Among the Living and the Dead

by Inara Verzemnieks

  And then Maruta had another seizure.

  My grandmother was certain someone must have heard or seen something this time. Please, she silently willed their neighbors. Please don’t tell anyone. Not when we’re this close.

  They knew their daughter needed to see a doctor, but they were also so fearful of being delayed again, of anything that could cause them to miss the final deadline for resettlement. They told themselves they had a better chance of getting Maruta the help she needed in America, if only they could get there.

  And so, although it roused in them a deep distress, they agreed that they would spend the remaining hours in the camp pretending that nothing had happened, lying if necessary, and hiding Maruta from any possible scrutiny.

  She waited as long as she could to bring Maruta into the medical screening room for the family’s final preflight evaluation.

  Any recent changes in her condition? the doctor asked.

  No, my grandmother said, and stared hard at Maruta, as if with only her eyes she could fix her to the floor, will her limbs to stay limp. She heard only the pounding of her own heart, a tripping rhythm. Then, the scratching of doctor’s pen: Approved for emigration.

  THEY CARRIED three suitcases and one rucksack between them, the contents meticulously logged: one petticoat, five handkerchiefs, three spoons, two cups, one knife, one men’s suit, three plates, one nightdress, two children’s training pants, one apron, one hammer, one camera, two undershorts, three blankets, one bedsheet, one pair of child’s overalls, one boy’s coat, one scarf.

  There are no toys listed, on the manifest, no jewelry and only one book—an English dictionary.

  This is what they would use to start their new life.

  Even as they settled into their seats, their names and refugee numbers pinned to their chests, Livija watched Maruta closely, fearing that another seizure could come at any moment, and they would be ordered off the plane.

  It was only when she felt the plane’s nose catch and rise that she let herself believe that this was truly happening, that they were leaving.

  What my father remembers:

  Not his mother’s humming fear, but that their plane was a Lockheed Constellation, the first plane he had ever seen close up, the fuselage sleek and silver, a mirror in which he could see himself.

  That the stewardess took him to meet the pilots in the cockpit.

  That they touched down in Greenland to refuel the plane, and it was night, but he could not sleep and when he looked out the window, he saw the world as pinpricks of light.

  He remembers New York, their port of entry, the smells of Penn Station, tar pitch, creosote, heated steel, pigeon dander.

  He remembers their first apartment in downtown Tacoma, not far from the train station where they disembarked, the cascading brick of it, the steep creep of the stairs, the way the windows let in the honking wail of the tugs shouldering through Commencement Bay just across the street, the sea-scratched voices of the longshoremen commuting to work by rowboat.

  In my grandfather’s billfold: a letter of recommendation from the former president of the Baltic University, the deepening creases an indication of how often he must have removed it and read it, trying to reacquaint himself with who he had been once, however briefly:

  I was always impressed by his ability and high qualification in the field of scientifics and teaching work, by his assiduity, and his present and friendly character in the relations with the members of the teaching staff. . . .

  As it turned out, he had no cause to bring it out for anyone else.

  Instead, in America, the former chair of economic theory with one eye was qualified to mop floors and wax linoleum, to pour molten metal into molds at the local foundry, to spread roofs with tar and to lay asphalt shingles. My grandmother, the former accountant for Latvia’s leading bacon export factory, took on piecework, sewing at home.

  And when they could, together, with the children, whenever they weren’t in school, they picked fruit from the local truck farms spread along the Puyallup Valley, in the shadow of Mt. Rainier, urging little hands to gather flats of raspberries and strawberries, to lop the stems of daffodils bound for elaborate bouquets.

  They saved. Stubs of pencils, scraped sharp with the edges of knives. Seeds collected from empty roadsides. Thread. Pennies. They spoke of the present, using the old tongue, kept the construction of their sentences from reaching too far into the past.

  But the past has a way of resisting silence, of asserting itself on the present without ever requiring a word.

  I think of my father, the boy who watched war planes, who slept in the Luftwaffe barracks, who grew up to become an aerospace engineer, an expert in the composition of materials required to build planes and helicopters and shuttles and missiles, in particular glass.

  He would devote years to developing a way to take this most brittle of materials to the very edge of breaking, yet remain strong enough to withstand the crushing forces of reentry.

  XVII

  IN THE LAST YEAR, my leg has healed so that only a small scar remains from the dog’s bite, the size and color of a currant, like those a starling is busily beaking from the bushes at the edge of Ausma’s yard.

  Just look at the state of my garden, she says, as we break from our embrace. Do you even recognize it? Most days, my hip hurts so much, I can’t do very much. I have to keep stopping to rest. My souvenir from Siberia, all these pains in my body.

  Harijs emerges from the barn, trailing wisps of hay.

  You! he says, as I kiss his cheek. All the way from America! Tell me, how long did it take you to get here? Did you fly here, through the sky, or did you come by boat?

  You can’t be serious, Ausma says. She came by airplane! It would take weeks if she went by sea!

  Tell me, do you have the same trees in America?

  Ausma shakes her head. You can’t really expect her to answer that—it’s different, of course, and the same.

