Among the Living and the Dead

by Inara Verzemnieks

  One day, some of the frustrated assemble on the banks of the Daugava, which runs through the center of Riga—the river into which Bear Slayer was flung—to try to dredge the depths of their dissatisfaction. High unemployment. Crushing poverty. Imperial rule. No way to change anything. No self-representation. They find that fury rises easily, there on the riverbanks, that they like the way it threatens to surge and crest. They chant and throw stones. The police don’t like it, though, and open fire on the crowd. A teenage boy ­crumples—a member of one of the Jewish labor groups that has been instrumental in organizing the city’s workers. Everyone runs. And at last, something breaks open, like the ice that cracks beneath the feet of those who scramble onto the frozen stretch of water, rather than run into the policemen’s guns.

  The screams beneath the ice travel the Dauguva, echoing deeper and deeper into the Latvian countryside. Seventy-three people shot or drowned. Two hundred injured. As this news from the capital ripples through the remote villages, anger mounts.

  For all the promises of freedom and reform since the emancipation of the serfs, nothing has changed. The peasants have no political voice or influence. All the power still rests in the hands of the wealthy German landowners, with the representatives of the tsar.

  What happens next is as if everyone suddenly dreams the same waking dream of revenge: across the countryside, the peasants take up torches and rocks, and head to the nearest manor house.

  For several days, they burn and they smash, until hundreds of castles and manors across the region have been reduced to ash and bone-char and rubble.

  Remarkably, these days of fury do not touch Cesvaine palace.

  It sits undisturbed, as the sculpture on the roof swishes his tail in the direction of the other local wolves, who do not slip fury’s attention so easily—their den immolated as the live-in servants stand and gawp in their nightclothes.

  The ruins have not stopped smoldering when the tsar dispatches troops. Together, with mercenaries hired by the barons, they fly through the occupied lands, executing, burning, flogging. More than two thousand peasants will die, nearly three thousand more shipped to the edges of the known world, to the endless and eternal steppes. And fury slips back under the ice.

  A relatively quiet decade passes, in which my grandmother and grandfather are born.

  Storks build nests atop Cesvaine’s chimneys.

  Deer venture closer, with no hounds to drive them back.

  From his perch, the palace wolf watches, sword clenched in one paw, always ready.

  He has a good view when the marching starts.

  All across the countryside, local boys emerge wearing the uniforms of the occupying empire, tsar-approved boiled brown wool that absorbs the kickback of the rifles that they aim at the kaiser’s advancing army. But it does not protect them from the winter’s bitter cold, so that they take to covering their heads with sackcloth, punching holes only large enough so that their eyes might make out the targets they can lock in their sights. They are completely shrouded, anonymous, an army of ghosts.

  Even alive, they are already as good as dead, rabbiting about underground, screaming faceless through the trenches, apparitions emerging and retreating into the chemical fog.

  And then Lenin makes his move, and now which uniform shall they wear?

  They’ve just fought on behalf of one occupier, against another potential occupier, as has been done for centuries. But no matter the uniform, the outcome is always the same. They always fight only for the right to remain ghosts in their own land.

  What does it take for a ghost to finally find its voice?

  Another country’s revolution, a Bolshevik coup, a tsar slaughtered in a basement, a kaiser’s losing campaign.

  One by one, the distractions mount, until suddenly there’s a pause that extends long enough for a man to take the stage of the national theater in Riga and announce, This place is real, this country is real. It exists.

  There are still two more chaotic years, years of civil war and uncertainty, before independence is official. But finally, Cesvaine palace, which was once situated at the edge of a frontier known to the rest of the world most recently as Livland, wakes up at the close of World War I to find itself on new ground.

  Once, this region answered to many names, organized by its occupiers into duchies, littoral zones, provinces. Now all that has been reclaimed and rechristened as the free and independent republic known as Latvia. And my grandparents are among the first generation to grow up, officially, from the time of their earliest childhood, as Latvians.

  Among the republic’s citizens, the period leading up to this declaration of independence, of growing national consciousness, is known as the time of awakening—an interesting phrase because it suggests the process of achieving consciousness, but not yet fully inhabiting it.

  In the spirit of this state of awakening, someone decides that the perfect setting for adolescence would be a baron’s empty castle.

  So the new tenants come, dragging trunks up the stairs, palming balustrades with hands blistered from handling harvest scythes.

  The first class of Cesvaine arrives in 1919, one year after independence is claimed, farmers’ children all of them, transplanted from the fields to this boarding school that will prepare them for a spot in the new national university system, if they so desire.

  They are Latvia’s future, the inheritors of its awakening, and yet, as soon as they cross the palace threshold, they will occupy a world that operates outside of real time. While their parents and grandparents head out to the fields under a heavy sun, the children gather in the castle’s cool ballroom to learn folk dances that mimic the motions of the harvest rituals. As their families bend to drop the seeds, they bend to see their reflections in the polished hardwood floor. As the draft horse clops back and forth to deliver his loads to the granary, they clop from one end of the ballroom to the other. The movements they make are as old as the soil they no longer have to handle, the soil they no longer must dig from under their fingernails.

