I sit with Ausma’s granddaughter on a bench carved from a log, in view of the cows that have been turned out to graze for the night. Ausma’s granddaughter tells me which cows love people, will follow them like dogs, nuzzling hands, licking faces, which are slow or slightly touched and need the others to remind them of their stalls, which can be coaxed with heels of bread. She recites the names of every cow she has loved. As I walk back down the hill drunk on the summer air and the strange sweetness of the conversation, a recitation of cows, I register movement out of the corner of my eye, something slipping soundlessly from behind a stand of filbert trees.
And I have only enough time to register this fact when I feel a pinch and burn and my leg gives, as the dog sinks a tooth in my calf.
XVI
ONCE, LONG AGO, in the region of Latvia where my grandmother is from, there was a man named Thies who for a time, before he came into his true calling, lived as a beggar.
One day, a man approached the beggar Thies. How about a drink, the man said, and Thies, given his current situation, could see no reason to decline. Back and forth the men passed a jug between them, feeling the edges of themselves blur. The man offered to make a toast to Thies, to which Thies had no objection. Maybe it would change his fortunes. When the man had finished, he raised the jug as if to take a nip, but instead blew through his lips into its neck—three exhalations. You will become like me, he whispered, before placing the vessel back in Thies’s hands, and waited for him to drink.
And that’s how you became a werewolf? asked one of the judges, who had hauled Thies in for questioning.
Yes, said Thies. He didn’t pause or stutter or hesitate.
It was the year 1691. By this time, Thies was in his eighties and had been werewolfing for most of his life.
His neighbors confirmed his assertion.
Everyone knows Thies is a werewolf, they said. They stated it matter-of-factly, the way someone would state a thing everyone knows: cows have a hard time eating thistle, or, storks hiss.
And just what does one do, when one is a werewolf? the judges wanted to know.
Well, Thies said, at certain times of year, he and his other werewolf friends shed their clothing and assumed the form of wolves.
What then?
They ate farm animals, sometimes. Mostly they traveled to hell—which could be reached through a swamp located about a twenty-kilometer walk from the village. They went to hell to retrieve the people’s blessings of their crops that had been stolen by wizards and delivered to the devil. Sometimes, this resulted in battles. This past year, he had managed to slip into hell and retrieve barley, oats and rye, which meant there would be a good harvest come fall.
So you admit that you consort with the devil, the judges pressed.
No, insisted Thies. He and the other werewolves worked against the devil. Maybe a better way to describe them, he said, was hounds of god.
But do you go to church and say your prayers?
Thies had to confess that he did not. He was an old man, and these were things that were beyond his capacity to understand. Who knew where souls went?
All he knew was that since he had turned into a werewolf, he knew how to say just the right words in just the right way, so that he could send his words to hell, too, to fetch back the soul that the devil has taken, and in this way, he would raise sick horses and cows from the floors of their stalls, unwither failing crops.
Yes, his neighbors agreed, Thies was a healer of considerable reputation, who could use the same words that you or I would use, regular words, but he could arrange them in such a way as to stop a cut’s weeping or to chase wolves from the woods.
On the subject of what the judges meant and what Thies meant when they each said the same word werewolf, this would never be satisfactorily resolved in court that day.
Did Thies truly believe that he could assume another’s form, or was he saying, in his own way, with regular words, arranged in just the right order, that imagination can also be its own form of transcendence, a kind of survival?
Thies would never get another chance to explain.
The judges had reached a verdict.
As they saw it, Thies and his words were dangerous and confusing, and the words needed to stop. And the only way they could see to stop him and stop his words from spreading any further within the village was to forever separate him from the context of his stories, to render Thies and his words, placeless.
AND SO it came to pass that they were now living in the days that followed the war’s end, the days of placelessness, when more than 30 million people had been scattered across Europe and had lost their words for home. All of them insisting, for wildly different reasons, that they could no more return to where they had just come than bombs can be undropped; than numbers on arms could be uninked; than death sentences for collaborating with the enemy—not because you believed in fascism but only because you wanted so badly to stop communism—could be unissued. No more than the shame could be unfelt that sometimes squirms its way to the surface of your waking thoughts before you manage to push it back down, the things you did or perhaps just as much the things you did not do that privileged you and your survival over anyone else’s, that meant you ignored another’s visible suffering.
The same shorthand was used to refer to all of them: DPs, as in Displaced Persons. An estimated 200,000 to 250,000 Latvians fled for the West during the war years; of that number, more than 100,000 were ultimately forced to make the trip back—because they were recaptured by the Soviets or returned by Western forces. That left about 120,000 Latvians who remained DPs. They took the acronym and used its letters to construct an alternate term for themselves: Dieva Putnini. Dieva from dievs, as in the Latvian god of sky. Putnini as in the diminutive for bird. Little birds. As in that which is ungrounded; as in that which can foretell sorrow, but also possibly hope; as in being in an endless state of passage.
