The Earth Is Singing

by Vanessa Curtis

  Guilt.

  I sit and shake in silence, tears running down my face and dropping onto my hands.

  All I can think during the short journey back towards town is:

  Why, Uldis? Why did you betray us? What did we ever do to you?

  But worse that that, I know that this has all happened because of me.

  Chapter Twelve

  We are driven back into the Vecrīga district.

  My heart contracts as I see the familiar burned-out shell of St Peter’s Church and the jagged remains of the Great Choral Synagogue. We pass my first school, now boarded-up and vandalized and the Freedom Monument, which is under heavy armed guard, and then the car passes the white Opera nearby in the park by the narrow canal.

  I stare through the glass at this building where I had planned to take the ballet world by storm some day and I realize that there may as well be a pane of glass between me and my city of dreaming spires for ever.

  Although Uldis is sitting so close in front of me that I could touch his head if I wanted to, it’s as if we are in separate countries. The love between us has been sucked away and replaced by something else – shock, on my part. Hatred on his.

  Mama is sniffing next to me. I pull out a handkerchief from my pocket and give it to her, only it’s not a handkerchief but the spare yellow star that Mama forced me to keep in my pocket in case one of my others came loose.

  She shoves it up her own sleeve with a horrified look. God only knows what the Gestapo would do to us if they saw us using the star to blow our dripping noses!

  So Mama sniffs until we pull up outside a building.

  We are astonished.

  It is our apartment building.

  We stare at one another, not comprehending. Then the driver gets out and pulls open the back door. He gestures us into the gutter. We have no luggage – that was all left at Uncle Georgs’s house in the panic to obey orders – so it is just the three of us standing huddled together again in front of our old home.

  “As you have not tried to run,” says the man in his charming voice, as if he were speaking to his favourite sisters, “we are not going to shoot you. You have until dawn to get your belongings and move into the ghetto.”

  “Oh,” says Mama. “Thank you. Thank you for sparing our lives.”

  She reaches out her hand to shake his.

  He gives a sharp laugh and takes a step backwards.

  “It is not a favour,” he says. “You Jews will get what’s coming to you.”

  The skull on his cap glows in the light from the moon.

  Then he gets back into the car. All this time Uldis remains in the front seat. He does not even turn round to see where we are going.

  The car roars off into the night.

  “Come on, Hanna,” says Mama. I have fallen to my knees in the street, sobbing. I feel as if my life has ended. I have lost Uldis and somehow managed to betray my beautiful mother and my crazy old grandmother too and now because of my stupid actions kind Uncle Georgs and frightened Aunt Brigita have been shot dead.

  Mama helps me up on one side and Omama pulls me up on the other. “He is not worth it,” says Mama. “We have other problems now.”

  We go upstairs and back into our apartment.

  There is no need to find a key for the door.

  The rooms have already been looted.

  The living room has had most of the furniture removed and the few bits left are broken and tossed about like boat wreckage after a storm in a small harbour.

  The curtains have been pulled down and one of the windows smashed so that the broken glass resembles a snowflake. A draught blows through the apartment.

  Omama goes straight into her tiny bedroom and we hear her muttering and moving stuff about. Then there is a crow of delight. She heads back into the living room clutching something to her chest.

  “Mama!” says my mother, outraged. “You surely didn’t leave that here? We could have all been shot if the police had seen it!”

  “Well they didn’t,” says Omama in triumph. She is clutching the small black square and almost dancing round in circles of joy, though because of her stiff hip it is more like watching a lurching walrus.

  It is her radio. Somehow Omama has found a place to hide it and it is still intact and working, judging by the crackling noises coming from inside.

  “Switch that off!” hisses Mama. “For God’s sake. We are not even supposed to be here. Say whoever trashed this apartment decides to come back? Possession of a radio is illegal, Mama.”

  Omama pulls a face like a sulky child. Then she winks at me and shoves the radio inside the waistband of her skirt.

  Mama gives a heavy sigh but she is already looking around for things that we can still use.

  “We need to pack,” she says. “It is nearly dawn. We must move to the ghetto. Just what I did not want to happen. At least we will find our friends there.”

  I start to help her in a daze. All I can see is the hard, cold expression on Uldis’s face and the way he looked at us as if we were pieces of dirt on his polished shoe. How can this be the same person who told me he loved me and put his arm around me at the cinema? I feel dizzy, as if somebody has taken away all the support from my life and left me wobbling unaided in the middle. When I’m not seeing Uldis’s face I see the sprawled dead bodies of my aunt and uncle lying bent and broken on their front path and it makes me shake inside so that I can’t stand still.

  I don’t even really know what a ghetto is. All I have managed to glean from Mama is that it is in the run-down Maskavas Forštate of town where those poor Russians have lived for years in houses without electricity or sometimes even water.

  “Why do we have to live in the ghetto?” I say.

  Mama snaps the lid shut on her small suitcase.

  Omama gives one of her sarcastic snorts.

  “Because the Nazis want the streets of Rīga to be judenrein,” she says.

  My stomach gives a little gulp.

  Free of Jews. They want to push us out of our own city.

  I think of Uldis again.

