Among the Living and the Dead Read online

  Alone, with two small children—her husband away at the Russian front—my grandmother had monitored the climax of the Second World War from a rented apartment in the Latvian capital with an address of 71 Peace Street. Between the choiring of the bombs, she breast-fed her newborn son and hoped she could remain in one place long enough for her body to heal, for the bleeding to finish. But as the glass in the windows rippled, and it became clear she couldn’t wait where she was any longer, she dropped diapers into a sack and tied a scarf around her shoulders.

  She picked up her three-week-old son. Made her two-year-old daughter clasp her hand. And ran.

  As she had explained it to me growing up, there was no time to write a letter, to address it to the family who waited three hours to the east in Gulbene, in the brown-shingled farmhouse where my grandmother had been born, and which she had left only a few years before, the first in her family to venture beyond its boundaries for a new life in the city. The day she left the farm, her whole family had accompanied her to the train station, still in their milking boots, and they had cried and waved at my grandmother until the train finally pulled beyond view. Now, there was no time for my grandmother to say good-bye to her mother and her father and her brother and her sister, no way to tell them where she was heading, because even she had no idea. It was too late for her to do anything, except to try to stay on her feet and ahead of the Russian troops, thousands of them, marching behind the battle standard of the USSR, red-silkscreened with hammer and sickle—Latvia’s new flag.

  I KNOW NOW that my grandmother left Latvia at the beginning of October 1944. It was late June 1945 before she finally crossed into British-occupied territory in the north of Germany. There, she and her children were officially registered as Displaced Persons, ultimately assigned to a refugee camp on the outskirts of the port city of Hamburg, where she and the children sometimes went on day passes to pick through the firebombings’ char, burned brick and pooled metals, searching for things to trade or that might fuel their cook-fires. But when she was alive, my grandmother never emphasized the length or the difficulty of her journey across Europe, what she might have seen in her memories that she wished she could forget. And while the stories she told implied great difficulty and sorrow, she erased them of the grim particulars, made them archetypal enough to feel memorable, recognizably powerful without exposing me to the specificity of her own traumas: A friend from Riga joined me, to help with the children; we slept in the woods at night and dried diapers on branches; we looked for farmhouses and offered to help with the cows in exchange for milk, a place to sleep. Her story existed for me only in simple outline, like the life-size self-portraits we made in elementary school art class by lying on our backs on a blank expanse of butcher paper, while the teacher traced our jittering bodies, our physical presence in the world suggested through negative space, the hollows held inside the lines. In much the same way, I accepted the presence of what went unspoken in my grandmother’s war stories as evidence of something that did not have to be made explicit in order to be registered, understood. She did not have to say terror or shame or anguish for me to feel these things held inside her, as clearly as if I had held them inside me, too.

  My grandmother, Livija, chose instead to speak about the place she had left, as if she had never left. Over the years—as she lay on her pallet in the refugee camp, where she would live so long after the war that she and my grandfather could trace the years by the additions to their family, two children becoming four, two boys and two girls; as she clutched the family’s passports and entrance papers to the United States and felt the transport plane’s rising, its wings tipped to the sea—my grandmother never stopped saying the name of the home she had lost.

  T-a-c-o-m-a, she practiced, as the smell of the mills punched through the cracks in the windows of her new home, an apartment in a downtown tenement where the volunteers from Tacoma Lutheran Family Services had indicated through gentle pantomime that the family of six now lived. But that word always remained unsure on her tongue. It would never sound as natural as the way she said Lembi, which she had first learned from her grandfather, a shoemaker from Gulbene who eschewed whiskers but let his eyebrows grow like cumulus clouds. The name he had bestowed on the two-bedroom farmhouse he built under the shelter of two maple trees. There he raised his only child, a boy, who would grow up to become my grandmother’s father, a man of waxed mustaches and a fine way with hops, known for the batches of ale he kept in the granary, always enough to lend to a wedding or a wake. My grandmother’s mother was ten years younger than her husband, and everyone agreed that she possessed the patience required to ret the farm’s flax and spin its fibers into linen so fine and soft that it felt weightless, yet she was also quick to snap a switch from the nearest tree if she sensed the slightest misbehavior.

  This was the world my grandmother, Livija, was born into: where landscape was lineage, and the span of a life could be measured by all that was held within the farm’s boundaries. There, she knew it was summer by the smell of fresh mown hay; fall when the saffron milk caps rose from the decay of the forest floor; spring by the storks winging overhead. Each day was organized around the rhythm and habits of the cows, and almost as soon as my grandmother and her siblings could walk, they were toddling barefoot behind the slow-hoofed cortege as it mouthed its way across the pastures, and they remained with the herd until evening, when it was time to drive them back to their places in the barn. The children did this for years, back and forth, stall to pasture, until they had spent more time in the company of cows than any other living being. Long after my grandmother had settled in America, she would visit the dairy barn at the state fair, wandering the labyrinthine complex and appraising each cow with tender eyes. Always, there would be a cow or two that stirred something close to rapture in her. Oh, how beautiful, she would say, standing unself-consciously in her heels among the splatters, taking care to address the animal directly. What a fine cow you will be.

