And always, in the afternoon, quiet hour.
Rest, Inara, rest, Ausma will insist. Don’t read. Don’t talk. Just rest.
Then, when we rise, more work until we can’t work anymore: raking, mowing, baking, butchering the hank of wild boar that Aivars has dropped by.
The weather is central to our day. We talk about it endlessly.
It looks like it will rain this afternoon, Ausma says, eyeing the sky, her cleaver momentarily suspended over a bloody swine hock. We’d better pick the last of the peas.
One day, during quiet hour, I take Ausma’s photo album to the room with me. And I notice that in pages toward the back, the old photographs begin to give way to more recent ones, including photographs of our family my grandmother must have sent from the States after the sisters were once again able to reestablish contact.
Ausma has laid out her sister’s photographs so that they are engaged in a kind of conversation with her own: here are pictures of Ausma’s children on one side of the page, Livija’s on the other; their Christmas, our Christmas; Ausma posing in front of a horse, my grandmother posing in front of my grandfather’s Chrysler K car; here is Ausma, helping to carry a casket, covered in pine boughs, here is my grandmother casting a handful of dirt on my grandfather’s grave.
And then I notice that one of the photos has come loose and fluttered to the floor. When I go to retrieve it, I can see my grandmother has penciled a brief description on the back.
Emils took this picture just as Juris was sneezing.
I check all the other photos of our family, and each one is the same: a brief vignette of nothing.
Here we are at Crater Lake. Maruta so wanted to go home, but we were 400 miles away.
My dahlias. It has been raining and I have had a hard time keeping up with the weeds. Look how scraggly.
Baby Inara with my little dog Polly. Polly attacked the vacuum cleaner because it got too close to Inara!
For a long time afterward, I think of my grandmother’s captions, how hard she tried with each one to convey the kind of intimacy that distance steals from the separated, the seemingly unremarkable moments of everyday lives.
It is what I think about when Ausma and I are debating which sweet we should have with our lunch: stewed gooseberries with whipped cream? (Maybe that’s better with breakfast, Ausma decides.)
It is what I think about when we roam the house, hunting flies (Ausma keeping count: 21! Swatter whizzing. 22!). When we practice English (Dead. Fly.). When we watch the nightly national news and both swear we are not tired, and then fall asleep sitting up during the segments on vandalized red light cameras outside Riga or preparations for the next national song festival, Ausma with her latest favorite kitten from the barn curled up high on her chest, like a fur stole. Or when, together, we clean the family cemetery plot, dragging rags down the headstone of my great-uncle, my great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents, and Ausma digs in her big black purse for a hand trowel she has stashed there, so that she can slice a seam in the ground where begonias can bloom.
It is what I think of when Ausma and I are sitting next to each other sipping tea, reading the local paper, which features regular updates on the number of tick-infected currently bedded at the local hospital, the level of potato beetle threat, as well as an astrological chart in every issue that notes the tasks best suited to the moon’s present phase.
A good day for planting annuals, reads Ausma. And manicures. And beating the rugs.
Then she turns to the jokes.
Always there are jokes on the paper’s back page, usually about husbands and wives. We have taken to reading them aloud to each other in the mornings. A way to summon some light before we begin to journey into the territory of forgotten things, unspoken things, lost things.
Wife to husband reading the paper: You can stop saying, Uh-huh, uh-huh, yea, yea, uh-uh . . . I ended my conversation with you ten minutes ago. . . .
I move through each day a collector now of the smallest of facts, a kind of dossier of the inconsequential, proof that I have spent long enough in Ausma’s presence to have absorbed the most mundane, yet deeply human details:
She cannot sleep before it’s dark.
She takes two spoons of sugar in her tea.
She prefers the radio station that plays nothing but Latvian-language pop songs, accordion-drunk polkas and hand-to-heart ballads that whisper to her in the background, a running narrative that alternates between documenting a love like summer flowers, a love like apple blossoms, and women, women, oh, women who crush men’s hearts, and never feel a moment’s sorrow.
At night, she places her teeth in a juice glass on a shelf above the kitchen sink, the same shelf where she keeps her only comb, and her favorite paring knife.
She has a special fondness for cats that hold their tails like dogs.
Her favorite tree is a birch tree that grows about a hundred meters from the house, its branches reaching low enough to rake the ground. She made a point of showing me the tree on the first day I came back to her. The tree is at least sixty years old, planted just after the war’s end. She lifted the branches so that we could slip past them, and we stood for a few minutes, hidden together behind the screen of leaves. She put her palm against the burled and scarred trunk: Look how beautifully it has grown old.
NO MATTER HOW EARLY I try to rise, Ausma is always up before me.
Would you like new potatoes for lunch? Ausma asks. Boiled or fried? And with milk, or butter, or both?
Do you know how many times I should have died? Harijs asks. Eight times!
