THIRD PERSON DISPLACED by Eva Saulitis
for Ieva
Opening Scene
She enters from the right, stops to survey her surroundings. In the far distance, a figure in a yellow trench coat bends to pick something up from the line of sea-wrack.
She walks directly toward the Baltic’s mud-blue pastiche. Out there, a ship plies toward the industrial canal, another lurks on the horizon. Small waves churn, churn, worrying the same ribbon of sand. The sun works also, ceaselessly, to clear the morning sky. And the ever-present wind off the Baltic sweeps the dune grasses of detritus. These constants, like old men hired to collect trash with their long pokers, persevere, all day, every day, back and forth, forth and back.
Decorated down its length the beach sports empty swings, monkey bars, and other children’s whirl-a-gigs, which she considers, for a time, as resting spots.
Instead, she sits on the cold sand. What am I doing here, she asks herself, meaning not this beach, but this place, Ventspils, Latvia. Her parents left Latvia in 1944, two of the war’s displaced millions. That’s what they called them, Displaced Persons. They never returned. Now, on another continent, an ocean away, her father is dying.
She feels displaced – and also carefully – placed. Deliberately. Like a stone someone pocketed, carried, then added to an evolving arrangement on a window sill. She’s anonymous. An old Russian woman doesn’t recognize her as displaced, foreign, asks her the directions to Olas Iela, Egg Street. She’s halfway struck dumb, her Latvian a shattered, bastard tongue.
Now here’s the sun – just in time. New figures enter the scene, suddenly. An old couple in long coats, one black, one brown, they stoop, add something to their white plastic sacks. Stones. Or amber. Who’s to say?
She is a piece of amber in which tiny human figures are trapped. Her mother and father walking arm in arm away from the Baltic.
The camera pans right to ugly Soviet-era structures near the industrial canal. Fish-plants. Office buildings. History enters, as fog tendrils blow in off the Baltic.
Considering History
Perhaps you’d like some context, a framework? Even the travel agent didn’t know the location. Latvia? Where is that? Scandinavia? The Balkans? On the surface, it’s simple: a small country sandwiched, north and south, between equally small, unknown countries, Lithuania, Estonia; east and west, between a sea and a vast country, Russia. History? A brief period of independence sandwiched between two wars, many occupations. Having fought on the side of the Germans in WWII, having suffered under Stalin’s purges and then the Padomju laiks (the Soviet occupation), a people smashed between the tragic and the culpable. A country whose twentieth-century history is a sandwich one eats with difficulty, a thick slab of salted meat between the bread of Stalin, the bread of Hitler. Now 16 years of freedom stretching to an unknown horizon. Nu ta. Now that. Un ta. And so.
History, like a stone, can be viewed in the round or in cross-section. History, like shattered shale, can be reconstructed from the fragmented utterances of a displaced person. But the reconstructed story – a letter from her mother, a tale told by her father, differently each time – makes no sense. She smashes it. Puts it back together again.
The history of those years is too complicated for me to know all the facts about armies going through our country, her mother writes to her in a letter.
Another layer of history can be discerned in the voices of the ancient Livs, their fishing villages once dotting the Kurzeme coastline. One dot marks the location of an extinct village buried under the criss-crossing lines charting the streets of Old Riga on a tourist map. This is a country of many-layered displacements. History viewed in a vertical slice.
(Camera pans from sand at her feet to shore break to horizon. Enter a slow freighter.)
Co-Existence
Looking out the window of her room at the writers’ and translators’ house. A man in a black wool coat pedals by on his bicycle, baskets loaded with goods from the market. All day pieces of faces pass. She’s raised the shade to reveal only so much. Shoulders, chins, scarves, mouths, shawls.
She considers the lines of a poem by a reclusive Latvian staying down the hall: “the lyrical ‘I’ cracks dark jokes.”
She considers what her mother called the gallows humor of the Latvians.
She considers how a joke or a word, its meaning, can be dashed. How meaning can be lost on those once-removed. Child of refugees, she is once-removed. People here tell her she speaks stunted Latvian.
