One day, he will run into the woods, trailing cheeky curls of breath like he has swallowed one of Aivars’s cigarettes, and never come back.
When this happens, Ligita will go to the neighbor, the man who sees things, the man who everyone agrees can use a stick to find well water where no one else can. He tells her that the puppy is dead, that he tangled with something ferocious and wild, and he tried, with all the strength he had, to get back to them, but he was too hurt, and couldn’t drag himself home. The neighbor who sees things describes the exact spot where the dog’s body lies in the snow, but one part of the forest can look so much like the next in winter, and so there is nothing to do but accept another disappearance.
I draw an “x” in the fog of the car window the next time we drive past the pine at the crossroads that once marked the way to the old cemetery.
One morning, I wake up sick, shivering. Probably from being too reckless with the sauna and the well. Everyone agrees I may have invited a chill into my body. Ligita, who also sees things, though mostly in her dreams—A witch! Aivars says in a way that you can tell is joking and maybe not joking all at once—makes me inhale the smoke from a burned thread of linen.
Aivars follows with a shot of balsam. One for him, too, so you won’t be lonely. And then one more all around, so that we favor each leg equally.
THIS IS THE WINTER Ausma’s wood-fired furnace stops working. The pages of her gardening magazines kept stacked next to the Christmas cactus freeze together, and the cats refuse to come out from under the cow barn. Above them, the layer of hay upon the stall floors, the wet heat of the cows’ urine, affords at least some insulation.
We huddle in the kitchen around the wood-burning stove, normally used for baking, wearing all our clothes, hats and mittens. Ausma knits me a pair of wool socks. Do you know how many times I should have died? Harijs asks, his voice visible in the air between us. But this time, he cannot remember times two and five without prompting. Later Ausma tells me he has started to confuse the day of the week, the year, to talk of memories from their life together that could not have happened.
And still the paper asks its jokes:
Son: Mama, why do you always stand by the window when I sing?
Mother: I don’t want people to think that I am hitting you. . . .
THE FIRST THING she saw when they finally reached the other side of the sun: nothing. The landscape told her nothing. The sky was white. The ground was white. White as the piles of boiled bones her grandfather kept in his tannery shed. White as the linen threads Ausma used to weave the sheets she imagined she would one day spread on her wedding bed, but which instead were now flapping on a neighbor’s clothesline, muttering Ausma’s initials to the wind—AS, AS, AS.
They stepped off the train into a void, her brother, Janis, hopping on one leg, the other taken first by gangrene, then a prison doctor’s saw, his crutches puncturing the scabbed and crusted top layer of winter’s storms. Even when it was clear the Soviets had won, Janis had fought along with what remained of the Latvian Legion for seven months, backed into the westernmost edge of Latvia, refusing to give up. When finally they surrendered to the Russians, they were all taken as prisoners of war, sentenced to a labor camp outside of Moscow, on the way to Leningrad. There, his leg was crushed when the coal mine in which he had been working collapsed. They had allowed him to return home, only after the doctors had insisted he would not live long anyway. I guess I got better so they could send me to Siberia and kill me a second time, he said.
Her mother, Alma, followed slowly behind, trying to match her daughter’s steps, as Ausma cleared a path for her through the snows.
They had thought it so cold inside the boxcar, the three of them trying to huddle under the single blanket Ausma had brought from the farm, watching through the slats as all color was leached from the passing land. There were others who had even less, who had come with only the clothes they were wearing, bare feet inside their boots. But this cold was like nothing they had ever known, like something wounded, ferocious with misery and pain. Later, the cold would try to take them as they walked, swallowing them in drifts that reached to their rib cages, smothering the breath from their chests, reaching into their pockets, filling them with snow. It would try to take them in their sleep, crawling into their beds, reweaving the strands of their blankets with ice. It stole their food, rendered it inedible, lifted the skin from their tongues, turned cheeks and the tips of noses the color of singed earth.
This was what waited for them after nearly three weeks of travel, packed into a single railcar, the space necessary for each person calculated by one particularly poetic bureaucrat to be no larger than a grave. Bog lands, unending steppes, burred and smothering forest. Blank lands. Areas in Russia’s remote east, unpopulated, unnamed, unacknowledged on any map.
Although no one ever explicitly said their destination was Siberia, nor gave any explanation what this was about, Ausma knew, from the first round of deportations she had witnessed almost eight years ago, at thirteen, where they were headed, and that they were being sent there because someone somewhere for some reason wanted them banished to a place from which they could not come back.
She was a special exile now, her passport confiscated, a form presented for her to sign—I have chosen to relocate of my own volition and will never return to the region I previously occupied: I will live out the rest of my days in the area where I have volunteered to be assigned. Then her paperwork was dated 1949, stamped strictly secret, treated, outwardly, as if it never existed, and archived—along with 41,000 other files, known collectively to those involved in the planning and execution of this mass exile by its code name: Operation Tidal Wave.
