How Long Is Exile?: Book Iii the Long Road Home

By Astrida Barbins-Stahnke

At the end of Book I How Long is Exile? The Song and Dance Festival of Free Latvians widowed Milda Arajs had taken a new direction in her life. She had decided to break solidarity with her mainstream ethnic community and make good her promise to her daughter Ilga that they would make a "pilgrimage" to Soviet Latvia at Christmas time (1983) and welcome the baby Krijanis, born to American Mara and Latvian Igors, as the symbol of a new era. Also, Milda had chosen to give herself to Peteris Vanags, the one-armed veteran she encountered in the Esslingen DP camp after the war. (Story in Book IIOut of the Ruins of Germany.) They married shortly before the momentous trip, and soon thereafter Milda joined him in Washington, D.C. For a decade they lived happily, making up for lost years of forbidden longing and desireuntil the Soviet Union fell, and the Kingdom of Exile felt the shocks and afershocks.

Unbeknown to herself, Milda's Christmas trip behind the Iron Curtain, with all its revalations, was her first step on her Long Road Home. Also, that trip at the height of American women's liberation movement, marked her adult coming of age and becoming the ruler of her life. Released from domestic bonds, she struck out on her own and challenged her mind to higher things. When Peter, in the late 1980s, was asked to join Radio Free Europe in Munich, Milda saw her Road clearly winding its way back to Latvia. This, naturally threatened the marriage. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the Road become bumpy, even trecherous. Afraid and out of step, Peter seemed to lag behind, while Milda hurried forward now that the iron curtain was swept away. With firm steps she returned to her homeland; she reunited with her sister Zelda and reclaimed their parents' apartment. Peter complied and came up with the money, but, as if lost, he often went off by himself, afraid of being watched and pursued until he could not walk anymore. After his death and after the guarded secrets were revealed, Milda took her last steps on The Long Road Home alone.

Exile was over, but the sense of exile was imbedded in Milda's mind forever, and it was heavy. She felt the weight most poignantly as she watched fireworks grace the skies at elaborate festivals, where strangers celebrated, frolicking and singing to her unknown songs, and young people rush about in search for passages to new lands, where the grass seemed greener and fame and fortune beckened from clouds with silver linings.

As a participant in that, so called exile state, I began writing my version of the experience after the Milwaukee festival, filtering it through the consciousness of my main character Milda Berzia-Arajs, who, coming out of mourning for her husband Karlis Arajs, arrives at the festival, ready to turn a new leaf in her life. During the four days with like-minded people, interesting events, and common recollections of her childhood, the war and post-war experiences in a displaced persons' camp flash before her in a swirling kaleidescope and, at the end, throws her in the direction she did not plan to go.

Book II captures the mood after the fall of the USSR. The ethnic communitiesthe Kingdom of Exileis shaken, and the people awake as if from a deep sleep. Milda suddenly becomes active; she makes crucial decisions and switches from an outdated romantic into a realist as she returns home, meets her estranged sister and the country she had left behind. As she tries to find her place in it, she understands that exile is a state of mind; it is a state where half the world's population liveslike sheuprooted by tyranny and wars. Yet she and other displaced persons go on living and finding pleasure in art, poetry, song, and in each otherthough with a sad, melancholy smile.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 22, 2016
• ISBN: 9781514426289

Astrida Barbins-Stahnke

I was born on March 15, 1935, in Priekule, Latvia, to Rev. Juris and Milda Barbins, the fourth of six children. I greatly admired my mother, a graduate of Latvia University's English Institute for her quiet wisdom and love for us. My father, a Baptist minister, served several country churches in Kurzeme, often taking us all along in our horse-drawn droshka. It was on those trips and other excursion where, early in life, I learned to love my native, pastoral landscape and the stories of the Bible, for at a very early age I too was a little shepherdess and many times had to look out for the wolfs that frightened my lambs. Our family's days on the farm, with its sunshine and dark clouds, ended on Sunday morning, October 8, 1944, when the German and Russian armies were at our borders. We had two hours time to escape, which we did in our horse-drawn wagon. Suddenly we were six homeless refugees. (My youngest brother had died, and my oldest brother was in the Latvian army.) Until the end of the war, we traveled through bombed-out Germany. When the war was over, we found ourselves in the American Zone, in Esslingen, in a Displaced Persons' (DP) camp, where we lived until we emigrated to the United States, in August 1949. After living a year in Charlotte, N. C., we re-located in Cleveland, Ohio, where my father formed a church and helped to establish the Latvian Community. After graduating from Shaw High School, I attended Western Reserve University for a year and then went on to Bethel College in St. Paul, Minnesota. By then, having sufficiently mastered the English language, I decided to major in English and study literature. That opened exciting worlds of the spirit and, inevitably lead to writing and my first award. At Bethel I met my husband, Arthur Alan Stahnke. We were married September 6, 1958. With that I left the Latvian community, eager to go on with my life as an American. By the time my husband received his PhD and obtained a tenured position as professor of political science at the newly opened Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville (1963), we had two children and a house. Feeling restless, I enrolled at the university and completed my BA in 1969, before our fourth child was born. When he went off to school, so did I and enrolled in the SIU-E English department's graduate school and gained my MA in 1977 in English and comparative literature. I wrote my thesis about a Latvian female poet and playwright Aspazija (pseudo. Elza Rozenberg, 1865-1943) whose romantic tragedy Sidraba šķidrauts (The Silver Veil), 1905, I had translated as participant in the SIU-Carbondale Translation Project. Excited about the play and its author, I decided it was time to return to my roots, and I flew back to Latvia, which then was locked behind the Iron Curtain. That was a profound turning point in my life, as I embraced my true identity from which I had tried to escape. My purpose in life (outside the family, which I would never abandon) was clear: I had to continue translating and bring the Communist-oppressed fantastic writer in the English-speaking world and I had to write my country's story. It would answer the frequently asked question, where you from? And so, as life changed, my parents aged and died, and we the siblings also aged and our children grew up and left home, I was busy translating and simultaneously writing poems, stories, articles (published in ethnic press) and working on How Long is Exile? When my husband received a Fulbright stipend to study in East Berlin, I accompanied him part of the time and revisited the places our family had lived during the war and after. All that gave me rich source material for the novel. Now when my country is free, I make regular trips home to visit my Siberia-surviving brother as well as the intellectual community that has rehabilitated the once politically incorrect national writers, including Aspazija. My latest trip back was in March 2015, when Aspazija's 150th birthday anniversary was celebrated with great pomp, including an international conference where I was invited to speak (April 15–18). The event gave me great joy as it coincided with my birthday and came as a reward for all the translating and writing I had done on her behalf. Together, we had put Aspazija back among important 19th/20th century European writers. My book Aspazija's Prose, which came out in Latvia, at the end of March, had its presentation at my surprise birthday party at the immortal writer's house in Jurmala. The event, with flowers, music, and poetry was a crowning experience. It is indeed a gift of heaven to see my country free again and see many dreams come true. The last trip marked the end of another stage in my life. Now I look forward to the publication of my two-book novel How Long is Exile?

