THE GROUSE MOTHER

Anna Maskava’s story for the performance “Ancestral Body II”

May 30, 2025

Riga Performance Festival “Starptelpa”

Location: K. K. von Stricka Villa, Riga

Performance duration: 90 min

In our family, we called my great-grandmother the Grouse Mother, mainly because she lived in a small village called Medņi, which literally means “grouse” in Latvian, referring to the wild bird, and she was the oldest woman in our family. I don’t know who first came up with the name, but sometimes I imagined that at night, all of us, her many descendants, would turn into small, dark grouse chicks, and she would spread her great black wings over us.

We weren’t the only ones who called her the Grouse Mother. Even the locals in the village called her that, maybe because she was one of the oldest women in the area and had gained the informal status of a local matriarch or elder. Her real name was Anna, and she was the daughter of Anna.

(The name "Grouse Mother" is also a reflection of ancient Latvian mythology. In the old Baltic worldview, Mothers preside over all realms of life and nature: Forest Mother, Wind Mother, Sea Mother, and many others. These are not abstract symbols, but vestiges of a once-living Great Mother religion that honored the generative powers of the natural world. This pantheon of Mothers, one of the oldest in Europe, reaches back to pre-Christian, Neolithic times, when nature was revered as alive and ensouled. If you would like to learn more about Latvian mythology, click here)

We were so used to calling her the Grouse Mother that it felt entirely natural. When I told friends I was going to visit the Grouse Mother, they were often puzzled, “The Grouse Mother? Who’s that? Some old lady living in a house not on chicken legs but on grouse legs?” (This is a playful nod to the Slavic folktale figure Baba Yaga, who lives in a house on chicken legs)

She didn’t live on a bird’s leg, of course, but in a small, gray wooden house which, for some reason, she always called a “hut.” Maybe because she and her mother had built it themselves along with a local carpenter. They had gone into the forest, cut down trees, sawed planks, and built the house with their own hands. To me, it didn’t look like a hut at all, more like an old, modest country cottage. She was proud of that so-called hut because, according to her, it was the reason she wasn’t deported to Siberia during the Soviet mass deportations. She used to tell me, “Even the Russians didn’t look twice at this hut.”

Visiting the Grouse Mother was like stepping into another era. Her home stood quietly at the edge of the village, surrounded by wide fields, with a dark forest visible in the distance. The wind would often race across the open fields and rattle the windows as if trying to enter the house, where warmth and an unusual sense of coziness always prevailed. Time seemed to stop there, or rather, time had long since stopped there. The firewood crackled softly in the stove, the smell of boiled potatoes hung in the air, and a small dog napped under the table. The house had no running water, it always had to be fetched from the well. She cooked on a wood-burning stove, and she baked bread in an outdoor kitchen. There, in that outdoor kitchen, she also brewed beer and distilled moonshine.

Next to the house was her potato patch, where she kept separate rows, some for herself and others for “the others.” I never fully understood who “the others” were, but it turned out they were, as she put it, the outcasts of life, people who sometimes had nothing to eat. If they came by asking for food, she always had potatoes to give. Every year, she made sure to plant those rows for others.

By the house, there was also a black sauna (pirts in Latvian), a traditional Latvian smoke sauna, and I think that was the first place where I ever saw multiple naked female bodies together. The women of our family lineage, sweaty, steamed, firm, wrinkled, marked with stretch marks, old and young. There, I first saw other women’s breasts, full and sagging, and wide hips covered with birch leaves. On my mother’s side of the family, daughters almost always gave birth to more daughters, and those daughters had daughters again. Even at celebrations, the women danced with each other. There was always a dominance of women, and the man, the man was like a misty, disappearing figure who, of course, never appeared in the sauna.

