selection of wildflowers appropriate to the braided crowns worn by maidens on midsummer’s night.
Our counselors crafted elaborate living reenactments of fairy tales and pagan myths, sending us on rambling quests through the forest, where we would encounter costumed devils and witches who we would then be forced to outwit in feats of cunning and skill, or to dispatch with the properly recited tone poem.
In this way, year after year, we came to believe the past was a place that would always wait for us.
We were too young to know that there is a difference between the exile’s memory of home, which remains perfectly still, immobile, as if encased in a carapace, and a homeland’s memory of itself, which drags itself from the shallows each day, molted, tender, new.
AND NOW the sun is sagging, snagging on the tips of the pines, making what is left of Lembi appear as if illuminated from within, the fading light finding every breach.
There’s an awful beauty to this moment, arriving, finally, at the scene of one’s past, and discovering only ruin. And yet, ruin resists simple affirmation, forces us to place questions over certainties, to surrender what we had imagined had always existed, to ask instead, what if.
What if: the most accurate resurrection of our histories depends not on their preservation, but on their constant, quiet disassembly.
What if: we told ourselves that ruin is really a reclaiming, a natural revision of what’s always been assumed.
What if: I had come here sooner. There would have been more for me to see. But maybe less for me to find.
From somewhere behind me, I hear the baby stomp and squeal.
When I turn to look, she is reaching for something balanced in the crook of a sapling: a nest, abandoned, fraying.
In ruin, edges vanish. Everything touches.
She is, it occurs to me, the same age I was when I went to live with my grandmother.
V
HOW DO YOU FEEL? my husband asks me, after that first visit.
Like my DNA is singing, I say.
DO YOU THINK a country can be a mother? a friend writes, when she hears I’ve already booked a return ticket to Latvia, to Gulbene, to what is left of the farm that makes me feel like I can see for once both what has been taken, but also what has been left. Can land mother? Can it replace a mother?
I KNEW you’d come back, says Ausma, when she sees me again, for the second time in just a year, but she is crying with such force that it occurs to me she didn’t know that I’d come back. And I think that I might have just learned one of the saddest things I will ever know: that nearly a century of experience can teach you to believe more fervently in the certainty of what will disappear than the possibility of what can be restored.
BUT THEN, that is the way of things when you make your home in a place where loss is inscribed on the landscape, from the trunks of its trees, to the waters in its lakes.
Like the pine that grows in a pasture at the crossroads that once marked the way to Gulbene’s old cemetery, just a short walk from Ausma’s house.
There was a time when people came to this pine on their way to bury their dead. I will come to learn that Ausma, in fact, stopped here on the day they carried her father’s casket to the town cemetery. Tongues numb with vodka, the mourners stood at the pine’s trunk and drew knives down its bark, a cross for each soul. It’s said that they imagined that the hole that they made would bind their loss to something in this world that endured, and would give their grief a home.
Maybe this is why, all these years later, local people still know the location of the pine, even if no one goes there anymore on burial days, and most people have long ago forgotten that anyone did. Why they erect a shin-high fence at its base in anticipation of the visitors who will somehow find their way to this pasture, despite a lack of signs or clear directions.
Up close, the pine is not a particularly compelling specimen on its own. It holds its spindly branches at awkward angles and does not possess great he
ight. But it is remarkable not for what it possesses, but because of what is gone, the way the living bark still bears the shape of each loss; hundreds of tiny hatch marks.
Then there’s the lake where locals go to stand on the shore and stare at the water’s wrinkled surface so that they might catch a glimpse of nothing.
The lake’s bottom is said to be the site of a phantom village that no one can ever see. An entire town swallowed up one day, when the lake suddenly arrived, unannounced, to find people already living in what it believed was its appointed place. And no one saw the lake’s waters rushing in to claim what the lake insisted was rightfully its home—the town’s inhabitants too busy celebrating the wedding of two locals, they didn’t have time, mid-toast, mid-dance, skirts raised, to register their own drowning.
And this is one small tale. But it is also a version of the larger truth. This has always been such an easy place to disappear.
One day, the neighbors are out in their fields, hitching the draft horse to the plow, or bringing straw to the sow soon to farrow. The next day, there is no sign of them, the farmhouse door thrown open, the cows screaming to be milked. Maybe it’s something to do with the transport trucks carrying people to rail depots. Or maybe it is the mounds that appear suddenly deep in the forest, black earth hastily tamped down over moss. And those who remain—they never say a word, as if they believe to say something is to invite their own deletion, quick as the point of a knife scratching away pine bark. Better to stay quiet, pretend you are focused on such things as bedding down the barn stalls, the hushing and rustling of the straw as it falls from your hands producing a sound that you could easily mistake for stillhere.
Spend any amount of time in Latvia, and you will quickly discover that every family’s history is cratered with epochs of loss and displacement, sudden chasms of nothing.
Consider the last century—a random almanac of vanishing:
1905
People deported to Siberia following an attempted revolution: 3,000
1915–1917
Latvian conscripts killed fighting for the Russian army in World War I: 32,000
1917
Number of Latvian refugees driven to neighboring countries by the fighting of World War I: 1,000,000
June 1941
Men, women and children deported to Siberia over the course of two days by Soviet order: 15,000
July–October 1942
Jewish Latvians murdered by German troops—and fellow Latvians: 70,000
1941–1944
Jews brought to Latvia during World War II from other European countries to be killed: 20,000
1944
Estimated number of Latvians who fled the country at the end of World War II for the West: 250,000
1945
Estimated number of civilians killed, unaccounted for by war’s end: 200,000
March 1949
Latvians deported to Siberia over the span of three days by Soviet order: 41,000
Today, the disappearing continues, although this time it comes in the form of a one-way ticket booked for England—but really, the final destination could just as easily be Ireland or Germany or Spain or Norway, flight paths traced each year by thousands of men and women who board planes in search of work, and never come back.
