17 April, later
It’s now afternoon. Despite the cold wind, a contingent from the writers’ house trekked a few miles to the outdoor museum grounds to participate in a spring event, organized by local bird-enthusiasts. We’d been specially invited, as someone had heard that a biologist resided at the house, and could she perhaps say a few words? No. She would not say a few words regarding Latvian birds, about which she knows next to nothing. But yes, she would come, in the company of other writers, to help build a bird house. So we set out, bundled in our warmest clothes: Ieva, her friend Inga from Riga, Alexi (the Russian-Latvian actor/playwright/erotica writer), and Suat, the newest resident, a Kurdish translator from Istanbul.
I chatted in English with Suat as we walked. We’re both fans of Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish Nobel Laureate. I told him that I regretted not bringing his memoir, Istanbul, along with me to Latvia. In it Pamuk elegizes the city he knew as a boy, its shabby backstreets and ruins reminding him every moment of its once-glorious past. He reflects in that book how he was shaped as a writer by place, by growing up in a fallen empire, in a city whose inhabitants wear that defeat like a shawl. Like Pamuk, I love the oldest houses in Latvia, those that don’t hide their signs of wear and tear. These are wood-sided, shingle-roofed, some still inhabited, some not. I love half-ruined structures, and mysterious overgrown cemeteries. Suat talked about his “intersecting identities,” as a Turkish citizen and as a Kurd. This reminded me of a conversation I’d recently had with my step-daughter Elli, who interviewed me for a paper she was doing. Her class’s title contains that phrase, “intersecting identities.” Suat translates from Greek into Turkish and Kurdish, but has decided to only translate into Kurdish from now on. He says he is the only person doing it, and he wants to help further the literary life of his people. He said that in Turkey, citizens are discouraged from identifying themselves as ethnic minorities, encouraged to define themselves as Turks.
We arrived at the park to find a group of enthusiastic folk listening to a man explain how to get started with bird-house construction. There were extremely tall, lanky young men, a few black (an unusual sight in Latvia), one with dreads, wearing red hoodies and sweat pants. These were members of the Ventspils basketball team (basketball is a passion here). Other people wore identical t-shirts emblazoned with “Demokrati LV” and a sun (Neither Ieva nor Inga knew the significance, but Ieva said “too bad some people have to ruin everything with politics.”) We found an unoccupied folding table covered with tools, and meanwhile, a brass band began to play (quite well) a rousing song that incited a flurry of activity in the crown. A group of older women in traditional folk costumes (tautas terpas) of the Kurzeme region (long green wool skirts, blue wool shawls clasped in place with an amber pendant) waited to sing. A pile of lumber lay on the ground. On our table we found metal squares, measuring tapes, hand-saws, nail-pullers, boxes of nails, crowbars. Ieva had teased Alexi that he wasn’t dressed for a woodworking project, so he decided to prove her wrong, and took it upon himself to take the lead with our bird house. It was an amusing sight, this motley group of writers, not one of us a carpenter, staring at the instruction sheet, with its vague diagrams. At one point, Alexi shook his fist at them. We sawed our boards and began to build, or more accurately, Alexi sawed, we held the boards in place or handed him tools or simply watched. In his tan trench coat lined with plaid flannel, with his black Samsonite purse slung over his shoulder, an umbrella handle sticking out from one end, with his leather shoes, he made an unlikely carpenter, but he dove into his job with such abandon, that one of the organizers had to interrupt to say the house we were building was much too big for the tiny visbulitsi, and would have to be trimmed. Meanwhile, behind us, the ex-mayor of the town, the infamous Lembergs, who stood trial during my last visit to Latvia for taking bribes, and who’d recently finished his jail time, with great brio constructed a very large owl house. After much nailing and sawing in the cold wind, while folk songs drifted by our ears, we finished our house, and walked quickly back, trying to warm up. When walking didn’t help, we took emergency action, and headed for the hot chocolate café.