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Copyright © 2016 by Astrida Barbins-Stahnke.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2015918916

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-5144-2630-2

                Softcover       978-1-5144-2629-6

                eBook            978-1-5144-2628-9

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Rev. date: 12/08/2016

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CONTENTS

FOREWORD

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

PART I

Home Alone

SUMMER/FALL/WINTER 1983

HELGA’S MANUSCRIPT

MARA’S JOURNEY

FROM MARA’S JOURNAL

A JOURNAL ENTRY

HOME ALONE (CONT’D)

MILDA DECIDES

THE NIGHT CALL

NECESSARY FORMALITIES

PART II

Milda’s Second Marriage

THE HONEYMOON

THE GLASSY MOUNTAIN

DOWN IN THE VALLEY

THE MORNING OF THE FAUN

THE FUR COAT

PART III

Milda On The Long Road Home

CHRISTMAS IN SOVIET LATVIA

PART IV

Mr. And Mrs. Peter Hawkins’ Decade Of Back And Forth Travels

RIGA, JULY 4, 1990. THE SONG AND DANCE FESTIVAL IN FREE LATVIA

MILDA’S REVERIES AND RECOLLECTIONS DURING THE FESTIVAL PARADE

BACK INTO THE PRESENT

RETURN TO KURZEME

A WEEKEND ON THE FARM

PĒTERIS VANAGS ALIAS PETER HAWKINS CONFRONTS HIS PAST

DEPARTING FROM RIGA, JULY 15, 1990

WASHINGTON, D.C., SUMMER 1990

A DINNER PARTY

GERMANY, AUTUMN 1990 TO SPRING 1991

ANOTHER TEMPORARY HOME

MEANWHILE IN LATVIA

ON THE JOB AT RADIO FREE EUROPE

THE BARRICADES OF RIGA

1991 MIDSUMMER IN LATVIA

DINNER FOR THE GUEST OF HONOR

THE CLOSURE OF ALMA’S AND VIKTOR’S LOVE STORY

MIDSUMMER CELEBRATION

HANDS ACROSS THE BALTIC, A POLITICAL INTERVIEW

LAYING CLAIM TO THE APARTMENT

BACK IN GEORGETOWN

REVISITING LONGLAKE

THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

THE AWAKENING

ANOTHER FLIGHT TO LATVIA

ZELDA’S SIGNATURE

RENOVATION OF THE APARTMENT

AUTUMN IN WASHINGTON

1992 SUMMER IN LATVIA

DECORATING THE APARTMENT

THE HOUSEWARMING PARTY

ZELDA’S VISIT

NEGOTIATIONS

MAKING DREAMS COME TRUE

ANOTHER SEPARATION

ANOTHER MEETING WITH ZELDA

THE SURGERY

A TELEPHONE CALL

ADJUSTMENTS

THE DEATH OF PETER HAWKINS (VANAGS)

THE FUNERAL

ASHES TO ASHES

PART V

Milda’s Last Steps Of Her Long Road Home

A SECOND FUNERAL

FROM MILDA’S JOURNAL

A WEEK LATER.

OTHER BOOKS BY ASTRIDA B. STAHNKE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

To my brothers, sisters, cousins, and Friends

On both sides of the Atlantic Ocean

FOREWORD

I started writing my novel How Long Is Exile ? in July 1983, as soon as I returned home from the Song and Dance Festival in Milwaukee. With the flow of activities over the July 4 th weekend and my character’s Milda’s Bērziņš-Arājs flashback of World War II, I merely wanted to record the event and turn it into a short story or novella. I intended to end as it did in How Long Is Exile ? Book I, The Song and Dance Festival of Free Latvians. However, when I fielded the manuscript out to my American literature professors and friends, they asked questions about my family’s escape from Latvia and also why my character Milda, living happily in the U.S., suffered so much from the hatred of communism and loss of country. I then began writing, what became, Book II, Out of the Ruins of Germany. Again, I intended to end the novel there and tried to find a publisher. Meanwhile , the eighties were coming to the end. During that decade I had made several trips to Latvia and spent prolonged periods of time also in Berlin, where my husband was making his own observations as a Fulbright scholar. Taking the train through East Germany to Latvia, riding through Poland and Lithuania, I saw the first clear signs of the end of the cold war. I heard people in small gatherings and out in the open, in ever greater numbers, expressing discontent with the behind-the-iron-curtain system. My husband and I listened to the jokes and laughter; we read the leaflets and heard the arguments calling for human rights and freedom. By the end of the decade, we saw candlelight vigils, open demonstrations, listened to hitherto forbidden songs in concert halls and in the streets. Freedom, like an avalanche flooded over the boarders and airways, the television soap operas and BBC and CNN news casts.

In the winter of 1990, it so happened that I was teaching a course in English at the Latvia University in Riga. Every morning, in a streetcar, as I crossed the Daugava River, I saw freedom dawn with the sun. I saw the Latvian banner rise on the Riga castle turret and the red flag go down on a government building and the Latvia University. I could hardly believe that the fifty year dream of freedom was indeed coming true. I looked and saw the tears and the joys in people’s eyes and thanksgiving hands lift up to heaven. I listened and heard the poetry and the songs. As in a dream, I realized that I actually stood in the middle of a unique and marvelous historical moment, such as may come to a country and people, if lucky, once in a hundred years.

