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Sanctuary
By Zinta Aistars
When the
leaves turn, as they are doing now, in a myriad of shades and those more nuanced between shades, blazing and others a mere
melting away of color, then I think of that other place. I don’t want to count the years passed anymore. It is a moment
standing still and set apart in time. Solidified like a piece of amber, and I am caught in its honey, my wings frozen and
my mouth a line that is neither smile nor the downturn to signal tears about to fall. I am in a green space in the center
of a circle of trees, great and ancient oaks, buttery yellow and a creamy brown, and maples with their brazen reds and blooded
burgundies. My heart is nearly broken, yet simultaneously reaching for that high pitch that only wild animals can hear. He
is standing at the edge of the circle of trees, watching me.
They (the
two of them, the trees) stand there still. I’m sure of it.
The place,
too, now exists for me on different planes, inside different universes, one folded inside another, and I can reach them only
by traveling on a kind of fairy dust, a trance, going inward with a slight risk of madness, walking the blade edge of it.
I am never sure if the return route is open. And still, this time of year, I go.
In my mind.
My passport remains expired. I had the photos taken, placed them neatly inside the old passport, face down. The application,
filled out, signed, is folded just underneath. The check for the amount of renewal is written but undated. I don’t go.
Like the
years, I don’t count anymore how many times I have traveled that route—in this world. The first time, I was only
fifteen. Latvia was still behind what we then referred to as “The Iron Curtain.”
Gathering our courage, my parents and I traveled through that iron, already showing a light dusting of rust flakes at its
hem. I’ve since come to understand the longing my parents must have felt to go back. They’ve had their chance
to go, stay, and never return. The curtain fell into a rusted heap long ago. But here they are, on this side, where I am,
and all the rest of our similar faces with similar gestures and similar ways, marking us as relatives, members of one extended
family with a shared history of endurance. All the many thousands of us, scattered across the continents, once calling it
exile, and now … now, we don’t quite know what to call it. Home? But wasn’t that home? The place left behind?
Is it wrong
to call two places home? Or to call neither of them home? I have traveled through my life as if on one long and endless journey,
unpacking the occasional suitcase, lugging a battered box of varied possessions, toting the baggage of a life lived with abandon.
Even if I lingered in one place for a handful of years, it was always with one eye on the door. As the abandoned do.
Or is it
we who did the abandoning? Is that tiny country on the eastern edge of Europe, notched and curving like a just opening fist
around the Baltic Sea, the mother we have abandoned? We the wandering children and grandchildren
and now great-grandchildren. Were we right to try to save ourselves? When the Red Army colored the horizon with a fresh spill
of blood, an unspeakable appetite for it, were we right to head into the wind, allow it to take us to whatever place, whatever
land, whatever new and different life? I would not exist but for that war. My parents, young refugees, would not have met
had not that current of events, set into motion by a foreign brutality, forced them into each other’s path. Am I to
be grateful?
I long for
that other place now as perhaps they have all along. The legacy of refugees. They were born there. I was born to it. My face
set in the direction of its shores of white sand sprinkled with wave-tossed chips of amber. My language unfolding to describe
its shape and sound and scent and rhythm long before I set foot on its land. It only made sense, a kind of full circle traveled,
that I would find my one great love there, and then have to leave him again. Standing at the edge of that circle of trees
on fire, watching me, not saying a word, but saying everything I needed to hear. I could cross that border a thousand times,
yet never leave.
Fifteen the
first time, then seventeen, then years gone by, then going back every year. Months set aside that I would anticipate the unbroken
circle, coming around its curved edge once again, my heart racing every time I passed an airport and heard the thrum and roar
of jet engines. Going home again. Coming home again. Both ways.