And now for a radical change of tone …
I mentioned in my last posting that I’d encountered a kind of truth about history at Ieva’s aunt’s house. Now I want to relate another kind of history, another kind of truth, of a more personal kind. I left off my last blog post in Cesis, then Priekulis. The next day, after spending the night at Ieva’s cousin’s house, we again boarded a bus, this time for Valmiera, the town my mother and her family left forever in September of 1944. In 2007, I’d traveled to Valmiera alone, into a complete unknown. In my backpack, I’d carried photographs: of the courthouse where my grandfather worked, of my mother’s old school, of her house. Some of the pictures were taken in the 1930’s, some in the 1990’s, when my mother’s sister visited Valmiera and found the house. I’d spent an epic day searching for the house, and only found it after a woman at the museum researched the old street name, which had been changed. So this time Valmiera was familiar when the bus pulled into the station. For once, I was the guide, showing Ieva the route to my mother’s neighborhood, over the bridge across the Gauja River. In a memoir letter she wrote about 12 years ago, my mother describes her last trip across that very bridge, sitting on a wagon with her sister, mother, father, and their suitcases. They were headed for the train station. They could hear, in the distance, gun-shots and explosions, as the Red Army advanced toward their town. My mother’s father bribed a train conductor with vodka in order to convince him to grant them passage, and with others from the town, the family climbed into a boxcar that would take them away from Latvia forever. To return to that house two years ago was a staggering experience for me. I sat across the street and wrote a letter to my mother, and of course, I cried. I couldn’t stop thinking about the family closing the door to the house and walking away from it for the last time. My grandfather worked in the Valmiera courthouse as a judge, and my grandmother worked as his legal aid. My mother and her siblings were cared for by a nanny named Natasha, and the photographs of family gatherings depict well-dressed people in comfortable surroundings. Soon after my mother’s family left their apartment, it was inhabited by Russians. This was reported to them by my great-aunt Lina, who stayed in Latvia, and returned to the house to check on things after the war. That was the beginning of the unknown chapters of that house’s history, as it collected and was marked by the dust, voices, scrapes, ashes, smudges, memories and soot of other lives.
I found the house easily this time, pointing out to Ieva the bank where I’d stopped with my old photographs in 2007. I described to her the helpful tellers who’d puzzled over the street address written in my grandmother’s hand, on the back of a black-and-white snapshot. They’d said the house seemed familiar. Hours later, they’d been joyful when I returned to tell them that I’d finally succeeded in my mission. This time, I knew to bear left, to stay parallel to the Gauja River, to watch for Leona Paegles iela, which was once called Dzirnavu iela, in my grandparents’ time. And there it was again, a large brick elementary school on the left, a park on the right, where the synagogue stood. In front of this synagogue, my mother, on her way home from school one day, watched German soldiers force Jews to throw holy books into a fire, and then lead them away.
Then, there it was, the house, with its flat roof, cream-colored paint, and tiny wrought iron balcony on the second floor, above the brown-painted double doors. We stood there, and Ieva said, “We should go inside.” I hadn’t done that, the last time; I didn’t want to intrude on the privacy of the inhabitants. I didn’t know what was or wasn’t proper. But Ieva assured me it would be fine. We tried the front doors, but they were locked, so went around to the back, where a small door stood open. It lead to a foyer. A staircase with a bent wrought iron railing, still retaining a hint of its former elegance, led to a landing, where the stairs continued up in another direction. Light shown in from a window there, onto the tile floor, and spilled down the gray-painted stairs. We stood before a wooden door painted white. “We should ring the bell, ask if we could go inside,” Ieva said. I wouldn’t have dreamed of doing this on my own. With great trepidation, I watched as she boldly pressed the buzzer. “What if no one’s home?” I asked, absurdly. “I saw someone behind the curtain,” she said. “Someone’s home.” We waited. We didn’t hear any footsteps, so she pushed the button again. And footsteps came. The door opened, and there stood a girl, about ten or twelve years old, slender and pale, with long, dirty-blonde hair. “Is your mother home?” Ieva asked. I wondered what the girl thought, perhaps that we were evangelists of some kind. “No,” she said, “my grandmother.” “That’s fine,” Ieva said, “would you please get her?” The little girl walked back inside, told her grandmother there were “two ladies” at the door. A short, plump, dark-haired woman appeared, looking to be in her sixties, with fine lines in her face, a plain short haircut, and brown, sharp eyes. She looked suspicious, but when Ieva explained who we were, and asked if we might come inside and take a look at the house, the woman stepped aside, held out her hand, and said “of course.” I looked at Ieva. She smiled at me, and nodded rapidly in her way, letting me enter ahead of her. And that’s how I found myself inside my mother’s childhood home.
