Flesh - Coloured Dominoes

by Zigmunds Skujins

Genres: Humor & Satire

Synopsis

When Baroness Valtraute von Bruegen's officer husband's body is severed in two, she is delighted to find that the lower half has been sewn onto the upper body of the humble local captain Ulste. She conceives a child only to see the return of her husband in one piece. A surrealist tale cum political allegory, this novel transports the reader between 18th century Baltic gentry and the narrator's life in the modern world.

Release date: September 15, 2014

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 256

Sample

Jelgava, lying just a short distance south of the Latvian capital Riga, once the seat of the Dukes of Courland as well as being a western outpost of the Russian Tsarist empire, has historically been something of a cultural crossroads. Whereas Riga became prosperous and culturally heterogeneous as a Baltic trading port, Jelgava, or Mitau as the Baltic German nobility used to call it, absorbed its cultural influences through its German aristocracy and gained its political power through the intermarriage of the Dukes of Courland and the Russian Romanov dynasty.

Into this rich and many-layered historical background the reader is plunged by this fascinating novel, which appeared in Latvian in 1999 under the title Miesas krāsas domino. Remarkably, its author, Zigmunds Skujiņš, was by then 72 years old, with a long literary career behind him. In this respect, and also in his love of rummaging in the byways of Baltic history, he is reminiscent of his Estonian contemporary Jaan Kross. Like him, and perhaps also like the so-called ‘magic realist’ writers of South America from the same generation, Skujiņš is able to make his central characters also the central players in curious events which enhance the luminous strangeness of their time-worn and neglect-encrusted physical surroundings. And adding to the magic – the child’s sense of wonder at all the treasures that can be discovered.


Skujiņš is a rare figure in Latvian literature in his willingness to delve deep into a wide range of times and places, in a variety of literary forms. Before considering his own career, it’s worth remembering that at the time this novel is partly set – the late eighteenth century – Latvia did not have an indigenous literature. And it did not have statehood either; the area which is the setting of this novel was then the Duchy of Courland, and its educated class was German speaking. Latvian was the spoken language of the peasantry. There was a kind of vernacular literacy, but only insofar as a peasant might learn his catechism to please an ‘enlightened’ German pastor. This backwater of German culture and Russian empire, home to an unenfranchised Baltic peasantry, becomes in this novel scene of extraordinary sideshows involving some of the more notorious characters of eighteenth-century European history, such as the charlatan Count Cagliostro.


Zigmunds Skujiņš was born in Riga, capital of the then independent Latvia, on 25 December 1926. He was educated there, but at the age of seventeen, during the war, he was taken to Germany, returning to Latvia at the end of the war. After a year at the Rozentāls School of Arts, he became a journalist, and was involved in the broadcast as well as the printed media, rising to become first chairman of the national Radio and Television Council.

Skujiņš is a writer who is equally at home in longer and shorter fiction – he has been prolific in both. His collections of stories began to appear in 1956 with Esmu dzimis bagāts (I was Born Rich). The collections that followed established a characteristic trend in his writing: the blurred lines between everyday reality and dreams or illusions, and they range over many times and places, and include Ciemiņš no viņpasaules (A Visitor from Beyond, 1963), Zebras āda (The Skin of the Zebra, 1968), Balzams (Balsam, 1972), Uzbrukums vējdzirnavām (Attack on the Windmill, 1976), Sermuliņš uz asfalta un citi stāsti (A Stoat on the Pavement and Other Stories, 1980) and Abpus durvīm (On Both Sides of the Door, 1988). Some of his stories have been made into plays and even filmed, notably the novella Kolumba mazdēli (The Grandsons of Columbus).


In his longer fiction, such as the novel before you here, the author tends to develop broader themes: the contrast between youth and maturity: Formarina, 1953; Kailums (Nakedness, 1970), Jauna cilvēka memuāri (Memoirs of a Young Man, 1981, which has been translated into several languages); and later, as the author himself reached mature years, the reassessment of values that comes with age and experience: Sudrabotie mākoņi (Silvery Clouds, 1967) and Vīrietis labākajos gados (A Man in his Prime, 1974). But it was the novel Gulta ar zelta kāju (The Bed with the Golden Leg, 1984) that expanded the author’s canvas truly into the historical dimension. This novel ambitiously dealt with a dynasty, tracing the destiny of a single family over the course of a century.


