Trafika Europe 3 - Latvian Sojourn

Thus Toņa had someplace to go and spend some of her time. Other girls from Zvanki ran around the grove meeting up with boys, but Toņa went to the oak. She picked flowers, made wreaths and brought them for her hero. She made up his life story. How he took his first steps on a cold floor and stood in the twilight of the room, stick-straight, surprising and delighting his parents. What he’d dreamt of. His first friend, his first pair of woollen dress pants. His first snowfall. She could see it all so clearly that in the end she almost believed she could feel his hands on her waist at his first waltz, before his fingers flooded with silt from the Daugava. She even went there in May, when the news reached the village that the war had ended. People hugged each other in joy, drank and celebrated. Toņa sat by her hero and wallowed in the strange sadness that coursed through her veins. Did he even know this day had finally come? Who was going to tell him? So Toņa got down on her knees in the Madaliņa church and prayed, asked the Blessed Virgin to tell her hero, if she saw him in Heaven, that the war was over. And to tell him hello from Toņa. In the summer Toņa turned 16, chekists travelled around the area, exhuming soldiers’ bodies to be reburied in the Brothers’ Cemetery; they asked people to inform them if they’d found any of the Great Fatherland’s fallen war heroes. Ludvigs thought what they were doing was good, the right thing, and directed them to the oak, even though

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