It doesn’t matter that he has already told me; this has become like a game between us—if I don’t listen, as if for the first time, he cannot be resurrected—and so over breakfast he proceeds to remind me, and himself, of all the ways he is unbreakable: the Russian soldiers he hid from in the forest when he was a boy; the mortar, years later, that went off just as far away as you are to me, and only left his ears ringing; the horse that he was riding that fell through the ice, with him still upon its back; the portion of a bridge he was helping to build that buckled and crushed his spine; the wheel of the combine that rolled over his chest, splintering ribs; the roof he tumbled from, last year, at eighty-four, snapping only a bone in his foot.
It is not so much a catalog of near-death, or a manifesto against disappearing, I decide, as a daily declaration of living: that against all odds, he is still here.
I am a cat! he says.
Go work, cat, Ausma says, flicking a dish towel in his direction, but she is smiling. The dogs need food and there’s hay to get.
I have learned to wait for this moment, the table half-cleared, tea still left in her cup, and Harijs clomped-off outside.
This is when she will allow the past to enter our present space. She will tolerate my questions, sometimes even begin to share memories before I ask.
But we have an unspoken understanding that I am to let her tell the stories in any order she chooses, and when she sets down the dish towel and says, And now to work, turning her face so I can’t see her tears, that means it is time to stop, that she has offered all she can for today and now she needs time to recover. And then she will head to the pasture where they keep their horse, ancient, swaybacked, bristle-chinned, but still sure-footed and true when it’s time to plow their vegetable fields. Behind her she drags a sledgehammer, which she uses to reposition the stake that tethers the horse to the land. She checks to see if he has bitten down all the grass the length of his rope will allow him to reach, then she shifts him to a new grazing spot.
After that, it will be to the shed where the chickens roost, to collect the day’s eggs from the dark corner scrimmed with cobwebs that the hens seem to prefer. And from there, to the currant bushes to fill a pail. Or to the edge of the garden, to snip the withered heads from the last of the calendulas.
Time for my show, she will say when she finally comes back inside, preempting any more possible talk between us.
&nb
sp; She has a particular fondness for Russian and Brazilian soap operas that have been dubbed in Latvian, and if I come and sit next to her in the darkened room where she keeps the old blinkering television, she will whisper the backstory to me over the action, so that I can follow along. This woman thought she was an orphan, but really she was the daughter of a wealthy woman who gave her up for adoption many years ago, and when the wealthy woman’s other daughter found out, she tried to have her half sister killed, but she only blinded her, and now, without her sight, she fell down some steps and dropped her baby, and it rolled into a garbage container where she couldn’t find it, and then later some strangers heard the baby crying and thought it had been abandoned, and they couldn’t have children of their own, so they took it, and now that woman is searching for her baby, trying to get it back.
Ausma watches, shaking her head.
How much more can a person suffer, she says.
She does not phrase it as a question.
ONCE, I THOUGHT I might see if I could take us back to the time before the present as we worked outside in the dirt.
Do any of these flowers also grow in Siberia? I asked.
For a long time, the only sound was of Ausma’s spade, biting into soil, then spitting it back out.
I spent so many years trying to forget what happened in the past, she said finally. That’s the only way I could keep going forward, by never returning again, not even in my memories.
We dug on in silence.
What I did not see then that I can see now: that there are many ways to make a declaration, without ever uttering a word.
The weight of cherries falling in a pail, the milky heat of a kitten’s breath, the dusted outline of the gelding’s ribs as it huffs happily into its hay, the sound of Harijs whistling from the barn as he repairs the horse’s tack—this sweet simple life, focused on the present, this was Ausma’s way of saying, Here is how I have survived. Here is how I live—so that I am able to live.
I still don’t know what it says about me that even after this became clear, I kept asking Ausma to go back into the time before the present.
That she kept going back into the time before the present says everything about her love for me.
And Harijs’s repeated recitations of calamity, always in the moments leading up to my morning conversation with Ausma, I have come to suspect that I misunderstood completely what he intended with that ritual.
That maybe all along, what he had been trying to do, over and over again, with all the life that remained in him, was to offer me his trauma, so that he might spare his love from talking about hers.
VI
IT WAS MARCH, the month when vipers sometimes rained from the sky, dropped onto unsuspecting heads by storks, clumsy-beaked, languorous-winged, scaly legs dragging through the low clouds. If it were possible for us to rise up high enough to join them on their lazed glide across the land, to look down upon it from their point of view, this is what we might have seen on that day, at the beginning of the spring that would mark the end of her former life. Below us, the fields, stubbled and brooding, like a man slowly lifting his head from the table to see so many empty bottles. And now the roof of the schoolhouse that had been raised from red stone, and where, inside, some children were still forgetting at the top of their school compositions to record the date as 1949, not 1948. There, perhaps a dog, sitting at the edge of a driveway, one hind leg hoisted toward the sky to make room for its rooting snout, guard to what once would have been called a house, but was now nothing more than the hollowed-out testimony of a mistimed machine-gun strafing. On that day, five years before, a Russian plane had swooped low, aiming for the German troops retreating on the nearby road, but all that fell in the plane’s wake was a horse, a woman and, finally, the old farmhouse, where the woman had planned to give birth to the child who died with her. But now, this day, upon that same road: a girl. Boots stamping mud, in one version of her memories. Bicycle wheels churning beneath her, in another. Either way: sent off that morning by her mother, pinch-browed, dim-eyed, drained by the effort of trying to still the worry humming inside her, like a wasp trapped between windowpanes: Why don’t you go to town, child, bring this fabric to the seamstress and let her measure you for a dress. She took what her mother pressed on her, said nothing.
