“I understand it will be unpleasant to disappoint your friends. But it’s only three days. And, after all, this is your grandfather’s and not some stranger’s grave.”
* * *
Late on a Saturday night Victor’s flight made its approach to the Riga airport. On the descent Victor looked out his window at the flat, green Latvian landscape. His neighbour for the three-hour trip from Heathrow had been a garrulous, ruddy-faced Latvian in his seventies—a San Diego resident since 1947. Following the collapse of Communism, the man had returned to Latvia every summer for the fishing. When Victor informed him that he was undertaking his first trip to Latvia since his family’s emigration in 1978, the man invited him to his cabin. Though the man was sincere and friendly, Victor couldn’t help but hear his parents’ refrain about innocent Latvians not retreating with the Nazis. Whether this was true or not, Victor was not exactly proud of the ease with which his mind slipped into clannish paranoia. But to maintain the necessary objectivity wasn’t easy, particularly when buckled into an airplane full of blond heads.
In fact, after Los Angeles, and even London, Latvia struck him as remarkable in its blondness. At the customs desk, a pretty blond agent checked his passport. Tall blond baggage handlers handled the baggage. And it was a blond policewoman in a knee-length grey skirt who directed Victor up to the second floor where he could find a taxi. He had returned to the city of his birth, but no place had ever seemed less familiar. As he left the terminal, he even marvelled at the sky. His flight had landed after ten and he had spent close to an hour in the terminal, but when he stepped outside, the pavement, highway and outlying buildings were illuminated by some bright, sunless source.
At the curb a thin Russian hopped off the fender of a Volkswagen and reached for Victor’s suitcase. He wore a New York Yankees T-shirt, Fila track pants and had the distinction of being not-blond. Identifying Victor immediately as a foreigner, he asked, “American?” Victor responded in Russian, speaking in a terser, gruffer register than he normally used—a register he hoped would help to disguise the extent of his foreignness, make him appear less dupable, less likely to be quoted an exorbitant fare. When the cab driver said, “Fifteen lats”—equivalent to twenty-plus American dollars—a price Victor still suspected was inflated, he growled his disapproval and, to his satisfaction, succeeded in having the fare reduced by one lat.
On the road to Jurmala, Victor—harbouring an appropriate level of resentment for the driver—rode in silence. He focused on the passing scenery. At that hour, nearly midnight, there were few other cars on the four-lane highway that led from the airport to Jurmala. The view was unspectacular. He registered certain banal observations. The road was smooth and clean. The passing cars were German, Swedish, Japanese—and clean. The few gas stations they passed appeared to be newly constructed. Victor kept expecting to feel something, to be somehow inspired. But all he could manage was: I was born here, and I’m evaluating the infrastructure.
The cab driver spoke over his shoulder and asked which hotel. Victor pronounced the name without turning his head.
“Villa Majori? Not bad. You know who owns it?”
“No.”
“The former mayor of Jurmala.”
Victor couldn’t be sure, but it seemed the driver expected him to be impressed.
“He was mayor for six months. Now he has a hotel. The property alone is worth 250,000 lats.”
“So, he’s a crook.”
“Of course he’s a crook.”
“Did you vote for him?”
“Did I vote for him? What difference does that make? Certain people decided he would be mayor, then later they decided he would no longer be mayor. It’s not like that in America?”
“In America he’d have two hotels.”
The driver laughed, inspiring in Victor a self-congratulatory and yet fraternal feeling.
“The mayor: a crook and a bastard, but I hear the hotel is good and that the girls he hires are very attractive.”
Minutes later Victor discovered that the hotel was indeed modern, tidy and staffed—even at that late hour—by a pretty clerk. The hotel consisted of three floors, giving the impression that, before being converted to suit the needs of the former mayor, it had been someone’s home. Victor found his room on the second floor and stood looking out the window at the flux of pedestrians on Jomas Street. The street was closed to all but pedestrian traffic and was flanked on either side by bars, restaurants and the odd hotel. Through his closed window he could hear the undifferentiated din of voices and music from rival bars. Had he wanted to sleep, the noise would have been infuriating, but though he’d hardly slept in two days, he felt exceedingly, even pathologically, alert. So, as he watched the sky literally darken before his eyes—a change so fluid it felt as though he were watching time-lapse photography of dusk—Victor decided to call home.
