Latvia: If Hands Could Speak (cont.)

“They look like cherries—what’s the word— kirsis?”

Arija shook her head and again said that they were forest berries. She grabbed two mismatched mugs sitting on the table. She had no pantry for dishes, only the half dozen or so that I could see sitting here. Nothing matched, not even the two spoons she grabbed from the silverware box.

Arija joyfully rattled on while she worked. She was talking to herself more than to me, but I listened, straining to understand. She dipped her spoon into the top of the jar and scooped about 5 cherries and some of the marinade into my dark brown mug. She did the same in her mug, which was missing its handle. I heard words here and there: “karote” (spoon) as she scooped; “udens” as she added water to the concentrate. As she delightedly prepared the juice, I got the impression that this was a special treat even for her.

“Ludzu,” she offered as she pointed to the concoction in my cup. She had a wry smile on her face. It was the kind of smile that someone has when they’re about to pull a prank on you. I tentatively lifted the drink to my lips and took a generous sip. Instantly my face contorted into a pucker, as if I had bitten into a lemon slice. As I struggled to regain composure, Arija heartily laughed. She must have pulled this one on a foreigner before. She passed me the sugar bowl and playfully offered, “Cukurs?” She added no “cukers” to her own.

After we partook of our berry drink and cucumbers, Arija moved aside her small collection of dishes to make room to put a citrs on the kitchen table. Upon hearing that I played the guitar, she had invited me to learn the instrument.. As she removed the citrs from its worn case, Arija told me that this instrument was 39 years old. The deep grooves, which scarred the board underneath the strings, showed its age. There were about 8 rows of 8-12 strings each.  Next to one set of strings was the word carved “DO” (as in “Doe a deer”). The strings were tuned to be a chord in its entirety, so there is no fingering – just the strumming of a rhythmic right hand.  Arija kept saying, “viegli, viegli.”  I asked her if “viegli” mean easy.  “Ja, Ja” was her enthusiastic reply.

After modeling how “viegli” it was, Arija handed me the pick and had me follow the down-up-up, down-up-up action of her hand playing in the air. Convinced that I could carry my own, Arija disappeared for a moment and returned with another well-worn instrument, this time a mandolin.

With Arija on the mandolin, and me strumming the oomp-pah-pah beat, we made joyful music together. We laughed speaking a language that needs no translation.

As I watched Arija’s hands brush back and forth across the strings, I could not help but notice how worn they were. Deep in the grooves of her aged hands was etched the stain of the Latvian soil—a testimony to the hours upon hours, years upon years, that she had spent planting, cultivating and canning her crops. Even if she spent a week of scrubbing, her hands would give away that they had weathered a long life of labor.

I looked around the kitchen and noticed that these hands resembled everything in it – the worn citrs sitting on the worn kitchen table next to the worn out dishes; the rickety stools held together by wires, sitting on a frayed rug covering a splintery, boarded floor. There was one particularly deep groove near her stove. After a lifetime of standing in one spot to stir soup and peel potatoes, the floor gave her away.

Save the beautiful gardens in summer, most of rural Latvia looks this way: haggard and weary. The tilting wood houses wrapped in black tar paper; the small Russian Lada cars just barely gaining enough speed to pass the worn farmers sitting with their wives atop flatbed carts pulled by old horses.

As I stared at her hands again I wondered, “What do my hands tell others how I spend my time?”  

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