If there happened to be a smallpox outbreak, mothers would take their unweaned infants to the homes of the infected, so that the baby would catch the disease. Or the mother would smear pus from the smallpox on bread with butter and feed it to her children. When challenged, the mother simply replies, “Better for the child to die now, if he is going to die than to eat all our bread and then die.”
Even as the barons publicly denounce the book as little more than incendiary propaganda to stoke sympathy for the serfs, even as they engineer the expulsion of its writer from Latvia, many still keep copies of The Latvians on their library shelves for those times when they require a reference to the more confounding aspects of their workers’ psychologies. And so long before my great-great-grandfather is conceived, he is already created, the fundamental elements of his character loosed in the fanning of these pages, thousands of gloved fingers tracing the black and white lines that will split, then replicate, the raw code of his inheritance:
The strangest unfortunates
eternally changeable
Semiliterate folk
yet one of the richest spoken languages in terms of perceptive and picturesque words
superstitious
primitive
Born to be domestic beasts
Through the blood and mucus, my great-great-grandfather takes his first gasp of air, mouth working like one of the carp rising to the surface of the manor’s moat. He is technically the first in his family to breathe freely—while he has been floating in his mother’s belly, the barons, under mounting calls for reform, have torn up all the peasants’ hereditary obligations, effectively emancipating all serfs—and yet my great-great-grandfather is born as much under the control of the barons as his ancestors ever were. Because while the barons’ gesture has saved the serfs from a lifetime of required service, it has also effectively separated the serf from his farm. Under the old system, serfs might be a baron’s property and receive no real pay, but in return, it was understood that the serf would live upon the land where he had always lived. He could count on baron’s equipment and his support in order to do that, because while the arrangement allowed the serfs to keep a little back for themselves, enough to survive, it was in the baron’s interest, too, because he stood to gain from whatever extra they might grow.
Now all land belongs exclusively to the barons, and the barons are free to choose who will be the land’s tenants going forward. They can charge rent—and set the terms as high as they like. They are under no obligation to give anyone the chance to stay.
So this is what freedom brings: a surname, but little else. Maybe your last name is assigned by the baron, his final attempt to leave a mark on what was his property. Or maybe it is written down by one of the parish scribes, sent from farmhouse to farmhouse to try to create a census of the newly emancipated, so that they can be taxed, their sons conscripted. Hovering at the threshold of all those darkened rooms, eyes burning with wood smoke, the smell of cow, dirt trapped beneath hooves, drying herbs:
And what will you call yourself now?
Think.
Little stone.
Plowman.
Birch grove.
Sparrow.
Swell of earth.
If you take too long, and he is tired, the scribe might just assign you something, anything, gleaned from a single wincing glimpse into the darkness:
Keg drainer.
Earthworm.
Dog head.
Lady bits.
Or perhaps, if he has exhausted all other possibilities, and can think of nothing else:
Schmid, German for Smith, which when written with the Latvian alphabet is Smits.
This will be the name my great-great-grandfather carries forward for us, a name he can say but cannot write. Neutral, impassive, name as placeholder, worn into the coming hunger years, the years of revolt and flight.
No one is required to work for the barons anymore, but then again, no one is allowed to move beyond the boundaries of the parish where they were born, so that the barons don’t lose their workforce. The land that once kept them now traps them. Many find themselves right back at the barons’ estates, begging for work as paid laborers. But they find that what little they make does not support them as well as the food that came from the ground they were allowed to live upon as serfs. Even those who manage to come to terms with the barons, who are renting back farmland from them, are discovering how this new life can bring just as much suffering as serfdom ever did, with no one to help them with equipment—unless they rent it from the barons, and fall further into debt, no one to underwrite the crops, no one to absorb the cost of seeds that fail, animals that falter, rain that doesn’t come.
They are starving.
My great-great-grandfather among them.
He digs in, trying to learn how to live under the new terms, fields that go unsown without the baron’s patronage, except for the ribs and the pinbones of downed milk cattle, weeds growing through desiccated hides.
This how the dreams of leaving begin.
They sing of it first in their songs, the songs they give one another in the place of written words, the stories they tell themselves about themselves, spilling from one mouth to another, open, hungry:
Oh where can I flee, little god of mine?
These woods are full of wolves and bears
These fields are full of tyrants
Rumor finally supplies a destination: more than three thousand kilometers to the south, along the shores of the Black Sea, land is said to be free for the taking, the soil so rich the smallest fruits, currants, cherries, grow the size of a fat sow’s shoats.
Thousands begin to imagine their exodus, what they will pack, which horse will carry them to their new home. They even change their faith in preparation. Over three frantic years, forty thousand peasants pledge themselves to the Russian Orthodox Church. Golden onion domes sprout across the countryside.
