Spankings, and Other Spiritual Matters

Nāk rudenis, nāk rudenis
Meitiņai, lapiņai:
Pūš vējiņis, dzen lapiņas,
Nāk puisīši, ņem meitiņas

Autumn's coming, autumn's coming
For girls, for leaves:
Blow wind, chase the leaves
Come boys, get the girls

(Autumn was traditional marriage time. I must report that many folk songs related to impending marriage depict girls trembling like leaves, in fear).


April 19, Sunday

I woke up early this morning. The orange of the window shade was subdued in the dawn light. After a furious day of writing yesterday, my mind upon awakening felt like a slow river, just before any direct sun hits its surface.

When the sun did hit that sleepy river’s surface, sparkled a little, I opened my eyes, and reached for the book beside my bed, a short story collection I found at the bus station book shop in Riga. It’s called Natasha, by Canadian writer David Bezmozgis, and it had been translated into Latvian. A year ago, a friend asked me if I knew about Bezmozgis, who is a child of Jewish-Latvian immigrants. I hadn’t heard of him. Then I read his story Natasha in a magazine, and fell in love, looked forward to the day I’d have his entire collection in my hands. And there it was, below the row of philosophy books, in that oddly literary bookstore, down in the basement of the Riga bus station, which is like bus stations everywhere in the world, gritty, grimy, crowded with tired people jostling for places in lines, with impatient and sometimes rude ticket-sellers, with beggars, students, tourists, and thieves, and with old women weighed down by their packages. Bus stations come with bookshops, the kind filled with magazines, travel toiletries, gum, newspapers, postcards, bottle water, and trash novels. Not with Plato, Socrates, Latvian-German hardcover dictionaries, and poetry. Is it just a fluke, or a sign of a truly literary society? Anyways, I bought the book. On the bus ride, I read the first two stories. Usually, attempting a serious book in Latvian is a tedious undertaking for me, as my vocabulary is basic, and reading requires frequent consultation with a Latvian-English dictionary. This was my first experience of getting caught up in a story I was reading in Latvian, the characters and their troubles dragging me past unfamiliar words, headlong toward the story’s conclusion.

Each story in Natasha is compete in and of itself, but all involve the same narrator, a boy growing up in an immigrant Latvian Jewish household in Ontario. The divided world of that boy, half of his existence playing out in one culture outside the home, half in a separate culture inside the home, the two sometimes clashing or weirdly mixing at their points of contact, is incredibly familiar. Not the particular situations, but something ineffable, the look of the world through that boy’s eyes – his parents, their relatives and friends, their thick photograph albums, their sometimes off-the-mark interpretations of life “outside” their homes, and the boy’s own experiences in that outside world.

After reading in bed for a few minutes, I got up and began the rituals of my morning, first looking out the window at the still-empty square. The frigid wind of the day before was gone. The sun was bright in the chilly air. Birds sang, church bells were ringing. When I have a good day of writing, like I did yesterday, I want to imitate the conditions, make it happen again, but it never works that way. Something stronger wanted me to get outside, to feel the slap of the cold on my cheeks, to move my body. I packed my small notebook, the one I use when I walk, intending to head for a sunny spot along the promenade that parallels the Venta River. The Venta, a few minutes’ walk from the writers’ house, is, to my eye, no longer a river in its lowest reaches, where it meets the Baltic Sea. It’s an industrial canal (it turns into a river further upstream). On the town side of this canal is a walking promenade, with park benches facing the water, and here and there, a strange, gargantuan cow sculpture to amuse the tourists and local children. On the far side of the canal is a coal and oil terminal. Huge foreign flagged freighters dock there to be loaded up. Giant cranes with gaping buckets creak and clang. A stench of asphalt drifts from the huge heaps of black slag. Sometimes a boat horn blasts, or a train, pulled up to the brick building near the slag heap, whistles in a haunting way. At the end of the promenade, near the seafarer’s memorial marker, is a small park, where I rarely encounter another soul. Sometimes I can watch coast guard guys coiling up lines or fire hoses near their cutter, docked nearby. There’s a bench near a small harbor, where I like to write. The sun’s warm in the afternoon, and the flower beds are full of blooming crocuses, tulips and bluebells. It’s not nature, not by any stretch, but its peaceful. That’s where my mind was headed when I walked out the door this morning.

