Riga
Photos by Author and From His Family Archive
When did things become real? Was there ever a precise moment, or were there just shadings and layers, things becoming realer by degrees…
Was it the deaths—first my father, then my mother—or was it before, when they started failing, needing more and more help? Or much later, when my sister and brother and I made our plans to fly to Riga to bring their ashes to the family gravesite, or when we faced that most disturbing prospect, of dividing those ashes, some to take and some to leave behind…?
My father died in August of 2017 and my mother in December of 2020. Both were cremated. The urn holding my father’s ashes sat on a shelf, first in the apartment they had shared in the Wingate Residences, and later in the apartment my mother moved into when Covid19 made life difficult at Wingate. After she died, her ashes and my father’s stayed in my sister’s keeping until such a time when we three siblings could fly to Riga to fulfill their wish to be buried there.
When we finally fly to Riga next week it will be nearly three years since my mother died and six since my father. Covid stalled so many things—the urns remained on my sister’s shelf for such a long time. My sense of those ashes has changed over time. They have lost much of their charge, which is to be expected. I remember leaving the funeral home after each cremation. What a weight in the bag I carried to the car, what a strange feeling to be driving with what was left of my parent in the back seat. This is what remains, I thought, and then a small jolt: this is why they are called remains.
Over these several years the ashes have become familiar, as have the deaths, at least the fact of them.
But I find that getting ready to lay our parents to rest changes things; brings them back out of that oblivion. Their remains must be dealt with, separated, parceled out, approved for transport...
The ashes and the knowledge of what—who—they were wakens in me the fantasy of the rewind. Going back in time—back through the slow failures of the later years, and back, through their last period of prime, to the time when—I realize with a start—I’m remembering them when they’re the age I am now...What a strange circuit that makes. How were they? Healthy? Happy in their lives? Oblivious to all that I know will eventually happen. Then the film breaks. Here are the ashes in their urns, their three grown children looking to wrap things up.
The very real question: who are we laying to rest? Which parents? All of them? I distinguish—I know I do, I can’t help it. The mother and the father I carry with me in some deeper way are the people who brought me up, who were the center of things for roughly a twenty year period, which means from their later twenties to their mid-forties, something like that. Those are the parents who are the subject of my most vivid memories, whose voices and gestures can flare up in me anytime, anywhere. They are the ones my sister and I can call back to life with a few coded phrases. I might look at her and say “Ritens ripo Rigai rinki” and we can bring it up together: not some specific memory, but a defining sort of atmosphere. It’s a silly phrase, it literally means, “the tire is rolling in a circle around Riga.” Spoken by all of us countless times, playfully, for the fun of the sounds—it is the textbook illustration of alliteration.
Because we three children live our grown-up lives in America in the world of English, we speak Latvian now only on rare occasions—mostly when we try to nudge one another into remembering something from that past. That fact alone insures that there is another, intimate resonance to these words. Not just the words, but the sounds, the intonations, and the world of our growing up that infiltrates everything. There is no getting to the bottom of this. It’s a saturation.
I’ve tried to describe it many times, the coexistence of the two languages, how it feels to carry them, and, most tellingly, how it feels to switch from English into Latvian, and back, which I do in my head every so often just to remind myself of the difference. One analogy I came up with was with closing one eye, then opening and closing the other. But that does not quite fit, because Latvian came first and those words have the power of being the originals. “Lauks” was a field before “field” came along to replace it; “laiva” was a boat before “boat.” The differences run deep. I was Peter—“Peteris”—before I was Sven.
I came into a world where there was already a word for everything. I naturally assumed there was some higher intelligence.
I have been to Latvia five times over a period of fifty-plus years. The first time was when I was in my teens—my parents took Andra and me to meet my father’s mother, Merija, and to tour the sites of their youth. I saw all the places, many of them familiar from their conversations over the years—the beautiful park and the corner where the cinema had stood, Elizabeth Street where my mother had grown up in bourgeois luxury, and the apartment where my father had lived with his mother, who still lived there.