But this will be the closest any of them ever come to realizing their Black Sea fantasies: standing once a week in the pew-less nave, hay-tangled hair perfumed by incense, the air around them turned to chanting, endless, repeating, like the lap of waves against a faraway shore. Yet even as this particular relocation fantasy will not prove viable, it has taught the peasants how to imagine leaving, that leaving is a possibility actually available to them. So when the decision finally comes to grant peasants the freedom to move beyond their parish, thousands go as far as they are able, off to the capital, weary of practicing flight only in their imaginations—the first subjects in what will prove to be a long-term test: what becomes of the former serf when he is separated from his countryside.
But still more decide not to go anywhere at all, as if watching all this leave-taking has made them that much more determined to try to stay, even when staying seems impossible. This is what my great-great-grandfather chooses. To remain a stone never lifted. He waits. And he waits. Quietly, in one place. A wife comes to him. Then a son. The winters shorten and the summers lengthen. He can save some grain. The sheep do not starve. The cows no longer sow the fields with their bones. He slips the animals from their skins, tans their hides into leather, turns the leather into shoes, which he sells to the baron. He collects the coins, feels the weight pull his pockets toward the ground. So that when the baron finally announces he is willing to sell land to his workers, quick as the rap of a shoe-blackened palm against the doorjamb, my great-great-grandfather comes to the castle to ask whether he might have a chance to buy the property upon which his family has lived.
The baron says yes—for 4238 rubles. Of course, he would be willing to extend credit.
My great-great-grandfather, quill ready, offers his reply:
XXX.
And with that, the land known as Lembi, once the property of the von Tranze family, becomes his.
THIS IS THE ROOM where your grandmother was born. This is the room where I was born. This is the room where our brother slept when he came home from the labor camp, after
the war, no leg, so weak, there, where the weeds are coming through that opening—that was once a window. This is where our mother slept by herself after it happened, her bed here in the corner. And this is where she was sitting when the soldiers came, when they told her to get her things, come with them. They didn’t even bother to close the front door, just left it open so the cats would run inside.
Ausma dips her head to avoid a root that has punctured the softening ceiling, and briefly suspends her narrative.
Harijs had driven us in the old car as far as the brush and rutted fields would allow, and Ausma and I had gone the rest of the way on foot, deep into the tick-thick stands of grass, cow parsley, wild caraway, hogweed. We moved slowly. The grasses, dried now by the long summer’s sun, nipped at our arms, our legs, our necks, leaving long weeping welts.
I don’t know what could possibly be left for us to see here anymore—not after so much time has passed, Ausma had said as we began our slow plow from the car.
Now we are stepping on shingles that snap underfoot, scattered two-by-fours that throw us off balance and cause our ankles to bow.
Slowly, a roof rises above the grass line to meet us, though its edges sag, brushing the ground in places, like the hem of a skirt coming loose. Here and there, sections of standing wood try to hold the shape of an exterior wall, but so many boards have tired and pulled away that the unbroken stretches begin to unnerve me, perhaps because they serve as a reminder that once there had been something on the other side. The house has decayed significantly in just the last year, since I first visited.
Through the gaps I see the outlines of empty rooms, as uncertain and hesitant as if drawn by someone trying to map the interior of a childhood home, unrecalled for decades. My eye is drawn to the ragged hole where a window should be, a sudden movement there—and even though I realize it is simply the yellowing edge of a curtain, twitching, this feels more unsettling, obscene even, than anything else I could have imagined.
Next to me, Ausma moans. Oh you are so horrible now, she says. She is speaking directly to the collapsing structure in front of us. I don’t even recognize you.
I wonder if I have made a mistake, letting her come here, if it might not be too much for her, and I’m about to suggest that we can head back to the car now and home, that I can try to find a way to return one day on my own, when I realize she is moving again, walking ahead of me, tracing the perimeter of the structure one limping step at a time, trying to reacquaint herself with what remains: Here was the front door, the little porch. And I can see that the door she is pointing to hangs slightly ajar, far enough from its frame that I might be able to hook my fingers around it and pull.
I look at her. She holds my eyes.
I take this as agreement. I step over a pane of unbroken glass, slide my hand behind the splintering wood, and heave.
The smell rises up to meet me first, earth unturned, but for the claws of mice, hundreds of them, working undisturbed for years, the bitter stink of mold, unrinsed beer bottles left in a corner by someone who must have crawled back here at some point to drink and piss himself in the unseeing dark, thinking no one would ever know.
I’m inside before I realize it, before I have even turned to ask Ausma if she thinks it a good idea. But by the time I stop and turn back to the doorway, she is already slipping through the opening behind me, tugging her skirt away from the jutting nails.
We move cautiously, flushing rats from mounds of debris with each step. They skitter ahead of us, tails thrashing. In many rooms, the support beams have buckled, demanding that we crouch in order to pass. Metal scavengers have broken in at some point; stubs of electrical wiring protrude from the walls and ceilings where the thieves have managed to rip out lines by hand. Where wallpaper remains, it hangs in ragged sheets.
This is where we ate our meals, Ausma says. She has been reclaiming each broken room we enter, trying to return it to the way it was. Right here, this is where I saw your grandmother for the very last time. She is addressing me now, but it still feels as though she is also directing her words to the house itself, to a presence that emerges only when she is here.
