Immigrant City

by David Bezmozgis

  Without a car, the trip from my grandfather’s apartment to the Latvian Centre required three buses. It was hard for me to imagine my grandfather making such a trip on his own. I couldn’t recall him venturing anywhere by himself. He seldom even went to the nearby supermarket for groceries; my mother and aunt handled the weekly purchases for him—not because he was physically incapable but because his lack of English made the task inconvenient. If he had a doctor’s appointment, someone in the family drove him. The grocery store, the doctor’s office, a family gathering—did my grandfather go anywhere else during the last decade of his life? His synagogue was on the ground floor of his building. Maybe he went for a stroll in the park across the street or sometimes attended a different synagogue a block or two from home, but I wasn’t even sure about that. To the extent that I thought about my grandfather when I wasn’t with him, I pictured him scrupulously engaged in some mundane task in the circumscribed precinct of his one-bedroom apartment. I certainly didn’t imagine him embarking on an hour-long, multi-stage journey to a distant part of the city. But a spry and surprisingly attractive nonagenarian Latvian woman confirmed that he’d done it quite regularly.

  She’d known him as Berls Singers, the Latvianate version of his name. I encountered her at the entrance to the dining hall, seated at a table, ticking off the names of the seniors who attended a Thursday afternoon social club. As we spoke, the members of a folk choir finished their rehearsal and descended from a stage at the front of the hall. The singers were elderly Latvian men; their piano accompanist was an elderly woman. All had approached their efforts with vigorous and joyless determination, as if at once proud and resentful at having to bear so disproportionate a cultural burden.

  The woman was surprised to learn that I was Berls’s grandson. In all the time he had frequented the Latvian Centre, she had thought him alone in the world. No family member had ever accompanied him or come to watch him perform with the choir. He’d been circumspect, so she hadn’t pried. To live a long life was to accrue many joys but also many hurts and disappointments. She remembered my grandfather as a quiet, mild-tempered man who possessed a beautiful singing voice and a remarkable memory for Latvian poems and songs.

  As she spoke I sensed her subtly inspecting me. She asked my name, and to ingratiate myself I offered the Latvianate version, which sounded foreign coming from my mouth. She inquired if I spoke Latvian and I conceded that I did not. She asked where I was born and was enthused to learn it was Riga. She, too, had been born there. A half-century before me. She’d last seen it in 1944, when she’d fled with her parents. I volunteered that I’d left with my parents in 1979. I’d imagined that from my grandfather’s name and physiognomy, she would have deduced he was a Jew, but her reaction led me to wonder. Maybe she’d known and forgotten? In any event, the little yellow pilot light did not come on. We smiled at each other as we each performed the sordid calculations. Innumerable faces, voices and landscapes swirled in the silence between us. Boxcars rolled to the east and west. A commissar and an SS officer shouted orders in a hoarse voice. A crow landed on a corpse.

  Despite whatever the woman had deduced about my origins, she invited me to stay for lunch. The centre’s kitchen prepared traditional Latvian foods and offered them at a reasonable price, and was particularly renowned for the baked goods. If I was curious about the centre, I could sit and talk to the other diners. They would be happy for the company. I observed them at their tables—most chewing silently or conversing in muted tones—and tried to imagine my grandfather among them. The men of the choir were rigid, silver-haired, peasant-faced. They wore suit jackets and narrow ties after a Latvian folk pattern. When I’d seen my grandfather surrounded by his contemporaries, wearing an ordinary tie, it was for the complimentary kiddush after the service at his building’s synagogue. He’d be one of a dozen or so elderly Soviet Jews loading paper plates with herring, honey cake and egg salad, and allowing the more boisterous of the group to pour down-market whiskey into his Styrofoam cup. In a room loud with joking and grumbling, my grandfather was usually reserved. I’d always taken it as a function of individual temperament rather than a manifestation of national character. But it was dawning on me that I’d underestimated and under-imagined him.

  With one question answered, I posed the other.

  “We have more than one Lauma,” the woman said, “but I think I know who you mean.”

  “My grandfather would have known her.”

  “Lauma Gulbis. In her day she walked on air. It was very sad how she ended. The more God gives in your youth, the more He takes in old age. Her daughter is Agnes. She lives in her house.”

  * * *

  There was a courtyard in the Latvian Centre with green patio tables. I took a seat to place my call to Agnes. Around me, paralegals drank coffee and smoked cigarettes during a break in a seminar. There weren’t enough Latvians to cover the overhead, so the community let space and offered catering. I could tell that the paralegals were only negligibly aware of their surroundings, as if to convey that life, already taxing, would be untenable if one took heed of every abstruse thing dear to strangers.

  They paid no attention to me, either, sitting by myself, daunted at the prospect of making a phone call. The initial momentum that had propelled me forward had stalled. It had been easy to come this far. Contacting my professor friend at U of T and Knut the Norwegian had seemed like a game. Dropping in on the Latvian Centre, like an adventure. But calling a woman out of the blue to pose intimate questions about her dead mother seemed like only an unwelcome intrusion. Then again, had I not passed the point of no return when thought became deed? And wasn’t the world already strewn with too many half-consummated acts? I didn’t want to contribute another.

