Someone Else’s Language

When I arrived in the former Soviet country of Latvia as a US Peace Corps volunteer in 1999, the members of my cohort and I were still raw from the duck-and-cover legacy of the Cold War. At first, hearing Russian brought a primal shiver of fear. “Vot tak,” said the Russian-speaking Latvian Peace Corps nurse before sticking me in the arm with one of our required vaccines. “Vot tak,” it turns out, is not a threatening phrase but a benign placeholder, meaning something like, “There you go.” But linguistic and nationalistic propaganda is effective. As a friend who grew up in the Soviet Union recently reminded me, everyone there had been sure that it was Reagan who was going to bomb them.

During my years in Latvia, I became close with someone whose husband had served in the Soviet Army. Every other week, we women would steam together naked in their backyard sauna, where we beat each other with birch branches. Then we would join the men and children for a meal of meat and potatoes, after which we’d play cards or tell jokes and stories. On a few occasions, after we’d had an especially delicious meal, people told me that when meat was scarce, families would pass around a single morsel on a plate so that its aroma would flavor everyone’s experience of their potatoes, though it was the man at the head of the table who ultimately got to eat it.

“You were the enemy,” my friend’s husband told me the first time I visited them. He was a compact man, lit from inside, kind. “And now you’re in my house. At my table.” Then he clapped me on the back and passed me another pork cutlet.

My best friend from Latvia, who asked to be called Katrina in this essay, does not like it when I speak of Latvia as post-Soviet, because this suggests that the Soviet experience defines Latvia, rather than being an aberration in Latvia’s much longer history. The problem for me is that I entered at a specifically post-Soviet moment, and the people with whom I lived and worked were constantly talking about how things used to be.

Take unemployment, for example. “In the Soviet Union,” they would say, “you could not not work,” the double negative signifying that unemployment was both a grammatical and moral deviation.

Or housing. “In the Soviet