You Shall Know Our Velocity (44 page)

Turn it upside down and this was the sky above Riga.

What did we expect of Riga? Something more drab, with less panache. But good God, this Riga, when we plowed through its suburbs and into the core of the place, was glittery and so alive. Full of stores still lit at 7
P.M.
, and hotels, casinos, restaurants, people going home in big coats and tall furry hats, the huge cable buses, whatever you call those things on tracks and attached from above,
full of commuters rehashing in their heads easy but punishing mistakes and wondering about God and his gifts long-withheld.

We stopped at a clothing store, resembling a Gap and staffed by the same sorts of young and indifferent women. It was closed. We knocked on the window, watching the girls fold and carry hangers from the dressing rooms. We knocked again.

“Sorry,” I said, as one, a short-haired girl with the face of a British boy, cracked the door. “We really need pants. Can we just run in and get something? We’ll be easy.”

We assumed they spoke English and were right. She smiled and let us in, locking the door behind us. I went to the shelf of pants, found my size in some green khaki kind of pants and brought them to the counter. There was another girl there, petite with black hair. Their skin, all of them, was so pale, petal-pink.

Hand asked them to dinner. They said no. They told us to come back the next day and then they would eat with us.

“We leave tomorrow,” I said.

“But you said you just got here,” the small one said.

“We did,” I said. “Ten minutes ago.”

I really wanted them to say yes. I wanted to talk, for once on this trip, to young women who were not for sale.

“We’re buying,” I said.

“You should come tomorrow,” the taller one said. “Why not come back tomorrow? We eat tomorrow. Tonight we are busy.”

We said we’d be back, knowing we wouldn’t, and left and checked into a hotel in an ancient building the color of wet sand and next to a block-long McDonald’s. We dropped our things and for a few minutes watched British news. They were covering the Paris to Dakar race—

“Holy shit.”

“I can’t believe it.”

—though it seemed like weeks ago when we’d last seen news of
it, but of course it had been one day, and two days before that the cars had been hurtling toward us, in Dakar, in person.

But now the race was over; someone had won, someone had died. A well-known driver had died, and this was big news, while the incidental deaths of seven pedestrians along the way was not.

We showered and dressed and had the concierge direct us to the restaurants. It was colder than before. It was so unreasonably cold. People hurried from amber-lighted door to amber-lighted door across the narrow cobblestone streets walled by ornate and tidy European storefronts, framed in ancient brown brick, offering food, compact discs, souvenirs, lingerie.

We got lost; we were hungry. Hand asked a young woman, with hands stuffed stiffly into her coat, if she spoke English. Without breaking stride she lied: “No.”

We started jogging, looking for the place recommended. With help from a pair of middle-aged men who looked local but sounded Australian, we found the restaurant and inside everyone stared. The place looked medieval and knew it, with great tables of oak and long benches crowded with loud friends. We ate as people stared. We left as people stared. Was it my face? It was always my face. Everyone hated seeing a face like that. We wanted to be everyone’s friend, wanted us all to sing hearty songs together, but instead they laughed privately and stared at us. We walked out and wanted to drink. The cobblestones soaked in our footsteps.

“Look at that.” Hand was stopped and pointing to a small engraved sign above us. “The Jewish Museum.”

“So?”

“I didn’t think there were any left here. The Germans killed every Jew in the Baltics. I thought so at least.”

We stood for a second. I breathed into my hands.

“That’s got to be the grimmest place in Riga,” he said.

“Yeah.”

Hand shuddered. “I could never walk in that place. Can you
imagine coming back here? Being Jewish and coming back here? Fuck. No way.”

We continued and when we couldn’t stand the cold anymore, walked into a small bar and down a spiral staircase and stopped at a Lasertag labyrinth.

“Is this Lasertag?” Hand asked. The teenager at the counter stood up—

“It iz!”

—and led us into the room, painted in mid-eighties dayglo, like a retro disco built for bachelorette parties. The place was a half-bar, half-Lasertag outlet, which seemed to us like a plainly great idea. We went upstairs and ordered two beers. We watched people walk through the cold muttering, grimacing, planning.