  “Why did Uldis betray us?” I say. “Why did he stand there with a gun? Why does he hate us so much?”

  My voice catches on the last word. I’ve just realized that my life has turned a corner I didn’t want it to go round and that there will be no turning back.

  Mama and Omama exchange one of their looks. Mama gives a slight nod. Then Omama disappears for a moment and comes back clutching a copy of Tēvija.

  She passes it to me with a sad smile, tapping at the black print with her bony finger.

  The paper is dated 4th July. The same day our Great Choral Synagogue burned down. This is what it says:

  In big black font there is an appeal:

  All patriotic Latvians, Pērkonkrusts members, students, officers, militiamen, and citizens, who are ready to actively take part in the cleansing of our country of undesirable elements should enrol themselves at the office of the Security Group at 19 Valdemāra iela.

  I look from the paper to Mama’s anguished face and back again. The words start to rearrange themselves on the page until I am staring at “undesirable elements”, which seems blacker than all the other text.

  “That’s us,” I say in a whisper.

  “Yes,” says Omama. “And your Uldis is one of those ‘patriotic Latvians’, I am afraid. Like father like son. When you lived next door to them his mother once let slip that Mr Lapa had been a member of Pērkonkrusts back in the 1930s.”

  I shudder. I have read all about the anti-Semitic Pērkonkrusts political party in Tēvija. They were outlawed by the Latvian government in 1934, but their slogan “Latvia for Latvians – Work and bread for Latvians!” is too close to what Uldis once said when I asked him why he was joining the auxiliary police. And yet because I loved him I chose to hear everything he said, and view everything he did, as good.

  So he had been planning his betrayal of us since the beginning of July.

  I sink down o
nto the floor as our chairs have been taken.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I whisper.

  Mama comes and sits on the floor next to me. She puts her arm around my shoulders and presses herself close to me.

  “Uldis’s mother is a good woman,” she says. “She does not share the beliefs of her husband and son. It was because of her that we let you see Uldis even though I was never really happy with it, as you probably could tell.”

  “I thought it was because you wanted me to make a Jewish marriage,” I say, leaning into her.

  Mama laughs.

  “Why would I want that?” she says. “I was happy with Papa, no? And he was not a Jew.”

  I note that she says “was” rather than “am” but I am too tired to protest.

  “Besides,” says Mama, “we did not think you would ever have to see Uldis again after we went into hiding.”

  “Well, you got that bit wrong,” I say. A new feeling is rising up inside me. Anger. Anger at the way Uldis sat at our family table when Papa was still here and talked about his plans for the future and ate our beautiful home-cooked food and charmed my Omama.

  A whole chunk of my future will have to be rewritten. No more blond-haired blue-eyed children with handsome, chisel-faced Uldis.

  When I think of him from now on, I will try just to see a rat. Rats are slippery and unpleasant and have eyes that are too close together.

  But it will not stop the hurt of his betrayal. I know that. I feel old, weary, about a hundred. It is like I have gone to sleep in a world of fantasy and woken up in a world of real life. In the cold light of day, everything I have left looks fragile and unappealing.

  “We need to focus on getting to the Russian part of town now,” Mama is saying. “We have to go to the ghetto, Hanna.”

  “Where will the Russians go?” I say.

  I picture us moving into their houses without them leaving. All squashed together and speaking different languages.

  “Hanna, there is no time for your questions,” says Mama. “See if you can find any plates and spoons in the kitchen. And cups or bowls. I need to sort out transport.”

  She goes downstairs to the cellar of our apartment building, leaving me and Omama pulling together the few possessions we can find.

  Twenty minutes later Mama comes in triumphant with two wheelbarrows and wobbles them sideways to fit them through the front door.

  “There,” she says. “Now we can move.”

  I stare at the barrows in disbelief. They are not very big, plus one of them has a broken wheel at the front.

  “We have to use these?” I say.

  Mama comes over to put her arms around me.

  “Hanna,” she says, “we are not allowed to have private transportation. We are not allowed to get on trains or buses or boats or hire carriages. We are not even allowed to walk on the sidewalks. So we have to use what we can.”

  Omama is already putting pillows and blankets into one of the barrows.

  “Perhaps we should push you, Mama,” says my mother. “You are very thin. I have just found out from the caretaker that there is a Gesundheitsamt set up to help those who are elderly or unwell. They can give us a pushcart.”

  Omama stands up straight and glares at us.

  “I might be old,” she says, “and yes, my arms and legs do not work as well as they once did. But I’ve still got enough dignity not to be pushed in front of the population of Rīga in a barrow, thank you very much.”

  As a last gesture of defiance she chucks the small black radio on top of the pile.

  Mama groans.

  “At least put a blanket over it!” she says. But she does not offer to put Omama in a pushcart again. Omama seems to have got a bit of her fighting spirit back since we were hustled out of Uncle Georgs’s attic.

  None of us mention what happened to Uncle Georgs and Aunt Brigita.

  It is too raw. We can’t yet find the words.

  We leave our apartment the next morning.

  The weather is starting to take on a sharp edge. Mama has spent the rest of the early hours sewing new yellow stars onto our winter coats so that we can wear them over our thinner jackets and, in that way, manage to take as much clothing as we are able into the ghetto.

