Among the Living and the Dead

by Inara Verzemnieks

  If one can be said to be lucky in such situations, the lucky ones will be delivered to areas where, maybe, there’s already a small, weathered community of existing exiles. Descendants of tsarist-era dissidents, or more recent arrivals, those shipped to the territories in the east within the last ten years—when the Soviet Union began its early experiments in the collectivization of all farmland, and officials realized the process would go much more smoothly if they simply banished a farm’s former owners rather than risk resistance. In these settlements, where about half of the newly arrived will die in the first year, from starvation or exposure, the presence of anyone who understands what it will take to endure means you might make it. Someone who is willing to share their crude tools, to offer a place on the floor of their dugouts, or at least to offer to barter bare necessities for whatever strange things the newcomers packed—a suit?—when they did not know what to pack.

  Even better: maybe the settlement will have managed to establish a rough working collective, with a bare share of food in exchange for one’s labor, a scratching of rations in the form of mealy grain, perhaps, whether offered, or pocketed.

  As far as the Soviet officials are concerned, there is no downside to this arrangement: every day that the exiles can survive is another day of unanticipated labor in a region rich in resources that would otherwise go unclaimed.

  And if the exiles die—and more than half of these exiles will—then, that’s another problem taken care of, too.

  IN THOSE EARLY DAYS, the story of the missing is a story they tell one another without saying a thing, the anxious transmissions of a hive mind, the entire village babbling silently to itself, as if suddenly, everyone is the old woman who can no longer remember her name, who bickers with her shadow, pitches pebbles at the sun, sucks the filth from her hands as if it’s really sweets.

  A list of the things they thought they saw that they did not know whether they should admit to anyone else:

  The farmer’s wife and her children, led from their own house, their fronts still dusted from making the morning’s bread. The neighbor’s cat that never crossed the threshold of the barn, that directed its wormy rump at anyone who tried to make eye contact, emerging from your peonies, jittery, dropping fleas, pleading for food. The little man well placed in the local Party, who is now sitting on a pile of pillows, driving the buggy you could swear belonged to the blacksmith.

  They react like a village of strangers. Each thinking no farther than the borders of his own life. And in this way, dread becomes something both secret and shared.

  It trails Ausma for an anxious week, plodding just behind her, a phantom presence that makes her uneasy in a way that can’t be put into words.

  Like the moment a fish’s belly slips through the knife’s slit?

  No.

  Like the egg, when rapped against a bowl, that disgorges bits of unformed chick, pale dimpled skin, a streaking of beak, the suggestion of an eye?

  That’s not right, either.

  Best to stop there, to quit trying.

  Some things don’t need to be put into words that anyone else can understand.

  This is hers and hers alone, the dread of a thirteen-year-old girl.

  And it follows its own logic:

  Because dread is a secret thing, and the future is a secret thing, now the future becomes something to dread.

  Wake to the sound of the stars. Stumble out to the cows. Place your pail so that you can lean into their warm flanks while you work, let them steam your skin when they reach back with their noses to nudge you, testing whether you are just a fly. Then close your eyes and half-sleep while you tug the milk from them. Know how much you have already done by the way the pail sings. Try not to think about how much you don’t know, such as whether today could be the day that your mother is imagining when she cries from the nest that is her bed and says she wishes your sister would come home, so that whatever is going to happen, we can at least be together when it happens, and your father says, or are you dreaming, shh, let her have her life, while she can.

  BOMBS TELL YOU they are coming by the sound of your brother’s voice, something held together with sinew and bone, like a hand in your back, driving you underground, into the cold cellar.

  BELOW THE LEVEL where anything can grow, they wait, like bolted seeds.

  Just a week has passed since the last trains pulled away from Latvia, carrying all those thousands of unspoken names east. And now, this is when the German troops choose to launch a surprise attack against the Russians, and claim Latvia for their own.

  They send their planes to Riga first, dropping bomb after bomb, until vast sections of the city are little more than pumiced swales, steaming mounds of slag, the spaces previously occupied by buildings suggested only through negative space; when all that is left is what surrounds what is not there.

