Among the Living and the Dead

by Inara Verzemnieks

  It’s true, he insisted. Words can become as real as anything we see with our eyes or feel with these hands. I saw a man put out a fire using only words, he said. The house was engulfed and they’d run out of water, but then the man arrived, and he walked in circles around the house, very calm, one way and then another, repeating something into the flames.

  This was how my grandmother sounded when she spoke to me of her former home, the farm she had rebuilt from memory, like someone who believed that the structure of it could be protected, even saved, through her telling.

  We might be standing at the edge of my grandparents’ property, which abutted a city salvage yard, feeding scraps of paper to the burn barrel. Then the wind would start, rattling the leaves of the nearby birch, and in its chatter my grandmother would hear the voices of the trees she had once moved through each day. Do you hear it? she would ask, urging me to follow her deep into the black and white thickets of her memories. This is what it sounds like when they speak.

  Or maybe one morning we would wake to snow, and as we looked out the window together, she would remake its falling with her words until it became the hip-high drifts that sucked at the hooves of the draft horse, now harnessed to a sleigh upon which my grandmother’s family rode, their laps weighted with blankets and furs.

  She led me to the nest in the grass where she hid with her little brother from her mother’s calls; let me peer into the cradle of her baby sister, born when my grandmother was fourteen. She revealed to me the location of the chest in which she had concealed love letters from a boy she thought she would marry before my grandfather, and sometimes I suspected I could hear the drawer scraping open inside her, as if she were pulling out the letters to reread them.

  Each time she showed me something, it filled in a new location on the map of the property I now carried within me, until I began to think I knew the way back on my own. But even when I tried to retrace our path faithfully, because I was following my memories of her memories, it was like one of those pictures I had once seen where you thought you were dealing with a single, static image, say, a tree in full leaf, but depending on which direction you tipped the frame, the composition was completely altered; now that same tree was little more than withered branches. Sometimes the dog that barked at my approach was black and white; other times he was white marked with black. Sometimes my great-grandmother appeared in the yard, bent over the stump that turned wet with hens’ blood after the thwack of the axe upon their necks, or maybe she was stoking the wood-fired stove that I had been warned was so hot it would cause the flesh of a curious child’s hand to slide off like the skin of a snake. Other times, I would find her in bed, wrapped in a wet tangle of sheets, my grandmother at her side, pressing a spoon against her mother’s mouth, the same way my grandmother fed me when I was sick.

  I knew her brother and sister were there, wandering the property, too. My grandmother had gone to great lengths to help me recognize them—his knees were always skinned and he liked to help with the bees; she was small and fast, like the kittens who lived under the barn and would not let you hold them in your hands—but I found that whenever I invited them to join me, there was nothing where their faces should have been, as if I were peering into the well on the property where my grandmother cautioned you should not play, because if you fell, you would never touch bottom.

  I DON’T KNOW if she grew tired of waiting, or if she simply came to accept the idea that the Latvia she had called home could only ever be accessed in memory, but where once she and my grandfather sat at kitchen table pecking out letters to the editor of the local paper on an old Olympia typewriter, the keys spackled with Wite-Out, so that their demands for the end to Latvia’s illegal occupation sometimes looked like demands for an end to Ltv’s llegl occupton, they now sat at the same table quizzing each other on the elements of the U.S. Constitution, the names of the state’s congressional delegation. They did this, even as the television in the other room, always on in the background, and always tuned to CNN, began to relay images of hammers bashing sections of the Berlin Wall, of more than a million protesters clasping hands to form a human chain stretching unbroken from Tallinn to Vilnius.

  My grandmother was in her seventies when she finally became a naturalized citizen of the United States, forswearing that she would renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen. Not long after, Latvia declared its independence.

  She did not hurry back, as some exiles did. Many went immediately, returning with applications for Latvian passports and suitcases full of jewelry fashioned from Latvian amber, the ancient resin of prehistoric trees entombed at the bottom of the Baltic Sea, a marrow discharged by trees belonging to the pine, as Pliny the Elder described it, once coveted by the Romans and said to bring its wearers strength; and bottles of Black Balsam, Latvia’s national liquor, a drink that tastes as if one is alternately tonguing the unfurled buds of trees, then their hot pitch. It’s revered for its medicinal qualities, is said to have brought Catherine the Great back from the brink of death, though in truth it is demonstrably curative only in that the first sip scours almost pleasantly from throat to bowel.

  Among other exiles, I sensed euphoria, a strident ­reclaiming—“Nyet Nyet Soviet” T-shirts and family portraits taken on the steps of the Freedom Monument in downtown Riga tucked into that year’s Christmas cards. Yet my own family seemed hesitant by comparison.

  What I know of my grandmother’s homecoming: when she saw her siblings again, for the first time in nearly fifty years, she wept, and they wept, and then everyone started talking at once and didn’t stop until dawn. Later, as everyone slept, my grandmother let herself out, and walked the fields and forests for hours, alone. One day, she asked to go clean the graves of her parents and grandparents. She rubbed moss off the headstones, picked fallen branches from the ground. She slipped flowers in vases. Then, as she backed away, she raked the dirt around the headstones, erasing all footprints, all signs that she had ever been there at all.

