Tarzier
Memoirs |
Part III Two Decades
of Freedom
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LATGALE CHARACTERS
Fetler’s rigid attitude was a stumbling block for our work. His
intolerance was well exemplified in the case of Anna Glum’s marriage
to a Russian Orthodox man. Anna Glum was a single woman, a loyal member
of our group from its inception. A widower with two grown daughters, a
Russian Orthodox man called Nkikin, attended our meetings and eventually
wooed Anna Glum. Nkikin was employed at the railroad station, but because
he spoke no Latvian he was reduced to doing menial work. They made an
odd couple. Perhaps it was a question of money rather than romance. He
may have figured that with his salary from the railroad and her stipend
from the Mission they would be financially comfortable. If so, he was
in for a disappointment. When Fetler found out about the engagement, he
dismissed her forthwith, ignoring the strong probability that Nkikin would
eventually become a Baptist. To me fell the task of giving Anna the news:
she had been fired for daring to date outside of the Baptist fold.
This was a blow to Anna, both materially and to her German ego. She left
us entirely, moved in with the man, and soon after the two were married
in the Russian Orthodox Church. On the day of their marriage our meeting
place was totally empty. The whole congregation was over at the Orthodox
Church to watch a Baptist get married to a Russian Orthodox. When the
ceremony was over, the crowd rushed to our meeting hall to laugh in our
faces. Our work in Ludza suffered beyond hope after that, and we never
regained the influence we once had.
I would like to say that things went well for Anna, but they did not.
In her marriage she soon became like a cricket in hot ashes, unable to
get out of a difficult situation. Nkikin’s older daughter regarded
her with suspicion and hostility and never let her assume the rightful
place of mistress of the house. She remained an outcast in that household,
and not even the birth of a son changed things. People who used to come
hear her sing and play at our services now looked down on her. I heard
that she called herself a sinner and regretted having disobeyed Fetler
and the Mission.
Eventually, Anna left her Russian husband and took her son to Germany,
as part of a repatriation of Baltic Germans initiated by Hitler prior
to the outbreak of World War II. Following the collapse of the Third Reich
she escaped to the United States, where she worked as a nurse in a Wisconsin
hospital. Not that I especially cared about her fate, after she betrayed
her sacred trust by marrying outside the Baptist fold. I didn’t
feel that our movement could ever count on her again. Still, I felt that
Fetler could have handled the matter with more tact, and who knows, she
might have been wed by a good Baptist minister instead of a Russian priest,
and our work would not have been exposed to ridicule.
I encountered another problem that I was poorly equipped to resolve, this
one in Zilupe. An Englishwoman, Margaret Reynolds, had volunteered to
participate in our missionary work. She received a stipend from England
and so asked for little pay. We welcomed her music—she played the
harmonium at our services—but she was stubborn and hard to control,
never became fluent in Russian, and never quite fit in. She did not listen
to my advice when a young man from our church, too young for her, presented
himself as suitor. That relationship broke off, but then a widower named
Tarvit proposed to her. Again, I found it unsuitable for an Englishwoman
to marry an older bearded Russian, but her mind was made up. Fetler refused
to interfere, although he could have, so I married them in a ceremony
in Zilupe.
They moved to Daugavpils. When the war broke out and currency controls
were mandated, her monthly stipend dried up. Moreover, in order to marry
a Russian she’d had to give up her British citizenship, so she was
stuck in Latvia. According to a Russian proverb, “Love like your
own soul, and beat like a pear.” That is, make your woman obey you,
even if it requires beatings, just like a pear that becomes soft as it
is pounded.
Jakobs Vagars, the other man in our original group, was swallowed into
Stalin’s gulag when the Red Army occupied Latvia in 1940. The Soviet
Secret Police had his name on file, and the before-and-after photos did
not sit well with them. Despite his past service in the Red Army, Vagars
was immediately deported to Siberia and never heard from again.
