Baltas and Nebaltas Dienas

At my cousin Rita's



Following Ieva back to the writers' house from the market



Iveta, Goddess of the Sun, with forsythia in the writers' house courtyard, late April



The wildflower bloom in Vidzeme (central Latvia), late April



The sauna at my cousin Rita's, in the old days, where families bathed (many farm families still do) and woman gave birth



My cousin Rita, who rode horses back in the day, has an Alaskan soul



Above, at my cousin Rita's (left), her daughter Tereze on my right

There is much that isn’t on this blog yet. I’ve been to Aglona, the town of my father’s birth, since my last post, and I’m in the process of writing about it, but it’s turning into an essay, and writing it is a kind of pilgrimage. As soon as the basic story’s there, I’ll post it. The same happened with the story of the monks in Riga; that too is a writing journey still underway. Some intended posts morphed into essays. A writing residency unfolds and deepens as the weeks go by. The daily effort of putting words down takes me deeper and deeper into my experience of being here. But now that experience is winding down.

It’s the last day of April. The Latvian-English dictionary is open beside me to page 742 and 743, deep in the “N”s. Between “neapstridams” and “necilvecigs”, “indisputable” and “inhuman.” Ne means, of course, no and not. As I scan down the page, anticipation grows inside me. I’m looking up a word I’ve seen and heard a thousand times, and know the meaning of by instinct, but there’s always a thrill of looking up any Latvian word, seeing it linked to an English word so directly, its meaning confirmed or clarified. “Neatkariba”. Independence. “Neatkarigs.” Independent. I see a variant of this word every morning, on the kitchen table. One of the daily newspapers is called “Neatkariga.” The next four days, my last four full days here, are national Latvian holidays, like our July 4 in the U.S. May Day is one of two Latvian independence days. It was the day Latvia was admitted to the EU, in 2004. The second is the one my parents celebrated every year when I was growing up, November 18, the date of Latvia’s first independence, in 1918. It was a bittersweet day in my childhood. My parents would gather with the Buffalo Latvians in some church basement. Candles would be lit, the Latvian flag displayed. The Latvian national anthem would be sung. Tears would flow. In those days, Latvia seemed hopelessly removed from the idea of independence. It was under Soviet control. The Latvians in that church basement were exiles, and November 18 was a day to remember the wrecked dream of a free Latvia, the distance they’d traveled from that place, and the daily hardships of “Latvia’s Latvians” under Soviet occupation. And then the liquor would flow, and “Amerika’s Latviesi” would dance to the Latvian Dance Party album.

My eyes travel further down the dictionary page. “Neatlaidiba,” perseverance. “Neatturams,” irrepressible. “Nebalsigs,” voiceless. “Baltas un nebaltas dienas,” throughout the ups and downs of life. “Nebeidzams,” endless. “Nebrivs,” unfree.

It’s April 30, 10 am, and I have four and a half days left in Ventspils, a half a day in Riga, and then I’m on a plane again, flying away from here, on my way back home, to Alaska, by way of Cape Cod. In Alaska, I’ll plant starts in the garden, help build a shed and cold frames, turn the compost pile, and know, in a way I didn’t fully appreciate before, that those things are in my blood; they tie me, like they did my parents, to a place and a people thousands of miles away.

The trees outside my window in Ventspils are leafing out now. The poplar branches in a vase in my room are leafing out. The first flowers in the writers’ house courtyard are already fading. The first morning here, I looked out the window at the broody gray sky and a thin powdering of snow on the north-facing roofs and sidewalks of the square, and I described the people walking by, bundled up in wool coats. This morning I look outside and see, squinting into the bright sun: squiggly shadows of oak trees, hatless women walking in light spring coats. Shadows of gulls streaking across the bricks. Pink-tipped buds on the poplar tree.

