The Earth Is Singing (2 page)

She is out of her rocking chair and hobbling towards the door. She grabs the bottle from Uldis, gives him a searching look and limps back to the chair. Within seconds she’s quaffing the black liquid out of a sizeable glass. Rīgans swear by the power of Black Balsam. It’s made up of vodka and various plant extracts. I tasted it once and nearly died. But Omama uses it for everything – colds, coughs and cuts. She even uses it to clean the bath and disinfect the lavatory although that’s not what the manufacturers recommend.

That’s my crazy Omama for you.

Omama is old, but she’s not nearly as feeble as she makes out. She likes to give the impression of a mad old Jewish grandmother in a black headscarf, muttering and rocking in her chair and stuffing her face with gefilte fish balls and smoked salmon, but her eyes in her wrinkled face are so bright that they’re at odds with the rest of her appearance.

Omama likes Uldis. She would prefer that he was Jewish but he gets round that by bringing her food and drink and having nice manners. Besides, she knows full well that I’ve got no intention of marrying anybody for a good while yet.

I’m planning on staying at my ballet school for the six years it takes to train to be a professional dancer. It’s what I have always wanted to do. Mama has told me that I should do science or maths but even she can’t deny the fact that I move like a swan, and swans need to keep swimming.

I also love music. I sing all the time. I feel like singing now, because my dear Uldis has found me and is hovering on the doorstep with an impish grin on his face.

Mama beckons him to come inside and shut the door.

“We have plenty of food,” she says to Uldis. She is speaking Latvian as that is Uldis’s first language. It sounds unfamiliar coming from her mouth. “Come and join us.”

Uldis kisses my cheek, blushing a little. Our relationship still feels very new and raw. Everything is exaggerated in intensity. The slightest look from him can leave me feeling naked and vulnerable, as if the whole world can see how I’m feeling without me even having to say a word.

Omama is already at the table, piling up a plate with eggs, cheeses and pickles.

I cut slices of dark Latvian bread. Even my arm cutting the bread feels all shaky under Uldis’s intense gaze, and a few nuts and seeds fall out onto the bread board. Omama is always telling me that this bread is a lifesaver if you get a fishbone stuck in your throat. Something about the density of the bread just frightens that bone right down your gullet.

Omama likes the caraway variety, so that’s why my mother always gets it. Sometimes she bakes her own, but it’s a time-consuming business and can make her bad-tempered.

There’s not so much time to waste now that Papa’s factory has been taken over by the Soviets. Mama has expanded her sewing business and is often up all night, hunched over her machine, foot pounding up and down with a bang. The banging is right next to my bedroom, but I daren’t complain. If Mama can’t work, we will end up on the streets.

Uldis sits at the small table at the end of our living room where we’ve tried to make a tiny dining area. He eats with relish, surveying the food on his plate with pleasure. It gives me a chance to look at him without being observed.

He’s tall, with fair hair that sweeps to one side over clear blue eyes and a healthy complexion from all the swimming and sports that he does outside of his apprenticeship. Sometimes I think that we look a lot alike. I don’t look Jewish, unlike Mama who has very dark brown hair and olive skin and what Papa refers to as a “distinguished” nose. I look more like Papa, who has the fair look of many Latvians. My hair falls in a light-brown plait down my back and my skin flushes easily. I too have got blue eyes, but mine are darker, almost navy.

“How is your work progressing?” Mama is asking Uldis. “How many years until you qualify to work as a lawyer?”

Uldis pauses for a second, with a gherkin frozen midway to his mouth.

“Uh – I’m not sure,” he says. “I heard that the Latvian police are hoping to recruit volunteers to aid the German army in Rīga. I might try out for that.”

Omama drops her knife and fork with an indignant clatter.

“A policeman?” she says. “What do you need to fight for? You already live on Latvian soil. You have a good life and the prospect of an excellent career.”