That apartment building felt rough. The Soviets had divided once sizable apartments into smaller units, and a number of Russian families lived there. I remember a dark stairwell with wide steps, and in my grandmother’s bathroom squares of cut-up newspapers stacked by the side of the toilet. A piano, the top covered with an embroidered cloth. Photographs and books, and fresh-cut flowers in a large vase.
The books and piano had seen their day. Merija, who had been a linguist and a schoolteacher, had lost most of her sight to cataracts. She depended on the kind assistance of a group of her most devoted students, who set up a rotation for shopping, cooking, and cleaning. Fresh flowers were brought every day.
That first was a sentimental visit. I felt uncomfortable every time my father—less so my mother—brought us together to point something out. “This is the window where I sat,” he would say, “and watched for my mother to come home from her teaching...” That brought a sharp twist because of the background story. My father’s father, Peteris—my middle name—left the marriage when my father was born; he moved to a small house on the Jurmala to do his work—writing and folklore studies. Though he lived mere kilometers away, my father never once set eyes on the man, though Merija did once tell me that she would sometimes see him walk past the park where she took my father to play. She worked full-time and raised him by herself.
My second visit, so I remember, was when I was in my twenties. My sister and I traveled to Riga via Moscow—this was still the Soviet era—and the images that flicker back to me are specific and disconnected from one another: drinking kvass, a vague grain-based concoction on our Aeroflot flight into Moscow; standing in the crowded waiting room of the train station walking up and down and calling out “Vai kads seit runa Latvisk?” (Does anyone here speak Latvian?) for we had lost our way and couldn’t find our train to Riga; and then Merija clasping her hands together and calling out in a high voice when we stepped into her apartment...
I’ve been back a few more times in recent years; I’ve spent time at the ultra-modern library my father designed, and experienced cosmopolitan Riga. I can close my eyes and picture it as it is now. But nothing can displace what I think of now as the old Riga, the Riga of my grandparents and my parents’ youth. It’s a city that I’ve stylized and romanticized, filled up with the atmospheres of my parents reminiscing, and come to visualize in the sepia tones of the photographs in family envelopes. I find it harder to imagine Riga in the colors we live among, though we will be there soon enough.
The scenarios I carry around are not of a piece. They live, like most of anyone’s past, in fragments, objects and photographs and remembered stories. My grandfather’s paintings, we have five or six here on the walls. Most of them were—technically—painted during his time in Germany after the war, or else in America, in Michigan, where he lived out his last years, but to me, on account of my particular fixation, they are all about that past. And the myriad little tokens, the amber necklace in my mother’s drawer, the massive bound volumes of folk sayings that my grandmother and grandfather compiled before he left the marriage. Or the objects in the trove I uncovered going through my father’s desk drawers after he died. There were several wallets, old passports, photos where he posed with his basketball team; buttons, insignias—so many things little enough to fit into a few tin boxes—but as I picked them up one by one, I felt them weighty in their signification.
It was a huge task, going through my parents’ things—decisions had to be made. There was no way to read what was sentimentally loaded and what was not. A photograph of my father standing with an unknown young woman somewhere in Germany—who will ever know, but something could be lost to the world if I discarded it. Everything matters, but we mostly don’t know why or to whom. Do we just keep everything on those grounds? It’s not a trivial matter. Speaking for myself, I define my contours, in a sense, by all the things I cannot seem to throw away, however useless they might appear to be.
But behind everything, more than the objects, the photos, the private souvenirs, too deeply in me to be discarded, is the language. The words, the living totality of them:
vilciens (train) sunis (dog) ziepes (soap) devsels (soul) chuska (snake) sniegs (snow)
laiva (boat) glesna (painting) trauki (dishes)
gulta (bed) gramata (book) karote (spoon) udens (water) akmenis (stone)
bikses (pants) piens (milk) raksti (writings) avize (newspaper) uguns (fire) …
Words that through their shapes and sounds create a world, and saturate the mind with the most intimate associations. We don’t just trade one language for another. It’s not like learning a language in high school, where words are only that, counters for objects and acts. I move from one lived language to another.
