Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Re-Entry




 26 March

Coming to Latvia for the second time is another story. Much of the anxiety and sense of displacement is gone (or, more likely, just hiding out in the kakti (corners) of my brain, waiting for a quiet, vulnerable moment to ambush me). Last time, every worry attached itself to every unknown, even the most benign. This time, I knew my way around the Amsterdam Airport, knew that I’d take a bus to the plane, that I’d be standing and swaying, holding onto a rail, listening for the Latvian language around me, hearing more Russian than Latvian. Observing, taking note: Who’s going to Riga? An Asian couple. A slight young woman with rumpled hair the color of summer dusted grass, her bare feet in sandals, wearing an ankle-length black and white African-print dress, a gray shawl wrapped around her shoulders. Her shaved-headed boyfriend was more conventionally dressed, but also barefoot in Tevas. On the plane next to me, a heavily made-up black-haired woman in a rhinestone studded sweatshirt, dramatic blue frosted eye shadow, and thick black mascara was flipping through a fashion magazine with her boyfriend. He clearly paid attention to such things, from the looks of his tight, acid-washed jeans, his frosted hair. But I knew not to apply what I saw on the plane to the rest of Latvia. Flying is for the privileged.

Out the window of the plane, the Baltic slid by, baby blue and placid under scattered clouds. Freighters trailed fan-shaped wakes. Then it was under us, Latvia: hem golden-tan, countryside snow-patched, lakes still frozen.

I knew their faces, Tereze and Maris, my second cousin and her husband, anxiously peering into the baggage area as the automatic doors opened and closed. (I had to pause for the friendly drug-sniffing dog to check my bags before I walked through those doors). We’d last seen each other when we tearfully said goodbye at the Riga Airport, two years ago. Tereze asked immediately, “Kur ir tava liela soma?” I explained to her that I’d left the big blue backpack at home. I didn’t need it. I was traveling light, I told her. And it’s true. This time, I came without my mother’s long black coat or aquamarine ring, without my Latvian namas gredzens (which most Latvians in the U.S. and Canada wear, but few Latvians in Latvia bother with; they’ve no need to announce who they are). I came without those 23 books, that computer printer. I came without my mother’s letters, without family photographs, without winter boots, without Latvian mittens. I came without long hair. I came (I hoped) without the burden of history and nostalgia weighing me down. We’ll see if I’m right. Time will tell me.

Tereze and Maris whisked me directly from the airport onto the straight two-lane highway to Ventspils, where the writers’ and translators’ house is located, a two and a half hours drive from Riga. Ventspils is a small, prosperous city, a mixture of old and modern, with a cobblestone market square, old brick and stone buildings (quite a few in various states of ruin), as well as an industrial shipping canal, a fancy boy-scout blue juice terminal that’s never stored or loaded or unloaded a drop of juice (some kind of scheme to ship exotic extracts from Brazil; it never panned out), and an artificial snow mountain made of garbage, for snowboarding. It’s called “Lemberg’s Hat,” after the ex-mayor, who just finished jail-time for bribery (was arrested last time I was here). The Latvians call bribes “kukulisi,” which means loaves, as in bread. The four “ladies” – Ieva, Andra, Iveta, and Zeltite, were waiting with hugs and pancakes. It felt as if I’d just been gone for the weekend. But at the same time, I was so excited to see them, particularly my soul-sister Ieva, that I could hardly meet her eyes. Tereze and Maris joined us for pancakes (with jam: bilberry, black current, red current, raspberry) in the brick-floored dining area, which opens onto a courtyard. A tile woodstove dominates a corner of this room, built directly into the wall. A cast iron door down low opens to a tiny brick firebox. A long table takes up most of the space. On the wall behind it hang three maps: the world, Latvia, Ventspils. Newspapers pile up at the end of the table, and CDs fill a carousel on a windowsill, as every writer brings a sample of his or her country’s music (from Alaska: David Grimes and Bearfoot Bluegrass; from the U.S.: Putamayo’s Acoustic Folk and Gypsy Caravan). A plasma TV screen’s mounted high up in a corner, though I’ve never seen it used. A new row of shelves stacked with a local potter’s wares (spruce blue and warm earthy brown) takes up another wall. Near the door, two collages hang. The whalebone mask I brought as a gift, made by an Inupiaq artist from Shishmaref, will watch everyone eat from a spot above the window. The evidence of world visitors has accumulated in two years, writers leaving their imprints on that communal space (including teas and spices from Israel, Turkey, China, India and all over Europe, east, west, north, south). The women were particularly taken with a group of Tibetan monks who’d been in town the month before to create a mandala in front of the Ventspils library. The monks had taken many meals at the writers’ house, and even become addicted to the simple version of pool set up in the front room. It consists of a square table with a smooth wooden surface, four cloth corner pockets, and small, round wooden discs (like pucks) instead of balls. You use a cue to hit the balls.