It all happened so quickly, there was no time to prepare, to access an inner place of expectation or even emotion. I didn’t anticipate this would happen. The woman told us her name was Leontine, that her granddaughter was Eveline; Eveline’s parents were working abroad somewhere (Ieva told me later that this is common; parents leave their children with a grandparent, often of limited means, sometimes for years at a time, to work in places like Ireland, where there are – or were – more jobs with better pay). Leontine led us into the kitchen, which was dominated by a heavy cook stove, white-tiled, and much-used. I’ve grown accustomed to the shabby, decrepit aspects of many Latvian homes, but it was hard to absorb the condition of the apartment, to place this scene beside the mental image I’d carried of my mother’s childhood home. I’d imagined a well-appointed house with high ceilings, tall windows, wooden floors, solid furnishings, tables covered in my grandmother’s exquisite needlework. My grandmother’s small home in Manchester, Conn. was clean, warm, cozy, with shelves filled with books and Hummel figurines, a cuckoo clock above the mantel and window sills of African violets. This home, which Leontine rented from an abstentee landlord, lacked decoration of any kind. A few heat-darkened pots gaped open on the black cast-iron stove top. A gray rag and a dish brush lay on the surface; it was cold. Above the stove, alone the white tile backing, a strainer, a blue plastic cutting board, a cheese grater and a roll of paper towels hung from clips. The ceiling above was black with soot. Beneath the stove, a pink plastic pan caught ash, and beside it squatted a fat square of sawed off wood, using as a chopping block for kindling. The walls were unpainted, peeling. It was impossible to tell their present or formal color. A broom rested against one wall. To the left of the stove was a chipped utility sink, and underneath it, a five gallon plastic pail. I followed Leontine like a sleepwalker. “Take a picture of that cookstove,” Ieva said, “it was surely the same one your mother knew, and she’ll recognize it.” That woke me up, and I pulled out my camera, asked Leontine if it was okay, and I began to snap photos, focusing on things my mother might remember. What would she remember? Would she recognize the door to the hall, painted cream? Or beside it, the same white tiles that backed the stove? Would she recognize the pattern of the wall-paper, though it was now faded and torn? Or the hardwood floor, emerging in patches from its chipped coat of tan paint?
From the kitchen we walked into the living room, quite small, with two single beds that doubled as couches (made up with blankets), a few tables and chairs, and a small television set, which was on with the volume turned down. In the living room, I photographed the white tiled heat stove, and got on my knees to take a close-up of the cast iron door. Would my mother recognize that door? Or the white-painted wooden trim, or the views from the windows, the street, or the garden, or the park, through the lace curtains? The wallpaper was rose-colored, with a subtle floral pattern: a hint of former elegance. Another hint was the ceiling, now cracked. It was high, and the corners were curved, not angled. The back bedroom, with the same rose wallpaper, contained a simple day bed, a desk and computer chair, and a cheap faux-wood armoir, with boxes piled on top of it. A faded rug covered the floor. Leontine apologized for the shabbiness of the house, which was neat, though completely unadorned, without charm. We stood together in that bedroom, and my heart started to hurt. “I’m probably going to cry now,” I told her, and she looked over at me for a moment, and remained standing there, by my side. When we rejoined Ieva and Eveline in the living room, they were cooing to a small tabby cat, which Eveline held in her arms. I asked Ieva to take a photograph of the three of us (and the kitten) in front of the stove. Leontine began to take down the coats pinned with clothespins to a string suspended across the front of the tiled surface, but Ieva told her there was no need; it was normal to keep things warm that way; perhaps my grandmother did the same thing. I took one more look around that room, and when I turned and began to walk back to the kitchen, Leontine followed close behind me, patting me gently on my back with both of her hands. She accompanied us outside, where I wandered through the large yard, with its gardens and greenhouse and small storage sheds. Against the wall of the house, I photographed spring flowers. Leontine said perhaps my grandmother planted them. Then we said goodbye like relatives, hugging. Leontine said I must return again with my siblings; we’d be welcomed. Back on the sidewalk in front of the house, Ieva took pictures of me. And then she remembered a marzipan bar she’d bought at the Riga Central market, so we went back, rang the bell, and handed the candy bar to Eveline, who shyly thanked us. As we left the foyer, Leontine opened the door, and again waved goodbye. As we walked away, Ieva told me that our visit probably meant a lot to Leontine, that now the apartment she inhabited had a history, a story.
