Rita: “Come on, sing ‘Voyennaya pesnya.’ I want to cry a little. It’s good for me.”
He starts in: “There’s an old tree on the edge of the woods.” She follows, and now they’re singing together, sweet octogenarians. In the refrain I hear Miliy moy Andrei, “My sweet Andrew.” Andrea, like my son. Our mutual longings go searching together.
He grumbles: “My voice is fine; it’s my fingers that can’t hack it. But give me another hundred grams, my friend.”
Rita happily fills his glass, then recites Pushkin: “This is how things go.”
Volodya rebuts: “Pushkin was Pushkin, but Lermontov was better.” And there goes another poem, “Now I no longer die of love, even if at night my heart runs free.”
Then Rita says, “Listen to that. There is no love like that anymore. Today it’s all vulgarity, banality, bodies for sale,” and her eyes are as ardent as a thirty-year-old’s.
“Ah, literature. Once there were lines to buy books. You remember, Rita? We had to reserve our place in line so we wouldn’t miss the best ones. Today our books aren’t any good to anyone. Nobody reads anymore. Not even our children. We have to throw them away after loving them for so long. They’ve become toilet paper.”
Monika translates, and I notice that she’s joined us on our little trip without buying a ticket, that is, without drinking even a drop of samogon. That’s her specialty; she becomes a member of a group by the power of self-suggestion. She becomes an Afghan among the Afghans, a Jew among Jews, a Russian among Russians. That’s why people let themselves be photographed so easily by her.
Now she sings a Polish song, then an Italian one with me, and finally a Triestian song that speaks of wind and the Mediterranean, to tell Rita and Volodya something of our world. She’s in the duende, too.
Volodya accompanies me to take a piss in the outhouse in the middle of the garden. He takes the lock off the door, waits for me, then walks me out to the lake. I can’t understand how we can manage to walk straight. We’re happy, on the periphery of this shtetl still full of old nobility. The wind whistling through the reed beds, little ducks cleaning their feather coats, a purple sky. I don’t feel worthy of what I’ve seen and heard. What little there is left of the soul of Europe lives here, among the forgotten—the Russians, the Slavs, the Jews who aren’t here anymore, the Gypsies perhaps.
A full moon is rising. I had forgotten about the moon in the low skies of the North, where the anemic night isn’t able to light up the planet. Now it’s huge, the color of parchment; rising slowly behind the trees, it illuminates the little obelisk in memory of the Jews killed by the Nazis in that exact place. As the wind turns the anemones inside out like enormous frog-mouth helmets, I empty my pockets and, in one machine-gun-like burst, throw all of my Latvian pennies into the lake, begging fate to bind me to this place forever. A dog barks, alarmed by the noise of that brief hailstorm in the silence, another answers him from beyond the wood, and it is as though all of the dogs on the twenty-eighth meridian were calling out to one another all the way to the Dnieper, Istanbul, and Smyrna. Time stops.
Ludza is my center of Europe.
The next day, as we are leaving for Lithuania, we go out to say good-bye to the couple in the synagogue. It’s also a sort of checkup visit. I feel well despite the drunk, but I’m worried about the effects of the alcohol on Volodya. When we get there, we find him standing in the door to the house. His eyes are shining with happiness.
“How did you sleep, Volodya?”
“Normalno,” he laughs, and adds, “never so well.” Then, worried, “And you, old friend?”
Hugs, addresses, telephone numbers, exchanges of small gifts.
Rita: “Come back. It was one of the most beautiful days of my life.”
Volodya: “Be careful with the Lithuanian police. They give the highest fines in Europe.” And he laughs again. He looks like a new man.
Before we get to the Lithuanian frontier, the spires of the Catholic shrine at Aglona call out to us from the woods, but the church and grounds are a disappointment, like the Croatian Medjugorje, which I visited during the war in Bosnia. I see an architecture of power and image, a tourist attraction with little or no soul, with strange athletic priests, strange black cars, strange hotels and campgrounds, perfectly empty among the fir trees. We’re getting closer to the land of Wojtyla, Poland, and the Vatican already appears to be a mega–travel agency, a multinational of pilgrimages with branches all over the world. Maybe I’m too quick to judge; mine is not a journey of deep investigation. But I’ve learned to trust my instinct and my first impressions. They are rarely off the mark.
I’ve never loved triumphant religions. I prefer the minor ones and the losers, the catacombs, the peripheries or the advance guards where the hierarchies don’t stick their noses in, and power struggles are nonexistent. Maybe that’s why I felt God’s presence more in the abandoned synagogue in Ludza than before the vaguely tomblike marbles of Aglona. In the same manner, Catholicism glistens more intensely on the high plateaus of Peru than in Rome or in Ratzinger’s Bavaria. But there’s something else disturbing about Aglona. Maybe it’s the gloomier woods, maybe the nearly vanished birch trees, replaced by the needles of the evergreens, as shady as the ones in Grimm’s fairy tales. Maybe it’s the ever more visible signs of the void left by the Jews, too hurriedly refilled.
We stop to have a bite to eat in a forest blue with blueberries and green with comfortable cushions of moss. Under trees whispering with the pallid colors of Klimt, there unfolds on a tablecloth a very Slavic menu of chives, buttermilk, cucumbers, brown bread, garlic, salami, and radishes. For the first time since Murmansk, my ankles sink into the underbrush; I notice that digging is easy.
After the permafrost of the Arctic lands and after the polished granite of Karelia, the soil is sandy, marked by slight swellings like little knolls. Not always are they morainic residues of glaciers. Here, everyone knows that every rise and fall might be a common grave. From the Baltic to Ukraine, Europe is one big necropolis, still to be discovered.
Even more than Rēzekne, Daugavpils is characterized by the redbrick houses of their old tenants, wiped out by the Holocaust. We drive through it in a hurry. On the streets, children with their heads shaved, as in Italy during the war. In a bar, less than reputable types, muscular refrigerators just hopped out from a big-engine car; it’s black, too, like their clothes. Then comes the border with Lithuania, in total abandonment, green buildings falling apart, the trailer once a currency exchange office now a shelter for the homeless, the floor covered with broken glass and two-liter plastic beer bottles. A moth-eaten border crossing that looks even older than the one with Russia. But nature triumphs. On the road to Vilnius, colossal linden trees tower over the landscape, maybe the biggest ones I’ve seen in my whole life.
On the outskirts of the little town of Sventa, on the road to Vilnius, pan Eduard, Mr. Edward, is sitting in his garden shed with two Russian friends, Yevgeny and Grigori. Lithuanian, born in 1930, and a face dripping with irony, he’s smoking a cigarette and weaving wicker nets for catching lake fish. Between the two World Wars, Lithuania was part of Poland, and today Mr. Edward lives in the house of a Polish official who escaped in 1939, right after the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, which had decided the partitioning of his country. “He was a despot,” he tells us. “Eight families worked for him. He had twenty-five cows and six horses, and he rode around on his horse to inspect the hay harvest, carrying a club. If he didn’t like something he saw, he would point the club at someone and say: you don’t work for me anymore.”