I accepted long ago that the death of any relative meant unwilling contact with something alien and strange, its entrance into carefully arranged everyday life. But this time, heading together with my mother to her sister’s funeral in the village of Başküü in Gagauzia, it was we ourselves who were going into this strangeness. At least that was how I felt, as I hurriedly sorted out the necessary transport and those jobs that were immediately pressing, while simply putting off everything else. However gradually death sometimes came, it still wasn’t wanted, it still couldn’t be predicted. Life had to accommodate itself.
My cousin’s friend drove us from Chișinău airport to the village, for two hours racing the car along the country roads. This time, unlike on our previous trips, the radio stayed off, and we also kept quiet, only now and then exchanging a few words about the weather. It was several days before Easter, but spring had still not really started and the air was chilly, with an annoying drizzle. And it was good at least sometimes not to think about our destination, even if it filled the whole car regardless. Even the police officer who stopped us in Comrat understood after a short discussion why we were hurrying and let us go on.
We got out of the car in Başküü to be met by tears and covert glances. There was now no time for greetings, we had to hurry to the guest room, where the open coffin was already lying on the table. On the right by the wall, women were sitting on stools pushed close together, dressed in black with shawls on their heads. The sodden air from outside seemed to have got in there too, lying heavy between the quiet whispers of the watchers and the candles burning at the head of the coffin.
We squeezed into a free spot, and a moment later the leave-taking started; it had been delayed while they waited for us. One after another the women walked past the body of my aunt, touching with their lips first the icon that had been placed on her chest, then her forehead, then going out into the courtyard. For the moment I continued to sit there, head bowed, trying to inconspicuously observe what was going on in order to work out the appropriate behaviour. I knew that the rules here were stricter, and that any violations would be viewed more harshly than in Latvia. What did it matter that I wasn’t quite a local – I was a grown man, wasn’t I? I should understand these kinds of simple things. I wouldn’t hear what was said myself, but it would inevitably reach my mother, and I didn’t want that. The views of the people in my home village cut deeper than any public criticism. It had for so long been our own world, our true framework, that to leave it completely was not possible. And it was quite often traditions and customs that defined this sense of belonging. We do it like that because that’s how you have to do it. Those people who do things differently or speak differently, they are outsiders – it’s really that simple. Birthplace or family ties help, but also place extra responsibility on you, and forgetting the correct behaviour is almost treachery.
I knew only the basics: you have to bring a white cockerel to a new neighbour as a visiting present, newborn children can for 40 days only be looked after by women, just-cut hair must be burnt, so that no one can get hold of it, and so on. But death came with too many rules for me to have learnt them all. Almost every step involved in commemorating the dead person was set out. But it couldn’t be otherwise; these customs helped keep you on your feet when it seemed that the earth’s solid foundation had vanished from beneath you. They gave a structure to the first days right after a death, allowing you to believe that everything would be OK if you just did what needed to be done. At least that was how it was for people who had grown up within these rituals. For outsiders – myself included that day – they were to no lesser an extent a minefield, carrying the risk of revealing yourself as an imposter – but at the same time also the possibility of feeling part of something bigger.
*
When we had finally all come out, the men who had been waiting outside went into the house and carried out the coffin, placing it in the middle of the courtyard. The mourners assembled in a semi-circle and began quietly to converse, while my uncle went off with both his sons in the direction of the barn. They returned just a moment later, holding by the legs a shrilly bleating lamb. Lugging it to the middle of the courtyard – a thought about sacrifice shot into my head, but I didn’t want to believe it – they carried the lamb around the coffin counterclockwise three times, then let it go, and my uncle went back to the barn, coming out with a cockerel in his hands. This time he was awaited on the opposite side of the coffin by the eldest of my cousins. My uncle handed the cockerel to his son, then both stood aside, as my cousin’s place was taken by a neighbour woman. Meanwhile my uncle’s daughter-in-law had brought out into the courtyard one large and one smaller bag. Leaving them on the veranda, she took out from the smaller one a bundle with the clothes of the deceased and handed them to the neighbour. She would have to wear them for 40 days, so that the soul understood what had happened to it and wouldn’t keep wandering between worlds. Afterwards, the rest of the clothes would have to be divided between the other friends and neighbours of the dead woman, as a final reminder of her former closeness.
The other mourners also got presents – simple, useful everyday things, which the relatives of the departed had provided. Blankets, pillows, brooms and so on. The distribution of her things went on longer than I had expected, one vaguely familiar relative on the opposite side of the coffin being replaced by another. Sometimes funerals cost more than weddings, whispered a cousin twice removed, who had noticed my awkwardness and taken me under her charge. She also prodded me when my turn came to receive a gift. And then finally it was time to move on.
It wasn’t a long way to the graveyard, but the day really was unpleasantly chilly, and what’s more it had started spitting again, and so a number of women climbed up into the box of a lorry that had driven up to the gates. The engine roared, and they drove away, tired faces gazing over the edge of the box at the mourners left in the courtyard. For them it was neither the first nor the last time, they didn’t feel the alienness that was knitted into my movements. And yet they were different women, not the ones who at home tended the garden, cared for their grandchildren and cooked meals for the family.
Meanwhile on our side of the yard, we got ready for the procession. The men took the coffin and carried it out onto the street, where a wailer was already waiting – I don’t know if he had come on the request of the family, or if he had himself taken it on as his job. But his loud voice accompanied us the whole way to the graveyard, while I followed, feeling an almost inappropriate relief that finally I could simply think about each step I was taking, instead of about the right behaviour or the expectations of those around me.
