I nod. She somehow managed to look elegant just going to the supermarket, or hanging laundry, I say.
Livija did everything just so, says Ausma. Her stitches were always straight. Her dough, always soft and light, like so many feathers! I looked up to her. Our mother was sick a lot of the time, especially after I was born, so Livija raised me, really—a surrogate mother. Like she raised you. She was the one who braided my hair. She was the one who fed me. She was the one who taught me how to knit and how to read, before I even started school. But oh, she was a demanding teacher. She made me sit and work for hours. Stop fidgeting, she would say. Practice your letters!
How old were you when you last saw her, before she went away? I ask.
Let’s see, says Ausma, it was the last time she came to visit the farm. She had just married your grandfather and they had just had their first baby. I was fourteen, I think. Yes, that’s right. I was fourteen. Maybe I was fifteen. But no older. Oh how I missed her all the way in Riga. And then the phones stopped working. And then the trains. And then she was gone.
When did you hear from her again?
Not until we had come back from Siberia. By then, she was in America.
So neither of you knew what happened to the other after the war?
No, Ausma says. Not even during the war. She was in Riga. We were here. Hiding in the forest with the cows as the planes dropped bombs. What we each lived through, we lived through alone. Without the other ever feeling along.
I FEEL along with you, the Latvians say, when they want to express genuine understanding, compassion, even sympathy toward one another. It’s interesting to me the way the construction of the phrase implies action, movement.
As if any true act of empathy demands not only emotional projection but also physical accompaniment, a willingness to travel with the other, deep into the unknown of wherever it is they must go.
PLEASE, AUSMA SAID, Take me, too.
She said it standing on the platform, crying and arguing with the soldiers who stood guard over the row of boxcars that stretched down the tracks. Through the gaps she could see eyes blinking, hands snatching at the air. Letters dropped to the tracks, and the people in the boxcars yelled to those who stood outside: Please pick up my note and bring it to my relatives, let them know where I am.
Upon discovering the ransacked farmhouse, Ausma had run to her father’s cousin’s farm.
Your mother and brother are at the train station, her cousin’s husband told her, and he took her there, led her to the car that held them.
Her mother cried and reached to her through the opening. I’m glad you’re safe, she said, and Ausma realized that her mother must have suspected something, sent her away on an errand to the seamstress on purpose, so she was not at home when the soldiers arrived.
Ausma cupped water in her hands, brought what she could to her mother’s and brother’s mouths. They told her they had heard the railcars were scheduled to depart the next morning, and although no one would tell them where they were headed, everyone knew, because it was not the first time.
What will you do? they asked her.
She didn’t know what to say.
That night, at her cousin’s, she tried to think.
They let her cry for her family, and then they told her to be practical.
You can’t do anything for them now. Best to save yourself. You are young. You still have a chance. That’s how you can help them now: by making sure someone lives.
That’s what she would remember, years later:
Make sure someone lives.
She didn’t sleep, and left in the morning before the sun. She would need supplies for the journey ahead, and she hoped to make it back to the farmhouse before a new wave of looters arrived.
A woolen blanket, a small hatchet, a honey tin. That was all the house had left to give her.
They tried to turn her away at the train station. The soldiers told her she was a stupid girl. Go home, they said. They could not understand what she was trying to do. Who volunteered for their own exile?
But she begged, and she pleaded—take me too—and finally they agreed to unlock the door of the railcar where her mother and brother were held.
Ausma stepped into the dark.
It’s me, she said, because they couldn’t see who it was at first. I’m coming with you.
You’re here? My girl is here? her mother cried. Oh, what are you doing, she said, her voice caught somewhere between relief and grief. What are you doing.
And now I come intruding from the present to ask how old she was when she gave herself up.
She says, I was sixteen.
But later, as I am running through the dates, I realize that this cannot be right, that she would have been twenty-one when she stood on the railway platform and asked to be sent with her family to Siberia.
I mention this to Ausma. She looks at me for a long time.
I was sixteen when my life ended, she says again.
I try once more: But that’s before Siberia.
Yes, she says. But that’s why it wasn’t so hard for me to go. I felt like my life was already over.
At sixteen?
She nods.
What happened when you were sixteen?
She doesn’t answer.
Ausma?
VIII
THE LATVIANS have always named their farms, as if they were living things, and it is a name that tends to remain—still printed on all official maps, like the one I am holding now, unfurled on the backseat, pinned against the wind roaring in through the open windows with my fingertips—long after all other evidence of that farm has disappeared.
Whether out of respect or neglect or superstition or maybe all three, when a farmhouse is abandoned in the countryside, it is never torn down. It’s left just as it was the moment the last person pulled the door closed. And in this way it will sit—as rain tongues plaster from the walls, as the weight of the winter snow snaps ceiling joists—waiting for someone to return.
Sometimes, though, this waiting goes on for so long that the farm can no longer remember what it once was. Like a drunk counting backwards, it is unable to retrace the exact order of its unmaking. And yet, maybe that is not such a bad thing.
Because watch what happens as each shingle scattered on the ground lifts, drifting back onto the roof.