As it was Saturday morning in Los Angeles, his mother picked up the phone. When she realized it was Victor, she deliberately kept her voice neutral so as not to attract Leon’s attention.
“You’re there?”
“I’m there.”
“In the hotel?”
“In the hotel.”
“On Jomas?”
“I can see it from my window.”
“How does it look?”
“How did it look before?”
“People were strolling all day. Everyone dressed up. All year long girls thought only about getting a new dress for the summer.”
Victor heard Leon’s voice rising above his mother’s, followed by the inevitable squabbling over the possession of the phone.
“You see, if I tell him who it is, he won’t let me talk.”
“What do you need to talk about? You can talk when he gets home. Has he spoken to Sander’s son?”
Sander Rabinsky had a son in Riga whom Victor was supposed to contact upon his arrival in the city. Sander’s son was named Ilya and happened, as Leon enthusiastically pointed out, also to be a lawyer. It had been Ilya who had informed Leon of Sander’s death. After not hearing from Sander for several days, Leon had called repeatedly, left messages and kept calling until finally Ilya had answered the phone.
“Did you call him?”
“It’s midnight.”
“Call him first thing.”
“I will.”
“Good. So how is it over there?”
“Exactly like Los Angeles. Maybe better. The women are beautiful and there are no fat people.”
“Latvians: they look good in uniforms and are wonderful at taking orders. God punished them with the Russians. The devil take them both. Don’t forget to call Sander’s son.”
* * *
Victor slept only a few hours and awoke in spite of himself at first light. He lingered in bed, trying to will himself back to sleep, but after an hour of this futility, he rose, showered, dressed and ventured outside. He found Jomas Street deserted but for a handful of elderly city workers armed with straw brooms engaged in the removal of the evidence of the previous night’s revelry. It was only five o’clock and Victor walked the length of Jomas Street, past the shuttered bars, small grocery stores and souvenir shops. The only place not closed at that hour was an Internet café attended by a teenager slumped behind the counter. Victor wrote a too-lengthy email to his friend in England. He had little new to say, having parted from his friend and his friend’s wife less than a day before, but to kill time he reassured them that they should begin their trip without him and that he would join them as soon as he resolved the business with his grandfather’s gravestone. At the very least, Victor joked, he would connect with them by the time they reached Dublin, where his friend’s wife had promised to set him up with a former roommate. Victor knew little about the girl other than her name, Nathalie, and that in a picture from his friend’s wedding she appeared as a slender, attractive, dark-haired girl in a bridesmaid’s dress.
By eight o’clock Victor had eaten his complimentary breakfast in the hotel’s dining r
oom and decided, even though it was still possibly too early, to call Sander’s son. He dialed from his room and a woman answered. Leon had told him that Ilya was married with a young son of his own. Speaking to the woman, Victor tried to explain who he was. He mentioned Sander’s name, the gravestone and his father’s name. Victor sensed a hint of displeasure in the way the woman replied, “Yes, I know who you are,” but tried to dismiss it as cultural—Russians are not generally inclined to American-grade enthusiasm—and he was relieved when he heard no trace of the same tone in Ilya’s voice.
“I spoke with your father. He said you would be coming,” Ilya said.
Victor offered his condolences over Sander’s death and then accepted Ilya’s invitation to stop at his apartment before proceeding to the cemetery.
Much as the travel agent had indicated, Victor found Dzintari station a few minutes’ walk from his hotel. This route—Dzintari to Riga—was identical to the route he would have taken twenty-five years earlier in the summers when his parents rented a small cottage by the seashore. Somewhere, not far from his hotel, the cottage probably still existed, although Victor didn’t expect that he could find it.
