“But Uldis,” she begins, “surely you know what the Germans will be doing when they get here? You don’t wish to be part of that! Have you not heard the rumours from Poland?”
We have all heard the rumours. It has been said from late last year that the Polish Jews have been forced to leave their homes and herded into some sort of ghetto area in Warsaw. But nobody is sure and it seems so hard to believe that this could happen to ordinary people that I try to convince Mama that rumours are not always true.
Uldis gulps his cheesecake and pushes back his chair.
“I just came to check you were all okay,” he says, with a big smile at Mama. “Thanks for the food, Mrs Michelson.”
My mother does not smile back.
I show Uldis out.
“Sorry about that,” I say. I look up at his tall frame. “It’s so good to see you. When will I see you again?”
Uldis is putting on his jacket. Summer in Rīga can feel like March. There’s an ice-cold wind which whips through the Baltics at this time of year.
He looks down at me. There’s something in his eyes that I can’t read. If I had to try, I’d say it had a slightly sad quality. But that can’t be right, because then he turns to me and gives me his wide smile and says: “Perhaps we could go swimming next week? I will pick you up on Saturday morning.”
He leans over me and kisses the top of my head. Electric thrills shoot right through my body to my feet.
Then he leaves me standing there. I watch him bolt downstairs.
On the last day of June I’m awake at one o’clock in the morning.
Outside comes something I haven’t heard for a long time.
Silence.
The last Russian tanks have finally rolled out of town, leaving destruction and ruin in their wake. The dust from the tracks of the tank wheels has hardly settled. St Peter’s church smoulders gently at the end of Skārņu iela, a strange spire-less structure that bears no resemblance to a holy place any longer. Behind the stump I can now see the four giant arches of the old Zeppelin hangars which house our beloved Central Market.
It’s too quiet. I can’t sleep.
I get out of my camp bed and pull back the curtains.
The lack of noise is so heavy that it makes my ears ache and strain. All I can hear is that eerie silence. It feels loaded with something that is yet to happen. The feeling reminds me of being little and putting a cup filled with water on top of a door, hiding behind it and waiting for Papa to open the door and get a soaking.
I’ve got used to hearing the sounds of police sirens and fire engines. I’ve almost got used to the sounds of shooting and shelling, bombing and screaming.
But on this night there is nothing. Nothing.
I hug my elbows and hum an old Jewish nursery rhyme to fill the silence.
Under baby’s cradle in the night
Stands a goat so soft and snowy white
The goat will go to the market
To bring you wonderful treats
He’ll bring you raisins and almonds
Sleep, my little one, sleep.
I gaze out over the roofs and spires of the city I love. There are gaps and holes but it is still my beloved Rīga.
The silence does not last for long.
Chapter Two
When I wake up the next day there’s another unfamiliar sound coming from the streets.
Singing.
I stick my head out of the window. The pavements outside are crowded with people, jostling and talking. There are speakers in the middle of the street, blasting out our Latvian national anthem.
“Merciful God, can’t an old woman sleep in?” Omama is muttering in her tiny bedroom, but she too is leaning her bony elbows on the window sill and staring down at the scenes outside.
“I haven’t heard that since before the Soviets came,” says Mama, laying up plates and bowls for our breakfast. “If only I could believe that all the trouble was over.”
“Maybe it is,” I say. “There are people carrying flowers and greeting the soldiers, Mama. Look!”
I stare down at the German army, men who are supposed to be our saviours and free us from the Soviet regime. They have thick brown arms in tight khaki uniforms and hats which look like helmets. They are armed with brown guns and their faces are exhausted but cheerful. There are Latvian women in traditional white peasant dress running out of the crowd to kiss them and offer them flowers.
“Nothing could be worse than what has happened to us already,” I say in what I hope is a firm voice. “What could be worse than Papa being taken away?”
I seem to smell Papa when I mention his name. Often that faint whiff of the aftershave he always wore when he was about to go to a business meeting or out on a date with Mama. The smell is painful and comforting all at the same time.
Omama heaves herself into the chair next to me and pinches my cheek so hard that my eyes water. It’s her way of showing affection, but I wish she wouldn’t.
“Your papa will come back one day soon,” she says. “Now that the Soviets have gone, they will perhaps release him.”
Mama lets out a dramatic sigh and flips her tea cloth impatiently at both of us.
“Eat your breakfast and stop speculating,” she says. “Hanna, you need to get to dance school.”
She ignores my pout of protest. There’s far too much going on outside for me to want to miss it all.
“And, Mama,” she says under her breath to her own mother, “stop giving the girl false hopes. She knows as well as I do what the rumours are. And you know that they hold us responsible for everything that has happened.”
Those rumours again. They are so terrifying that I try to shut them out in my mind with a thick curtain of black. They can’t affect us here in Rīga. After all, this is not Poland. We are different in almost every way. Our language, our food, our history are all different. It is only our religion that we have in common with the Jews of Poland.