See walls unbuckle, the center beam unsplinter.
Brick by brick, the chimney rises. Vines retreat. Windows unshatter.
And now boards must mend to restore the edge of the hayloft upon which suddenly my great-grandfather alights, as if spit from somewhere far below, feet scrabbling, neck untwisting, a death repeated, even as it is reversed.
AUSMA IS THE ONE who finally suggests that we visit together. We’ve been circling the subject for weeks, and I have been hesitant to push her. I have been eager to visit whatever remains, to register the progress of the farm’s decay over the past year, but it’s too far to walk on my own.
I haven’t been back to Lembi for so long, Ausma says, her belly to the sink, using the blunt side of a knife to scrape the skins off potatoes that she’s just spaded from the soil. I don’t want to see it anymore. There’s nothing there, anyway. Why would you want to go there?
It seemed like the happiest place my grandmother had ever known, I say. She talked about it with me so much, it seemed like she wanted me to know it, the way she knew it.
Ausma studies me.
The farm was a very different place for my sister, she says. She could enjoy her youth there.
And you? I ask.
It took my childhood, she says.
Then, suddenly, one morning, over tea and tomatoes and pickled herring, Ausma announces that this would be the perfect day to take a drive.
The hay can wait, she says to Harijs, who has spent the last week winching half-ton rolls of hay into the loft of the old cowshed. Get the car.
With Harijs at the wheel, we lurch onto the main road, past Ausma’s old horse rubb
ing against the bark of an oak tree, past the storks, trailing a few steps behind the harvesting tractors, beaks open for prey scattered by the blades. I move to put my seat belt on and Ausma laughs. There’s no point out here, she says, and it’s not clear whether she means that the gesture is unnecessary, or that it’s futile. I let go of the strap.
Soon it is only dirt beneath the tires. Ausma names the abandoned farms we pass. That belonged to my godfather, she says. He disappeared in the war. No body. We never knew what happened to him. There—our neighbors. Dead.
As she speaks, stands of birch and ash and aspen rise and repeat, a white noise that drowns out all other landmarks, yet somehow Ausma can still sense when we have crossed the old property line.
This is where Lembi starts, she announces over the droning of the trees. Right here.
Right here, the baron’s secretary said. Sign here.
And my great-great-grandfather, who never learned to write his own name, drew three “X”s.
It is the eighth of January 1882, and with those quill strokes Andrejs Smits is the first of his family to own the land where his ancestors before him have lived and worked and died.
Their home has always belonged to someone else. Going all the way back to the days of mud and sticks and squatting forms huddled in marshes, honing bone with sharpened stones, the region’s inhabitants have only ever really held the briefest of claims to the ground that they lived upon, or had a say in what it is called, or how it will appear on any maps.
Babies here might be born under the flag of one nation, but by the time they draw their next breath, another flag is already being unfurled.
Where do you come from?
Always, there are two possible answers:
I come from _____ [insert name of country today].
Or: I come from here.
Here—meaning the grass and stones beneath a person’s feet, the ground upon which they are raised. Because that will never change, regardless of who happens to be ruling at any particular moment.
Here pins each person to something solid against which they can always reference themselves, no matter how weird or confusing things get, the way a drunk puts his toes on the floor beside the bed to try to stop the swirls.
And for its part, each successive occupation also sees those who live in these territories as inseparable from their land—as in: desirable features of a particular property, tallied on plat maps like water sources, hillocks or meadows.
But there is no concept of the Latvians as a people, except in relation to what they can do for others, because there is no concept of Latvia as a country, except in relation to what it can provide to others.
To be born in the territories now known as Latvia prior to the twentieth century is to more than likely be born a serf, bound under hereditary contract to provide a lifetime of labor to the wealthy friends of whatever empire happens to be ruling at the time. In the three or so centuries leading up to my great-great-grandfather’s purchase, the countryside is largely under the possession of titled Germans, some of them descendants of the Brothers of the Sword who helped the Catholic Church tame the region’s pagan tribes.
They have last names like von Wolf or von Hen, sons and daughters of men named Johan Gottlieb II or Heinrich Johan I—friends, counsel and cousins to the tsars. They refer to the Latvians as a whole as not-German. Alongside the Latvians’ crops, they raise neo-Gothic manors and neo-Romanesque manors, baroque manors, manors with Corinthian columns that support carved pediments of birds and flowers and family crests through which they usher their opera-singer brides, their Italian-novelist lovers.
They build stables and riding arenas and wine cellars and plant shrubs in the shape of their spouses’ initials, pour concrete for platforms upon which they may enjoy afternoon tea as they look out over their lands. There is no limit to their wealth, but, out here in the countryside, they discover there is a limit to their knowledge.
They do not know how to handle rye seed, how to lay by hand the stone foundations of a livestock barn. They cannot gauge by the change in the light when it is time to head to the fields with the scythes, have never burned the bedding and clothing of the dead and then turned the warm ashes back into the soil.