  There are choirs to join, too, in which they sing folk songs, while dressed in the clothes of the ancients, women’s waists nipped by belts onto which have been woven the symbols that were used before words existed to call upon the sun and the morning star and the snake who protects us and the god that lives in the grain and the tree through which dawn emerges each morning. But also, just as easily, they slip out of the old costumes and into heels and drop-waisted dresses, smooth their bobbed hair and pose for formal school portraits, which they then carefully paste into photo albums that in just a few years will be abandoned all over again, left in houses from which they are taken, or left in houses that they must flee so that they are not taken.

  All that will come later, when time and fury has caught back up with them.

  For now, there is only the strange, protected space of the castle.

  There is my grandfather, arriving from his family’s chicken farm.

  He is already starting to turn in on himself, intense and silent, a boy who has learned from an early age that he cannot depend on his parents, who spend most of their time locked behind their respective doors, his father with a bottle, his mother with a bottle, too, but also one of her many dear women friends who come to visit—and then stay overnight. They are an affluent family by the standards of the countryside, but their fortune is emptying as quickly as all those bottles piling behind locked doors.

  Years later, the only story he will repeat from this time is how his mother once left a roast unattended on the kitchen counter, and in the time she realized her mistake, the cat had wrestled it to the floor and gnawed it to the bone. He will tell this story in place of all the others he could tell about what he knows of disappearing, of how in a few years his younger sister will stop eating, until there is almost nothing left to bury, the coffin so light it is unbearable to lift.

  By the time my grandfather enters the castle he has already shed his attachment to the land, to home. He wants
no part of the family farm and its memories. He prefers the certainty of numbers, likes their assurance and solidity. He particularly likes the idea of economics, formulas and models that might render at least some aspects of human behavior predictable. With his round wire glasses and his hair groomed so precisely as to show the path of his comb’s every tooth, he looks as if he has just come from a wood-paneled study full of books, where the only sound is the susurration of paper as he flips through his notes, not the feathered, squalling, manure-booted chaos of the poultry farm.

  The first friend he makes at Cesvaine is nothing like him—as blond as he is dark, a joker, a tippler, winking and unrestrained. He looks like the land he is from: weathered like the hay that is stacked on racks to dry in the sun, eyes as pale as the petals of flax, a tip to his head like the cricked branch of an oak.

  His new friend is always writing letters.

  To whom, my grandfather wants to know.

  That is when he says her name to my grandfather for the first time.

  In two years, she will be old enough to join them at the castle. By then, my grandfather has memorized everything about her. He knows the name of the farm from whence her letters come. He knows the confessions that these letters contain, the secrets she believes she is sharing only with his friend, and is careful to hide from everyone else, especially her father, who is certain she is too young to feel the way she claims she does and has forbidden the relationship, even banned her from speaking the boy’s name.

  So she writes it.

  Maybe this is why one day, not long after she has finally taken her place among Cesvaine’s pupils, my grandfather does what he does, why he slips a knife in his pocket and heads out by himself into the forest surrounding the castle, where the baron once stalked his harts, why my grandfather picks the white trunk of a birch, its bark thin like paper.

  He cannot tell his only friend that he has fallen in love with his girlfriend. He cannot say her name. So he takes out the knife, presses the point in the bark. And he writes it.

  Livija

  A few months later, while home on school holiday, his best friend will step on a nail that drives through the flesh of his foot. He will be dead before the holiday is over, under the ground by the time classes in the castle resume. She’s too distraught to attend the funeral, too distraught to speak of him when my grandfather tries to approach her in their shared grief.

  He leaves the palace soon after, off to Riga for a spot at the university there, and he tries to forget her. He channels all his intensity into his studies, eventually earns his master’s degree in economics, and a position at the university as an assistant professor. By day he works for a textile mill, running their books. At night, he teaches. He wears a fedora now and a marten-collared overcoat and carries a briefcase full of student papers. After his evening lectures, he rides the streetcar to the apartment he shares with two others from the university, located next to what looks like a park, dark and wild with ground elder. It is really a mass grave, the site where bodies of Riga’s plague victims were once dumped when this was far outside the city limits.

  One day, one of my grandfather’s flatmates announces his intent to move out, and so the landlady posts a notice in the newspaper. A new tenant is found while my grandfather is off visiting his family, already moved in by the time he returns two weeks later.

  It is a shock to both of them when he opens the apartment door to find her standing there.

  She has left the countryside to accept a job as a bookkeeper with, as she liked to say because she liked the sound of the phrase, Latvia’s leading bacon export factory, and she has been looking everywhere for a place to live that she could both tolerate and afford, crossing off each circled listing one by one, until finally arriving here.

  Her room is just down the hall from his, but soon she is no longer using it, instead sharing his single bed.

  If he ever wonders whether it is because he is the closest thing she has to what she has lost, he keeps it to himself.

