by Mari Saat
Natalya Filippovna had taken her daughter to several doctors in her time, but none of them had been able to explain a thing. She’d finally found one who said that the only thing they could do was wait. When Sofia was eighteen she could have an operation to carefully break her jaw and then widen it somehow. Natalya Filippovna found the idea so horrific that she stopped visiting doctors altogether. This doctor had a model of the jaw that she snapped open and shut to show how someone’s bite should be and what Sofia’s was like. Only now did it dawn on Natalya Filippovna why all the doctors had asked her daughter to close her mouth: it was because everything in there was in the wrong place. It wasn’t just the upper and lower front teeth that wouldn’t bite together, it was her molars too, and this caused tension in the jaw joints to the extent that they were becoming or had already become deformed, exactly how badly Natalya couldn’t remember, so great was the shock. What she did remember, though, was that if nothing was done then the joints would become stiff in around fifteen years’ time and she would no longer be able to open her mouth. She’d only be able to drink from a small beaker and as for eating, well, she’d only be able to put thin slices of food into her mouth…
Natalya Filippovna tried to argue that she’d never seen anyone who couldn’t open their mouth, and the doctor did not bridle at her argument; she merely explained that such people were definitely around, it was just that we didn’t notice that they talked with their mouths half-closed…
“What language was she speaking?” Natalya asked her daughter as they made their way home.
“Estonian,” said Sofia. “You spoke in Russian but she replied in Estonian.”
“And I understood everything?”
“Of course,” said Sofia, “she made things clear as crystal!”
But Natalya had the feeling that the reason she’d understood was that what the doctor had had to say was so horrendous, she would have understood her even if she’d been speaking Chinese.
How could it? How? How could it be like this? Natalya Filippovna asked herself over and over again. How could it be that in fifteen years’ time Sofia would no longer be able to open her mouth, and if they hadn’t seen this doctor, this orthodontist with the PhD, that’s how it would have been, and that’s how it could still be, if she were unable to find enough money to pay for the braces, because apparently the powers that be had decided that children’s braces would no longer be funded – children’s dental treatment was free of course, but parents had to pay for braces themselves because “malocclusion” – a poor bite – was a cosmetic defect. This was exactly what the health insurance people said, and it was just what Natalya Filippovna had herself thought until now, but how could it be a cosmetic defect, if the person affected wouldn’t be able to open their mouth in fifteen years? How could the sickness insurance system be so stupid? The stupidity of it brought tears to her eyes.
Natalya Filippovna cried. She was depressed and the insurance system appeared to be a monstrous iron machine, while Sofia was so fragile and helpless. The machine was threatening to imprison Sofia inside her own jaws.
“Don’t cry, Mum,” said Sofia, stroking her. “If you can’t afford the braces then I’ll earn the money myself, I’ll get a job in the summer…”
“Right, and just where are you going to get that kind of job?”
And then they started discussing how to find the money. It wasn’t completely impossible, because the money didn’t have to be paid all in one go: the doctor had even given her a schedule – a treatment schedule setting out all the costs, and had even comforted her herself with the fact that there was no need to pay for everything at once, the treatments lasted eighteen months… Or actually, a bit longer, because first they would have to extract Sofia’s wisdom teeth, but that would be done for free by her usual dentist… After that, there would just be some spacers – costing 350 kroons – and in the second week X-rays, impressions and tests – they cost 1,400 – which was manageable… But then came the appliance, the first appliance as the list said, and that cost 6,400 kroons in one go. Then there would be the adjustments – in just six months she would have to come up with 9,800 to make ends meet. And with another 19,000 kroons in the following six months, and six months after that another 9,000 kroons, making a total of 36,800 kroons. Natalya Filippovna found it hard to imagine that kind of money, but spreading it across eighteen months she saw that it meant 1,800 a month and each month she had 2,000 to spare. If she was lucky she earned 5,000 a month – but reckoning on 4,500 would mean there would be 2,500 spare a month, 3,000 if she was lucky. From that sum you’d have to subtract the cost of the flat, food, clothes, everything else – paintbrushes, textbooks, paper, pencils, perhaps aspirin or more expensive medicine – after that there would be 1,000 left over, 1,500 if she was lucky… So what did that give? 30 kroons a day, in the best case 50… For both of them! “We couldn’t even afford to eat with that,” Natalya Filippovna again felt her throat tightening.
“Where will your pencils and paper come from? And the travel passes? I completely forgot about getting around – we couldn’t even buy bus tickets! I’ll get the works bus in, but you’ll still have to get the bus to school.”
“Child benefit,” shouted Sofia, “one hundred and fifty kroons a month – we can live on that! And I won’t be asking you for meat or bread rolls. We can both go on diets.”
“Don’t talk rubbish. You will not be going on a diet,” scolded Natalya Filippovna although in fact her own fleshy arms and soft cheeks embarrassed her. “If you don’t eat and your teeth fall out, what use will the braces be to you?”
