It must have been a relief, then, to those first settlers who finally stumbled to a halt upon this prone place, those who were said to have walked without direction on leathered feet until at last they reached what felt like the edge of everywhere. There, in the mossy light, amid the sound of grabbling wings and the croaking bogs and the unceasing horizon, they said, We are tired, and this will do, and burrowed like ants under the flat fat blankets of soil.
But the planed relief of their new home, the welcome lack of obstacles also meant that this was a geography that would expose them, that there was nothing to stall the pace of whatever force might be rippling across its surface this very moment.
At least it offered an unobstructed view of their ever-changing futures.
And on this particular June day, in 1940, the land says their future looks like this: the flea-brown tunic of a Russian soldier moving at the edge of the meadow.
This is how the concepts of invasion, occupation, then war announce themselves to Ausma.
It began with the vague hissing of the radio inside the farmhouse at Lembi—Poland and Germany and English naval blockades in the Baltic Sea; letters from her sister in Riga about shop shelves running empty, not a grain of salt in the whole city; the adults discussing rumors that the president is about to send Riga’s redundant workers to the countryside to work on the farms, to help the country produce more food; the arguments over the meaning of a government announcement that the country has entered into a Mutual-Assistance Treaty with Russia, and will open its borders for the Russians to establish military bases, whether this is, in fact, a free choice.
All these words manifesting themselves now in the flea-brown tunic of a Russian soldier, set in silhouette against the June wheat.
It is the summer of Ausma’s thirteenth year, and she has been imagining what it will be like to take her turn, finally, at Cesvaine, the boarding school for farmers’ children, in the fall.
She has no idea the sighting of the soldier will signal the end of her formal education. Never again will she sit in a classroom, staring at a chalkboard map that tells her she lives in Latvia, while from the back of the room, her husband-to-be secretly studies her studying that map, the cool rivering of her braids, the smart path they cut down the back of her dress, a dress he thinks is beautiful, and which she thinks that she hates, tugging self-consciously at the armpits, another hand-me-down—her clothes are only ever hand-me-downs, darted and unhemmed, rippered and reseamed—left to her by her older sister when she decided to move to the capital.
Where once, her sister, Livija, had come home to Lembi nearly every weekend on the train, dragging back with her grainsacks of potatoes, knobs of cabbage, scoops from her mother’s wooden salt box—the countryside has not suffered the way Riga has with the blockades—she has been returning less and less, choosing to stay in the city now that she has fallen in love with someone in Riga. She tells Ausma the story of how they came to be together, meeting first at Cesvaine, then at the apartment on Peace Street, the whole sad, startling story—not her mother, not her father, just Ausma. And Ausma feels, for the first time in her life, like the letters bound in ribbon and addressed to her sister from the boy she loved, which Ausma had found and then rehid among Livija’s things.
The next time Livija is back at Lembi, she convinces Ausma that they should ride their bicycles to Emils’s family’s home, where he is also visiting his parents. It’s a long way to go in just a day—nearly forty kilometers—and the sky looks an unpromising color—let us imagine the lilac gray of rotting things. But Ausma likes the feeling of being brought into her sister’s confidence too much to care about how tired or how wet she might get. There is something about seeing her sister, typically so poised, almost frantic over the idea of being apart from this man, unable to wait another day to see him back in Riga, when she knows he is this close to her. It’s as if she and her sister are coconspirators in something, something as wild and as uncontrollable as the storm that rolls over them while they are still pedaling, pelting them with raindrops fat like splatting plums, hail that pits the skin on their hands and their faces an angry pink.
They reach Emils’s house, soaked and chattering, and spend the day in borrowed clothing, pulled from the back of an old wardrobe. This feels nothing like wearing her sister’s hand-me-downs, more exciting somehow, like being granted the chance to spend the day in costume, to put on someone else’s life. When they ask her how she likes her tea, she asks for only a twirl of honey, like Livija. She sits at the edge of her chair, in front of the fire Emils has made to warm them, and crosses her legs at the ankles, like Livija. She memorizes her sister in this moment, her easy happiness, light as the teacup in Livija’s hand, light as Emils’s touch on the small of her back as he walks them, with their bicycles, back toward the road, toward home. The sky is turning dark, and so they ride single file, Ausma trailing just behind her sister, watching the last of the sun catch and scatter on the spokes of her tires, letting Livija set the pace. And maybe, later that night, as she rolls over in her bed, back at Lembi, trying to find a comfortable position for her burning, cramping calves, and a wisp of hair catches on her cheek, releasing the dusky smell of dried rain, maybe she thinks this will be her template for what it is to grow up. That all she has to do is follow Livija.
WATCH THE BEES, her brother, Janis, tells her. See where they’re flying—today, over to the raspberry cane.
Her brother is twenty-four, and next in line to run the farm, and he has already begun to take over some of its operations.
For as long as anyone can remember, bees have been a part of Lembi, the wooden boxes that serve as their hives spread from orchard to field to forest’s edge.
Janis learned to care for the bees from his father, who learned from his father before him, back in the days when they kept the bees in cavities they had carved in trees, and reached by climbing, or in hollow logs. Janis thinks maybe Ausma might have the gift, too.