  That which still manages to stand looks spun, not built.

  Seen from above, it’s almost possible to pretend Riga is no longer a city, but a vast flattened field where, in the cool of the early morning, before a foot or a hoof has touched the grass, hundreds of spiderwebs might suddenly appear visible to the naked eye, each spare strand latticed with dew.

  Down in the cold cellar in Gulbene, in the rooted dark, they listen to the zippering shriek of the planes, and hope that Livija is also somewhere safe, wherever she might be in Riga. The earth relays the only news they receive from the surface, dribblings of dirt and earthworm casings in patterns that communicate the concussive forces of the various forms of ordnance, antiaircraft rounds launched from the ground, bombs dropped from the skies, aerial skirmishes, hit or miss, miss or hit, near, far, near, near, far.

  When, finally, they climb to the surface, they see scorched sections of road, smoldering bits of fuselage, blistered fields. But Lembi still stands. Somewhere, in the distance, a horse is screaming, whether in distress or fear, it is impossible to tell.

  Next come the Russian ground troops, trailing German tank fire, the sparking cut of machine guns, their uniforms smoke-soaked, their faces furred and singed from the carbon particles released by the torches they’ve touched to the roofs of the farmhouses that appear on their path of retreat. But first, they lift all possible supplies, raid the larders, liberate equipment and horses. Then they flint the matches. Their goal in retreat is to leave the Germans nothing, by taking everything from the peasants.

  At Lembi, they track the path of the German advance and the Russian retreat by the graying of the sky. The candling incandescence of the signal flares replace the regular rhythm of sunrise and sunset. They know they lie in the path of the fighting. They do not want to leave Lembi, but they also don’t want to be caught in the crossfire. So they round up the animals, eyes rolling, trailing nervous snot. They pack the wagon as if they are never coming back, and head for a clearing, deep in the forest, where they will hide along with some of their neighbors.

  Days pass. No one sleeps. That includes the animals, bleating and wheeling, tangling their leads, pissing on themselves, mouths foamy with grass and worry.

  Ausma feels their lathering fear. She works her jaw, tries to rid herself of the clenching pain that she’s grown to suspect is a bad tooth. She’s rubbed her gums with the salve they make from what they find in the bees’ hives, held compresses to her swelling cheek, but the pain won’t break. She sweats through her clothes, then shivers under blankets. When she opens her eyes she is not sure if it is fever that makes her see a figure emerging from the forest.

  It is a German soldier, and she can’t understand much of what he says. She has been out of school for so long now that she is struggling to recall her language lessons—and soon, the Germans will requisition the school where Ausma might have gone back, if life had ever returned to normal, which it will not, the new occupying forces claiming it now for the convalescence of wounded soldiers, so that the few German words Ausma still possesses in this moment will be the extent of all she will ever learn of the language, at least formally. />
  The soldier is speaking directly to her, pointing to the hand she holds to her cheek. She thinks he is asking her what’s wrong, that maybe he is trying to establish whether she has been wounded. Finally, she blurts out what she thinks is the word for pain. She opens her mouth, points to her tooth. Pain, she repeats.

  The German nods, dips his hand into a supply bag. In his palm, a pill, no bigger than a seed. He offers it to Ausma, motions for her to place it in on her tongue.

  She swallows it without water. And almost immediately, the pain is gone. Someone translates: the German soldier is telling everyone that they can go back to their farms now—the fighting is over. The Russians are defeated, and the country has been liberated.

  She looks at this soldier who has just shown her this kindness, however small. Later, she will hesitate remembering the moment, a grave misreading of right and wrong that she otherwise would not have regarded herself capable of, but this is what she thinks, in that moment, in the dark of the woods, the pain momentarily leaving her: maybe life will be better now with the Germans.

