The Earth Is Singing (12 page)

Mama pushes me behind her and steps up to the man. She only reaches the level of his chin but she can be very intimidating when she gets going.

“We were sleeping!” she says. “You expect us to wear the star when we are asleep?”

The man looks at his colleague and exchanges one of those vile, lazy smiles.

“What shall we do with these Jews?” he says. “They are very bolshie.”

Mama stares him straight in the eye.

“You can do what you want with me,” she says. “Yes. I am a Jew, and proud of it. But I ask you to spare my mother as she is old. And my daughter is only a half-Jew.”

The man and his colleague share another smile.

Then he pushes my mother out of the way so that she stumbles against Omama. He lifts my chin and looks straight at me.

“
Mischlinge
,” he says. “Aryan blood contaminated by a Jew!”

Then he spits straight into my face.

All this time Uldis has stood at the back of the attic room, stooped over to avoid banging his head on the beams.

My thoughts are all over the place.

How could you hate me this much? What have I ever done to you other than shower you with love and want to spend time with you?

My anger is rising up in a red mist in front of my eyes.

At that moment there’s a slight bang downstairs. I recognize the sound of Uncle Georgs’s front door. I half turn my head and see my uncle and aunt scurrying down the front path like frightened mice, carrying their leather suitcases and wearing hats and coats.

In a heartbeat both the Gestapo men have thrown themselves down the loft hatch, snapping instructions at Uldis on their way down.

We hear them burst out of the front door and shout a one-word order at Georgs and Brigita, who are at the front wheel of their car. The dogs are let loose and stand in front of the car, barking their harsh, repetitive warning. I watch my aunt and uncle getting out of the car and trying to fend them off.

There’s a commotion of shouting and confusion and I hear my aunt’s scream and my uncle’s voice raised in protest.

Then there is a shot.

Then another.

“Mother of God,” cries Mama. “No. Please no.”

Even Omama looks scared. I have never seen that haunted look in her eyes before. Now she looks just like what she is – a tiny, bent-over old lady who is weak from lack of proper food and emaciated by old age and worry. It’s like her big personality has been sucked out of the attic and flown over the rooftops seeking another home in the city.

“Mama,” I whimper, “what are they going to do to us?”

My mother looks at Uldis. All this time he has been standing silent in the attic, although I notice he has brought his gun out of its holster and is now holding it with some awkwardness, like an angular newborn baby.

“Perhaps you can tell us,” she says. Her voice is cold and thin. “I knew that you had volunteered. I knew about your father. But I was hoping you had more sense, Uldis. Your mother is a good woman and for her sake I’ve allowed you into our lives against my better judgement. Why are you hunting down innocent people? Where is your pride?”

Uldis steps out from the shadows in the eaves. His face betrays no emotion under his peaked cap. The blue eyes which I have always loved seem to have lost their clarity and taken on a dull, glazed look.

“How did you find us?” says Omama with a spark of her old outrage.

“Hanna told me you were hiding here,” he says. Mama and Omama both gasp at this. They look at me for confirmation. I give a small, ashamed nod.

“Hanna,” says Mama, “how could you? I told you to tell nobody of our plans. Nobody.”

I flush with fear and anger.

“I thought Uldis was different,” I say. “He told me he loved me.”

“Oh, Hanna,” sighs Mama. “No. You have been fooled.”

This is all too much to take in. Only months ago I was going to the cinema with Uldis and even though I had decided to put my ballet career above everything, I still had a dream of marrying him and having lots of blue-eyed, blond-haired children who looked a little like both of us.

Now he is standing here with that strange, detached look in his eyes and I feel as if I am in a waking nightmare.

“So?” says Omama, shuffling forward to peer up at Uldis. “What have you got to say for yourself? Why pick on us? What have we ever done to you, other than welcome you into our home and give you our food?”

A sneer settles on Uldis’s thin face.

“You are Jews,” he says. “Responsible for everything bad in this country. I am helping Herr Hitler cleanse Latvia of your race.”

Neither Mama or Omama look surprised at what he says, but my spine goes cold.

