A blood vessel in his head burst, then pooled.
When help finally arrived, it was too late to undo the damage. It is difficult to find a capable doctor when you have already banished so many.
Across Siberia, the exiles were gathered in party halls and community centers, as the news from Moscow spread:
Stalin is dead.
There were aunties who wailed and smashed their chests against the glass of the community center portraits, their breasts level with his mustache. But later, after those aunties left, there were others who flipped the portrait over so they did not have to look at that mustache again.
With the death of the architect of their exile, the banished began to compose letters, like this one penned by my great-grandmother in 1952, asking to exist again:
Please, your Honorable Minister. My family and I were exiled to Siberia in 1949. There are only three of us here: myself, my son and my daughter. I am old and ill, and can no longer work. My son tries to work, but he is an invalid, missing his left leg. We have never been members of a seditious group. My dearest wish is to be able to return to my home to sleep at last in the sandy soil that also holds my ancestors. I beg your permission to do this.
I FIND this letter in a file in an unmarked warehouse located at the end of an unpaved service road in Riga, hidden behind the bulk of an old factory where fifteen thousand workers—the same number of people sent to Siberia in the first mass exile, in 1941—once assembled Soviet transistor radios and record players the size of kitchen tables. Now the factory building is shuttered, for rent. The brokers kindly refer to it in promotional literature as a fine example of brutalist architecture.
Anyone searching for the records of those who disappeared in the days of Siberia will be told that they must first find the factory; only then will they find the warehouse that now holds all the files from that time, the secret orders, all those handwritten letters addressed to Dear Honorable Ministers, like the one signed by my great-grandmother Alma.
Once, when I asked Ausma if she knew why they were sent away, the reason for all that they had suffered, she answered immediately: The bees.
After the war, when the process of collectivization began, and property lines were being redrawn, possessions divided, a man who lived not far from Lembi, someone suddenly of some authority in the Party, initiated his own plan to redistribute local wealth and personally requested the delivery of Lembi’s hives to his own farm.
To which my great-grandfather was said to reply: Not even when I am dead.
Four years after his fall from the loft, his widow and his son and his daughter were on a train to Siberia under secret order.
And all the hives from Lembi were spotted on the Party official’s land.
In the family’s declassified file in Riga, there is no mention of the bees.
Only a document signed by officials from Stalin’s Ministry for State Security that appears in the file of anyone who was ever sent to Siberia as a special exile.
It says:
STRICTLY SECRET
And:
DESIGNATED FOR EXILE
And:
EVIDENCE: _________________
(Choose one: bandit, nationalist, kulak)
Kulak was the most popular choice, filling in the blank 29,030 times. It means wealthy peasant, as in: The kulak possesses 33 hectares of land, 2 horses, 19 cows, 12 pigs and 3 paid laborers.
This was the reason selected for my family. That they were peasants—who owned too much land.
In the end, one could say that the farm that my great-great-grandfather struggled to buy so the family could remain connected to the land of their ancestors became the very reason they would ultimately be exiled from it.
And how thin the line that distinguishes one wealthy peasant from another, those who were deemed threatening enough to be taken from those who were deemed safe enough to leave.
Only three hectares, in my family’s case—the equivalent of seven and a half acres.
Or, by another accounting:
One brood of hens.
On that day, years ago, when my great-grandmother demanded that her husband evict his cousin and the cousin’s wife, and the wife’s maurauding chickens, from Lembi, that meant buying up the cousin’s share of land in order to get him to leave. The cousin’s holding and my great-grandfather’s existing holdings added up to thirty-three hectares.
And a kulak becomes a kulak for every hectare over thirty.
As for my great-grandmother’s plea, the files indicate it was not answered until 1956. When a response was finally issued, it came by form letter, curt, bureaucratic, unemotional:
You may return to your original place of residence.
They sold everything they had accumulated—Gauja, the crude furniture they had built, the bed. They used the profits to buy train tickets. A free ride here, said Ausma. Now we pay our own way home.
Ausma kept a little money back to buy a bolt of fabric to take to a woman in the settlement, someone too old and crippled to work for the collective but who supported herself by taking on small sewing jobs. She asked the woman to make her a dress. To make up for the one that she had been measured for by the seamstress back in Gulbene, all those years ago, on the day everyone was taken, and which she had never collected. She always wondered what had happened to that dress, which her mother had hoped would save her.
THEIR FIRST train journey had taken three weeks. This time, they reached the Latvian border in just fourteen days. Ausma and her mother and brother disembarked at the same station from which they left eight years before, not far from the cemetery where my great-grandmother wrote of her longing to be buried. She would get her wish, dying three years after the family’s return from Siberia.
But she never did return to her original place of residence.