  XII

  THE GRANDFATHER of my memories strips down to his white undershirt, the elastic braces on his pants still hitched up over his bare shoulders. I watch—maybe four years old—as he stands before the old bathroom mirror, clouded as a cataract, holding his left eye in one hand. Careful not to drop the eye in the basin or on the floor where the glass could chip, he runs it under the tap, rinsing it with a gentle stream of warm water. When he is finished, he uses his free hand to pry the skin around his left eye wide, and for an instant, the cavity carved more than thirty years ago by the Russian soldier’s bullet is visible. Then, with a muffled pop, he wedges the eye back into its socket.

  HE IS ALWAYS trying not to think about the last image that he saw with both eyes. If only it had been his wife, and the pale down on her postchildbirth belly, still stretched to fit the shape of their first son, conceived four months before he received his orders to the front. Or the view from their apartment, where he used to lie with her in the days before the war, the two of them on the narrow bed, knowing what was just beyond the window, the tramline, and the cemetery just beyond that, the graves overgrown and unmarked, dating back to the days of the plague, when bodies could not be buried within five miles of Riga’s old center for fear of contagion. Or even a formula, drawn on the chalkboard, back when he still taught ­economics—AFC + AVC, or maybe, MV = PT—white dusting the hairs of his knuckles on his writing hand, round glasses sliding down his nose.

  THE BULLET pierces the metal bridge of his glasses first. The eye is gone before he even registers the loss. Initially, there is no pain, only the sound of his boots on packed earth as he staggers back through the trenches, over bodies, toward someone who might help.

  FOR THE PAST FEW DAYS, they have been counting rounds, watching their munitions slowly disappear shot by shot, wondering, bellies to the ground, when the forest will stop firing at them. They have laid a clutch of mines at the edge of the trees and strung a fence of barbed wire that spasms with each blast. But they know that none of this will be enough to hold back the gathering Russian troops, who outnumber them ten to one.

  What matters now is not whether they can defend this line, but for how long. They are all that is left to keep the Russian army from advancing on the capital, eighty kilometers away.

  The calculus at work is desperate, simple: each additional moment they can absorb the Russian onslaught gives someone in Riga the chance to flee, and all the soldiers seem to have someone in Riga, including him. What is left then but to load his remaining rounds, and hope that this is what she is doing, running, that she does not stop, there is no time for hesitation. There is only time for her to sweep up their two children and leave. Leave it all: the window and the narrow bed. Leave everything, including him.

  They run out of ammunition on the second day of fighting. The blood has churned the dirt of the trenches to mud in places. He still has a grenade, his pistol. The silence in the forest, the sound of his own breath, should tell my grandfather that the Russians are on the move, slipping under the barbed wire, creeping toward the ten-kilometer-long trench that has sheltered the Latvian troops. Soon, they are skittering over the lip like spiders.

  For the next two days, they fight with their hands, with whatever is at hand, the narrow passageways of the trenches breached, overrun. There is always a press of the enemy’s brown uniforms, emerging ahead of you, or behind you, guns drawn. The moment will come when your back is turned, and they are nearly upon you. And something, a twitch, a mote, a flicker of red from a uniform collar, snags on my grandfather’s consciousness. And the pin is out before he can even think. And now the grenade is wheeling from his hand toward the Russian soldiers, their turned backs, feet digging into dirt for purchase, as they try to flee. And now he is running through the smoke, and the black and the ash of what remains, running in the direction of their retreat, pushing deeper and deeper into the trench after them.

  The man with the gun is just around the corner. They surprise each other. It is an officer, a Russian captain, identifiable by the leather belt cinched at his waist. And clipped to that, the empty holster from which his pistol has already been withdrawn, hammer back.

  Together, they fire. This will be the last thing my grandfather sees with both eyes. As he squeezes the trigger of his pistol, he turns his face away, toward the packed earth walls that surround him.

  Oh, sparrow, when will you take a wife?

  In autumn, fall time, time of the barley.

  All the birds were invited to the wedding,

  Only owl was not invited.

  Owl went uninvited,

  And sat at the end of the table.