When finally, my grandmother and my father and Liene and Maruta passed through the steel gates of Camp 269 UNRRA Pinneberg, where 3800 of the placeless, mostly Latvians, had been assigned temporary shelter, my father had only just found his capacity for speech, the ability to name himself and the things around him—little bird; lost boy.
At night, curled in on himself, as if making himself as small as possible to give others more room, my father, the baby who had absorbed the flight paths of the bombers from his mother’s arms, and from Liene’s arms, now dreamed in a barracks that had billeted young Luftwaffe pilots.
Where once they had absorbed lessons in the principles of aerodynamics and aerospace engineering, and how to navigate by the position of the stars, he now played on the floor with scraps of paper that he made glide and twitch with his breath as if they could take wing.
It was a life defined by waiting, wherever you found yourself, whether assigned to scratchy cots wedged inside stalls that until recently berthed saddle horses for the German cavalry or boarded in bunks installed in former surgical suites that still smelled faintly of amputations, cauterized wounds. Mothers approached toddlers in their rooms, absorbed in quiet play, only to discover them gumming what looked like scraps of exploded ordnance. Those early days passed in an endless stretch of unstructured hours, the monotony of small temporary rooms.
Together, they were cleansed in clouds of DDT, the babies sometimes laughing into the fog, trying to catch it in their mouths like snowfall, the women instructed to kneel slightly, as if in curtsey, and to lift the hem of their skirts just enough to accommodate the delouser’s nozzle, with its puff of air and the fine dusting that would drive away the lice and their typhus. For hours afterward, each step, each brush of one thigh against the other, would release the chemical’s smell—hints of burned marzipan. No, others said, more like borscht.
Lice were not the only named fear.
Also: dysentery, rickets, diphtheria, syphilis, TB, scabies, polio.
They learned to surrender themselves for regular medical inspections, passed the
ir health record books to the nurses and doctors to initial without thought for privacy, their lives now a running count of coughs and infections, lung spots and fevers. On the days of the mass inoculations—hundreds of the camp’s children injected at once, the nurses punching the flesh of one twitching buttock after another—the mothers helped skin their babies from their chunky wool tights. Rabbit pants, the Latvians called them.
But for all the shots, sickness still found them.
One morning, Livija lifted Maruta from sheets sweated wet.
In time, they would learn she had contracted polio. But on that day, all they knew was the force of her fever, that she was listless, unable to sip water without distress.
A nurse came, and perhaps thinking it was something that could be cured with a dose of antibiotics, she decided to administer a shot, a quick punch and wriggle of the rabbit’s haunch.
Whether out of haste or ignorance, or both, she chose to slip the needle into the center of Maruta’s buttock, and pierced her sciatic nerve.
Almost immediately, Maruta’s leg on that side went limp, the ankle flopping as if attached to the foot by a thin tongue of skin.
Between this, and the effects of the polio, Maruta would ultimately struggle to take a single step, her legs bound in braces, pushing a walker.
And, eventually, though still years in the future, but already starting then, in the camp—as she tried, and failed, to grasp the hands of the other small children whose mothers encouraged them to circle up in the weak sun to sing and dance as a distraction from the guard towers and the phlegm-colored soup and the fact that they were swaddled not in diapers but in flyers instructing the refugees on the regulations of the camp—the muscles of all four of her limbs started to shrink, atrophying, until one day, which would mark the beginning of her last days, the only comfortable place for her was bed.
These were the unnamed fears:
That you—you were the reason this happened.
That you were the one to blame.
That the moment you pushed the door closed on your former life, the moment you took to the road, chose flight over your family and the farm—all the while telling yourself that you were making the right choice, the only choice—you might have been mistaken.
And now this: your little boy, his sudden not-speaking, like an envelope quietly sealing itself shut.
WHAT DID my father understand of their life among the placeless? He would have been too young to remember the walls of the refugee processing centers that they passed through, covered with the names of family members whose whereabouts were unknown, sometimes a photo, if photos had come with the refugees: Have you seen_____ ?
But he most likely heard the nightly broadcasts that played on the camp radio, the voices of children, old enough to recall their names and from where they had come, sending their words out in search of lost parents. Perhaps he even understood the pitch of their pleas, if not the actual meaning.
Did he know his own father was missing, like so many of the men who were there, but weren’t there, a number written then crossed out on their wives’ intake forms?
He turned one, then two, before he even learned what the word father meant, at least what it meant in relationship to his own life, the shape that it occupied, its silence, save for the scrape of rough hands jacketing you for a trip outside, the impatient clapping tempo of a walk too fast for small legs, the crusting of one weeping eye.
On the subject of where Emils had been for the last two years, and what had happened to him in the war, he appeared to have drawn a line through his memories, as if he were a document from which hundreds of pages had suddenly been redacted. But the rage that sometimes gripped him and filled the little room that they shared—that rattled the tins of dried milk and sardines and sent rolling from the table the cigarettes that came in the refugees’ boxes of rations, and which everyone traded on the black market for the things they really needed, like soap and sewing supplies—said enough for his family to suspect that he’d never really returned from wherever it was he’d gone.
