The Long Trip Home: Riga The City That Sleeps

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The Road Less Traveled

Riga: The City That Sleeps
by Daniel Brauer

So Latvia’s not doing bad for itself. Just under fifteen years of independence and it’s a member of the European Union and the most stable and prosperous of the former Soviet republics. The difference between old and new is that of grey and pink: in the U.S.S.R the buildings were grey, as were the fruit and the children*. Today the buildings in Riga’s city center scream. They are blue. And yellow. And pink!

Everywhere there are signs of progress. The first modern skyscraper, spit-shined glass and steel, has just been built. The hall that held my parents' wedding reception is now an Emporio boutique. The city’s lone synagogue needs only one pair of police officers to guard it. And the girls, who with few exceptions are tall and slim, all wear very appealing pants.

One imagines that back in Soviet times there were no such appealing pants, that there were only baggy, poorly cut burlap slacks, made from excess potato sacks in years with weak harvests (which were most years) which is why the pants were so baggy. But no more! Pants now are tight, and the inevitable march of freedom plows on.

The hall that held my parents' wedding reception is now an Emporio boutique.

Yes, Riga today attracts Finnish and Norwegian couples on weekend getaways, western kids backpacking the globe, and German businessmen too busy to go to Southeast Asia for kicks. Brimming with clubs, and regularly hosting acts as varied as REM , TV On The Radio, Sarah Brightman and – I kid you not – the Wu Tang Clan, live, in concert, in Riga, the place should be burgeoning, buzzing, downright combustible!

But it’s not. It’s a ghost town.

I came to Riga with my family and, in our eight nights there, on only one, a balmy Friday, were the streets anything resembling alive. My parents grew up in this town, so I turned to them for explanation. They offered only: Riga was always a bit sleepy.

That can't explain the emptiness we see, can it? The city’s piazzas are awash with the side-walk-cafe style seating of innumerable kafejnicas, its side streets studded with quaint and varied restaurants – all empty more often than not. It’s possible that we missed the tourist summer season, sure, but the weather is still nice, the hotels are still priced high… and anyway no city of one million should ever be so empty, so thoroughly bereft of life, as this.

The people are still poor. Then how can one explain all the BMWs? Maybe everyone stays in. Then why build the fancy restaurants and kazinos and strip clubs? They’re for the tourists. There are no tourists. The tourists went home. Then why keep everything open, why set up hundreds, thousands, of outdoor tables each morning? Maybe they’re making an artistic statement, on the nature of emptiness and the sanctity of solitude. Who wants to ponder solitude when the girls all wear tight pants? Maybe everyone’s still in their summer dachas on the beach. We went to the beach; it was empty too. It was a great beach. A great empty beach.

Back in my parents’ days in Riga, I imagine there were abundant excuses for lifeless streets: everyone was busy evading the secret police; or trying to procure hard to find items, like vegetables and meat, on the black market; or reading official proclamations on the policy and advancements of the State (“We shall strengthen the teeth of our children by making them chew steel!”, “We shall crush these grapes with our feet!”). But the secret police has long gone kaput and my dad points out to me, as we pass it, the KGB’s old Latvian headquarters, a big drab thing of a building whose evil faded the day it was converted to apartments and office space. Who knows what creative business the basement dungeons now house, but whatever it is, it signifies at least the end of fear.

It’s a curious thing, then, this emptiness. With it lies the mystery of Riga: it is enigmatic, beautiful, maybe beautiful because it is enigmatic, romantic yet gloomy, and gloomy because, frankly, it’s dead. The place is as lively as a tinful of sprats. The color of its city center screams. But the emptiness simply muffles.

***

*Just to be perfectly clear: much of the commentary in this essay has been hijacked by my imagination and penchant for pretending that living in a communist country was roughly equivalent to living in a medieval backwater. The truth is: the children were not grey. Nor was the fruit. People’s pants were not made out of potato sacks, etc. And although my mom admits to being forced to swallow fish oil, regularly, for its many alleged rejuvenative properties, no state authority ever proposed to make children chew steel. (Tin, maybe. But not steel.)