In the second language, English, the words don’t have the same shadows; they don’t get spoken within a field of intimate associations.
I can bring back the feeling of the threshold from the early days of school, speaking English all day in class and on the playground, and then coming home to have my mother “Ka gaija sodien skola?” How was school?
As it was my first, I have always thought of Latvian as part of my core identity. But now, getting ready to travel, I face up to the fact that over there I will be the outsider. I know from previous visits that I am wary, hyper-aware of words I don’t really know because we did not use them at home. Writerly words, nuanced usages. I am worse with written Latvian, where I often guess at word endings, tenses, and the correct agreement.
The writer George Steiner had a word for the feeling of being between languages and therefore cultures. Extraterritorial.
There is the matter of closure. So long as my mother was alive, however fragile her sense of things had become, she was a living connection to Latvia and the past as she remembered it. The names, the words...When she died that connection was suddenly gone.
The idea of ‘no more’ means little to a child or a teenager but takes on increasing weight as one gets older. Experience, past and present, has a different shine, a longer shadow. To fly back home after placing the urns will in some sense be about leaving behind the sources—anecdotes, the places and people invoked, the generations—the deep story of my family. I will still ‘have’ it, of course, in the sense that I do now, but it will also be different. It will all have migrated entirely into the mind, become a world unto itself.
My sister has been texting me photos as we prepare, mostly of our parents. She sent one the other day that right away choked me up. It shows my father sitting alone next to the family tomb. There are flowers in a vase on top of the marble platform, a scatter of leaves. He is wearing sunglasses, and sits with his legs straddled, a cane held between them. His expression is hard to read. He seems to be looking at a plaque which has a relief of a cherubic boy holding an open book. I can’t imagine what he might be thinking.
The image speaks. My father was the only child of book people. His mother was a folklorist, philologist and school teacher, his father a folklorist and also the writer—along with his brother—of books on many subjects. His father’s desertion is vividly there in the emblem. As is for me the knowledge that my father himself grew up to be not much of a reader. Newspapers and architectural journals, that was all. It’s hard not to see this as signifying.
A few years back, my father had arranged for all of us—his children, their spouses, grandchildren—to fly to Riga to attend the opening ceremony of the Latvian National Library. It was the most important commission of his life, more than a decade in the completion. Construction had stopped and then re-started due to funding and political wrangling. But at last it was done, and there was to be full pomp and circumstance, with orchestra and choir, Latvia’s President attending, speeches and receptions.
The day before the ceremony my father hired a bus and a driver, and sixteen of us, his cousin Maija included, were taken to the cemetery, a vast, beautiful old world place with trees, winding paths, statues...There he led us to the family site, where his mother, Merija, and step-father, Indriks, are buried. He asked us to gather in a semi-circle around the wide marble platform and when he had our attention, he bent over and pulled back a slab of marble. Beneath was a rectangular space. “This,” he said, “is where Sylvia and I will one day be buried.” Did he say “Remember this moment” or have I embellished? My father was properly somber, my mother turned away, rejecting the idea, as she had and would for the rest of her life.
I have in my possession a red file box that contains various family papers, including long, taped-together sheets that unfold into a family genealogy. There is also a separate document of some hundred or so pages that is an annotated genealogy of the Birkerts family starting back in the 1700s.
I knew I had these materials, but I had let them fall into the oblivion of moving boxes and storage areas. I didn’t set them aside to study because, truth be told, the typescript was faint, much faded, on thin paper, and, yes, in Latvian, which I can read, but not easily.
We don’t easily think that far back. Life is overwhelming in the present, vivid and personally exclusive. As the years pass, the grandparents—we had them in our lives for a few years—stand out more in anecdote and family photos than in memory. Any earlier kin trail off into legend, or don’t enter the thoughts at all.