I glance at Mama. She has gone very pale underneath her dark skin. She picks at a pile of pickles and then goes into the kitchen to get the cheesecake she baked earlier. When she comes back her colour has changed and her face looks flushed, as if she has a fever coming.

“But Uldis,” she begins, “surely you know what the Germans will be doing when they get here? You don’t wish to be part of that! Have you not heard the rumours from Poland?”

We have all heard the rumours. It has been said from late last year that the Polish Jews have been forced to leave their homes and herded into some sort of ghetto area in Warsaw. But nobody is sure and it seems so hard to believe that this could happen to ordinary people that I try to convince Mama that rumours are not always true.

Uldis gulps his cheesecake and pushes back his chair.

“I just came to check you were all okay,” he says, with a big smile at Mama. “Thanks for the food, Mrs Michelson.”

My mother does not smile back.

I show Uldis out.

“Sorry about that,” I say. I look up at his tall frame. “It’s so good to see you. When will I see you again?”

Uldis is putting on his jacket. Summer in Rīga can feel like March. There’s an ice-cold wind which whips through the Baltics at this time of year.

He looks down at me. There’s something in his eyes that I can’t read. If I had to try, I’d say it had a slightly sad quality. But that can’t be right, because then he turns to me and gives me his wide smile and says: “Perhaps we could go swimming next week? I will pick you up on Saturday morning.”

He leans over me and kisses the top of my head. Electric thrills shoot right through my body to my feet.

Then he leaves me standing there. I watch him bolt downstairs.

On the last day of June I’m awake at one o’clock in the morning.

Outside comes something I haven’t heard for a long time.

Silence.

The last Russian tanks have finally rolled out of town, leaving destruction and ruin in their wake. The dust from the tracks of the tank wheels has hardly settled. St Peter’s church smoulders gently at the end of
Skārņu iela
, a strange spire-less structure that bears no resemblance to a holy place any longer. Behind the stump I can now see the four giant arches of the old Zeppelin hangars which house our beloved Central Market.

It’s too quiet. I can’t sleep.

I get out of my camp bed and pull back the curtains.

The lack of noise is so heavy that it makes my ears ache and strain. All I can hear is that eerie silence. It feels loaded with something that is yet to happen. The feeling reminds me of being little and putting a cup filled with water on top of a door, hiding behind it and waiting for Papa to open the door and get a soaking.

I’ve got used to hearing the sounds of police sirens and fire engines. I’ve almost got used to the sounds of shooting and shelling, bombing and screaming.

But on this night there is nothing. Nothing.

I hug my elbows and hum an old Jewish nursery rhyme to fill the silence.

Under baby’s cradle in the night

Stands a goat so soft and snowy white

The goat will go to the market

To bring you wonderful treats

He’ll bring you raisins and almonds

Sleep, my little one, sleep.

I gaze out over the roofs and spires of the city I love. There are gaps and holes but it is still my beloved Rīga.

The silence does not last for long.

When I wake up the
next day there’s another unfamiliar sound coming from the streets.

Singing.

I stick my head out of the window. The pavements outside are crowded with people, jostling and talking. There are speakers in the middle of the street, blasting out our Latvian national anthem.

“Merciful God, can’t an old woman sleep in?” Omama is muttering in her tiny bedroom, but she too is leaning her bony elbows on the window sill and staring down at the scenes outside.

“I haven’t heard that since before the Soviets came,” says Mama, laying up plates and bowls for our breakfast. “If only I could believe that all the trouble was over.”

“Maybe it is,” I say. “There are people carrying flowers and greeting the soldiers, Mama. Look!”

I stare down at the German army, men who are supposed to be our saviours and free us from the Soviet regime. They have thick brown arms in tight khaki uniforms and hats which look like helmets. They are armed with brown guns and their faces are exhausted but cheerful. There are Latvian women in traditional white peasant dress running out of the crowd to kiss them and offer them flowers.

“Nothing could be worse than what has happened to us already,” I say in what I hope is a firm voice. “What could be worse than Papa being taken away?”

