The Earth Is Singing (3 page)

And it is then that I see something odd.

There is a column of young men with their heads hanging low, being marched off towards the outskirts of the old town by a group of soldiers.

The soldiers are not wearing the uniforms of the German army. They have red and white armbands on a khaki uniform and are clutching guns.

The guns are pointing at the heads of the young men.

My arms chill with cold.

I stare at the column of men again. One or two of them look familiar. I realize with a jolt of horror that I can see some of the boys who used to be a couple of years above me at my last school. They can be no more than seventeen or eighteen years old.

But where are they going?

I watch them being marched off. If other people have seen, they are choosing not to comment. Most of them are still facing the other way, cheering at the soldiers’ parade.

I wait until the young men have been marched round a corner and out of sight and then I run back through the crowds and in the direction of home.

I have to tell Mama.

Mama is not too pleased that I’ve skipped dance school.

“Hanna, I’ve got work to do,” she says, pointing at the mountain of fabric in front of her on the table. We don’t have Mama’s sewing table any longer, although we managed to sneak her machine out of the villa. So the dining-room table doubles up as a work table after I have gone to school.

“Where’s Omama?” I say. She’s usually snoring in her chair or shelling peas whilst moaning about something or other.

“She wanted to go out and see what was happening,” says Mama. “I told her to be careful. The streets are not really the place for a frail old woman.”

She catches my eye and we both break out laughing. There’s nothing frail about Omama, as we both know.

My smile fades.

“I need to tell you something,” I say.

Mama passes me the bagel I forgot to eat at breakfast time. I smear it with cream cheese and smoked salmon and gulp it down. Mama is very pretty, which helps with buying food. Papa always said that she could charm the birds out of the trees, but we don’t have too many trees around here and the birds have been scared off by the bombing and continual fires.

“I just saw a group of young men being marched away from the Freedom Monument,” I say.

“Yes?” says Mama. “Soviet prisoners of war, I expect.”

“No,” I say. “They were not Soviets. They were just boys. And the soldiers were not in German uniforms. They had red armbands.”

Omama has come in while we are talking. She is regarding me with her bright brown eyes. She is eating pickles with greed, scooping them up and shoving them into her mouth, which is half-open with her two front false teeth on show.

“That is the new Latvia police,” she says. “Your Uldis has designs on becoming one of those.”

I am so surprised that a laugh bursts out of me.

“Uldis is a good person,” I say. “He would never hurt people.”

I think back to last year. I was in the park with Uldis and a bee flew straight into the top of my ice-cream cone. He spent ages trying to coax it onto a leaf and then put it in the sun so that it could dry out its wings. Together we watched the tiny insect struggle back to life and dart away.

“Did you recognize any of the young men?” Mama says. “Perhaps they were in training to become soldiers.”

I picture the group of men in my mind. I see their hanging heads and the look of shame and fear on some of their faces.

I see the muzzle of the guns shoved into the small of the young men’s backs and for a dizzy moment I actually have a flash of what it must have felt like.

“Yes,” I say. “I recognized some of them from school.”

Mama and Omama exchange looks.

“Dance school?” says Mama.

I sigh and reach for another bagel.

“No,” I say. “Ezra.”

Ezra was the school I used to go to, before the Soviets invaded us.

“Jews?” says Omama, still chewing. Her eyes never leave my face.

“I guess so,” I say. I had been so shocked by the guns in their backs that it had taken me a little while to realize this.

“Where were they going?” says Mama. Her cheeks are bright pink. “Did you see?”

“Mm,” I say, my mouth full of fish and cheese. “
Aspazijas bulvāris
.”

“My God,” says Mama.

“Ah,” says Omama. “They were being taken to the prefecture.”

Mama darts Omama a furious glance and flaps her hands to quieten her but it’s too late. Now I want to know.

I wait until Mama begins to prepare lunch for later.

Then I whisper, “Omama – what is happening in the prefecture? Is it bad?” The prefecture is our police station.

My grandmother fidgets about in the pocket of the black dress she always wears and produces a squashed caramel in a faded gold wrapper.

“I’m not ten,” I protest, but she forces me to take it before hobbling over to the chair in the corner for her nap.