“Teeth fall out because of scurvy, if you don’t get enough vitamin C,” replied Sofia knowledgeably, “but you can buy cabbage from the market for that. Sauerkraut! I can probably eat sauerkraut instead of apples.”
She began to make a list of what they could buy for thirty kroons. She had lessons at school on health and nutrition, and knew very well what people should eat. She knew nothing about prices though, because Mum preferred to do the shopping herself. Turned out that there was a fair amount you could buy for thirty kroons: a litre of milk, and bread, and eggs for both of them, and a small packet of margarine for two days, and sauerkraut…
“We’re a long way from starving,” pronounced Sofia confidently. “In World War II the people in Estonia ate moss and leaves off the trees. Most of them made it through.”
This historical empathy did not inspire Natalya Filippovna in the least.
“No way you’d survive long on moss,” she retorted, but then she remembered that Kiira’s mother had survived the Leningrad Blockade. There they’d eaten dogs and cats and pigeons – for as long as there were any to be had. And the trees had been stripped of leaves for food… Cat meat was apparently revolting but dog meat was quite nice – a bit like veal… Even as an old lady, Kiira’s mum would still eat bread as if it were sweets – she would suck dried bits and say that there was no going hungry as long as you had bread… There’d been no eating human flesh where they’d been. One of the neighbours, an old man – not a woman but a man – had died of hunger; he’d lived alone with his little grandchild and had died of hunger but the child had survived. Not everyone had eaten their children or their parents or even their grandchildren.
Natalya Filippovna sighed. Sofia had a way of seeing things that made them seem much simpler, like an adventure.
“Let’s imagine it’s an adventure!” exclaimed Sofia. “Let’s imagine that we’re under siege for a year and a half.”
“Riiiight,” murmured Natalya Filippovna tearfully.
“And maybe I can get myself a job? In summer at least? Some people sell newspapers, don’t they?”
Sofia was like a butterfly, like a reed wafting in the breeze, like a cloud floating up above. Why did she have to have this problem with her teeth, her jaw, that meant it might freeze open all of a sudden? It felt so unfair, so unbefitting.
Natalya knew it was all down to her own wantonness, her own sin
! She hadn’t for a moment thought about a child at the time, there in Crimea on the shores of the calm, sighing sea, so great and warm and dark. She had wanted it to be this way, wanted Volodya – that was his name – to remain in her life like a dream, a beautiful dream so utterly different from damp, cold, grey Estonia or Grisha who yelled and got drunk and ruled with his fists and oozed a sour smell in the morning… Perhaps she was afraid that her beautiful dream might turn rowdy, sour and rank in everyday life? Not that she had a clue where to look for him now. If a child had crossed her mind, the possibility that there might be a child and that she might need support… Perhaps Volodya was now a wealthy man and would be willing to pay for the braces and a touch more because Sofia was the spitting image of him. No need even for any DNA testing, one look at her was enough… But she took pride in the idea that “the important thing is to bring up this child” – and in fact she had been perfectly capable of managing on her own… At any rate she’d need to borrow a bit at first, no way could she scrape seven thousand together quickly. Maybe Lyuda had something put away for a rainy day. Lyuda would trust her, no question, if she explained the situation and paid her back two thousand at a time…
Naturally, things were not as straightforward as Sofia had thought. They did just what Kiira’s mother had done: they dried small cubes of bread and sucked them – that was dead good. It didn’t bother her at all, after a while it was just like taking medicine or pills. At school it felt good to pop something into her mouth when everyone else dashed down to the tuck shop at break time to buy bread or crackers and Coke and chocolate. She would suck on bread and then drink water. Soon it became quite the fashion – sucking bread and watching your weight. The whole class sucked on cubes of bread – if they could be bothered to make them at home and bring them into school, and the boys would cadge them off the girls…
And yet her stomach always felt empty. And she constantly had cravings, especially for chocolate. After all she couldn’t accept anything anyone offered her at school: who would believe in her weight-watching and principles if she did? They would all realise that she simply didn’t have any money. She noticed that she would nervously peek into the bins when walking along the street, just in case there was an empty bottle in there. It was completely pointless: she would never have dared to pick one up and claim the deposit; someone might have noticed and labelled her antisocial. What’s more, given all the homeless on the streets, who would want to take anything from a bin – one of them might attack her. She had nothing against them in principle, but they stank. She reckoned that the very act of taking a bottle out of a bin would leave a nasty smell; even a mere glance at a bin made her feel that something might have rubbed off on her and that it would dawn on the others at school what that “something” was… She suddenly became aware that she’d started looking down all the time in the street and on the bus… Sometimes she spotted a twenty-cent piece, for some reason it was usually a twenty-cent piece. But picking it up was tricky – as if it weren’t the proper thing to do – especially on the bus… No one else did, they all went coolly on their way. Not Sofia… As she covered it with her foot she would adopt the expression of someone who’d lost something…
On top of that she suspected that Mum wasn’t playing fair at home: Mum often had sausage or even cheese in the cupboard at home for her and claimed she’d had something to eat at work, but Sofia could see that Mum’s eyes had sunk. Mum said of course that the weight-watching was working very nicely, but Sofia didn’t want her to be thin, or even just thinner. Mum had always been soft, plump and warm. Even as a small child she had been unable to understand why other children weren’t frightened of their thin mothers (even now she didn’t understand it). In her opinion a proper mum had to be plump…