But my feet led me to the tirgs. I went along with them. I stood in line for cheese and eggs, then bought produce from my favorite vendor. My bag now heavy, I walked back toward the writers’ house. Approaching the square, I saw the faithful walking into the Lutheran church, and some small part of me wanted to join them. There’s something deeply appealing about the open doors and the bell calling people to relinquish their ordinary lives and take part in something old, meditative, and ritualized. But I’m not Lutheran, and would feel like a stranger, a voyeur, inauthentic, so I came back up to my room with a pot of tea.

I stood at the window with my notebook and watched people come from all directions for the 10 am service. I opened the windows so I could hear the bells when they rang, and perhaps the singing. In the distance, I heard clarion-like bells from the Russian Orthodox church, and then, the Lutheran bell gonged, a steady resonating series. The stragglers rushed in, and the square emptied of people, and filled with sunlight and bird songs. I thought about my desire to join those church-goers, and how to meet it. I reread an e-mail from my friend Therese, in which she beautifully described the masses and vigils and rituals of Easter week at the tiny Catholic Church back in Homer. Recalling a book of spiritual poems I left in the writers’ house library back in 2007, I decided to retrieve it and read a bit in a reflective mode. Poetry is a form of prayer, I wrote in my journal. And so is paying attention to the details of the world. In the brightly lit library room, I found that book, but others too, and I piled them in my arms and came back upstairs, and now they surround my computer: One was a book of paintings by two famous Latvian artists. I opened it to a page depicting Vija Maldupe’s “Raza” (Harvest), and, on the facing page, “Peldetaji,” (Swimmers). In a book of Latvian literature in translation, I discovered this quote, by the iconic Latvian poet and playwright Rainis. “Away from home – you have joy, but it is alien; here you have sorrow, but it is your own.”

David Bezmozgis’s stories contradict Rainis’s claim. The family he describes has sorrow and hardship more than joy, and it’s certainly alien, a mystery to outsiders, the way my family’s sorrow and heaviness and strangeness was a mystery to my American friends. Here in Latvia, I have both sorry and joy, and some of it is alien, and some of it is endemic to my being here and nowhere else, and some of it isn’t even my own. But day by day, I am finding the sorrow and joy that IS my own, separating it out from the sorrow I’ve carried for my parents (without their asking). And maybe that’s the way it is with spirituality, why I can’t walk through the doors of the Lutheran church today, or even the Catholic church down the road, and take my place with the faithful. First I have to tackle a hard task, to connect to it inside myself, something ancient and shared, the basic impulse to pray, or to praise, or to worship. The main way I do that, in life, isn't available to me. It's through nature. In Alaska, I can walk out the door of my house, past the garden, and find myself in the woods, along a ravine. In the swale, I might see moose or a coyote or, in summer, a black bear. I might hear the voices of cranes flying over. In a treetop, I might spot a goshawk, or an owl. For sure, on many walks, an animal I didn’t see watched me. In very bleak moods, in winter, I’ve crawled under spruce trees, where the ground is bare, and curled up on the ground, until the angst seeped out of me, until the cold air and cold ground drove the darkness away. Here, I can’t walk to wild nature, which is my church, and so I look out my window, at the Lutheran church, with longing.

Poetry and prose are another way to go to church, both reading and writing. When I write, I pay attention to the details of the world. When I read a good poem it shows me the world in new light. When I finally opened that book of spiritual poetry I intended to read, before getting distracted, I found this, by Wendell Berry:

“To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight …”

When I don't have my spruce tree, something like that gets me through a rough patch.

While I’m on this subject of the spiritual, here I’ll describe something I intended to write down, for my friend Therese, as promised. Something that took place in the dark, but with lights.

