The Truth About History

17 April

A sunny, blustery, cold Saturday morning in Ventspils. I’ve been immersed in life here, the daily rituals of tea-making and apple porridge-cooking, of raising the orange window shade and leaning on the sill to watch the activity in the square, of writing, walking, sharing meals, of taking tiny spoonfuls of hot chocolate at the kafenica with Ieva (I’m afraid she’s succumbed to its aphrodisiac properties; we’ve been five times), of walking into the kitchen and saying cau, or labrit, or labien. More and more frequently, I leap into Latvian conversations like a cliff-diver, stuffing self-consciousness into some pocket-sized cubby in my brain. I sit at my desk this morning allowing the idea of this routine to seep into my blood and bones. I have less than three weeks left in Latvia. This past week I set sail out of my routine, and now my boat’s docked again, in this harbor I’m temporarily calling my home port.

There’s much to relate of my week-long adventures. On Good Friday, Ieva and I boarded an early bus to Riga, for an Easter weekend road trip. Latvia was blanketed in thick fog, which lifted a bit as we neared the city. In Riga, we bought tickets on to Cesis, a beautiful town in Vidzeme (middle-land), where Ieva’s Annastante (Aunt Anna) lives. Cesis is also only a twenty minute bus ride from Valmiera, where my mother was born (this will be described in my next post). We had two hours before our bus left, so we took a turn around Riga’s Central Market. But first, as we were hungry, we looked for a kafenica (café). A friend of the writers’ house, Erik Hansbergs, lives in Riga and has written two books about the market. When Ieva goes there with Erik, he knows which vendor sells the best pickles, which the best sauerkraut, which the best smoked fish or cheese or poppy seed butter. He also likes to try out every café, and there are many. They line the outdoor part of the tirgs, so you can sit near a window, eat a bowl of soup (less than $2), and watch the action. And that’s what Ieva and I did. It was the first of many kafenicas we’d visit in the next 48 hours. We ate solyanka, a favorite Ukranian-style stew flavored with sour cream and paprika, and drank milky coffee. Then we breezed through the tirgs, first the outdoor stalls selling daffodils, tulips and bundles of pussywillows, fruit (we bought Latvian apples), vegetables (most imported; you have to come to the tirgs at night for locally grown produce; at night, the farmers don’t have to pay a fee to rent space). Then we turned to the four indoor pavilions, constructed from early 20th century German Zeppelin hangars, transplanted from the Kurzeme region. We entered the dairy building, where we bought fresh farm cheese, three kinds, one studded with pumpkin seeds, one with caraway, one plain. The inside of these amazing buildings is hard to describe. Voices echo, rise to the top of the domed ceiling. Stalls fill the cement floor space, and crowds form in front of the choice vendors. How can the inhabitants of a small city like Riga possibly consume this much cheese?

The question becomes even more compelling when standing in the middle of the fish pavilion. We pushed open the doors and the smell – smoky, salty, tangy, stinging – pushed back. There were plastic tubs of still-writhing lamprey eels (see photograph above), whole Baltic Sea wild salmon on ice, fresh sardines, herring, mackerel, sole, fatty pink Atlantic (farmed) salmon, and then all of the dried and salted and smoked fish, pickled herring, dried zutis (eel, my parents’ favorite, long tubes that, in their papery dark skins, look like giant sushi rolls), plastic buckets stuffed with whole shriveled fish, smoked mackerels gutted and splayed out, garnished with shaved garlic or onion, fish heads for soup – a head-spinning sensory overload of fish. At first, Ieva thought we shouldn’t travel with any fish on the bus, but we couldn’t help ourselves, and bought a chunk of smoked butter fish for Annastante. Our backpack and bags now crammed with bread, cheese, apples (which Ieva eats like some people eat potato chips, one after another after another), and fish, we boarded the bus for Cesis.

