Through the radio, word comes of each new town taken. Liepaja, Jelgava, Tukums, where it is said, people are flayed alive, women raped, a man’s hand severed from his wrist by a Russian soldier who wanted his watch (in every town, there are stories of Russians killing for watches, so that it grows unclear whether we are talking about actual theft, or simply repeating a parable about the destruction of order, of certainty, of all previously agreed upon references).
Officers of the Reich can be seen racewalking Riga’s narrow streets toward the port, where they descend gangplanks of ships bound back to Deutschland. The radio soothes—avoid panic—as the city flares. Soon the refugees’ animals begin to disappear, reduced to nothing more than smears of fat, gristled bones. Then the refugees disappear, too. Some are down at the docks, begging for a spot on any departing boat. No room, they’re told. That’s because others are already on board, rounded up against their will by Riga’s police, who are under order to find all able-bodied men and women who can be sent to the Reich to help try to reverse the course of the war, whether they want to or not. In the forests outside Riga, soldiers order the few Jewish prisoners not yet murdered to shove the lips of their shovels deep into the earth to exhume the bodies of those who have already been slaughtered. And then they make them burn the corpses, before they themselves are shot.
From the middle of September onward, Riga is bombed every night. No one sleeps. Or if they do, they sleep cocooned in clothing, shoes against the sheets, so that they are ready to run.
Maybe it is when the Germans girdle two of the bridges leading into Riga with explosives—what is a bridge if not the promise of passage—or maybe she has heard that soon they will start slipping mines into the waters around the port, but now leaving is all Livija can think about.
No matter what she chooses—to stay or to go—it will only promise more uncertainty. In the end, my grandmother chooses an uncertainty that she hopes, at least for the moment, will deliver her, and the children, from the immediate threat of violence, from the bombs spit by the hunchbacks that maim and crush, like the children a few blocks over, now entombed in the rubble of their apartment; from the gunfire of snipers who have taken position on bridges, on rooftops, drunk on vodka, some say, shooting at ghosts.
Out on the street, her friend Liene waits, pale eyes stinging for the smoke, one more set of hands for the babies. They attempt to board a boat out of Riga, jostled up the gangplank by the parade of groaning bags, swaddled bodies, layered not against cold, but to maximize the number of clothes one might carry, coats clinking, hems heavy with coin, fur stoles circling necks and shoulders like life rings. In the pocket of my grandmother’s coat, the photos my grandfather has taken, freed from their albums to take up less space, a jumble now of baby, baby and sow, baby and switch, baby on horse, baby and mother, baby and father, now the mother on her own, seen not as parent, but as lover, face framed by the gentle V in a vase of fresh-cut pussy willows, her close-lipped smile coded, charged. They make it as far as the deck, but then are ushered off again to make room for retreating German troops. On the shore, they stand, numb, watching the boat’s departure.
We can imagine from our own safe distance the water roiling in the ship’s wake, like the surface of a pot left to boil too long. And then the familiar drone from the skies, a blink, and the sea explodes.
When they look again, the plane is gone, the boat is gone, the water still.
Years later, long after she is dead, and after I have begun my trips to her lost village, in a satchel tucked in the far corner of my grandmother’s closet, I will find a ticket granting passage to a boat departing Riga’s harbor on that day. I will never be able to determine whether this is the ticket for the lost ship that almost carried her, or if it was for the ticket of the boat she eventually boarded, and which ultimately spirited her from Latvia. Eventually, and it will take a long time, I will realize that it does not matter.
Either way, its presence serves to establish the same proof, and that is not of the idea of proof in the definite sense—that which is clear and determined and fathomable—but rather proof of all that can be explained only by random happenstance, a slight hesitation, a pause, a retraction, a stupid doubling back, action that unfolds without regard to intent; that there is nothing to your survival more grand than the ship you took, or did not take, that your claim on life is as thin as this ticket, the edges worried, shiny with the oils of her hand, as if she had taken it out and looked at it again and again.
WHAT DID she see once they made land, and began to walk, trying to make their way west? Hundreds of thousands of other people were doing the same: the displaced, deserters, war criminals, their intended victims who had managed to resist, to escape, all walking as one limping mass through the carnage. Likely she saw versions of what other people saw or said they saw: a teenage girl who stopped the flapping of her shrapnel-studded scalp with her last bobby pin; the man forced to slit the throat of his horse after it dropped to knees, as if its legs were broken at the fetlocks, and refused to rise, only to find moments later, strangers setting upon the steaming carcass with knives; the clots of smoke that hung over villages, the burning of unearthed bodies, the German troops and their local collaborators trying to erase all evidence of their killings; the silence of those who witnessed this, but never spoke of what they knew, trying to erase what they had not done; women, traveling alone, regardless of age, forced behind barns, into roadside copses by men in uniform, emerging, the backs of their skirts bloodied.
While alive, she chose to skip over this part of her trek, traveled it by way of omission, winding narrative detours. She told instead a few choice stories that reinforced chance, close calls. Close calls imply lack of agency. Lack of agency implies that you were powerless to react to what you saw.
