by Daša Drndic
Only one of the former residents is still there, Mrs. Herman, up in the attic, alone. Now she has a telephone. We sat for three hours, we drank five very sweet coffees out of very small cups, with a pattern of women in maroon crinolines strolling through gardens and smelling roses, followed by men in evening dress. Then Mrs. Herman said, She died in Vrapče Asylum.
We had believed that she died in hospital, of heart problems, of pneumonia, that’s what we were told. That’s what we had believed for twenty-five years.
Then Mrs. Herman said, They took her away by force. She didn’t want to go. She pleaded, “Don't, don't.”
Those women on the cups kept on calmly strolling through the scented gardens. There were no clocks anywhere. It seemed that Mrs. Herman had put them away, like the railway caps, they weren’t there anymore either.
Then Mrs. Herman said, Bruno got in touch then. He instructed them, Take her away. They shouldn’t have taken her, she was in her right mind.
I thanked Mrs. Herman. It was stupid, but I did. Mrs. Herman gave me her telephone number, I’ve got it here. Give me a call from time to time, she said.
I went to Mirogoj Cemetery, to the office. To settle the bills, to pay for the grave, I said. They told me there was no need, that it was no longer the grave of Ana Osterman, but that of Magda from Medvedščak. They said, Madame Magda pays everything on time.
I went to the court. They gave me the transcript and the judgment. They were very pleasant. The corridors were crammed with clients, but they took me out of order, which was incomprehensible. They photocopied everything for me, for free.
In the street I studied the papers. The trams had stopped, everything had stopped. The pedestrians had stopped and the noises had stopped. The papers were from the inheritance hearing, somewhat belated, by twenty-five years. Ana’s son Bruno, the one who had been alive until two years ago, had given Ana’s grave to Magda, he had not called us. No one could have called us because Magda had declared that we did not exist. Magda had declared that Marisa, my mother and Ada’s, had never had children, so we had not been born. She did admit that Ana’s other son, Karlo, had been born, but his daughters had not been born; one of Karlo’s daughters, Clara, worked here in the hospital; she died of glioblastoma. The other is a lawyer and is alive.
So, I said to Clara while she was still alive, when we were eating cakes once in that café with gray armchairs, we don’t exist.
When my mother Marisa died, the send-off, as some like to call it, was large, a lot of people pushed their way into the chapel of the crematorium at Belgrade New Cemetery and threw themselves onto our chests and spattered us with sticky spit mixed with tears, while we just stood there. In fact, when the body is burned, it’s better to say leave-taking than cortège, because the deceased is not carried anywhere; the chapel is usually right beside the crematorium, a few meters away. When you say send-off, it’s as though the person is going on a journey from which they will return, and a crowd of people is standing on the platform, waving, smiling, sending kisses and waving.
With a cremation, there are no long processions meandering through the paths of the graveyard, swaying with the whispers of acquaintances from whom a little laugh or a little sob occasionally escapes, above whom fear and unease hover, there is no solemn walking through the city of the dead in which around every corner wait engraved shadows, calling. The speeches end, and now ever more frequently that awful church chanting, that collective praying in which the priests call out the name of the deceased as though they were old acquaintances, which of course has nothing to do with common sense, when the visitors, as though catatonic, repeat Mea culpa, mea culpa, that hideous amateur performance with elements of Greek tragedy and vaudeville comes to an end and the coffin just sinks, and the assembled don’t know what to do with themselves.
But, when we came for the ashes, we were alone, our father, Ada and I. Torrential rain was falling, we waited in the cemetery office for them to bring us Marisa and watched through the window as the graveyard was submerged before our eyes. Grandma Ana didn’t come. She sat beside our mother’s bed, eerily empty, stroking the pillow. After that, Grandma Ana became ever smaller, ever rounder and ever blacker. She was transformed into a little velvet ball that rolled through the apartment, unable to rebound. Just occasionally, as though she were all made of ashy down, Grandma Ana would rise barely perceptibly off the ground, then she would softly land again and fall without a sound. Like a little bird, she would try to chirp, and a tiny jerky whisper would emerge from her, a general huskiness, a cracking, internal and external. We were afraid that she would go missing somewhere, under the carpet, behind a door, that we would step on her or squash her, she had shrunk so much. Then one day, she said, I’m going home and left.
