Latvia

Latvia is one of the countries through which Adrián Gallardo fights his way westward in the final months of the Second World War. Its place in the novel is brief but consequential: it belongs to a retreat that carries him from the site of his crimes toward Berlin, where he has resolved to die.

Place in Gallardo’s Retreat

In late 1944 and early 1945, Gallardo fights in Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and finally Germany. The sequence charts a geographical retreat alongside his conviction that he deserves death. He fights not in expectation of survival or return, but to postpone the reckoning he believes will come when Germany loses the war and the evidence of the massacre at Klooga is discovered.

Latvia thus appears not as a separately narrated setting but as one link in a widening route of flight. Gallardo has no country, village, or home to return to; after the killings at Klooga, he regards himself as already dead in spirit. Movement across the map does not offer escape from that past. It carries him toward the place where he hopes body and spirit will finally become one in death.

From Latvia to Berlin

The passage through Latvia precedes Gallardo’s arrival in Berlin on 2 April 1945. He reaches a city described as a vast ruin: hollow, collapsed buildings, streets buried beneath rubble, and rubble turned into trenches. The narrative’s compressed naming of Latvia among the territories of his retreat makes the country part of the approach to this devastated endpoint, rather than a place of refuge or renewal.

The route also sharpens the contrast between the physical persistence of Gallardo and his sense of inward death. He continues fighting across successive countries, yet imagines his destination as the point at which his body will at last match his spirit. Latvia’s significance lies in that trajectory: it marks another stage in a journey driven by survival’s delay, guilt, and the deliberate pursuit of an ending.