buildings are large apartments, built to accommodate Riga’s burgeoning population in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The timing proved fortunate. The buildings are attractive still, decked out in a wild array of motifs, classical, Gothic, Egyptian, and more. Artful low-relief work and freestanding statues, glazed tiles, and, especially, beautiful doors. The streets are wide, the buildings low. The population is dense enough to support sidewalks busy with pedestrians, the best thing about a modern city, I often think. Somehow, on busy sidewalks the energy of the crowd becomes your energy, and you feel as if you can keep going longer, farther. And I don’t think that feeling is an illusion.
But the energy is frenetic, and finally, I have to admit, I’d rather go less far but quietly, and less in the company of cars. On Alberta Iela, I get my wish, the street silent, almost deserted. I linger with the pair of sphinxes guarding the entry to the apartment at #2, watching leaf shadows play over their black faces. I look first to my left, and then right, the street straight end to end, and I miss already the bent streets of the old towns. I’ve lived my life on straight streets; whatever they have to say—about geometry or the strict line perhaps—I’ve heard enough of it. I like the decorative facades of Art Nouveau; they make me look around, forget for a while the linear prospects. The beautiful details, the great, vertical slashes of red tiles in the façade at #2. “God is in the details,” as Mies van der Rohe, famously, if oddly, remarked, since the buildings he and his fellow moderns designed came so perilously close to not having any.
So I gravitate back to Riga’s old town, where, after all, a fair amount of the infill is Art Nouveau. I don’t fail to notice the low-relief peacock on Smilsu or, just down the street, over a door, the gorgeous, sleepy face of a woman, her eyes closed, her ears hidden each under an elaborately carved curl, her mouth pursed as if she were tasting a melancholy truth. Weary, I long for her beauty, to rest in it. I decide to sit down for coffee, in a small square; I take a table inside, hoping for a break from all the bustle. Nodding in front of my espresso, I drift toward reverie, one of the attractions of traveling alone, a luxury, to court the imagination, to indulge a reverie that is sometimes abetted by weariness. But not this time. The door swings wide and in they strut, the louts. I’ve heard of their kind, bands of bucks who fly to the Baltics just to drink and make rowdy. English, this crowd, and they hardly look real. Somehow, they’ve been inflated into something outsize. Steroids, maybe. But big, all of them, and for sure rowdy. They’ve come in for the bathroom and crowd into the tiny cubicle several at a time, brushing off the protests of the wait staff. Then they swagger out, still buckling up, a couple exposing themselves for fun or maybe just failing to notice. They bully everyone. They talk loud, loud as shouting, but it is just talk. They sit down at tables with people they don’t know, tickle the chins of little girls and babies. No one dares confront them, the louts in the orange T-shirts. They have a leader, smaller, smarter. They do what he says, their Mephisto. Dressed in white overalls and pink gym shoes, he wears a green wig and has powdered his face, painted his eyebrows white. His jibes are witty and malicious, way more witty than what the locals are going to be able to appreciate in English. He is the only one of them who doesn’t project a wild, pulsing energy. He seems at ease in a relaxed malevolence. Is it the orange shirts that make me think of Clockwork Orange, or just their sociopathic glee? They dare you to admit you want them to leave. They draw out their exit beyond what is bearable until, like every bully you have ever known, they stomp out and are gone.
If, in walking the streets of the old town, I sometimes feel the ghostly presence of a me who might have lived in such a place, long ago, I have to acknowledge that the opposite is also true, that the people who walked here then, when the old streets were new, already carried in them the unfulfilled potential to live a life much like mine. And I too must carry in me potential ways of living that some future, had I been born into it, would have called into being. And perhaps this future self is the ghostliest self of all, the most unknowable. Still, imagining futures has its attractions, as it must have for Anthony Burgess and Stanley Kubrick, when they conjured up the Clockwork Orange, and occasionally the supposers do turn out to have gotten it right. But I don’t think about the future very much, a time in which I, of necessity, will have no better part than one of Bert Notke’s dancing dead. And somehow I need the artifacts, especially the architecture, to call to the ghosts within.
After the louts, I ride the trolley back out to Mezaparks, weary enough of the present. I walk there, too, in the green suburb, a place very like the one where I grew up, if grander. Mezaparks was one of the first garden suburbs ever built, so was itself a harbinger of the future most of my contemporaries were born into. It has a home feel to me that is very different than the ghostly reality of the old towns, a home feel based on simple memory. This is a suburban neighborhood, meant to be green, quiet, and safe, although only two months ago there was a brothel in a house on the next street, and not at all long ago many of these houses were inhabited by ten or twenty families apiece, like the urban warrens described by Dostoyevsky and Dickens. And a half-timbered place a few hundred yards from where I’m staying was notorious during Riga’s Russian years when it served as the interrogation house for the KGB. And if you know where to look, I’m told, you can still see the remains of the rail line that served a small concentration camp built in Mezaparks during the Nazi occupation. Architecture won’t save us from history.
So how do we choose where we travel? How do I choose? I often think of the poet H.D. in this regard, remembering these lines from her Trilogy:
I go where I love and where I am loved,
…
I go to the things I love
with no thought of duty or pity;
I go where I belong, inexorably…
Ah, how I admire these lines, how I envy their certainty! I think they are as good a formulation of what I intend by traveling as any I’ve seen (in spite of the fact that H.D. is writing about travel here obliquely, if at all). Still, H.D.’s lines suggest the eros of traveling, that the activity is bound up deep down with love, and they insist on the implacable seriousness of going, on the seriousness of life, however much comedy there is to endure. Comedy is not the same thing as frivolousness, after all. And yet, I don’t know what I’ll find until I get there, and often enough traveling I don’t find “the things I love.” Too often my ghostly selves, which might help me escape, a little, being time-bound, and to such a time, simply fail to materialize, and I find myself walking down dusty roads at world’s end trying to reconstruct just how I got there.
In Riga, I go shopping for a souvenir, for something small to attach a memory to, for a gift. In the Baltics, such a thing is likely to be amber. I look, I ask questions. The colors of amber, honey, cognac, green, black, and white. The salesgirls point out the occlusions, bits of fern or the wing of a small insect, things caught out of time. In a gemstone occlusions count as a fault, but in amber they add value. They seem to suspend time, and for this the traveler is expected to pay. But I find the equation a little too easy, and we never make anything our own by a simple purchase. The world is a harder, more exacting place than that. So I ask questions, try to know something. Anything I’m at all interested in I touch, getting a feel for amber. Although I like the black amber and the pieces with a dark, reddish hue, it’s the white amber that speaks to me with the most gravity. White amber is oldest, the salesgirls tell me, very primly, not old themselves at all. Although they can’t explain it, the years in the end press the clarity out of amber, and then what you have is white amber, opaque, not white so much as a marbled yellow, a little honey or bitter lemon stirred into milk. And any moss or moth that might be in it stays hidden, as if behind fog. This appeals to me as the better, the truer story, the way clarity is lost with age, in history, in our own lives. The whiteness. Already I can feel the page going blank under my hand.
In H.D.’s Trilogy, birds are the great travelers, and want to be time travelers, too. But like the rest of us, however clearly lost worlds speak to them, the birds must fly the atmospheres of their own time. H.D. imagines her migrants,
who still (they say) hover
over the lost island, Atlantis,
seeking what we once knew…
Is it an island under the waves we seek? And if so, what