It was only she, only my grandmother Ana who, quite by chance, if there is such a thing, offered me a little proof of Karlo’s amorous adventure on the axis Split–Paris–Riga–Split–Riga–Split, on the basis of which I was able to construct this nonconstructable story.
Even though after my flight from that Bavarian village my affair with Leila Mazais was definitively ended, Leila got in touch looking for an explanation, but I was not inclined to elaborate on my discovery, because I had not yet discovered anything. Then, that year when Grandma Ana went back to her Ulica Medvedgradska for the second time, but before they took her away to Vrapče Asylum, Leila asked me to meet her at Pleso Airport and help her find accommodation on one of the Adriatic islands. We went together to Grandma Ana. Your girl says that she comes from Riga, Karlo was in Riga, said Grandma Ana, long ago, just before the war. I’ve got two of his letters to us in Split and one of Frida’s to him here, sent to Zagreb. I’ll tell you sometime, I don’t feel like it now.
She gave me the letters, I went back to Belgrade and I never saw her again. She died that winter. In fucking Vrapče. Alone.
From Karlo’s meager letters and that one of Frida’s I learned little. I learned that at the end of June 1940, Karlo returned to Split, then in the summer of 1941 he traveled to Riga again, but soon came back, definitively, to Yugoslavia. How he made his way through war-torn Europe I don’t know, maybe by train, the trains were running efficiently, except that their timetables were adapted to the passengers, of whom there were so many that they brought in cattle trucks for people, in addition to passenger carriages. Karlo was a journalist and perhaps that legitimation gave him some sort of protection, but also his Saxon surname, which probably had a soothing effect on the police of the Third Reich. Although he did not speak German, Karlo spoke French and Italian, which was interesting, but not essential. In short:
It seems that none of the Landsbergs survived the war. That fact significantly impeded my research, not to say that my delving into the small, encapsulated past of a family that was altogether remote from me became an impossible, almost senseless undertaking. It was seventy years and more since that family broke away, like an independently hovering body, detached itself from the earth and soared to the heavens, where it is now floating, roaming, and continues to emit soft, ever-softer wailing, lamentation, dirges like the plucked strings of a violin. But that the story of Frida Landsberg is not finished and that it draws into itself other stories, contemporary stories with deep roots, which, as some historians like to say, branch out like capillaries, that is, their veins weave a network underground, that I know, that I see, that I have discovered in the course of my relationship with Leila. Now I am making connections, I rummage through my sunken memories, my memories blurred by oblivion, my memories, which are hostages to time, coated in mold, my rejected memories, and I summon up encounters, fragments of conversation, passing faces, I seek links, a reason for my fury with Leila. Around me is chaos, within me confusion.
The building at 99 Stabu iela is a fine white or gray five-story house in the art nouveau style in the center of Riga, not far from its old heart. Today it is a private hotel, but then the Landsbergs lived on the f
ourth floor, Frida’s father Benzon and mother Sonja, née Miller, they ran a small shoe factory, and had a shoe shop in the center of town. Latvia has a tradition of manufacturing shoes. I discovered that in 1939 there were eighty-four factories employing fourteen hundred workers. They produced mainly rubber footwear. When the Soviets occupied Latvia for the first time in June 1940, they nationalized Benzon Landsberg’s factory, although he continued to work there — only at one of the machines. His shoe shop was also taken from him, the Russians changed its name, its range and its personnel. Frida was still studying at the conservatoire, Karlo sent “Letters from Riga” to the Split local newspaper, which were not published because in 1940, for Split and generally for Europe, there were more important topics; Hitler was marching on Paris, who could be bothered with some Latvia or other, and Poland was more and more in the news.
So, in June 1940, Soviet tanks entered Riga. Life was not immediately turned upside down. During all wars, always and everywhere, people build niches, magic burrows in which they place their everyday lives, their mirages, their illusions of normality, in order to survive. So, Karlo Osterman watches people disappear. Karlo Osterman is horrified, oh, yes, but these arrests, these disappearances, surely they have an explanation, an acceptable explanation, Karlo Osterman consoles himself, well, he’s only twenty-two.