So all the women in our family, when visiting the Grouse Mother, would bathe in the black sauna. They used birch or linden whisks (bundles of leafy branches called pirts slotas in Latvian) in a traditional sauna ritual, where you lightly whip or sweep the skin to improve circulation, cleanse, and refresh the body. This is a deeply rooted Latvian bathing tradition, similar to other sauna cultures across the Baltic and Nordic regions. They scrubbed their skin with herbs gathered from the meadow and clay scraped from the riverbank.

The Grouse Mother’s skin was quite dark, her hair a deep brown, almost black, with dark eyebrows and very light blue eyes. Her mother had been an orphan, and local gossip said she came from a mixed Romani and Latvian family, which supposedly explained her daughter’s unusual looks. But no one knew for sure, and, of course, no one openly spoke of it. Her gaze was direct and sharp. There really was something in her that reminded one of a grouse. She carried a wild and unique kind of freedom, bathing in the river in summer and in the sauna in winter. She lived simply but completely independently. In the sauna, she would rhythmically sweep the linden whisk over her bent, old back. It was there, among the sauna’s steam and the soft rustling sounds, that I first saw her large, sagging breasts, wrinkled and hanging almost to her navel. I also noticed that she had a birthmark on her back in exactly the same spot as I do. In that moment, I felt how my own body was revealed through hers.

Medņi is still located between the Latvian towns of Jēkabpils and Madona, and to get there, you have to drive several kilometers down a dirt road. The surrounding places have bird-related names, Rubeņsala (Grouse Island), Irbessala (Ptarmigan Island), Rubeņi, and Medņu Rubeņi. I haven’t been to Medņi for several years. The last time, of course, was for the cemetery festival (a Latvian tradition where families gather at the cemetery). I remember, slightly tipsy from a shot of moonshine, sitting under an oak tree and looking at the Grouse Mother’s house in the distance. By then it had been sold and transformed beyond recognition, solar panels on the roof, running water, even internet. Internet in the hut. I wonder what the Grouse Mother would have said about that.

The Grouse Mother was born in 1916, during World War I, somewhere near the Daugava River in Krustpils. Her father was a raftsman, as at that time the Daugava River was a major transport route where timber was floated, and her mother was a housemaid, working for Jewish families as a laundress. Her mother was also a healer, who used folk charms and incantations to heal both people and animals, but she never took money for it because “God forbids it.” The Grouse Mother told me that during healings, her mother would wash the sick person with water while chanting, then take that water to a firepit behind the house and throw the water through the smoke and flames, continuing the prayers and spells.

Back then, Krustpils and Jēkabpils were true raft-towns, filled with taverns where the raftsmen celebrated after work. The raftsmen were even granted houses along the Daugava River, and that’s where the Grouse Mother was born. But the family didn’t live there long, a bomb hit their house, and they relocated to Medņi. Her father caught tuberculosis working on the river and died when she was just nine years old.

The Grouse Mother completed four years of school, more than her mother, who had never attended. At sixteen, her mother sent her to work as a maid on a local landowner’s estate. The work was grueling, sifting grain, working in the fields, cooking. She earned one Latvian lat per day. That’s where she met Artūrs, who also worked there. He had taught himself to play the violin and began courting her with love songs. Before long, they decided to marry.

There’s a photo on the wall of their wedding in 1936, a joyful celebration. The Grouse Mother sits in a carriage with a smoking Artūrs, her husband and my great-grandfather. Behind them are the wedding witnesses. Behind the horse, wearing a headscarf, is the Grouse Mother’s mother, the woman in the light dress is her sister, and next to her is Artūrs’s mother. The couple seems to fade into the background next to the striking man on horseback, the accordionist who was the Grouse Mother’s sister’s husband, a very handsome Jewish man with surname Zvaigzne (meaning “Star”). No one in this photo yet knew that another war was coming, that the accordionist would be shot in his own home by the Nazis, in front of his children, and that Artūrs would be drafted into the Latvian SS Legion. The little girl in the right corner is the accordionist’s daughter. She still lives in Jēkabpils. Whenever I ask her about the past, she always remains silent.