Winter or spring, “baltas un nebaltas dienas,” people will keep on walking across the square toward the market, carrying plastic bags and purses, pedaling their rickety bicycles, yakking on their cell phones, smoking their cigarettes, or battering at the bricks of the square with their stiletto heels. The clanging cranes of the loading docks along the river will compete with the church bells and bird songs for dominance. The wind will blow across the Baltic, once in awhile carrying the smell of asphalt, or smoking fish, or the sea. On a cold night, the smell of burning wood will hover over the chimneys. At his wooden table in the market, the blind man will arrange his garlic. An elderly couple will stick their fingers into buckets of sauerkraut on a vendor’s stand and sample some before buying it. The vendor will encourage them to try another kind. The gulls will screw on the rooftops. The tiny gypsy beggar with her long black ponytail and black leather coat will purposefully stride up to someone sitting on a bench in the square and insist on a few santimes. Old women’s kerchiefs will flutter in the never-ceasing breeze. From a loudspeaker in front of the bus station, a block away, a bell will ding and a woman’s voice will announce the departure of a coach to Riga, or Liepaja, Kuldiga or Tukums. I won’t be standing at this window, but these things will continue on, as many of them have for hundreds of years, as long as there’s been a town called Ventspils. In a country that’s been inhabited for 9000 years, it’s “nebeidzams.”

I try to savor every moment of these remaining days, recording as much as I can, memorizing the shapes and outfits and burdens of the people walking by, so that when I’m far from here, I’ll be able to close my eyes, and in my mind, get up from my desk, walk to the window, and see them.

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.

12 Leona Paegles Iela, Valmiera, Then and Now

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.

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.

He who labors, let him labor singing

Photos (bottom to top):
1. Roasting (what else) sausages. Pictured: Maira (a translator), Ieva (behind smoke), Alexi (in trench coat), Rudis (down low)
2. Green Thursday delivery (taken from my window)
3. Poplar zagari, pupoli, pine, juniper, in my room

9 April 2009, Green Thursday (what the Latvians call the Catholic’s Holy Thursday)

A gray, brooding day. The sun rose into an rosy egg-wash sky, and then the clouds felted together, and thunder and lightening are expected later. This is not a good sign. The Latvians say if the first thunderstorm comes before the leaves “nav lielak ka pelites auses,” (aren’t bigger than a mouse’s ears), things won’t grow well during the summer. And last summer, like ours in Alaska, was cold and gray. Because of the forecast, I walked to the tirgs first thing. I’d promised to make yellow split pea soup (my idea was lentil, but they were nowhere to be found in Ventspils). The tirgs is gearing up for Easter, with more stalls, more people jockeying for space at the popular ones (like the milk cart and the fresh bread and homemade candy stand, and the dry fish vendor, who's sadly, not here yet). I realize that Latvians, and probably many other Europeans, don’t shop for food the way we in the States do. People buy fresh food nearly every day, in small amounts. They decide what’s for dinner, and then get what they need. At least that’s how it works at the writers’ house, where the tirgs is a block away. And it’s what I gather from the constant foot traffic heading that way. I was proud of myself today for braving the crush of old ladies and gents lined up in front of that bread vendor. I had to have a half a loaf of authentic black bread with raisins, so I stood there until I made eye-contact with the vendor (and of course waited until the tantes (aunties) made their purchases). Latvians can be pushy and even rude in these situations. Maybe it’s a throw-back to waiting in long lines during the Soviet occupation, when food was scarce. But I’ve learned to be more assertive than normal in the line for the bread or for the bus, or I’ll become a victim of shameless budging. I’m glad I got that bread … It’s fabulous, a black rind, the bread itself moist, dense, dark brown, studded with raisins. Beigi forsh. (This means something like totally awesome).

Walking back, I was approached by a dark-eyed woman, asking for a few santimes. I’ve seen her working the bus station. She’s slight, middle-aged, with a sharp weathered face, long black ponytail, a black leather trench coat cinched at the waist, and black boots. She walks with force when no one's looking, obsequiously when approaching a mark (I know because I've seen her from my window ... I'm a village spy).