  What about wolves—do you have wolves in America?

  That’s enough with your silly questions, Ausma says. Next thing, you’ll be telling her about all the times you nearly died. I’m sure she’s tired. Let’s make tea.

  AUSMA HAS placed a vase of mock orange next to my bed and laid at my feet a linen blanket made on my great-grandmother’s loom. But sleep refuses to come.

  I listen to the cows cudding grass outside my window. Then the cats spitting and fighting somewhere beyond the cows, biting one another’s backs, releasing puffs of fur for the chickens to bob over come morning. Then: the sound of something howling, a piercing monotone hymn that lasts for what feels like hours.

  How did you sleep? Asuma asks the next morning, placing a cup of tea on the table in front of me. The radio sings to us a list of reasons that Latvian women are the best in the world.

  Did you hear the dogs howling? I ask.

  Dogs? says Ausma. I didn’t hear any dogs.

  A FEW DAYS LATER, in the archives of the local museum, I find a stack of transcripts from interviews conducted with survivors of the same mass exile that included Ausma. They appear to be part of a school project, village children assigned to record the memories of local deportees.

  Each interview includes a questionnaire.

  Did you know anyone who died?

  Yes, a man circles.

  Who?

  My father.

  How did the person die? Choose one.

  Suicide, he circles.

  One woman, when invited to describe what life was like for her in Siberia, says only this:

  We lived under pine trees, and once, a wolf bit me.

  MY COUSIN— she of the exaltation of cows—has taken a job for the summer as a rural mail carrier. She has just graduated university with a degree in economics, but she is not sure she wants to leave the countryside, even though there is no call here for the theories of marketing she spent all those years memorizing. A relative in England has invited her to come stay with her, to see what jobs she might fi
nd there. But she is hesitant.

  In a city, she says, can you ever be alone, the way you’re alone here, with only quiet? Where do you go to remind yourself you and your problems are small? I don’t think I want to get too far from that feeling. I want to be able to go walking in the fields by myself, looking for wild caraway, and never see another soul, except maybe my cows.

  So for now she drives her mail truck over roads built from nothing more than what is there, impacted topsoil and muck, and she hopes maybe her stuttering tires might jar a decision loose inside her.

  The box of mail on the seat next to her reveals the existence of a nowhere that even she—who has lived in this countryside her whole life, who celebrates its remoteness, its secret caraway fields and cow-quiet—had no idea existed. These are not houses, she thinks. They are burrows. Or dens. Holes above ground, through which it is possible to slip from the surface of this life into a forgotten one, where spluttering candles provide the only light; where bed is a greasy blanket on the floor; where what at first seems a carpet is in fact a thick layer of fleas. Gradually, from the dim, other occupants materialize: old men and old women, or not yet old men and women made old by work or by drink, it is so difficult to tell, their faces as haggard and featureless as a turnip at the bottom of a crate that has been left too long in one of the subterranean root cellars that are a feature of every country home.

  They ask her to open and read aloud the letters that come in their names, and whether this is because their eyes are no good, or they have never learned to make sense of the marks on the page, she doesn’t ask. Sometimes, they implore her to take their signed government checks, their pensions back to the village to cash, and she can bring the money the next time she comes with the mail. And maybe these groceries, too? Can you write it down if I tell you?

  One day, I accompany my cousin on her route. There are miles of brooding woods, roads so dusty she must at times turn on her wipers to see.

  We visit solemn, stout apartment blocks, Googie-gilled and cold-eyed as carp, like the blocks of developments you see in the capital, mile upon mile of Stalinist-era architecture, stretched along promenades wide enough to accommodate several lanes of Zaparozhets cars, some of the last visible reminders of the Communist years. Specifically: the promise of cheap, fair, practical housing for everyone.

  They are also reminders of the unanticipated consequences of exile. One day, it occurred to Soviet officials that between all those killed or wounded in the war, and all those who fled, and all those they had already banished to Siberia, they would never be able to find the kind of replacement labor required to run the country’s new collective farms in Latvia alone. So they reached across the republics, gathered up workers and scattered them throughout the countryside. And they raised hundreds of these developments to house them. The problem was that many of these workers had never farmed before, nor did they find the idea particularly enjoyable. To them the landscape was not bucolic. It was grim, bewildering, backward-looking. They were city dwellers, marooned between fields of sugar beets and goat-trampled bracken.

  At a distance, it’s easy to feel a kind of smug disdain for these Soviet-era apartments that remain. But up close, following my cousin as she drops women’s magazines through mail slots, hand-delivers a government check to a woman who half-hides behind her front door, as the television in the background sings the theme of a Russian game show, they strike me as strangely beautiful, the way all attempts at a carefully calculated uniformity are quietly interrupted by the fragile, yet persistent business of everyday life: the balconies flagged with laundry-line semaphores that wink fuchsia, chevron, Spice Girls, tropical paradise, black lace; the naughty graffiti in English written in too much haste and left to drool down the pebble-dash walls, a preteen laughing too hard at his own sad-silly dirty joke—“Poop/fuck”; the potted sweet peas that throw legs over railings; the cardboard boxes left turned on their sides in the bushes with pillows stuffed inside—thrones upon which the stray cats can perch like queens and tooth their chicken bones or preen their sable coats; the old woman in sandals and kneesocks who brooms with twigs the surrounding dirt footpaths in patterns that resemble clouded skies.

