[He] was my firstborn, and you know, I was so tired, I would cradle him and talk to him and I thought I was calling him love, but after a while, I realized, I’m so tired I’m saying dove. But then I thought, what’s so wrong with that. Dove is beautiful too. So I called him my dove.
I wrote these stories as if secretly assembling a list of locations where it was difficult to distinguish the boundaries between what had been taken away from this world and what remained.
I wrote:
We are surrounded by invisible cities, places constructed entirely of memory, of suggestion: the remnants of a foundation, broken slabs of concrete, a clearing in a field, an unusually ordered stand of trees.
I wrote, in other words, like a person trying to assure herself that the shape of what was missing could be used to rebuild that which she didn’t even know she’d lost.
AND THEN, at last, my grandmother came to me, just not in the way I had expected.
One night, my father brought over a box of items that he’d found while cleaning the last of the things from my grandparents’ house, where he had gone to live following the end of his second marriage.
These were things which did not seem to have any discernible value, but which he could not bring himself to give away. He wondered if I might have any use for them.
Inside, I found spools of silken thread; a music box with a pull-string that my grandmother had played to calm me when she lay me down for afternoon naps on her bed; and a yellow and green scarf, clearly woven by hand.
My father said he had found the scarf deep in one of my grandmother’s dresser drawers. It was old, fraying in places. I had never seen her wear it in all the years I knew her. But it still smelled of her and so I took it.
Later, while going through some old photographs, I found one that had been taken in my grandparents’ Riga apartment not long before she fled Latvia. I had always understood that almost nothing from my grandparents’ old life had survived, that my grandmother had emerged from her journey along the war roads with only the clothes she happened to be wearing the day she fled.
But as soon as I saw the photograph, I recognized it: the scarf.
It was unmistakable, knotted at the hollow of my grandmother’s throat.
Where once stories had seemed the only way to access her past, now, suddenly, something tangible had surfaced, pointing the way back to where it all began: proof of what could be made and unmade, then made again; the complexity of the pattern invisible only until you sit still long enough to follow the unraveling threads, retrace their individual paths, so many intricate connections, gifted to you by the silent, insistent hands of the dead.
IV
THE WOMAN who could be my grandmother, but is not, motions for me to follow her into the weary house.
I can hear the chirruping of a bad hip as she hitches slowly down the narrow hallway, which is lined with tomato starts and baskets of flower bulbs, white with bonemeal, knobbly with dirt and age. As she leads me into what appears to be a sitting room, I see her draw a balled-up handkerchief from the cuff of her cardigan and dab it at her eyes—eyes that I must keep convincing myself are not, in fact, my grandmother’s eyes. My grandmother Livija’s eyes were brown, edged in blue, I remind myself. This woman’s are blue, edged in brown.
She scrapes a chair back from the table, indicates I should sit.
It’s easier for her to let photographs speak.
Here, she says, wresting a thick album from a cabinet in the corner of the room. She sets it on the table between us, lifts away the yellowing layers of parchment that cover each face like a caul.
Livija, she says. And my grandmother appears to us, a young woman, the hem of her skirt hovering above the summer-stiffened grass, her face turned slightly as if she registered the sound of her name.
Next to her, a boy buttoned into a suit as rigid and unyielding as the fence posts in front of which they pose, itching neck and rakish grin stifled—Janis!—said just like that, an exclamation, the sound of uncontained braying, my grandmother’s brother.
So this must be you? I ask, pointing to a little girl who sits on a chair between the other two in the photograph. Her hair is pulled into braids, her feet end in stiff boots. She looks like she has been swinging them back and forth. She nods.
Ausma. It means dawn or daybreak in Latvian. A lightening. My grandmother’s sister, born when my grandmother, Livija, was fourteen, and whom I have specifically traveled here to meet, my history in flesh and blood.
Was this portrait taken at the farm? I ask Ausma.
Yes, she says.
My grandmother told me all about the farm, I say.
Ausma doesn’t immediately respond.