Back at the house, Ieva made challah, we tossed together a salad, and I served the soup with a dollop of sour cream (with dill, grated cucumber, crushed garlic), and some black olives. To my immense relief it was pronounced good by the ladies, and I knew they were telling the truth when they took second helpings. I feel like an absolute novice cook around them. Zeltite had started a fire, perfect for this gray day. Wieland, the German poet (we saved him from yet another frozen pizza for lunch) mentioned going to the “amatu maja” (craft center, interior pictured in one of the photos, where the women sit at the looms). Ieva explained that the building once housed the first elementary school in Ventspils. A side room off the foyer is still set up like a children’s classroom, with antique desks, and the original schoolbooks. She told Wieland that the most famous person in Latvia went to school there, Krisjanis Barons. He’s the person who, in the late 19th century, helped to archive over 200,000 Latvian folk songs/poems, known as dainas. Being quatrains, he printed their texts on small slips of paper, index-card sized, and then designed a special set of wooden drawers to hold the texts. This cabinet is in the Archives of Latvian Folklore, and was inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register in 2001. Many of these songs, passed on through an oral tradition, were already being lost, when this massive preservation effort began.

I’ve always found the Latvian folklore tradition mind-boggling. Through centuries of foreign occupation, living as an illiterate peasant society in a harsh climate, nonetheless Latvians kept alive an ancient, pre-Christian oral tradition: songs, dances, poems, riddles, designs, myths and stories. People are impressed with technology, but for me, oral traditions like this are more astounding. A whole culture developed, and held in common, and passed on for who-knows-how-many generations, without pen, paper, library, museum, archive, database, certainly not blog. I imagine it like a fungal mycelium (that huge invisible form under the ground, from which mushrooms sprout). It’s there, under the soil, while above the ground, tiny people in worn homespun clothing push wheelbarrows, plod behind plows, bake bread, herd cows, yell at their neighbors, make love. They look like simple, uneducated country people, but they’re much more than that. So every time I hear one of those “stasti”, like Iveta saying a thunderstorm means bad luck, I want to pass it on. I feel like I’m part of something very old, something as enduring (and life-sustaining) as black bread.

I found the electronic version of the dainas, and read through some of the work songs. “I sang out a loaf of bread,” one proclaims. “Singing, I thresh, I grind” states a woman in another, explaining (in four short lines) that she does this so a strange woman passing her window won’t think she’s sad on account of work. “Climbing a mountain, I’d sing,” says yet another. Each daina reads, to me, in the voice of a particular person. I see clearly, in my mind's eye, that woman in her kitchen, kneading dough for bread, singing in a loud voice, her song carrying through the open window. She doesn’t begrudge the labor she has to do (or she certain wouldn’t want a passing stranger, another woman, to think she did). And as I walk by that window, I don’t. I want to rush home and make my own loaf of bread, and sing my own song. You get the picture. The rhythm of physical work is the rhythm of the dainas. And so is the rhythm of dancing.

Many dainas use words not in a modern dictionary, so they were impossible to easily translate for me. But here’s one that worked. The rhyme scheme even came through (though the rhythm's a little off in the second and fourth lines:

624.
Kas gul miegu, lai gul miegu, He who slumbers, let him slumber
Lai gul miegu raudadams; Let him slumber crying;
Kas dar' darbu, lai dar' darbu, He who labors, let him labor,
Lai dar' darbu dziedadams. Let him labor singing.

A poet is a person who works, both singing and crying.

I look out my window. It’s raining. A kaja (seagull) is the only one walking down the sidewalk. No thunder yet, though.