But that afternoon, when I found those papers in their file box, I was suddenly full of conjecture and imagining. There are roots, deep-reaching ones, and as far as records go they seem to reach into the mid-17th century. These are seen on the long taped together sheet with its innumerable branching staves, inked in names and dates, not to be meaningfully untangled. But the bigger fact was there. On my father’s side of the family I come from many generations of people employed by the great German landowners of the times. Not field workers, I remember being told, but domestic helpers—grooms, valets, household staff. To feed my imaginings, I have a few photographs of the Latvian countryside, and several landscape paintings, some by my grandfather, Mike, and others by well-known Latvian artists like Indrikis Zeberins and Vilhelms Purvitis.
That’s as far as my reach extends, but I understand that as vague as my sense of connection is, those generations were there, and the earth turned many thousands of times.
For many years—my whole childhood—I had mostly negative feelings about being Latvian. Desperate to assimilate, to have an American boyhood, I felt that our foreignness, our home language, excluded me from any inner circle. Maybe it was all in my mind, but there it was.
As for the country itself, nobody, not even some of my teachers, knew where Latvia was. The little country on the Baltic Sea. “Are you Latin?” people would ask. No. But when I tried to explain how I was not, I could feel the interest fading.
I felt it was a yoke, an obstacle. I was very glad that my parents did not join any of the church or social groups, that they kept their Latvian-ness to themselves. What I could not abide was the way they—my father mostly—sacralized all things Latvian, and did so often by contrasting with things American. This soft bread, this canned music, these idiots on TV, cartoons, the obsession with baseball...Nothing like what they had known growing up.
LNB. Latvijas Nacionala Biblioteka. The Latvian National Library.
There it sits, by itself on the banks of the Daugava, colossal, reputedly the largest library in the world, silvery and sharply angled. It is the most conspicuous building in Riga and the final completion was a triumph. To move the hundreds of thousands of volumes from the old library, the people of the city formed a human chain, passing the books from hand to hand, a fabulous spectacle, as I’ve seen in film clips.
Through all of the years of my growing up, my father spoke of destiny. He believed his purpose in life was to follow a track that was somehow laid out in front of him. That track, in my mind, ultimately sketched a grand symbolic circuit of exile and return.
Though my father was born into a literary family and a world of books, but he went the other way. Not only did he not read, he often took up against reading: it was impractical, an escapist dodge, a refusal to engage the real stuff of the world. What a sublime irony that he should be invited to be the architect of the capital city’s temple of books. Had his mother lived to see the day! But my interpretation, which I never brought up to him—it was too loaded—was that the building, the cultural triumph of it, was a psychological retort to the man who left him, who then lived another twenty five years without making the least contact. “If you were only here to see!”
The whole family flew to Riga for the opening ceremony. We rode in several taxis from the airport to the city center and just before reaching the bridge across the Daugava we all saw it, looming on the right, massive as some calved iceberg, the library. His legacy.
The cemetery memorial awaits us. The two names on the marble now are my grandmother’s and that of Indrikis Saule-Sleine, my father’s step-father, who she married when my father was still a boy.
Though Merije and Indriks were married for some years, my father hardly ever talked about him, except to say that he had been a quiet man, and that he had been a geographer by profession. When I spent a week in Latvia years later, in the many conversations we had, Merija herself mentioned Indriks only in passing. Her mentor, the philologist Janis Endzelins, was more present in her accounts. But the key figure, brought up over and over, exonerated—he had to leave to do his work—was Peteris. So many years later, after a lifetime of sorrow, he was still the one. I sat next to her bed as she talked, and I could feel it: she had never let him go. He was a great man, she said, exempt from ordinary things. She also prophesied that my father was carrying on that destiny.
Today the death certificates for my parents arrived. They are required documentation for any transport of ashes. The thinnest envelope. Two folded letter-sized sheets, each with the basic facts: date, place, cause, address at time of death, etc. If a bag of ashes constitutes one kind of reduction, this document is another. My parents survive as a set of summaries. Sic transit.
The finale of the great human drama is working itself out right here. Adult children transporting their parents’ remains to their home place. Long lives lived and at last concluded. Solemnity observed at every point—to the point where it’s hard to make room for all that was real in these lives.
Preparing to leave, I have the feeling of a waterfall up ahead on the river, pulling everything toward itself.
