Among the Russians(50)
I saw a group of gypsies reading palms. They wove among the crowds with loose strides in a shocking flare of scarves and pavement-sweeping dresses: handsome, satanic women clutching olive-skinned babies. Nobody could tell me where they came from. Moldavia, said one man; Georgia, thought another. In any case, it was agreed, they were beyond control. I followed their progress with amazement along the streets. They walked like scandalous royalty, anarchic and free. People averted their eyes.
During my second day in Riga I encountered an independence more bitter and sophisticated than theirs. I met Edvigs on a street corner by a machine which produced watery apple juice for three kopeks. He was thirty years old, heavy, balding, casually dressed. The machine ingested our money but gave back no apple juice. Edvigs kicked it on one side, I thumped it on the other. Then we began to laugh. He enquired my nationality, and I his. He was Latvian.
In 1919, he reminded me, the British had helped Latvia to its brief independence. His gaze snaked over my clothes to confirm my foreignness, before he landed a farewell kick on the machine. ‘I bet it’s Russian.’
Everything about Edvigs asserted a bruised independence. He looked like a bulldog running to fat. But he was nervous at being seen with me. His job—he was an interpreter—rendered him vulnerable. We ate in a restaurant frequented by middle-class Latvians, and spent the afternoon at the Mezoparks cemeteries far on the city’s outskirts, where the graves of the war dead stretch in desolating avenues. For two years until 1917 the Latvians fought the Germans to a standstill along the Daugava, and thousands of their fallen are buried here, together with men who fended off the Bolsheviks in 1919. Nearby, the city’s later graveyards flood beneath the birch trees in white wooden crosses, black headstones, weeping angels and little benches where nobody was sitting. As we neared the memorial to Rainis, Latvia’s national poet, the crosses gave way to the tombstones of Party dignitaries, inscribed with due titles and inset with photographic portraits—prestigious faces above medal-spattered chests. I wondered again what an atheist funeral could be like.
‘You hire professional speakers,’ Edvigs said with disgust. ‘They charge per speech. It’s fantastically well paid. They get two or three hundred roubles a day if they cram in six orations.’ He burst into sour laughter. ‘That’s something I should have done! They earn ten times what I do! They’re given a lot of data about the deceased, of course. But they muddle all the dead up. It’s horrific. They start talking about he instead of she and confer decorations and children on people who never had any. I’ve heard some speeches like I can’t describe to you. And the priests are just as bad.’
His face was scrunched into a pugnacious knot, and a continuous, characteristic gesture—an outward twist of his palms and splayed fingers—scattered these spoken horrors into the surrounding air. ‘I’m in the wrong trade! Christ! At university I studied foreign literature. But what the hell’s the use of that? It’s not even safe to write a critical defence of some dead author—before you’ve finished the whole fashion’s changed. Steinbeck, for instance, used to be popular here. Then he wrote in favour of the Vietnam war, and vanished overnight.’ A jerk of his palms polluted the air with these absurdities. ‘And now Somerset Maugham’s come up. Why? God knows, he was such a bourgeois.’
It was the professions and the arts which appealed to Edvigs. They had remained in the hands of conservative, middle-aged Latvians, he said, who jealously excluded the Russians from their field. But a deep divide opened between his own age group and theirs. ‘That middle generation, and the old, are always talking about the country—Latvia—what’s good or bad for it. They’re still idealistic. They loathe the Russians. They’re for ever discussing freedom. And they’ve been through Hell. My parents, for instance, were shaped by the war and the Stalin years—the fight for material things. But those battles have been won now. Nobody dies on the streets here any more.’ He sounded hard, weary. ‘I can’t remember the war or even Stalin. None of us young can. We’re tired of all that. We want to be free, of course, but we’re philosophical. It’s only our parents who talk about quick miracles.’ Another flicker of his hands dismissed such things. ‘My whole generation is cynical about politics.’
‘That’s how you’ll be absorbed,’ I said cruelly. Young Latvians intermarry with the Russians now.
Edvigs gave his sour laugh, and didn’t answer. All the time we were talking the massed graves of his countrymen flowed past us in a dumb, accusing undergrowth. When we passed the tomb of the poet Rainis, Edvigs was touched by a fleeting, bitter nationalism. ‘This man would have been a Goethe or a Shakespeare if he’d been born anywhere else. But he wrote in Latvian…and who reads that? Poetry, politics, religion—we’ve lost them all. Latvia’s like anywhere else now. We young ones look for something to replace it all. But what do you do? Drink, sex…? You face a vacuum.’
Around us, under dappled avenues of lime trees, the crosses thickened again where Christians and atheists lay side by side in an unplanned communism of death. Some of the dead, even here, were bolstered by photographs and titles, but most were buried only with the compassion of memory—loving fathers, cherished wives. Tombstones, Edvigs said, ensured that our hypocrisy continued to the end in professed love, professed faith. Yet these graves were the most tenderly kept, the most personal, that I had ever seen, separated by tall hedges and nurtured flower-beds, and each with more space in death than a city apartment might give in life.