  Looking back now, I am surprised at how little I asked my grandmother about that trip and how little she offered, as if together we had reached the unspoken decision that it would be my job to retain the remembered version of her old home—the re-created farm of her youth that she had gifted to me—rather than the contemporary version she had discovered on her return.

  Not long after my grandparents’ trip to Latvia, my grandfather’s heart began to fail, and within five years he was dead. Less than six months after we buried him—dipping our hands into the old coffee can, now filled with the soil of free Latvia—one of my grandmother’s neighbors dropped by to see how she was faring. When the neighbor knocked but received no response, she put her eye to a gap in the crocheted hanging my grandmother had placed over the window in the front door. She spotted my grandmother’s glasses first, resting in the pile of the rug, then the soles of my grandmother’s slippered feet.

  After the first stroke, I told myself that my grandmother would recover, that there would still be time for us to go back through her memories again. But a second, stronger stroke followed, and this time she disappeared into territory that I couldn’t access.

  Sometimes, when I went to visit her at the nursing home where she now lived, and if I happened to catch her in the half-conscious moments just following a nap, she might string together a few labored words, enough to tell me that she was spending time with those long lost to her, my grandfather, her parents, her brother, how they had been traveling together to all the places she had never been before, like Paris. Other times, she was back in the refugee camps; once, she told me she had been nursing the infant of a campmate who had died—I still have milk, and the baby is so small—but she never again mentioned Latvia or the farm.

  III

  ONCE THERE was a time when the living made a habit of sitting with the newly dead. The dead would be offered a special chair, and everyone
would crowd around to ask the dead: Why did you leave this world? Then, all the living would call out in turn the reasons they believed the dead should remain with them. When they ran out of things to say, or they could no longer keep their eyes open for want of sleep, the living would place the body of the dead in its coffin. Next, they set plates of food on the table, especially beans and peas, said to mimic the shape of tears. And then, before they turned out the lights and went to bed, the living would lift the coffin’s lid and leave it partway off, so that the dead could get up in the night if it desired, and have one last meal alone. In the morning, the living joined the dead for breakfast, plates on knees, or balanced on the coffin’s edge. The grandmothers saved their best bites to place on the plate of the dead. Your road is long, so long, they would say. Here is some strength for what’s ahead. And whatever beer or bread was left, they took to the barn, to sprinkle in the cows’ stalls, so the herd could mourn, too.

  The old ways held that the dead never stopped being considered members of the family, and it was up to the living to try and impress upon the dead this fact.

  For the first few years after she died, I waited for my grandmother, Livija, to visit me, as her mother had done for her, but she never came. I said her name to myself at night, when I couldn’t sleep, like a summons—thinking of how, if I said it as an English speaker would, the first syllable sounded like “live,” as in the command form of the verb “to live,” the “j” soft, voiced like the letter “y”: LIV-ee-yah. And if I pronounced it the Latvian way, the first syllable sounded like the word “leave,” as in “to leave someone.”

  I had asked for a few of her things in the hope they might serve as talismans to my grief: a calla lily spaded from her garden’s soil; her old mixing bowl, in which she soaked threads of saffron in warm milk to color the sweet dough she braided to celebrate our birthdays and name days; a velvet evening gown from the 1970s, soft as sable, the color of crushed violets, copied from an image in Vogue. It didn’t fit me and I didn’t want it to; my grandmother, a talented seamstress who could sew without patterns, and whose stitches were so precise that her garments could be worn inside out, had tailored the gown so perfectly to her own form, that even hanging in my closet, it returned to the world the shape and weight of the space that I had known her physical body to occupy.

  And while these things gave her absence a kind of presence in my life, they could not help me picture her with the kind of clarity that would make her feel real to me again, complicated and full, more than these fading traces of memory: the brown of her eyes, irises edged in blue, like the bark of a madrone tree set against a clear sky; the way she smelled of sunlight, clothing left to dry on the line; the shape of her curlers beneath the kerchiefs she wore home each week after having her hair set at Sharon’s Beauty Parlor—a double-wide trailer located in the motor court tucked behind the neighborhood corner store that did brisk trade in both penny candy and adult magazines; the angry divots her clip-on earrings left when unclasped; the sound of her body, released from its girdle, soft and low, like the exhalation of air that releases a dandelion of its seeds; the method she employed to test a bolt of fabric before committing to buy it: grabbing a handful of material and clenching it in her fist for several seconds. No good, she would say. Wrinkles too easily. It will look old and worn before you leave the house!

  She tried to learn to drive—once. She crushed the neighbor’s fence beneath the back wheels of the car. After that, if my grandfather was not home, she walked anywhere she needed to go.

  She could peel an apple without ever lifting her knife, the fruit unwound from itself in gentle drifts in the bottom of her kitchen sink.

  Come here, she would say, when I woke and complained of cold, opening her bathrobe as if it was her skin, and letting me slip inside.