The country’s population is declining, like a clock running backwards.
Over the past ten years, 250,000 people have been erased from all official tallies. For years, Latvia’s citizens have vanished at a rate of 68 people a day. There are no signs of reversal, and on some days, even the government cannot summon the resolve to craft optimistic denials. Latvia, pronounced a minister for the Office of Family and Children, is dying out.
In the countryside, where life is set to the schedule of milking and the local papers are attuned to the slightest fluctuations in the welfare of the potato crops (“Beetles Attack!” read the front page of the local paper one week), the dying looks like this:
In June, on solstice, when tradition calls for a bonfire to burn through the night, those still left in the countryside search the horizon for purls of smoke.
The old people remember a time when it seemed hundreds of fires blazed in the dark. Now, they struggle to spot the faintest smudge of one pyre in the distance, maybe two.
Used to be they sent people to Siberia, a local dairy farmer will tell me. Now they just exile themselves.
THE PUPPY RECOGNIZES ME as soon as he sees me again, the pads of his paws skritching my collarbone when he jumps and tries to force me into a happy jig. Liva, the baby who found the nest, is no longer a baby, but the sister to a baby. The big-puppy licks food from the new great-grandchild’s face.
I have come back so that I can be here for the span of a summer, the time of light, hours and hours of an unsetting sun that tricks the heart into thinking that it will never tire or slow.
What do you want to do while you are here, Ligita, Ausma’s youngest daughter, asks as she embraces me again with the kind of enveloping fierceness that is meant to banish all distance in an instant.
And I tell her this is the closest I imagine I can ever come to experiencing life as my grandmother might have known it, and so all I want to do with the time that I have here, in Gulbene, with them, is to live, as family lives together.
So we live.
We live outside, harvesting tomatoes, snicking weeds from the potato beds, wrenching beetles from the leaves.
There are trips deep into the forest to forage for wild fruit and mushrooms. We emerge with baskets of chanterelles and Latvian huckleberries, our limbs burred with bug bites, dense swarms of mosquitoes that reach us through our clothing, clog each breath.
I see, for the first time, with Aivars’s help, the dimpled tracks of wild boar.
I harvest strawberries and currants from the garden until the palms of my hands are leathered and red, as if burned by lye.
At night, in the undark, I follow the smoke to a former cowshed that has been converted into a sauna.
I take water from a bucket in which birch branches soak and let the drops pearl onto the hot rocks.
Then, I hit myself with the moistened birch switches until the leaves drift the floor and my skin shines like peeled bark.
This is how we mark time:
First, we cut armfuls of peonies. Then dahlias. Then gladiolus.
And with each new day, a little more of what had seemed lost finds its way back to me.
TODAY WE ARE TALKING about love. And a boy. No, not a boy—a baby rabbit, Ausma says. A baby rabbit hiding in the back row of desks that thicketed her childhood schoolhouse. So little, Ausma remembers. Quiet. Always listening. Ears twitching.
That was her first impression of her husband, Harijs.
Was there a romance back then? I ask.
Not for me, no, but he seemed to think so, she says, and smiles. I didn’t even know his name.
This has become our routine, to talk in the mornings about the time before now as Ausma clears the breakfast dishes. Ausma offering strands of stories that I gather, one at a time, and I try to find a way to make them hold together in my mind, like my grandmother’s scarf, which is up in my room, under my pillow.
I thought no one would marry me; I was in Siberia during the years all my friends married, Ausma says.
I don’t stop her to ask more about Siberia, although I want to. Something tells me to go slowly.
And then, says Ausma, after we were allowed to come back, and I was working at the chicken farm, he came over to help my brother, and he saw me sawing something. He said he was so impressed by how hard I worked. Well, I had some experience cutting wood back in Siberia, I said. I know, he said. And I said, how did you know that? And he said because we went to school together. I said, we went to school together? How did you remember me? Later, he told me he’d always thought of me, that he was quiet when we were younger because he was paying attention, memorizing things about me, but he was too young then to dare to do what he wanted to do now. And
that was to tell me that he didn’t want to let me slip away again.
So he waited for you all those years? I ask.
He waited, she says, and smiles, then pinches Harijs’s arm just beneath his T-shirt.
I waited, he says.
They held their wedding party here, at the house they still live in, in the garden. We can see the spot from the kitchen window.
Do you know, I built this house, Harijs tells me. With my own hands! And then I wished for the perfect bride to always keep me company in this house, and she appeared!
They filled the fields with music from a record player they planted in the grass beneath a canopy of lilac trees, and everyone danced, while my great-grandmother sat bundled on a bench, happily summoning mittens from skeins of wool, soft as a baby rabbit’s pelt.
I knew there were people whispering, that I was old to marry, that we would be lucky to have children, Ausma says. Ha! And I had three. Now we have grandchildren, even great-grandchildren.
She is my love, Harijs says.
And I am struck by not just the sweet simple clarity of his declaration, but also its construction:
Here in this little house that Harijs built by hand for his love, she is, he is, we are.
It is a sweet simple life, focused on the present. The next meal is what we can gather from the garden. There is no indoor shower, only a sauna. And a privy.
Always, with breakfast, lunch or dinner, there is dessert: stewed fruit, whipped semolina with fresh cream or maybe the extravagance of candy plucked from the village supermarket’s penny bins.
Among the Living and the Dead Page 5
