The Earth Is Singing

by Vanessa Curtis

  Some of the holes are caused by bullets.

  I try not to think about what might have happened to the soldiers wearing them.

  I follow Mama’s example and keep my head down and my hands busy but inside I am screaming the same refrain over and over.

  Is this to be my life now?

  Will we get through it and somehow get back to normal?

  Will I ever find Papa?

  Why did I have to be born a Jew?

  At six o’clock on the dot we are told to stop work.

  “I have taken my lunch bread for Omama,” Mama whispers as we wait with the crowd. “It is well hidden, don’t worry.”

  We reform in our column and are marched back across Rīga and towards the ghetto. The rain has become lighter, but a thin layer has frozen and the gutters are hazardous. I am glad that Omama has not had to come with us.

  At the ghetto gate a guard calls “Halt!” and we stop, just avoiding tipping over the back of the person in front of us.

  A Latvian policeman walks along our line. He is asking people to turn out their pockets.

  A woman near the front empties her pockets. Two pieces of black bread fall onto the road and lie there, dark against the grey.

  There is a struggle. The woman falls to the ground and lies motionless.

  The crowd screams out in horror.

  Lines of red snake out from behind the woman’s head.

  Mama’s face shows her shock for only a moment. When the policeman reaches us she gives him a small smile and a polite nod.

  “I have no food,” she says. “It would be stupid to risk my life that way, no?”

  She sounds as if she has a toothache. Maybe she has. She has wound her scarf tightly around her chin and cheeks.

  But the policeman makes her turn out the pockets on her coat and the pockets on her dress and apron underneath.

  Nothing.

  We reach our apartment at 29 Ludzas iela and at last can shake off the guards.

  Mama closes the downstairs door against the cold and spits something out of her cheek.

  “Not perhaps the nicest thing,” she says. “But it is food.”

  I stare at my mother in horror.

  “They could have seen that,” I say. “They might have shot you, too.”

  But Mama is already heading upstairs to our apartment.

  Omama is waiting for us in the main room. She kisses Mama and gives me a painful cheek-pinch.

  “I would like to say that I have prepared you a beautiful dinner,” she says. “But the reality is somewhat different. Nonetheless I have been to the ghetto shop. In fact that is all I have done. The queue lasted nearly the entire day.”

  She gestures towards the box that we use as a table.

  There is a small amount of meat on three plates alongside some mouldy potatoes.

  “Meat,” says Mama, her eyes widening. “Thank God.”

  “Do not get too excited,” says Omama. “The meat has to last us for a whole week and I would not be surprised if it came from a dog. I only got the potatoes because I bribed the man in the shop.”

  “Oh yes?” says Mama. “And what did you give to the shopkeeper in exchange?”

  Omama busies herself with filling up our cups with dirty tap water.

  It is then that I realize.

  She is walking without her carved wooden stick. Or limping, to be more exact.

  “You didn’t?” I say. “But you can’t get around without that!”

  “Oh, Mama,” says my mother, sinking down onto the floor and staring at the potatoes. They are full of black eyes. She picks one up and her finger goes right through into the middle with a soft phut noise. “It is not worth it for these! You should not have given him your stick.”

  “Well, I had to do something,” says Omama. “It is too dangerous for non-Jews to come in here now with extra food. Soon the bastard Nazis will lock us all away from the rest of the city for good.”

  Mama is crying.

  I look at her, astonished. All day she has been so strong and brave.

  “I don’t mind working,” she says between sobs. “But I hate that my daughter must work twelve hours a day too and that my mother has given away her walking stick to help feed us. That is wrong. WRONG.”

  Omama limps over and places her hand on Mama’s shoulder.

  “We do what we must,” she says in a voice so soft and unlike Omama that it sounds as if another woman has sneaked into our apartment and crept up behind us.

  Mama nods, gulps and pats her hair.

  “Sorry,” she says. “Long day. Anyway, I brought you some bread, Mama.”