Tereze and Maris drove home after our supper, and I went up to my room, which this time is on the top floor, and looks out through a gable window onto the square. I unpacked and took a shower, intending to take a walk, but tiredness overcame me, and I lay down under a blanket with my yoga clothes on (another forgotten intention). All the jet-travel finally grabbed me by the ankles and pulled me into exhausted sleep. I woke briefly to music playing somewhere in the square, but not to the midnight stumblings of the Latvian critic, who, I learned the next morning, had drunk himself silly after a month of near-hibernation in his room.

27 March

Twelve hours after lying down, I dragged myself to the surface. In the window: light behind the bare trees. Groping for my watch: 6:30 am. I got up, showered, made matte downstairs (the house absolutely still), and stood at the window, my legs against the radiator, watching the sun rise and the town come alive. It was a perfect way to arrive here, a kind of meditation that held at bay any anxiety that might have been hovering near. I’ll transcribe some of my observations (this habit must be a holdover from my biological work, taking detailed notes of behavior):

A stout older woman, a pink scarf knotted under her chin, walks a small black dog past the clock, which says it’s 7:30 am. Three men, hands in pockets, cross the cobblestone square. The sun unrolls a swath of light onto the cobbles. A woman my age circles the clock, looking for something on the ground. The gulls’ voices are pulleys screeching. Now a mother walks her child purposefully to school. She seems preoccupied. Her little one trots, backpack sagging. He falls behind; she doesn’t notic. A man in a black leather jacket, jeans and a red hoodie pulled over his head strides past the Lutheran church. (Last night, the minister’s lights were on past midnight.) Colors of buildings: lemon yellow, dull green, dusty pink, and the nebulous no-color of ruin. Terra cotta tile roofs. Houses brown, unpainted, wood-sided, windows shuttered at night. Here comes another one of those ubiquitous stocky women walking with a side-to-side gait, like a boxcar on a slow-moving train. She’s wearing a long gray coat, black boots, a brown hat, black mittens, carrying a large black purse. Now here comes an Alaskan-looking blonde man, hands in the pockets of his dark-blue parka. The clouds spread, as though tethered to the sun. Another stocky woman, almost identical to the last, the same kind of black purse in one hand, an empty plastic sack in the other, trundles by, now another in an aqua green coat pushing a stroller laden with packages. A fancy lady in green coat and black Russian style hat, the same black handbag, appears next, but she’s got a regal air, a slower stride, no side-to-side. Who’s going to question or judge this one? She scorns any comparison to the frumps who just happen to share her taste in handbags (cheap imitations!).