Pussy Willows and Chocolate

April 3

Meandering around with my morning matte, I picked up a small book from the coffee table in the upstairs lounge of the writers’ house. It as an old calendar, with collage illustrations (squiggly line drawings, photographs from the writers’ house) accompanied by fragments written by various residents. One by Nora Ikstene caught my eye. She’s a very well-known Latvian novelist who was in residence at the house in March 2007, when I was last here. I love her writing, so I decided to try my hand at rough translation of this fragment, which immediately spoke to me. I wish I could capture Nora’s voice in the original (every translator’s lament, but more so for a novice like me). There’s something very old and very new about Ikstena’s voice, something otherworldly and magical. Here’s my crude attempt:

Today she finished the book about her life’s purpose. She’s a woman, and she writers, and hers is not a simple purpose, and that’s precisely why she set out to write her book in the first place. Otherwise, she’s like an empty husk, carrying out everyday chores and doings. But with language she’s like a miraculous tree that simultaneously sprouts catkins, full blossoms and ripe fruit. What if right now a miracle-worker came to her and said, “Hey girl, I’ll give you everything, whatever you’ve longed for in your life, your heart’s desire; you’ll find love; your child won’t die. But in exchange, I’d take your tree, with all of its catkins, flowers and fruits.” Would she change anything? “No,” she’d say, “that tree you can’t have. Not one branch, one leaf, one flower, one fruit. No, you’ll never take that tree. That tree, no.”

Doesn’t every person who’s written from the deepest place within felt that kind of passion? Would any of us accept that devil’s bargain?

This fragment is from her Ikstene’s book, something she was working on when I met her. It’s called, literally, “Existence with Regina,” but I like to think of it as closer to “Being Regina” (pronounced “Rejeena,” with the accent on the first syllable, and the “r” rolled, of course). She’d acquired the “dienas gramatas” (day books, or journals) of Latvian writer Regina Samreto. As she told Regina’s story, she absorbed it; her imagination and Regina’s merged. The book is written in the form of diary entries, the first being in June of 2002. The work skips radically around in time, some entries dated 2007, some dated as early as 1940, each opening with a report on the weather.

After translating, I wrote, Do I have that tree somewhere inside me? How do I reach it, that tree of creativity? How do I get past the thicket of language, tangled in my head? On some days it’s worse than a thicket. On those days, language is the sand-choked grease imbedded in a bicycle chain. Like Ieva today, cleaning bicycles for spring, I apply steam, but it only moves the grease and grit around. It slides across the steel surface of the derailleur. It clings to every single spoke and tooth and stay.

I’m caught somewhere betwixt, between back there (home, Alaska, the language of snow, ash, volcano, melt, ice, inlet, storm, westerly wind) and here (my limited vocabulary inadequate to it, to what’s to me still only the idea of a place). To myself, I’m a chameleon, a strange and cagey travel companion, sometimes wide open and soft, like a mollusk, all nerves and tissue, sometimes unyielding, closed up in a husk, guarded against the unknown. Other times, I’m all a-gawk, shyness pushing my shoulders up to my ears, that girl again, standing against a dark wall, watching a dance, not knowing what to do with her hands. The page stares back at any one of my variations. Well, what now? And today, who, what voice? The page locks eyes with me, until I have to look away, have to get up, lie down. The page says, get a grip, “karaliene” (which means, literally, “queen,” but it’s in this context as something like “home-girl”).