It sounded like an incredible place, I say.
She flips a page. I can hear a clock somewhere in the house, its second hand conducting the tiny eternity that has opened up between us.
You should know that your grandmother’s stories aren’t my stories, Ausma says at last. Her memories aren’t my memories.
FOR YEARS, people had asked me when I finally planned to visit the Latvia of my grandmother’s stories, and I always had an excuse ready, about work, about money.
It didn’t occur to me then that my hesitancy might have had more to do with fear—specifically, the fear that such a trip, rather than confirming the general outlines of the memories my grandmother had gifted me, could only, inevitably, complicate them.
FRIENDS OFTEN WANT to know what that first visit was like, what it felt like in that instant to be reunited with long lost family. And I always wonder whether my answer is too quiet to make sense to anyone else—we sat, I say, we sat, and we wept, and we ate, and we laughed, and we ate, and we wept some more—but it is the instant recognition I felt in the presence of that quiet, something continuous, vital, enduring, the assumed natural state of things, that I always return to; a memory of such pure and overwhelming contentment, a sense of peace, unlike anything I had ever known in my life before, that I wonder if I do understand something of the intensity of the memories that have kept my father from speaking, the intensity of a past that feels as if it is still happening inside of us.
Go ahead. Ask me:
Where are you right now?
Here is what I would tell you:
I’m sitting. I’m sitting at a table. I’m sitting at a table with Ausma and her husband, a man named Harijs, who, although he is in his mideighties, has just been scrambling around on the roof, checking for a possible leak.
Do you know how many times I should have died? he asks, as he takes my hands in his hands, tar-stained, stretched by years of labor to the size of bear traps, triggered, lying flat.
Shh, says Ausma, poking him, though not unkindly. Not now.
We are joined by two of Ausma and Harijs’s three children, and their children’s children. Also at the table that day is the family’s first great-grandchild, a girl, just turned two, and when I hear her name for the first time, I have to ask the family to repeat it because it sounds so much like my grandmother’s name: Liva. We are seated like this, so many generations, so close to one another, that every voice seems to begin inside my own chest. My lips are swollen from shots of sweet muscat, or maybe it is the salt of my own tears. Eat, someone says. Drink, someone else says. Hours pass. There is no room to walk around the table where we toast and cry and eat and laugh, so Liva crawls across my lap to reach her grandmother—Ausma’s youngest daughter, my second cousin, a woman named Ligita, who upon seeing me for the first time, ran forward and embraced me so fiercely that I felt my own ribs under the pressure of her forearms, work-strong, sunned to the color of cloves. We’ve waited for you, she said, as she held me. We waited, and now you’re really here.
I can feel Ausma studying me from her place across the table, and whenever I meet her gaze, I read her expression as one of overwhelming happiness, but also great sorrow, as if in me she recognizes someone temporarily restored to her, but also still lost. I, in turn, study Ausma. Her h
air, downy as a catkin, combed so quickly I can still trace the pass of each tine. Her skin is remarkably smooth, like tumbled stone. Only her forehead is rifted and seamed—the kind of furrowing that is the result of sustained intensity, stress, exhaustion. She downs a single glass of sweet wine, presses a knuckle to her lips to stifle a belch, then winks at me. In some ways, she feels lighter than I ever remember my grandmother being, less restrained somehow. Like someone who keeps her sweetness and joy close to the surface, but also her anger, I think, looking at her hands, nicked and seamed with the white of old wounds, never stitched, left instead to find their own way to close. The kind of anger that helps a person stay alive.
Tea? someone asks.
And as we wait for the scream of the kettle, Ausma decides now is the perfect time to take me to meet the rest of our dead.
Out comes her album again, and she flips through the pages with the solemn efficiency of a tour guide tasked with escorting me through my unknown past: a wave to the ancient fraternity of grandfathers, leather-skinned and possessed of an uncanny knowledge of the cultivation of facial hair; the godmothers of names long forgotten; men dressed in uniforms for wars that were fought for sides she cannot recall.