I seem to smell Papa when I mention his name. Often that faint whiff of the aftershave he always wore when he was about to go to a business meeting or out on a date with Mama. The smell is painful and comforting all at the same time.

Omama heaves herself into the chair next to me and pinches my cheek so hard that my eyes water. It’s her way of showing affection, but I wish she wouldn’t.

“Your papa will come back one day soon,” she says. “Now that the Soviets have gone, they will perhaps release him.”

Mama lets out a dramatic sigh and flips her tea cloth impatiently at both of us.

“Eat your breakfast and stop speculating,” she says. “Hanna, you need to get to dance school.”

She ignores my pout of protest. There’s far too much going on outside for me to want to miss it all.

“And, Mama,” she says under her breath to her own mother, “stop giving the girl false hopes. She knows as well as I do what the rumours are. And you know that they hold us responsible for everything that has happened.”

Those rumours again. They are so terrifying that I try to shut them out in my mind with a thick curtain of black. They can’t affect us here in Rīga. After all, this is not Poland. We are different in almost every way. Our language, our food, our history are all different. It is only our religion that we have in common with the Jews of Poland.

“I have heard the rumours,” I say to Mama, “but still I don’t understand what we have actually done wrong.”

I am hoping that Mama is about to tell me.

But she just eats her bread with a closed-off look on her face.

I drag myself to school, dawdling as much as I can. I push my way through the cheering crowds and listen to the sound of the German soldiers’ feet as they march through the city centre. All the way to my school there are people lining the streets, waving flags and flowers and kissing one another as if at last they are free.

I cut past the beautiful white
Opera
in the park and stop to stare at it. The building is a little like a garlanded white wedding cake to look at, surrounded by the bright pink and orange flowers of the park and the gentle canal with the little bridge over it.

One day I plan to dance here. Mama will be in the audience with Papa and Omama, who will probably still be alive even if she’s over a hundred by then. I will stand on the stage and spin and pirouette and jeté in a white costume studded with silver and I will dance the dance of Rīga and its spire-studded beauty. I will dance of love and life and all the possibilities which it has.

Papa always taught me to grab life with both hands.

The night before he was taken away, he called me into the spacious wood-panelled study that we had in the villa. “My little dancing daughter,” he said, his eyes filling with water. “My little songbird.” The room reeked of pipe smoke but I didn’t mind. “Promise me”, he said, “you will always try to live. Whatever happens. Keep living. And look after Mama. Promise me?”

I laughed at the time. I thought that Papa was being overemotional and silly. I liked him calling me “little dancing daughter” because it made me feel special and cherished.

“Sure, Papa,” I said. Then I skipped off back to my bedroom.

It was only later that the thought struck me like a ton of rubble.

Papa spoke as if he knew he was to be taken away.

And the very next day, he was.

When I reach the
Brīvības bulvāris
where the
Brīvības piemineklis
, our Freedom Monument, is located, the sheer number of people there takes my breath away.

I stop and stare up. The monument is forty-two metres high. I’ve had that fact drummed into me at school for as long as I can remember. It was put up after the Latvian War of Independence to commemorate soldiers who died, but ever since then people have congregated here whenever anything of national importance has happened. There are flowers laid at the foot of the monument every single day and there are always at least two armed guards standing motionless in front of it. When I was a little girl I was very worried about how the guards would fare if they needed the lavatory, but Mama said that they worked in shifts and that every hour a new guard would take over.

At the top of the column is a statue of Liberty carrying three gilded stars over her head.

Everybody is looking up at the top of the statue today, like they’re seeing it in a new light.

I push my way towards the monument because I need to get to my school on the other side of town. It’s not easy. I smell the sweat of unwashed bodies and sickly-sweet blooms as I elbow my way past the soldiers and the over-excited Latvian women who are darting out to press their flowers upon the German soldiers on horseback. It is a rare hot day, with sunshine beating down on the stones of the
bulvāris
and the old people already huddled under the shady trees in the park.

I get to the other side of the monument, panting for breath.