She would limit her account to statements such as: We slept in the woods during the day, and tried to keep the children quiet. Then we would walk at night.
Why?
We did not want the soldiers to see us. That’s all she would say. Sometimes they would come close, and once I thought they would see the diapers we had put on the branches to dry, and I thought that was it, but they walked past us.
In death, there is less circumspection, scraps of paper that do the talking for her, books that suddenly announce their presence in cabinets scanned a hundred times, and when their spines are cracked, reveal select pages dog-eared by her silent hand. Old tickets unslip themselves from hidden wallet sleeves.
These clues weave with the words she left, filling in some of the blank spaces on the map of her trek across Europe, the nine months she spent walking through territories that remained contested, territories where the last chaotic days of the war would unfold.
She mentioned once that she and Liene tried to follow the rail tracks, a common route for Europe’s displaced at the time, one of the last intact paths that one could trace through the flattened landscape. She would have skirted Berlin while Hitler gophered underground, as the city above him flashed and cindered. She would have walked along tracks where railcars tried to shuttle concentration camp prisoners ahead of advancing Allied troops, to new places of death, or death, they hoped, along the way. She would have traveled through a landscape where it was not uncommon to find children wandering parentless among the columns of refugees, clothes still charred from the blast of the bomb that had somehow spared them, not yet old enough to recall the particulars of their names, no idea where they were going, simply absorbed by the blind forward momentum of so many people in motion, all of them trying to get somewhere, anywhere beyond the next air strike.
Sometimes, when they did not think they could walk another step, they tried to hop boxcars, Liene climbing first, Livija handing her the children, then clamoring after. They looked for farms, she told me, especially in winter, wisps of smoke, a chained cow. Sometimes, as soon as they could stop, they would hop down and double back. Cows meant they might be able to offer their help as milkers in exchange for something to
eat, or even just a spare cup dipped in the pails for the children. Even when they did not understand what my grandmother was saying, the farmers recognized her hands. Usually, though, my grandmother let Liene talk, or if they could not be sure it was safe, she would wait in the bushes while Liene went ahead on reconnaissance. Liene spoke perfect German and so she could offer a cover, if needed, could pretend to be local. Sometimes a farmer might let Livija and Liene and the children stay a few nights in the barn, and, briefly, there were times, nestled in the hay, feeling the children’s breath prick her neck, she might allow herself for a second to remember Gulbene, sleeping in the loft on the summer’s hottest nights, each poke and scratch of the straw beneath her that released a smell like cobwebs in sunlight.
They woke to tendriled breath, the crackling of frost underfoot. When it was time to move on, they buttoned the children inside their coats, and hipped them through the wind. Ice rimed the puddles. They cracked it with their toes, dragged graying diapers through the slurry, and as they had done back home, hanging laundry outside, even in the dead of Latvia’s winters, they waited for the fabric to freeze into stiff sheets—their signal that all the water had evaporated and the clothing was, in fact, dry.
When the baby boy cried because Livija had less milk for him than he knew there should be, Liene was the one who took him and bounced him, tried to soothe away hunger with silly songs. With her fingers, in forest light, under the cover of birdsong, she combed Maruta’s rook-wing hair. For the children of Latvia, with its unceasing history of occupations and wars, famine and servitude, parents were forever being snatched away, and the old myths were full of stories of the role of the surrogate.
Titmouse, chaffinch, where are your children?
—Over on the other side of the Daugava,
In the branch of an oak.
But who rocks them?
Who raises them?
—Mother Wind rocks them.
Mother Wind raises them.
Apple trees were said to be mothers to those who had none. Beneath their boughs lonely girls could go and feel the soft fall of petals as an acknowledgement of their tears. But what of the women, like Liene, who wanted to be mothers, but could not have children of their own? She spent nine months on the road with my father and my aunt, as long as if she could have carried her own baby to term, and she felt each child grow heavier in her arms.
She watched my father’s features change from the squinting, blurry outlines of an infant to someone solid, intense, heavy-browed. He locked eyes with her, smiled at the sound of her voice. He was also growing harder to hold. He kicked, threw back his head, as if trying to make eye contact with the pilots in the planes always screaming overhead. The boy wanted to crawl, but they had to keep moving.
The women tried to stay away from the cities, the bloated carcasses trapped in the rubble, the flies, the detached hooves and scraps of hides turning sweet water sour, the living shitting uncontrollably.
Livija and Liene said they were tempted to stop only once, after they heard a rumor that they should try a city a bit farther to the east, where the train station had been turned over to refugees. Liene went ahead to look, while my grandmother and the children waited.
When Liene finally returned the next morning, she described the scene: the stench of the diesel engines, sulfur, the unwashed. Hundreds of people crammed onto the platforms, stowed in storage areas, like luggage, lying in the basement. There was absolutely no room, she said.
Then we keep moving, Livija said.
Later that night, when they stopped to look in the direction of where they had just been, when they looked back toward Dresden, they saw fire where there should have been sky.