She considers how relearning this language is a process of dashing a word against the trotevars, the sidewalk, and rearranging its parts.
She considers the sentence her brother wrote in an e‑mail, responding to the sentence she wrote in an e‑mail, about wishing she knew some Russian in Latvia: “Your mother would cut out her own tongue before she’d learn a word of Russian.”
She considers the stooped form of the Russian woman looking for Egg Street.
Trying to remember which poet asked, “Which I is I?”
Facts
Like leaves, facts can be raked variously, in piles along paths, in heaps beneath trees, or scattered.
Like language, facts can be dashed. Or arranged on sills. Or altered by time or intention.
Facts can deceive. Can take a beating. Take history, a series of arranged and battered stones. Consider those figures on the beach, the gatherers. What they choose. What they leave.
The fact of amber.
The fact of an oak leaf.
The fact of a chicken coop in which human beings slept.
It’s hard to imagine a human being living in a four-meter square chicken coop for two years, much less four human beings. The fact is, they did, hid also in the forest under heaps of clothes stripped from the dead. The Jews of Latvia. The hidden, the removed, the scattered.
The fact of her own father who fought in the Latvian division of the Waffen SS.
The Idea
was not to be visible while armies come and go because you can be led out of your home and shot in the front yard, no questions asked. One of my grandmother’s sisters lost her husband this way, her mother writes.[1]
Thus some hid beneath the heaped dead.
Thus some donned the oppressor’s uniforms.
Thus She
is “nervose” most of the time.
She is “apjukuse” most of the time.
She likes how words like that can be taken apart and given more specific meanings:
As in: she is shaken up most of the time meaning she is confused meaning she is messed up in her head most of the time she is deranged she is wrong. How can she pick just one?
She meets a cousin named Juris. By way of introduction he says, Your father was in the Gestapo, you know. He came uniformed back to the farm and scared everyone. During the Soviet occupation, her father sent this man sugar for his bees. Some facts can never be reconciled.
Thus she is parvietota. Picked up and put someplace else, a place where history walks the narrow streets, and no one pays it any mind. Where rubble of bombed buildings remains in place where it fell. Where ruins are unrestored. What can she say about any of these things? She is an American. She is a stone from a beach displaced to a sill. Imagine such a stone then talking about life going on outside this window. As if it knew. The stone believes there is sand in every pocket of every coat moving past the window.
Which she is she?
She is a stone without geological context. She is a mislaid artifact. She is a ghost wandering among the living.
Reprise
Dusk. As she goes out walking, the Ukrainian novelist says, You be careful. He doesn’t like the way she eats standing up, in socks, the way she spoons peanut butter into her mouth, straight from the jar. She waves him away. Hands in pockets, she walks fast along the canal, cuts inland, cuts left again, down Saules Iela, Sun Street, finds a cobbled path, kids ride their bikes over the ruined grass. On the brick wall, the gangsta scrawl, some of it even beautiful. Sometimes she loves it, this being invisible, in this place which in some ways is so jarringly modern – the mothers in thigh-high boots pushing perambulators through the park, for instance. Oblivious to all that haunts her.
She buys soy milk from the mega-mart.
She buys apples from the squat Russian woman at the outdoor market. She buys garlic from the blind merchant.
Isn’t life gorgeous, isn’t life strange?
Prayer
She leaves her writing desk, she goes out walking, when the facts pile up, when they’re too much to bear, when no arrangement makes horror, the horror of history, gorgeous, or even strange. She kneels in the sand at the edge of the Baltic. She shifts the cool sand through her fingers. She prays.
Someone, please, tell me
the truth about history.
From which facts is truth baked?
Recipe
Four parts auzu parsli – oats
Four parts water
Two parts spekis – bacon
A quantity of potatoes, cabbage
Salt
They
are riding their bicycles over the cobbled back streets at dusk, two friends both named Ieva, and suddenly it’s there, in brick, it takes up a city block, its towers have been shorn, the torni end in stubs.