  Sparrow asked the owl to dance;

  Owl trampled sparrow’s foot,

  Sparrow pecked out owl’s eye.

  HE WAS CONSCRIPTED, that was all he would say about his time in the war.

  Conscripted into the Latvian Legion.

  And that is all true, but the longer I remain in Latvia, the more clearly I can see that there are some truths that can become more damaging than any lie. Truths built from omission.

  When my grandfather fought that day in the battle in which he lost his eye, it is true that he fought as a conscript of the Latvian Legion. But it is also true that technically, even as someone who was drafted into the legion, and not a volunteer, he fought for Germany. He wore a German uniform. It is also true that within the structure of the Nazi military, the legion was classified as a formation within the Waffen S.S., even though, as members of one of the several ethnic legions established in countries occupied by Germany during the war, they were not considered by the Nazis to be genuine S.S., more like cannon fodder for the front lines.

  These are the things I know now. Things I did not know then.

  But because my grandfather never spoke of the war and his part in it, I had always sensed, even as a child, that it must have been a source of tremendous guilt and shame, a suffering so awful that he did not want to think about it. And yet, as he silently rocked and shook and cried in his chair in front of the TV, the sound blaring, an old man, liver-spotted, ­fragile-boned, it was clear he could not block the memories of what he had seen when he still possessed two good eyes.

  IN GOES the eye.

  And it’s July 1, 1941.

  The day the one army retreats from Latvia, taking with it its hammers and sickles, and Serov’s NKVD officers and their thousands upon thousands of secrets, some of which will soon be unearthed from mass graves beneath the prison where everyone suspected the disappeared were taken and questioned. Other secrets—specifically the more than fifteen thousand now just two weeks into their journeys east, still locked in their train cars, but already dying—will remain, a bewildering and unresolved haunting of horror, confusion and rage.

  And another army enters, readying swastikas and yellow stars.

  Briefly, the country’s national anthem warbles over the radio. And then,
as the German tanks roll into Riga’s center, the radio begins broadcasting a new call to loyalty: those interested in volunteering for a special branch of the auxiliary police to rid Latvia of traitors, including Communists and Jews, should report at once to the headquarters being established in Krisjana Valdemara Street, quarters requisitioned from a local Jewish banker.

  Even today, some Latvians say that it wasn’t until after the German troops arrived that the savagery began, that it was their presence which began to turn something in people, but that version of events would mean ignoring the women who, on July 1, 1941, have just appeared on Riga’s main boulevard dressed in folk costumes, braids bouncing, as they offer bites of bread and shots of vodka and their upturned mouths to the incoming S.S. officers. It would mean ignoring the men, speaking Latvian to one another, who have gathered down in the basement of the banker’s former home on Krisjana Valdemara Street, securing plastic sheeting to the walls, something to catch the anticipated sprays of blood. It would mean ignoring the line of volunteers that has already formed outside the building with its plastic-sheeted basement, hundreds by one estimate, many wearing the colors of the fraternities from the University of Latvia, where my grandfather teaches. It would mean turning our eyes away from the Jewish man who is being beaten by men in suits, as if they have just stepped away from their desks, at the feet of a statue of the writer Rudolfs ­Blaumanis—the author of the novel In the Lap of Happiness—in broad daylight, in one of the city’s busiest parks.

  Within twenty-four hours, Riga’s major newspapers publish the following notices: Jews must surrender all property; they may no longer ride on public transportation or use sidewalks; they may not own radios; they may no longer stand in any lines and must only shop in places where there are no lines.

  That night, men wearing armbands in the colors of the Latvian flag roam the city, going door to door, looking for all Jewish residents. Many landlords are happy to direct them to the proper apartments. Once the doors open, the beatings begin, then lootings, and finally, arrests. The prisoners are marched in columns down the streets of Riga to the headquarters on Valdemara Street, where they are then led to the basement, but not before they are stripped of all valuables, rings and watches, which their jailers take a moment to enter into a ledger, then slip onto their own fingers and wrists.