I love the walk to my mother’s old school, which is about a quarter mile from the house. It passes a beautiful cemetery behind a stone wall, crowded with carefully tended graves. Ieva loves cemeteries, so we left the street, opened the gate, and entered. Somewhere there, my great aunt Lina is buried. She stayed in Latvia through the war, and she died alone. I haven’t found her grave, but I feel her presence. The graves were freshly raked and tidied for Easter, with glass jars of candles and vases of pussy willows and flowers propped against the stones. Several people worked on plots. In Latvia, people have other living spaces, like the dachas where apartment dwellers like my cousin Juris grow gardens and tend greenhouses. And they also have grave plots, which I think of as tiny outdoor rooms or miniature gardens. Often, a bench is situated beside a grave, with a small hand rake hidden behind the stone. Families visit or have picnics there on holidays. From the graveyard, we continued to the end of the road. My mother’s school is there, a brick edifice, beautifully restored, with gleaming metal roofs. I can easily imagine her, along with her sister, walking back and forth from their home. The pavement ends partway down, and cars are rare. Old wood-sided or brick houses line the street. Other than the streetlights and traffic signs, I don’t imagine it’s changed much since the 1930’s.
We had a little time before we had to catch a bus back to Riga. Looking back on it, I know that I was in a mild state of shock; I hadn’t absorbed the reality of the experience, of having been inside my mother’s house. But I knew one thing for certain, that without Ieva, my Latvian soul-sister, I wouldn’t have put my own finger to that doorbell. I knew I would never be able to repay her. She is not a nostalgic or sentimental person, quite the contrary, but she understood exactly what it would mean for me to enter the house. At some point afterwards, she said something akin to, “I also wanted you to see what Latvians are like; they may seem cold at first, but they are in reality generous; if you ask, they will give.” Of course I thanked her for what she’d done, and told her I wouldn’t have been brave enough to enter the foyer. But to become effusive would have embarrassed her, so I simply did the only thing I could by way of thanks: I took her to a kafenica. (And of course in my heart, I hugged her).
Staring now at the photograph of myself standing in front of the tiled stove, I see what I didn’t see that day. I do see charm, in the light filtering through the lace curtains, in the curve of the ceiling, in the cream-painted trim, in the less faded wallpaper in the back bedroom. I see the beauty that might have been. In my imagination, I take out the junk furniture, roll up that dusty rug, I clear everything out of that apartment, and I get on my knees and scrub. Then I repopulate the house with furniture, not ostentatious, but solid and beautiful: an oak armoir, a pine desk, a cozy couch. I place potted violets on the deep window sills, behind the lace curtains. I build bookshelves and fill them with linen-covered books. In a glass-fronted cabinet I arrange my grandmother’s teacups, her Hummel figurines. I pull the carved wooden pine cones on the ends of their chains to start the ticking of the cuckoo clock. I stoke the cook stove, put a copper kettle on to heat. I set the small table in the kitchen for a family of five, and then, remembering, I set an extra plate for my great-aunt Lina. And then yet another for Natasha. I put out sliced black bread, chocolate, meat, and cheese. And then I leave. Knowing there will be supper for them, when they come back. It’s been such a long journey.
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