*
We returned to the graveyard on each of the seven days that followed, except for Sunday. We had to light a fire and commemorate the deceased. Here I only needed to stand alongside the others, with cold hands gazing at the plot, which looked strangely high alongside the older graves. The text on some of them could no longer be made out, but on others my surname could be seen, still completely clear. I don’t know how people in Latvia feel at their family plot, which they visit several times a year, but the memories that really stick in my mind from the graveyard in Başküü were from when I was still a child, when I was able to collect up the sweets left on crosses and so had eyes for nothing else. The times that followed they were really nothing more than graves.
But now, occasionally casting a glance at the Kasims lying not far away – several already dead before they had reached the age I then was – I again felt like an imposter. As if they could see my behaviour, my odd pronunciation and uncertain movements, and would now discuss what on earth to do with me. I didn’t know what I could do so that they would accept me, or if that was possible at all. However meticulously I learnt the customs here, my actions were and would always remain just imitations, nothing more than a subtle fake, just like a foreign language learnt in adulthood. Or, in my case, like the basics of a language learnt in childhood and which had always stayed at that child’s level, amusingly unsuited to attempts to express any kind of emotional pain.
But it was just the same for them – they would also have felt like outsiders if they had one day found themselves in my home village of Zaļupe. Even if they had been able to find the way to our home, to our kitchen, drawn by the aroma of so-familiar food, even if they could have settled themselves down on the sofa and got talking about the usual things in their native tongue. Even if they had seen how my mother handed me a kulich cake wrapped in her late sister’s handkerchief, hearing her say “just don’t you tell the others how we commemorate people here, no one would understand anyway”. Even if I had taken them under my wing, brought them to Riga and introduced them to my friends, and they had received them in as welcoming a way as possible, not looking at the peeling scraps of skin, the face starting to rot. I’ve spent too much time in foreign lands not to know that it comes along with you, no matter where you go, no matter what you do. Perhaps that’s just why I’m talking now about that funeral, about our customs. Nothing brings people together more than shared secrets.
But in that place right then, I just looked at the inscriptions on the graves of my relatives, while alongside there flickered a flame lit in a bucket. And a little further, on the other side of the field, beyond the sanctified ground of the graveyard but before the sheep visible in the distance, there was a very small gravestone with the name “Hagi”. He had died before being baptised, and so did not have the opportunity to be buried with the other villagers. The plot was covered with fresh, sodden flowers.
*
At my uncle’s house almost everything happened according to the precepts. The mirrors were covered up, the television was turned off, the doors to the guestroom were closed and washing was forbidden. For those 40 days, you should commemorate the deceased, not think about your own appearance or comfort. But these days the traditions were no longer as strict as before, said my uncle, invoking with a sigh his grandfather’s firm faith. He had taken part in secret Adventist meetings, taking along his grandson, who would sit in a corner in the semi-darkness and listen to the men talking about the world order. But now everything was dependent on each individual person’s conscience and beliefs, the firm grip of the village had slackened here, just like everywhere else.
I will confess that during those days of remembrance, I brushed my teeth and in the evening washed my armpits in a bowl, remembering my own childhood. But sometimes between doing the housework, visiting the cemetery and simply going for walks, I took a look at my phone, to keep track of events in the outside world, and to tell an acquaintance who later became my wife about what was happening. I wasn’t quite an outsider in this house, but more allowance is still always made for guests.
One evening my uncle even offered to turn on the TV so that I wouldn’t miss a Champions League quarter-final match. On the screen the slightly blurry players chased the ball around, while he sat next to me, showering me with questions about the best players of his youth and grumbling that even football wasn’t so easily comprehensible as it once had been.
Before long his thoughts moved on to practical problems, to getting along with the new reality. That didn’t so much mean loneliness – one of his sons lived right next door – as a simple restructuring of day-to-day life in order to deal with that strangeness that was now inescapably there. First of all, he had to decide what to do with the sheep. He didn’t have many, no more than ten, but they needed a lot of caring for and outlays for feed and to herders, for their grazing and shearing. They didn’t bring in any income, prices for everything were low, so it was better to just buy meat and bryndza at the market, he said, more to himself than to me, the TV images continuing to glow in the background while I fruitlessly tried to find a suitable reply.
The sheep were mostly his wife’s thing. Her father, my grandfather, had been a herder himself, during pasturing season he had spent his days in the meadows and his nights in a crooked shed that had been put up right there by the dried-up river. But that was long ago now; my uncle was continuing the story in Comrat, where we had driven to pick up his grandson from his martial arts training, and to get some money from the cash machine (that was my job, he had never done it himself). Everything really had changed, whether we wanted to or not we had to feel alien even in our own homes. Especially now, when the days of remembrance were coming to an end and we would have to return to our everyday life, which would become irreversibly different – but it wasn’t him who said that, I was thinking it myself, immediately feeling ashamed at how banal I was making death.
Of course, time makes foreigners of us all, I continued to think to myself in Riga, returning there after my visit to Başküü and ten years spent living abroad. That city had also changed, and I was a different person too. I hadn’t died and been resurrected, but the world doesn’t stop just because we look away for a moment. And in every one of my steps, every word, even in the pupils of my eyes were involuntarily revealed all those earlier years – the fields of my childhood, the behaviour my mother taught me, the scenes of foreign lands. So I try not to be surprised when people speak to me in English, or ask where I’m from. I just smile and get down to explaining, for the umpteenth time, who I am.
