Among the Living and the Dead

by Inara Verzemnieks

  And then she paid the seller exactly what he asked, because she wanted to get away as fast as she could from the circumstances that led to its sale in the village market.

  She kept the wardrobe in a corner of her house, and the tin upon its shelf.

  The dust it gathered represented so many contingencies: if the family survived, if they ever came back to Gulbene, if she was still alive when they returned.

  The dust tasted like the passing years, bits of hair, particles of skin, molecules of worry, specks of joy.

  Old barley fields gave way to new soaring apartment blocks.

  The villagers ironed their children’s Young Pioneer uniforms and learned what was best said outside their children’s earshot, so that the children, later, did not, in all innocence, accidentally denounce their parents to the teacher or the neighbors. They parked tractors and combines in what was once the former ballroom of the baron who sold Lembi all those years ago to his servant and shoemaker. They learned to anticipate which days the stores might put out some of the special rationed commodities—everyone could still remember the taste of the little sausages, in particular, stuffed so tightly in their casings like the weary calves of the wool-socked women who tied on their head scarves, as if preparing for battle, and committed themselves to days in line, for the momentary distraction of those little sausages, or the occasional tongue-burst of soft-whipped ice cream, the toothy spray of an orange slice in winter.

  With all these new ways of living still to learn, the woman forgot about the tin in her closet.

  And then, the family gave her cause to remember, stepping back as they did onto the platform of the very same train station from which they had been taken eight years earlier.

  She returned the wardrobe with its tin. And with riven hands, they unclasped its crypted artifacts, let the parchment uncurl and speak.

  It was the original deed to Lembi, the only record of the shoemaker’s marks, the baron’s loan and the recorder’s sketch of the shape of the land that once was theirs, the ghostly outlines of all the swells and forests that fell within its boundaries.

  As a document, it no longer held any real power, they knew, the line of “X”s made all those years ago by the shoemaker’s hands now covered over by new marks: the cloven hooves and mucketed treads of the collective’s cows and all the workers who cared for them, who lived in the house, too, among their herd, trailing after them, scratching at flea bites, dreading already the call for morning milking that pulled them from their beds on the floors of what was once the old kitchen, the sitting room, the old shed where milk was once left to cool.

  In those strange days, when people rarely ever said exactly what they meant, at least in public, they all began to learn that lying could be a kind of truth. And when truth can be lies, and lies can be truth, then certainty is destabilized, but so is uncertainty.

  Don’t believe them even when they are lying, went one saying.

  In other words, everything requires translation.

  Truth. Lies. Lie-truths. But also, truth-lies.

  To successfully anticipate the correct sequence of truth-lie-lie-truth-lie required a kind of detachment that sometimes made them doubt their own minds. Did the dog wag his tail because he was pleased to see you, or because he wanted you to think he was pleased, so that you could then realize you had in fact not pleased him at all by leaving him all day without so much as knob of gristle? Did the brigade captain who said that you had milked more than anyone else this month really mean that you had done this, or did she intend for you to realize that because she’d said you’d done a good job, you should know you’d in fact done a terrible job, that you had all done a terrible job, that the cows were going dry, but that she would be doctoring the collective farm’s numbers to convince the central agricultural committee that they were surpassing their utterly unrealistic and unmeetable projections?

  It was not as if anyone said, Lembi is no longer yours. You can never go back. It was simply assumed, when the family returned, that everyone would go on acting as if nothing had happened, as if things had always been this way, cows in the kitchen, ten workers to a room, your furniture in someone else’s house, your laundry on another woman’s line, your horse dragging someone else’s plow, your hives in someone else’s meadow. Sometimes, you just needed to hold a piece of paper in your hand that said, Yes, you could trust your own mind. Lembi was real for you. Its borders were real. What had happened inside those borders, that was an altogether different matter, open to interpretation and even misunderstanding. But the parchment could reassure them of this much, at least: they were not wrong to claim that their memories, good and bad, remembered and forgotten, shared and disputed, could be traced back to a specific place in the physical world. And so they kept it, this small quiet verification of a private fact, which they assumed would only ever matter to them.

  To harbor it felt like a form of silent resistance, an assertion even, if only to themselves, that they still had secrets, something that belonged only to them; one small aspect of their life to which no one else had access, something they could keep separate, set apart, concealed in a battered tin—hidden evidence of what they had once possessed and lost, which meant that it possessed them still. Maybe, they decided, this was the safest form of possession in the end, harbored as they were inside a sustained and uninterrupted longing for something that was already gone. At least this way, what they had could never be taken away from them again.

  So in the months after independence was declared, when there began to be talk of returning seized property, and they looked again upon the parchment locked in the tin in this new light, it is hard not to suspect that any initial excitement they would have felt at the possibility of Lembi’s return might also have been accompanied by a small pulse of fear, an instinctive twitch to run and spare oneself the pain of a reunion that brought with it the possibility of new loss.

  There was a certain safety to staying exactly where they were, fixed in memory, reassured of the legitimacy of their claims, certain of the wrong that had been visited upon them, never challenged by the disappointments of reality.