From there it seems a logical progression to this present novel: with the perspective of history, Skujiņš strives to throw into relief the uniqueness of Latvian identity. What makes a person a Latvian? By this time the author had accumulated a body of work in several genres and styles, but even in his more mature years he has been anxious to remain a quester after new forms, and fears stagnation: ‘I’m most afraid that this novel has the smell of old age, which can easily happen at my age […] The most terrible thing is to go into an old-fashioned nostalgic twaddle,’ said Skujiņš in an interview published in the literary journal Grāmatu Apskats (1999, 6/7). His fear was unfounded; this novel has no trace of the smell of old age. Quite the contrary – the novel is very challenging. Some readers may be daunted by it, but as the critic Guntis Berelis said in a review of the book on its appearance, the voice of healthy common sense that is present in many places really is healthy, and not just the rumination of endless general platitudes. Berelis felt that this questing, restless and provocative work was perhaps Skujiņš’ best novel.


The title of the novel well describes the process of its creation. First there is the game of dominoes, whose pieces fit together by matching patterns. Some of the pieces in the domino set are events at the end of the eighteenth century, intertwined in an extravagant Rococo manner; others are events of the twentieth century. And some are universal: those concluding sections in which the plot lines come together, and it becomes clear why the novel jumps between and across the centuries. These sections also contain broader speculations, reinforcing the novel’s conceptual base. Some of these ‘dominoes’ may be read as separate short stories: for examples, the story of the funeral of Aspazija, the celebrated Latvian poetess (1865–1945), who was also the wife of Latvia’s national poet Rainis and who became something of a Latvian national institution in herself. Skujiņš had already dealt with this theme in an earlier story, ‘Satan’s Angel’, one of several semi-fictional reassessments of great Latvian literary figures of the past – but in this instance with a conscious sense of a game, as the domino pieces fall together revealing connections that were not immediately obvious. In this falling together of apparently unrelated connections, Skujiņš was applying a creative principle he had used in The Bed with the Golden Leg.


Another meaning of ‘dominoes’ refers to carnival costume. Yet, carnival costume in flesh colour isn’t distinguishable from real flesh. A mask is transformed into a face, a face into a mask (recalling Skujiņš’ earlier novel Nakedness). The author’s underlying implication is that history is sometimes reminiscent of a comic carnival, or even a ghostly one, for whose participants the masks are indistinguishable from faces. The roles enforced by society on the individual become part of their natural existence. Doubts arise about the nature of what is ‘real’. Sleight of hand with reality seems to be the extraordinary skill of one of the main characters in the novel, Cagliostro – was he a mage or just a charlatan? And who actually was the Pilot (the name by which Herberts Cukurs is unmasked in the novel), in whose character are united a servant of all the powers, a seeker of experiences, a shooter of Jews and a saviour of Jews? Seemingly disparate elements, the author suggests, go to make up the character of a Latvian – if such a nation really exists, he is suggesting, then it is an accidental blending of all kinds of bloodlines. In the twentieth century, the character of Jānis, of Japanese origin and with Oriental features, bears a passport that says ‘Latvian’. The eighteenth-century figure of von Brīgen bears exactly the face that our narrator sees in the mirror.


What parts is a person made of? This is a question to which the novel pays special attention, starting from the nightmarish versions of the eighteenth-century soldier, sewn together from two parts by the surgeon, so which is the ‘real’ identity of the person, the upper or the lower part? The question is then posed: does the whole nation lack an ‘upper part’? Skujiņš compels the reader to feel that it is history itself that poses these questions of identity. His gift lies in finding the illuminating anecdote from history, the little-known curious fact that throws light on history’s grotesque domino-game with individual and national identity. It is a challenge for the author to provide a plausible background to the implausible mystificator Cagliostro, for example, and he rises to this challenge. The novel begins with his arrival in Jelgava in 1779 (an event also related by another modern Latvian author, Marģeris Zariņš, in a short story). The author/narrator places one of his ancestors in the story as a witness to events. Mystification is also the predilection of this ancestor, Count Bartolomejs Ulste; it is part of the mystification process that the narrator has come into the world after a long chain of generations. Mystification is a great leveller; it is not the exclusive right of the rulers or the ruled. It is a universal principle in world history, and it is comparable to cobbling a person together from several parts.


Skujiņš unmasks several myths and mystifications but immediately builds new ones, including his own self. The biography of the narrator in the novel seems suspiciously close to the author’s biography. Are the differences and similarities between them to be taken seriously? Biographical veracity is interwoven with imaginative creation.