Within seconds she is snoring, her head dropped on one side.

Mama comes in with a new pile of fabric and we spend the rest of the morning cutting and sewing to the endless sounds of cheering and marching outside. Or at least, Mama sews and I cut.

The Latvian national anthem is played on and off all day along with another song I don’t recognize. This second song is rigid in time and sounds very patriotic. I ask Mama what it is and she snaps off a length of thread with her teeth and doesn’t answer for a moment.

“It is the anthem of the Nazi Party,” she says when I continue to stare at her.

“Oh,” I say. A tiny bolt of something painful passes through my stomach. “They are already here, then?”

“Yes,” says Mama. She doesn’t elaborate.

My mind is racing.

I keep replaying in my head the expressions on the faces of those young Jewish men as they were marched off.

I see the red and white armbands on the uniforms of the men accompanying them.

Uldis might be wearing those armbands soon. What if he is ordered to stick a gun into the back of a thin Jewish boy?

But I know him so well. He is kind. He won’t harm anyone. He will keep the peace.

I want to discuss it with Mama, but something about her face is as closed off as the sign outside our famous church warning people not to venture inside the ruin.

So the questions and doubts inside me have nowhere to go.

They grow into the silence, filling it up like mould.

Mrs Rubinstein and her family
are taken away in the night.

I wake up from an uneasy sleep to hear screaming.

Mama is already up and standing in her red flannel dressing gown at the window, her hair in a dark plait down her back. For the first time I notice the wiry grey hairs poking out and floating in the lamplight.

I stand next to her and we peer out of the gap in the curtains. Mama tells me to switch off the light.

Down on the street the white-clad figure of Mrs Rubinstein, still in a nightdress, can be seen huddled over next to a man in sharp uniform with a smart peaked cap to match. Her two children cling to her hands. I can hear little Peter crying and see his older sister, Leah, trying to comfort him. She is crouched down, peering into his face.

I stare at the soldier. He looks different to the ones who marched through Rīga with their wide grins and tanned faces.

I can’t see much of his face because it’s dark, but something about the rigid way he holds himself makes my stomach feel horrid. He is pencil-thin and full of sharp angles.

“Why are they taking her?” I whisper, almost to myself as much as to Mama.

Mama doesn’t answer. Mrs Rubinstein was our neighbour when we lived in the villa and she was moved at the same time we were, to the apartment block right next door to ours. Now she is being shoved into the back of a truck. As she sits in her thin nightdress, she looks up at our apartment for a split second and Mama places the palm of her hand on the window and it’s like a message passes between them via electricity.

We watch as the truck with the three figures in the back passes down our street and roars out of sight.

There is a terrible silence for about five minutes. The truck drives off so fast that I can still see leaves and debris swirling around on the pavement. Mama pulls her long coat over her nightdress and runs downstairs and out into the street. I see her bend over something in the gutter. When she comes back upstairs she is sighing heavily and I don’t think it’s from her exertions on the staircase.

She puts something on the window sill in front of us.

It’s the dirty stuffed teddy bear belonging to Peter Rubinstein. It only has one black beaded eye.

“We will keep it until he gets back,” says Mama, her eyes shining. “I will sew on a new eye and give this bear back his sight!”

I smile. Sometimes Mama can be strict and hard to fathom.

At other times I love her so much that it hurts.

The silence outside doesn’t last long. The sound of screams and gunfire reach us from somewhere just around the corner –
Kalēju iela
, perhaps.

Mama makes us a cup of coffee each as it’s obvious that we will not be able to sleep any longer that night. Already I know that I will fail to reach school in a few hours’ time.

“Mama,” I say, fiddling with the ends of my hair. “The Germans have chased the Soviets out of town but it does not feel safe. I can still hear shooting.”

Omama has woken up and come in to see what we are talking about. Mama pours her a cup of strong black coffee and gets out a tin of biscuits.

“Mama,” I say, with more insistence in my voice this time. “Why did they take Mrs Rubinstein away?”

My mother looks like she is wrestling with something in her head. She plays for time by dipping a caraway biscuit into her coffee and chewing on it in a very deliberate way.

“Tell the girl, Kristina,” says Omama. “She’s not a baby any longer.”