  My grandmother wrote:

  We marvel that of my childhood home something still stands. And although it pains me to hear that it is so overgrown, that you can’t even see the old apple orchard anymore and that all the maples next to the house are gone, the farm can be rebuilt, and we will help you rebuild, if this is what you want. I will help you do this from afar for as long as Emils and I are able, as long as we are still breathing. We will give you all the support you need. I have such fond memories of my childhood on the farm, I would love for Lembi to return to our family, for others to experience it as I did. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, brother, if you could spend your last days there, in the home where you were born, and I was born, and Ausma was born?

  IN THE END, it was Ligita and Aivars who offered to try to return the farm to its former state.

  If administrative order was what had ultimately banished the family, it now offered their means of return. There was no human drama, no open conflict. Only a series of mundane bureaucratic steps. Copy. Assemble. Swear. Sign. Once the original deed had been presented, there was nothing to argue. The cows left the house, the people left the barn.

  Ligita and Aivars swept the rooms of manure and trash, bleached the walls of their methane stains, scrubbed through layers of unwashed funk and exhaustion and fitful night breath. They painted and papered and polished, and the fleas crabbed and pinched in tonguing waves, until their skin began to leap on its own, already anticipating the bristling touch of their legs.

  With the land itself, they were forced to start over again, to level the burls of brambles and strangling grasses, to replow and reseed. They resurrected the old apple orchard but could not reclaim the original stands of gooseberries and currants. Evidence of the vines of hops that once supplied Ligita’s grandfather with the ingredients for his homebrew had long since vanished. Here and there, the serrated
leaves of the descendants of the old hemp crops tipped and waved above the weeds.

  They filled the barn with milk cows, sheep and hogs. When the Roma came riding through, selling horses, Aivars picked out a gelding, feeling his legs for soundness, quietly assessing his disposition. They found dogs that knew in their blood how to cut a herd, how to bite without teeth. And they returned bees to hives in the meadows, so that when it was time, Janis could collect their combs, then crutch to the kitchen, where they had placed a honey extractor for him to use.

  First, he would place the combs inside a basket, then he would lower the basket into the extractor’s drum, which he would spin as quickly as his hands could turn the crank, trying to create enough force to fling the honey from its cells. Then he would drain the nectar that had collected in the drum’s bottom into old jars.

  For days after, as they walked through each scoured room, they could still smell the traces of crushed grass, new clover, fermented blackberry, the waxen peal of pollen as it is released, the sticky heat of bee’s wings.

  It was as if they had stitched traces of the old farm into the existing world. And it worked for a time, this reclaiming of what had been as a way to live yourself into what could be. But gradually, the patching between past and present began to show, then strain.

  Aivars, who had always been active in the country’s national guard, began to climb within its ranks. And while this development brought more opportunity and more pay, it also meant more travel, which frequently kept him away from home for days. All too often, that left Ligita to tend to the farm and the children on her own.

  I’m worried about Ligita’s health, Ausma wrote her sister, and she did not say this in her letter, but watching her daughter, she must have been reminded of her younger self, the fear and the stress she felt when the task of running Lembi fell to her alone.

  My sweet Ligita’s not sleeping. There’s so much work to be done and she can’t keep up, even as she’s giving it all her strength. I’m worried she will exhaust herself to the point where she won’t be able to go on.

  Here was the truth: the farm was an old dream from which the new country had awakened. Without the money for machinery, for rapid expansion, without the ability to farm several hundred acres at once, a person would never be able to scratch out anything more than the most basic existence as a farmer in Latvia’s new-old countryside.

  Sometimes, the ending, the resolution that strikes you as so right, so happy, so perfect as to have been scripted—lost farm returned to the family from which it was taken, continuity restored, guilt assuaged, collective memories repaired—turns out to be the one you didn’t really want, or need.

  Was it not better to sell what they could, while they still could, to set aside whatever money they might make to help their children to go to college, to learn to use something other than their hands, to move forward without debt? Could they not hold jobs in the village, but still make time, in their off-hours, for the old ways, the smell of honey, the swing of the scythe?

  Then why did they still feel so guilty to think of Lembi, abandoned, decaying, returning to ground? As far as Ausma is concerned, there was only ever one choice, and that was to let go of Lembi, to release it, once and for all.

  Earth is earth, she tells me. It does not matter whether you live upon it for it to remember you, and for you to remember it.

  After living through the family’s first desperate attempts to hold on to the farm, never realizing just how much that would cost them—because what if she had not tried, at sixteen, to hold everything together following her father’s death, what if she had said, Enough, I am too young, and they had lost Lembi then, would it really have been so bad, because how could they have sent them to Siberia when they had no more hectares to their name?—Ausma was clear: there was nothing sacred or noble about choosing home-ground above all else.

  Still, she says, whenever she dreams of a house, her mind always returns her to Lembi.

  It is the only home I ever visit in my dreams, she says. Even if it’s not supposed to be Lembi, it always looks exactly like Lembi.

  Once, I asked Ausma if she knew how Lembi got its name, and what its significance might be, but she said she didn’t know.