As we left the city, passed through the forests, and finally trundled down a narrow road lined with abelites (apple trees), we gradually transitioned from the coastal flatlands around Riga to the (slightly) hillier country of the Gauja River, which winds slowly through Vidzeme, the middle region of Latvia. I love this part of Latvia, maybe because it resembles western NY state, where I grew up, maybe because I know it was my mother’s birth place. As Ieva read the copy of Siddhartha (translated into Latvian) that I found for her at the amazing bus station bookstore (a non-descript tiny space crammed with the usual glossy magazines and trash novels, but also translator’s dictionaries, classics, and heavy-duty philosophy books – all hard-cover), I stared out the window, took mental snapshots: small farmsteads of wood-sided structures with tile roofs, run-down but neatly kept; wood smoke drifting from brick chimneys into an already smoke-colored sky; freshly plowed fields stretching to the edge of mixed pine and hardwood forests; small groups of cows following each other down lanes (the first outdoor cows I’ve seen); an old woman with a kerchief tied around her head, sitting on a stump at the edge of a creek, surrounded by five white goats (truly, something out of a children’s tale); stork pairs folding and unfolding their wings, arranging themselves on their big stick nests; old men pedaling bicycles; buxom women, bent at the waist, working their flower beds; untended brush fires; families raking up mulch and trash beside the mounded shapes of root cellars.

At 2:30, I put away my journal, and Ieva put down Siddhartha (I haven’t mentioned this: Ieva has a degree in philosophy. She enjoys curling up with Wittgenstein and Augustine; Hesse was light reading, but spoke to her recent connection to the Buddhist monks. Ieva has a curious, open mind; she’s also studying French at night, in preparation for her trip to Paris this summer, to visit a past writers’ house resident). The bus pulled into Cesis, into what, in glances, felt like another century.

We spent the rest of the afternoon wandering through a park at the edge of an old pils drupes (castle ruins), what had once been a fort built by the Livonian Brothers of the Sword, German crusaders, in the 1200’s. The history of the castle is indicative of Latvia’s history: built by the Livonians, it was destroyed by same to prevent it from falling into Ivan the Terrible’s hands. It was later incorporated into the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Then it was captured by Sweden and rebuilt, only to be destroyed again in 1703 by the Russian Army.

After contemplating the ruins, we descended a set of graceful stone stairs to a pond. Along the stairs were the most cunning statues I’ve ever seen, cherubic naked children, paired with hares, flowers, sheaves of grain, fish, owls. I photographed every single one. In the center of the pond, a stone man clasped a massive fish. Past the pils park, we ignored a sign warning us of danger, and wandered through an abandoned cemetery, until we saw a drunk on a bench, and headed back to the street. After a rest break for lattes in a kafenica with the deepest windowsills I’ve ever seen (we sampled that pumpkin seed cheese on black bread and agreed it was pretty much manna from heaven), Annastante picked us up in the square and off we zoomed to her small house in the tiny village of Priekulis, home of one of Latvia’s best potato varieties (I’m going to try to smuggle some home).

Annastante lives in a typical “lauku maja” (country house). It has two floors, the top floor an attic crammed with stuff: stacks of magazines, bundles of books tied up with electrical cords, old toys, furniture, etc. etc. This was to be a living space, but it never happened. Ieva, to Annastante’s dismay, took me up there, as it was one of the magical spaces of her childhood.

But let me go back … You enter the ground floor of her house through an entry way, where a wooden door in the floor lifts to reveal a wooden stair to the root cellar. The house is tiny: a run-down bathroom with an old claw-foot tub and a very low wooden toilet (non-flush). All I can say is that there’s water at the bottom. The kitchen is barely big enough for Annastante (a large woman, formidable dark hair and penetrating eyes) to work in. She was frying pancakes for us. Her sister, Ieva’s mother was also there. She’s a slender woman in her sixties, with attentive large brown eyes, sandy hair, and a gentle disposition. Physically, the sisters are opposites. Both women are doctors, but Ieva’s mother is retired.

The living room is tiny also, just room for a small square table pushed against the window, half-covered with plants, surrounded by four wooden chairs. You can barely push one chair back without running into a crammed bookshelf. Opposite, the other chair, when pushed back, hits the couch. There are two bedrooms, one for Annastante, one for guests, and Ieva says it’s there, hidden from a visitor’s eyes, where Annnastante’s reputation as a pack-rat manifests itself, in a narrow passageways winding between stacks of books, magazines and other collected merchandise. A big tiled hearth in the living room, along with the wood-fired cookstove, heats the house. A hapless American, stumbling on this scene, would wonder why two doctors would be living in such a simple fashion.