By then, Lembi had been absorbed into one of the local collective farms, sections of the house converted to stalls, people living in the barns.
Sometimes, it seems any answer you choose can explain everything and nothing.
EVIDENCE: _________________
Choose one:
And someone writes bees.
And someone else writes hens.
And someone else writes kulak.
But there is another possibility, one that I suspect my grandmother must have known. In addition to owning farmland, the exiled often had connections to someone who fled the country and did not come back. Or, worse still, to someone who’d fought for the German side.
If you had asked my grandmother, Who is responsible for the loss of the farm called Lembi and the subsequent exile of everyone who lived upon it, would she have written Me?
XIX
SHE TRIED to send them a message to let them know that she had survived, but it never reached them.
They tried to send her a message to let her know that they had almost not survived, but it never reached her.
For a long time, they were upset with her, because they thought maybe her silence was a choice, that she did not want to remember them.
And then they would worry that her silence actually meant she was dead.
And then she would worry that their silence actually meant they were dead.
In this way, they spent more than ten years, trapped in silence and paranoia and misunderstanding.
It wasn’t until she had safely reached the States, and they had safely returned from Siberia, that they were able to find each other again, through letters.
Dearest Sister, We are overjoyed to know that you are alive. When so much time passed with no word from you, we decided we should give up ever hearing from you again. Gradually, our hurt and our anger subsided and we wanted to try once more to find out what had happened to you, but we didn’t know where to start. We were so grateful to get this letter. We realize now that you tried to reach us, too, and that you also had no idea where we were, or what had happened to us.
As much as these letters offered the family a temporary stay against th
e realities of exile, they also had a strange way of simultaneously magnifying its effects. The family quickly learned to read for what was not there, to be sensitive to that which was avoided. The letters taught them to think in terms of how much they could leave unsaid while still appearing to say something. They told stories not about what really happened, but stories designed to help you guess what really happened when what really happened was impossible to say—a truthful misdirection, a necessary fiction, cribbed entirely from fact.
You may not know, but after the war, I spent some time working in a coal mine, and one day, the mine collapsed and my left leg was crushed. I developed gangrene and the bone became tubercular and so it was amputated to my hip. Ausma is now the strongest one in the family and our sole breadwinner. Not long after I recovered from my accident, we went far away to work for a time. Just when our mother began to think she would like to pay a visit to her husband’s grave, and to the graves of her parents, we were given permission to return here, to Gulbene. We have a new place to live now. We depend on the kindness of relatives who are letting us stay with them. Ausma is working for the local kolkhoz, tending chickens.
It was as if they were squinting through keyholes at one another, seeing only cropped or partial glimpses of their lives.
Or maybe they were more like people trying to force the shape of constellations from individual stars. They assumed relationships, presumed significance where maybe there was none.
Or was it more like divination, like throwing bones, studying the patterns of the fragments that emerged, as if this could finally answer the real questions that they had for each other, but could never voice: Was I right to flee? Do you ever wish you’d never left? Are things really so terrible where you are? Are they really so wonderful where you are? Are you scared? Are you happy? Which of us is truly the fortunate one—the one who was taken, or the one who was left?
Hello, Amerika!
Dear family, far away!
Loving wishes from the Motherland!
My most precious child!
Here is some news about the cows: we just bought a heifer, and she is a such a soft milker, with pliable teats!
Thank you for the coffee, the candy, the peanut butter, the cooking oil, the raisins, the perfumes and the medicine for the children.
We are cutting wood now.
We are waiting for snow.
We are putting up a greenhouse.
There has been no rain, everything is dry.
There has been too much rain.
This is a good hay year.
There are so many tomatoes.
There are no nuts to gather.
Today I went mushrooming and found more than twenty! Bilberries, too!
The barley is so beautiful this year.
Thank you for the money; I used it to buy a coat to replace the one I had that was twenty years old.
Thank you for the money, we have been doing without refrigeration for the last two years, and our old TV showed only pictures of fog.
Thank you so much for your help with the car. I found a 1984 Ford Escort, violet in color. I used to be scared to even dream of a car that didn’t fill with clouds of dust and that in cold weather I could drive without shaking. Now that dream has been realized! I am still having a little trouble learning how to drive it. A Ford is no Zaparozhets!
Pork is selling at a good price.
We harvested all the potatoes in just three days this year!
We have eight milking cows, three horses, two sheep, eight steer, many chickens and ducks.
I have lost all my teeth. The dentist wants twenty lats for new teeth. That is the one good thing about Communist times. It used to be free.
We are very worried about the coming cold. The cows are already showing thick coats. Will they produce dramatically less milk?