Flesh-Coloured Dominoes is easy and pleasant reading (especially thanks to this sensitive and finely-nuanced translation by Kaija Straumanis), but it is not facile reading. Skujiņš’ assumption as a writer is that truth is stranger than fiction: the real events of history need little embellishment to seem to stretch the credulity of even an indulgent reader. The absurdities of history are here presented as the apparently random turns in a deadly serious game of dominoes: the apparent paradoxes are part of a logical structure at a higher level. The logical structure may be shaped solely by apparently impossible and at first glance incompatible paradoxes and absurdities. The arrival of Cagliostro in Riga in 2000 in the closing pages of the novel, again linking the centuries, seems to imply that the random operation of absurd events will continue into the future. Like dominoes being laid end to end to form a circuit, the pattern of history repeats itself.


As if to illustrate the capricious nature of the fall of history’s dominoes, in a preface to the 2009 edition of this novel (as volume 8 in his Collected Writings), the author relates how, shortly after its initial publication, he was contacted by a reader who indicated that he had evidence that the ramifications of the extraordinary transfer of the court of Louis XVIII of France and his retinue to Jelgava in the late eighteenth century may lead down, through a complex set of family histories, to the author’s own personal biography. Skujiņš digresses entertainingly on what is known of the families involved and their possible links between himself and the court of Louis. He has also been reliably informed, he says, that the greatest incidence of syphilis in Latvia for many generations after this ‘second Versailles’ period was concentrated precisely in Jelgava.

The intersection of a transferred French court, a charlatan from Sicily, and the local German aristocracy on the author’s home territory of Latvia at a particular point in history is piquant and fascinating in itself. But perhaps, for a writer of Skujiņš’ generation, there are further important signals from history. Up to the Second World War, when the author was in early youth, the ethnically German nobility formed the bedrock of the aristocracy in Latvia, though gradually waning in influence. Yet their life was swept away suddenly by the turmoil of the Second World War; Germans were no longer in the ascendancy, and new foreign masters swept in – the Russian occupiers who forcibly incorporated the still fledgling state into the Soviet Union.


In his later works, too, Skujiņš has continued to re-examine episodes from Latvian history. His novel Siržu zagļa uznāciens (Entry of the Thief of Hearts, 2001), embellishes the speculations about the life of the great Latvian dramatist and author Rūdolfs Blaumanis (1863–1908). The same author is the subject of one of Skujiņš’ numerous plays, which have a habit of revisiting figures from Latvia’s past and throwing a new, semi-fictional light on them.


A word about the transliteration of non-Latvian (essentially Baltic German) names. It is a peculiarity of Latvian that all foreign names are respelled according to the rules of Latvian spelling; this is so that that names can be adapted to the Latvian case-ending and gender system. The original of this novel was no exception, so the question arose for the translator whether to render the German names according to more orthodox German spelling. As not all of the characters are real, the question of fidelity to an ‘original’ doesn’t always arise. So a compromise arrangement was reached between the author, the translator and the publisher. Other foreign names that are well-known from history, such as Cagliostro, are of course rendered in their familiar original form.

Christopher Moseley


Teaching Fellow in Latvian language and literature


School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London








I never knew my father or mother. I remember once when I was little, the topic came up over dinner with guests; grandfather said Ausma had gone off overseas with some circus act and disappeared without a trace, like a pebble down a well. After that I’d often peer terrified down the damp and darkened walls of our well, afraid I’d see a drowned woman.

The subject of my mother and father became an issue again when our teacher in junior school assigned us an essay titled ‘My Family’. Grandfather just laughed: Write that your mother’s a Siamese princess and that your father’s Charlie Chaplin. And I wrote something along those lines. As she handed back our workbooks, our teacher joked that I’d be a writer some day, the next E. T. A. Hoffmann. But my nemesis, Consul Egle’s son Fabian, spent the break talking loudly about how he doubted children of those kinds of women even have fathers. And that my grand-père was just a poor carter who made his living off transporting corpses.


That night, Grandfather and I had a long talk. The answer was split in two, like the tips of a fluttering pennant or banner. No child has ever come into the world without a father, and the matter of whose father was better, mine or Fabian’s, could only be settled once it was clear what became of the seeds they’d sown.

‘So kids come from seeds?’


‘How else? Of course from seeds.’

‘And where is the seed sown?’

‘In the furrow of life, dummy. Where else?’ Grandfather stared at me in surprise.

‘Life furrows?’

‘You’ve got to be joking,’ Grandfather’s temper flared. ‘We’ve got seven mares and three stallions in the barn, and you have no clue where the seeds of life are sown!’