Then friends of the Landsberg family vanish, Karlo Osterman had met some of them, he had gone to exhibitions with some of them, he had played chess with some. A frequent guest in the Landsbergs’ apartment at the time was the well-known chess player Kārlis Ozols, who would be mentioned — how amazing — back then in the 1970s in that German dump, by Leila’s father, except that it took me forty years to drag that encounter back into my memory and place it somewhere. Kārlis Ozols was a first-class chess player and a great patriot, that’s roughly what Arvīds Mazais said, We met in 1946 in a displaced persons’ camp in Germany, he said. And Leila added something along the lines of He was tall and thin, he had a stoop and a shrill voice. Of course, I knew about the chess master Kārlis Ozols even then, I knew that he had represented Latvia at Olympiads in Munich in 1936 and in Stockholm in 1937, and that in 1958 he became the chess champion of Australia. I knew that much and it was enough. Much bigger and younger names were shaking up the chess world, and Kārlis Ozols had lost his shine, if he ever had any, in fact I had quite lost sight of Kārlis Ozols. I’ll come back to that fellow (in the name of textual structure, cyclical, as the critics would say).
In Riga, in 1940, lawyers, doctors, engineers and some of Frida’s colleagues disappear, They must have gone abroad, training, said Frida, the Russians arrest around five thousand reputable citizens and who knows how many more “disreputable” ones and shove all those people into wagons. The trains are going to Siberia. Karlo Osterman watches as, from one day to the next, the station becomes increasingly crowded, at the station a dense, impenetrable silence reigns. Disquiet slips into Karlo Osterman’s breast, and grows.
So, here are the Russians. The changes are swift, abrupt and remediless. The secret police trail many, including artists and writers. The censors have wide-open eyes, unblinking. The state regulates life, private life above all.
And the worst is yet to come.
When Frida Landsberg is transferred in October 1941, as it says on the little confirmation note that falls out of Rosenberg’s diary, from 99 Stabu iela to the suburbs, to Maskavas iela, Moscow Street in other words, she is transferred in fact to a Jewish ghetto. I discover this from Frida’s letter to Karlo which by some miracle, even if several months late, reaches 24 Ulica Medvedgradska, in Zagreb. Karlo is already working for the underground movement. Karlo Osterman and Frida Landsberg’s love is arrested by history; it is kicked into a corner and on it is put a lock with no key. It is not known how long that love thrashes about, how much it twists and howls, kicking and beating its fists against the steel door of the prison, which has no one to open it. Some loves endure even when all that is left of them are tufts, chipped dreams, which rarely occur, and when they do, create chaos. A few days ago, I dreamed of Frida Landsberg, I embraced her and whispered into her neck, You’re killing me, I feel her body, her cheek against my own. Then, in an instant, her long curly hair bursts into flame and Frida Landsberg burns up. Am I becoming the forty-years-dead Karlo Osterman?
At the beginning of 1940, one still eats well in Riga. Dairy products are first class, Karlo Osterman spreads warm, freshly baked bread with local butter, the cream is thick, the curd cheese better than that in Split, jana cheese with caraway is a real delicacy, a lot of smoked fish is eaten, and for a feast day Sonja Landsberg bakes piragi, bread filled with onion and bacon, and klingeris, bread with saffron and dried fruit. The beer is excellent, the wine mediocre.
Latvians are not loud. They don’t shout in the street, they don’t wave their arms about when they talk. When they’re angry, they’re restrained. They accept foreigners with caution until they get to know them, then they relax and embrace them. Their intimate relations are very intimate. In their intimate relations they touch each other constantly and like to use diminutives. It is not known how noisy, explosive Karlo Osterman gets on in that environment.