“I have heard the rumours,” I say to Mama, “but still I don’t understand what we have actually done wrong.”
I am hoping that Mama is about to tell me.
But she just eats her bread with a closed-off look on her face.
I drag myself to school, dawdling as much as I can. I push my way through the cheering crowds and listen to the sound of the German soldiers’ feet as they march through the city centre. All the way to my school there are people lining the streets, waving flags and flowers and kissing one another as if at last they are free.
I cut past the beautiful white Opera in the park and stop to stare at it. The building is a little like a garlanded white wedding cake to look at, surrounded by the bright pink and orange flowers of the park and the gentle canal with the little bridge over it.
One day I plan to dance here. Mama will be in the audience with Papa and Omama, who will probably still be alive even if she’s over a hundred by then. I will stand on the stage and spin and pirouette and jeté in a white costume studded with silver and I will dance the dance of Rīga and its spire-studded beauty. I will dance of love and life and all the possibilities which it has.
Papa always taught me to grab life with both hands.
The night before he was taken away, he called me into the spacious wood-panelled study that we had in the villa. “My little dancing daughter,” he said, his eyes filling with water. “My little songbird.” The room reeked of pipe smoke but I didn’t mind. “Promise me”, he said, “you will always try to live. Whatever happens. Keep living. And look after Mama. Promise me?”
I laughed at the time. I thought that Papa was being overemotional and silly. I liked him calling me “little dancing daughter” because it made me feel special and cherished.
“Sure, Papa,” I said. Then I skipped off back to my bedroom.
It was only later that the thought struck me like a ton of rubble.
Papa spoke as if he knew he was to be taken away.
And the very next day, he was.
When I reach
the Brīvības bulvāris where the Brīvības piemineklis, our Freedom Monument, is located, the sheer number of people there takes my breath away.
I stop and stare up. The monument is forty-two metres high. I’ve had that fact drummed into me at school for as long as I can remember. It was put up after the Latvian War of Independence to commemorate soldiers who died, but ever since then people have congregated here whenever anything of national importance has happened. There are flowers laid at the foot of the monument every single day and there are always at least two armed guards standing motionless in front of it. When I was a little girl I was very worried about how the guards would fare if they needed the lavatory, but Mama said that they worked in shifts and that every hour a new guard would take over.
At the top of the column is a statue of Liberty carrying three gilded stars over her head.
Everybody is looking up at the top of the statue today, like they’re seeing it in a new light.
I push my way towards the monument because I need to get to my school on the other side of town. It’s not easy. I smell the sweat of unwashed bodies and sickly-sweet blooms as I elbow my way past the soldiers and the over-excited Latvian women who are darting out to press their flowers upon the German soldiers on horseback. It is a rare hot day, with sunshine beating down on the stones of the bulvāris and the old people already huddled under the shady trees in the park.
I get to the other side of the monument, panting for breath.
And it is then that I see something odd.
There is a column of young men with their heads hanging low, being marched off towards the outskirts of the old town by a group of soldiers.
The soldiers are not wearing the uniforms of the German army. They have red and white armbands on a khaki uniform and are clutching guns.
The guns are pointing at the heads of the young men.
My arms chill with cold.
I stare at the column of men again. One or two of them look familiar. I realize with a jolt of horror that I can see some of the boys who used to be a couple of years above me at my last school. They can be no more than seventeen or eighteen years old.
But where are they going?
I watch them being marched off. If other people have seen, they are choosing not to comment. Most of them are still facing the other way, cheering at the soldiers’ parade.
I wait until the young men have been marched round a corner and out of sight and then I run back through the crowds and in the direction of home.
I have to tell Mama.
Mama is not too pleased that I’ve skipped dance school.
“Hanna, I’ve got work to do,” she says, pointing at the mountain of fabric in front of her on the table. We don’t have Mama’s sewing table any longer, although we managed to sneak her machine out of the villa. So the dining-room table doubles up as a work table after I have gone to school.
“Where’s Omama?” I say. She’s usually snoring in her chair or shelling peas whilst moaning about something or other.
“She wanted to go out and see what was happening,” says Mama. “I told her to be careful. The streets are not really the place for a frail old woman.”
She catches my eye and we both break out laughing. There’s nothing frail about Omama, as we both know.
My smile fades.
“I need to tell you something,” I say.
Mama passes me the bagel I forgot to eat at breakfast time. I smear it with cream cheese and smoked salmon and gulp it down. Mama is very pretty, which helps with buying food. Papa always said that she could charm the birds out of the trees, but we don’t have too many trees around here and the birds have been scared off by the bombing and continual fires.
“I just saw a group of young men being marched away from the Freedom Monument,” I say.
“Yes?” says Mama. “Soviet prisoners of war, I expect.”
“No,” I say. “They were not Soviets. They were just boys. And the soldiers were not in German uniforms. They had red armbands.”
Omama has come in while we are talking. She is regarding me with her bright brown eyes. She is eating pickles with greed, scooping them up and shoving them into her mouth, which is half-open with her two front false teeth on show.