Do you see what I’m seeing? That broad square in filtered light? The Methodist church that weighs more than the rest of the town put together, pale yellow stucco with white trim, encircled by a low wrought iron fence? Do you see those bare trees, the sunrise growing subtle, the half-unshuttered windows, the town coming awake, all of the people walking right to left, toward the outdoor market? Do you see that churly-surly man, cigarette clenched between his teeth, hands stuffed in the pockets of his plaid wool coat, watch cap pulled over his brow, scowling at the cold? Or that tiny woman all in black – coat and shawl, skirt, tall black boots oversized for her girlish frame, the clomp-clomp-clomp at moderato speed on the stones, her long black ponytail swinging? Or that one, there, in the baby-pink hat, mincing along the sidewalk with her left hand akimbo, like she’s balancing on a ledge? Or that guy shuffling along the writers’ house façade, a cigarette in his cupped hand, puffing out smoke like a censor? Could I be describing any place, any people? Look. I’m in the second floor window. You almost saw me, but I stepped back. Standing here, taking notes, I forget myself, my self-conscious-about-my-bad-Latvian, uncomfortable-in-my-own-skin, awkward, fearful self. I become just a pair of eyes, this a hand holding a pen and writing everything down in a tiny red notebook with yellow pages, filling those pages with words. This is what it means to be a writer. This is why I’m here. This tiny alcove, this dormer. In ordinary life, the lists and tasks and chores and demands push the writing into a space just about this size, and I run around in the outer rooms, with its beds and sinks and cell phones and laptops and flats of sprouting plants, doing everything but writing, answering every need but my mind’s. Now, my entire self has entered the alcove, left that outer room and world behind, and she writes. And she’s blissful.

After writing that, I went downstairs to say labriet, and Andra, Ieva and I went off to the market (tirgs) so I could stock my cupboard and refrigerator shelves. The “ladies” tease Ieva and me, that we are twins. And it’s true, we both wore black down vests over wool sweaters. She wore her signature arm-warmers (the same idea as leggings). She makes them out of her old striped wool socks by cutting off the heels and toes, and adding slits for her thumbs. Because all of her jeans are worn out, she wore a denim skirt and brown wool leggings. Let’s just say that she’s cute, unique, wonderful, and one of the most generous, genuine, sincere, guileless souls I’ve ever encountered. She was particularly taken with (and I’m sure by) the Tibetan monks, and with good reason. She has a Buddhist soul. They left notes for her with their address in India, signed them with lots of “loves” and entreaties to visit.

As we walked, Ieva and Andra pointed out a little terrier-like dog, dusty and rumpled, trotting purposefully along the sidewalk toward the market. Andra said "he's on his way to work," and sure enough, we saw him later, sitting near some old men tending a stall, quietly waiting for a hand-out or a fallen crumb. Darting across the tirgs square toward the fish market was the gray feral cat (Bandits) I remember from last time. He looks dirty like a chimney sweep, and is another market "stradnieks" (workman). He comes to the writers' house for milk, when Rudis, Ieva’s black cat, allows it. Rudis is much bigger now; Ieva had to buy a larger cat purse to carry him back and forth between her apartment and the writers’ house each day.

The economic crisis has hit farmers in Latvia hard, which isn’t to say things were easy for them before. Regular grocery stores pay them a pittance for their products, so more farmers have taken matters into their own hands (in January, farmers blockaded the roads into Riga with their tractors to call attention to their situation. Trade agreements – cheap goods imported from other countries – have hurt them badly). More of them now sell goods directly, in Riga, at the vast tirgs, and here. People line up with their jars to buy milk from a farmer at the Ventspils market. They hold their bottles under a spigot, fill up, get a deal, and the farmer gets all the money. And this milk is so fresh, and so rich, that I’m forgetting I usually drink soy milk back home. It leaves oil on your tongue. Ieva and Andra dispensed advice freely about what I should buy – which was the freshest cheese and sour cream, which was the tastiest yogurt, which was the best black bread, which was the most intense honey (the buckwheat). We checked out the fish market, a tiny basement shop that smells like … fish … and salt and wet cement. They pointed out the fresh Baltic sea salmon (not farmed), which has gray flesh. Most of the salmon in Europe is farmed, but people are waking up to the issue, so it was good to see real salmon available. They’re about the size of our China Poot reds. The economic crisis has its benefits: you’re charged for plastic bags at the big grocery stores, and the smaller market stalls don’t supply them at all, so everyone has a basket or cloth shopping bag. People are growing more food, and hunting and fishing.