When Karlo Osterman arrives in Riga in 1939, culture is flourishing. He visits museums with Frida, goes to the Opera, to concerts, to exhibitions, he is delighted by the extravagant Kārlis Padegs, a painter and dandy who walks around Riga in patent-leather shoes, in a long black coat with a red scarf around his neck, with a black hat on his head, swirling a bamboo cane as he walks and whistles. Padegs hangs his canvases in cafés, in the street, in exhibitions at photographic salons and publicly shoots to pieces the hypocrisy of the scandalized bourgeoisie, in whose faces his urban homeless, cripples, prostitutes and alcoholics laugh. Padegs’ paintings and his drawings, distortedly expressionist and figurative, full of refined contrasts, seem to prefigure the evil that was coming. Toward the end of his life, and he died at twenty-nine of advanced tuberculosis, in the spring of 1940, Padegs, a loner, became an embarrassment for the terrified Latvians, a thorn in their side, and if he hadn’t died, someone would have tried to get rid of him. And so Padegs sinks into oblivion. Then in 1998 that oblivion miraculously disperses, removes its veil and after nearly sixty years here is Padegs again in museums in Latvia and abroad, personified in life-size statues and on memorial plaques on the buildings in which he lived. That’s how it goes. Karlo Osterman didn’t know what kind of funeral was arranged for Padegs in 1940, because he was getting ready to return to Split. For another month or two he listened to jazz in cellar bars with Frida’s friends, and there was a lot of singing of traditional songs and dancing of traditional dances, there were big choirs, mass festivals, which didn’t exactly enthrall Karlo Osterman, but he understood the sickness known as stoking up the national identity, watched that pathetic danse macabre that reinforces the inner orientation of all who are caught up in its ring dance, watched that steel fist with its combination of repressed aggression, violence and fascism, that hypertrophied growth of roots whose branches wrap themselves firmly around the homeland, faith and family. Caught in that trap, people believe, Here, I exist, I am protected. All that, those traditional dances, that traditional melody, those customs, all that swiftly sinks, and out of the putrid core of identity surface new identities, new monsters, first the Soviets’, and then those of the Third Reich.
Before the coming of the Soviets, Latvia exported large quantities of agricultural products and timber, it was technologically advanced, it produced radios and mini-cameras; per capita numbers of registrations at universities were among the highest in the world. The first sound film was made, Zvejnieka dēls (The Fisherman’s Son), which was hugely successful, and after which nothing significant in film was produced for a long time. Karlo went with Frida to the Splendid Palace cinema, built way back in 1923, and was stunned, he had never seen anything like it. Nor would he again. Behind the neobaroque façade there opened up a vast rococo int
erior with a painted ceiling and more than eight hundred seats. We’ve walked into a dream, in two hours we’ll walk out of it, said Karlo to Frida. Dreams are short-lived. And deceitful, Frida whispered to him, as though foreseeing the dirty tricks being prepared for them by fickle History. In 1952, the Soviets renamed the cinema the Riga, so that it should fit at least somehow into communist reality, because that “palace,” and “splendid” to boot, was a bit much, simply offensive for the little show-off that was Latvia. Today the cinema has risen from the dead and is once again called the Splendid Palace.
But, as early as the middle of 1940, the tramping of encroaching poverty can be heard, there is an odor of fear. Karlo Osterman senses a small yearning that runs through his body like a flock of colorful butterflies, which then fly out into the ever more somber Riga, because, whenever there is no one to hear him, he walks along the shore of the gray Baltic singing “My Split is far from me.” But how much Split is changing, and how rapidly, Karlo Osterman cannot surmise. In his imagination, he visits the shops of his native city, including car showrooms, he leafs through film magazines, freshly shaved at his father’s barbershop, drowsy, he goes to jazz evenings, looks at beautiful women, he calls in to some of the numerous bars for a glass of wine, plays a bit of briscola and the compulsory sei-sette, in cafés he drinks espresso, newly imported from Italy, his step is blithe and life is, ah, good.
Ethnic Germans abandon Latvia. In 1940, fifty-one thousand leave. When Karlo Osterman returns briefly in 1941, a further ten and a half thousand have gone. Many move to so-called Warthegau, to the parts of Poland that Nazi Germany annexed in 1939, many perish on the journey, others join SS military units, and they too perish.