Maija Vanaga, my father’s cousin, is the only family relative we have left in Latvia. I’ve met her on a number of occasions over the course of various visits, and like her very much. She is about ten years older, has Latvian seniority, but she has none of the formality that I have always associated with older Latvians. Every Latvian I met throughout my childhood seemed to me stiff and almost censoriously formal, including my grandmother.
Maija is straight-on, direct, with an edge of drollery. She looks me in the eye, and I feel an essential sympathy coming from her. She has been central to all of our planning. She has coordinated with people at the cemetery, has lined up people to clean the existing plaques, has commissioned the engraver for the new ones. I can’t imagine any part of our repatriation of ashes happening without her.
I don’t remember much about Sophocles’ Antigone, except that the plot turned on Antigone’s determination to bury her brother, to appease the gods but against the wishes of her father, Creon, the king of Thebes. It’s a concept we long since let go of, gods or no gods, but a vestige survives:some sense that the circuit of life is not complete until the body returns to the earth. Ashes to ashes.
Ashes have become such a part of my contemplation. Not just the idea of return and completion, but I’m also wondering what putting them to rest might change. Will my parents recede even further out of their former immediacy, enter history, become part of the record of what’s done and finished? Do our memories age along with us?
My sister has now made an album commemorating both our parents to bring to Latvia, with photos of each as children, and then together as a couple, from courtship and wedding to their later years. Sequences like this are always poignant. I felt I was moving them forward through time by turning the pages.
Things I notice: the little things:
My father as a young boy. He stands on a balcony and squints at the camera. He wears a sailor suit. On the ledge next to him are two wooden blocks and a spool. I assume he is building something, that part of him already engaged, never mind that every boy that age plays with blocks.
My mother, maybe five, posing with a wide hat, an umbrella, and a cigarette in her mouth. Really just a rolled up paper, of course, but the striking of a pose is already there. It’s very hard to find a photo in which she is unaware of the camera.
My mother, again at the roughly same age, posing with her mother, Emilia, leaning her head against the fur collar of her coat. Not a warm photo. My grandmother looks a bit severe, lips tightly drawn. Both are wearing stylish hats. Of course they are—my grandmother owned a millinery shop. The most exclusive in Riga, she used to say.
Where my father, an only child, grew up with a working mother, my mother—also an only child—was pampered. When the war came she moved with her parents in a displaced persons area in Bavaria. My father, cut off from his mother at 16, spent many fraught months trekking through wartime Germany before ending up in Stuttgart, where he then studied architecture. It was during this time that he met my mother.
Another photo shows my father and mother in America, arms outstretched, holding hands, in front of a large house—not theirs. This was most likely taken before I was born. My mother, always slim, looks chubby in her dress. My parents would joke about this years later. How when she came to America, living with her parents in Princeton—this is before my father arrived—she discovered milkshakes. After her years in Germany she couldn’t get enough of this sweet novelty. My father liked to say about his arrival: “I almost turned around right then.”
Here is my father, dressed in a sweater and suit coat, leaning toward the camera with a big smile, brandishing a long black comb in his right hand. His thick hair is combed straight back, several prominent waves showing. I never saw him with his hair combed that way. When we were growing up he had a standard sort of cut. He wore dark-rimmed glasses and my sister and I called him Clark Kent.
Completely uncharacteristic: my mother striking a pose of relaxation on a garishly flowered couch. Where was this? Where was my father? Knowing how stringent his aesthetic was, I assume that he had not arrived at Ellis Island yet. My mother is smiling, holding open a newspaper, looking for all the world like an American housewife in an ad for air-freshener.
The photos that follow jump rather abruptly into later life---from their twenties into their sixties, seventies, eighties, and one that shows my father at ninety with his fingers held out toward the camera in vampire-cross fashion, though what he intends with that gesture is unclear.
Among the final photos in the album are a few that stand out to me. One is a family portrait taken sometime in the early 2000s. Through some concerted cooperation, we were all—parents, us three children, our spouses, our children— together for a week on Cape Cod. I can’t imagine it now: how did that happen? But there it was and there we were. My parents would have been in their late seventies. Our daughter Mara has that mid-teens look about her, Liam was maybe eight or nine.