  Sometimes, when we went shopping together, clerks would insist they did not understand what she was trying to say, even as they bit back laughter, and she tried so hard to stay calm, composed, in her handmade clothes. Unwrinkled.

  I hate them for this still.

  The problem was that my memories of her were now reduced to little more than anecdotes, lists, not the true sense of a life, complicated, evolving, embedded in an unfolding present.

  At the same time, it had also grown harder for me to locate my grandmother in our shared version of her past.

  I tried to find her again in the stories that she had left to me of the farm, but they felt brittle now, unfamiliar, all the things that had gone unspoken, the absences and elisions and silences so much more apparent now that I was forced to encounter them on my own.

  It didn’t help to recruit my father. Although he had grown up hearing many of the same stories, and he had come to the United States when he was still young enough that he could switch between English and Latvian without accent, to call back what he knew of the family’s history, his memories of growing up in the refugee camps, in any language, caused him real pain. So he held back the words.

  He told me once that he remembered a stretch in his adolescence when he could not speak without stuttering. His brother and his younger sister recalled their own periods of stammering, too.

  It wasn’t that my father and his siblings didn’t want to hear their mother’s stories, or weren’t interested in them. For a long time, they simply did not know. Recently, my father’s younger sister, who had been just a year old when the family arrived in the United States, told me she did not learn of the details of her mother’s flight from Latvia until after she had graduated from high school, until after she had left the house, and even then, the details were scant.

  In my father’s case, it seemed to me that his reluctance to engage with the family history felt almost protective, as if to place himself inside of it again—to investigate the deliberate silences that it contained, the home that had been left behind, the hole where his father’s eye should have been, the missing months of his own infancy, set against the war’s end—might actually hold a personal danger. I use the word danger because on the rare occasions he attempted to enter these spaces, to look directly into them, he was quickly overcome, and would shut down, as if the past traumas he had been exposed to were not something that he had survived, but something still happening, the present-tense intensity of it all too much to bear.

  When my grandparents returned to Latvia for their first and only visit after the war, after Latvia regained its independence, my father had gone with them.

  To this day, he cannot speak of the experience without crying, finally seeing the country he had left before he could ever know it, visiting the region where his mother and father were raised, living according to its rhythms, staying long enough to begin to work alongside his relatives, helping to lay a new roof on the barn, collecting honey from the hives. And yet, once the trip was over and my father was back home, it was almost as if the emotional force of what he had experienced frightened him in some way, and he retreated deep inside himself.

  He didn’t consider returning to Latvia again for twenty years, not until I began to travel there, and although I know he felt a deep and abiding love for the relatives he had met and lived alongside, he had not been able to bring himself to write or to call them in all that time.

  I don’t know why I find it so hard, he told me once. Why I can’t break out of my shell, sometimes. What is the Latvian word for hermit?

  YEARS LATER, I would recognize my father in a story a colleague once told me about visiting a facility where those who had seen war were treated for severe post-traumatic stress. Of all the things she saw and heard, the woman said, what haunted her still was the way staff approached anyone who appeared in genuine anguish. Always, they started with the same question, gentle but insistent: Where are you right now?

  Not to remind the patients of where their bodies were, but to acknowledge that our memories are real places in which it is possible to become trapped.

  The woman and I worked together at the same newspaper as reporters.
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br />   It was the only job I had ever spoken of wanting since I was in grade school, already so comfortable inhabiting a history that was not my own, that even then, when asked what I wanted to do when I grew up, I claimed a living that would allow me to observe the living of others.

  I slipped business cards behind screen doors, the name of the paper I worked for on one side, a scribbled note on the other: I am truly sorry about _____. If you ever feel like talking about the life that was lost, I’m here to listen. I said this regularly to strangers, never once considering whether this was something that I should instead be saying to myself.

  It’s interesting to me now to think that I had deliberately chosen a profession where I was actively discouraged from ever using the word I, from ever inserting myself in the frame.

  And yet, in the years following my grandmother’s death, I found myself writing different versions of the same story over and over again.

  Of abandoned amusement parks, where elk now grazed in what had once been the parking lot, where sedge and Scotch broom slowly swallowed all evidence of the log flume ride, the snack shack, the miniature train.

  Of a house where a room on the second floor had been converted into an aviary by a man who had discovered the thrumming of birds’ wings was the only thing that could distract him from his despair. Until one day, it couldn’t anymore. And still, as his ex-wife sorted through his remaining things, the sparrows winged in circles around the room, empty, except for a single chair, positioned so you could imagine him sitting, alone, taking in the arc of their flight, night after night.

  Of a bench in the city’s oldest park, dedicated to a man who once climbed to its highest point, and as the sun began to drop in the sky, drenched himself in lighter fluid, then flinted a match. Come sit, says a sign on the bench, And know that you are loved. A sign that also bears the inscription of the man’s name, and an engraving of a dove, because, and this is not written there, but can be learned only by tracing the sign back to his mother, who put it there, for someone, anyone, to find, and to ask, so she could remember once more: