Among the Living and the Dead

by Inara Verzemnieks

  And although he is part of the first generation that is born free, able, in theory, to choose any life now, not just the life of a serf, he finds there are still limits on what he can hope for himself. He is picked by his local parish priests as one of just three peasants’ children to study for the first time for free at one of the church schools where the barons and other well-to-do residents normally send their offspring. Where all the subjects are taught in German. And although he excels in school, the top student in his class after three years, his family doesn’t have the money for him to pursue further study, and when he goes back to the priests to appeal for help, he is pushed to forget his academic dreams, to focus instead on making his living as a laborer.

  And so he labors. He helps his father manage the properties of a series of manors, turns wood in the winters as a carpenter. He finds work as a ferryman, floating people across the river Daugava, dragging his pole through its silty waters, watching his changing reflection dart and shiver, like the fish that trail in the raft’s wake.

  He is in his midtwenties when he finally becomes a surveyor’s assistant, his pockets lined with levels and rulers. And also: pens. Because ideas are coming to him, clipped, precise lines of poetry, arranged like the grids of his emerging maps.

  Even as he sets the boundaries of the existing world, he can see the invisible one that fits inside of it, the hidden inhabitants and phenomena and cultural landmarks that appear whenever they are given voice, whether spoken or sung.

  He uses these old ideas to craft new lines of verse, jots them in the margins of his field notes, next to his calculations. And he senses that this could be the beginning of something more sustained, an epic even.

  But first, he must live his own version of the epic, the restlessness, followed by a requisite period of wandering, of fortune seeking, of testing one’s self against the challenges that come only through a period of self-imposed exile.

  His self-imposed exile leads him to Moscow, where he falls in with a circle of journalists and intellectuals whose thoughts on nationalism will ultimately spur him to volunteer as a surveyor for the Russian army, so that he might help the Serbs battle for independence against the Ottoman Empire.

  The military offers mobility. A spot at officers’ training school. And then, finally, a commission that delivers him back home, to the land where he grew up, this time in uniform, medals clinking.

  Upon his return, Andrejs Pumpurs begins to compose a series of cantos that flow from him, a strange liquid rilling of time. Chants, he calls them.

  It’s as if he has set himself back upon the river he once worked as a ferryman, his thoughts drifting like the old raft he rowed from shore to shore, his subconscious sending to the surface everything he has ever read or heard or seen.

  Bobbing by him now: a waterlogged copy of The Chronicle of Henry of Livonia, penned by a priest from the thirteenth century who witnessed firsthand the work of the knights of the Brothers of the Sword, as they attempted to tame Europe’s last pagans, a document of the violence required to subdue these people, who too long had been living, in the words of Pope Innocent III, in the darkness of infidelity, with their animal offerings and their queer way of thinking, which, with His divine help, would now finally vanish: eclipses said to be the auguries of an angry god who has used his teeth to gnaw away the sun; forests that mean more than the life of any man, trees which no axe must ever touch; hills and valleys and cliffs and caves and plants and beasts and impure spirits that are spoken to like sacred things by people who prefer to serve the created rather than the Creator.

  The poet fishes the priest’s book from the flow of his memories, shakes its soggy pages, then turns it upside down.

  The old gods float past, Thunder, Mother Fate, the Daughters of the Sun.

  Then come witches, hissing and spitting, lashed to a log; demons, the skin on their faces pulling back from their teeth to reveal gums prickly with bone fragment, flecks of eel skin; the devil, paddling his shaggy legs like a pony.

  Now and again, a tattered resistance fighter, perhaps, like those the poet saw in Serbia, bloodied, grim, looking off in the distance in a way that suggests a brave soldier seemingly unconcerned that a much larger army stands against him, like one who is posing as reference for an oil painting titled Martyr to Nationalism.

  At last, the poet stares directly into the depths of the Daugava, imagines a face taking form in the silt:

  A boy, but with ears furred and veined like a bear’s.

  The poet plucks the bear-boy from the river—and writes him into an alternate mythopoetic version of the past. One where he is a foundling, the child of man and bear, chosen specifically by the gods, and lifted from murk of the river where he has been cast, to help unite the Latvians against their occupiers.

  In the poet’s rendering, the boy is sent by the gods to live with the king of one of the pagan tribes. One day, while they are walking through forest, they are startled by a bear. It charges at the king, but the boy leaps between them and rips the bear’s jaw from its head, using only his hands. From this point on, the boy is known as Bear Slayer, and soon after, he sets off to pit himself against witches and demons, and other dark forces, preparing himself for the day he will finally meet the Black Knight, and his army of German crusaders, so bent on breaking and subjugating Bear Slayer and his fellow pagans.

  By the time the final, decisive duel arrives, it seems possible that the Bear Slayer, who up to now has only known success after success, might triumph.

  But as they clash, the Black Knight manages to slice off both Bear Slayer’s ears, having grasped that they are the source of his extraordinary strength.

  Stripped of his powers, and reduced to just a man, Bear Slayer fights as hard as he can. He strikes the Black Knight with his sword and splits his armor. The Black Knight in turn breaks Bear Slayer’s sword. Weaponless, Bear Slayer launches himself at the Black Knight. They grapple, inching closer and closer to the edge of a cliff. For a moment, it appears as if Bear Slayer will find just enough leverage to tip the Black Knight over the lip. But as the knight tumbles backwards, he grabs hold of Bear Slayer. Together, they plummet into the river from which Bear Slayer first rose. And they vanish.

  Unveiled at a time when the former serfs are just beginning to ask, however hesitantly, What is our collective identity?, Who are we?, How shall we think of ourselves?, the poet’s portrait of the hero Bear Slayer emerges as a potent metaphor.

  It will embed deeply in the emerging national consciousness, to be told and retold, again and again. The character of the Black Knight grows more and more fluid over the years, assuming new incarnations, depending on what the poem’s audience needs him to be at any given time.

  Still, as heroic national epics go, it’s a curious one. Decidedly downbeat. Unresolved. The hero fails—sails off a cliff to his death.

  But it’s the last lines, in particular, that have always unsettled me, in a way I could never quite name. Something about Harijs’s bear story tonight has sent me to the bookshelf in search of the exact text, not because I think Harijs’s bear story isn’t his own story, but because, sometimes, two very different stories have a way of asking the same question.

  In the final lines of the Bear Slayer, we learn, in fact, that the moment that has happened is still happening, that we are all trapped in a kind of eternal time. And this means that the knight and Bear Slayer did not actually disappear to their deaths, but instead remain hidden beneath the water’s surface, only to be endlessly resurrected, always returned to precisely the same spot, forced to reenact the same last steps.

  They clash. They tear flesh. Briefly, they teeter. Then, they begin their long slow pinwheeling descent toward the water. It never varies, never ends.

  In some interpretations, this suggestion of an eternal struggle is said to evoke the promise of transcendence—that the Bear Slayer can never really die, because he was never actually alive to begin with. Other interpretations focus on wording that implies, one day
, the Bear Slayer’s struggle could in fact end, but that it is up to us, as witnesses, to make it stop, the moment we assume his struggle as our own.

  Maybe it’s because I’m still thinking about what Harijs said earlier, but tonight, all I can see in the ending is an unbearable weariness—the characters never allowed to relive any other part of their story. Always, they are returned only to their worst last moments, of violence and suffering. Then they must repeat this, over and over and over again.

  We are always there, too, watching.

  No questions tomorrow, I say, but Ausma is in her room, in Harijs’s arms I hope, and I am alone in this dark, with what I know and what I don’t know struggling to arrange themselves into some kind of form inside of me.

  X

  THERE WAS A TIME, in the not-so-very-long ago, when the site of my great-grandfather’s death would have served as the very place all new lives together should begin.

  Back then, what young couples knew of love came from following the bobbing of torchlight through the bosky dark, away from the sounds of their celebrating families, to the barn. There, a bed would be spread on the floor to hold them on their wedding night, their bodies writing the first faint outlines of a future together in the dust.

  My grandparents didn’t have a proper Latvian wedding.

  They didn’t dance for two days straight.

  No one wove my grandmother the bride’s traditional crown made from the leaves of the bilberry. And at the stroke of midnight, my grandfather did not remove the crown from my grandmother’s head with the tip of a sword, then let the crown slide slowly down to the length of the blade to the hilt as everyone watched. My grandmother’s mother did not step forward to tie a scarf around my grandmother’s bare head, signaling that she was now a married woman. And the next morning, the entire wedding party did not burst into the barn, where the two slept, beating pots and pans, driving the new couple to the nearest spring so they might cup their palms in the icy water, then take turns washing their scent from each other’s faces with the tips of their fingers.

  My grandparents didn’t marry at Lembi, although, unlike Ausma and Harijs, they could have. At that time, Lembi still existed. My great-grandfather was still alive, his fall in the barn, and the beginning of the end of farm, still more than three years off in the distant future.

  Instead, my grandmother and grandfather said their vows in a registry office in Riga. They traded what appeared to be plain gold bands, with no other family, save my grandmother’s brother, in attendance.

  They never spoke much of their wedding, but from what little I had heard, I was left with the image of something somber, intensely private, muted, like the moth-soft scuffling of their voices that I could sometimes hear, in the days when I lived with them, as I lay in my bed in the room just beyond theirs, separated only by an unfinished doorway, whisperings that emerged only in the night, things they didn’t want to say or couldn’t say when anyone else was around, the unmistakable jagging rhythm of tears.

  During those years I lived with my grandparents, I had seen my grandfather grab my grandmother by the hips as she tried to pass when he sat reading the paper at the kitchen table, or when he was perched on the edge of their bed, unlacing his boots with thick, work-bent fingers. He would bury his face in the hollow of my grandmother’s back as she bucked and tried to get away from him, but she would be laughing, too, and I sensed that if I had not been there, she would not have been in such a hurry to slip from him. They did not say anything to each other in these moments. What passed between them was silent, physical. My grandfather had never been one to speak effusively, particularly when it came to feelings. He was not free with praise. When he wished to be extremely complimentary, he used the phrase Not bad. And if he was feeling especially moved by something: Pretty good.

  In his later years, however, my grandfather could not talk about my grandmother without his voice catching. What a beautiful woman—I am the luckiest man, he would say to anyone and to no one, and then he would paw at the tears that collected in the corner of his one good eye. But such displays of emotion always left him drained and mute, rocking back and forth, until finally he found the strength to reemerge, although by then he would launch into long, rambling stories about economics, the lessons one could learn from Latvia’s pork and sugar export policies of the 1930s, the business model of the chicken farm his family used to own in the town of Madona—anything, it seemed, to save himself from being overwhelmed by his feelings again.

  Once, at a gathering celebrating my grandparents’ anniversary, my grandfather, who had been lost in one of his silences, suddenly turned to me: I know that she loved someone else before me. I know because he was my best friend.

  He looked directly at me, his glass eye milky. I already knew her before I met her. My friend told me all about her. As he talked about her, I thought, I hope one day I could have a girlfriend like that. And then I saw her. She had long hair then, two braids down her back. I couldn’t stop thinking about her. It hurt, how much I thought of her. So do you know what I did next?

  It’s why I am here now, grandfather. Wandering this forest about forty kilometers from Ausma’s house, having negotiated a ride with a relative this morning, so I can leave her in peace; why I am scanning the bark of every tree I pass, trying not to think of the ticks I am stirring as I stomp through the underbrush. Beneath my feet, a thick carpet of bilberry. I can smell the scent the leaves release as they are crushed under my boots, like a jar of old pennies, the long forgotten drawer of a basement workbench, full of washers, screws, bent nails. I took a knife and I went out behind our school, to the woods, he said, and when I was sure no one could see me, I carved her name into a birch tree.

  THIS LAND has always made its own fables, like the one about the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the country’s former serfs who came to live in a palace that had once belonged to one of the barons who had ruled them.

  The palace was called Cesvaine, and the children slept in its turrets; they sipped cabbage soup in the former grand dining room, where stone bears nearly as tall as they were supported the mantelpiece of a fireplace on their great shaggy shoulders.

  The castle was made from stones, placed by architects brought specially from Berlin for the job, the vision of one Adolf Gerhard Boris Emil von Wulf, who should not, under any circumstances, be confused with a von Wolff, a separate baronial dynasty that happened to rule just a few kilometers down the road. This potential for confusion apparently elicited strong feelings in our young master von Wulf. So strong were his feelings, in fact, that when it came time for workers to mount a sculpture atop the pediment denoting the baron’s personal wing of his new palace, it was said to be no coincidence that a particularly demonstrative version of his family’s lupine mascot was chosen—tail lifted—and aimed in the direction of the rival house.

  Von Wulf had designed Cesvaine as a hunting palace, a place where he could mount the skulls of the roe deer and harts flushed from the neighboring forestland. He placed his trophies in careful rows above the castle’s tiled hearths, built by German craftsmen. The hounds paced and shed upon hand-laid parquet. Above them, in frescoes painted upon the vaulted ceilings, hawks retired to persimmon-branch perches to tear carp apart with the points of their beaks, while wolves, toothsome and unrelenting, snapped at the spindly legs of a bull moose, one misstep away from becoming carrion. Guests of the baron slept beneath more soothing images, carved reliefs on the walls of each bedroom featuring cherubs so content and fat as to appear kneeless, stomachs lolling happily below the waists of their loincloths.

  All this—this land, this title, the means to build these rooms—how much did he allow himself to think about how it had come into his possession, that it was all down to someone else’s death, a hunting accident, a blind shot in the woods that felled his father?

  In the end, young master von Wulf would have only seven years to enjoy what he had made of that inheritance, this palace with its scenes
of flight and pursuit, its cherubs, and cheeky wolf sculpture—as many years as it took him to build it.

  He died a few weeks before his forty-seventh birthday, in Vienna, and his body was returned to Latvia to be buried, at his request, on Cesvaine’s grounds.

  After the baron’s death, little is known about the subsequent events in the castle. This rather cryptic account is from a history commissioned not long ago by the local council.

  I like to picture the interior of the palace during those lost years: empty, still, white sheets draped over the unused furniture, the fug of trapped air, windows long unopened.

  And then, the fine layer of dust that covers the floor, the stairs, is stirred, as if by a gentle huff of breath.

  Maybe an antler, knocked crooked, slowly rights itself.

  Down in the basement, where the servants once dragged blocks of ice cut from the nearby stream to cool the contents of the palace larder, empty jars might suddenly jump and natter upon cobwebbed shelves.

  And upon each sheeted bed, in each locked bedroom, a depression appears—always to one side—whichever one he remembers preferring.

  I will give him fifteen years to roam like this, undisturbed by the pace of history unfolding outside the castle walls.

  And then comes the revolt of 1905.

  Even though the country’s former serfs, like my great-great-grandfather and his descendants, have lived as free men and women for almost ninety years by this point, most remain landless, unlike my great-great-grandfather and his descendants.

  So the peasants venture to Riga, the capital, drawn by stories of electric lights and streetcars, only to find that they still go to bed hungry and frustrated, that the hands of a good milker, the hands that can guide a draft horse at the plow, mean nothing on the assembly lines of the newly opened factories.