She knew what her mother really meant: that maybe in town, she might hear some news about her brother. He had driven off from their farm a day before to see about a gelding. It was long past the time he should have been back.
And so Ausma went, out the door of the farmhouse, past the sign into which its name was carved, Lembi, and headed in the direction of the sun. On a good day, the walk to town took two hours, a chance to catalog the things that had returned with winter’s ouster, the first new thrusts of grass, as pale and awkward as colts’ legs; the skitter of birds’ claws on green wood, and then, maybe, the high pealing bawls of a kinglet, or the dizzy, gulping chants of a warbler—whoever had ridden the winds back north first.
A truck passed, trailing a spray of mud, but otherwise it seemed as if she had the road to herself. What she could not see: her family’s farmhouse, some distance behind her already, and the truck rolling to a stop in front. And off in the distance ahead of her: the village, with its houses and churches and businesses, the distillery, the abattoir, the candy factory that made caramels wrapped with portraits of voluptuous cows, hock-deep in clover. And just beyond all that: the town’s railroad tracks, where, for the last twenty-four hours, cattle cars had been coupled and locked into place, one after another, until they formed a great snaking line, so long that it did not end, just dissolved into the horizon. And on either side of the tracks, piles of boards, those that were not needed by the men who, while the rest of the village slept, had hammered them against the car walls to form crude bunk beds and over the windows so that no one could see, the sound of the driving nails like the churring of so many nightjars.
The town revealed to her nothing of this, and later, upon reflection, everything. It was the tiniest of tells: her hand raised in greeting to a man she thought she knew; the man dropping his head, so she saw only his hat. At the time she told herself maybe she’d confused him for someone else.
Not a sign of her brother anywhere. In the seamstress’s shop: the sound of needles punching through fabric, steady and methodical. And then all that was left was to go back home.
At first, she couldn’t understand what she was seeing as she approached the farmhouse: the front door, extended wide like the mouth of a yawning cat.
Then she felt the shards of broken crockery snapping underfoot.
VII
NOT MANY people seem to remember anymore, but the living used to sing as a way to reach the dead, to make the dead heard in this world.
I spend my days in a house made of wood,
Above me spans a roof of green.
I have never opened the doors to this house,
Never opened my eyes to the sun.
The living would sing in the voices of the dead:
Give me please, my dear little god,
Some land of my own.
I don’t need much.
Something as wide as the length of a man’s forearm,
As deep as a man is tall.
And sometimes, the dead would sound a little maudlin, as if they, too, had just polished off a bottle of vodka, soft-lipped, eyes wet like the inside of the shot glasses scattered across the table:
I sleep deeply, sweetly,
Steps from the endless sea.
The waters sing, the stones weep.
The distant swells sparkle.
Other times, the dead showed a testy side, roaring like a drunk the next morning, woken by little more than the padding of cat paws across his pillow:
What is all this snorting, all this howling
Right next to my grave?
And the living would have to cross back over to their side, in order to answer the dead:
That’s not snort
ing, that’s not howling.
That’s just your relatives mourning.
Enough of this sorrow, the dead tried to insist. But it sounded hollow and unconvincing, channeled through the lips of the living. Sorrow was always embedding itself in the experiences of the living,
like a bee trying to make a hive in a splintery oak.
Like a nail hidden in the grass; his bare foot treading upon its tip; the churning of his jaw, the arching of his back, the way he rises up off the bed, pinned to the mattress only by his heels and the crown of his head; the stillness that follows; the letters he wrote, Dear Livija, tied off with a ribbon, placed deep in a drawer; the sound a drawer makes as a hand scrapes it closed.
Come my love, my fiancé,
Come see where I sleep beneath a hill of sand.
It’s a train door opening onto an endless, whipping cold, a bundle released, and then nothing but a guard’s empty hands.
What happened to the white snows?
What happened to my beautiful body?
Sun ate the white snows.
Earth ate my body.
WE HAVE NO SONGS to reach my grandmother, Livija, only the lilt and drift of Ausma’s memories of her sister, which I collect, and then pocket, like they are so many perfect stones.
I ask: What was she like when she when she was younger?
And Ausma answers:
Well, you have to remember, she was fourteen when I was born. To me she was very glamorous. Always perfectly dressed. Always looking in the mirror. She had many boys who liked her, before your grandfather, but one who was very special. She kept his letters in her room, and I snuck them out once, intending to read them, but after just a few sentences, I felt ashamed for taking them. They were too private, words no one else but the two of them should know. I used to get all her cast-off clothes, which were beautiful, because she was, but I didn’t like that I never got anything new. I do remember she had a big black coat, with a ruff of fur at the throat. She wore it when I went to visit her in Riga once, before the war. At the time, I dreamed of being grown-up enough one day to wear that coat, too. Ha! That seems so funny to me now. And a hat with a feather that swooped like this.
Among the Living and the Dead Page 6