For the care and cultivation of those things that exist beyond the baron’s understanding, he turns to his serfs—like the family of my great-great-grandfather—happy to prosper from their knowledge, even if he is not certain it qualifies as a form of intelligence.
These are people, after all, who insist on the existence of devils, so say the pastors hired by the barons to run the local churches. They have heard the farmers talking, heard them speaking to one another about visitations and sightings, though how much of what is being said can the German-speaking pastors truly catch? There exists no written version of their parishioners’ language to refer to, except for what the clergy themselves begin to try to create from the Latvians’ chatter. But the sounds keep slipping just beyond the pastors’ reach. Shh, one hears. Tsch, hears another. At one point, there are a dozen proposed variations of just one letter. It’s possible to listen, but never hear. The serfs understand perfectly, though, when one says to another:
If you wake in the morning to find a devil has left footprints in your field, wait for the next rain. Then drink the water caught in his tread.
Or a man says:
Once, the devil surprised me after I had fallen asleep while working in the threshing barn. “Who’s that in there?” the devil asked. “Linen,” I said. The devil wanted to know if he could come in, too. “Only if you can endure everything I have had to endure,” I said. “And what have you had to endure?” the devil wanted to know. So I told him: “Along with hundreds of others, I have tried to make a life from the soil, but then one day, we were set upon, yanked from our home, and our heads chopped off. Then we were drowned in water, and left to bake in the sun. After that, all our bones were broken, what was left of our bodies pulverized. Finally, we were combed and spun and then threaded through needles, woven and then sewn and then worn and then used until we were nothing but brittle rags.” But by the time I had finished recounting all this, the devil had decided he couldn’t in fact endure all this, not even as a story, and he fled.
When one of the barons unveils on his property a gate through which all guests must pass and names it Devil’s Gate, it’s hard to know whether this is meant to be a pointed reference of self-awareness or a simplistic attempt to mock local superstition. Regardless, the baron staffs Devil’s Gate with men who it is said as a condition of their employment must never bathe or change their clothes or cut their hair, so as to look like wretched beings of the other-world, gnashing and howling for the passing carriages, then presumably heading back to their room inside the gatehouse to warm a cup of brackish tea.
Beyond Devil’s Gate lies the castle with battlements and stone lions and a pond that wishes it was a moat. It has been in the possession of the von Tranze family since the early 1800s. From the exposed-timber beams they hang chandeliers in the shape of mermaids, forever gliding through the air in the direction of their finely cusped breasts. The von Tranzes love, too, the empty armor of dead knights, lavish arrangements of flowers and feathers that spill from vases sculpted to look like gliding swans. They collect wall-size paintings of capering fauns, barrel-loined centaurs—anything by the artist Hans Makart, darling of nineteenth-century Viennese society, lover of allegory and thick gold leaf, inspiration to Gustav Klimt.
This is where the peasants come when they must seek the baron’s favor. As a people they are not unaccustomed to the idea that the everyday world can be populated with the fantastical, recognizing as they do not only the very real possibility of devils in their midst, but also cats possessed with the hidden power of speech, weddings which take place between the sun and the moon, gods concealed in tassels of wheat. Still, what must they make of all these translucent-skinned nymphs and scepter-wielding Dianas, all the wolves and lions that emerge from their dens car
ved deep in the wooden lintels to listen, teeth exposed, as the serfs plead their requests. Maybe you were caught stealing wood from the baron’s forest and so the overseer took your saw. Or maybe you have found a girl and you are ready to exchange wedding rings—iron bands fashioned from blacksmiths’ scraps—but before you and your bride can say it for yourselves, the baron must first say yes.
The grandmothers say that if you slap the jamb of the door on your way in, it might ensure that the baron’s resistance lasts only as long as the sound of your palm against the wood.
What they mean: Go ahead and ask. But you can’t expect to hold any more sway than a simple knock of flesh against wood.
Those same grandmothers will also tell you: A stone often lifted never becomes green.
What they mean: Don’t hope too much. Best to accept your situation, endure.
This is what qualifies among the serfs as happy talk. The Germans for their part find the Latvians to be terrifyingly grim, stoic to the point of catatonia. About fifty years before my great-great-grandfather’s birth, a book circulates among the landed class, a chronicle of Latvian peasant life written by the son of a rural minister who hopes that his grim, unblinking account of serf existence will guilt landowners into repentance and reform.
A Latvian reacts to the suffering and death of his children or his closest relatives with an unsettling blank calm. No one has ever shown him any empathy, and so he cannot summon it when it comes to others. Given the crushing grip of his everyday wants, all ties, even those between blood relatives, are as fragile as a spider’s web. In their lives, we see the effects of constant, sustained cruelty.
Soon it is all anyone is reading. On fainting couches stuffed with horse’s hair, or from the pillowed nests of four-poster beds. Editions are ordered in Russian and French and Danish. Some people read it with the kind of heavy shame that one reserves for Martin Luther’s version of church, rough stone under bare knees. But others read it hungrily, compulsively, skipping the more pedestrian sections on Latvian folklore and language to get right to the shocking bits.
Among the Living and the Dead Page 7