91 / 198
91
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