The next day we go back there. Monika has a sense that there’s something more. There’s a house that has an air of mystery about it. It looks like a puzzle, as though in just a few years not one but five or six eras had superimposed themselves in it, inside and outside of the perimeter walls. In the garden there is an old woman hoeing. She too is clearly Russian, and her name is Rita. “Yes, the Jews used to pray here, too,” she says with a wide smile, and she explains that the synagogue was transformed into a barn by some beastly men in uniform. Those animals declared the people that prayed there “aliens,” killed them, and buried them in the woods. One day, however, the barn again hosted pious men and became a place of celebration, music, and joy. But since in the lives of mankind, the dark times and the joyous times inevitably alternate, one day the house again became a place of sadness, the last refuge of people labeled “aliens” by a heartless Europe.
This is the story of Rita and Volodya, old Russians trapped in Latvia by the latest shift of the moving frontiers, an unimaginable story of forgotten Europeans, third-class passengers, hidden like something to be ashamed of in the last cars of the luxurious train of the “community.”
“This was a synagogue,” Rita explains, “but in 1941, Hitler kept his soldiers’ horses here. You know what happened next. Thousands of Jews murdered, even here on the lake. Then we came, in 1946. Come on in, dear friends. I’ll show you what it’s like on the inside.” She goes in the house, lifts up a carpet, opens a trapdoor and shows us a cement drainage hole. “The Nazis built this to drain off into the lake the water they used to wash their horses.”
Inside the walls are wood slats; the arcades have been shortened and turned into windows.
“In the beginning, a lot of Jews came back. God only knows from where. Auntie Gyela, Auntie Fruma… dear people, we called them aunt and uncle. And then Boris Gansen, Jasko Moissev, Doctor Schmutze, old lady Zagoria. Today there’s hardly anybody. They either died or went to Israel.”
I ask where she was born and her surname.
She pulls out her passport, shows me something printed in Latvian: Nepsilona Pase. Just underneath, the English translation: Alien’s Passport. An alien, a nonperson, someone who can’t vote even in local elections.
“What do you want? I’m not Latvian enough, I’m no longer Russian, and my first identity card was Soviet. There are a thousand of us here in town. We’re supposed to pass a language exam and a national loyalty test, but what can you do? I’m too old to learn Latvian. You know, in the beginning I felt really bad, but today I don’t even think about it.”
I listen to her, ashamed. I’d like to become an alien myself, cry out against this well-mannered fascism that is invading Europe, Italy included.
The pendulum beats out five o’clock. Rita’s husband, Volodya, who has suffered a hemiparesis, is lying on the couch and limits himself to a formal hello.
I ask Rita if she feels any strange presences in the house.
“My granddaughter says she hears whispering, but I tell her that’s stupid, impossible. We are protected by this holy place. In the USSR, the Jews were treated well. We were all happy, poor and equal. If you were a lazy bum, they got you right away and sent you off to work. Today we’re all unequal and unhappy.”
Now Volodya wakes up, nods his head to say yes. He’s never seen anyone pay attention to his life like these two strangers who by chance have come to visit his house. He gets up, takes a case out of a closet, and opens it. “Here, this is our whole story.”
He takes out some old pictures and starts narrating. “The Jews were incredible musicians. Arkadi Kovnatar was a great accordion player. He died just a while ago. Davidoff was another phenomenon. And this here in the photograph is the People’s Wind Orchestra. They were the best in all of Latvia. They didn’t play Jewish music, but four out of five were Jews. Look here: from the left, Karotkin, then Moissev, Kovnatar, and Davidoff. The only non-Jew is the fourth, and he’s also the only one who is still alive. Take a good look at him. Who is it? Why, it’s me, Vladimir Dirbenyov,” and with a glint in his eye, he does a half bow toward an audience that’s not there.
“People used to dance until they were ready to keel over. We played at weddings and funerals; everybody wanted us. Our years with the Jews were our best. When they left, in the early 1990s, everything turned sad.”
Rita: “Who knows which of them are still alive. Ah, zhizn proshla, life has passed by, my dear. But how nice it is to be with you two. We’re people, aren’t we? And people were made to meet one another. Do you want some tea?”
I say that I’d rather hear some accordion. I can tell that Volodya is dying to take it up again. It’s been two years now that nobody has asked him to play. I exhort him, and he doesn’t back away. He gets up and picks up his case. The instrument is really heavy. He rubs his fingers over the keyboard; the emotion is strong, and his hands are stiff from his illness. He makes an enormous effort and tries to play “Come Back to Sorrento.” He struggles with the rusted body, his face is tense, his fingers search for the notes, but slowly the melody takes shape, the bellows swells in search of more difficult notes, and it succeeds. Volodya relaxes and smiles.
Joy has retaken possession of the house of the spirits. “Come on, Volodya, sing for us!” But Volodya shakes his head no and keeps on playing.
We insist, and he looks sly. “Give me a hundred grams and I’ll sing.” “A hundred grams” is the Russian way to say “a little glass,” and a little glass is never denied in the presence of guests.
So Rita brings in the carafe, brandy made from fermented barley—called samogon, “homemade.” Golden yellow, excellent aroma. She explains how it’s made: a kilo of barley, two liters of water left to soak in a bucket with three kilos of sugar. Then you put it on the stove to boil. When the water starts to diminish, you add two hundred grams of yeast, and in two days, the yeast does its job.
Another day to let it cool, and in the end, there’s your samogon, nice and ready.
Rita: “There, now you know our secret. Volodya knows how to do the same thing with wheat. When he went to work in Kazakhstan, he learned that procedure as well.”
Volodya confirms and stamps his foot. “Drinking is fine, but what are we going to eat?” By now it’s clear, our dropping in has been transformed into an invitation to dinner.
On the little table between the couch and the armchair arrives some homemade bread, homemade butter, smoked fish caught by Volodya in the nearby lake, and fresh greens grown by Rita in the greenhouse out back. A triumph of the zero-mile diet. I think that when the great food crisis comes, the Russians will survive, but Europe won’t. The aliens and the uprooted, whom we have forced to learn the art of survival, will survive, too. Like the Jews.
We toast one another and take a sip.
“Good,” says he, satisfied. Now I’ll sing for you, Nekrasov. He concentrates, swells the veins of his neck, his vocal cords, his lungs and then lets go and sings, moving from whispering to thundering, he carries us away like the carpet of The Master and Margarita, in flight into the great Slavic night that surrounds us. The occasional false notes from the long-unused instrument make the singing even more soulful. It’s the duende, sung of by García Lorca—the spirit that possesses a man when he renounces cold perfectionism and performance anxiety.
I can feel that I am in the heart of my journey. It’s all here: Slavic culture, the Jews, uprootedness, the frontier, the return of fascism, the goodness of the least of us. And this Latvian sky that sums up the North and South of my continent.