“It’s colder than Chicago,” I said.

“The latitude must be similar. The air feels exactly the same.”

“Everyone walks fast here.”

“They all wear black.”

“And fur.”

“Right!” Hand said, “So much fur!”

“Almost all the women wear fur.”

“Especially the over-forty women.”

“But why all the black?”

“They are expressing their inner darkness. Their gloom. [Now in sociologist voice] The Latvians, many believe, cover themselves in large coats and furs because they want to
disappear
. They are ashamed of their bodies. And the hats. Notice the large hats, some also covered in fur. These they wear because they are ashamed of their heads—”

Two women near us, sitting at the bar, nodded hello. We said hello. Actually, only one spoke to us. She was about fifty, with short black hair, a masculine jaw and wide-set eyes, looking very much like someone’s mom. She tipped her drink to us and asked questions—where from, having fun, where staying. We told her.
She moved from the bar to our table and sat down. Her name was Katya. Her friend, wearing a fuzzy blue fur coat that tickled her face like a feather boa, stayed at the bar, legs crossed on a high stool.

“How long are you stayingk een Riga?” she asked.

“We leave tomorrow,” I said.

“Tomorrow! You come here for one drink!”

“Yes,” said Hand, very seriously. “We heard the beer in Latvia was very good.”

“Where in America do you live?”

Hand said Chicago.

“Chicago? Is it very dangerous?”

“Very!” he answered.

This comment somehow changed the tenor of the conversation, and prompted the advent of the furry woman. Her coat was green. She slid off her stool and descended to our table.

“She speaks no English,” said Katya.

The second woman smiled, then held her thumb and forefinger an inch apart. “A little.” She smiled again. Her eyes examined me and then, more closely, Hand. She squinted then opened them wide, in a way you’d have to call feline. She did it repeatedly. At some point some idiot must have told her that was sexy. Her name was Oksana.

“I am sorry we do not speak Latvian,” Hand offered.

“We also don’t speak Latvian,” Katya said.

“What were you just using with your friend?”

“Russian. We are not Latvian. We are Russian.”

“Oh. So you’re visiting too?”

“No. We were born here.”

“How are you Russian then?”

She said something to the green-fur friend and they both laughed—quick mean coughing laughs, laughs like the throwing of clenched fists.

“Half of Latvia is Russian,” she said.

“Oh,” we said. We had to accept this as true, until we could get back to our guidebook.

“But they treat us like [tongue out and hand waving away, dismissively, like brushing a cat off a tabletop].”

“They treat you not well? Why?”—Hand again. I wanted to beat him.

“Why? How do
I
know why? They are corrupt.”

“Who?”

“The government. Run by the mafia. The people here, they are fine. But the government don’t want us here and they make it hard. They are criminals, mafia.”

“The government is the mafia?” Hand was really interested. The bartender, our age and goateed, was watching us.

“Of course. In Russia there is mafia too but they are not organized. They are broken and they [then gestures for stabbing through one’s heart and the cutting of one’s throat]. The mafia here is organized.”

Here I knew what Hand was going to say—I saw it coming from miles away, a slow steamtrain chugging and hooting—and I could do nothing to stop it.

“So you might call it … organized crime?”

“Exactly,” she said, nodding her head slowly, then pointing to Hand while taking a squinting sip of her drink. She didn’t get the joke; Hand knew she wouldn’t. He was such a prick.

A large man, bearded and ugly, the hooked face of a rooster, who was at the bar, was now standing behind the women and talking to me and Hand.

“Where are you from?” he asked.

We told him Montreal and gave him a bitter French-Canadian look, like he too was trying to oppress us.

“You like these women?” He swung his hand over their heads like a game show model would over a washer-dryer set.

We both nodded. We liked them fine.

The man scoffed. “A lot of people like these women. Real nice ladies!” A small woman slipped beside him, touched his shoulder and they started for the door.

“Have fun,” he said to us over his shoulder.