This is one of the very few photos that catches all of us—most of us—in its frame. When grandchildren began to arrive, it was very difficult to get the generations fully represented. Only two other such occasions come to mind. One is a portrait taken just outside the Latvian cemetery. We were all together in Riga—spouses, grandchildren, everyone—for the grand opening of the Latvian National Library. This was in 2014.
In the other, the whole family poses together on the lawn of the Latvian Church in Brookline—my mother, the three siblings with their spouses and children, almost the same group as before, but a very different feeling. We have all just come together for a remembrance of our father, some months after his death. Just three years after our time in the Old Country.
The last image in the compendium was one I had never seen before. This surprised me. I thought I knew all the family photos. But this—where did it come from? The photo is full color, both parents smiling into the camera, but not posing—the image was caught on the wing. They are full of youth, and they are so obviously happy. Ages—my father 25, my mother 23. A perfect closing image. Them, mother and father, before the work of family, still unburdened by us and by everything that would come. If I could determine how I would henceforth remember them, it would be like this, even though that was such a small part of the ‘all of it.’
As our departure gets closer, there are many exchanges in all directions, Maija asking about things, filling us in about arrangements, me in turn passing any news on to sister and brother, and so on. In the latest exchange, Maija wanted to know what we were thinking about the actual placement of the urns. Did we want music, a violinist, say? Or—she didn’t think so—a minister to preside? Or were we three planning on speaking?
I checked with Andra and the first two options were scratched. But there should be something. She made it clear right off that she couldn’t see herself speaking, and I knew already that my reticent brother Erik wouldn’t. Clearly there would have to be some words spoken. It would be up to me.
This ceremonial duty had me rattled, I’ll admit. Any speaking to any audience is a challenge. Teaching for thirty or so years, I was able to find a style: slightly wry, confident, pacing it all out to make sure everyone was following. But this would be very different. I would be graveside, and I would be speaking to four people—my siblings, Maija and her grown son, Martin. I would be speaking in the mother tongue, of our parents.
I was having coffee with a friend and I was talking about our preparations. I told him that I didn’t know how I would feel there at the cemetery. After all, my parents had now been dead for years—I had lived with the loss, gone through so many memories; I had written at length about both and had worked through a good part of the generational history. What was I likely to feel?
“You have no idea,” said my friend, “and whatever it is, it won’t be what you might imagine.” It seemed such a sensible thing to say, and I nodded. But in the car heading home, it came over me like a wave, a kind of prophecy: that I would be moving into something new, that the scheme of things might in some way change. The burial was not just final closure for those being buried, but that it was also a psychological release for the survivors, all symbolic of course, but nonetheless real.
I realize I haven’t packed in this way for a very long time. I think of boarding the airplane as walking through a door, but I have little sense of what is there on the other side.
The morning of the day my sister and I are to fly—I’ve stayed the night at her house—I wake to a cry of alarm coming from her bedroom. Then a commotion. A minute later Andra is standing in the kitchen, agitated. “There was a bird in the bedroom—it came in through the open window and then it flew back out.”
We look at each other. We are both thinking the same thing. “What kind of bird?” I ask it pro forma. She only nods. A sparrow—of course a sparrow. The Latvian name for sparrow is Zvirbulis. Our mother’s maiden name.
I’ve never known what to do about these kinds of things. Given the vein of superstition on my mother’s side of the family, I’m a ready mark, wavering uneasily between credence and skepticism. So is Andra. The question in the air is not so much whether it was an omen so much as what kind of omen it might be.
Benign, we decided: our trip has been blessed. Some small part of me accepted the interpretation. And now that I’m back, I can testify that it was, at least in the obvious outer ways: smooth flights both ways, a comfortable and friendly hotel, smooth interactions with all the people we spent time with, and five days of the best kind of weather—clear skies, no humidity.