And I knew I had to write another book. It had to be about the reparation of war-broken parts and pieces. It would be about Milda and her sister Zelda re-uniting in a free Latvia. And there would have to be a joyous festival of song and dance. I named the book The Long Road Home. It completes the trilogy of How Long is Exile?

With the fall of the Soviet Union, the hitherto closed gates not only opened but soon became revolving doors, as people traveled back and forth in and out. Exile was officially over, but was it in reality?

As in the Brother Grimm’s fairy tale Briar Rose, the evil spell was broken, and a new era had begun. The princess was saved, and life could resume its interrupted activities. All is well. All will live happily ever after. However, in real life, within the real turn of events and governments, changes and adjustments are difficult and not always happy, because there are those who rise and those who fall and those who confusedly spin their wheels, uncertain of what road to take and what to do.

I tried to congeal the euphoria and disillusionment in the notes I was taking, as I looked and listened and saw former refugees actually returning home from the Kingdom of Exile. Milda was among the first to awake as if from a long sleep. She and Ilga and her husband Pēteris Vanags (Hawkins), like many others, would not miss the 1990 song and dance festival in Riga, where the home and exile choirs would sing in unison for the first time in half a century and dance throughout the night. But that was only the beginning. Milda’s first flight into free Latvia went smoothly. The rest of the journey would be long, with many unpredictable hitches on the way. On the final trip she would be alone and afraid. It would be almost like going into another country, perhaps even another exile. The Long Road Home tells the story.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

M y first visit to Latvia was in September 1977, when it was steeply entrenched in the Soviet system of communist rules coming from Moscow. All western travelers were carefully screened and put under the surveillance of the Intourist Bureau in Riga. I was given only one week, but it was enough for me to realize that I would be returning again and again. At the time I presented myself as the translator of the foremost Latvian female poet Aspazija’s (1865-1943) dramas. After meeting the recognized scholar Saulcerīte Viese and explaining to her that I was interested in further research for a book to be published in English, she promised her support, especially because Aspazija was threatened with being erased from the anthologies as a nationalist unacceptable for the promotion of communist ideology. With Viese’s unexpressed encouragement and more translations, I applied for a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) summer stipend, which was granted to me in 1983.

From then on the Soviet Latvian Sakaru komiteja (connections agency) took care of numerous visitors’ entry visas, accommodations, permits to visit Aspazija’s archives, and other sites closed to foreigners. Without the committee’s assistance, my research and publications would not have been possible, hence my sincere gratitude and appreciation to those who helped me not only with the translations but opened hidden paths to Latvia’s history and the people’s hearts. I am also grateful to the Academy of Sciences and the administrators of the Latvia University in Riga who invited me to teach several short courses in the English department. I have not forgotten the kindness and welcoming spirit of the chairperson at that time, Brigita Šiliņa and her staff, as well as my excellent and responsive short-term students.

Likewise, I want to thank my close and distant relatives who opened behind-the-iron-curtain Latvia to me with their stories and took me to secret trips outside the allowed perimeters. Without their frank and courageous care, I would not have known what life in that closed world was really like, nor would I have heard their jokes and songs that lightened their daily lives and helped them survive those hard times. On those brief encounters with the folk away from suspected and/or real watchful eyes I became keenly aware of what it meant to be oppressed and what it meant and cost to be Latvian. Several people of my early visits are no longer alive and others have, so to speak, gone off the screen. Still the ties have not been broken, as I make new contacts and freedom to choose, as new possibilities open and new generations are born.

Lastly, I want to thank the X-Libris Publishing House and the staff that turned the 1,500-page manuscript How Long is Exile? into three attractive books—hopefully, my readers, for your enjoyment and enrichment. And many thanks go to my family, my children and grandchildren, relations, friends, and my husband Arthur Allan for patiently supporting me throughout the difficult publishing process. Thank you all!

Sincerely, Astrida

Homeland

by Astrida B. Stahnke based on the original poem Dzimtene by Aspazija

How should I describe my native land?

High mountains and steep waterfalls

That wrap some other lands in silver, flowing ribbons,

She has none.

One would not find there magnificent and splendid panoramas.

She has few roses, and her nettles sharply sting.

And yet—in exile—far away from home,

Where each day dawns and sets as if in tears,

Beyond the gray and heavy fog-filled clouds,

She seems to me like a far-off isle of light:

I see her form entwined with garlands bright.

My heart is ever filled with sweetest memories:

There, in my land, the sun shone warmer

And much more gently fell the rain.

In early spring, among white cherry blossoms,

I listened to the swarms of honey bees.—

I still remember all the narrow forest paths

And my own secret hiding place beneath the apple tree.

I see the soft, green lawn besides the trampled courtyard,

Which was my happy world of make-believe.

Indeed, should I by chance, return there in the darkest night,

I know, I’d find each stone as if in broad daylight.—

I do remember, Motherland, that moment

When your doors slammed hard behind me

And I, pushed out, was forced to walk on foreign lands.

I then sought peace in Spirit’s lofty spheres

And slowly healed my open wounds.—

I rose again and felt new forces moving me to life,

And in my mind I soon outgrew you

As any daughter does outgrow her gray-haired mother.

But still.—My soul turns me forever back,

And if I could, I would fall down at your locked door

And weeping beg of you to take me in once more.

Note: Dzimtene, by Aspazija (Elza Rozenberg-Pliekškāne 1865-1943), written in Slobotskoy, Russia c1901, while visiting her husband Rainis, who served a 5-year sentence as a political prisoner. Published in Dvēseles krēsla (soul’s twilight), St. Petersburg, Russia: Ansis Gulbis, 1903.

The exile theme is large in Latvian literature and arts, since wars, persecutions, and deportations have been and still are a part of Latvian history and culture. As a school girl in the Esslingen refugee camp I memorized this poem. After joining the Baltic Drama Translation Project in 1974, this was my first translation of Aspazija’s works. The English variation was published in Raiņa un Aspazijas Gada Grāmata 1980 Gadam (Rainis’s and Aspazija’s Yearbook for 1980), Vasteras, Sweden: Andersen & Kagardt Tryckeri AB, 1979.