For the trip Victor assumed a window seat and watched as the train sped past the grassy banks of a river and then russet stands of skinny pines. Since it was a Sunday morning, and as he was heading away from the beach and in the direction of the city, there were few other people in his car. At the far end of the car were two young men with closely cropped hair sharing a quart of malt liquor, and several benches across from Victor, a grandmother was holding the hand of a serious little boy dressed in shorts, red socks and brown leather sandals no self-respecting American child would have consented to wear. Now and again, Victor caught the boy’s eyes as they examined him. The boy’s interest appeared to be drawn particularly by the plastic bag Victor held in his lap: a large Robinsons-May bag in which Victor carried a bottle of tequila for Ilya and a small rubber LA Lakers basketball that he had purchased for Ilya’s son.
From the train station Victor followed Ilya’s directions and walked through the centre of the city. Ilya lived on Bruninieku Street, formerly called Red Army Street, in the apartment Sander had occupied for over fifty years. It was there, on Red Army Street, that Sander and Leon had become acquainted. They had been classmates in the Number 22 Middle School. Leon had lived around the corner and spent many afternoons playing soccer in the very courtyard where Victor now found himself. The courtyard and the building were older than the fifty years, closer to eighty or ninety, and the dim stairwell leading to the second floor suggested the handiwork of some pre–World War II electrician.
Victor climbed stone steps, sooty and tread-worn to concavity, and squinted to read graffiti of indeterminate provenance. Some was in Latvian and seemed nationalistic in nature; some was in Russian and, if he read carefully, he could make out what it meant: “Igor was here.” “Nadja likes cock.” “Pushkin, Mayakovsky, Vysotsky.”
Victor found the number of Ilya’s apartment stencilled above the peephole and rang the buzzer. He heard a child’s high and excited cry of “Papa,” and then Ilya opened the door. He was slightly shorter than Victor but was of the same type—a type that in America could pass for Italian or Greek but that in Latvia wasn’t likely to pass for anything other than itself. Ilya wore a pair of house slippers, track pants and a short-sleeved collared shirt. Standing at Ilya’s side was a little blond girl, no older than five. The little girl seemed excited to see Victor.
“Papa, look, the man is here.”
Ilya gently put a hand on her shoulder and edged her out of the doorway.
“All right, Brigusha, let the man inside.”
Victor followed Ilya into the living room, where Ilya’s wife was arranging cups, wafers and a small teapot on the coffee table. The mystery of genes and chromosomes accounted for the nearly identical resemblance between mother and daughter and, but for a fullness at the mouth, the complete absence of the father in the little girl’s face.
As Victor, Ilya and the little girl entered the room, Ilya’s wife straightened up, looked at Victor and appeared no happier at seeing him than she’d been at hearing his voice over the telephone. Ilya motioned for Victor to sit on the sofa and then performed the introductions.
“This is my wife, Salma, and Brigitta, our little girl.”
Victor smiled awkwardly. He felt that he had made the mistake of taking his seat too soon. The upholstery claimed him in a way that made it difficult for him to lean forward or to rise. Undertaking the introductions while seated seemed wrong to the point of rudeness. As it was, he already felt less than welcome. He wanted to be on his feet, not only to shake hands but also to offer the gifts he had lugged in the Robinsons-May bag—though the prospect of getting to his feet immediately after sitting down and then presenting the inappropriate basketball to Ilya’s daughter momentarily paralyzed him. He felt the temptation to explain the misunderstanding about the basketball but knew that to do so would be a betrayal of Leon; that it would conjure an image of his father as confused, inattentive, self-involved, possibly senile.
Doing his best to mask the exertion, Victor rose from the sofa and offered his hand to Salma and then, playfully, to the little girl. Because he knew that Salma didn’t like him, Victor watched her face for some sign of détente, but as Brigitta’s small hand gripped the tips of his fingers, Salma’s smile merely devolved from token to weary. Her expression made Victor feel like a fraud even though, apart from trying to be social, he was quite sure he hadn’t done anything fraudulent. Under different circumstances, Victor consoled himself, he wouldn’t tolerate a woman like her.