Somewhere
in the passing through that portal, I would start to change. Subtle ways, at first, then more marked. My fingers would intertwine
with the loose strands of my long hair, twining and twirling in the unfolding of a daydream, until I had braided my hair in
a long rope falling down my back. My face washed clean. A hint of pink rising to my cheeks. The tension in my face, in the
set of my shoulders, slowly releasing. My stride lengthening. My laughter as easy as wind chimes. My lips slightly parted,
as if ready to be kissed. My dreams turning over and over on themselves, two languages mixing, then separating, the transformation
complete. I would climb onto the airplane one woman, climb off as another. Years later, I would glance at the photographs
and see, indeed, two different women. Only my heart beat inside both of them.
Every year,
until the years ran out. The gods, perhaps, became too jealous. He was that place, and that place let its old earth open before
me and from that dark and granular richness, he emerged. He was my portal. The Baltic Sea
washing over me. The silvery pines swishing in sea breezes overhead like a silk dress, the moss giving soft as pillows beneath
my feet, the rounded cobblestones, the dark, grainy bread tasting of the centuries, the amber in its honeyed shades, the heavy
silver roped over my fingers, the stones, shaped and smoothed by an ancient history, the Daugava a dark swirl of waters striving
for the sea. Every time, every time, a rebirth. Seven generations, and only God knows the generations before that, all humming
through my veins. And I the eighth one.
When the
leaves turn, as they are doing now, I know what the animals must know, the hint of a coming winter beating its drum deep inside,
calling, calling, beating like a heart buried deep below. The beat of the earth. The beat of humanity. The beat of a billion
hearts, longing to be among one’s own.
~Fall 2008
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| My maternal grandfather, Hermanis Dunkelis |
Samtins
by Zinta Aistars
I remember his hands. I loved those hands. Behind closed eyes, I see them now. Gnarled and thick-knuckled,
grooved and lined, the veins roping over sturdy bones, the large, square nails, pared with a knife.
This many years
later, at an age that I remember him while only beginning to know myself at this half-century mark. My half century measured
against his. Then, I was a little scampering bit of trouble at his knees. Now, he lives behind my closed eyes, his blood a
potent blend with mine.
I can still feel their strong yet gentle grip. Today, November 2nd, is my grandfather’s
birthday. I refuse to count the years. I know only, with a sense in my physical body, more than a calculation of the mind,
that he has been gone from me a long, long time. It is an amputation.
Odd, how we had the same pet name for each other.
The rest of the family called him Vecais Papitis, or Old Pappy, while I called him – Samtins. Samts is the Latvian
word for velvet. With the addition of a diminutive ending, he was my soft place of comfort, my warm and gentle heart. In return,
he called me the same: his “mazais Samtins.” The little velvety one.
He was my first great love. At family
gatherings, where the very young were a nuisance and the very old, the same, the two of us always seemed to find our way to
each other, in some tucked away corner of the busy room. The rest, they thought my childish chattering too silly and simple.
His stories, repeated a thousand times and yet again, had faded to a drone in their ears. Yet to Samtins, my chattering seemed
always great wisdom, a call to pondering the mysterious and grand world I was so eager to explore and he equally eager to
guide me. To me, his tales were an open book of adventure, a history of the world behind me, and I never tired of hearing
them. There was the land he worked in Cesis, Latvia. The days of being a postmaster in Riga. The war that tore him from his
land, so that he and my grandmother, my mother and her brother, ran through the dark forests and followed the rails, all the
way to Germany. How brave he had to be …
He was small in stature, thin and wiry, so thin that even in sweltering
summer he wore two, even three shirts, suspenders holding up his pants. Yet his strength seemed something of myth and legend
to me. Indeed, when I heard later that he had participated in the Olympics in his youth, won a medal in jiu-jitsu, wrestled
in the light-weight division, I was pleased but not surprised. I’d always known he was a warrior. My first and ever
knight in shining armor. The only knight who would never, not once, disappoint me. Even when I’d reached my adult height,
as soon as I saw him, I’d race into his arms and he’d grip me in those steely, great hands and lift me up, twirl
me around him, until we were both laughing. He was my Atlas who never shrugged.
When he died, I knew myself alone for
the first time. No knight to guard me. No great and gnarled hands to gently touch my cheek. No ear to hear my nonsense stories.