PART I

HOME ALONE

Summer/Fall/Winter 1983

A h, yes … a ring, Milda Arājs said, waking up the next morning. I must stop dreaming and start living again—with a purpose. He did not exactly propose, but what else was it? What was that long roundabout night talk if it wasn’t about our getting married, about his making good on the promise under the blooming rosebush : One day you will be mine?!

Dramatically she threw off the covers and stretched her arms, recalling and reenacting her role as the heroine Saulcerīte (Hopeful for the Sun) in Rainis’s winter solstice folk tale adaptation Zelta Zirgs (the Golden Steed). It was back in Germany, in DP camp Esslingen, after the war. She was then seventeen. Hopeful had been lying in a glass casket on top of the glass mountain for seven years, waiting for rescue. The hero Antiņš, who transformed as Prince Saulvedis (One who Leads into the Sun), shining in pure gold, had scaled the mountain, opened the glass lid and kissed her lips. Dazed in surprise, she had thrown off her icy covers and stretched her arms toward him. He lifted her out and put a ring on her finger, which nobody else but he and she could take off. Then he placed her in the saddle and brought her down to earth, down to the castle, where the people shouted, cheering freedom! The seven-year sleep on top of the lonely and bright icy glass mountain was over. She and the people were free! All she had to do was wake up fully and live. And all this was accomplished because Antiņš had a dream:

Blue glass, green ice—

Twixt them white dress of snow

Blue glass, green ice—

Twixt them lies a marble face.

Blue glass, green ice—

Twixt them golden sunbeam hair …

It was a hard act, she murmured, again remembering the unheated stage of the Esslingen Latvian elementary school auditorium. Her face actually frozen as it was powdered with real ice crystals, like crazed marble, waiting for the prince, waiting for his uncertain kiss to bring her back to a living life. And she was really afraid about his missing that—the appointed hour—doubting whether her partner would arrive on time. Milda knew the shy young man, the hero and her classmate. She worried that he might make some mistake, mumble his lines, or fall off the ladder and cause her to tip over, sending her back into an abysmal sleep. Milda stopped reminiscing and became practical:

The ring … Blue glass, green ice … Pēteris Vanags was there. He’d know, catch the meaning, the symbolism, so I must present him with either a blue or green gem. Emerald or sapphire. But so expensive, either one … Yet isn’t love’s value measured by its sacrifice? And aren’t we waking up to a new life? Who can put a price on that?

She calculated and considered and decided on the sapphire because Peter’s eyes were blue, and blue supposedly was the color of deep longing. So poetic! So fittingly romantic! Will he get it? That, only that, would make all worthwhile—his wonder, his delight … his kiss … Isn’t it strange how a man ages but his voice and kiss stay the same, like his fingerprints? She smiled and hugged herself. Ah, yes, yes! All very expensive. So … she decided to go to Butterfields and choose the brightest gem, large enough to shine on a large man’s hand and dazzle any onlooker’s eyes.

I am his who wears my ring …

Before the clock struck the noon hour, she had bought the ring. Jean took care of everything from a good discount to affordable payments and exquisite wrapping. Both women parted rather conspiratorially, for such sales didn’t happen every day. Thanks! Thank you very much!

That evening, Milda happily and restlessly waited for the telephone to ring, but it did not. He did not call, not that night, or many nights thereafter. No one called, except the solicitors. The days of long silences confused and nearly drove her mad, but she didn’t call him, thinking, fearing that he had not proposed after all, that he had really said nothing definite about their future but was only dreaming, looking at her Dorian Gray image painted on his wall, comparing the before and after, perhaps trying to get away from her, to get out of any entanglement and go back to his comfortable political zone where men ruled.

Yet had he not pursued me all the way to Milwaukee and around half the globe? Had he not kissed my fifty-two-year-old lips, not eighteen? Didn’t he desire my current, older, and wiser self? And what about me? Which of him did/do I long for and what am I afraid of? How and when shall we ever meet again?

Ah, Saulvedis, help me to rise!

Helga’s Manuscript

When, a month later, having made the first payment on the ring, Milda walked up her front steps to enter her house, she saw a thick, 8 × 12 manila envelope tucked behind her mailbox. It was from Helga Williams. Surprised, she carried it inside and sunk into Kārlis’s easy chair. She tore it open carefully and slowly extracted a neatly typed manuscript, 140 double-spaced pages, entitled Mara’s Journey. She read the cover letter:

My dear friend, it was such joy to run into you and share many most precious hours together … [And so on, as such introductions go.]

Lately the unexpected has happened to me quite often, especially ever since my trips to Latvia, when at about the same time I reentered our trimda counterpart. (Trimda always translated as exile but it’s not quite the same. Don’t I know that there is always something lost or skewed in any translation?!) Anyway, back to the point. Back to Latvia. So … no matter where I happened to be it was like casting a fishing line into a pond. No matter where my bait sunk, stories seemed to surface, ready to be placed on blank pieces of paper. I call that inspiration. It comes often on to me like an unexpected storm or breeze. This happened at the Poetry Morning, while I listened to your brilliant daughter’s crying out her heart-rending question: How long is exile? I too closed my eyes and counted the years and felt my own guilt, though I tried not to push my children into my foreignness or exile but allowed them to find their own way and place in American society so that they would not feel split up like many of us. This was/is not easy and has its own consequences, but that has little to do with my enclosed novel or novella or a long short story. I’m not quite sure of the definitions. I just wrote as it presented itself to me (as Henry James would put it), and I haven’t reworked it. So I’ll be glad to hear from you. All right?

On my long drive home from Milwaukee, I pondered and reviewed the hours and days at the festival and all the things Ilga touched upon, as well as the burning issues of our lost nation and people, and the systems our two sides are subjected to. Ilga had me thinking about all our children who are born here, after the war, but have our Latvian blood in their veins, full 100 percent or 50 percent, as mine. I wondered about their marriage/life’s choices and alternatives. It seems to me there were three basic passages: (1) Those who stay within our community, in spite of being often at odds with it. Like, for example, Ilga herself. (2) Those who willfully break away and assimilate, like your son Gatis, and (3) Those who make their way to Latvia and establish a home there, in spite of communism and all other difficulties—like Ms. Māra Kalns. I am focusing here on the patriotic segment of our society, the one that truly lives in a kind of state of exile, and not ones such as those of us who live in isolated towns and away from those many trimda states—states within these United States. I am also mindful of how much being a true blue Latvian costs—camps, books, schools, time, etc., when life seems too short and not enough to live out one’s own ideals, let alone those of parents, leaders, friends. And then there is the cost, the expense of ethnicity, but let’s skip that.