  Just as he never talks about the fact that the luck that brought her to him is the result of someone else’s misfortune, that the life that grows inside of her is because of someone else’s death.

  They make an appointment with the registry office.

  What they do not yet know, as they take these steps toward what they imagine will be a shared future, is that the future has already been decided, without them:

  Because, two years before, right around the time they were finding each other again in the apartment on Peace Street, somewhere in Moscow, men were meeting, too, to pretend they were not speaking of war.

  This is what a secret pact looks like:

  Men in suits gathered in a paneled room, too many for the small space, their damp handshaking and back-clasping overseen by an unremarkable portrait of Lenin, hunched, severe-looking, as if he is not happy with the messy state of the desk behind which he has been placed for the purposes of the painting. In real life, there is also a desk, buffed to a high polish, fussy with paperweights, ceremonial ink blotter, heavy glass-shaded lamp, magnifying lens. Three rotary telephones. And now, a representative of Hitler’s government and a representative of Stalin’s government are taking turns placing the nibs of their respective quills to a paper laid upon the desk. And it would appear as if the men are doing nothing more remarkable than simply scratching their signatures on this paper, as Stalin, very much not a portrait, looms over their shoulders. Still, if we were to pick up the magnifying glass that lies in the corner of desk and train it in the direction of Stalin’s mustache, we would see, just beneath the screen of it, a grin so unrestrained that the waxed tips of his facial hair appear as if they are levitating, as if electrically charged, trying to conduct Lenin’s attention. This is our hint that something more is happening here, something that cannot be seen as it is happening, only in retrospect. And what is happening is this: with their signatures, these men are effectively scratching away the borders of the country once known as Latvia.

  Proposed in its place: an undefined block of territory to be known as the Soviet sphere of interest.

  Publicly, the men will say this meeting was about finalizing an economic trade agreement.

  And the agreement is a trade, of sorts.

  Russia secretly promises, for the time being, to do nothing so Germany can invade Poland, then Lithuania.

  In return, Germany secretly promises, for the time being, to do nothing so Russia can invade Latvia, Finland and Estonia.

  When the ink is dry, Germany makes straight for western Poland.

  And World War II begins.

  It will take some time for the news of this annexation on paper to actually reach the people of Latvia, who will spend the next three years that follow the secret meeting living as if this no-country is still their home, completely ignorant that its name has been unsaid, that in textbooks and on schoolhouse maps in Russia, children are already learning that Latvia is part of the USSR.

  By the time my grandparents finally enter the hushed seclusion of the registry office, the consequences of this secret pact between Stalin and Hitler are becoming painfully clear. In the span of the past twelve months, Latvia has already been invaded twice.

  First by Russia, expanding its sphere of influence, as agreed upon in the pact.

  Then, just a year later, by Germany, when, flush with mounting victories, Hitler decides that perhaps the pact has outlived its tactical usefulness.

  And in that small, unremarkable and nearly empty room, which sits roughly in the middle of the two opposing sides, my grandfather places a ring on my grandmother’s finger, and she places a ring on his finger.

  Together, they attempt their own fragile, muted pact.

  Inside his wedding band: an inscription, a wish, a plea.

  The same letters he etched in the tree—

  Livija

  —his incantation against vanishing.

  NOT FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, a fire ripped through Cesvaine, as if set by the inv
isible hands of an angry mob of serfs that had suddenly appeared to complete the unfinished job of 1905. Flames licked largely through the upper floors where students like my grandparents once bunked, but the rest of the castle was spared.

  I have come already certain of what I want to find.

  Inside, I see the frescoes my grandparents spoke of, the rows of antlers, the bears on either side of the fireplace still supporting the weight of the great mantelpiece.

  I run my hand down the wooden banisters smoothed by the years of gripping hands, slip my feet into the grooves carved into the stairs by so many heavy steps.

  I spend what feels like hours in the surrounding forest, willing the letters to rise on scarred bark.

  But every birch I find is bare, unmarked.

  XI

  BEFORE THE family farm felt war; before it absorbed the difference between the tumbling pitch of a bomb, and that of my great-grandfather’s body; before it sheltered my grandmother Livija’s youth, then stole Ausma’s; before it was lost, then regained, then lost again, as if in imitation of the confused cycles of the country in which it found itself—this is what the eighty acres that would one day be Lembi knew:

  For over a billion years, uneventful stillness.

  Once the Earth’s crust cooled, once the days of rifting and rending ended, this part of the continent chose for itself, at least inwardly, an identity of stability and caution. Geologically speaking, it was not in the land’s nature to move or to drift.

  Ice came, vast sheets that flowed and stretched and pooled across the land’s surface. When enough ice built upon the existing ice, it would walk. Slowly. Grinding everything beneath it flat, dragging with it clots of debris.

  When the ice finally began to melt, it left in its wake, upon the scraped and leveled landscape, all that it had gathered, deep tills of sediment, rich hummocky deposits that could be read under the feet like braille.

  What passed for hills swelled low, blisterlike beneath the Earth’s skin. The steepest pitched no higher than three hundred of a man’s boldest strides.