  The three of us stare down at the small soggy black pile of mush that has spent the last couple of hours living inside Mama’s cheek.

  My cheek begins to twitch. I daren’t look at Omama.

  She lets out a great splutter of amusement.

  “I will go and get three spoons,” she says. “We will not waste this treat.”

  And with that, our family limps back to life for another night.

  Chapter Fourteen

  There are sixteen shops for Jews inside our ghetto.

  By the end of the first week we are familiar with all of them.

  Mama sends me out at the weekend to queue alongside the rest of the ghetto residents.

  The food is brought in by Jewish wagoners who have been allowed out into the city to collect it.

  There are strict rations for Jews. We are allowed one hundred and seventy-five grams of meat, one hundred grams of butter and two hundred grams of sugar a week. For those who have extra money there are still non-Jews who take the risk to smuggle in dried food and smoked and canned goods and charge three times the usual price for them.

  Mama manages to get three cans of smoked fish by selling a piece of her jewellery, a pendant necklace of gold and amber.

  A lot of people are burying their valuables by night.

  I watch them from the window seat upstairs at number 29. They creep out during the night under cover of darkness. They dig deep slanted holes near trees and then bury their goods wrapped in sacks inside sealed cans. Then they cover over the holes until there is no trace.

  Sometimes I wonder if in fifty years’ time, somebody will buy these houses and dig up their gardens to plant carrots and potatoes and instead find a family’s hidden gold and silver underneath.

  We have a few trinkets left to sell and a little money which Mama has managed to put by. It is left over from when she was a busy seamstress in the old town.

  We use this money to queue up and buy our meagre rations once a week.

  The rest of the time we spend at work.

  Mama has developed a cough.

  She is running a fever on Wednesday morning when the work columns are due to assemble. Omama tells her to stay at home and rest but Mama has heard rumours of what happens if the SS raid your apartment and find you not at work so she struggles into her coat and boots and wraps her scarf right round her mouth to try and stifle the cough.

  My heart contracts at the sight of Mama’s shoulders shaking as she tries to lessen the noise.

  The SS do not like illness and disease. Mama says that they are frightened of an epidemic breaking out in the ghetto that they might catch. At the same time the ghetto has no method of disposing of garbage and sewage and the streets are starting to smell bad so the Jewish Council begin to dig large pits and bury rubbish inside them and they arrange for the sewage to be collected and buried in other pits nearby.

  It is the 1st October and Yom Kippur today. This is the most important date on the Jewish calendar. In our old life that would mean that we had a day of fasting followed by an evening at the synagogue with dramatic chantings and beatings of our hearts with our right hands. It is a day of atonement where we are supposed to remember our deceased relatives and make up with those we have quarrelled with.

  This Yom Kippur is somewhat different. It goes like this:

  Mama and I struggle to work. Instead
of fasting we are desperate for the bread and soup which is passed around the workers at midday.

  At six o’clock we stop work and are marched in columns across the town towards the ghetto.

  We find Omama trying to observe the day of fasting but Mama puts her foot down and forces Omama to eat a small piece of meat and half a rotten potato and a strange sort of sweet bread that Mama has managed to make out of our sugar ration and a tiny amount of flour that she had to pay over the odds for.

  Mama’s cough is so much worse that Omama asks me to go and visit the clinic on Katoļu iela and get her some medicine. This clinic has been set up by the Jewish Council for ghetto residents. I go in through the main doors feeling sick with nerves and I have to wait for over an hour to be seen, but in fact the Jewish doctors and their one nurse, Bobé, are kind and efficient. They give me some syrup for Mama’s cough and say that I must bring her in if it gets worse.

  I walk back to Ludzas iela clutching my medicine bottle with pride. It feels good to have done something useful for Mama.

  I have been out for a total of about ninety minutes.

  You would not think that anything could change so much in that time.

  That is what I used to think before I lived in the ghetto.

