THIRTEEN ATTEMPTS by Eva Saulitis
1. In March of 2007, I traveled to Latvia, the country of my parents’ birth, for the first time. My plane landed in Riga at the tail end of winter, the day gray with a light drizzle, visibility five miles. I was met on the other side of customs by my second cousin Tereze and her husband Maris, strangers who drove me and my bulging blue backpack weighing 48 pounds and my smaller duffle bag weighing 20 pounds and my carry-on backpack weighing 12 pounds to a tiny hotel above the intersection of Krisjanis and Gertrudes Streets, not far from Riga’s old city center. Tereze walked me around the city, helping me to get a phone card and cash . . . Wait. Not that. I’m getting bogged down completely. Let me start again.
2. My parents were born in Latvia and left there in 1944, my father as part of the retreating German front, my mother as part of a mass exodus of Latvian citizens who fled the approach of the Russian Army, clinging to the coat tails of the retreating Germans. But that’s simplistic. It explains nothing of the complexity of this history. Better start again.
3. In 1917, Latvia, a small country on the Baltic Sea, occupied for centuries by foreign powers, began a brief period of independence that ended with World War II. My parents were born during that period of independence, and left Latvia when it ended, never to return. In 2007, I was the first of their children to return – Wait, why did I use that word, return?
4. Latvia is a small country pinched between the Baltic Sea, Lithuania, Estonia and Belarus. The language: unrelated to German, Russian, Estonian, Swedish, Finnish, Polish, etc. Close to Lithuanian. Along the same linguistic branch as extinct Old Prussian. A branch sprouting from the nurse log of Sanskrit. My first language. My first word was ciekurs, pine cone. But no, I’m not fluent in the vernacular. An old man selling wood products at the Ventspils market asked me, “So what language do you normally speak?” In Latvia, I was accused of speaking folk song Latvian. Over There Latvian. Bad Latvian. I speak the language of those who left Latvia and fled west, the language of the first independence. But there are also those who left Latvia and fled east and speak the language of the occupation, Russian. And there are those who stayed, who speak a Latvian that
edged/slid/stumbled/tiptoed/slunk/skipped/skittered/crept
through the occupation into second independence. So this is a story about language, spoken or not. Well no, not exactly. It’s a story about displacement and exile. Or maybe more of a story about identity, so I’ll start there:
5. I’m a child of Latvian immigrants. I’m a child of Latvian displaced persons. I’m the child of peasants and intellectuals. Was it safer to be peasant or intellectual during German and Russian occupations? Which were more culpable, more brutal, more oppressed? There’s always the question of oppressor and oppressed. KGB or SS. Those who were drafted and those who joined up and those who hid and those who fled and _____
6. When I arrived in Latvia, I carried three pieces of luggage weighing 48, 20 and 12 pounds. I weighed 130 pounds. I left Latvia weighing 124 pounds and hefting a backpack weighing 60 pounds (rear view) and a duffel weighing 25 pounds (front view). Besides the 23 books I carried (books I’d brought with me from the United States) I schlepped back to the U.S. two bottles of Riga Black Balsam (alcohol content 45%), seven Laima (translation: happiness, luck) chocolate bars, a crudely made blueberry picker, a knife, two jars of honey, a bag of Baltic sea sand, a handful of amber, a handful of earth from my father’s childhood farm, my mother’s long black wool coat (worn only once, on the day of my arrival), a prayer card depicting Our Lady of Aglona, several beeswax candles, my great-grandmother’s gold chain, and a month’s supply of clothing. Several strangers, including a street sweeper and a man opening a parking lot gate, watched me stagger down the cobblestone streets between the writers’ residency where I’d lived and the bus station at 6 am on the cold morning I left Latvia. They watched me stop, drop the duffle bag down, my knees nearly buckling under the backpack’s weight. No one asked me if I needed help. This, somehow, says something about my encounter with the Latvian people. And this says nothing of the kind, only something about me. Which is a big part of the problem I seem to be having with beginning this story.
7. When I went to Latvia for the first time, I carried a burden on my back and a myth of Latvia implanted, fully realized, in my mind. As a young child, Latvia was a Camelot. In my internal Latvian tapestry, it was always summer, and it was always hot and dusty. Every road was dirt, rutted by wagon wheels, and it cut through a field of golden grain to a near horizon. Every girl’s hair was corn-silk blonde and braided. Every boy was tall, slender, and sandy-haired. They dressed in trousers, wool skirts and linen shirts with Latvian embroidery around the collars and cuffs. The girls were always laughing. They had wide faces, rosy skin, high cheekbones, and forget-me-not blue eyes. Their hands were always occupied, doing something with bunches of wildflowers or embroidery floss. The boys hovered around them as they wandered barefoot down the dirt roads in the sun. Every once in a while, they’d burst into a Latvian folk song.
I conjured these images from the songs I heard at Latvian gatherings, or at the dinner table, or at Latvian song and dance festivals we attended every few years. But when I researched the dainas, or folk songs, each a rhymed quatrain, they painted no such idyllic picture of carefree Latvian maids. When I listened to an authentic version sung by a modern choir, they sound nothing like my tearful Toronto relatives singing around the Solstice fire, mourning their lost country, their exile. The dainas are the literary canon of a rough peasant people. They survived orally through the centuries of foreign occupation. The reality of traditional courtship songs presented a darker picture of my Camelot. Marriages took place in autumn, and many of the songs I found compared betrothed girls to autumn’s trembling leaves. It’s the time of one’s greatest beauty. But the downhill descent is steep and immediate.