Turning his attention from her, Victor reached into his bag, caring less now about the reaction to the basketball, and retrieved first the bottle of tequila and then the ball. To his relief, the little girl took the ball with genuine pleasure and bounced it on the stone floor with both hands.
Ilya, inspecting the bottle, looked up and watched as Brigitta chased the ball into the kitchen.
“Before she punctured it, she had a beach ball like that. She could bounce the thing all day. Brigusha, say thank you.”
Victor, uncertain if he’d been commended or not, said that he hoped the gift was all right.
“You couldn’t get her anything better. Right, Salma?”
Salma, for the first time, looked—though not quite happy—at least somewhat less austere.
“It’s very nice. Thank you.”
She then picked up the empty Robinsons-May bag that Victor had left on the floor.
“Do you need the bag back?”
“No.”
“It’s a good bag.”
She called after her daughter.
“Brigusha, come here. Look at what a nice big bag the man left for you.”
Carrying the ball, Brigitta returned to admire the bag.
“See what a big, fancy bag. You could keep all your toys in here. Come show the man how you can say thank you.”
Brigitta looked up at Victor, down at her feet and then pressed her face into Salma’s hip.
“Now you’re shy?” Ilya said. “Maybe later you can show the man how you say thank you. She can say it in four languages. Russian, Latvian, German and English.”
Placing the tequila on the table, Ilya asked his wife to bring glasses.
“Come, we’ll sit. I should have put a bottle down to begin with.”
Angling past the coffee table, Victor resumed his place on the sofa.
“What kind of alcohol is this?”
“Mexican. They make it from a plant that grows in the desert. It’s very popular in America.”
Salma returned with two glasses and Ilya poured.
“To new friendship,” he proclaimed.
After Salma made the tea and distributed the wafers, she took Brigitta into a bedroom. From what Victor could see, that bedroom, plus another, along with a kitchen, bathroom and living room constituted the apartment. The ceilings were high, maybe
twelve feet, and the floors and walls were in good repair. Also, the furniture, polished and solid, seemed to be many decades old and might have, for all Victor knew, qualified as antique.
“You like the apartment?” Ilya said.
“It would be hard to find one as good in Los Angeles.”
“This apartment is the only home I’ve ever had. Now it’s my inheritance. After the war my grandparents returned from the evacuation and moved here. My father grew up here, married here, and when I was born this is where he brought me from the hospital. As a boy I slept on this sofa, my parents in the smaller room, my grandparents in the larger. When my grandparents died, my parents took their room and I was given the smaller one. Now it’s my turn to take the big bedroom and move Brigitta into the little one. You could say I’ve been waiting my entire life to move into the big room. Though, if you follow the pattern, you can see where I go from here.”
“So don’t move into the big room. Then maybe you’ll live forever.”
“Well, we haven’t moved yet. Brigitta still calls it ‘Grandfather’s room.’ She likes to go and see his white coat hanging on the hook.”
“She’s a good girl.”
“Do you have children?”
“No.”
“Married?”
“No.”
“It’s a different life in America.”
“Probably not that different. At my age most Americans have children. Some are even married.”
The mood had started to become a little too confessional for Victor’s liking and he took it as a good sign when Ilya grinned.
“One day I’d like to visit America. Salma’s English is very good. Until recently she even worked for an American software company. Owned by Russians from San Francisco, Jews, who left here, like you, in the 1970s. They returned to take advantage of the smart programmers and the cheap labour. But the company went bankrupt after the problems with the American stock market.”
“Unfortunately, it’s a familiar story.”
“‘Capitalism,’ as my father would have said. Though he wasn’t much of a Communist. But when everyone was leaving, he wasn’t interested. He liked it here. He was a doctor; he wanted to remain a doctor. He had no regrets. Not long ago, after your father contacted him, he said to me, ‘You see. What if I’d left? I’d be collecting welfare in Brooklyn, and who would help blind Leon Shulman with his father’s gravestone?’ He had a real sense of humour.”
Immigrant City Page 9