This, says Ieva Balode (balode as in dove), was the synagogue. Now it’s a Baptist church.
Is there another synagogue? Ieva Saulits (saulite as in sun) asks.
No, Ieva the dove replies, pedaling fast, and then it’s behind them. Sun and dove, riding on through the night, the question of displaced synagogues exploding behind them in silence.
Thus
The facts she unearths, a thousand Ventspils Jews killed in a single day.
Thus the Ebreju cemetery on Saules Iela, a long way down a forest road, marked on her tourist map.
Thus she walks there in the vetra, the windstorm.
Thus the sand in her eyes, in her face.
Thus two men huddled behind the artificial snow-making shed at the base of the man-made mountain. A recreation mountain constructed of garbage.
Thus her fear.
Thus the wrought iron gate broken on its hinge.
Thus the absence of recent graves, that is graves dug since 1941.
Thus the salt-encrusted, lichen-encrusted Hebrew script.
Thus the broken and toppled state of moss-capped stones.
Thus the strewn vodka bottles, the bunched-up and discarded sweatshirt.
Who has been here, she thinks, who but the drunks visit these dead, in the past seventy years?
Thus the wind, which never relents.
He
Her brother hates Russians as a matter of pride, of family and ethnic honor. Once, as a child, after learning in school about the nuclear arms race, she came home and declared that America was just as bad as Russia. Her mother slapped her across the face. Does her brother blame the Russians for their parents’ strokes, aneurysms? For the wheelchairs and life alert alarms? For the schnapps and smokes and beltings? For their father’s SS uniform? For his hidden, empty bottles? For the stars griz-grazling the wrong way down the sky?
For the way life chews and twists its own bones like an animal caught in a leg-hold trap?
She knows there is only one way to say it. Only one exact word for this being displaced. But one word can have hybrid meanings. Her job is to find that exact word, where each alternate meaning is equally true. This is the truth about language. There is only griezt, to turn, griezties to turn oneself (inside-out, like a pelt), griezieties (to spin). Griezt also to cut, as with scissors, as with a knife. There needs to be that grz with the ie between. There is no other way. At the far end of language, at the end of the line, where the train stops, where the ship docks, you find izgriezt, to cut out (crudely, cruelly) as with a serrated knife, from the very center of the thing you seek to understand, and kill by understanding.
Tava mama but iegriezusi pat savu mele – your mother would have cut out her own tongue –
He says the Russian language is the animal, the exiler, the defiler, the gaoler, the torturer, the oppressor, the rapist. You can cut its tongue out of your face.
But what of the fact that the names of their mother’s family
Alexandrs
Irina
Lucia
Nikolajs
Asja
Teofils
Kurils
are Russian names?
And the fact that the man who raped their mother was a Latvian man?
You can trace words and facts and even names back to the smallest pebbles. Where does language, where does oppression – where do we – begin, and end?
They
The Livs inhabited the Kurzeme coast for five thousand years. As the armies came and went, as the proto-Latvian tribes arrived and laid claim, they dried their sprats and herring, their plaice.
She stares at faces of Livs outside their homes, photographed in the ’20s. She examines their bee-shacks, their apiaries.
Their bodices decorated with leafy twigs.
Fisher-people, their houses faced the Baltic. Their wide faces opened like suns.
She slips sideways into the photograph, she pulls her hair back, she stands behind a set of grandparents. She opens her face like a sun.
How perfectly she blends in.
Down the Industrial Canal
She floats, face up, and shadows of birds veer like javelins across her face. She hears the clangs, the shouts of stevedores. She reads the names of freighters as they appear: the Neva the Hotstar the Shamrock. Someone throws in his watch cap, she floats alongside it out toward the Baltic.
Back at the writers’ and translators’ house, her feet are bare. She eats standing, she eats from a jar. She disobeys. She says nyet.
She reads the morning paper, collects stray facts. Former SS soldiers are marching in Riga. The mayor of Ventspils wants to buy a whale skeleton, the biggest yet, for his museum. The mayor goes to jail for taking bribes, kukulisi, they call it bread.