“That is the new Latvia police,” she says. “Your Uldis has designs on becoming one of those.”
I am so surprised that a laugh bursts out of me.
“Uldis is a good person,” I say. “He would never hurt people.”
I think back to last year. I was in the park with Uldis and a bee flew straight into the top of my ice-cream cone. He spent ages trying to coax it onto a leaf and then put it in the sun so that it could dry out its wings. Together we watched the tiny insect struggle back to life and dart away.
“Did you recognize any of the young men?” Mama says. “Perhaps they were in training to become soldiers.”
I picture the group of men in my mind. I see their hanging heads and the look of shame and fear on some of their faces.
I see the muzzle of the guns shoved into the small of the young men’s backs and for a dizzy moment I actually have a flash of what it must have felt like.
“Yes,” I say. “I recognized some of them from school.”
Mama and Omama exchange looks.
“Dance school?” says Mama.
I sigh and reach for another bagel.
“No,” I say. “Ezra.”
Ezra was the school I used to go to, before the Soviets invaded us.
“Jews?” says Omama, still chewing. Her eyes never leave my face.
“I guess so,” I say. I had been so shocked by the guns in their backs that it had taken me a little while to realize this.
“Where were they going?” says Mama. Her cheeks are bright pink. “Did you see?”
“Mm,” I say, my mouth full of fish and cheese. “Aspazijas bulvāris.”
“My God,” says Mama.
“Ah,” says Omama. “They were being taken to the prefecture.”
Mama darts Omama a furious glance and flaps her hands to quieten her but it’s too late. Now I want to know.
I wait until Mama begins to prepare lunch for later.
Then I whisper, “Omama – what is happening in the prefecture? Is it bad?” The prefecture is our police station.
My grandmother fidgets about in the pocket of the black dress she always wears and produces a squashed caramel in a faded gold wrapper.
“I’m not ten,” I protest, but she forces me to take it before hobbling over to the chair in the corner for her nap.
Within seconds she is snoring, her head dropped on one side.
Mama comes in with a new pile of fabric and we spend the rest of the morning cutting and sewing to the endless sounds of cheering and marching outside. Or at least, Mama sews and I cut.
The Latvian national anthem is played on and off all day along with another song I don’t recognize. This second song is rigid in time and sounds very patriotic. I ask Mama what it is and she snaps off a length of thread with her teeth and doesn’t answer for a moment.
“It is the anthem of the Nazi Party,” she says when I continue to stare at her.
“Oh,” I say. A tiny bolt of something painful passes through my stomach. “They are already here, then?”
“Yes,” says Mama. She doesn’t elaborate.
My mind is racing.
I keep replaying in my head the expressions on the faces of those young Jewish men as they were marched off.
I see the red and white armbands on the uniforms of the men accompanying them.
Uldis might be wearing those armbands soon. What if he is ordered to stick a gun into the back of a thin Jewish boy?
But I know him so well. He is kind. He won’t harm anyone. He will keep the peace.
I want to discuss it with Mama, but something about her face is as closed off as the sign outside our famous church warning people not to venture inside the ruin.
So the questions and doubts inside me
have nowhere to go.
They grow into the silence, filling it up like mould.
Chapter Three
Mrs Rubinstein and her family are taken away in the night.
I wake up from an uneasy sleep to hear screaming.
Mama is already up and standing in her red flannel dressing gown at the window, her hair in a dark plait down her back. For the first time I notice the wiry grey hairs poking out and floating in the lamplight.
I stand next to her and we peer out of the gap in the curtains. Mama tells me to switch off the light.
Down on the street the white-clad figure of Mrs Rubinstein, still in a nightdress, can be seen huddled over next to a man in sharp uniform with a smart peaked cap to match. Her two children cling to her hands. I can hear little Peter crying and see his older sister, Leah, trying to comfort him. She is crouched down, peering into his face.
I stare at the soldier. He looks different to the ones who marched through Rīga with their wide grins and tanned faces.
I can’t see much of his face because it’s dark, but something about the rigid way he holds himself makes my stomach feel horrid. He is pencil-thin and full of sharp angles.
“Why are they taking her?” I whisper, almost to myself as much as to Mama.
Mama doesn’t answer. Mrs Rubinstein was our neighbour when we lived in the villa and she was moved at the same time we were, to the apartment block right next door to ours. Now she is being shoved into the back of a truck. As she sits in her thin nightdress, she looks up at our apartment for a split second and Mama places the palm of her hand on the window and it’s like a message passes between them via electricity.
We watch as the truck with the three figures in the back passes down our street and roars out of sight.
There is a terrible silence for about five minutes. The truck drives off so fast that I can still see leaves and debris swirling around on the pavement. Mama pulls her long coat over her nightdress and runs downstairs and out into the street. I see her bend over something in the gutter. When she comes back upstairs she is sighing heavily and I don’t think it’s from her exertions on the staircase.
The Earth Is Singing Page 2