“But you told me you loved me…” I begin, but we are interrupted by one of the Gestapo, who bursts back into the attic and orders us downstairs.

He has his gun in my back.

I guess he thinks I’m the most likely to make a run for it. I’m the youngest and fittest out of the three of us. But I can never leave Mama and Omama. I promised Papa and I am not the sort of girl who breaks an important promise.

So I let him shove me downstairs towards the armoured vehicle revved up outside. The other Gestapo man is already at the wheel, drinking out of a bottle and staring straight ahead like he’s tired of us already.

The front path is littered with the clothes from Uncle Georgs’s suitcase. I step over shirts and hats and trousers and then I stop. My aunt and uncle are lying motionless amidst the piles of clothing. Uncle Georgs’s left leg in its brown trouser is bent out at a strange angle, like a stork. I can see my aunt’s face. She is staring up at the sky with her red-lipped mouth opened in a half-circle, like she is about to sing.

A patch of dark red seeps into the cracks in the pavement and spreads out like a jagged fan.

“Move forward,” hisses the second Gestapo man.

I stumble over the bodies and get into the car, weeping. I daren’t look round to see if Mama and Omama are coming but inside my head I pray to God for them to stay alive.

I hear Mama’s scream of shock as she treads the same route and I hear her consoling Omama over and over in a low voice. They are both pushed into the back seat with me.

The vehicle roars away from my aunt and uncle’s house.

I clasp the hands of my mother and grandmother and look at the back of Uldis’s head. He is sitting in the front seat with the two men and he betrays no emotion at all. They pass him the bottle and he takes a swig. I get a whiff of the sharp, sterile smell of vodka.

I am horrified and in shock because of what has happened to my kind uncle and his wife and I am sickened to the core by Uldis’s betrayal, but there is a worse emotion bubbling up and threatening to overtake all others.

Guilt.

I sit and shake in silence, tears running down my face and dropping onto my hands.

All I can think during the short journey back towards town is:

Why, Uldis? Why did you betray us? What did we ever do to you?

But worse that that, I know that this has all happened because of me.

We are driven back into
the Vecrīga district.

My heart contracts as I see the familiar burned-out shell of St Peter’s Church and the jagged remains of the Great Choral Synagogue. We pass my first school, now boarded-up and vandalized and the Freedom Monument, which is under heavy armed guard, and then the car passes the white
Opera
nearby in the park by the narrow canal.

I stare through the glass at this building where I had planned to take the ballet world by storm some day and I realize that there may as well be a pane of glass between me and my city of dreaming spires for ever.

Although Uldis is sitting so close in front of me that I could touch his head if I wanted to, it’s as if we are in separate countries. The love between us has been sucked away and replaced by something else – shock, on my part. Hatred on his.

Mama is sniffing next to me. I pull out a handkerchief from my pocket and give it to her, only it’s not a handkerchief but the spare yellow star that Mama forced me to keep in my pocket in case one of my others came loose.

She shoves it up her own sleeve with a horrified look. God only knows what the Gestapo would do to us if they saw us using the star to blow our dripping noses!

So Mama sniffs until we pull up outside a building.

We are astonished.

It is our apartment building.

We stare at one another, not comprehending. Then the driver gets out and pulls open the back door. He gestures us into the gutter. We have no luggage – that was all left at Uncle Georgs’s house in the panic to obey orders – so it is just the three of us standing huddled together again in front of our old home.

“As you have not tried to run,” says the man in his charming voice, as if he were speaking to his favourite sisters, “we are not going to shoot you. You have until dawn to get your belongings and move into the ghetto.”

“Oh,” says Mama. “Thank you. Thank you for sparing our lives.”

She reaches out her hand to shake his.

He gives a sharp laugh and takes a step backwards.

“It is not a favour,” he says. “You Jews will get what’s coming to you.”

The skull on his cap glows in the light from the moon.

Then he gets back into the car. All this time Uldis remains in the front seat. He does not even turn round to see where we are going.

The car roars off into the night.

