Verzemnieks - Among the living and the dead: a tale of exile and homecoming on the war roads of Europe

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 fathers fields:

Where I left a meadow

I found a birch grove.

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

To Livija,
who helped me build a home from what was lost.
And to Ausma,
who waited for me there.

Copyright 2017 by Inara Verzemnieks

All rights reserved

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AMONG
THE LIVING
AND
THE DEAD

I

T HE ROAD I must travel to reach my grandmothers 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 Annes 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 childs 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 cars cooling engine, the chickens clapping their beaks, skimming the air for insects I cant see.

And just as I am trying to think of what I want to sayhow to introduce myself to someone I have always and never knownthe 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

T HIS IS why I had journeyed to my grandmothers lost village, nestled at the edge of Latvia, which is itself nestled at the edge of Europes 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 yearsuntil 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, tooat 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, its 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 deads 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 grandmothers 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.

Its 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 its 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 its 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.