Now, to step back from those abstract thoughts, to life, a brief update about the residents here. The mysterious critic is gone, and also the shy Finn, and the possessions of the Latvian novelist who up and left (I inherited her healthy teas). Medeine, who stayed a week as respite from her travels hither and yon (including all of the –stans) is off to Moldavia … Can’t wait to hear news of her adventures, and I expect I’ll see her in Alaska one day. She e-mailed me a piece she’d written about Buddhist monks she encountered in Kazakhstan. The house is gradually filling up with new faces and personalities. There’s a fastidious, quiet young Russian-Latvian playwright and actor who writes soft porn on the side (ala Anaiis Nin). This took me completely by surprise. After our evenings of translating the first chapter of my book (we finished!), my friend Ieva and I tried to entice Alexi to write some killer whale porn (after describing some of their highly sexed behaviors), but he said that his editor had rejected a piece he did from the point of view of a woman, so a killer whale would be completely out of the question. And now, down the hall from me resides a very well-known Latvian poet, whose last name translates as "one who digs ashes." He's on a special diet for high cholesterol (which, after over a week of eating with abandon all of the local cuisine, I realize is a big risk of living here, and a challenge to deal with). Tonight he held a bowl in his hands, whatever it was, topped with a large number of raw garlic cloves. He’s frail looking, with lank brown hair, and an interesting, fine-boned, thoughtful face and penetrating brown eyes. He’s either loud and boisterous (with a distinct nasal voice) or very quiet and sad, and he writes amazing poetry. I’m a bit in awe of him. Yesterday arrived Wieland, a German writer with friendly blue eyes, and today, an Estonian writer, Suat, who drove up with a bicycle on the roof of his car. He’s white-haired, disheveled, and walks rapidly, even in the tight space of the kitchen, with his torso tipped slightly forward. Everyone who’s here at the moment is a returning writer. Once people come, the ladies say, they don’t get sad anymore when it’s time for goodbye; everyone comes back.

Sunday morning, April 4. I sit at my desk, which I’ve pulled back so that the sun from the gable window falls on me in the morning as I write. At this moment the Lutheran church bell is chiming, calling the faithful to Palm Sunday mass. At the same time, from the Latvian pagan tradition, it’s Pupolu Svetdiena, Pussy Willow Sunday. Yesterday, people bought bunches of pussy willows from the market, or cut them themselves. This morning, they’ll surprise the children (and the adults) in their beds, tapping them with a willow branch, chanting a rhyme, chasing spirits of sickness out, inviting spirits of wellness in. How do I know this? From memory, waking to my mother and father, branches in hand, sing-songing “Apals ka pupols, apaks ka pupols.” That’s what’s happening as the day begins in some of the houses. Me, I close my eyes, and sit in the center of another kind of prayer, wordless, composed of the church bell, so close it’s like something’s being struck inside my skull (on holy days, it rings and rings, five minutes or more), the bird songs, and the warmth and light of the sun on the right side of my face and on my arm. After the last clang, the sound of the bell resonates for several seconds. The bird songs poco crescedo, and then enter again the ordinary noises of Ventspils town life: cars, voices, shoes on stone, a siren. When get up to look out my window, the first thing I see: two girls in Easter-egg colored coats and pink hats, holding bouquets of pussy willows in their hands. They walk to the bench by the clock. I snap a photograph of them from behind the window glass.

The square wakes up, walkers come from all directions. I’ll go to the tirgs myself, and hopefully the bunnies will be there. At the big Palm Sunday and Easter tirgs, cages of flop-eared rabbits arrive, for children to coo over, and for some adults to salivate over. I’ve never eaten or heard about rabbit stew in Latvia, but somehow those gargantuan specimens must eventually make it into someone’s soup pot, vai ne?

I pause to read a page ripped from a magazine, something I keep by my side to remind me of what it is I’m doing, setting all of these words to paper, “the telling of stories of the soul . . . the soul’s passage through the valley of this life – that is to say, its adventure in time, in history.” That’s the poet Stanley Kunitz. The text is from an excerpt, an address he gave called “Speaking of Poetry.” Further on he writes: “It would be healthier if we [poets] could locate ourselves in the thick of life, at every intersection where values and meanings cross, caught in the dangerous traffic between self and universe.” I certainly feel exactly that in Latvia, caught in the thick of language, food, history, conversation, bird song, tirg-ing, reading, walking, cooking. And maybe that’s why I love my window, here, and in Alaska. It allows in all the distracting rhythms and harmonics of humanity and nature, reminding me that no matter how compelling the inner world is, and no matter how isolating, it’s connected to, and feeds on, the outer. A writing retreat is supposed to shut out distractions. That’s true. There are distractions that, in ordinary life, disturb rather than inspire. The distant sound of a compressor or sander. The high pitched “pukh!” every car here makes when it’s unlocked with an electronic key. The molto fortissimo of some 19 year-old tearing across the square, taking a turn without slowing onto some one-lane cobbled street in his sports car. When I keep one ear tuned to these sounds, and the other ear tuned to the voice inside me, the result is, I hope, a deeper music. The bird that lands in the bare tree pulls a new association from my brain, one that wouldn’t exist without the open window. The laughing gull yanks me back from a digression into the same old self-analysis. “Yes, it’s true, even you,” sings another unidentified bird (here, I learn them first by song, most only by the song).