Once, briefly, my great-great-grandmother steps out to meet us, ghostly, so faint even Ausma is momentarily unconvinced of her existence—I think that’s my grandmother, yes, no, yes. . . . A skirted figure, sitting in the gloom of what appears to be an agricultural shed; clearer is the lamb she holds by its two front legs, tender belly exposed to us, the legs blurred, kicking. Its appearance is followed by a succession of wedding dresses, white as the lamb’s pelt, empire-waisted, drop-waisted, each, regardless of the era, modeled by an unsmiling woman who also wears the Latvian bride’s traditional crown of flowers.
Did my grandmother have a wedding photograph? I ask.
Ausma does not seem to hear me.
Here is my wedding photograph! she says. I was sad because my dress got dirty and my roses were wilting.
Now she is taking me to see the corpses.
Formal funeral portraits: the body in its casket, the casket borne on the shoulders of the grieving to the cemetery plot. But first, this is where the body was laid out, in the front yard, under the linden trees, amid heaps of cut flowers. Covered in a white linen sheet, only the face is exposed, already hollowing in death, collapsing along its ridges, sinking like a roof staved by snow. Suited and kerchiefed, the grieving circle the body at the photographer’s instructions. And then—his flash. In this instant, all eyes are turned to the body. The body’s face already turned toward home.
And then, a new page.
Where is this? I ask, pointing to a portrait of Ausma, her mother, and brother. They are posing with another couple in a room with rough white walls, the dull brass of what appears to be a bed frame visible in the background, a single potted plant, hunched over, embarrassed, trying to shed its dropsied leaves. The women in the photograph all look off to the left, as if avoiding eye contact with the photographer. The men look directly into the lens.
And the Ausma who is here with me in this little dining room with a view to the surrounding pastures, empty now of cows, is making her way back there, too—I can feel it—as if she has pushed away from the table and shuffled out the front door, past the flea-gnawing dogs, the cats dug into the cool dirt beneath the cherry trees, across fields and through forests, heading deep into the wilds of her memories, emerging, finally, when she has reached the girl in that photograph.
She regards herself.
I’m in Siberia, she says.
Later, in the state archives in Riga, I will find hundreds of photographs like the one Ausma showed me of the white-walled room in Siberia, the same composition, but different faces, the work of enterprising itinerant photographers who roamed the region’s remote settlements, proposing to snap the portraits of the exiles who lived there in exchange for whatever they could offer in return. Scavenged berries. Socks. Sewing needles fashioned from fish bones. For the exiles, it was worth the sacrifice of their most precious commodities. Portraits offered proof of life. They resurrected the banished, restored them to sight, so that it was possible to imagine they existed once more in the world of the living. In some of the portraits, I notice the women are wearing a similar dress. It takes me a while to realize that it probably is the same dress, passed from one exile to another so that each might feel she looks her best for the photographer.
Who is the couple? I ask Ausma.
They were our neighbors there, Ausma says. Latvians, too. They came on the same train.
I study their faces. The woman wears a kerchief, which, according to the old ways, means she is married, but she looks more like the mother or even the grandmother of the man who stands protectively behind the chair where she sits. Her breasts are heavy, finishing in her lap. She grips one hand with the other, her fingers tensed, clawed. Her chin juts forward in the way of someone who has lost all her teeth, her mouth soft, quaggy, like a field after weeks of rain.
She had a baby, Ausma says. A newborn, just a few weeks old. It died on the way.
Ausma pushes up from the table, leaving me with the album, and shuffles off.
Then quietly, over her shoulder, as if an afterthought:
One of the guards took the body from her, then threw it out the doors of the train.
TO BE PART of a family is to know instinctively the subtleties behind what remains unsaid and why.
And yet, with my new, long lost family, it was clear that I still had so much more to learn.
About Ausma and Siberia, and what happened to her after my grandmother left Latvia.
But also, the farm.