A weed ago yesterday, Ieva and I had returned from our road trip. It was Saturday night, and I was exhausted from travel. I lay down in bed, closed my eyes, and tried to quiet my mind after so much sensory input. But something kept disturbing the passage to sleep: a light kept flashing through the window shade. I didn’t think much of it. Then I heard chords, an organ playing; it seemed to be coming from out in the square. I got up and ran to the window, pushed the shade away, and the most beautiful and unexpected sight met my eyes. Below, people were standing in a long line, parents, children, old folks. Each person held a burning torch. Candles lined the stairs to the church doors. I pushed open my windows. The people were singing, and then they began to walk, slowly, around the church. The air was cold. People wore hats and coats. The clock in the square said it was nearly midnight. The flashing light came from a police car, which was blocking traffic from entering the square. The policemen stood watching the procession with their arms crossed, leaning against their patrol cars in typical policeman fashion, and now and then, a car pulled up, idled briefly, and after consulting with a cop, turned away. Every few minutes, the organ, which must have been amplified from inside the church, began to play, and then people sang another hymn. I lay back down until I heard the minister’s voice booming, with great joy, from the top of the steps. Jezus Kristus ir atcelies! The people were lined up in front of him. He stood at the door to the church. The torches flickered. He exclaimed again, in a voice full of joy and amazement. And then the people followed the minister into the church, and the bell started pealing, and rang for a long time in the midnight sky above Ventspils. It was dream-like.

And speaking of dreams, I haven’t written this down yet, but I’ve been thinking about it. Being here is sometimes very real, very concrete, like this moment, late sunlight in the empty square, the sound of a television in the next room, my back stiff from too much sitting at the computer. But in other ways, it’s like a remembered dream. If I could say one thing to my brothers, Andy and John (who went to Latvian school in New York City; Andy didn’t know English when he started public school), and to my sister Mara, and most of all, to myself, it would be this: Remember that dream we all had? The one where only we spoke that strange language, with its absurdly difficult to pronounce words (tie mikstie skani, the l’s and g’s with the little comma under them, sounded by mashing your tongue against the side of your teeth, as though you were talking and chewing an entire pack of bubblegum at once) and diminutives? Remember the dream where you were called Janitis, or Marite, Andritis or Ievina? Remember the biezputra, and skabie kapostie, and janu siers? Remember that dream where bread was maize one minute, and maizite the next, depending upon your mother’s mood or the size of the slice? And how in the dream your parents and their friends stood around a bonfire wearing big oak leaf wreaths around their heads, singing folk songs? And their names were Kaposts and Bumanis and Gailitis? Remember the dream of your father with dirt on his knees and hands, and a white handkerchief knotted on his head, spading soil into beds to plant potatoes, and you weren’t watching cartoons, but were standing there next to him, wishing you could be at Gaylord’s buying a Barbie (well maybe my brothers wished they were buying comic books, I don't know)? Remember the dream about the rupjmaize, with the black, black rind? Remember how, in the dream, your mother put brown paper bags over the loaves when they were baking, ran cold water from the faucet over the top crust when they came out of the oven, how you waited up with your father to have the first slices, steaming, slathered with butter and honey, always at midnight? And the Latvian Dance Party Album? And words like zagars, puteklis, lupatina, budina, kartupelis, gludeklis and velas masina? Remember kieselis? Pastete? Dzintaru kreles? How just saying a word like desa could make you laugh until your stomach hurt, it seemed so absurd. Who could contrive a word like skinkis? Like silkis? Like knabis? Nobody. In the dream, your parents and relatives made up those words.

Well, it’s not a dream. It’s real. There’s a place where someone (in her twenties) says she’s going aja zu zu when she goes to bed. There’s a place where someone – and not your Oma – says man vajag curat when she has to pee. There’s a place where every store has a sign above it that says veikals. There’s a place where people hit each other with pussywillows on Palm Sunday, and spank each other in saunas with bundles of oak branches soaked in cold water, and take egg-cracking games very seriously, and throw out folk sayings as readily as some people talk about the weather. There’s a place where a thirty-something woman will warn you against sitting on the ground before the first thunderstorm of spring, and a few days later, an old staggering drunk, seeing you sitting on a cement stoop with your friend, will slur out exactly the same scolding. And another young woman will tell you that a man who shaves at night is shaving because he’s going out to find a woman, and a man who shaves in the morning is shaving for another reason. There's a place where the editor of the local newspaper, addressing the issue of stores throwing bread out when it's past its expiration date, reminds readers that bread is more than groceries. It's symbolic. She reminds readers that if you drop a piece of bread on the floor, you're supposed to kiss it when you pick it up, or God will be angry at you. (And you wondered, in that dream you had, why your mother slapped you when you threw a loaf of bread you'd just unpacked from a grocery bag to your sister). There’s a place where an old woman – and she’s not your Oma – ties a kerchief around her head and walks to church on her thick legs, or pushes her bicycle through the graveyard, leans it against a tree, and tends her husband’s kapis every Sunday. You thought it was just your family, marooned foreigners in the middle of the vineyards and orchards of Silver Creek, New York, the only Latvians among all of those Continoes, Tryzsynskies, Kawskies, Turzilloes, Salernoes, Clarks, Winkowskies and Smiths. But it’s not just them, your family. And it’s not just the Torontiesi. It’s a million people doing and saying these things, and not thinking anything of it. It’s real. It’s not a dream.