Time moved on and the dentists worked on Sofia’s teeth. Her wisdom teeth were extracted one week at a time by the august gentleman dentist who had introduced them to their sparrow of an orthodontist (that was the nickname Natalya Filippovna had given their clever little doctor, and Sofia liked it – she imagined herself to be a crocodile, mouth open wide, and the orthodontist picking at it just like the little caretaker birds in a crocodile’s jaws). The last one (in the lower jaw) proved rather difficult, but finally Sofia had her first braces fitted, not the actual train tracks as yet, but braces that you couldn’t see: a brace fitted to the inside of the upper back teeth to widen the palate. The front tooth that had coyly held itself back was already standing in a single line with the others… She had questioned whether it was really right to have the braces when they were the cause of so much worry and the reason for her mother’s sunken eyes, but even when just her wisdom teeth had been removed, a feeling of expansiveness spread through her mouth. As for the braces that the dentists had said might make her mouth horribly sore, well, it felt as if they created an expanse throughout her head – as if her intellect and vision had broadened in some way…
Then one day when she came home from school she found her mother sitting at the kitchen table, staring at the window. That wasn’t like Mum at all. Sofia had never come home from school to find Mum, already back from the morning shift or just leaving for the late shift, staring so fixedly at the window, completely oblivious to her. Was she in a world of her own? That had to be it, otherwise she would have done what she always did; she would have come over to give her a hug, or if she were busy with something she would at least have called out and asked a question or explained what she was doing. Sometimes it felt like she was a bit of a nag.
“Mum, what’s up?” she asked.
Natalya Filippovna cried. She cried during the day and she cried during the night, even in her sleep. She wasn’t even sure whether she slept at all or just cried. If she were suddenly called back to work now it was more likely than not that she wouldn’t be able to do anything because her eyes were so red and sore from crying, and her head was thumping, and she had a pain in her chest, and her fingers were trembling – there was no way she’d be able to do anything with her fingers in that state. And now there was nothing for them to do anyway.
She had of course heard that things weren’t going so well at the factory. There was talk of a crisis engulfing the global electronics industry, of things not going well with their two main clients, and that there might even be lay-offs. That’s what the gossip was – not that she really paid much attention to it, perhaps because she was, after all, above average. No doubt her age was significant but what did that matter? She was above average for accuracy and speed, had never been off sick and her daughter wasn’t so young that she’d have to stay at home on the odd occasion that Sofia happened to be ill. She was a very good, effective worker. As a result she didn’t immediately understand when they called her in for a chat and said that with regret they could not extend her contract. Later it transpired – as the women had already guessed – that only people whose temporary contracts were coming to an end were being let go. This meant that they would not be laid off – only that their contracts would not be extended any longer. Then it emerged that they were not real workers, unlike workers with permanent contracts who could not simply be discarded in this fashion because they had to be paid redundancy money. Temporary workers could merely be tossed overboard. Natalya Filippovna found it particularly insulting that everyone was treated alike; their speed and accuracy and how much supervision they required counted for nothing. They’d always been happy with her, she’d never missed a shift and now they were suddenly letting her go while the slower, careless workers were kept on just because it cost the factory more to get rid of them… She understood of course that the factory had problems. Even if they actually got rid of the less capable workers on permanent contracts, the factory might not survive, but whatever way she looked at it it felt so unfair. Why bother to monitor and congratulate and praise workers, if it counted for nothing? As she stared at the window, she wanted to hammer her fist against the glass until it bled but instead she merely wrung her hands. It didn’t matter if she broke
her fingers, but a broken window would have to be paid for… And how could Sofia live here then, in a kitchen with the wind whistling through… There was no money for new glass… How much would they charge for glazing these days anyhow?
Kiira brought her back to reality. Where from she didn’t know – not from the clouds but from a black hole somewhere. “You mustn’t cry. There’s no point in you crying like this; you’ll make yourself ill and you’ve got a daughter. Who’ll feed you both and what are you thinking of – that your daughter’ll end up on the street? You’ve got to find a job quickly,” Kiira scolded.
That was true all right. She had to find a job quickly. Not just any job because Sofia’s braces were waiting and she was still 7,500 kroons short. It wasn’t just the braces though – if she got behind with the rent they’d be evicted. She had half a mind to walk into the sea, the cold grey sea, go as far as she could, first wading and then drowning, going ever onwards for as long as she could – until it was so cold already that she would just freeze to death and have no more worries. But where would that leave Sofia? The very thought that she could think like this at all – forgetting her child, not caring about her, not caring about the braces – drove her back to tears.
“Stop snivelling! There’s no point in crying. You’ve got a child to feed and bring up. You can’t let it get you down,” chided Kiira. “Here, have another swig!”