Thank you for the twenty lats. The neighbor who all winter long gave us water from his well when ours was too frozen to use had just asked us if we could loan him thirty-six lats so he could have his own teeth pulled. We were so worried, where would we find the money? We gave him your twenty lats!
Soon the cows will go to grass, and we hope they will produce at least ten liters more.
This is what is blooming here: apples, plums, tulips, narcissus . . .
We brought the cows that would no longer milk to the slaughterhouse, but they still have not paid what we are owed for three months.
We’ve picked two kilos of strawberries already and we can’t pick them all. We’ve given the rest to the neighbors who have even less.
I am worried that there is something wrong with the bees.
You should be careful about sending cash. There are stories in the news about letters found slit open, whole sacks of them, dumped in Riga’s woods, undelivered, all from people in the U.S. sending to their relatives here. Our Christmas card from you arrived slit open. It’s like the old days with the censors, but they aren’t looking for words anymore, they are looking for dollars!
Milk prices are so low, because we are competing with the rest of Europe now. We can only pray they will go up again.
Who will care for my bees when I am gone? No one seems interested in learning. Will I be the last beekeeper in our family?
The snows this year reach to my belly.
Remember the stand of maples that used to grow next to Lembi? They’re gone. A wicked storm knocked them down.
The bees are dying, and we don’t know why.
LIVIJA COULD NEVER decide if their words to her were like dying bees, or downed maples, or soft milkers, or new-old Fords the color of violets. She wanted so much to feel along with them, but there was only so much that she could intuit from these accidental-on-purpose tone poems that they composed for one another, first through the worst of the Cold War, then through the Singing Revolution, then finally through the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the country’s early days of independence.
Dream moved faster than paper. Again and again, correspondence was lost, whether through theft, knifed-open cards left to rot in the forests outside Riga, or through silly error, additional stutters to their already elliptical communication.
You still have not said whether you received our last letter? Maybe it never came? Could you put a date on the letters you write to me, that way I can track how long it takes for your letters to reach me, and I will know when to worry if I have not heard from you for some time.
Written confirmation of her mother’s death reached my grandmother long after her mother’s spirit had visited her in her sleep.
The dream of the farm returning to the family had also arrived long before the envelope that my grandmother finally opened at the kitchen table where she and my grandfather had just a few years before taken turns tapping out their demands for the end to Latvia’s occupation on my grandfather’s typewriter.
You should know that Lembi is in ruins, her brother wrote, but there might be a chance to get it back.
The new government, postindependence, was willing to restore any parcel of private land confiscated under Soviet rule, so long as the former owners could document their clear claim to it.
And even before she read her brother’s next words, she knew what he was about to say.
Had she not spent years imagining it into existence?
LET US imagine it, too: that one day, not long after the family had been exiled to Siberia, an old school friend of my grandmother happened to be wandering the local market in Gulbene. As she drifted between the vendors, she spotted an old wardrobe for sale, the wood the color of spun honey. Perhaps she ran her hands down each side, testing the ease of the grain. Or she tapped the back, to see if the maker chose flimsy boards for the places no one else would see. She tried the doors, checked the resistance of the pulls, listened for the wheeze of the hinges as they opened. It was then that she saw something on the top shelf, something pushed to a far corner, nearly out of sight.
Balanced on the tips of her milking boots, she could only just
bat the edge of it with her fingertips, like a cat at work on a skein of yarn.
When it dropped in her hands she could see it was a tin, secured with a single battered clasp.
Inside, depending on who is telling the story, or who is imagining the story, maybe there was a stack of photographs, face side down.
And so the woman turned the stack over, as if preparing for a game of cards.
The first image revealed was of a face. Old and anonymous—a stout, rippled-skinned auntie, face like a hazelnut peeled from its shell. Or, maybe, a whiskery, horse-nosed uncle.
The next image was also of a face, but this one she recognized: her old school friend, lost to the war.
It seemed such an odd, impossible coincidence and so, she began to flip through the entire stack to make sure she was not imagining things.
But there she was again, her friend, now in communion dress. There were her siblings, her mother and father. There was a picture of their high school class, standing outside the baron’s castle—and there, in the back, the man who would become her husband. There was a picture of the rook-haired baby girl they would have together, the child rooting about with a stick in what looked like the cabbage fields of Lembi. And there was a picture of the boy her friend once loved, before his foot found the nail.
But more important than the photographs: a tin, containing a sheet of parchment yellowing at the edges. It appeared to be some sort of document.
Among the villagers it was an open secret who had been sent away on the trains to the east, those whose farms had been seized and were never expected to come back. She knew then that this had to be the family’s wardrobe, likely carried out of Lembi on someone’s back while they were being loaded into the train cars at the village station.
She snapped the lid of the tin shut.
How much for this wardrobe? she said.
Among the Living and the Dead Page 20