And now, to the subject of spankings, Latvian style ...

On the subject of dreams, I slept better last night than I have since I arrived, and the reason is, I had my first real Latvian sauna. Yesterday, Iveta took Alexi, Ieva, Inga and I to her family’s dacha, just outside of Ventspils. Many city families, especially those who live in apartment blocks, have these places, a small piece of land for growing food and flowers, a sauna, a greenhouse, a tiny house without running water. They’re crowded together, so you can smell the neighbor’s dinner cooking, or chat across the fence. You can walk through the neighborhood on one-lane sand roads and check out everyone’s gardens. This one’s built along the bank of a small river, which slowly winds through marshlands. Men fish along the banks, and people jump in the water after saunas. While we waited for the sauna to heat up, we had a picnic, and then Alexi showed Ieva and I some of his yoga exercises while Inga dozed in the sun and Iveta painted some kind of white insecticide on the trunk of an apple tree. The sauna was nothing unusual at first, but then Iveta offered to give each of us a “periens” (which as a kid I knew only as the dreaded word for “spanking”). Upside down from the roof of the sauna porch hung bundles of oak branches, which must be gathered before Jani (the summer solstice festival) each year. Iveta soaked these in cold water for an hour or so (warm causes the leaves to fall off). When we were good and hot, after three sessions sweating in the sauna, it was time for a spanking. Iveta told me to lie on my stomach on the top bench of the sauna, which was already wet and leafy from Alexi’s session. I can’t say exactly what she did, as I had my eyes closed, but it was done with bracing rhythm and sureness. First, she shook a leafy bundle, dripping cold water over my skin, and then she held the bundle over the stove to heat it, and then rapidly and sharply slapped every square inch of my body with it, from the soles of my feet to my shoulders. The slapping produced tremendous heat, almost overwhelming in intensity, like a head-rush. She dipped the branches in cold water, brushed my skin gently, then repeated the hot slapping. At some points she moved the branches in a fanning motion, not touching my skin, but wafting air over it in hot whirlpools. All these variations occurred in rapid succession, in a pattern. She told me later that in a real Latvian sauna, other rituals would follow. There would be rubbing of salt on the body, and then honey, and even bread. Back in 2007, I took several saunas with Helle, a seventy-year old Estonian translator, and we used salt, coffee and honey as exfoliants. A true sauna might take five hours to complete. It’s nothing like I imagined. I’d always pictured the branch whippings as wild, random floggings. I imagined a poor naked person huddled on the floor while others flailed at her with brutal abandon in the sweaty heat. I thought it some sort of endurance test. Needless to say, I was pleasantly surprised by my Latvian spanking.

Part of the sense of well-being it produced was Iveta’s personality. Her ample figure mirrors her big-heartedness. She’s funny and warm, and I love to listen to her tell a story. She’s got a distinct Ventspils accent (she grew up here), and is extremely expressive, with a wide vocal register, like a winter wren. She’s generous, a born nurturer, and would make a fantastic massage therapist. She also, apparently, colors and cuts hair, and offered to do mine. When she’s the “spanker” of several others, she doesn’t get the treatment herself, as it’s tiring. Once, after she herself had a particularly vigorous sauna spanking from her mother, she jumped into the lake, swam out a ways, turned around, and discovered that the shoreline was see-sawing. Luckily she made it back to shore and lay on the ground until the earth stopped tilting.

April 23

Iveta colored my hair on Earth Day. I’m afraid it wasn’t natural dye. All the ladies are pleased that I’m no longer sporting my gray hair though, and it's awfully nice to be told how skaista you look, and how jauna, every morning.