Grandfather’s eccentric, old-fashioned ways were tied to exacting precision, his wild imagination to deep-seated knowledge. It’s possible his old-fashioned ways weren’t really him being old-fashioned, but a display of his disdain for conformity. The way Grandfather saw it, what the world needed was entertainment, rich theatrics. He didn’t want to do anything the easy way. When performing in Paris, the singer Maurice Chevalier traipsed around in a flat-topped boater, which no one else did any more. When Grandfather worked with the carriages, he’d wear either a light grey English bowler hat or one of his many top hats. In cold weather he’d go out for firewood wrapped in his pelerine cloak. He’d paint benches in the yard while wearing white gloves. His tendency to wear a hat in any situation, it seemed, was driven by a modicum of human vanity: Grandfather was handsome, but his hair was thinning – a fact he either consciously or subconsciously tried to hide.

I’ve thought a lot about to what I could best compare Grandfather’s personality. Maybe the old cash register that sits proudly on the Baroness’s desk. Modern registers are definitely more practical, but this old machine was a monumental work of art, made of silvery metal, embossed with chains of flowers. When you cranked the handle and pushed the buttons, the beautiful redwood drawer would jump open with the ring of a bell.

The next morning Grandfather said he had to drive the small carriage to Riga and if I wanted a ride to school he’d drop me off.

The small carriage was incredibly enigmatic. In some ways it was similar to the black mares that pulled it. Now that I’m older and wiser, I’m able to elaborate a bit more on what, back then, were simply vague notions. The things we consider beautiful are, more often than not, a sign of conformity. The brilliance of perfection – be it the beautiful body of a woman, a boat in full sail, a running deer or a luxury car – touches us like the warmth from a stove or the breeze from a draught. The feeling I got when I touched the door of the glistening carriage excited me no less than a lover’s caress would ten years later. The cool, red goatskin seat sighed quietly under my weight. I sat between two crystal glass windows like a king on his throne.


The May sun shone brightly. The blossoming row of cherry trees along the Manor’s stone wall created a white wave you could almost ski over. Grandfather came out not through the small side door but through the large main door, dressed in a new, light blue riding coat, indicating it was a special occasion. On his head, of course, was a silk top hat.

Five minutes before class started, the carriage swerved in a thin arc up to the school door. One of the classroom windows was open. Fabian’s friend Alvis was sitting hunched up like a fat cat, using a pocket mirror to shine the sunlight into the eyes of girls walking by. As soon as he saw the carriage he fell back off the windowsill. And almost immediately several other heads popped into his place, like cuckoos from a clock.

That night, Grandfather and I talked again.

‘Do you know what Fabian said? He takes back what he said about you being poor. But you still smell like a stable. Me too.’

‘Ah-ah-ah! Tell him that stables aren’t the worst smell there is. Foolishness, however, that has a nasty stench! Tell him it’s easier to get into Buckingham Palace itself than it is to get into the palace stables. Ask him if he knows that Ernst Biron, the Duke of Courland and regent of Russia under Empress Anna Ivanova, was the Kalnciems Manor stable master’s grandson. And ask him: What exactly is a duke, and what a stable master? Compared to the history of mankind, all of these distinctions are short-lived and trivial. One hundred, even two hundred years from now – which in the scheme of infinity is but a single breath – the scale of value will be different. What’s a duke compared to Darwin, Kant or Harvey? Like Turandot, the history of mankind will give preference to those who can solve the riddle.’

I listened to Grandfather’s words in silence, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. He studied my face and seemed to understand that I wasn’t ready for this kind of discussion. He opened the table drawer and took out a deck of cards. ‘You see,’ he said, spreading the cards out on the table, ‘each generation has to learn to play the game from scratch. But there’s also genetic inheritance. A skilled player can give birth to children who then inherit an improved version of that player’s skill. Do you think our beautiful mares fell from the sky? It’s genetic! It doesn’t matter where I am, in church or at the market – I can spot a fool from ten paces away. Stupidity, arrogance, violence, those you can see in people’s expressions. And words can lie, but the hands never do.’