  As I climb up the stairs to our apartment I hear raised voices.

  Amidst the clamour I can hear poor Mama trying to make herself heard and then dissolving into bursts of coughing. I can also hear Omama using her sharpest and most sneering tone of voice, which is never a good sign.

  I walk into the main room with my medicine bottle clutched close to my chest and I stop dead.

  There are three extra people in our apartment.

  Five faces turn towards me as I walk in.

  For a moment I am so confused that I can’t even pick out the faces of Mama and Omama.

  For a moment I think I am in the wrong apartment.

  But no. My mother and grandmother are standing in one corner of the room and opposite them by the wall stands a family of strangers.

  There is a boy of about my age with a sharp, narrow face and a sweep of dark hair. He is holding the hand of a little girl with the same dark hair tied up with a pink ribbon. Next to them stands a man about Mama’s age with greying hair. He is wearing a brown leather cap, a brown jacket and has dirty brown work boots on his feet.

  All three of them are thin and angular, like they’re made of coat-hanger wire. I’m starting to see that look a lot around here. I can see it on my own face when I dare to look in the dirty mirror on the wall in the tiny toilet.

  “Hanna,” says Mama, trying not to cough. “Did you get the medicine?”

  I nod and slip her the bottle. The little girl looks at the bottle as if she would like to have some of the contents.

  Sugar, I think. It is cough syrup. We could probably live for a week on this bottle alone.

  Omama goes to get a spoon.

  I stare at the three strangers. They stare back at me. They all have the same worried brown eyes and thick dark brows.

  “Is anybody going to tell me what’s going on?” I say. Once upon a time I would have been more polite and waited for Mama to introduce them. The ghetto seems to be knocking all traces of manners and decorum out of me.

  “I’ll tell you,” says Omama, pouring Mama’s medicine onto a spoon and gesturing for Mama to open her mouth and swallow. “We have new room-mates, that’s what. These people want to live with us.”

  Horror rises up from my feet and threatens to throttle me.

  I go into the tiny kitchen and start throwing together our evening “meal”, such as it is. There is no point even trying to fast. We are too weak and need all the food we can get. I swallow and try not to think what we would have eaten on the day before Yom Kippur in our old life. Saliva moistens my tongue as I picture the home-made chicken soup, golden and savoury and studded with fragrant, soft matzo balls that would have lined our stomachs for the day of fasting ahead.

  Tonight we have what is called the “ghetto speciality” around here. Zilla and her mother told us how to make it. It is basically a liver paste made from yeast. Yeast is cheap so we can get a lot of it. At first I thought it was disgusting but it’s amazing what you can get used to when you are hungry. I have fried up the potato peelings from last night on the tiny stove and I spread the liver paste on top of them. We have more of the weird sugar-and-flour cake that Mama made earlier in the week so I put that out as well, along with the black bread which Mama still smuggles in from the workshop on Ganu iela when she can.

  The three strangers are standing where I left them.

  I put the food on the box and raise my eyebrows at Mama and Omama.

  My look is supposed to say, “Okay, game up. Get rid of the visitors now. Time to eat.”

  Omama frowns at me.

  “Ach, I can’t go on fighting,” she says. “I am too old for battle inside the house as well as out. Yom Kippur is a day of making up with people,” she says. “We are all human beings in this room tonight.”

  Mama sips red liquid from the spoon and doesn’t speak. She is looking at me, trying to gauge my reaction.

  Then she looks over at our uninvited visitors. I follow her gaze. Three pairs of dark brown eyes have swivelled their focus onto the food that we have put on our box-table. The little girl’s eyes are wide with longing. Her legs are like lollipop sticks in stout lace-up boots and grubby white socks. The boy has a thick black woollen jacket but there are holes in the knees of his trousers. The man has kind eyes underneath the yearning expression.

  I sigh and go back into the kitchen. I feel very old and wise and tired.

  I get the rest of the week’s “ghetto speciality” and put it out on the box.