I spotted my “friend,” the old man who sold me a homemade knife, berry picker, and wooden egg last time. He was sitting in his same spot, and when I get up the nerve, I’ll go back to check out his wares. Two years ago, he hassled me about my “bad Latvian” and tried to convince me NOT to buy the rustic knife he’d made himself, but to buy instead one of the commercial ones he had for sale. I bought the rustic one, and it’s now my favorite kitchen knife, though technically it belongs to Lars.

Back home, we snacked on two kinds of smoked fish and Latvian bread. Andra cooked up a big pot of brothy salmon soup with vegetables. And yes, I went upstairs and wrote, in case you were wondering if that was going to happen again, with all of this tirg-ing and eating … At dusk, I took a long walk in the afternoon to the sea, something that will become my daily break from sitting and haggling with my brain over words. The road to the beach, through a residential area and past a park, was deserted, as was the beach, except for two grown men playing on a swing set. The same black car kept circling round and round the neighborhood, so I didn’t linger. When I returned home, I accompanied Ieva to an exhibit in a space recently renovated by the same architectural firm that transformed the old decrepit city hall into the writers’ house. The foyer is dark, with an inlaid stone floor and walls, and beautiful beams, somewhat medieval (a bit of Germanic influence, I think). To the left is a bright retail space with all kinds of locally made craft items: Latvian mittens, tapestries, weavings, folk costumes and accessories, fine needlework, carved objects, jewelry. Past the store are three rooms filled with giant wooden looms where artisans work. Upstairs is the gallery space. On display were baskets, wooden bowls, hand-made furniture, delicate wooden mobiles, and weavings.

I wrote again in the evening, until Ieva came to get me, to tell me that a young Lithuanian writer/traveler/translator named Medaina had arrived on the bus to spend a week at the house. She was born in Canada, but has been vagabonding around Eastern Europe on trains and buses for the last few years, visiting as many odd museums as she can, collecting family history from Lithuania, and thinking about what it means to be living today in the former Soviet block countries, nearly 20 years after independence. She’s only 29, but has collected enough stories from her adventures for a lifetime. Like me, she travels with a huge library. We sat up late visiting. It feels like we’re the only one’s here, as the other three writers are either reclusive or missing. The Latvian critic has hardly been spotted in the month he’s been here. No one knows if he eats or not. (They know that he drinks). A Finnish translator with a heavy gestalt shyly made a cup of tea this morning and then disappeared into his lair. And a Latvian writer, a young mom, fled the writers’ house after a few days in panic, leaving all of her stuff, overwhelmed at being apart from her husband and children, who live less than three hours away in Riga. Quite a contrast to the high drama of my last residency, and a welcome peacefulness before April first, when the house fills up again. I can hear someone vacuuming one of the rooms in preparation.