  My grandmother spent more than a decade not knowing what had happened to her family and to the farm after she fled Latvia. Even when she was finally able to reestablish contact with her relatives in Gulbene, communication was sporadic, halting, the letters subject to censors’ eyes. How far away she felt from the days when she could sit with her family in the kitchen of the farmhouse, everyone nursing cups of hot tea, replaying the events of the day. Often, it was a catalog of nothing. Maybe a heifer had been born with a broken mouth. A cloud had passed overhead in the shape of a girl. The bees seemed agitated. Now, as she sat alone at her kitchen table in Tacoma, crying over the pages of the latest stilted letter—We went far away to work for a time—there was a part of my grandmother that understood she could never return to that place again. But there was also a part of my grandmother that refused to accept the idea that she could never return to that place again.

  In the end, my grandmother decided to try to find a way to occupy the space that bordered both realities: until the day she could return to the farm, she would rebuild it here, in America, board by board, through memory.

  At first she did it by herself, silently setting the survey lines. She raised the sky just far enough overhead so that it felt as if you could reach up and brush your fingers against it when you lay on your back in the grass. She smoothed the fields out to the edges of the horizon, and then summoned the forests, dense and dark. Behind the screening branches, she placed the anthills and the badger burrows. Reluctantly, she conjured the mosquitoes and horseflies, if only for the sake of accuracy, the way they blackened the summer air.

  Orchard sown, she replanted the gooseberries and currants and let their rows grow unruly, vines curling back on themselves like the ends of her father’s mustache. She staked the stems of the lolling dahlias and drove posts for the picket fence deep into the soil, but still it would list. She bucked hay into the loft, and stacked logs for winter’s approach. But since this was a world summoned entirely from memory, there were places where the landscape dropped aw
ay without any explanation, sudden chasms of white space, unresolved constructions. The milking barn contained stools, but not a single churn. The horse grazed endlessly, reins dragging through clover. Inside the house, some of the rooms appeared never to have been framed or plastered; the same hallway led to different bedrooms each time it was accessed. Outside the kitchen window lilacs bloomed, regardless of the season.

  LIKE A GHOST, my grandfather had simply shown up one day at the refugee camp where my grandmother was living following her flight from Latvia. My grandmother had spent the last two years fearing he was dead.

  Number of family members? the camp intake forms had asked. Four, my grandmother had written, then scratched it out. Above it, she wrote much more faintly, Three.

  My grandfather could not hide from her the hole where his eye had once been, but he refused to say anything about his time in the war. And no one ever asked, even though they knew that this was what made him rock in his chair for hours, his hands fluttering in his lap like birds with snapped wings, that this was what made him slam his fist down on the table even when there was no point to be made.

  As a little girl, I learned to watch for the moments when my grandfather slipped away from us, knew, when the trembling started, that if I put a small hand on his arm and spoke his name, I could eventually make it stop. You are here with me, Papa, I would say, trying to call him back. And he would agree—yes, yes, yes!—but I could see by the set of his brow he was still someplace else. We lived quietly, my grandfather, grandmother and I, rarely venturing far beyond the house, except for my grandparents’ nightly walk beneath the freeway underpass and down the dead-end street, past the trailer court and the overgrown field where my grandmother sometimes waded into the grass to pinch the heads off wild chamomile flowers that she then pocketed to dry. Two times a week, my grandfather chauffeured us into downtown Tacoma for choir practice and worship services with the other Latvian exiles, all of them drawn to this area by the sponsorship of the local Lutheran church. Few of them had known one another in their old country, but now war and coincidence had made them a community, albeit a small one. By the time I came to live with my grandparents, the number of congregants hovered around fifty, from an original three hundred members, though no one was quite sure how to count the woman who everyone suspected must be part Russian, given the suspicious way she made her pirags—with lard in the dough and boiled eggs and beef for filling: like swallowing stones, it was whispered.

  Every Thursday and Saturday, we gathered in a rented church basement, where we sat on metal folding chairs that had been arranged in narrow rows. I tried not to stare at the man who had a hook for a hand, or to squirm when suddenly I was crushed against the breasts of a woman who always wept and whispered another girl’s name as she embraced me. The pastor gave long and tremulous sermons in Latvian, and when I grew restless, my grandmother would let me flip through her hymnbook, really just a stack of mimeographs, handwritten scores reconstructed from the congregants’ memories, the songs they carried with them when they fled. I was always the youngest person in attendance by at least sixty years; the congregants’ own children—most of whom had been about my age when they first arrived here as refugees with their parents in the 1950s—were all grown now and deep into the work of making new lives in this new land, sometimes even calling themselves by new names, easier for American tongues to grasp.