IT FELT STRANGE to walk again, after so long on the train, its juddering still echoing through Ausma as she helped her mother and brother toward the processing center, a crude, sprawling compound of barrackslike buildings where they were told to prepare for the selection, although no one explained exactly what that meant.
Still echoing inside them: collective memories of the journey east, which held the goatlike cries of an elderly man, all alone, saying the name of his daughter, or his wife or his mother, no one knew, over and over again until it sounded like one continuous trilling of a single vowel, EEEEEEEEE; the woman who wet herself rather than perch on the slick lip of the hole which served as the latrine for the entire car, steam rising from her lap afterward, until someone next to her, wanting to maintain at least a symbolic privacy, snuffed it with a coat; the cups of soup handed out at the depots where the trains would stop, potato skins floating in tepid broth, chased with a swallow of what tasted like water in which fallen leaves had stewed for days; and the tiny bundle leaving the guard’s hand.
What the mother of the baby did after the guard took her dead child, Ausma does not recall, or does not want to recall. So she chooses silence instead.
I don’t think she made a sound. There was more quiet than you would think.
Once, seen through the slats, along the rail lines: a corpse, possibly, someone tossed from a different Siberian transport, a perfect silhouette left untouched by teeth or beaks. Glimpsed through the slats, the body looked disconcertingly like someone who had simply stopped after a long trek and lay down momentarily to consider the sky.
But there was this, too; I shouldn’t forget this:
The local Russians who ventured up to the railcars at some of the smaller stops, mittening weeviled bread through the open doors, extending pails of water.
How quickly the scene cuts from cruelty to kindness, and it is clear that this is how she experienced it, how it felt at the time, a bewildering, contradictory series of encounters that confused kindness and pain. I see the same themes emerge in the accounts of others who were taken on the same transport as Ausma, from the same village, on the same day, transcripts of survivors’ oral histories that I have begun to collect from any written account I can find. Taken together, read one after another, the voices become a kind of commun
al dirge, a strange polyphony of memories and fears and wonderings that speak at once to the collective experience of suffering, and to no one’s experience but their own:
When we stepped off the train, the first thing I saw was carts, pulled by oxen, and they loaded the sickest people in the back, those who could no longer stand, and ordered the rest of us to fall in behind.
The barracks where they took us first had been built to hold German prisoners of war. That’s what I was told. They had been built hastily, with green wood, so there were gaps in the walls and the floors, as the wood wept all its moisture, then shrank.
There were people who grew tired quickly—we had eaten so little for days—and sometimes someone dropped to the ground, but we were told we couldn’t stop for them.
What I want to know is why did our guards have guns? Where were we going to run?
When the ice melted, I saw them take bodies and drop them in the lake.
Someone said they heard that we would be presented to the local collectives, as soon as the ice broke on the river, and they would take turns picking us, like one picks a cow. The weakest would be sent to the worst places, so they might die quicker. You didn’t want to go where the invalids and the elderly went. I went and found berries to crush and rub on my cheeks, so I would look like someone healthy, someone they wanted to choose.
THEY WERE among the last to be chosen. Not the very last. But close to the last.
First, the eyes of the collective’s officials had fallen on the space where her brother’s leg should have been. Next, the members of the collective studied Ausma’s mother, Alma, her face withered beneath her kerchief, like the surface of an apple, forgotten beneath the tree, left to the workings of the wasps and the ants and the rain.
It was clear that the two of them would be useless to contribute to the required work quotas. Then they saw Ausma.
Ausma, the girl who had spent the last four years since her father’s death running the family farm because her brother was too damaged, her mother too weak with sickness and grief, her sister lost to the war roads, they had no idea where.
There was no one left but this girl, who had abandoned the idea of school or dances or courting to rise at three each morning to milk the cows and ration the hay that she alone had scythed and turned and dried and wagoned back to the loft, day after day as summer transitioned to fall, until her hands turned black with blood.
The fabric of her dresses—now thin and shiny at the back, stretched and strained by the thickening of her shoulders, the hardening of her body. Like stone, she thought, not wood. She felt the grinding of her joints whenever she raised her arms to swing an axe or to wrap a calving chain around one of the cows’ reluctant births.
They saw in her the entire story of the past four years: she could do the work of all three.
A woman stepped up to Ausma, her hands encased in what looked like fur from a dog, something with an angry, wiry pelt, with what looked like tooth scars, tar-colored welts, running beneath the fur, like veins.
The woman spoke, her voice low, expressionless, formal.
Ausma didn’t speak Russian, and she couldn’t pull any meaning from the woman’s tone.
The woman began to walk away, then turned and indicated that Ausma and her brother and mother should follow.
It wasn’t until much later that Ausma finally learned what the woman had said that day. But not until after they had moved into a corner of the woman’s kitchen, in a small shack at the edge of a collective farm, a place named for the Russian word for flame, where for half the year, milk left in a pail for more than five minutes would freeze; after the woman had taught Ausma her first Russian word, chai, a word which in normal circumstances meant tea, but in this new world meant boiled water with a lashing of milk, skimmed with a spoon from one of the frozen pails; after Ausma had gathered the woman’s story—that she had lived in Siberia for decades, had survived famines that had killed everyone else around her.