Nothing comes by force in writing. I can’t grab two old planks and hammer them together without giving myself a headache, without slamming my finger. That’s what’s happened when I’ve gone back, with resolve, to the old essays I wrote two years ago in Latvia, hoping to find the thread that ties past to present, and to follow that thread. But it hasn’t worked. I’ve become mired in the past. So today, I approach it another way. I start from here, 11:25 am on a Sunday morning. I’m holding the end of a thread I found in the square, and I can’t see the other end, it disappears around a corner, in the direction of the tirgs. I know it begins a long way off, two years in the past, probably further (it probably begins, come to think of it, in 1944). But I just can’t think about that. I hold the thread. It’s red. I begin to follow it, reading its texture through my fingers as I go, transcribing it.

Yesterday, as we walked along the beach at Skaldene, an old fisherman’s village, Ieva found an old brick. As the bank erodes, it deposits these bricks and fragments of the past onto the sand. Then she found another. The first was typical terra cotta, the other lichen green, corners rounded from erosion. She put bricks on the floor of the Ziguli, in the back, because her brother told her the car’s too light. As we walked, a red-haired, willowy artist visiting for the weekend said Ieva could build her house that way, found brick by found brick. It would take a long time, Ieva said. I could imagine it, though, not the house, but the process of building. And that’s how it is with writing.

Great excitement, I jump out of my chair, take the two steps, lean out the window … the voices of cranes! I’ve seen them fly over since I’ve been in Latvia, but this is the first time I’ve heard their heart-breakingly familiar voices. Ieva’s says they’re called gray cranes.

It’s ten. The bell clangs again, this time to announce the start of mass. Stragglers arrive in their cars and on foot. Another Easter egg family hurrying down the sidewalk, the purr of another car engine pulling up to the curb to park. The bell stops. Through the open church door I can hear the minister’s deep voice, and the collective voice of the congregation, singing. Somewhere down the road, from a more secular person’s yard, the sound of a weed-eater.


4 April 209, noon

A little girl is singing in the square, what language? I just got back from the tirgs, which is a little quieter on a Sunday, but still livelier than weekdays, with the outdoor stalls filled with dry goods vendors: cheap blankets and clothes, shoes. I passed through on my way to the indoor dairy/meat/bread building for fresh milk (returning my old bottle; the farmers use reused plastic water bottles), caraway cheese, sour cream for salad. A woman beside me asked for a chunk of butter from a massive slab. It was produced in Valmiera, my mother’s home town in central Latvia. On my way back, I passed through the vegetable stalls: bundle of pussy willows for the dining room table; a bag of skabie kaposti (like sauerkraut, but less sour, with grated carrots; the market vendors scoop it from big plastic pails). Dill, cucumber, radish (for salad). The woman I purchased these things from spoke Russian to the couple before me, Latvian to me. I try to get as much of my food as I can from the market. I love how this aspect of the agrarian lifestyle thrives here, and I’m excited that it’s a growing part of our lives (in summer, anyways), in Homer. And people here are so devoted to their foods. How many times, when cooking something, have I heard, “Mes nekad ta nedaram.” (We never do it that way.) Or “Mes nekad neliekam tos kopa.” The latter statement, “We never put those two things together” was said by Ieva in response to my suggestion that we mix two leftovers together into a kind of dal bhat, melnie zirni (black chick peas) and griki (buckwheat groats). I told her all the more reason to put them together, and she conceded it was good, but the next day, she teased me to Andra: “You wouldn’t believe what she did. She mixed peas and griki together!” But I know she adopts some of these unconventional food habits. One of her favorite writers, an older man from France, introduced her to sliced bananas on rupjmaize (black bread). Inspired, I bought bananas today for the first time. I’ve been trying to eat all Latvian-produced foods (which is entirely feasible). Everything necessary grows here, and even at this time of year, you can purchase apples, carrots (with the dirt caked on them, perfectly preserved), and potatoes stored in huge root cellars all winter. And now, from the greenhouses, you can buy lettuce and radishes. But tomorrow morning, I’m going to go non-bioregional, and slice up banana for my bread.