  So only the elderly remained, which meant we had cycled through all the weddings and christenings that there would be. Now it was only funerals. Standing at the graveside we dipped our hands into an old coffee can filled with sand that someone had managed to smuggle out of Communist Latvia, and we took turns scattering it over the coffins’ lids. Then we moved to the heap of raw earth, already studded with shovels. At first, the local cemetery didn’t know what to make of us, the way we insisted on filling the graves ourselves. Sometimes the cemetery still sent its own gravediggers, who watched from behind headstones a few feet away as the old mourners swung their shovel blades, sweating and straining against suits and skirts. But the extra help was never needed. According to our traditions, no one left until every trace of soil had been scraped back into the hole, every last clod of dirt tamped down.

  We entrusted our dead to a single funeral home, a brick building reminiscent of the Parthenon but located in an area of Tacoma more typically favored by bail bondsmen and pawnshops. The location mattered less than the fact that its owners were unquestioning, accommodating, even eager to learn our traditions, if it meant we would bring more business their way. If they ever thought it strange that we mixed Lutheranism with old pagan ways, they never said a word. They just made sure to keep copies of the Bible translated into Latvian on hand, as well as plenty of caskets crafted from oak, the tree the ancients had considered most sacred.

  The ground those caskets were lowered into was in a section of cemetery the Latvians had purchased so that we could always be together, undisturbed. I’d been shown once where my grandparents’ places waited, two anonymous rectangles of grass otherwise surrounded by occupied graves, and I liked to test myself whenever we found ourselves at the cemetery to see whether I could find my way back to them without any help, as if practicing for the day when it would fall to me to stand at the edge of the holes into which my grandparents had disappeared, feeling the old songs in my mouth, the weight of the sand from the old coffee can in my hand, the grit that it left behind in the creases of my palms and on the cuffs of my coat. It was like a silent command running behind everything we did, but in the cemetery, among the ever-expanding drift of headstones, I could hear it more clearly: watch, listen, remember.

  This was how I knew someone had died: my grandmother would pull her paring knife from the kitchen drawer and head out to her garden to cut calla lilies, carrying them to the funeral cupped in the hollow of her hand.

  This is how she soothed me back to sleep when I woke crying: the same hollow of her hand cupped against my cheek.

  I began living with my grandparents following the collapse of my parents’ marriage, a bitter coming-undone that had left them both emotionally incapable of caring for me; in my mother’s case, it was also a legal ruling, her parental rights clipped, like the car she once steered off the road in a haze of drink. Custody was awarded to my father—the infant my grandmother had delivered as the bombs rained down on Riga—but my father, for his part, was lost deep in his own anger and sorrow and silence. Five years home from Vietnam, and he remained as tightly locked inside himself as the day he returned. Just as his own father had done, a quarter of a century earlier.

  My father’s not-speaking was much quieter than my grandfather’s, not so much a refusal as a ceding to a kind of paralysis. He went to work, he went to school, but he seemed somewhere else, somewhere far away. And so my grandparents made a place for me in their home while he tried to find his way back to himself.

  Where once I had known only one word for mother, now there were two. My grandmother was the one who took me to the backyard and showed me how to find the sweetest raspberries, hidden in the shade of the leaves. She was the one who set me on a kitchen chair, draped an apron around my neck and let me sink my fists into the warmth of rising dough. She was the one who said my name over and over again until it sounded like a song, the one who took me in her lap and comforted me after I spent hours on the porch with my little blue suitcase waiting for the mother who promised but seldom came.

  I am now raising little Inara, my grandmother wrote to the relatives back in Latvia, who by this time she had not seen in thirty years—letters I would not discover until I was nearly forty, and had begun to visit Latvia myself.

  I have fallen deeply in love with her, as she has with me. She calls this her home. But at night sometimes she jumps up screaming: “I want my daddy. Where is my daddy?” I don’t know why, but she has not called out for her mother. At times, Inara calls me mommy. We speak Latvian at home, and she understands everything. She is enthralled with books and I read aloud t
o her from titles meant for much older children—stories of Hansel and Gretel and Snow White. Sometimes, she sits alone with piles of books and “reads” by herself. We have no neighbors with children she can play with, but maybe it’s not so important yet—she turns just three in December. When she first came into my care, Inara was so terribly anxious; it’s required real effort to bring the little child to this place of calm.

  And two years later she wrote: Inara’s mother comes to get her for visits only now and again.

  What she did not share in her letters she instead documented in a small spiral notebook, which I would not see until years after her death.

  Once, I returned from one of those rare weekend visits with a burn on my chin in the shape of a lit cigarette.

  And a few months after that entry, she wrote again in the notebook:

  Tonight, when Inara came back it was like she was in a trance. Her mother laid her on my bed, and her eyes were open, but there was no motion in her for a very long time.

  For as long as she lived, my grandmother never spoke to me about my mother, about what she did or did not do, what had happened or not happened in my earliest years, that I would need to be taken from her. And I never asked, as if I agreed that this was something that should not be given voice.

  In the region of Latvia where my grandmother was raised, there are people who believe even to this day that the right words spoken in the right combination are a way of resurrecting what has been lost. Or, as an old man once asked me: Did I know that there were times when words could become more than words?