Katya and Oksana glared. I glanced at Hand and we both knew. If we’d been smarter we’d have known sooner. But why are almost all of the women we meet in this line of work?
Because who else would talk to you?
I don’t want to think that way.
And what line of work are you two in, if not the exhange of money for love?
Oh c’mon.
It’s not that different, is it?
I want to think it’s different.

“He is a stupid man,” said Katya. “See how we are treated?”

The women talked about their rent, and the lack of work available, and about Katya’s seven-year-old son. I asked if she had a picture of him, but she did not. Hand asked what kind of work they did. Katya paused for a few seconds, glanced at Oksana. They were unemployed, she said. Oksana did her catty eye thing again, to Hand.

“So,” Katya said, to Hand, “do you like dancing?”

Hand said sure. Katya described a dance club, called The Pepsi—

“Like the drink?”

“I don’t know.”

“We have a drink called …”

“I know.”

—where she assured us that there would be people, even tonight, very late on a weekday. Hand said maybe we’d meet her and her friend there. The lie was obvious to all.

“You will not come,” the catwoman said to Hand, pouting.

“We will try,” said Hand, holding her small hand between his two, still covered in marker from the Scorpions pouch he’d created in Senegal.

I stood up and indicated I was heading home. He stood, too.

“So you will meet us. You must,” Katya said.

“Yes,” he said.

—I would almost prefer if you just asked us for money.

“When? What time?” she said.

—You’re playing us both ways. You’ll offer Hand sex—you’ll offer your friend—but if that doesn’t work, you throw in the stuff about your kid. And we have no idea if you have a son at all.

—You have no right to judge.

—I think I can wonder. I can speculate.

—You can do neither. Just one day in my life would cripple you.

“Right after we change, we’ll dance,” said Hand, swinging his hand over his clothes like a security wand. “I don’t want to wear this stuff to the disco.”

“Okay, so half an hour?”

“Yes. Then we will meet.”

“You will promise to come?”

“Yes.”

“You promise?”

“Yes. We promise.”

I was out the door and Hand followed.

The street was barren.

“You’re not going to meet them?” I said.

“No.”

“The one with the fur was kind of cute.”

“I don’t even know what to say,” Hand said. “I feel so shitty for them. With Olga it was different, she was just between jobs or something. But these two—Why not give them the money?”

“We gave them some, didn’t we?”

“No, we didn’t. We paid for their drinks.”

“Oh.”

“You heard Katya talk about her kid, right? We should give her the money. Give her all of it. They need it, right? They’ve got the Estonians breathing down their ass. They need it.”

“Who?” I said. “Breathing down their ass?”

“Yes. The Latvians. Sorry.”

“I don’t want to give it to them.”

“Why? Because you don’t like them.”

“Right.”

“But what does that mean? That makes no sense. You’re going around rewarding what? Good manners? That’s about control.”

“Anytime you don’t know your head from your browneye you say it’s about control.
It’s about control
has turned into the catch-phrase of you amateur psychologists.”

We were heading toward the hotel, we thought, but were quickly losing our sense of direction.

“If you want, you can give them what I have in my shoe.”

“How much?”

“About $200.”

“I think we should.”

“Fine.”

We walked back in their direction. We started jogging again. I was jogging with my knees high, anything to keep warm.

“You never finished about the helium,” I said, finding the words through pants. “Before we got stopped by the cops.”

“Oh!” He stopped in his tracks. He liked that sort of drama. “I have to tell you this!”

“I think we’re lost again.”

“I know.”

We asked an older man, heavy-lidded and angular. The man gave us a general sense of how far off we were. We thanked him and I thought of paying him for the directions, but his overcoat, of camel’s hair, betrayed his wealth. We still didn’t have jackets of any kind.

“Go on,” I said, as we passed the Lasertag place again.

“Okay,” Hand said. “I have to start back a ways. So first of all, I guess Raymond’s ancestors were more or less native to Chile, on
the Pacific—the southwestern part of the country. The something Archipelago. Chronos. Something like that. Chronos Archipelago. And these people had this theory, or maybe belief is the better word for it probably, that all people carry all of their relatives with them. Like in their blood, in their heads.”