Among the Living and the Dead Read online

  To Livija,

  who helped me build a home from what was lost.

  And to Ausma,

  who waited for me there.

  What is told here has happened, although I tell it in my style and manner.

  —EDUARDO GALEANO

  I looked to the sky and to the ground and straight ahead and since then I have been writing a long letter to the dead on a typewriter that has no ribbon, just a thread of horizon so the words knock in vain and nothing sticks.

  —TOMAS TRANSTROMER, Baltics

  I am wandering, lost

  In my father’s fields:

  Where I left a meadow

  I found a birch grove.

  —FROM THE LATVIAN FOLK SONGS/TONE POEMS KNOWN AS THE DAINAS

  AMONG

  THE LIVING

  AND

  THE DEAD

  I

  THE ROAD I must travel to reach my grandmother’s lost village is like tracing the progression of an equation designed to restore lost time. Each kilometer that carries me from Riga seems to subtract five years.

  First there are the gas stations and Swedish supermarket chains, signs ever burning. Next come the old Soviet-era apartment buildings, stubborn blocks of concrete and pebble-dash, their facades brittle and peeling like the skin of old wasps’ nests. Down in the parking lots, old women pile bones for the stray cats.

  From this point, the land begins its reclaiming, grass and Queen Anne’s lace rooting through abandoned concrete slabs. Occasionally, a house will appear, canted and suffering, maybe with a slope-shouldered figure poking at a smoldering brush pile in the yard. But just as quickly, these glimpses are smothered by the trees.

  Sometimes a house stands still long enough to admit that it is abandoned, portions of the roof skinned away to reveal blackberries growing on the inside, the surrounding fields neck-high and riotous.

  Soon the village center announces itself: first come the thumps of the railroad tracks and then the houses, clad in wood worn as gray as lichen. Sheets snap on clotheslines. A van parked in a gravel turnout advertises smoked carp. A man teeters along the shoulder on a child’s bicycle, a bottle wrapped in brown paper poking its neck from his jacket pocket.

  The center holds for a few more seconds and then abruptly, it gives up and lets the fields resume their patter: rapeseed, rye, rapeseed, rye.

  Eventually, the fields stop just long enough to take a breath, revealing a long rutted driveway.

  At the end sits a home made from brick, modern by the standards of the countryside, clearly built within the last sixty years, after the Second World War, though the sun and the snow and the rain have worried it to the point of exhaustion.

  The yard is still, except for three chickens, muttering and picking their way across tindered grass. The house acts as if it is empty, though I know someone is inside, waiting for me.

  I sit for a moment, listening to the car’s cooling engine, the chickens clapping their beaks, skimming the air for insects I can’t see.

  And just as I am trying to think of what I want to say—how to introduce myself to someone I have always and never known—the door to the little house opens, and I see my grandmother.

  Of course, by this time, my grandmother, the woman who raised me, has been dead for more than five years.

  II

  THIS IS why I had journeyed to my grandmother’s lost village, nestled at the edge of Latvia, which is itself nestled at the edge of Europe’s psychic north, south, east and west, or, as Pope Innocent III described it in a papal bull written in the thirteenth century, the edge of the known world:

  Because I imagined, maybe, I might find her again in the old stories that still existed there.

  Maybe what I mean to say is that I hoped to see, as the writer Rebecca West has put it, what history meant in flesh and blood.

  And I suppose you could say this same recycled hope is what then moved me to return year after year, for what would ultimately become five consecutive years—until I could almost convince myself that I knew what it was like to live there, at the edge of the known world, as if I were an old story, too—at least for as long as the handful of weeks or months I managed to string together with each trip.

  People say, If the old stories are to be trusted, when in fact the old stories never stopped being trusted, because trust is different than belief.

  Belief is to faith, to truth, as trust is to comfort, to consolation.

  Whether a matter of comfort, or of consolation, it’s long been assumed of this region, where my grandmother was born, and where she made her life until the outbreak of the Second World War, that at some point each year the dead will come home.

  And while general consensus holds that the dead’s arrival can be read in the last stalks of grain, as they lengthen with the shadows, a signal that the fields are ready for the final pass of the scythe, no one can say which route the dead take on their annual pilgrimage, whether they walk alone or in procession. Now that I know my grandmother’s lost village as well as I do, I like to imagine them cutting through its streets, lingering at the windows of the beauty salon where the last of the summer brides are having their hair set, slipping just past the reach of the angry goat tethered in the field adjacent to the crumbling apartment blocks.

  It’s possible, of course, that the dead prefer to make their way through the forests, where they can wander the nettle-hemmed paths looking for the last of the mushrooms, blackening now, the soft, gilled undersides thick with worms. Perhaps some of them recall where the woods hide the old Soviet missile base, birch trees growing from the roofs of the abandoned living quarters, piles of sodden clothing strewn at the entrances to the former command center, the deep furrows in the earth that mark the old beds of the nuclear warheads.