  I dialed the number I’d been given—a number, I was told, that had been in operation for fifty years—and heard a woman answer. I ascertained that she was Agnes and then tried, as succinctly as possible, to explain who I was. There was a drawn-out silence on her end when I asked if she knew Berl Singer, as though she wasn’t so much trying to place the name as decide whether or not to avow what she knew.

  “Is he still alive?” she asked.

  “No, he died ten years ago.”

  “Well, I’m sorry to hear that,” she said, and fell again into a tempered silence.

  I filled the silence by telling her that I’d recently discovered a reference to her mother in my grandfather’s documents and was curious to learn about her and the relationship she’d had with him, since he had, for some reason, kept it a secret from his family. I’d hoped to determine why.

  “I can’t answer that question for you,” Agnes said. “He never spoke of any family, so I had no reason to believe he was concealing anything.”

  “What did he speak of ?”

  “The past. My mother was already not well when he encountered her. Alzheimer’s. He reminisced with her about people they knew in their youth.”

  “I’d like to hear more about that,” I said.

  “You want me to recite conversations from fifteen years ago?”

  “I’m sorry if it sounds strange.”

  Agnes fell silent once more, although this silence felt gentle, ruminative.

  “You couldn’t know, but you have called on my mother’s name day. So maybe it isn’t purely accidental. I’m now in my kitchen baking a cake in honour of the day and will celebrate it with my daughter, who is practically the only person left with whom I can reminisce about my mother.”

  * * *

  Agnes’s house turned out to be not very far from my own, twenty minutes by bicycle. I rode there in the late afternoon as we’d agreed, a bouquet of red carnations jouncing in the basket before me. The neighbourhood had once been Polish and Hungarian but was gentrifying like every other in the city. Young professionals with children and enigmatic resources were eradicating the old houses and replacing them, often as not, with narrow modernist boxes, architectural lexicon for “Fuck off, old.” Any of the remaining or
iginal homes looked like poor relations, stubbornly or haplessly impeding progress. Agnes’s was one of these, flanked alternately by a cube and a construction site. As I rode up I saw a blond woman smoking a cigarette in the shared lane between Agnes’s house and the cube. She eyed me sullenly as I came to a stop, dropped her cigarette on the pavement, ground it out with her boot and disappeared through a side door. Her terse revulsion evoked the usual countervailing response. I presumed this was Agnes’s daughter and imagined, against reason and practically against my own will, the illicit possibilities. The heart barks like a dog.

  I walked my bicycle up the driveway, past a Japanese compact car, to the steps that led to the covered porch, which was painted a pale blue. To the right of the front door, set against the brickwork of the house, two patio chairs with striped blue cushions faced the street. To the left, a large ceramic pot blazed with pink geraniums. Before I reached the landing, Agnes was waiting at the threshold, regarding me in a flat, unsmiling, almost clinical way. She appeared to be in her sixties and altogether reconciled to the fact. She wore no makeup, and her grey hair was gathered in a simple ponytail level with her shoulders. She had on a cream-coloured sleeveless blouse and roomy denim shorts that fell just below her knees. On her feet were brown orthopaedic sandals. The only adornment she’d permitted herself was a silver necklace with an amber pendant and earrings to match, like an affirmation of Baltic heritage. My mother owned similar things.

  Agnes directed me to lock my bicycle to the balusters. As I knelt to secure the device, she watched me silently. When I’d finished with the awkward business, she remarked on my resemblance to my grandfather. Now that I’d crossed into my forties, I’d noted the same thing about myself. Though, peculiarly, the resemblance wasn’t just to him, but to all my male relatives in their more advanced years. It was as if some primordial, Jewish oy-face had surfaced with time, rounding and softening features, imbuing a fatherly, grandfatherly, even ancestral lachrymosity as from the headwaters of the biblical patriarchs.

  “I look nothing like my mother,” Agnes said. “The resemblance skipped a generation. Ruta, my daughter, inherited my mother’s looks, but not much else.”

  I removed the bouquet from my basket and followed her into the house. We walked through a dim foyer—to the left, a staircase led to the upper floor; to the right, an archway accessed the living room. Another archway separated the living room from the dining room. In other words, the rooms were small and dark, closed off from one another.

  Agnes ushered me into the kitchen, where a glass door offered a view of the backyard. It was late September, and the leaves of the Norway maples cast a copper wash over everything. On the table Agnes had set out a kettle, teacups, plates, forks and three-quarters of a cake.

  “The cake I baked for my mother’s name day,” she said. “We’re only two women; we could never finish it.”

  She took the bouquet of carnations from my hand and motioned for me to sit at the table while she went to the sink. I watched her deftly free the flowers from the plastic wrapping, separate out the blooms, count them and then snap one of the stems in half and deposit it in the trash.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought the superstition against even-numbered flowers was only Russian.”