  We have loaded up the two wheelbarrows with blankets, pillows, pots, pans and as many clothes as we can fit in. Mama manages to squeeze her sewing kit in on the very top. We tie the bulky loads down with pieces of rope so that our belongings do not fall out in the street.

  The janitor of our apartment block helps us carry both barrows downstairs, although he pulls a face when Mama asks him and says he won’t go any further than the downstairs corridor.

  “You Jews are nothing but trouble,” he says. But his face is not cross when he says this. He’s always had a soft spot for Mama. I reckon he’s scared, just like the rest of the non-Jewish population of Rīga now. He is risking his life by helping us.

  “Thank you,” my mother says to him. “We will leave you in peace now.”

  We stand outside the door to our apartment block and look up at the building one last time.

  Then Mama and I push the two barrows into the gutter and, with Omama walking behind, we start our journey out of the old town and towards our new home.

  It takes nearly an hour to navigate our barrows into Maskavas iela and the heart of the ghetto.

  We struggle across town, alongside the river, and join other streams of Jews pulling carts, wagons and barrows loaded up with their only remaining possessions.

  The Latvian citizens of Rīga regard us impassively from behind their coat collars as they hurry to work. Some of them mime things at their Jewish friends on the way past. Others go out of their way to cross the road when they see us coming. Helena and her mother are heading towards the centre of the old town where they will buy food in the shops we are not allowed to queue in and sit in the cafes we are no longer allowed to eat in. Mama risks a wave but is rewarded with a blank, hard stare from the friends she has had for years.

  “Told you,” I mutter. I don’t even try to make eye contact with Helena. What is the point? She will not lower herself to offer a smile to a Jew.

  There is a marked contrast between the speed of Rīga’s workforce hurrying along in their smart office clothes in one direction and the slow, cumbersome pace of us Jews of Rīga, with our yellow stars visible on coats and jackets dragging our loads in the other.

  “Oh,” says Mama, her face brightening. “Look. There is Mr Gutkin!”

  She is pointing at Rīga’s leading manufacturer of our beloved matzo crackers. He is being wheeled along in one of the makeshift pushcarts that Mama wanted to get for Omama. He is waving and smiling at everybody in the Jewish queue as he travels beside them. I like Mr Gutkin’s grey moustache and beard and his kind dark eyes.

  “Free matzo for everyone after we leave the ghetto!” he is shouting. Many of the Jews are smiling and shouting back, but Omama’s face is set like stone.

  “He is living in a world of fantasy,” she mutters. “Maybe he ate too much of his own damned bread!”

  I can tell that Omama’s bad temper is because her hip is hurting, but I’m too frightened to stop wheeling my barrow along the uneven gutters so that I can turn round and help her. There are SS units in open-topped cars patrolling up and down the streets and every now and again their soldiers leap out and beat the slow-moving Jews until they either speed up or fall to the ground and lie there motionless.

  I dare not stop.

  On the endless walk we learn from other Jews that we must report to the Jewish Council in Lāčplēša iela.

  When we reach this street we are cold and numb from lack of sleep the night before.

  There is chaos in the large school building which has been converted into the headquarters of the Jewish community. Here a small number of Jewish men and women have been assigned by the Nazis to manage every aspect of our lives in the ghetto.

  A dark-haired lady called Mrs Blumenfeld is i
n charge of the apartment office which deals with housing. She is wearing a white armband with a blue Star of David on it and sitting at a small desk being begged and besieged by several hundred desperate Jews who have walked across town and now have no place to live. In the courtyard at the back of the building, despondent people sit on barrows and suitcases with their heads in their hands whilst their children cling to them and cry.

  Mama sits Omama down outside in the courtyard and puts her own coat around Omama’s shoulders before she remembers that she can’t remove her own yellow star, so she takes it back again and then she and I queue up for nearly two hours until it is our turn to be dealt with.

  Mrs Blumenfeld looks up our names and then copies them into a large register.

  “You have been assigned a first floor room at number 29, Ludzas iela,” she says. “There are already some Jews in the building and you will probably have to share the room with others.”

  I look at Mama, horrified, but Mama is signing her name on a document and appears to have nothing to say about this latest horrid twist of fate.

  “Go and register at the labour office across the street,” says Mrs Blumenfeld. “All able-bodied Jews must work.”

  Mama nods. Her face is full of fear and confusion but she is determined not to make a fuss.

  Then we negotiate our barrows out of the crowded community centre buildings and with Omama grumbling behind us, enter the crowded building of the labour office at 145 Lāčplēša. Mama and I queue up again and are given yellow cards.

  “We already have blue cards,” says Mama. She means the ones we first got when we registered at the police station for work.

  The man behind the desk frowns.

  “It says here you are seamstresses,” he says. “So you are specialist workers. You need yellow cards.”

  “Oh,” says Mama with a faint smile. I can see she is pleased to be called a “specialist”.

  Omama is too old to be registered for work. She throws her hands up at the harassed staff from the Jewish Council and protests, but she is informed that she can stay at home and keep house for us.