  Should the dead choose to go through the fields, and it’s evening, they can always fall in behind the line of heavily uddered cows, nipples shuddering and arcing milk with each thudden step. Majamajamaja, the herders sing and clap the air at their backs: Homehomehome.

  Whether it is their childhood home or the last home that the dead inhabited that they choose to visit during this time, no one really knows. But it’s long been understood that once a year it is possible for the dead to suspend their exile from our world and cross back over to see how life has continued in their absence.

  At one time, this idea would have been a source of great consolation to both the living and the dead, the possibility of return, however brief: to shoulder open the front door and find the row of boots, mud- and manure-crusted, still next to the far wall; one of the barn cats, broken-whiskered and notch-eared, secret sprayers of the phlox and hosta beds, trying to slink in behind them; and everyone around the table, stabbing cabbage around their plates, slathering black bread with butter. With each visit the dead would watch the lives of the not-dead progress: the new, fumbling couples, whispering and biting at down pillows; the blinking infants, swaddled and mewling; the graying heads, rasping and hacking into the closing dark.

  And while the living wouldn’t have seen the dead during this time, they understood that the dead were close, watching. They might have called out their names, talked to them, told them what they had missed over the past year, even set them a regular place at the table to encourage their company. But eventually, the living would decide that the visit had gone on long enough. Maybe they worried the dead were getting too comfortable, and might never want to leave. So they would politely inform the dead that it was time for them to go back to their world and wait until the next turn of autumn. They fell into an easy rhythm, the living and the dead, anticipating this annual reunion. And that was the first mistake: assuming that this was how things would be for et
ernity.

  Because let’s say suddenly, one year, the dead pushed open the door to their old home and found everyone gone. Only empty rooms and overturned chairs and scattered papers, and a pile of white fur and bones in the old root cellar. It’s hard to imagine the dead who found this would have wanted to linger for long, but because it was so new to them, this emptiness, maybe the dead liked having their old home to themselves at first, liked the way it allowed them to remember, unchallenged, the way things were in their time. But how many times can you unhasp all the safety pins in the sewing basket or place your palms on the surface of every mirror before you long for the presence of someone else to remind you that you were there, even in death.

  So, when the dead returned again the next year and suddenly saw smoke clawing its way from the chimney, it’s possible they felt something rising in them, too, something like hope. But once they crossed the threshold, they would see how everything was wrong: hay on the floors, ankle deep; the air thick with the smell of ammonia and dung; lowing from every room; scraping hooves; dozens of wet eyes meeting theirs in the dark; tails thumping against the walls of rooms turned stalls.

  Even if it so happened that people eventually reclaimed the home of the dead from the cows, these newcomers would be no one the dead knew, or anyone who knew the dead—­strangers speaking a strange language, living behind worn blankets that had been hung from the ceiling, crude dividers simulating some semblance of personal space, but that could not block out the sounds of the night, the groaning, the stiff shuffling to the back of the house, once a bedroom, now a makeshift privy, a hole hacked in the floor over which everyone squatted.

  This is where, according to the logic of the living, it would have made sense to turn away, to retreat, maybe to the barn, empty except for the tractor that identified this as a collective farm, Russian-made, narrow-snouted, like the dogs that once slunk through here, long ago, secretly rooting through the stalls. But what do we, the living, know of how the dead define their losses.

  What we can say is that a ritual the living had once imagined as a way for the dead to visit the homes of their memories had in fact become a search for a sign that these homes ever existed. Because after the blankets came down and the tractor disappeared from the barn, when trash and broken glass became the only records of habitation, then it was just fleas and mice and the occasional drunk curled up on the floor with a bottle, hiding from his wife in a place she would never think to look. And then after that: nothing. Only silence and decay, until all that remained was a jumble of broken boards in an overgrown field.

  It was not just the physical home that had been lost to the dead: now no one sets a place for them anymore or anticipates their coming. In recent years, anyone who could be a descendant of the dead has left this countryside for more prosperous regions of Europe, places where it is possible to find not only work, but something that is certain to put more than a few hundred dollars in their pocket each month, and does not require one to muck stalls or buck hay or handle cows’ teats.

  The living might come back, briefly, for a wedding, or a christening, or a funeral, bottles clinking in plastic bags from the airport Duty Free. But the truth is that the dead now come more frequently than the not-dead; each year, after the harvest, if the stories can be trusted, stumbling through the forests, down the two-lane roads, across the shorn fields, searching for reassurance in a landscape that offers its reply in the form of empty clotheslines, untended graves, winter snows unbroken now by a single step.

  THERE WAS A TIME when migrant flocks of Bewick’s swans and whooper swans stopped here each year to winter in the bogs and fens. And so the region was named for these birds: Gulbene, from the Latvian word gulbis (“swan”). Located on the country’s eastern edge, two hours from the Russian border, this place has witnessed centuries of migration and flight.