28 March

I just returned form my first excursion. It’s the last night at the writers’ house for the shy Finnish translator (who lives in Tallin, Estonia), and he wanted to see some interesting places. He overcame his shyness (but not his heavy gestalt) and offered to drive us around in his sturdy Suzuki Samuri-like car. We piled in: Ieva, her nephew Eduards (12 years old; he arrived on the bus from his home in Tukums, a couple hours away. I met him last time and won his heart by giving him a quartz crystal, which was promptly stolen from his pocket at school), Medaina, and me. We were going to try to find a marsh I’d read about in the local paper, where 15,000 migrating swans (2 species) and geese (4 species) had stopped to rest before heading further north. Ieva’s “Zigulis,” a thirty year old mint green Russian Lada, had been loaned out to a ne’er do well who’d basically absconded with it for two weeks. It might not have been the best choice for the mud season spring roads of the Latvian back-country anyways. We headed out on the highway about 20 km with Ieva’s road atlas open to the Izava region. We weren’t quite sure where to find the birds, so stopped to ask a couple who were building a garden wall from bricks and cement. They described large fields where the birds had been seen, but it meant back-tracking, so instead we drove first down a sand road through pine forest to the coast, to see a lighthouse. It’s a short, squat structure, quite elegant. A woman lives in the lower part, below the tower, and a German Shepard barked frantically in the window as we approached. The keeper let us in the front door, collected admission, and we climbed the spiraling metal steps to the top and stepped out into the wind. The view up and down the coast and across the tops of the pines was beautiful. The sun tried to burn through the cloud layer, laying down a waxy light on the water, giving the Baltic a more oceanic feeling. A furtive wind kicked up waves. The Baltic sand is a light, warm tan, the water murky blue/brown. After we climbed down, we walked on the beach for a ways looking for amber. Several men had fishing poles rigged from the shore, their handles buried in the sand.

Then it was off to find birds, following a muddy one-lane track. We spotted swans in the distance, in a farmer’s field. I threw my bag and hat on the muddy ground in my excitement to get at my digital camera – two white swans and a rare black and white one were passing overhead. It’s a good thing we couldn’t turn around there, and had to drive a ways further to a wider spot. Back-tracking, I spotted something colorful at the side of the road. My purse! Most of the migrants were gone already, but we did see hawks, cranes, swans and geese. On the way home, we stopped at a brewery so the Finn could buy a couple of pints to take home, and then Ieva suggested we visit a tiny farm next door, with unusual blue-gray cows. You can see in the photos a taste of what a small Latvian farm is like. The couple and old man who showed us around described their troubles, how it was more and more difficult to pay for their animals’ feed, to make any kind of living. The saimniece (woman of the farm) was so proud of the cows, so gentle and loving toward them, so friendly and happy to show us her animals. Many of the cows were hugely pregnant. In winter they live in dark, ramshackle sheds, several cows in each. She tried over and over to get them to show us their blue tongues. For cows (sorry, govi), they were genuinely curious, shifting awkwardly to face us, and melting our hears with their big liquid eyes. The farmer was more pragmatic. He watched us, bemused, for a while, and then went to work shoveling old hay and shit from a stall into a wheelbarrow. Everything was so basic. You see no evidence of American-style consumption in a place like that. Things are patched together from materials at hand. The old and broken is fixed again and again until it stands, frozen, a relic, in the yard, like one of the tractors we saw there. It’s a bit like rural Alaska, at least the Alaska of the homesteading years. But right next to this farm …. (I lost my train of thought for a moment … the cat of the house, Rudis, just walked into my room for the first time, and I had to make him feel welcome) … was that newly built modern brewery, with its chrome and laminated wood, its high-priced tourist crap for sale, and relatively new cars filling up the lot. A strange juxtaposition.

Rudis jumped up on the desk, and I think the smell of my little aromatherapy bottle of spikenard, an extremely earthy substance, drove him wild. Everything started falling off the desk as he rolled around on the tablecloth and rubbed against the computer. Maybe he knew I was writing about him.

Now it’s nearly midnight. I just came upstairs after working on a side-project that’s become a nightly endeavor. Ieva is helping me translate the first chapter of my book into Latvian so I can read it to a local audience. It’s a laborious process. There are no mountains in Alaska, and no glaciers, and no archipelagos like Prince William Sound, and no rocky coastlines, and no whales. So there is no cognate for snowfield, for pocket glacier, for snow bowl, for ridgeline. And the words we adapted Ieva says Latvians will have trouble understanding. Language is utterly tied to the landscape we live in; it’s easy to forget. It hits home, what it means, the extinction of a language like Eyak, how much knowledge and information it holds about the Copper River Delta region, how it takes thousands of years of continuous habitation of a place to develop that richness and descriptive capacity. We’ve finished three pages, and have six to go. We’re doing a literal translation, and then a local writer/translator, Maira, will work with us to do a literary version. What an amazing process. It teaches me about Latvian, and English, and about my own writing style. Many times I’ve lamented to Ieva how I’d like to just rewrite an entire paragraph so it’s simpler, more straight-forward. (At one point I suggested tossing the whole book into the fireplace). I imagine that doing this enough would change my writing, and help my Latvian, and Ieva’s English (which is already very good). My brain is tired and atangle with Latvian and English vardi ...