“Thank you,” I say, indignant.

Mama gets up and looks out of the window again. Then she turns around and stands behind me with her hands on my shoulders.

“They are shooting Jews,” she says. “And they have taken Mrs Rubinstein away because she too is a Jew.”

She brushes my fringe off my forehead and rakes her fingers through my hair.

I nod. Mama is expecting me to be brave and understanding, so I try to look serious.

“Is there some other reason, though?” I say. “I mean – has she done something wrong, other than just being a Jew?”

Mrs Rubinstein is a very gentle, nervous lady. We saw her nearly every day, outside supervising her children in the small back garden of the apartments or hustling them down the street to the kosher butcher’s shop. She had the same large, dark worried eyes that could be seen on the faces of her children.

“Oh, Hanna,” says Mama. She drinks the dregs of her coffee and sinks her head into her hands. “She has done nothing wrong. As you say – she is just a Jew.”

“But you are a Jew,” I say. I can hear my voice rising up a bit in panic. “So why didn’t they take you? Or Omama?”

Omama snorts. I can almost hear her saying, “Pity the soldier who tries to take ME away. I’ll hit him with my stick!”

“Because I am lucky this time,” says Mama. “Because I pray every night to God that He will leave me here to look after you. Because I promised your father” – and here she swallows back tears – “that I would always protect you from harm.”

I feel sick. I push my cup away and hang on to Mama’s hand.

“First the Soviets hate us because we are proud to be Latvian,” I say. “And now the Germans hate us because we are Jews. What have we ever done to them?”

Mama sighs.

“It is complex,” she says. “But it is not all Germans who hate the Jews. Just the Nazis. They are working for Hitler and
he
hates the Jews.”

“Why?” I say. I know that my questions are wearing Mama out and Omama is flashing her eyes at me, which probably means that I should stop, but I can’t seem to hold the words back. It’s like a whole new section of my future life has just started up without me even wanting it to.

“He blames them,” says Mama. She sounds so matter-of-fact, like she’s discussing the Sabbath dinner menu.

“For what?” I say. “I promise that is my last question.”

Mama gathers the cups and helps Omama from her chair. When she turns back to me her eyes have taken on a haunted expression I’ve never seen before. I can trace back her family and her family’s family and even ancestors before that, in those pain-filled eyes.

“For everything,” she says. “He blames the Jews for everything.”

The next day is Friday.

I am not allowed to attend school, just as I had predicted. The streets are too dangerous.

Mama goes out on her own after breakfast to get the ingredients she needs for the Sabbath dinner tonight and the meals we will have tomorrow. In the new paper,
Tēvija
, published every day in Rīga, there is an announcement for Jews. It says that we are banned from shopping anywhere that has a queue of people outside it. We are not supposed to mix with the rest of the population now.

Mama takes this piece of news with a shrug.

“We need to eat,” she says. “I’m sure that our Latvian neighbours will turn a blind eye.”

She ties a scarf over her head first and pulls on her shapeless coat and her stout brown lace-up shoes.

“I look like a good Latvian woman, no?” she says to her reflection in the mirror.

I stand upstairs at the window and watch her scurrying down
Skārņu iela
. She greets a couple of neighbours and acquaintances on the way but does not stop to chat.

At the corner of our street there is a soldier in a grey uniform with stiff boards on the shoulders and a cap with an eagle on the front. I stare. I have never seen such a uniform before.

Mama comes back half an hour later.

“There are queues everywhere,” she says. “I had to join one. Mrs Karulis recognized me. But she didn’t give me away. I kept my head down. There were other Jews like us in the queue, too.”

“Like you,” I correct her. I don’t really count myself as Jewish. Papa wasn’t, and I look a lot like him. If it wasn’t for him being taken away, we wouldn’t be observing so many Jewish rituals and festivals. We have always celebrated the Sabbath, though. Even Jews with no faith at all tend to sit down on a Friday night and hold the Sabbath meal. I am starting to wonder if this is a good thing. Already I feel as if I don’t want to be at all connected with the Jews any longer. If Hitler is out to get them, then surely we should stop advertising our faith and try to blend in with the general population of Latvia?