Among the Russians(51)
‘Resurrection, heaven…I’d like to believe in all that,’ he said. ‘My parents are church-going Lutherans, but I’m an atheist. For years I didn’t even see the necessity for this God of theirs.’ His voice lowered, although nobody was near. ‘Then my father got into trouble. He was in charge of a Young Pioneer camp, and he could have been sentenced to eight years for embezzling Party funds. He was too trusting of people round him. Even though he was acquitted, his career was ruined. You know how it is: a man has a coat stolen off him and five years later nobody can remember if he was the thief or the victim—he just goes on smelling rotten. Well, it was after this that I began to change. I found myself walking round the streets thinking: what else, what else? I realized then that my parents weren’t religious at all. They just went to church out of habit.’
We had slowed to a standstill. Two women were embracing over a nearby grave, clutching at each other, weeping. They were Russians. The older was wailing in half-pagan grief.
Edvigs turned away. ‘I think ninety per cent of my friends feel as I do,’ he said. ‘They’re religious at heart…But there’s no God left.’
Between the World Wars there was a place commemorated in this cemetery where the bodies of Latvian civilians, executed by Bolsheviks in 1919, were thrown into a pit. It used to be marked simply by a crucifix nailed to the trunk of a pine tree, and inscribed astonishingly ‘Father, forgive them’. It has, of course, gone.
Edvigs had not even heard of it. This history, too, belonged to his parents. And in a way, he said, he envied them. Such memories were a kind of freedom, whereas his generation had been brought up from infancy in a world of fallacy and intrusion.
‘You’re always treated like a child. There’s nothing but bureaucracy, dogma, interference! It’s all so stupid. They even ask you questions if you’re still unmarried at my age. Not officially, of course, but things are insinuated. They want to know what’s wrong with you.’ The bulldog jowls quivered. ‘But not being married could be precisely a man’s most vulnerable point—some real grief—impotence, homosexuality. And this interference starts from the moment you’re born. If you do badly at primary school your parents and schoolmaster get together and say: ‘What’s wrong with you, little Edvigs, why don’t you want to work?’ They set up a commission. You’re considered abnormal. And it’s like that all the way through. You’re made to feel you’re letting down society, the system, the country. God!’ he blazed incongruously, ‘Who is the country, the system? The country is me too! Let me breathe!’
My last evening in Riga was spent at a concert in the city’s cathedral, whose towering Romanesque nave, lined with the tombs and memorials of Teutonic bishops, sent up a heady cloud of Germanism. More than two thousand people—plain-dressed Latvians mostly, with blunt working faces—listened to Bach preludes with a reverent intentness. The cathedral’s organ is the fourth largest in the world—6,768 pipes of different woods and metal alloys, ranging in length from ten meters to a few millimetres. It touched the darkening air with a fathomless hush, and rolled its fortissimi effortlessly down the aisles.
As the light faded in the stained-glass windows, the carved and painted coats-of-arms of German barons glimmered out of the walls and pillars where they hung—stupendous Gothic armatures drowned in Renaissance detail. Above each scutcheoned shield, notched for its jousting-lance and blazoned with turrets and crowns, lodged a helmet mantled in fountains of strawberry-leaves and ribbonry; while on either side wyverns and lions and stallions—rampant, couchant, winged, maned, horned—grappled with swords and banners or made way for officious-looking Prussian cupids. As twilight filled the aisles, and the choir launched on Mozart’s Requiem, this defunct heraldry only brooded huger on the walls, as if its dispersed owners—worshippers of soldier-saints and a martial variant of the Virgin Mary—might yet return to fight the Swedes or bully Hanseatic cities. But the coats-of-arms betray them. In these, the sober arsenal of the early knights—a grim Westphalian nobility of liege-lords and landmeisters—have frothed and fattened into the snobbish paraphernalia of an emasculated sixteenth century chivalry. For by the time these hatchments flowered into their final quarterings and marshallings, and the last lozenges and roundels were in place, the Teutonic Knights had declined into a ceremonial and near-powerless court, vassals of Poland.
Yet their influence lived on. Their surviving aristocracy was not disenfranchized until the land reforms of Latvian independence between the World Wars. And their culture continued obliquely all about me in the solemn Lutheran faces which drank in the pathos of Mozart’s Lacrimosa and the exultant bonfire of the Sanctus.
Orchestra and choir together were concealed beneath the organ case, a harvest of grey-gold sheafs hung up in the gloom, and their music filled the nave with unearthly fervour. I was disproportionately moved by it. The soloists, I could tell, were poor. But for the moment they seemed to offer some international sacrament, a force of healing.
‘Hopeless,’ murmured the girl beside me, as the Agnus Dei lifted to its end. She had been shaking her head in the interval and complaining about the vocal standard. ‘I could sing the contralto better myself.’
She seemed to mean it. I looked into a face of Latvian freshness. She’d longed to be a singer, she said—she had even trained with Arkhipova in Moscow—but her tuition had been ended by two operations. We left the cathedral together and walked back through the lanes. She was staying in the same hotel as me, she said. This was strange. I wondered vaguely if she were attached to the KGB, then mislaid the thought. She gave out an almost infantile frankness. She prattled about music and Western cosmetics, and brushed her body against mine as we walked. She seemed a living illustration of that tender, incontinent quality—the Russians untranslatably call it umileniye—that belongs to a world in which nothing intrudes between a feeling and its expression.