The bees of Lembi are said to make honey that tastes like time, sweet and sad and ancient, as if it contains all the memories of all the things that had ever grown and died there. Their keepers believe it’s because they speak to the bees, soothe them with the touch of their breath, rather than smoke. Where did you go today? they ask. What did you see? When it comes time to open the hives, to remove the racks and cut the capping of wax from the combs that tell them the honey is ready, the bees skim their arms like gossamer sleeves, scarf their skulls as softly as silk handkerchiefs, beard their cheeks like light fuzzings of stubble. They never sting.
Midsummer is the busiest season, the racks so heavy they require four hands to lift, any gaps or cracks around the edges daubed thick with the mixture of bee spit and wax and the resin that rushes like blood from a cut bud or a tree branch, which the bees use to seal their hives, to keep out harmful things. Her brother shows Ausma how to scrape at the red braids of it with the edge of a knife, to save it in jars, as a salve for cuts or burns, as a balm for toothaches, for mouths that erupt in sores. He knows by the subtle variation of yellows and browns in the pollen on their legs which flowers they have visited, heather or clover or buckwheat, although she can’t see it yet.
As he works, her brother sings to the bees: One day, I will brew beer, and I will keep you in my pocket while I do it, so that anyone who drinks from my bottles will feel their heads trilling like your wings!
The sound of the bees is calming, like sleeping while you’re still awake. She loves the way they seem to return to the same hives, like the cows entering the barn each night, always tramping without any prompting into their own stalls. And when you shake into your open palm the cakes of pollen that the bees tamp down like secrets in the bottom of their cells, then press them against your lips, it’s almost possible to imagine you are tasting their memories, a flavor that is at once lush and chalky and acrid, like touching your tongue to humus or bone.
And then, one day, Ausma is stung.
The way her skin puckers and bloo
ms, they know this will put an end to her apprenticeship.
She watches from a distance now.
Inside the house, her mother Alma sleeps. No one can say what’s wrong with her, what’s left her so weak, pinned to the bed, like a bee with wet wings.
LATER, IT WILL BE EASY to see this as the summer when all the loss that is to come reveals itself to her at once, using the cover of visible things, like when they would pour spoonfuls of molten lead into a pail of water on the first night of the new year, searching the twists and folds for a likeness in the living world, a shape to which they could attach a narrative that would foretell the future.
But when she first spots the Russian soldier moving through the fields, she’s not thinking of signs or portents. She’s not thinking about much of anything, except for cows, bees, bicycles, Cesvaine, her sister’s new love.
It’s the first foreign soldier she has seen, outside of books. And he looks so small. A bee far from the hive.
Then she sees the long solemn columns, clodding the roads. Next, the tanks slowly, deliberately snailing their way toward Riga. They chew runnels in the roads that make the horses balk for weeks.
Later, inside the farmhouse, when they turn on the radio, it crackles with news that is not so much news, as aphorism.
I am remaining in my place, you remain in yours, says Latvia’s president, a former dairy farmer, who in his youth, was among those seized after the unrest of 1905, briefly imprisoned, before fleeing to America to avoid further punishment, to the state of Nebraska, where they also love cows. He spent several years there, before deciding to return to Latvia just in time to assist in the country’s fight for her independence, and became a significant force in the emerging government, a darling of the agricultural party.
Then, he took control in a bloodless coup, saying the good of the country demanded a firm hand, clear guidance, as if a country were one of his milk cows, not producing as she should. People seem not to know whether to admire him or detest him for his totalitarian ways, a benevolent dictator, if such a combination is even possible, who has achieved the illusion of unshakable national unity—Latvia’s sun shines equally over everyone!—by clamping down on any dissenting voices, outlawing all political parties, scrapping parliament, muzzling the press. Small things, some people argue, when you consider what he has done for Latvia’s economy, how well they are doing, relatively speaking, for such a small nation, and how quickly he has boosted the profile of its farmers, sold the rest of the world on the singular quality of her butter and bacon.
I am remaining in my place, he says, as Russian tanks ring Riga. You remain in yours.
A few weeks later, he is deported.
New government, the radio stutters.
Then: Welcome to the Soviet Republic!
THAT PUTS AN END to summer, and now fall is approaching, but on the subject of Cesvaine, Ausma’s parents are silent. Later, she will hear a rumor that the Soviets claimed the castle after their arrival, requisitioned it for something other than classes, accommodations for officers, perhaps, important people in the Party. She has no idea if that’s true. All she knows is that the start of the school year has come and gone, and someone is sleeping in the castle of her sister’s stories, and it’s not her.
Ghosting about the farm, she catches fragments of the adults’ conversations, rough like the trimmings of the horse’s hooves that her father leaves scattered on the floor of the barn for the dogs to tooth. Collectivization, she hears her father’s friends saying, and they spit the words like it’s something turning in the bottom of an unwashed glass. Never, they say and shake their wooly heads, making the beer they grip with their chapped hands swirl and tremble.
Her father pulls down a new bottle.
Then another.