Went downstairs to check and see if Ieva had arrived (we’d talked about riding bikes today). A group was gathered around the table: Maira, Imants, the red-headed artist (Maira’s son and friend made a brief appearance before taking off on the bikes), and two new people, a short, compact, red-haired woman in a pile jacket and jeans, the editor of the main nature/green magazine of Latvia, and her partner, a tall bald man with glasses, a kind face, a big sweater. She was passing around a container of home-grown sprouts, dark brown, delicious and nutty, and extolling their virtues. I shared my dried fish. The man put some on a piece of crunchy, grainy, delicious rupjmaize, which the woman said was “ekologiska,” organic. Ieva put the sprouts on bread reluctantly, said she’d certainly not eat them very often, made a comment about sausages being more to her liking. I could tell that the self-satisfied, somewhat opinionated style of the two “zalie” (the Latvian equivilant of greenies) rubbed her the wrong way. The couple talked about growing one’s own food, how the seeds for the sprouts are very cheap, it could be a money-making business, that even old men, when they taste them, are won over by the sprouts. When someone mentioned Rimi, the biggest chain grocery store (and most expensive), the man rose to the bait, said loudly, “Who needs Rimi! People should grow their own food!” I sensed everyone shifting on their chairs, not commenting. The woman was very perky about all of this, patted him on the shoulder to calm him down, and then, when Imants and Maira got up, unlit cigarettes clutched in anticipation between their fingers, and went out to the courtyard to smoke, she rose, rifled around in her husband’s jacket, pulled out a cigarette (organic????) and joined them in the sun to puff away.

I’ve learned that humility, and the ability to laugh at one’s self, is valued highly in Latvia, at least with the people I know. Because I’m not completely at ease spouting off about my political views in Latvian, I tend to listen more, to think about what I say before I say it, to be less opinionated. Speaking a second language curbs certain unconscious, habitual tendencies, and points out aspects of myself I’d otherwise fail to see. It’s one of the great gifts of being out of my element. And yet the longer I’m here, the more in my element I feel.



5 April

Time to post this. Yesterday, Ieva and I walked in the woods outside of town, gathering branches. I showed her how incredible the poplar buds smell this time of year, and we collected an armload. I plucked buds off some, and dropped them in a bottle of almond oil, to create eau de spring for the ladies, true aromatherapy for the winter-weary. The rest of the branches we put in a vase along with pussy willows for the table, and in another vase for my room. I look forward to seeing the leaves sprout out. I also collected branches of pine and juniper. It was so peaceful walking in the forest, a contrast to the beach, which was very windy and cold. This weekend it’s supposed to get up to 13. I’ll leave it to y’all to do the math. Pavasars!

The day ended with something I’ve waited for these last two years. We returned to a tiny kafenica in a beautifully renovated old wooden building (high oak ceiling with beams, brick walls) for Latvian hot chocolate. This is something brineskiegs (amazing, miraculous). It comes in a little white cup, espresso-sized, and the dark, warm chocolate is served with a tiny spoon. It’s the consistency of pudding. It induces a state of utter euphoria, and probably greatly increases one’s life span as well. I’ll try to learn how to make it.