  “Who knows who borrowed from whom,” Agnes said.

  She trimmed the remaining stems, filled a vase from the tap and set them in water.

  Framed on the kitchen walls were several small amateur watercolours of regional songbirds and a larger charcoal drawing of a cat. There were also photographs: a posed portrait of an elderly couple—presumably Agnes’s parents—taken on the occasion of some notable life event, and a more recent snapshot of a young woman in bulky workwear—a reflective vest, green hard hat and protective goggles—standing inside a monumental garage, dwarfed by the treads of a gigantic front-end loader. Though her features were obscured by the hard hat and goggles, it was obviously the woman I’d seen smoking outside.

  Agnes brought the vase to the table, cut each of us a slice of cake and commenced to pour tea. She noted my interest in the drawings and photographs.

  “My mother painted the birds and drew the cat. The birds she did from pictures in books. The cat she did from memory. It was her cat, Mitzi, from Latvia. When she and my father fled the Russians, she brought the cat with her. All the way to Germany. Imagine that. For three years Mitzi lived with them in the DP camp, but she didn’t make it to Canada.”

  “Very lifelike,” I said.

  “My mother was very talented, very artistic. My father was also talented, especially with his hands. He kept a wood shop in the garage where he created beautiful things. Figures. Sculptures. Also traditional Latvian musical instruments. Maybe in another life they could have been recognized for their gifts. But for people of their generation, from simple families, from small provincial towns, they had limited opportunities. My father finished the eighth grade; my mother the sixth. It’s amazing they accomplished all they did.”

  “I felt the same about my grandparents,” I said.

  “Come,” Agnes said, rising. “I’ll show you something.”

  I followed her into the living room, where, hanging by braided leather straps along a wall, in the shape of a V, were three trapezoidal, dulcimer-like instruments. Agnes took one down and presented it to me. It was made of pale wood—pine or birch—and was decoratively carved in the Latvian style, the minimalist suggestion of a sun for the resonant chamber, and runic designs that resembled intersecting swastikas above the tuning pegs.

  “You can hold it,” she said.

  It felt quite solid, heavier than I’d expected it to be. “What is it?” I asked.

  “A kokle,” she replied, disapproving of my ignorance. “You play it by resting it on a table or on your lap. That is the Latgalian kokle. There is a Kurzeme kokle, but it is smaller and has fewer strings. My parents were from Latgalia, same as your grandfather, and so my father preferred the Latgalian kokle. He made many of them. A few, like these, he kept. The rest he donated to the community. Not just in Toronto, but across Canada and even the United States. Chicago, for instance. Also Texas.”

  “Did he play them?”

  “He made them; my mother played them,” Agnes said, looking wistfully at the instrument in my hands. “She played also when your grandfather visited. When she wasn’t capable of doing much else, she could still play. She played and he sang. I think it was a great comfort to her. Perhaps to him, too.”

  I tried to imagine my grandfather in this room with the elderly Lauma—she with the kokle on her lap, he sitting next to her singing Latvian songs. I supposed it was a touching scene, but so much about what Agnes described didn’t add up. How extensive was the secret life he’d led? Not only was he making furtive trips by bus to the Latvian Centre in one end of the city, but also travelling to Agnes’s house in another. He never had a cellphone, and my mother, aunt and uncle called him routinely. If he didn’t answer, nodes of panic would aggregate like birds on a roof and occasionally erupt in a spasm of flapping.

  I asked Agnes, “What did you know about my grandfather?”

  “Not very much. He told me he was a friend from Baltinava, from my mother’s youth. After my father died, I used to take my mother to the Latvian Centre. Her mind was going and she was depressed and confused by my father’s death. At the Latvian Centre, people knew her. They looked after her. I could leave her and run errands. One afternoon I came back and found her sitting at a table holding hands with a strange man. Your grandfather. Then he started coming to the house.”

  “By himself ? He didn’t speak English.”

  “I gave him directions in Latvian.”

  “Had your mother ever mentioned him before?”

  “No, but she wasn’t one to talk much about her past.”

  “When the two of them spoke about the past, what did they speak of ?”

  “Do you know what it’s like to care for someone with Alzheimer’s? If you can get a
moment to yourself, you take it. He came here and they talked or sang. It gave me a chance to cook, to clean, to wash my hair. I didn’t sit over them and listen to every word.”

  “I understand. But did you possibly hear them talk about his brother, Venyamin? Venya?”

  “Not that I recall.”

  “My grandfather never delivered a letter from him?”

  “A letter to my mother?” Agnes regarded me as if I were impaired. “In her condition, what would she do with a letter?”

  I understood that my line of inquiry would lead nowhere. Either my grandfather had been a master of concealment, careful to divulge nothing to Agnes—as he had divulged nothing to us—or Agnes had been, and continued to be, a party to the subterfuge. Why that might be, I couldn’t comprehend. I felt myself gripping the kokle very tightly. That I still held it compounded my sense of frustration and foolishness. I relaxed my grip and set the instrument on the sofa.