  Some years it was members of the Order of the Brothers of the Sword who invaded, emissaries of the pope, their shields decorated with images of crucifixes and sharpened blades, their armor decorated with the spray of pagan blood. Other years, it was Ivan the Terrible’s men, galloping through on horseback, rapiers drawn and torches in hand. Occasionally, there were Vikings, shaking snarled beards and shields, as well as soldiers who answered to a Swedish king who preferred to keep his facial hair in a trim Vandyke. Mostly though, it was armies dispatched by tsars and tsarinas, or those sent by kaisers. And after that, men who demanded that they be addressed as General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Or: Führer.

  Once, the people who lived here didn’t even bother distinguishing between the different routes that cut through their land. They simply called the paths in and out of the region by one name: war roads.

  The roads through the region are mostly empty now—sometimes you can go hours without seeing another passing car—but there are days when it feels like the travelers of the war roads are out there still, all those ghost armies, advancing, retreating through the landscape, their presence suggested in the graffitied bunkers left to decay in the fields, and in the sudden disappearance of roadside trees, felled to block an incoming army’s advance, and never replanted even all these decades later. They are always in the background, the sound of their phantom boots on the landscape as steady as a heartbeat: all these troops, from all these eras, a formation of tattered uniforms and missing limbs, marching through the collective memory, silently, endlessly—the harbingers of flight. And everyone in their path runs, is still running, through the years and generations.

  This is where I come from, from this place of flight—daughter, granddaughter and great-granddaughter to those who once lived at the edge of the war roads, and who came to feel the roads’ terrible pull. What happened to my family here happened long before I was born, but I know now that my life started the instant the road claimed them. That when it led them away from the land, all those years ago, and scattered them—some to the west, to be dropped at the edge of the ocean they called silent in their old language, and others to the east, to disappear into the territories of the banished—it made their exile mine, as much a part of me as any characteristic governed by heredity, like the nearsightedness that by the time I was seven would reduce my view of the world to what fell within an arm’s length in front of me. Whatever lay in the distance, no matter how hard I tried to make out its contours, was always lost to me.

  It helped that I was raised to believe in the existence of what I could not see. The language and stories of my childhood were always referencing hidden places. And one of those places waited on the other side of death. That’s what the old homesick Latvians would say. That when we die, we go to live in a land that’s found beyond the sun. They said this not as superstition or myth, but as habit, the reflexive tic of centuries of belief, now preserved in figures of speech that tended to emerge late at night, after the drinks had left everyone tremulous and heavy-lidded, such as One day, we will meet in the place that exists beyond the sun.

  Beyond the sun, life is said to be not too dissimilar from this one. In fact, it’s said that there, we do the same things we’ve always done, except we are no longer alive. Dead farmers look after dead cows that are herded by dead dogs. Dead children presumably go to schools where they are taught by dead teachers, who take their grading home at night to apartment buildings full of dead neighbors. Dead cats leave dead moles on the doorsteps of the dead.

  There are moments when this strikes me as one of the most strange and beautiful ideas I have ever heard. And then there are moments when it makes me terribly sad, imagining a world unfolding parallel to this one where everyone is going through the motions of home, trying to hold on to its shape and memories. But it isn’t home.

  And now, from within this sadness, a realization: I’m not describing the dead anymore. I’m describing us, and our life in the little bowed house that we shared, my grandmother, Livija, my grandfather, Emils, and me.

  I can still recall the way the house slunk low, like a person trying
to hide; the plum tree that dropped its watery fruit on the front lawn in drifts, like snow; how the floor and the walls of the cellar beneath the house were only earth. And yet I hesitate to say that this is the place where I grew up. Maybe it is more accurate to say that this is the place where I learned of the existence of our true home, the one we could no longer see, but that called to us nonetheless from somewhere out there, far beyond the buzz of the paper mills; the single, ever-spewing spire of the copper smelter that turned the grass of the yards bordering it a mesmerizing yet unsettling chartreuse; and the stacks of shipping containers—corrugated blues and yellows and reds—that formed the edges of our accepted horizon.

  Our true home, so the stories went, like the ones that my grandmother read to me at night from a battered edition of Grimms’ fairy tales, the spine broken and held in place by tape, was far, far away, in the province of the swans, but we could never go back there again. Nor could anyone from that world visit us to remind us of who we were and where we came from, though once, my grandmother’s mother had apparently shown up at our home, moments after her death, more than five thousand miles away, but only my grandmother saw her. She emerged from the seam that runs between darkness and daylight to stand at the edge of my grandmother’s bed, as my grandfather snored and twitched beside her. It was the first time my grandmother had seen her mother in more than twenty years, and her face looked withered, like flowers left in a vase without water. My grandmother opened her mouth to say something, but before she could speak, before she could form the words forgive me, her mother leaned over and placed a callused palm on my grandmother’s curlered head. She let it rest there for a moment. Then she disappeared.

  My grandmother seemed to accept the brief terms of this visitation. She, too, as I understood it, had disappeared just as quickly from her family’s life, though her vanishing had been the living kind, born of war and panic, the heavy trundle of redstarred tanks over cobblestone, airships swimming overhead, flames where roofs should have been, and from somewhere nearby the sound a building makes just before it crumbles: a whoosh of air, like a breath released from a cracked sternum.