Grandfather owned what he referred to as a ‘cart rental business’. Fabian’s scathing comment about transporting dead bodies hadn’t exactly come from nowhere. There were also catafalques in the carriage house, sitting in the half-light among the coaches, fiacres, landaus and phaetons that clients rented for weddings, baptisms and confirmations; there were both black and white catafalques, to which two, four or even six horses could be hitched. Put simply, they were hearses, and they looked no different from those used in the times of Mozart, Robespierre and Casanova. There was an airfield a kilometre from the Manor and commercial aircraft would fly over our yard daily as they’d take off and land; but, Grandfather would philosophise, eras always overlap in the end. It really was a fantastical sight when a two-horse catafalque rode out ‘to work’. Above where the coffin lay rose a rounded, baroque roof supported by thick pillars and decorated with scalloped drapes and golden palm fronds. The horses were draped with black netting that reached to the ground. Large bouquets adorned the horses’ foreheads. A coachman in a long black coat and a crescent-shaped, eighteenth-century hat sat on the coachbox. Four more coachmen, wearing the same black capes and the same crescent hats, were to walk on each side of the catafalque during the funeral procession. The men sat on the edges of the empty carriage as it drove out of our yard. But as they swung their feet back and forth you could catch glimpses of their legs from under their coats and the image was shattered: their trousers were completely of the twentieth century – probably bought from some Jew on Marijas Street or from the new flea market next to the Central Market. Either way, their clothes couldn’t date back beyond the First World War.

These strange pretences that were so close to the frightening, intangible mystery of life and death held me tightly in their grip. The entertainment aspect of it didn’t make it less real. It was theatre, but instead of plays people performed life. And those who were taken by catafalque to the cemetery didn’t take their bows after the show.

The house we lived in also belonged to the era of Mozart, Robespierre and Casanova. It was no palace, even though it had initially been built as the Manor’s central building. It was a simple two-storey structure with a great baroque tiled roof and a large fireplace in the middle. Clean lines and balanced proportions gave it a natural beauty, as did the ornately carved wooden doors, the ornamental metalwork and individually designed window shutters.


We – by which I mean Grandfather, the Baroness, Aunt Alma and I – lived in one wing of the Manor. The Pilot and his family lived in the other wing. Or rather, the Pilot’s wife and two sons lived there, because the Pilot was usually off flying somewhere in the monoplane he had built himself, the ‘White Fuzz’. To Africa, the Canary Islands, or Borneo. You could usually find out where he was by reading the first pages of the newspaper.

The kitchen and giant fireplace were used by both wings of the Manor. When the Baroness caught the Pilot cutting bits from the rack of her smoked ham the sharing stopped. The door to their wing of the Manor was walled shut. If there was anything to be discussed with the neighbours, it was done over the phone. We used oil and carbide lamps for light. There was no electricity in the Manor.

On the ground floor, along with the Baroness’s room and the office, was a room that, for some reason, was called the armoury. What it really was, was a changing room for the staff. The walls were lined with large old cupboards which had most likely been built right there; there was no indication that they could be taken apart or that they had in some other way been brought in through the door. The massive, blacksmith-forged locks were no longer used, probably because the keys had long been lost. And the things you could find in those cupboards! Those same pelerine cloaks and grooms’ liveries, thick cassocks, Friesian tailcoats and field jackets with bright buttons. The shelves were lined with top hats, bowlers and velvet huntsman’s caps. Wigs rested on special wooden stands: a layer of dust and cobwebs indicated they’d lain untouched for some time. The corner of one cupboard was crammed with black mohair armbands and mourning rosettes to pin on hats.

Foggy mirrors in cracked Venetian frames stood between the windows, their mercury faces speckled here and there with bubbles. I’d sometimes sneak into the armoury and stand in front of one of the mirrors, where I’d become Admiral Nelson, Napoleon Bonaparte, Gulliver, George Washington, Cardinal Richelieu. When combining the contents of those cupboards with things from the other rooms – a blanket, a broom handle, towels or kitchenware – the possibilities were endless. In my imagination I could turn into a musketeer, the Caribbean pirate Captain Morgan, an ancient Latvian soldier or Robinson Crusoe.


The Baroness knew about my pretend games; she’d even play along, sometimes, by letting the door open and close in a ghostly way or by beating eerie rhythms on a chair. We’d look at each other conspiratorially, the Baroness would press a finger to her lips and, carefully lifting her booted feet, would sneak out as quietly as she had come in.

Aunt Alma did the cooking, the cleaning, the laundry, and would introduce herself to strangers as the housekeeper. She couldn’t stand the Baroness, not even the sight of her, and called her a crazy German behind her back, and, at least once a week, shouted threats of ‘If this keeps up, I’ll quit!’ Back then I had no idea what she meant, and I didn’t try to figure it out. There were no noticeable changes in our lives and Aunt Alma stayed on and continued her threats.

The Baroness was strange, that was undeniable. She wore riding breeches and knee-high boots whether it was winter or summer. She smoked cigarettes and wore men’s ties. But at the same time, she went around with her hair curled, envelop. . .