Anyway, as I drove home, the idea of a novel suddenly popped into focus: I imagined Ilga as my daughter addressing, accusing, or pleading with me, her mother, for raising her according to her own formula as Latvian, but to deal with that (and risk being misunderstood, even by you) seemed much too difficult, so as soon as I got home, I started writing about a child in the third category, namely Mara.

At the festival, I saw and admired these obedient children who turn out beautifully Latvian. I do envy them and their mothers and fathers, but I have also wondered where they go once they leave the nest—once they are on their own. And then, somehow, as I sat under my dogwood tree, I kept seeing and imagining Mara—how she came to decide to find her way to Latvia, the country of her parents, not her birth, and make it her home. I thought about Ruth of the Old Testament and envisioned that, like Ruth, who became the ancestor of Jesus, Mara would become the mother of a new age, a new movement, a new Latvia. It had to start somewhere, I was sure of that, and grow out of us—both sides—the home and exile—for a new, modern Latvia to emerge. I had really nothing concrete to go on, but it was not hard to imagine an obedient, smart, and loving girl trying to please her parents in the course of growing up and then being strong enough to make her decision to go home and follow her dream.

For the way home and what happened there—the first impressions, the grayness, the heaviness of the system I drew from my own experiences, observations, impressions. (Those of other first travelers were pretty much the same, with slight variations, so I knew that I would be quite close to hitting the target for Mara.) Things that I experienced and adopted were, for example, (1) missing the airplane connection in Moscow, (2) meeting my brother in that garden colony hut and hearing his Siberian stories, (3) meeting the old couple in Hotel Latvia who were afraid to talk, and (4) picking the anemones, feeling like a thief and being scared, etc. (I actually did run up the mountain and picked a bunch, as when I was little and then my mamma scolding me for running off to the woods alone.) And I could well imagine the fear of being watched and followed in SSR Latvia, even though I knew that in the ’80s I would not be arrested or deported. Still, the fear, the psychological tension I clearly did feel on every step as I also felt the sudden, daring, reckless openness of the young people. (It happens with the third generation. It’s written in the Bible, my father said).

Mara’s love story itself is fiction, as I don’t know her personally. I don’t know how she met the young man she married nor how the wedding went. Ilga did, however, tell me that Mara brought out the letter from your sister, but how it was done exactly—well, I imagined most of it.

You’ll see how I’ve woven it all together. I hope you will like this, my first try at writing the great American novel (!) full of Latvia—full of us all, actually. I found the writing exciting and liberating but also very difficult. Writing/creating is hard, as we know, like knitting, like painting, when you pull colors and images out of your soul and blend them into a work of art that starts dictating you like a stubborn donkey. (You should try it also!) When my doubts put that writer’s block in my way, I remembered what my favorite writing instructor told me after I made some lame excuse that Shakespeare has already said all there is to say and that I could never write like that. He said, But Shakespeare could not write your story. Only you can do it and it is up to you to do it honestly and well. Yes, that’s what he said, and whenever doubt crushes down on me I remember that and hit the typewriter again and put my ballpoint to my yellow pad and write … So here it is. I’ll await your reaction and comments with some trepidation.

Love, Helga

(Summer 1983)

*

Indeed, Milda held the manuscript with some trepidation. What would she comment after she read it? She was no editor and no critic, and she was uncertain about Helga’s impulses and her own ability to stand outside this work and evaluate it. Should I simply return it with some general words and let it all drop where it may?

She hesitated and set it aside, then went to fix something for her lone supper and, pondering, ate it as she watched a talk show followed by the evening news, all the while listening for the expected telephone call. Mindlessly she potted around, killing time, going back and forth picking up things, glancing at the thick envelope like a robin at a juicy worm, afraid of gagging. As the twilight glowed in her windows, teasing and enticing, she, too, recalled the festival; the feelings and experiences made her spine tingle and her chest heave with deep breaths and desires. Why doesn’t he call?

When the last streaks of the sunset evaporated, she went upstairs, undressed and took a shower, then put on a lose negligee, made herself a pot of tea and returned to her late husband’s empty chair. Its wide open arms enfolded her, and she pulled Helga’s story or novel out of the envelope and started reading:

Mara’s Journey

Preface

I dedicate this poem to Mara, who has gone home, Guna, a young poet, breathed into the microphone, smiling wistfully, closing her eyes so she could see better. She was addressing the poetry-listening audience at the Latvian Song and Dance Festival in Milwaukee, July 4, 1983. It is early morning, but Guna, true to her name, which meant fire, was wide awake and ignited. She seemed to glow because she had stumped the festival organizers, who did not allow prime-time space for the young writers, by turning the morning into evening because it is evening in Latvia.

Her provocative act raised the issue of détente, as it had become a point of contention in American Cold War politics. In the Latvian communities, lively debates matched those of Meet the Press as some argued that communists would never change, while others tried to prove that they already had, that a slow thaw had been going on for years, and that the policies of the Cold War were obsolete. Such assertions were threatening to the hardliners who condemned the young Latvian as well as the American left-wing liberals. Yet people, for very personal reasons, didn’t listen and flew home, only to return with stories that didn’t quite fit the held-up image of a terror-infested Soviet Union. They had listened to the undertones and the open jokes. They had seen that life goes on, that children are born, people marry, and the old and sick—the hard-line communists among them—die. Such is life. Not American or Latvian life, but Life Universal.

Guna, who was born in Germany and had never seen Latvia, also wanted to fly. She wanted freedom to happen. She wrote poems and speeches. She admired all who could afford to fly against the winds and fight for the truth. She stood now as on barricades, all aglow in the candlelight, and bravely dedicated her poem to controversial, beautiful, daring Mara, who had gone home.

