I tell her about the journey we’re making. I say, “This place of yours is magnificent, it nourishes the soul.”
But Nelly cuts to the chase. She replies, “You’re a handsome fellow,” and it’s as though she had said, “This Italian rooster is mine for the plucking.”
I respond that I’m an old codger with a two-week-old beard and that I’m in urgent need of a barber so I can go out in public.
Nelly: “What barber? Come to my house in the country, and I’ll take care of your beard.” Monika translates, undaunted.
Next comes a friend of Nelly’s, as brigandesque as she. Her name is Janna. Nelly calls out to her and says, “Come here, come here, this guy’s Italian.”
So Janna takes the field, too. “What do you do for work?”
“I’m a writer,” I reply.
The two look at each other surprised. Up to now, they’ve met only rich wholesalers or chain-store reps. Who knows, they wonder, how rich a writer is.
Janna, decisively: “Come out to our ranch. We can milk the cows together, and then drink the warm milk.”
Nelly: “Come on, I’ll teach you how to milk; you’ll see how easy it is.”
Janna draws a map on my notebook of how to get to their town and writes down her name and phone number. She continues: “I’ve got a special tie to Italy. A dear friend of mine is married to a Sardinian.”
I tell them that Italy is beautiful, but we like the countryside of the Baltic countries. The smells, the people.
Nelly won’t let up. “We can spend a wonderful day together. Come to our place. Tomorrow is not a market day.”
There’s no escape. I keep repeating my we, but the two of them go right on with the singular you. They’re in the market for an Italian chicken. They look at Monika as though she’s a secretary/interpreter, and it’s easy to understand why, because such is the usual companion of the Italian man traveling on business.
Telling them that we have our own work deadlines is useless, so we don’t have any choice. We’re forced to get out of the fix in English, making a false promise of an appointment for the next day. With all best wishes to Janna, Nelly, and their milk and honey candies.
We have arranged a meeting at a café in the center of town with a Latvian Pole, an attractive, distinguished-looking woman named Regina. She explains to us that Rezekne is actually part of one of the many cross-border regions that were broken up by the empires and consequently erased from the maps. “Here we are in Latgale,” she explains, “a place of Lutherans, Orthodox, Catholics, and Jews, whose plurality is a headache for the Latvians of Riga.” Russian has been the lingua franca here for centuries. The Soviet occupation has very little to do with it. “It was full of Germans here, and Hitler saw those Teutonic advance guards as the prototype of the new Aryan race, cold colonizers.”
It’s not easy to explain this complicated place, and Regina has to help herself with a drawing. She tears out a page from my notebook and draws a Baltic space that is totally new, where the nation-states are absent but historical regions crop up on all sides. Jutland, Livonia, Latgale, and then, in Polish, lands whose untranslatable names sound more or less like Kizensky, Zenigalsky, Rizensky, Vizensky. They are the territories of the “Deluge,” swept away by the Polish-Swedish War, a disaster that destroyed Poland like a “plague of locusts” between 1600 and 1629. The drawing is thick with annotations and important dates: 1553, 1583, 1722, 1795, arrows indicating the movements of the armies, lines representing roads but more often borders, occupations, liberations. Looking at this brown-haired woman bending over her map, I realize that Latvia is the center of my journey. That paper is a cornerstone, the frame of the squeaking front door to old Europe. A Sarajevo of the North.
Ludza—yet again the shadow of the frontier. Clouds swirling above lakes and forests, over the maternal dome of the Orthodox church and the spire of the Catholic one, like a meringue. Once the country’s population was 50 percent Jewish, and it is said that in 1906, when a pogrom was ordered from outside, the local Christian population rebelled and proudly saved their Jews. Today the people of the synagogue have vanished, and Russians have taken their place.
Forgotten by the central government in Riga, they are the new “strangers.” We arrive in town on the day of the Latvian national holiday, on which it is obligatory to display the flag. A scowling Russian is in the process of lowering his flag at twilight and says, “I have to show the flag; if not, they hit you with a fine.” Like everyone who is part of the ex-Soviet minority, he too is under special surveillance. We have a lot of good reasons to explore the lake.
Already at seven thirty the streets are deserted. The only open store is the alcohol-and-sweets shop across the street from the Orthodox church. It’s a curfew that cannot be explained simply by the lake being so near to Russia. This is the void left by a heavy absence, and it is surely the absence of the Jews. Monika strikes up a conversation with Anna Sergeyevna, who is looking out the window of her ground-floor apartment together with her granddaughter Viktoria and a six-month-old dog. There’s only one Jew left, she says. His name is Bernacki and he is a lovely person. He lives two blocks from her house, on the way to the country. “The others have all gone. They come back every now and again just to visit their dead in the cemetery.” But for a lot of the dead Jews, as we know, there is not even a tomb; after the Holocaust, all that’s left of them is a name on a plaque. But when did the last Jews leave? In the early 1990s, as soon as the Communist regime fell and it was easier to get a visa. And the synagogue? Where was the synagogue? Anna Sergeyevna points the way. It’s about three hundred yards toward the lake. It was right under our noses and we hadn’t even noticed.
The void—that’s the sensation of the curfew in Ludza. A recent void, unfilled and perhaps unfillable. The Jews did not disappear in the Hitler years, as we had thought, but fifty years later. The break is recent, perhaps irreparable, in this all-Russian ghetto where Latvians would rather not live. But there’s the synagogue.
In the style of the 1700s, in dark wood, with a roof that looks like the upside-down hull of a galleon, alone on the edge of the lake populated by ducks. Before we left on our journey, Monika had showed me a book on wooden Jewish houses of worship in Eastern Europe ( The Doors of Heaven) and now I am looking at one of those forgotten masterpieces here in Ludza, where Mount Zion seems to have wedded the forests of the North. Through the basement windows, we can see that the books are still there. Nothing but the wind has touched them. Abandonment, not devastation. Until 1991, we are told by people in the neighboring houses, you could still see the lights shining on the first floor.
The ground floor is bolted shut, but we’re able to get inside through the women’s gallery by way of a shaky external stair. From up top, you can see everything: the ark, the side benches under the large windows, the octagonal elevated platform for the reading of the Torah, the ceiling like the keel of a ship, on which something may have been painted. Under the gallery, a collection of closets, old books still open, ornaments that shine in the half-light of the evening.
It’s striking to feel like an archaeologist of an era that ended less than thirty years ago. We go out to look at the lake in the twilight. Water the color of bronze, the sky almost green, two semicapsized boats, a small monument to the Jews exterminated by the Nazis. The splash of a jumping fish that breaks the silence. Amid the many flourishing trees, there is only one that’s black and dried up. On one of its branches, two crows as black as the tree seem to be listening and eager to tell us something. Then we are swallowed by the night, the first really dark night of our journey. We go to bed without saying another word.