30 March

Today was Iveta’s birthday. Flowers, flowers, flowers: yellow tulips, yellow daffodils, a pink hyacinth. She baked her own torte last night. Two thin yellow cake layers, reminiscent of soft vanilla wafers, lemon jelly filling between them, rich sour cream topping, sliced plums and toasted, sugared oats as the decoration. But before cake, fish, fish, fish. Jellied herring. Herring in tomato sauce. (The whole fish, mind you). Some kind of silvery sardine-like fish, raw, gutted, arranged on black bread with sliced eggs on top. Black peas, like chick peas, but dark greenish gray, only found in Latvia, apparently. A topping for the peas: fried slab bacon and onions (diced).

Today, the invisible Latvian critic left, and the runaway novelist returned for her things, and promptly headed back to Riga. While he himself was a phantom presence, the critic’s litter was, unfortunately, completely corporeal. Zeltite and Ieva had to clean his room today, and they described “sausmigie mesli.” How to translate something so perfectly nasty and descriptive, so loaded with implications? It’s impossible, partly because of the way it’s said. Latvian is so very expressive. All three syllables of the first word are accented when used in such a context: shauw-smeee-gyeeiah. It means something like “unbelievably horrible.” Or better yet “you can’t believe how awesomely awful.” Mesli means the worst kind of garbage: maahslih (the “a” as in baa baa black sheep). It means animal shit, manure. Nuff said. Apparently, it’s not unusual for some of the male writers to leave their rooms in this condition. With their bottles of stinky, high-potency cleaning supplies, mops, vacuum cleaners, sponges and rags, the women of the house transform these pig sties into the spotless, clean, spare spaces for writing that greet each newcomer, veritable blank books waiting for ink. Let me tell you about a few of these maslu taisitajus (the second word means “makers.” There’s the athlete whose bedding looked like he’d slept in his muddy shoes. And the writer whose bathroom was inexplicably full of dirt clods. And the recluse whose abandoned lair smelled like the month’s supply of dirty dishes and uneaten food he’d left behind. And the somewhat infirm old writer who chain-smoked. We’re talking chain-chain-chain. When someone opened his door, clouds of blue-gray would billow out. Visibility in his room, down to the decks. (Smoking’s not allowed in the house, but no one could bear to ask the poor old man to hobble all the way outside every time he lit up). These stories are bandied about the dining room table, amid general hilarity, becoming part of the writers’ house folklore. One of the joys of staying here is all of the laughter. Criticism is largely disguised in this way. There’s a certain kind of affection in it, an acceptance of human foibles, mixed with a bit of self-satisfaction, I think, from having the last laugh. Sausmas! (Horrors!) And then that ironic Latvian smile.

How can each day be so long, so full?

4 comments:

  1. Thanks for starting this up, Eva. To answer your question above, yes, we can see what you're seeing, and thank you for including us. Even makes me want to learn Latvian...

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  2. Eva, so glad to be vicariously enjoying a bit of your time in Latvia. I'd like to participate in the bread/butter experiment. I'd also like to see the short hair. I'm going to do my best to piggyback onto your spirit of open wonder and exploration. Only 2 months left for me in San Francisco. Sending love.

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  3. I loved the sausmigu maislu-or however it is spelled. I am laughing out loud in my living room while everyone else is asleep!

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  4. Great stuff Eva. I'm thinking you need to buy a cane to whack people on the shins, then yell "Beigi forsh!". If nothing else, it should get you a wide berth in the bread line.

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