*

Mara Kalns (age 18 ½) arrived in Riga at two o’clock in the morning. It was Easter Sunday, but there were no signs of Easter trimmings. Overwhelmed by the fact of her arrival, she, too, forgot the holy day—that amalgam of paganism and Christianity. Jet-lagged and disoriented, she remembered that Easter in the Latvian tradition was by enlarge the celebration of the return of spring. Her parents—in keeping with the ancient faith of folk deities—ignored biblical facts and beliefs. They had named their daughter Mara in honor of the goddess of earth, and so Mara, having walked down the airplane stairs, stood for a moment in the early morning star-studded darkness, inhaled its cool air, and blessed the earth—the holy land of her parents and all her ancestors.

Her flight from Frankfurt had been delayed by unknown circumstances, and, consequently, she could not be cleared through customs in Moscow on time to take the shuttle car to the airport on the outskirts, where she would board her scheduled Aeroflot to Riga. She had not missed the connection but had been rudely shoved out of line and, therefore, had not arrived as scheduled. The young lady of the Intourist Bureau found a taxi driver, whom Mara bribed with a pack of Marlboros (always have cigarettes handy, she had been advised). The driver dropped her off and the intourist, taking all her documents, had hurried her along until they reached the clumsy airplane far out in the field. Mara thanked the lady and rushed up the stairs, but at the door, the hostess, in crude Russian, shoved her aside, shouting at her that there were no seats left. Mara showed her the ticket, pleaded, and cried but nothing helped. The metal door was slammed shut. She stood on the top stair, in the drizzly rain and watched the plane pull away, as the stairway wheeled backward. Like a lost sinner at a closed heaven’s gate, she held on, suspended, until a man’s voice shouted and the intourist turned back. In gentle Russian, with the help of her extended arms, the intourist coaxed until Mara came down the slippery iron stairs, holding on to the frosted railing. The intourist helped her off the last step, uttering apologetic sounds, and then guided her back to the airport, which seemed kilometers away. They stretched their steps to get over and around puddles of glossy water. So this is the great capital of the Soviet Union, Mara said cynically, knowing that her guide understood English, but had not let on. Where is the American embassy? she asked, but was answered only with the shrug of tired shoulders.

As soon as they entered the terminal, the working women started buzzing around like poked hornets. They rushed back and forth, shouting at each other and pointing at Mara and her guide, who tried to speak but was outshouted. Mara tried to find out if there was some way to let her aunt and uncle know that she would be late. No one answered. She asked how long she might have to wait. No answer. A man in the line next to her grinned with yellow teeth and pointed to a bench. Mara backed toward it. She slumped down, feeling the cold wall on her back. She leaned her head against the wall and let her tears roll down her face. Exhausted and jet-lagged, she felt on the edge of some twilight zone, aware of people walking past her, speaking in strange languages. Some stopped to look at her as if she were on display, others grinned. Yes, I understand. They had not seen anyone from the West. Everybody eyed her Levi’s jeans and jacket.

After an eternity, an airplane departure was announced, but it was not for Riga. The waiting room emptied of its gray crowd. Mara was hungry. She saw an empty counter but behind it, on a shelf, she saw only a basket of boiled eggs. That was all. She closed her eyes, hugged her purse, and let a wave of sleep carry her where it would, until hours later she felt a nudge and sat up. In partial consciousness she saw the double door open. Two stocky women with buckets and twig brooms emerged. Heavy as clay, their feet firmly planted in felt boots, they proceeded to vacuum the filthy carpet by sprinkling it with water and wiping up with the brooms. Bent over, in silent rhythm, they moved from side to side, stepping backward until the job was done and then disappeared, closing the door behind them. Mara’s head slumped again to one side.

Again someone nudged her and she sat up. A kindly woman, displaying a row of gold upper and lower teeth, which passed for a smile, showed her a piece of paper with 1:15 written on it. Intouristi, she said. Mara understood that there will be an airplane at the scribbled time. From hand and finger signals, she guessed that an intourist guide will be waiting in Riga. Mara said, "Harasho, spasiba." The woman’s teeth gleamed, the eyes turned kinder, a rough hand touched her. Mara put a dollar bill in it and watched it disappear inside a smudged apron pocket. The woman went to the counter, took an egg, peeled it, and put it on a porcelain plate. She cut a thick slice of rye bread, holding the loaf tightly against her own big, soft loaves, put it next to the egg and gave it to Mara, bidding her to eat, then turned to pour tea from a brass samovar.

"Spasiba, Mara said with her white smile and bit into the dark brown earth bread and the white, nearly transparent egg. She drank the tea. The warm liquid relaxed her, and soon her eyelids tucked her away in nervous slumber, barely aware that the woman came and took the dishes away and returned with a blanket. Mara opened her eyes when the woman’s hand pointed at the clock on the wall and nodded, knowing that she could sleep for five hours, but she sat up, thinking she better use the toilet before going to sleep. The woman guessed her need, opened the double door, and pointed. Mara sleepwalked down the hallway as the smell guided her forward, alerting her senses, making her disgusted with Soviet culture" as it dealt with basic human needs. Luckily she had brought extra packets of Kleenex. At last, she returned to the smooth old bench, put her purse under her head, and pulling the gray blanket up to her shoulders, closed her eyes and, trusting the gold-teeth smile of a kindly stranger in a strange land, gave herself up to sound sleep.

*

Meanwhile, in the Riga airport, Mara’s uncle and aunt Kalns waited; Aunt clutched a bouquet of pink carnations. Her large face was carnation-colored, flushed. Uncle asked the intourist about his niece, but she snapped back, It’s not our job to worry about you. She shrugged her shoulders apathetically, sleepily, as she chewed a foreign gum and settled for a long nothingness. She refused to take or deliver messages. She was commissioned only to be there, she said again quite rudely. Uncle and Aunt went to find some place to sit down where they could safely doze off. They were used to sleeping in sitting positions. They had slept like that in many stations, on many trains, even in Siberia. Almost happily, they settled in a far corner of the terminal. The flower petals curled up in Aunt’s overweight lap. She muttered that she should have wrapped them in wet newspapers. They should have known. It would not matter to them if the flowers were half-dead, but what would the American girl think? They were used to sleeping upright and to stale things and mold on sausages. They were used to communism and the Russian signs and slogans all around their land. But she? What would she think? They sighed and nodded, half-asleep. Still, they were resigned. They were very good at waiting; they only wished the flowers would hold up politely, and then their heads, in slow motion, sank down below their necks. They slept. Unconscious for hours, they snored into their faded scarves.