Disappeared, she hears another time. The whole family. No one knows where.
Which is not entirely true.
Someone somewhere knows.
Across the country, inside unmarked buildings, files are accumulating.
And inside these files: names.
Unreliables. Enemies of the people. Individuals the newly installed secret police suspect could prove disruptive in this time of transition and unification.
The consequence of being one whose name appears in such a file is revealed slowly at first, one person at a time, so that it’s easy to convince yourself what’s happening can’t really be happening, easy to invent stories that somehow make more sense than what must be the truth.
The schoolteacher who one day doesn’t show up for work. Bent over double with a stomach gone sour? Or the minister who doesn’t come to unlock the church door on Sunday. Laid up with the gout? The newspaper editor who speaks Esperanto—on one of his binges, most likely, just give him a week and he’ll resurface, split-lipped, hickeyed, memory scoured, repentant.
But as the unmarked buildings begin to fill with files, great drifting mounds of files, and one hundred people begin to disappear each month, then two hundred people, then three hundred, these absences, and the unspoken implication behind each of these absences, are becoming harder to ignore.
Soon, the loved ones of the missing no longer bother to report them missing. They understand now that no one in the unmarked buildings will ever tell them whether there is a file. Or whether the file says Gulag. Or whether it says, Execute by firing squad.
Inside the unmarked buildings that are rapidly filling with secret files that no one will admit the existence of, the gatherers of these individual names would not mind some additional flexibility in assigning fates. Something between a death sentence and a prison sentence. Something like a bureaucratic order that could apply, immediately, to thousands.
For this, they begin to turn to the idea of forcible resettlement.
Special exile.
To designate someone a special exile is to be freed from the bother of ever staging a trial. No need to accuse someone of a specific crime, only to imply that they fit one of twenty or so preapproved categories that are fast tracks to banishment, general enough that they could apply to almost anyone. A government-ordered change of address that catches thousands unaware, and comes without warning.
Just a knock. Usually in the early hours of morning. So that you will be half-asleep, cotton-headed, slow to grasp what is happening, what it means when the senior member of the operative group tells you to gather everyone in your family into one room, while taking all necessary precautionary measures against any possible excesses, so that you can be notified that upon the decision of the Government you are being deported to other regions of the Union.
Do they give you time to pack? Do they tell you the items you are officially permitted to bring?
One suit.
Or are you dreaming that?
Do the neighbors come out to see what is happening? Are they called upon to disperse to their homes? Is not a word allowed to pass between you and any passersby?
Would you say what is happening to you is firm and decisive . . . without the slightest pomposity, noise and panic?
And once you are loaded into your designated railcar—an estimated 25 persons per car should be observed—can you hear the door lock?
These are the protocols as prescribed by the Third Deputy People’s Commissar of State Security of the USSR, an exhaustive list of how-tos for those needing guidance on such subjects as the Manner of Executing Deportation, the Manner of Separating the Deportee from His Family, the Manner of Conveying the Deportees and the Manner of Embarking.
The commissar is a man named Ivan Serov, stocky, with blue-gray eyes and a knack for engineering mass exile. Calm, deliberate, methodical, he excels at anticipating each step, right down to the moment the bolt should be thrown across the door.
He is honing his skills, perfecting his method, squinting his blue-gray eyes off into the Soviet future, when he will run the KGB.
Already, his résumé includes the recent exile of a million and a half Poles. Tens of thousands of Crimeans. Ukrainians. Gone
. Later, it will be Hungarians, teenagers mostly, thought likely to join the resistance, hustled off beneath the streets and loaded into train cars, the doors locked tight.
In Latvia, his secret police identify more than fifteen thousand candidates for a single operation of mass exile. Several thousand from Lithuania and Estonia, too. After months of planning, they pick a day: June 14, 1941.
Mostly, for this round—because the planning has already begun for another round—it’s intellectuals, the political elite, soldiers, businessmen, even Boy Scouts who are targeted—and never just an individual, but their entire families. Jews, Russians and Poles who also call the country home. And while the whole family is taken together, they will not stay together. The men will be sent to labor camps, the women and children to special settlements.
At least for those sent to the Gulags, there is some kind of internal infrastructure, a crude logic at work: places to sleep, however rough, regular meals, however meager. When the special exiles are finally coaxed blinking from the boxcars that dragged them through the Urals, across the overwhelming steppes, they’re simply left in the middle of nowhere, instructed to fend for themselves. There are no daily breadlines, no fences or guard towers. The land is so unforgiving, it forms its own prison. Stripped of everything, carrying only what they had time to pack, the special exiles must start over again. They must secure their own shelter. They must feed and clothe themselves.
But even as they’re left to engineer their own survival, they are also expected to help the architects of their exile. They are all workers now for the Soviet State.
And so, for the good of the state, they will drag saws through Russian pine, clear meadows in the summer with scythes, harvest milk from the spindly Siberian cows of the sad collective dairies, descend newt-eyed into mines.
A pen scratched them out of existence, now it will record their every move: who reports to work, how much they saw and stack. Exhaustion from starvation does not excuse anyone from their work.
Among the Living and the Dead Page 11