I found my way to his closet, buried my face in his old tweed jacket, smelled his scent, my history, and understood fully,
at last, I had lost my soft spot of velvet in an ever-shifting world.
I think of you today. I miss your hands. I
am empty, still, where you were.
~November 2, 2008
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| Zinta at 14,000 feet |
Zinta’s Leap of Faith
It’s as Easy as Tripping Over Your Own Feet
(Published in Encore
magazine, 2001, as a sidebar to a story about Joan Esson)
Fourteen thousand feet above the earth, the door
of the tiny Cessna plane opens. Winds at 220 miles per hour push me with breathtaking force back into the plane, but I fight
the push and place a tentative foot onto the small step that juts from the side of the plane.
Nothing but air and clouds below that step.
With a tandem master—an expert parachutist—harnessed
to my back and a second parachute, I get ready to take the leap.
Far below, Joan Esson, assistant professor of
chemistry at Kalamazoo College, already dove into the clouds, just as she nearly 600 times before. This time, she brought
along 8 students from the College—and me. This is my first jump.
Anything for a story!
Earlier that morning, we stood in a group at
the Napoleon Skydiving Center in Napoleon, Michigan, eyeing the sky. We pulled on our jumpsuits and harnesses, strapped canopies
to our backs, chattered nervously, and watched the propellers of the Cessna whir into readiness for flight.
“I’ve been jumping for about five
years now,” Joan said earlier this morning. “My mother still thinks I’m nuts. It’s taken her this
long to be able to just talk about it in casual conversation. She refuses to come out to watch.”
I consider this as I watch clouds underfoot,
bracing against the wind, counting the seconds before taking the leap. This is the day my parents celebrate their 50th
wedding anniversary, and my own mother was in a horrified snit when she heard about my mad venture. I’m a journalist,
I told Mom, this is research. I thought you worked on a computer, she wailed, and you’re going to ruin
our anniversary by getting yourself killed! My father was almost too angry
to speak to me. I understood the anger was but a father’s fear for his little girl’s safety. I assured him life
is full of risks, even when just taking a bath in a slippery wet bath tub, or crossing the street in traffic. He huffs something
about “unnecessary and foolish risks” and makes me promise to call as soon as I hit the ground. Softly.
But
we all know: children never listen, even when in their fourth decade of life, and so here I stand, on the edge, secretly praying
I will not ruin my parents’ anniversary.
I grip the bar from the wing of the Cessna as
the tandem master has instructed me and wait for his signal to let go. It comes. We fall. We backwards somersault, and the
wind carries us away from the plane that quickly shrinks to a dot overhead. For forty seconds, we free fall, then the tandem
master taps my shoulder to indicate it is time to pull the ripcord. I pull. With a stomach-churning wrench, our bodies soar
upwards as the canopy opens, and then we are suddenly floating, floating, weightless, free and untethered among the clouds,
and the ground below is a beautiful quilt of green and golden fields. For this moment in time, I am suspended in air, feeling
the freedom and exhilaration of a bird in flight.
Too soon, we approach ground, and the tandem
master signals for me to pull on the toggles at my right and my left, connected to the canopy, and with a gentle tug, we float
slowly down towards the grass, landing with a surprisingly gentle touch to the earth.
The students, Joan, and I eagerly compare experiences.
Some in the group have jumped already, while others listen with wide eyes, anxiously awaiting their turn. Joan is preparing
for yet another jump; her face is as flushed with youthful enthusiasm as those of her students’. During the week, she
teaches analytical chemistry, but today she is teaching the chemistry of adventure and flight.
Peeling off my jumpsuit and harness, I prepare
to make a call to my parents to let them know I have not ruined their anniversary. Someone hands me a cell phone. My father
answers. The relief in his voice to hear mine is palpable. But then, he has bad news: Mom has taken a spill and broken her
arm. What?! I howl. How? And on your anniversary yet! He hems and
haws for a moment. It seems she tripped on her own feet and took a spill in the kitchen.
Is that a touch of embarrassment I hear in his
voice?
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