  From here, the mail route takes us past crumbing radio towers, down hoof-trampled paths that reveal at their end clearings, but no evidence of the hooves that tramped the way here, or the house and barns which must shelter them, just a crude box on a post, and manged dogs with screaming pink skin that spring from the weeds, like highway bandits, to mouth the truck’s wheels, until my cousin throws food out the driver’s side window to distract them long enough so that she can reverse.

  The route also takes us past the old family farm, where we park the truck and wade into the weeds so that I can monitor the continued and uninterrupted progress of its unmaking.

  It’s now been five years since my first visit, and the floor has begun buckling upward, toward the sky, then folding back upon itself like rock from some great prehistoric rift. The roof that remains bows so low in places that it almost, but does not quite touch the ruptured seams of the floor.

  Do you think it’s possible houses have something that’s equivalent to a soul? my cousin asks. Something that’s left in the house when someone is born there, or someone dies there?

  I don’t want to ruin her question with an answer. So instead I try to list all our ancestors who were born and who died at Lembi.

  And they were the last, she says.

  SHE WORKS the truck down a narrow road made from earth that threads through forest so stolid and imposing and endlessly repeating that I imagine for a moment that we must be driving in circles.

  The soil beneath the trees is undisturbed, soft with the memories of centuries of rotted things. The light that filters through the branches is silvered like lichen, and feels as if it’s never before been taken into human lungs. I imagine these are the kind of woods where the werewolf Thies might have hidden postbanishment.

  Under the truck’s wheels, the road spits dust like a string of letters appearing on a blank page. Otherwise, nothing stirs.

  After ten minutes of driving, we come to a stop next to a makeshift mailbox nailed to a hemlock that nods its branches at our approach.

  My cousin explains that there is a very old woman who lives all alone in a hut hidden in this forest, built only from what it has given her. Once a week, she hikes several kilometers to this box to check for word from the world beyond hers.

  No one knows the reason for her self-imposed exile, just that something happened that made her choose the company of pines over people, the language of birds and stones and water over human speech.

  Other people are related to other people

  Me, poor me, I am kin only to trees:

  Ash, maple, oak

  They are my blood, they love me like family

  The old stories hold that the forest is a place out of time, where the normal rules of language and comprehension and knowledge do not apply, where miracles are possible. Not miracles in the religious sense, but holy in their own way, like the no-weight of a vole’s skeleton, the murmuring of old leaves that twist in the wind like withered tongues.

  And maybe this is why I find myself debating whether I should ask my cousin to let me out here, so that I can go and find this woman who must have been alive in the war, who is old enough to know what it is to feel pain, and be the source of another’s pain.

  But even if I could follow the smell of bramble fire to her open door and a crow-eyed welcome, an old head bobbing, I already know that the question I most want to ask her, this woman who has so deliberately lost herself in these woods which I cannot see my way through, is also my only answer, an instruction, a command, a plea: how to live with this hurt.

  XVIII

  WAS YOUR life in Siberia all sadness?

  Not at all. People laughed. There were dances.

  Did you feel joy?

  Now, I wouldn’t go that far.

  IF IT WAS POSSIBLE to be gra
teful for a job to which you are sentenced, Ausma was grateful for the herding assignment: a mob of ewes, 350 solid solemn things, spotted, their hindquarters like two heavy half-moons. A new breed for Siberia, she had heard, brought from one of the more mountainous republics in the west, on the assumption they would introduce, with their tough, scrubby bloodlines, a disposition toward hardiness.

  Her job was to trail them into the fields, so they could nose away the snow in search of fresh growth. They had been locked away for the worst of the winter and were eager to graze, grunting happily to themselves. She watched them eat, wriggling and pink, recently skinned of their long heavy coats. At least the job was familiar, one of the first chores given to a child in the Latvian countryside, dispatched to the fields almost as soon she can walk with a lunch pail in her hand and the latest generation in a long line of soft-mouthed farm dogs—jaws like a farrier’s nippers, pinching but never puncturing flesh—trotting behind. There were no fences, not then, not now, not ever, and so it was up to child and dog to keep the animals from following some unnamable bovine instinct into the underbrush or bogs. The quickest children learned to use the landscape to pen the animals, to drive them lowing to a V in the river, so that the waters can mind them on three sides. Then all that is left for you is to make a bed in the grass behind them, stitching colored mittens or making whistles from the grass.

  Ausma had just started to settle in when she saw one sheep drop. Followed by another and another, until the whole herd was keeling. They would not rise, no matter how hard she tugged. Slowly, it became clear to her that the collective had shorn their coats according to the schedule they had always followed with the sheep who had already lived in this region for a long time. But this new breed was not accustomed to the scalding cold that still lingered as winter turned toward spring. Now, they were too numb-legged to hobble the kilometer back to the barn on their own.