They continued, slowly, to work their way north, tracing an arcing path clockwise, toward the sea, stopping first at Lübeck, then moving on to a DP camp in Pinneberg, on the outskirts of Hamburg. They stayed together as long as they could. But, eventually, Liene left—among the first refugees to be offered a chance to emigrate, in her case to England. Reluctantly, she left my grandmother and the children behind. She moved to London and married another Latvian refugee, a maker of traditional jewelry.
Decades later, when my father remarried, Liene’s husband gave my stepmother a silver ring bearing a cascade of charms onto which he had hammered the ancient symbols calling forth things like health and joy, and also: fertility. And when my father and my stepmother had their first child, my little sister, they named her for this woman who helped carry my father through the worst of the war.
We went to visit my sister’s namesake in London when my sister was just three months old and when Liene reached down to take her from her stroller for the first time, I can only imagine her body instinctively remembered what it was to hold my father at that age.
I could not sleep for the jet lag while we were there, and I remember once finding Liene sitting at the kitchen table in the middle of the night. She seemed to be crying. I was maybe ten years old at the time. She did not say anything, just fetched a glass jar of milk from the back step, its foil seal studded with tiny puncture marks from birds pushing their beaks through to reach the cream. She sloshed some milk from the bottle into a pan that she heated until it steamed, and then she sat with me, lost in thought, until I had emptied the whole mug. Then she walked me back to my bed and pulled the covers to my chin and placed a palm, soft from her years in the city, on the side of my face until I closed my eyes.
Years later, when she was at the edge of death, Liene wrote to my father, begging him to help her, to come to her.
Her husband was gone. It had not been a happy marriage. She was all alone now, in London, and she wanted him to know how she had thought of him as her son, too, in those days on the war roads, imagined for a brief while that he was her boy. He had given her a glimpse of what it was to be a mother, and she ached for him still.
He never wrote back. My father admitted this story to me only recently, and he wept as he told me.
It just felt too intense, he said. I’m so ashamed when I think about it now, that I let her down like that, but I just couldn’t handle it. It frightened me. I didn’t know how to respond in the face of all that . . .
He never finished his sentence that night, but the word I insert even now, as I replay our conversation, is need.
And here I mean need in its most ancient and basic sense. Not need as something soft or longing or wistful, but need as something anguished, howling, blood kin, even in etymology, to misery, to suffering, to anguish—need as linguistic ancestor to the Old English word for trouble or pain, but also: the Proto-Germanic word for violence.
Here I mean need as something that awakens us to that which causes us unendurable distress, but also: that which could help us abide it.
Need teaches us how to articulate that which could exist on the other side of our suffering, to give it a name.
But let’s say it is your name that is spoken.
There’s something intensely moving about that—to be called in such a way. But there is also something frightening, too. Because now there is no way to separate yourself or your understanding of the depth of that person’s need of you from the depth of the pain that summoned it.
When I tell Ausma what I have managed to piece together of my grandmother’s journey, her months of flight, she says nothing at first. Just gets up, and starts to break kindling to start a fire in the kitchen stove for the bread.
Do you know what hurts the most? Ausma says at last. She struggles to speak, keeps her face to the fire. I needed her. But, from what you say, she needed me. All she went through. And now, my sister is buried so far from here, in strange soil. There’s no way for me to go to her, to do something for her, even now.
Later that night, as I try to sleep, I will wonder whether the sounds I am hearing are coming from the barn, where the mother and her calves are now berthed in separate stalls, or from somewhere closer still.
XIV
THE NEXT TIME I come back to Latvia
, it’s winter, the cows’ coats thick and draggly, as if in imitation of the hoarfrost that tinsels the trees each morning.
The local newspaper keeps its moon watch, says now—when the moon is old, as thin as a curl of fat—it is time to take saw teeth to trees. This way, the resulting wood will release the most heat. On the evening news, an astrologer is interviewed with the kind of seriousness one normally sees reserved for members of government. What can we expect in the year ahead? She advises everyone to spend more time in nature.
In the local paper, a story runs that more Latvian babies are being born abroad than in-country. What’s a young person supposed to do, says Aivars, the husband of Ausma’s daughter Ligita. Live next to all these abandoned farmhouses, falling down around him, with his hand on his heart, singing “God Bless Latvia”?
Their daughter, the mother of the two little girls, including the one who found the nest on my first visit, has recently moved to Norway.
The days are long and dark, with an edge of cold that sears the lungs. They send me to the sauna, where Aivars has strung camouflage netting outside, so that we can sit in the heat until we cannot bear it, then fling open the back door and plunge our steaming bodies in the old well to cool down. We jump feetfirst so our toes will crack the ice that seals the water’s surface. I imagine, briefly, my grandmother Livija toeing frozen puddles in the flare-lit woods.
The puppy from my first visit is now so big his paws punch holes in the snow as large as tea saucers, and he serves as personal escort to each steaming streaker. He stands at the well’s edge and greets us with jubilant barks when we shoot back up to repierce the iced surface, screaming without sound for the shock of the cold, our lungs learning to heave air again, as if reborn.
Among the Living and the Dead Page 14