She’d said: I am sorry this has happened to you.
XV
WHEN I was still in college, working for a paper in Albuquerque for the summer, I once took a man’s life from him as his sister listened.
What I mean is that I had been assigned to work the newsroom’s predawn shift, lone monitor of the scanners and phones and faxes, ready to catch any possible emergencies that might happen when the rest of the world was still deep in sleep. Mostly, it would be quiet, supervisors assured me. But early in my assignment, I received a call from the local police department: a man murdered after an altercation outside a bar. They gave me his name and date of birth. This was newsworthy, the supervising editor told me, when I sketched the details for him; we had just enough time to get something in the first edition, if I got to work.
And so I began to do what I had been trained to do, to call those who might know the man, who might, using language borrowed from one veteran reporter, help me provide readers with a portrait of your loved one, help make him more than a name and a victim.
I located a number of someone who shared the man’s surname, and dialed.
A woman answered.
I was sorry to bother her so early, I said. But I was looking for the family of _____?
That’s my brother, she said. He’d been staying with her, she explained, but he was out right now.
And then she paused, as if letting her words and the implication of them in this context catch up with each other. What’s happened? she said.
That’s when I knew that police had not yet informed the family of this man’s death. It was an unheard-of breach of protocol. Police departments never released to the press the name of someone who had died until family had been informed first. But something had clearly broken down on this night.
You should call the Albuquerque police, I tried, but the woman was yelling now—What’s happened to my brother—no longer a plea, but an insistence.
At some level she knew, and it was as if she wanted me to do the right thing, even if it was the most hurtful thing, wanted me to get it over with, because she didn’t want me to let her imagine for another second that this could be anything other than the horror she suspected.
He was killed, I said. Outside a bar.
And I still remember the sound she made, then the sound of a phone falling, the click of my own handset, the way I hated myself for summoning just enough momentary numbness to write something that reflected none of the ugliness of what had just happened, but not enough to be unmoved by praise from my editor for my good work.
I had left no record of my cruelty, only a clean, compelling narrative about pain, as it is suffered and inflicted upon others.
Ausma does not seem to want to talk anymore.
It’s summer now, a new visit.
She does not say as much to me. She is so grateful to have the presence of her sister restored to her life through me, that she will suffer my questions, endure the details that I am keen to write down to fill in the details of our family story. She does not correct me, never says, don’t you mean your story?
Because both of us know this has become my story, a story I am constructing from her stories, her words, her memories, to try to answer something for myself, something I don’t know how to reach, except through her. But it is a story Ausma does not want anymore. She abandoned it years ago, walked away and left it to rot like the remains of Lembi.
So she simply stops speaking.
She will walk away suddenly. Will go outside. And quietly remove the chain from the dog that charges anyone who does not live at the house. The dog that has bitten at least five people, I will discover later, including a man who came to fix the telephone. Once, while helping Harijs in the barn, I wandered too close, and he lunged to the end of his tether and snapped the air in front of my nose.
The dog watches me through the window, guarding me now from leaving the house. I move from room to room, so that I might see what Ausma is doing: scattering scraps for the chickens, dragging a hoe d
own her rows of potatoes, culling softened turnips from the bins in the cold cellar. The dog moves whenever I move. I nap. I reread my notes. I open the door to try to call to Ausma to tie him up so I can go outside and help her with chores, but I make it as far as the porch before the dog charges. Always, a few hours later, Ausma returns. And I know that this means that questions are over for the day. It is our truce.
One night, as we are watching an old Latvian movie from the 1980s, a period drama set in Siberia, she is suddenly animated, commenting on the sets, their accuracy, linking what she sees to her own memories. So I think I might attempt to ask her more questions, draw out just a few more details, and I imagine that I am being delicate, keeping things light, but I can feel her growing smaller and smaller, pulling into herself, until finally she is no smaller than the spot that remains at the center of the screen of the old television, which she has shut off midprogram. Time for bed, she says.
The next morning, I go for a run while it is still dark, past rye fields and barley fields and down mud-dried roads where I must occasionally stop for a procession of cows; through the nearby village where lightning recently struck and split a linden tree in which storks had nested, making the front page of the local paper: “Baby Storks Crushed.”
I have made it a point to never leave the house until I know the dog is tied, and they have been good about keeping him restrained until I return.
But as I come up the path to Ausma’s house, I see the dog’s empty lead coiled in the dirt. I spot Harijs, outside the barn, and I wave my hands, hoping to alert him—and not the dog—to my presence. He manages to understand my pantomime and fishes his finger under the dog’s collar to hold him as I slip inside.
I freed him, says Ausma, when I mention the dog was loose. I feel so bad for him tied up all day. Like a prisoner. Besides, he knows you are living here now. He knows you are family.
Later that afternoon, when I go to visit one of Ausma’s granddaughters, who lives just up the hill, I double-check that the chain still holds a dog. The evening is warm, like new milk, the locals say.
Among the Living and the Dead Page 15