But I’ve leapt forward far too quickly. There was the night at Andra’s, the matter of the ashes. Which had really been no more than an idea of a task until I arrived. I did know the ashes awaited us, but suddenly the prospect of dividing them loomed. It’s one thing to imagine, another to physically deal with. In terms of the process, not much was required. Andra had the plastic bags we would travel with, she had the ties, the scoop, and just out of sight, in a larger container, she had the ashes of each of our parents.
As steeled as one might be—I thought I was—there is no avoiding the obvious drama of the split, the gulf. Between the weighty bag of ash and the knowledge of what the grainy substance was: the originators and protectors, full of all the stuff of a life. And now? Five pounds—I’m guessing. I undo the tie, take a breath, and lower the scoop into the mass, dipping five or six times, until the carrying canister is full. Then the plastic lid is snapped into place and the canister is placed in a soft black cloth bag —
— the same bag that is extracted at the airport baggage check at Logan, the inspector asking me what is inside, giving his condolences when I tell him, and as I watch, opening the plastic seal, shaking out a small bit of the contents, and then producing several little bottles of chemicals and an eye-dropper, testing for reaction. Apparently there is none, so he closes the bag, replaces it respectfully in the other bag, and once again gives me his condolences. His father, he says, is 93, my father’s age when he died.
When we arrive at our hotel in Riga—the Hotel Gutenberg—the woman at the desk produces the large bag we had been told would be waiting for us. Maija has left two substantial wooden urns, which will receive the ashes and will then be brought to the cemetery where we will inter them in the special niche my father had designed.
And the very next thing—that’s how I remember it—my brother, sister and I are together in a ride share heading to the cemetery where we will meet Maija and her son Martin.
I can’t help but think about the elasticity of time and the proportionate value of things. The three of us meet Maija and Martin at the main intersection in the cemetery, in front of the monument to the poet Rainis, and we walk the short distance to the family site. It’s the matter of less than an hour, getting to the place, going through a simple ritual. We set the two urns in the open space, each of us throwing in three handfuls of dirt; then comes the placement of flowers on the marble slab with their names and dates. As eldest, I offer a few thoughts—I talk about the distances traveled, the history lived, the rightness of the return. At that point, Maija and Andra light candles and place them in front on the marble platform. We are done. Almost.
There is one other person present, an older man who has contrived to be so inconspicuous that I forget he is there. He is fairly slight, dressed in workman’s clothes. I saw him standing a short distance from the grave, and it was only when we got closer that I saw that a shallow trench had been dug in the place where the marble had been pulled back, and that there was a short shovel leaning against a shrub.
He remains in the far background until we are finished, and then, taking a cue from Maija, he steps quickly past us, picks up his shovel, and starts shoveling the dirt back into the small trench he had dug. He is brisk and at the same time respectful.
Again I register the great gulf between that most basic action, the shoveling, and what it is that was being removed from us. My father, my mother—the splattering sound of dirt on the wooden urns...
That was exactly a week ago. I’ve been home for three days now, and I’m amazed at how quickly that period of intensity faded. Disbelief. I think of old-style tube televisions, how when you turned them off everything would fold in toward a dot at the center of the screen, which would shine for a moment and then blink out.
I exaggerate, of course, but it’s also true that the new immediate displaces everything, drives yesterday’s sharp brightness into the background, where it remains until something—like Proust’s Marcel stumbling on a loose cobblestone—brings it back again.
The scenes fade, the sensations and conversations, but the event itself, the laying of the ashes in their urns, remains, its finality sure to re-center the life in ways I can’t yet imagine. The deaths, each and both, had that effect. I thought that I had mourned each loss. But so long as we had their ashes in canisters on this side of the ocean, the circle was not closed. I didn’t recognize this until I heard the rasp of the man’s shovel.
It struck me at that moment that the seventy years they lived in America were for them ultimately years of exile. They created a family life, my father built a career—for the three of us that was all we knew. But standing by their grave, it was suddenly so clear: all that living had taken place as if between parentheses. And the word came back to me with a whole new resonance. Dzimtene (homeland).
Sven Birkerts is the author, most recently, of The Miró Worm and the Mysteries of Writing. He is the former director of the Bennington Writing Seminars and co-editor of AGNI. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.