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A friend of mine from Brussels visited me in Rīga last week. She had never been to this part of Europe before, so there was a lot of exploration to do.
My guest went down into the cellars of the KGB museum; we made several dinners with the food package my mother had sent as greetings from her garden; I took her to the forest and we foraged for berries; we went skinny-dipping in the sea in broad daylight. I couldn’t have planned some of the things we did even if I’d wanted to. Among the highlights was the strongest summer storm in 60 years.
We went to see Spider-Man: Brand New Day that night. Rīga was more or less fine when we entered the cinema; when we came out around midnight, it looked apocalyptic: barely anyone in the streets, heavy rain and howling wind testing how far the trees could bend. We walked home through horizontally moving rain, stepping over waves of broken leaves and branches. When the new day came, the scale of the damage was becoming clear: around 280,000 households had lost electricity, and some 20,000 were still in the dark on Tuesday.
Driving was discouraged on Sunday because of all the fallen trees, so naturally I took my guest on a graveyard tour. First, the Great Cemetery, Lielie kapi, home to generations of important Latvians and Baltic Germans. This time, though, the dead were secondary to the fallen trees.
My guest watched, amazed, as Latvians voluntarily cleared branches from the paths. She joined in and removed one from the grave of Krišjānis Barons, the « father of the dainas », whose collection of Latvian folk songs became a cornerstone of Latvian national identity. We went on to the Brothers’ Cemetery, Brāļu kapi, with its memorial to the First World War and Latvia’s freedom fighters, and then to a regular cemetery to inspect some more fallen trees.
Somewhere during those eight days, my friend started voicing her « cultural observations »: on Rīga public transport, she realized that everybody is awfully quiet; nobody speaks. The only two people who did were whispering to each other. Needless to say, my friend also whispered while explaining this to me. Then, while hiking in the forest, several people passed my Western European friend without returning her cheerful hello. « Cultural observation: how come you don’t greet each other in the forest? » Oh, she’s so right. We go to the forest to be alone. There was one I noticed too: the cinema. Before the film, during it, afterward – the quietest crowd ever. Absolute silence.
Eight days of Latvia: KGB cellars, berries, naked swimming, a once-in-decades storm, fallen trees and three graveyards. In the end, what surprised her most was that nobody talks.