When I sat down at the table, Annastante handed me a large mug of kieselis, a wonderful cold fruit “soup.” It’s clear, rose-colored, and its flavor brought me back to childhood. It’s made from red currents, and is only slightly sweet, and very refreshing. Ieva had warned me that I’d be plied with questions and stories, and she was right. I found it wonderful. Over pancakes, smoked butter fish, Latvian bread, and later, pastete sandwiches (pastete is a liver pate, which my mother also made for special occasions), they told me about their lives, about the medical system in Latvia, about the padomju laids (Soviet times), and asked me questions about everything Alaskan and American, from the price of a doctor’s visit in the U.S. to the price of a house, to the price of a loaf of bread, to the doings of killer whales. They were dumbfounded when I described medical costs in the U.S. I asked them if Latvia had a socialized medical system, and they said no, but then told me that a visit to the doctor costs 1 lat (about $2). Of course Latvian salaries are much lower than ours, and the unemployment rate is in the double-digits now.

Their father built the house we were sitting in, after returning from ten years hard labor in Siberia. He was sent there during one of Stalin’s purges. Like my parents and relatives, those who escaped from Latvia during WWII, fleeing the advance of the Red Army, these two women’s lives were shadowed by the history of the war and subsequent Soviet occupation. The clash of perceptions – Ieva’s view of being Latvian, and theirs – was vivid and entirely familiar to me. Ieva has many Russian friends, as well as friends from all over Europe (and now, India). To her mind, people need to live together in peace in Latvia, and the country benefits from diversity. But to her aunt and mother, the darkness of the war and its aftermath suggests something else entirely. Like an echo from my childhood, I heard the following sentence: “Everyone knows all about the Holocaust. But why doesn’t anyone talk about the genocide of Latvians during the Soviet times?” This question is asked with deep bitterness.

Everything changed so rapidly in Latvia after it regained independence in 1991. The early years were terribly hard, as the socialized institutions collapsed, and the Soviet economic engines pulled out. But in the later 1990's and on into this century, Latvia benefited from the overall economic surges we experienced in the U.S. At one point, it was one of the most rapidly developing economies in Europe. Now all that’s changed with the economic crisis, but nonetheless, westernization is everywhere. But people of Ieva’s mother’s and aunt’s generation are, it seems, spiritually still staggering out from under the padomju laiks, while their kids grew up in the paradigm of an independent, modernizing Latvia. I sat at the table, in that small room, watching their faces, listening to their passionate arguments, like someone straddling the border between two countries, one Eastern European, one Western. In Ieva’s eyes I recognized my frustration with my parents’ and relatives’ old hates, with their victimization. In her mother’s eyes, I recognized the need to be heard, for one’s suffering to be acknowledged and honored and remembered.

I’ll never forget that visit. The complicated truth about history played itself out in that room. When I’m in Latvia, history is a preoccupation of mine. How could it not be? My parents' lives were utterly changed and shaped by WWII. My childhood was darkened by that history. I came to Latvia, especially the first time, to find out what it all meant. There’s a refrain that plays over and over my head: Someone, please tell me the truth about history. It plays every time I bike past the impressive stone Baptist Church in Ventspils, which once was a Jewish synagogue. My friend Molly Lou was visiting this past week, and as we walked past the church, I told her about it's history. “It’s so big,” she said. I explained that before the war, over a thousand Jews lived in Ventspils. I told her that the Baptist church made me sad. “That’s the story of many churches in Europe,” she replied, reflecting on the fact many houses of worship have had different incarnations in their long lives. History is longer here than in Alaska, or the U.S. It reaches back, before my parents' time. Seen in that context, the truth about history shifted to one side for a moment. I think now that history won’t reveal itself to me through museums, books, Internet sites, monuments, but, like language, through immersion. Through listening, and watching. In those two women’s eyes, I saw eagerness, curiosity, and also desire. Tell me your story, they said. And I’ll tell you mine.