Raise Your Hand
Around the dinner table at the writers’ and translators’ house, the hip Latvian novelist asks, How many of you here were links in the human chain across the Baltics on the 23rd of August, 1989? Half those assembled put their forks down, raise their hands.
This singing, human chain is believed to have led to the liberation of Latvia.
She considers her displacement, her remove. She fingers her great-grandmother’s gold chain. She considers her father’s uniform. She considers a blue flag flying over a Baltic beach in winter: safe to swim now. She considers a coal freighter leaving the industrial canal. In which chain is she a link?
She wants to ask, how many here have known disaster? Raise your hands now.
Prayer II
Please, she asks the village closed up tight, shuttered and bricked, the sealed lips of the walkers, the lit windows of the music school, the students practicing their scales, tell me the story of someone who saved someone. A resistor. One who refused a uniform. Or just tell me her name.
She catches a ride with some writers to Riga. When they ask where she’ll go in the city, she tells them the Jewish museum. Why would you go there? It’s full of propaganda. If you want the truth about history, you should go to the Occupation Museum.
She walk to the Jewish museum. In a tiny room at the back, she finds it, a shrine to the Latvian resistance. She reads the names on the wall. Tell me.
Elizabete
Grieta
Zelma
Olga
Otilija
Amalija
Marija
Tell me about the flowers and the sisters and the chicken coop where they hid them.
Tell me about Ieva Dezne.
I am sorry. She died in Schtathoff.
Then tell me about the living.
Living in a Chicken Coop
Ieva Dezne lived in Aizpute, Latvia during WWII. She had three daughters, Elza, Anna, and Emilija. Elza and Anna married brothers whose surname was Pukis (flower). Emilija married Gerhards Susters and had a son. Elza’s husband, Karlis Pukis, a tailor, worked in the peat marshes during the Nazi occupation, where Jews from the Riga Ghetto were used for slave labor. In 1943, Karlis agreed to help four Jewish convicts run away. He hid them in Ieva Dezne’s attic. Later, they moved to a specially designed hen coop behind the Susters’ house, where they hid for two years, coming out only at night. Until a neighbor spotted them and reported them to the Nazi authorities. When the police came, Gerhards Susters was executed on the spot. The rest were arrested, except for Emilija and her handicapped child, who could not walk. They did not search the chicken coop. Emilija gave guns, bullets and food to the four Jews, and told them to run. They were later shot in the nearby forest. Karlis and Elza Pukis, Janis and Anna Pukis, Janis Susters and Ieva Dezna were sent to the concentration camp at Schtuthoff, where all perished except Elza, who survived her imprisonment, and Anna, who was released from prison to give birth to a child.[2]
Bad Girls
Let’s go on a bike ride, Ieva Dezne, let’s go now, we three Ievas, before the sun sets over the Baltic, with the wind messing in our hair, we’ll upset the Ukrainian again, we won’t be careful, we’ll ride on the sand and it won’t matter what’s going to happen at Schtuthoff, we’ll push our bikes over the dunes, we’ll be girls who wash windows in the sunshine, and when we have to we’ll be girls who hide Jews in chicken coops for two years, girls who are found out and arrested and taken but not yet, now let’s talk about the genius of the coop and the significance of roosters in Latvian religious art and why there’s a plaster cow walking up a flagpole in sight of the Russian Orthodox church in Ventspils and let them watch, the people, shuffling along the beach in their proper shoes and coats and scarves, arm in arm, let them look at the strips of naked skin between our shirts and the waistbands of our jeans.
There
This is the late twentieth century.
And this is an old peasant woman who can’t speak English, once a refugee, stooping to collect apples under a tree in Silver Creek, NY. Now she’s in the kitchen, she’s coring them (griez again), cutting them into rings, she’s drying them in the oven. She’s storing them in coffee cans.
This, look, is a piece of amber.
This, look, is war damage.
This, during the Russian occupation, is a boy climbing the apple tree in his Latvian folk costume, carrying a rope from which to hang himself.
This is her father, polishing his gun.