*

It was past two o’clock in the morning. Suddenly they jerked and lifted their heads. People were moving about. People with flowers shuffled past them, and they, too, rose. The woman touched her hair; the man pulled in his gut and pulled down his double-breasted brown jacket, shiny from wear. Holding on to each other, they stretched their necks like everybody around them, looking for faces they had only seen in photographs; they looked for phantoms of their minds, for personified fears and wishes. They looked for the outside, the world on the other side of the iron curtain.

At last the gates opened, and people from that other world came through. They also looked into the strange, drab crowd with outstretched necks and uncertain glances, searching for faces they likewise had seen only in photographs. But soon they matched up. As quickly as the visitors came through the last door, the hosts received them. First, there was the uncertain look of recognition, then the smile, then the forward thrust, then a halt, the thrust in slow, cautious motion, like mating slugs, until they locked arms, necks, lips. The two worlds thus came together and the bodies and souls spoke. The arms clasped, but the lips twitched, unable to release the dammed-up words. They could not summarize the time of separation which is much more than a time span of calculable years. The years of living apart was, has been, the persistent rending of a nation. Dialectics personified beyond mere theory. It was a process of history in which people, like Mara’s aunt and cousin and mother and father, had been ripped apart by unseen claws that, nevertheless, dug into them, leaving them forever terrorized, forever split, and divided like stars and continents.

So when they met briefly for a visa-stamped week’s visit, as if in an eclipse, as if in a blurring of star with star, continent with continent, world with world, there fell a silence like a shadow or a great light, like unbelief so incredible and heavy that no words could be conjured. The bodies clung together, and when they released, a trail of sticky tears and sweat still seemed to glue them, even as they pulled apart and went looking for the baggage, suddenly uttering quick, trite phrases. For the first time they heard the sound of their voices, stamped as they were indelibly with accents and idioms of their respective and protective dominant superpowers.

Baggage in hand, coldly the intourist directed Mara toward her car; coldly she told Aunt and Uncle that they could not follow. You may visit her in the morning. But minutes later, out on the highway, the major šoseja, Mara saw in the rear-view mirror her uncle’s little Moscowich, purchased years ago with her grandfather’s assembly-line-earned dollars, following daringly close. The official car drove on through miles of pine forests, then crossed the bridge of the wide black-wave Daugava and bounced on through dark, mysterious streets, some as narrow as the bicycle paths of a Philadelphia park. Mara vaguely recognized the streets and large buildings from paintings and old photos, but she was not sure of anything. She felt as if drugged, her head slumping down only to suddenly jerk up at full attention. She did not want to miss even the smallest first impression. She sat up straight, legs crossed, poised, and imagined herself as a character in a film reeling on a screen suspended from star-pricked clouds.

*

Hours later, Mara woke up in a room in the Hotel Riga. The other tourist who had slept in the bed next to her was already gone, although it was only six o’clock. She lay still for a while, looking at the ceiling, noticing the faded scroll border ornaments. She saw the wallpaper of a long-gone quiet elegance, when through this hotel circled famous artists and rich merchants with their elegant women dressed in furs and picture hats. German nobility. Bourgeois Riga … Paris on the Baltic … City of spies, of crossroads. Richard Wagner directed the German symphony orchestra here for a brief time and then escaped because of his debts. Der Fliegende Hollander. Peter the Great cut his window to the West here, leaving his imprint in the form of fat trees, gates, a fallen-off horseshoe. Gorki directed the Worker’s Theater. Even Casanova and Don Giovanni passed through this ancient city, which Mozart should have included in his Catalog Aria. Mara also remembered reading about an English Shakespearean theater troupe with a real Moor, who played Othello. The troupe had made a performance stop in Riga before traveling on to Moscow. She knew about famous ballet dancers, singers, violinists, pianists, all of whom had touched a stage, an instrument, a hand here, in this northern hemisphere. Who’s been sleeping in my bed? Mara tried to guess and visualize how it was then—in centuries past, in victorious and defeated occupations. She tried to guess how it was now and how it could be if only Latvia were free again. But when will it happen?

*

Slowly she stretched every limb and then jumped with one swift twist of her body toward the window, toward the smoggy light of a new day. She opened the solid French window wide and breathed deeply. The smell of chocolate and coal filtered through her nostrils, and these unlikely combinations felt strangely delicious. Ah, it must come from the Laima chocolate factory, not Ķuze, for he was deported. She recalled Mother talking about those chocolates, wrapped in gold, for birthday presents and other special occasions, to be sucked slowly so the deliciousness would last, the senses would dance. But Laima was also confiscated in 1940. Was that owner also deported? She did not know; should have asked Mother. Oh, there are many things I don’t know and will have to learn!

She pressed her eyelids with her hands and inhaled again the city and morning air. The next instant her eyes opened wider, becoming telescopic. She looked across the rooftops, the gray shingles that lay in sooty ripples below. Mesmerized, she gazed at the panorama. Like a sleepwalker, she imagined sliding across the shingles, across the roofs, holding on to the gables, on through the narrow passages, and gliding straight up the steeple of St. Peter’s Cathedral, which no longer functioned as a church. That she knew. Communists banned religion. She wondered what faith was nurtured inside, below that graceful steeple of Riga’s skyline she recognized from paintings and photographs. The gilded rooster, which had stood on its pinnacle for many centuries, long before Columbus discovered America, was a symbol of national endurance, at least to those in exile, but must be here as well, for it shone as if newly polished. Indomitable, it seemed to rule the hazy sky. But wait! The steeple, the old wooden structure, was burned during the war, so this was new, reconstructed since then, as it once had been. So with permission, sometime after the war, it must have been rebuilt and the rooster restored. How did that happen? She stretched her arms, imagining herself flying, floating up to the rooster, and perching herself on its back, singing with it, ringing the bells full blast for all to hear that she has come home! This is my birthday, she felt like shouting. This will be my wedding day!