“Come on, Hanna,” says Mama. I have fallen to my knees in the street, sobbing. I feel as if my life has ended. I have lost Uldis and somehow managed to betray my beautiful mother and my crazy old grandmother too and now because of my stupid actions kind Uncle Georgs and frightened Aunt Brigita have been shot dead.

Mama helps me up on one side and Omama pulls me up on the other. “He is not worth it,” says Mama. “We have other problems now.”

We go upstairs and back into our apartment.

There is no need to find a key for the door.

The rooms have already been looted.

The living room has had most of the furniture removed and the few bits left are broken and tossed about like boat wreckage after a storm in a small harbour.

The curtains have been pulled down and one of the windows smashed so that the broken glass resembles a snowflake. A draught blows through the apartment.

Omama goes straight into her tiny bedroom and we hear her muttering and moving stuff about. Then there is a crow of delight. She heads back into the living room clutching something to her chest.

“Mama!” says my mother, outraged. “You surely didn’t leave that here? We could have all been shot if the police had seen it!”

“Well they didn’t,” says Omama in triumph. She is clutching the small black square and almost dancing round in circles of joy, though because of her stiff hip it is more like watching a lurching walrus.

It is her radio. Somehow Omama has found a place to hide it and it is still intact and working, judging by the crackling noises coming from inside.

“Switch that off!” hisses Mama. “For God’s sake. We are not even supposed to be here. Say whoever trashed this apartment decides to come back? Possession of a radio is illegal, Mama.”

Omama pulls a face like a sulky child. Then she winks at me and shoves the radio inside the waistband of her skirt.

Mama gives a heavy sigh but she is already looking around for things that we can still use.

“We need to pack,” she says. “It is nearly dawn. We must move to the ghetto. Just what I did not want to happen. At least we will find our friends there.”

I start to help her in a daze. All I can see is the hard, cold expression on Uldis’s face and the way he looked at us as if we were pieces of dirt on his polished shoe. How can this be the same person who told me he loved me and put his arm around me at the cinema? I feel dizzy, as if somebody has taken away all the support from my life and left me wobbling unaided in the middle. When I’m not seeing Uldis’s face I see the sprawled dead bodies of my aunt and uncle lying bent and broken on their front path and it makes me shake inside so that I can’t stand still.

I don’t even really know what a ghetto is. All I have managed to glean from Mama is that it is in the run-down
Maskavas Forštate
of town where those poor Russians have lived for years in houses without electricity or sometimes even water.

“Why do we have to live in the ghetto?” I say.

Mama snaps the lid shut on her small suitcase.

Omama gives one of her sarcastic snorts.

“Because the Nazis want the streets of Rīga to be
judenrein
,” she says.

My stomach gives a little gulp.

Free of Jews. They want to push us out of our own city.

I think of Uldis again.

“Why did Uldis betray us?” I say. “Why did he stand there with a gun? Why does he hate us so much?”

My voice catches on the last word. I’ve just realized that my life has turned a corner I didn’t want it to go round and that there will be no turning back.

Mama and Omama exchange one of their looks. Mama gives a slight nod. Then Omama disappears for a moment and comes back clutching a copy of
Tēvija.

She passes it to me with a sad smile, tapping at the black print with her bony finger.

The paper is dated 4th July. The same day our Great Choral Synagogue burned down. This is what it says:

In big black font there is an appeal:

All patriotic Latvians, Pērkonkrusts members, students, officers, militiamen, and citizens, who are ready to actively take part in the cleansing of our country of undesirable elements should enrol themselves at the office of the Security Group at 19 Valdemāra iela.

I look from the paper to Mama’s anguished face and back again. The words start to rearrange themselves on the page until I am staring at “undesirable elements”, which seems blacker than all the other text.

“That’s us,” I say in a whisper.

“Yes,” says Omama. “And your Uldis is one of those ‘patriotic Latvians’, I am afraid. Like father like son. When you lived next door to them his mother once let slip that Mr Lapa had been a member of Pērkonkrusts back in the 1930s.”