We walk from room to room, so long that I begin to realize how dangerous this really is, the roots clawing their way through the floor, the softening spots that give way beneath my feet, the angry strip of ceiling hanging above us, shock-white, black-stained with rain, like the inside of a scalp peeled back from the skull.
This is where we laid his body out, Ausma is saying, here, in this room, in that corner, there. Livija had already disappeared by then. We didn’t know where she was. We buried him without her.
The floor creaks beneath our weight, little songs of grief, as if it is also remembering that day, the voices of the mourners.
We are to die, we are to rot.
But our name is to stay here,
Our name is to stay here,
In this corner of the room.
Janis. That’s the name his wife screamed, kept screaming, after she found him, neck twisted on the floor of the barn.
Janis and Ausma. Those are the names he had been calling, less than an hour before, summoning his son and daughter to him. Here, take the wagon and deliver this grain for me to the farmer up the road who helped with our harvest.
His voice was warm, riffled from drink. His cousin had shown up that morning, despondent over a woman. Janis had taken one look at the man, then pulled two glasses from the shelf and uncorked a bottle.
It was afternoon now and the day was getting away from them, and so he had decided to delegate, send his two children to make the delivery, while he quickly climbed into the loft to get some hay so his wife could feed the cows. Then they could open a new bottle and go back to solving the problems of the heart.
It was an accident. A miscalculation. He did not realize how close he was standing to the loft’s lip. A misstep, a wobble. He tried to set a boot down to steady himself, and stepped back into air.
Ausma would swear later it was ravens that told her first, circling in the sky overhead as she and her brother drove the horse and wagon in the direction of home.
The raven ran into the skies, dripping gore.
Quick, grab a broom made of linden branches.
Brush away the drops of blood
The raven has left.
And that is one kind of telling.
Here is another:
A neighbor racing to the edge of the road, shouting to the figures on the wagon, telling them to hurry home, to Lembi.
That was the name she called out.
Not my great-grandfather’s name. But the name of the farm.
IX
THAT NIGHT, back at Ausma’s house, we eat in silence.
Ausma nibbles at her slice of brown bread, pushes a potato around her plate with the back of her fork, the tin tips of its tines chiming softly in protest.
Finally, she speaks. I haven’t talked about the day he died, since it happened, she says. And now I can’t stop thinking about it, seeing him again in my mind, his neck. Her voice catches.
Harijs looks at her for a long time, then at me.
Did you know my father once danced with a bear? he asks.
Ausma sets down her fork, pushes back from the table. We watch as she slippers off toward her room. The door latches. Then there is the unmistakable sound of crying.
Harijs presses on.
He was walking in the forest one day, and he surprised the bear. The bear reared up, like this—Harijs rises off his stool to full height, waggles his trap-sized hands like claws—and my father knew he didn’t have time to run, if he turned his back he’d surely be dead. So he made himself as big as he could and rushed straight at the bear, with all his strength, with his arms out wide, as if to clasp a bride. And—bang, Harijs smashes the meat of his palms together—he and the bear, they met, chest to chest. My father held on tight to the bear’s middle, and the bear held tight to him. Like this, each standing on two legs, they danced.
&nb
sp; How did it end? I ask, although I realize as soon as the words are out of my mouth that how is never the question that drives the telling of any anecdote in Latvia. What matters, as with all stories here, is the unspoken why.
The bear, it clung to his shoulder. And locked together like this, they turned around and around, until shrick—Harijs rakes the air with one of his claw-hands—the bear managed to draw a paw across my father’s back. But my father didn’t let go. He said some words to the bear, right into its ear, and for whatever reason, the bear finally stopped. It dropped down to all fours and it looked in his eyes one last time. Then it turned, and it ran. Who knows why. Maybe—and here Harijs meets my eyes—it was tired of dancing.
At this, Harijs rises and shuffles down the hall to Ausma’s room.
I can hear him rapping gently with his big hands, then calling to her, his cheek to the door, the stubbled skin of it tracing the wood like sandpaper.
Don’t cry, my love, he whispers, his own voice breaking.
NOT QUITE ten years after my great-great-grandfather signs the deed to Lembi and becomes the owner of its land, as one century begins to slip into the next, a poem is published in Latvian.
The poem’s author is a man, magnificently whiskered, with a beard that bristles like a pine’s needles. Beneath it, he wears a face that looks as if it has been summoned from a series of precise angles, like the view through a surveyor’s transit—an instrument he has spent a good percentage of his adult life carrying through the countryside east of Riga, taking exact measure of the land and its people, noting the new farmsteads that are emerging, now freed from the old outlines of the baron’s estates, making the once invisible borders of the peasants’ presence here something definite in the world.
He knows the peasants’ stories. The words to the secret histories they convey to each other when they sing to one another, the way others learn by reading books. He understands because he himself comes from a family of farmers who worked as tenants on an estate.
Among the Living and the Dead Page 8