Mara pulled back her long dark blonde hair to one side, plaiting it in a long thick braid. Then she leaned far out the window and looked down. Like Rapunzel’s, her braid fell and seemed to touch ground. She receded into the fairy tale, with Tasha Tudor’s illustrations, and wished that her hair would become the golden stairway for the love who sought her. She peered through the brightening day and the rising smog, down into the narrow streets. She looked for her love, her prince, but she saw no one. Only street-cleaning women were walking about. They were massive counterparts of the Moscow airport vacuums. With birch twig brooms resting on their shoulders, they appeared like witches gathering for a convention. In Mara’s mind crowded many stories of witch- hunts. She knew that in the Dark Ages, when the light of the Renaissance barely streaked this sky, they were burned somewhere down below, in some square or marketplace, always adjacent to a church, while others were buried alive to keep the devils from pulling steeples down into the treacherous quicksand and swamps upon which this city was built nearly a thousand years ago. She rubbed the goose bumps on her bare arms and, pulling herself inside, bolted the window.

She threw off her nightgown and went to the bathroom. The toilet bowl was antique; the water gurgled above her head in a rusted box. The shower was halfway up the wall, so that she had to stoop to get under it. She would not wash her hair, she decided, and hunched over. The water came out in spurts, alternately cold and hot. Irritated, she turned the hot tap off and let the cold water souse her until she was burning from the chill. The towel was no more than a foot wide strip of linen, shiny and threadbare, silk like. She wondered what kinds of bodies had rubbed themselves with it. There was no washcloth. A fraction of a soap bar lay in a green-streaked brass holder. Only—she counted—six rough squares of toilet paper lay next to the bowl. She shuddered and got out of the bathroom and dressed.

*

In the hotel restaurant, an hour later, wearing her Levi’s skirt and shirt, she sat with Aunt and Uncle Kalns and cousin Sofija, a pretty, winsome brunette. The dining hall was elegant, with fine paintings on its walls and chandeliers hanging from a high ceiling, edged with tarnished gold scrolls. Classical baroque, she noted studiously. However, the people sitting around modern Soviet tables were anything but elegant. They were the new masses, the workers, the proletariats. Mara could easily pick out the tourists from the people, who were more or less like Aunt and Uncle, who clearly had not changed clothes since she met them in the night. They, judging by the creases, had slept in their clothes, perhaps at some friend’s flat, on chairs pushed together. She learned quickly that Sofija shared a room in a dormitory on the other side of the Daugava and had come across by bus. She was a student at the Conservatory of Music, the string fakultāte, which she proudly pointed out. It stood next to the university and the conservatory—the two huge neoclassical buildings of the past century, now black from soot. Sofija pointed to other prominent buildings across their hotel, on the other side of the park, on Rainis Boulevard, all needing a facelift. Again Mara recognized some of them from paintings and photographs, but there the French embassy was cream colored and trimmed in blue and gold. The white opera building, closer to the hotel, was the pride and cultural heart of every Latvian (though built by Germans at the end of the nineteenth century). It marked the end of the showcase park facing the Padomju (Soviet) Boulevard—formerly Aspazijas bulvaris, Aunt reminded her quietly and pointed out the columns and the facade of the opera, remarking how gray, soiled, and crumbling they were. Silently they watched the streetcars rattle by and the people who passed their window. A class of school children, in a double row, holding hands, crossed the busy boulevard and walked through the park, past the Freedom Monument. There she stands, Mara said. With new eyes, all looked at the monument as it reached high above the budding trees on the tall obelisk rising out of a platform of historical granite frescoes. Yes, there still stands our copper Milda holding the three golden stars that symbolize the three districts of Latvia. Sometime ago, in our circles, it was rumored that the monument was torn down, she commented in the low tone everyone here assumed.

Yes, such an attempt was made, Uncle said as quietly as possible, but his wife told him with her eyes to be quiet. He clamped up and clutched on to his knife and fork. But Aunt and Sofija silently followed Mara’s gaze. They would not dare, Sofija said in quite a normal tone of voice, turning her attention to the waiter who set down the food with stiff motions and a very serious expression.

The reunited had breakfast. The coffee was thick and bitter, but the deviled eggs and slices of smoked salmon served with brown bread were deliciously nourishing. Communism clearly had not succeeded in eradicating old-time culinary arts and table manners, observed famished Mara, and savored the unusual textures and flavors, trying to match the descriptions of food her mother often nostalgically recalled but could not produce because American cream and everything else was not quite right, saying that even the soil, air, and sun were not the same.

As Mara chewed the food, she looked out the window and watched the people who filled the morning rush-hour streets. They were unlike any she had seen in the streets of Western Germany, England, or the United States. She saw women, their hair brightly tinted, dressed in incoherent clothes that spoke of no particular style; they walked arm-in-arm in chains of twos, threes, fours. They went with their heads leaning toward each other, talking softly and intimately, looking down. She saw stocky men and women, solid like bricks. They stomped past the window, boldly looking in, scowling, pointing at those behind the glass panes who, like manikins, sat at white-linen-covered tables.

Russians, Aunt pointed out, unconscious that Mara had already observed how the brick women looked like her aunt, in whose veins, she believed, flowed the purest Latvian blood—or did it? They were, after all, in Riga, the crossroads city and the East-West thoroughfare.

Uniformed Russian soldiers glided by. They walked straight, confident, overseeing all. On their lapels glowed red stars like drops of blood. Mara looked past them at the buildings, all sadly needing repair. But she also admired the finely laid out begonia beds leading up to the opera and down below around the fountain, where the cleaning women, with their twig brooms, made designs in the gravel, weaving around and through the pedestrians.

A very beautiful young woman, her arm linked in a businessman’s, appeared on the scene as on a Renoir canvass. She wore tight jeans, a fashionable Parisian-style jacket, high-heel shoes that stepped over the cracks in the sidewalk. Her face was a painting.

Whore, Sofija said.

So early?

Oh, they work hard.

But only an occasional, ordinary Aryan type passed the spatter-streaked window, suddenly so exposed by the direct and bright sunrays. Mara wondered where the real, the indigenous, people were. Surely, the statistics cited in the exile press must be off, for she should see Latvians here also, in this city, their capital. Not all escaped; not all were deported. Riga surely did not belong to the occupiers completely.