  “Okay,” I say. “Dinner is served.”

  The little girl stares up at me with a mouth already smeared with paste.

  I feel like I’m their guardian angel.

  Over the scraps of food we talk.

  Mama coughs, but Omama and I ask questions.

  The man’s name is Janis and he was born here just like me. His children are called Max and Sascha. Max is sixteen and Sascha only four.

  “Where is your wife?” I ask. Mama does an extra-loud cough on purpose to stop me asking such personal questions but I figure if these people are sitting here wolfing down my peelings-and-yeast speciality then I have a right to know a bit about them.

  Janis continues to stuff food into his mouth and lick his fingers but his eyes take on a wary look. He has not removed his leather cap or his coat. It is colder inside this apartment than it is outside in the ghetto streets.

  “You remember the first days of the Nazi invasion?” he says. “When there was fighting and a lot of apartments were looted and Jews killed?”

  The three of us nod. It is hard to forget the screams and sounds of gunshots and burning buildings.

  “My wife, Sara, was shot,” he says, in a matter-of-fact voice. He reaches out for more peelings and puts them in front of Sascha. “She died in my arms. The children were watching.”

  I stop eating. I am hungry but somehow I can’t pick up another morsel.

  “Hanna,” says Mama. “Go and make some coffee for our guests.”

  Omama has managed somehow to buy a tiny amount of ersatz coffee from the Jewish shops in the ghetto. The coffee tastes nothing like coffee used to before the war but it is hot and black and something to offer the others, so I go in and boil up water in a small grey rusty saucepan and pour it into the assorted cups that we brought in our barrow from Skārņu iela.

  I cut pieces of Mama’s strange sugar-cake and divide it up amongst the five of us. It amounts only to an inch cubed each but Sascha eats it as if it is the very best chocolate torte in the whole of Rīga. I look at Max. He has kept his head down so far, concentrating on the food. I notice that his fingernails are very dirty.

  “Do you work?” I ask him, but it is his father who answers.

  “Well of course,” he says. “We
have to work. What choice is there?”

  I flush. It was a bit of a stupid question.

  “Where?” I say.

  “Army warehouse,” says Janis. “We sort coats and boots captured from the Soviets.”

  That explains his solid work boots and Max’s thick, warm black coat. I am envious of that coat. Mine is thin and patchy and the yellow stars are starting to flap at their seams.

  “Where have you been sleeping?” I ask. I can’t seem to stop my voice sounding harsh and suspicious. The truth is, I don’t want these people living with us and sharing our food. I have got used to it just being the three of us.

  “On the floor of a house in Līksnas iela,” says Janis. “Before that, on the streets. We were one of the last families to enter the ghetto. There was no room left.”

  I am about to pop my square of cake into my mouth but a beseeching look from the little girl stops me with my hand halfway to my lips.

  “Oh, go on then,” I say, passing it to her. “I’m too tired to eat anyway.”

  That part at least is true. I ache from a day hunched over a sewing machine under the cold eyes of the SS and from the long walk to and from the workshop.

  “What happens to Sascha when you go to work?” I say, yawning. It is nearly ten o’clock and we must be up at five for work again the next day.

  Janis pulls the little girl onto his lap.

  “She is looked after by whichever kind lady happens to offer,” he says. Then he gives a sly look at Omama.

  “Oh no,” she says. “I am not a nursery. I am an old woman without a stick. I cannot chase after a little child all day.”

  Janis’s face falls. He looks at me and then at Mama.

  “Sorry,” she says. “We work all day every day.”

  Omama puts her hands together as in prayer and rolls her eyes.

  “God help me,” she says. “It is Yom Kippur. He knows full well that I can’t disobey His wishes on such a holy day.”

  Then my grandmother, with a great creaking of knee joints and much moaning and sucking of teeth, levers herself towards the floor. She peers into Sascha’s doubtful little face and then offers the greatest compliment that she knows – an Omama cheek-pinch.