  I was too young to care about such things, she said, and I never thought to ask the people who would know while I still could.

  Over the last few years, I have tried, without much luck, to come up with a satisfactory answer. Something to do with lambs, someone suggested. The baron was infatuated with Italian things, and it was a reference to something Italian that was modified over the years, someone else said. But then recently, as I was thinking about all this, about Lembi, about the difference between what we lose and what we let go, I stumbled upon a paper tracing the anthroponymic evolution of Latvian names.

  Among the examples listed is the name Lembe, which is referenced in The Chronicle of Henry of Livonia, and thought perhaps to trace its lineage back to ancient Finno-Ugric roots.

  It means love.

  XX

  THEY ARE too old to hay, but every morning I wake to find Ausma and Harijs at the kitchen window, scanning the road for combines, consulting the clouds, debating with each other as if they were in charge of all the surrounding fields.

  The neighbor, why is he waiting so long to gather the windrows? Ausma says. Can’t he see it’s going to rain? He should be out there!

  And then Aivars and Ligita call. Their hay is ready, and they have enough to spare. Could Ausma and Harijs use some? Ausma bites back tears. They have spent the last of their pension checks for the month, and there is still a week left before the next ones come, and they have been worrying how they will feed the horse, but they didn’t want to ask for help. Oh yes, she says, and hangs up, only to realize there is a new problem. How to get the hay—and store it in the barn before the rain they are predicting arrives? Usually, another relative with a truck spares Harijs the bother of hay collection, but he is unavailable.

  We are old but not helpless, Ausma says at last, as they debate what to do. Take the old wagon! Inara can help.

  In Communist times, Harijs had worked training all the collective’s horses. At one point, he and Ausma had cared for more than two hundred. It is immediately clear, by the speed with which he tacks the horse and hitches it to the wagon, that he has missed this part of his history, and is eager to exercise his skills as a horseman one more time.

  I watch as he leans in and whispers something in the horse’s ear.

  What did you tell him? I ask. Harijs doesn’t respond. And I can’t be sure if it is because he does not hear me or because he is choosing not to answer, whether these are the kind of words that are more than words.

  Holding the reins in one hand, Harijs sits on the wagon’s edge, one leg dangling off the side, just above the ground. I sit behind him in the empty bed of the wagon on an old rag rug Ausma has laid for me to sit on—to make your chariot ride a little softer—and I keep my hands around the pitchforks to stop their rattling.

  We ride in silence, Harijs concentrating on the horse’s path, alert for the sound of cars. Occasionally, he will click or whistle, and the horse will adjust to his commands, but mostly it seems that Harijs communicates only with the slightest change in the tension in his body, a twitch, a small tug, nothing I can see.

  Just past the crossroads pine, he maneuvers the horse toward the center of the road so that we can make room for two young women walking along the shoulder.

  As they register the clatter of hooves, not the hum of tires, they stop and gape.

  I’ve only ever seen this in books, one says.

  Are you real? asks the other.

  It’s like a painting, says the first woman.

  Would you like a ride? says Harijs.

  Yes, they shout.

  Harijs blushes.

  The horse takes this moment to let out a stream of urine.

  I can’t wait to tell everyone that I have hitchhiked on a wagon, says the first woma
n.

  When I tell Ausma the story later, about Harijs picking up young women with his wagon, she laughs. They must have been really young to be so impressed! In Communist times, well into the sixties, most people here couldn’t afford cars. We still did everything with horses. Or we rode bicycles. I remember when Harijs finally saved up enough to have a motorcycle. With a sidecar! That’s where I would ride. Now that was fun.

  At Ligita and Aivars’s house, we ease the wagon out to the back field, where they have forked the windrows into dense, towering piles.

  Aren’t those beautiful, says Harijs. It’s almost a shame to take something so beautiful apart.

  But this is what they do, peeling sheets of hay from the mound with the tines of the pitchforks, carefully spreading layer upon layer on the wagon’s bed. Every so often, Ligita will hoist herself onto the growing pile and walk from one end of the wagon to the other, balancing the load, packing it down. Soon the stack of hay towers more than fifteen feet above the ground.

  And this is how we ride back, perched on the very top, nothing to hold the hay in place, no rope, no straps, only the simple eloquent construction of each careful layer.

  YOU’RE AWAKE, Ausma says, as I pad into the kitchen, and tap the side of the kettle with my palm to gauge whether it’s warm enough for tea.

  You are here, I tell myself. You are here. You are here with Ausma, in her kitchen, with the radio playing Latvian pop songs, and there are chamomile flowers and nettle leaves drying on the stove, and there is the newspaper with its jokes, and there, through the window, is where Ausma and Harijs were married, and a little farther still, there is Ausma’s birch tree.

  Last night, I dreamed of a wolf in a cage. Actually, the wolf was inside a cage that had been nested inside another cage. The wolf sat with its back to me, and I could see that its pelt was lashed, laced with dozens of old wounds that had left raised scars. From somewhere behind me a voice called out: Don’t look at it.