What he did not say:
After the doctors had picked the bone fragments from the hole in his head and sutured it shut, then fitted the pit of his skull’s orbit with an eye made of glass, after my grandfather had finally emerged from the coma induced by his injuries, the German military hospital in which he recuperated was seized by the Allies.
At this point, my grandfather was transferred to a prisoner-of-war camp in Belgium, where the Allies tried to make sense of men who wore the uniforms of Nazis, but who claimed that they were not Nazis at all, only conscripts, forced to join the army of their occupier. There were interrogations, and inside those interrogation rooms, if the stories of the men who were held there can be believed, the kinds of reckonings that accompany war’s end, the release of collective anger and rage and fear.
In the end, after months of questioning, Allied investigators ruled that he was not a criminal, and let him go. But from the larger moral question of what constitutes collaboration, he would never be released.
Once again, my grandmother corrected her calculations, restoring the original number of family members to include her husband, but only because there was no other way to record the presence of someone who was back, but not back. He was not her first experience with a lost love, but she had learned the first time, at the tip of a nail, not to expect too much. And so, when her second lost love returned to her, she understood that she should be grateful for whatever remained—the skin laced fine with keloids, the lumbering pace, the square jaw grinding, always grinding, awake or asleep.
She had heard enough resurrection stories, myths that celebrate the possibility of regeneration—the revivification of those assumed dead—to know that there is almost always a hidden cost, almost always something that is held back in exchange for the right to return from the other side.
When he spoke, his voice sounded like the tip of a match drawn across phosphorus.
Mostly, he didn’t speak.
He could disappear at any moment, even as he lay right beside her. She could feel him scuddering about inside himself, traveling years and miles, before abruptly returning to their bed to look at her in a way that told her she might be the only thing tethering him to this room, to her, to the two children asleep on their cots at their feet.
My grandmother listened to him breathe himself back to calm, the four of them suspended in the night-sounds of the barracks, the sound of secrets uncontained, slipping through the loose weave of the blankets hung as partitions, between the suitcases stacked in imitation of walls: who is loving whom, who is striking whom, who is sick on homebrew, who neglects their children, who calls out in their nightmares, and who thrashes in silence.
Like this, she would remind him without words. Being alive is like this.
A year after my grandfather’s return, my grandmother gave birth to another child, a boy. This time, my grandfather was there to hold his second son.
Now, with a brother, my father began to find his voice again, to whisper to him, to tell him all he thought he should know about their home, its secrets and wonders and dangers: the puddles of oil and floating garbage at the camp’s periphery that could be lanced with sticks; the older boys who stole and fought and ran from the police, and who once blamed my father for their supposed crimes when an officer stopped to talk to them, so that my father ran, too, and burrowed beneath a mattress for a very long time before he realized, in a pinioning of confusion and fear, that no one was looking for him at all.
By now, most of the refugees had lived nearly three years in circumstances meant only ever to be temporary. On the question of where the hundreds of thousands in Europe displaced by war should go next, the rest of the world had remained decidedly silent. Only Great Britain, Australia and Canada had come forward offering to help in any substantive way—Where would you be willing to be resettled? a form from that period had asked; Canada, my grandfather had written, his handwriting less certai
n than his answer—but even still, restrictions were such that all available spots would likely go only to young single men and women.
Few countries seemed to want resettle families with small children, let alone families who might be supporting someone with a disability, the war-maimed, the chronically ill, the elderly.
In the United States, Congress shut down all attempts to relocate any refugees, citing possible shortages of housing and consumer goods, fear of reconversion unemployment, and apprehension as to the type of persons who were inmates of the D.P. camps in Europe.
And in this way, the impermanent became mistaken for the indefinite.
Life in the indefinite was to scale piles of war rubble for sport, to root through the grit for anything that could be turned into toys, fragments of magnet, webs of cloth, unburned books, miraculously, once, a spoon.
It was to push donated baby dolls in donated baby carriages across reclaimed fields that had originally been graded to accommodate soldiers for inspection; to run naked on your mother’s orders so that the sun on your bare skin might somehow help unbow the bend to your legs, unthicken the bones in your wrists that had begun to bulge beneath the skin, the first signs of rickets.
It was to pretend the smears of guts and grease in the barracks’ basement were not from the pig reported stolen from a nearby farm. It was to see nothing when seeing nothing was required, as if you, too, had rinsed your gums with some of the black market liquor that was said to sometimes cause blindness.
Life in the indefinite was to leave the adults to meetings where they argued over the preservation of the language, the loosening of grammar, the loss of the old words for things that had no equivalent in this new life. They should resist becoming like potatoes with old eyes, one former farmer put it, never to be replanted.
So they searched for a word that would embody the state of remaining ready for the possibility of return, even as they prepared for the unlikelihood that they could ever go back.
Among the Living and the Dead Page 16