This is betrayal. And this is she, the immigrant’s daughter, the soldeir’s daughter, mixing up katrupelu biezputra. Potato porridge.
Ieva Saulite is hanging clothes to dry in the cold March sun.
Ieva Balode is packing bottles in a basket to fill with milk at the market.
Ieva Dezne is bringing pails of food to the chicken coop.
All of them, always, some arm in arm, some pushing perambulators, going somewhere, doing something ordinary.
It’s amazing that anyone could have been found.
It’s amazing that anyone could have been saved.
Wounds
She likes how the war-wounds of buildings reveal a cross-hatch of warp, weft and mortar. Like an anatomical detail in a medical text.
She likes what’s broken and won’t be repaired.
The shock of the new, the mundane of the wreckage.
Lace curtains at the windows of a ruined façade.
White cats asleep on wooden sills. Stuffed socks keeping out the drafts.
Once, behind a cracked window pane, a menorah.
She
She is sitting in the park taking it all down in a notebook. The camera moves in close to her red hands, the page filled up with black scribblings, pans back until she’s a figure, hunched over the book in her lap, a still point in a moving sea of people, dead and living, walking by, carrying bags or holding their children’s mittened hands – the living.
There is no way to escape the past. And there’s no way to chase it down. Still she is trying to find someone familiar, she is scanning all the faces. No one remembers the people she is looking for, no one looks like them. Even the connections between her father and his siblings, between those who left and those who stayed behind, between the one who donned the uniform and the brothers who did not: Antons, Aloysis, Boleslavs, Stanislavs: the connections are broken. Some of their names aren’t remembered. Their farm house in Kundzeniski: part of the roof fell in.
Your name, Saulitis, it’s not a typical Latgale name . . .
She’s still waiting for the lyrical I to crack a dark joke for her. She is still waiting for the current to carry her to the museum of stones.
Zeme, the Earth, Kermenis, the Body
Soon, she’ll fly home. She’ll step off the plane, blinking, into the West. She has existed only inside her mind for a long time now, a word-zone, a blue canvas spattered with bird-shot, a flock in an updraft. She’ll need to decide which words to keep.
At the shoreline of the Baltic, she sits on a dune, shoves her hands into the sand at her sides, imagines guiding the hand of her father into a bowl of this sand, her words to him, Tetien, seit, iebaz tavus pirkstus Baltias juras smiltiem. She imagines his face when he does as she asks, puts his fingers into the bowl of Baltic sand, and she’s afraid. What will move through his body, across his face?
There’s a reason he never returned to Latvia.
There’s a reason she came instead.
There’s a consequence to remembering the reason.
There’s a consequence to cutting away history, looking for reasons, peeling away time like a callus, with a paring knife.
She lies back against the earth, her face in the sun. Above her, a uniform sky, cloudless. She realizes she is spinning, she is dizzy. She is afraid. She lies still until it’s just the earth underneath her, the anonymous earth, the earth a long way back, when it was mejonigs, wild, with a few Livs wandering its banks, building their crude shelters, when the land belonged to itself. Before history. Before blame.
Enough now, she says. Pietiek.
Ieva Dezne
I don’t care about consequences! You must follow this through to the very end. Are you willing to do that? You must figure out what the birds know. And the cobbles and the ships. The smilti – the sand. And the bicycles and the shutters. The moss at the base of birch trees in the park. That old woman who sits on the bench.
You must make something from this, however broken.
And then you must tell them.
[1]. Italicized text was written by my mother, Asja Saulitis (then Ivins), of her experiences as a 17-year-old Latvian war refugee.
[2]. From Guntis Berlis’ introduction to Lyrics, by Latvian poet Janis Rokpelnis.
Eva Saulitis is the author of two books of nonfiction: Into Great Silence: A Memoir of Discovery and Loss among Vanishing Orcas (Beacon Press, 2013), Leaving Resurrection: Chronicles of a Whale Scientist (Boreal Books, 2008); and the poetry collection Many Ways to Say It (Red Hen Press, 2012).