The most devoted missionary in Latgale was Lucia Silins. If she were a
Roman Catholic, she would have been canonized. Her story begins in the
basement kitchen of the Missionary and Bible Institute in Riga. Her formal
education could not have gone beyond junior high when she came on the
staff as a cook. But, over steaming pots of food in the kitchen, she heard
the call of the Lord to dedicate her life to spreading the Gospel. She
applied for a change of status, from cook to mission worker, and soon
arrived in Zilupe as a missionary, bringing a bicycle and a few articles
of clothing, all her worldly belongings. Her work with us consisted, initially,
of making house calls on her bicycle, or, in the winter, simply walking
from house to house on the snow. She did not really have a permanent home.
She spent her nights wherever people offered lodging.
During the German occupation and food rationing, the local authorities
refused to issue ration stamps to Lucia, ostensibly because she was not
a farmer woman, but more likely because they knew she was evangelizing
the Roman Catholic population. She survived World War II and the Soviet
occupation by living just like the Prophet Elijah, fed by ravens and eating
off the land. She eventually found permanent lodging in the manse behind
the Zilupe chapel. During Soviet rule the church was turned into a print
shop, and Lucia used the manse for meetings. Eventually, the church was
dissolved by the Communists and Lucia had to leave. She died a few years
ago. No one, I believe, did more to evangelize Latgale than Lucia Silins.
In Vaivodi, fellow pastor Kurcitis and I held meetings in a widow’s
cottage. One August, after we finished our meeting, the widow offered
us her bedroom for the night. Well, we thought, why not, anything was
better than the benches at the railroad station--but we were mistaken.
She gave us her bed, which had two straw-filled mattresses one on top
of the other. I made my bed with one of the mattresses placed on two parallel
benches, leaving the bed to Kurcitis. But as soon as I laid down my weary
bones, a plague of shiny black fleas set out to feast on me. Needless
to say, I scratched all night. In the morning Kurcitis persuaded me to
go roll in the meadow for a dew bath, which, he said, was just the thing
for flea bites. He joined me, the two of us in our birthday suits. I noticed
he had few flea bites, while my body was covered with red spots. Why was
that? I think that Kurcitis was spared because he’d slept on the
bottom mattress, while I had used the top mattress, complete with the
widow’s fleas. But it still rankles that Kurcitis accused me of
not being his equal in holiness: “Look, Brother Tarziers, I have
faith and you don’t, and that’s why the the fleas chose you
for their meal.” We left Vaivodi and went back to Rezekne, where
I was living at that time. We did not stay at the widow’s again.
Before I leave Latgalia and move my story to Riga and the Golgotha church,
I would like to relate an odd experience I had. Once a month I took the
train to the village of Vilani, about 25 km west of Rezekne, to hold a
Gospel meeting. Vilani was a primitive place. It consisted of one muddy
road with a boardwalk on each side. During snowmelt and the rainy season,
this “main street” became a sea of dirty slush. In order to
get to the other side, one had to wade in knee-deep mud. If a pig had
a mind to cross the street, it left a deep trough that soon filled with
dirty brown water.
The village had a Roman Catholic church with a small monastery next door.
We held our meetings in a small room with several plain benches for furniture.
Midway through one meeting, as we knelt down to pray, the air became heavy,
so heavy I could almost touch it. The room seemed full of evil spirits.
I wasn’t the only one affected--a woman in the group broke into
fearful cries, as if she were being choked. I had to summon all my strength
and faith to resist the power floating in the room. I felt completely
drained when the meeting was finally over and the group left. I slept
on two benches placed together, using my overcoat as blanket. I was glad
when morning finally arrived and the eastbound train took me back to Rezekne.
I remember with sadness the fate of some of the citizens of Vilani. The
first members of our congregation were gypsies, a family of four by the
name of Kovalevsky. They opened their doors and hearts to us before anyone
else. Kovalevsky gave testimony at our meetings, in a simple and folksy
way. The local Roman Catholics did not mind our presence at first, especially
when the gypsies gave up on petty thievery after accepting Jesus as their
savior. But then the Nazis occupied Latgalia and proceeded to exterminate
gypsies along with Jews and homosexuals. The Kovalevskys were flushed
out of the house and shot in the backyard.
Arrested
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