Nak rudens lapu laiks It’s coming, the leaves’ autumn-time
Nak meitens bailu laiks It’s coming, a girl’s fearful time
Krit lapina cakstedama The leaves fall, rustling.
Skriend meitina drebedama The girls run, trembling.
But wasn’t I saying something about identity?
8. I’m an “Over There” Latvian. I’ve been ashamed of being a Latvian. Like an ugly secret, I keep a copy of The Murder of Jews in Latvia, 1941–1944 by Bernhard Press on my bedroom bookshelf. According to his sister, my father joined the Waffen SS in 1941, at the age of 18. According to my cousin, my father scared the family when he returned for a visit wearing his SS uniform. My grandmother trembled. Bless me, father, for I have confessed your sin. Forgive me Father, for I have been a Latvian.
9. In 1943, during the Nazi occupation of Latvia, my father, a child of peasant farmers, joined the Latvian division of the Waffen SS. My mother’s brother, the son of a Valmiera judge, was drafted into the Waffen SS in 1944, as fodder for the crumbling Eastern Front. Remember the year that each joined. It’s important. But not yet. I’ll come back to it. There’s still a lot more context.
10. I came to Latvia like a sleuth. In Latvia, I was a sluice box, facts and images passing through me. But since they were not always precious or full of potential, I’ll choose another metaphor. I came to Latvia like a blueberry picker, the crude one I bought from the old man at the market who asked about my “bad Latvian.” I ran my face through the scenery. I stuck my fingers into the sand, the moss, the water. Many things passed right through me. Some stuck in my tines. Those I ate, berry by berry. They stained my teeth, permanently. Come to think of it, almost everything stuck in my tines. So no, I came to Latvia more like a baleen whale, its mouth full of fine sieves. The smallest fragments caught in the hairs. I coughed up the larger, angular pieces. Those pieces are called history.
I came to Latvia to find the truth about history, about my family’s history. But history was too big, and sometimes it broke through my sieve, my picker, my sluice box, my net. I kept coming back to the years 1943 and 1944. Through my sieving and sleuthing I learned that the date of my father’s joining of the Waffen SS and the date of my maternal uncle’s being drafted into the Waffen SS and the fact that not one of my father’s brothers joined or was drafted – these facts were significant. But I couldn’t fix on exactly why or how they were significant to the present, to me. They simply lodged under my breastbone and ached.
I came to Latvia as a sin-eater. I came to Latvia as an unfilled bowl with a certain capacity, both for truth and its quantity. I came to Latvia as an empty stomach. I left filled with the hot wind of facts and messages from the other side. I came to Latvia with an acute ability to discern the heaviness of objects. I held history and my parents’ stories in my two hands. Sometimes one weighed more, sometimes the other, and every day I weighed less. I stuffed history in my blue backpack, and it weighed me down. All the while, Latvia existed, a place on earth, like any other. I spent a lot of time sitting on the sand watching weather come and go over the Baltic; I spent a lot of time biking through forests that existed apart from history, free from culpability – and that gets at the truth behind all these useless metaphors. So I’ll start again: only facts this time.
11. My father, a child of peasant farmers, joined the Latvian division of the Waffen SS in 1943, at the age of 18. Or was it 1944? Is my aunt’s version of the story correct, or is the story he told to get permission to emigrate to the U.S. correct? This is an undisputed fact: in the spring of 2006, at 84, after a series of mini-strokes, my father suffered a psychotic break. His symptoms included what could be construed as either hallucinations or flashbacks. It seemed to us, his four children, who sat knee to knee with him, that he was looking constantly past us, over our shoulders, to see what was coming through the door – the FBI, the KGB, the World Court, a black dog. He told us his bedroom was a gas chamber. He told us he was being tried with crimes against humanity. Had it found him again after 45 years, the true version of his story? Had it rooted him out? The story of a war that, in our lives, began all wars.
12. In summer 1944, as the sound of approaching Russian artillery grew louder, as the German Army fled Latvia, my grandmother buried the family’s valuables in the earth at Kundzeniskis, their farm, closed the door to the house where she’d birthed 11 children, including my father, including three daughters, all named Lonija, all dead. She climbed aboard a loaded, horse-drawn wagon and took the only road away from Kundzeniskis. It passed through Aglona, where her husband was buried. It headed west forever. On March 29, 2007, I peered inside a window into the ruins of that house.
13. On the final descent into Riga, the Baltic Sea swept by beneath the shadow of the plane. Suddenly it was there, a brief glimpse of Latvia as it had always been, a coastal zone of dunes and grass and brackish wetlands, and I thought, my God, it’s so beautiful. And then we hit the pavement.
Eva Saulitis is the author of the essay collection Leaving Resurrection (Red Hen Press) and a memoir, Into Great Silence: Discovery and Loss in the Realm of Vanishing Orcas, forthcoming from Beacon Press in 2013. She is a frequent contributor to Alaska Quarterly Review.