I had assumed someone from our family must still be living at Lembi, because I had not heard otherwise. And yet, since my arrival, no one had brought it up, or suggested that we go there, and I could sense the silence surrounding it is something soft, vulnerable, like the things that are revealed when an old log is lifted.
I didn’t know enough yet to intuit the outlines of what was not there—though I had begun to suspect Siberia and the farm were somehow psychically linked, in a way that makes one silence impossible to understand outside the context of the other.
And so, I decided, at last, to ask if someone could take me to Lembi.
IN THE QUIET that follows, I can hear the shrilling of sparrows outside, the exaggerated yipping of a puppy. Through the window, I glimpse the dog’s silhouette: pawing and biting at the shadows the birds cast as they swoop over the lawn. The puppy belongs to Ligita and her husband, Aivars, a man with the ability to cultivate the kind of mustache the ancient fathers from the photographs would have admired, and an encyclopedic knowledge of what it means to be self-sufficient, down to milling his own wood by hand in a shed at the back of his house. The puppy is a German shepherd who was found abandoned, starving, in the parking lot of a nearby hamlet where Ligita works as a bookkeeper, signing checks for pensioners, writing receipts for library fines paid in change.
Gone, I think I hear someone say over the cries of the dog and the birds.
I wait for more. But the silence continues to extend between us, drifting like a fine mist of wood released by Aivars’s saw, until it occurs to me that no one feels comfortable giving me the words for what this means, that they need me to discover it on my own.
I’m just curious about the place where my grandmother grew up, I say. I have no other expectations, if you could just show me the way. And at that, the room seems to contract with relief.
Off to the car we trundle, including the baby, tiny Liva, shod in rubber boots, trying with unbending knees to outtrot the puppy who pursues her, openmouthed, grinning, desperate to lash her with its tongue. As we back down the driveway, he dances in place, dribbling pee, trying to contain the torture he feels at being left behind.
From the car window we see storks, gliding to standing in the overwintered fields, legs the color of the hottest coals puncturing the last riming seal of
snow. Here: smoke hanging above a chimney, weak, bowing, like the vertebrae of a grandmother with bad back. There: a pile of hay, gray with rot. A cat, belly-crawling through the mud, stopping to shake its paws with the fervor of someone trying to revive feeling in cold-numbed extremities. A woman, balanced on stacked heels, cell phone in hand, taking the brunt of the debris kicked up by the wheels of the car on her bare legs, headed down a stretch of road where there are only fields. An old man, glimpsed briefly, deep in a forested stretch—untamed woods, pathless—tugging a grocery cart.
When the car finally stops, we step out into a landscape that holds only still air, the hush of a place that has begun to forget what it is to hold a conversation with anyone other than itself.
And then, the house emerges from behind a screen of weeds.
I recognize it, in the way that one can sometimes briefly recognize, in the faces of the very elderly, all the versions of every age they have ever been.
From the outside, it is exactly as my grandmother described—there is the window in front of which she and her brother and sister posed for their portraits.
And now the stories are returning to me: there is the stoop from which my grandmother’s mother would have shouted for her to stop playing in the hemp fields, where my grandmother sometimes liked to sneak on hot days, the smell of the sun on the leaves like something sweet and something dead, all at once.
And there is the half of the house where Livija’s father’s elderly cousin would have lived with his wife, a woman said to have lacked the will to contain her chickens, who let them run everywhere, pecking and scratching like a mad herd, sharing their mites, laying, without qualm, in their cousin-chickens’ nests, until no one could say whose eggs were whose or whose chicks were whose.
And so then it would have been behind this wall, on the opposite half of the house, when, one day, in frustration, my grandmother’s mother would issue an ultimatum, the repercussions of which would drift far into the future, like a feather from one of the marauding poultry next door snatched up by the wind: Do whatever you have to. Buy up their share of the land. Promise to care for them to the end of their days. But those people and their chickens have to go. And because sixteen and a half hectares of dirt seemed, at the time, a small price to see something other than her back in the night, her husband agreed.
Among the Living and the Dead Page 4