My mother would tell me strange stories, things no one had ever told me before. She said that we had once been free. I didn’t understand. We’d had our own nation. But we have our own nation, I protested: the Soviet Union. Before it was only Latvia, my mother said. Her face took on that familiar, fearful grimace. There was only Latvia, she repeated, without the Russian lice, which won’t live in their own homeland but crawl all over us. In our school there were two classes of Latvians and one of Russians, and we got along well. Why lice?
