Soviet Milk

by Nora Ikstena

  I did not feel the same longing as Serafima. I had carried and given birth to a child, but I had no maternal instincts. Something had excluded me from this mystery, which I wanted to investigate to the very core, to discover its true nature. I disappeared for days so I wouldn’t have to feed my child. My milk was bitter: the milk of incomprehension, of extinction. I protected my child from it.

  Serafima sang – and in my head an experiment was born. How to circumvent Mother Nature and snub God, whose existence I had denied in hell’s antechamber. My women colleagues at the Institute were ready to take part. But I had to convince Serafima.

  Late one evening in Larisa Nikolayevna’s kitchen I described to Serafima what had to happen but was not happening in her body to create a child. I drew Serafima’s ovary and the released ovum, to which rushed a whole army of her boozing and abusing husband’s spermatozoa, which turned out to be so feeble that they couldn’t occupy Serafima’s fortress. She gazed at me with round, frightened eyes, crossed herself several times and repeated, ‘Upasi Gospodi. Upasi Gospodi’ – ‘God forbid! God forbid!’ Then I screwed up my courage and said, ‘I’m going to help your bastard of a husband in this struggle, because you want this from the very bottom of your good and pious heart.’ Serafima froze. ‘No, no, dear Serafima, it’ll be the two of you alone. I’ll just extend my doctor’s helping hand.’

  Serafima thought for three days and three nights, then she made a decision. On her next fertile day, she came to meet us at the Institute. Tucked under her arm to keep it warm, she had brought her abuser’s preserved sperm. We warmed it further on our radiators, then introduced it into Serafima’s uterus. For half a day she slept in the Institute with her legs raised. Then she went home. After some time it was confirmed that she was expecting a child. She rushed into Larisa Nikolayevna’s kitchen and embraced my legs. ‘You’re a saint, a saint, a true saint!’

  *

  We could see the silhouette of the old town. Then the new residential districts flashed by, where people lived in identical flats with identical mats at their doors. In the mornings the indistinct mass of them streamed to their workplaces. They streamed back again in the evenings to watch the same unfathomable television broadcasts about their motherland. All this we left behind as the train passed through forests and fields, and the houses and people at the stations grew fewer. Eventually we got out at a small country station. The train disappeared whistling into the distance. Mother lit a cigarette, and our new life began.

  For a while my mother and I followed the railway tracks. ‘Be careful of the points,’ she said. ‘Watch that your foot doesn’t get caught.’ I counted the railway ties as my small feet stepped over each one. In the next few years, those tracks were to become my place of contemplation. They brought me closer to my grandparents, who now lived in expectation of my visits. The freight trains that rushed by often scattered kernels of yellow corn onto the embankment. Picking them out of the gravel, I soothed my longing and shortened the long days and weeks of separation.

  For the time being, along with the spring, my mother and I did seem to be beginning a new life. The white and blue anemones greeted us from the ditches. The sky was clear, and somewhere in the distance a cuckoo called. The birches were still in that brilliant, bare greenness that dazzles one’s eyes. The spring air mingled with my mother’s cigarette smoke and heralded something new. It drove away the sadness of separation.

  In our small house at the edge of the village everything was different. Water had to be fetched from the well, the cooking stove and the pot-bellied stove that heated the house used firewood. The waterless toilet gave off an unpleasant smell. But school and my mother’s workplace, the ambulatory centre, were less than a ten-minute walk away. And we had an overgrown garden in which yellow forest tulips, a couple of plum trees, a mature cherry tree and a cluster of bushes were all blossoming.

  My first school day was dreadful. My mother led me to the old brick building and threw me into the lion’s den. The country children were full of suspicion. They stared at me as if I had arrived from a different planet. Their only satisfaction lay in thinking up ways to humiliate me. The teacher looked on with indifference, for she in her turn viewed my mother with great suspicion.

  The first month of my new life passed in a fog of tears. Each day after school I walked to the railway tracks, sat on the embankment edge and gazed into the distance. There I allowed my imagination to carry me back to the city and to my grandparents.

  My mother left for work early in the morning and returned late at night. I had to take care of myself. I learned how to fire up the wood stove, to bring in water, to do the laundry and to make soup. I lived in one room with a dog which had adopted our home. He was a good and faithful friend, but he passed his fleas on to me.

  *

  In Leningrad, Serafima changed in front of our eyes. Every other day she would arrive at the Institute with baked treats. She swore that peace and enlightenment had descended upon her husband. He had almost given up drinking, was polite and attempting to take care of her. She was carrying his child, after all. We female doctors were quite a company. Meddlesome bluestockings only interested in cell cultures, the view through our microscopes, complex theories, coffee, cigarettes, more coffee and alcohol. We screwed up our marriages as badly as we mothered our children. And then there was Serafima: an icon of milk and blood, the faithful wife, the blossoming Madonna, the living experiment to prove all our theories.

  Serafima grew attached to me, as one does to a teacher or a saint. I couldn’t stand the looks she gave me, combining a childlike naiveté and admiration with something akin to a dog’s faithfulness. Often, when no one was looking, she would try to caress me or make the sign of a cross over me. I tried to hide my annoyance, in order not to hurt her.

  One afternoon at the Institute when we were sitting with glasses of tea I told Serafima that I had a daughter. Not only was I not a good mother, but I didn’t feel like a mother at all. Serafima gazed at me with fearful eyes and told me not to say any more. I kept talking. I wanted to sever the umbilical cord of Serafima’s admiration. I told her that I didn’t believe in God, and that I didn’t want to feed my milk to my daughter, so that she couldn’t suck my vileness in with it.

  ‘Vileness?’ Serafima exclaimed.

  ‘Yes, Serafima, vileness, this bes – the devil, as it’s called in your language.’

  ‘But there’s no bes in you, you’re a saint,’ Serafima exclaimed, and it issued so naturally from the bottom of her heart that I was stunned.

  She took my hand, placed it on her expanding stomach and said, ‘You gave me this.’ She gazed at me with clear, shining eyes, and for a moment I felt it. A mother’s joy, filling this empty, inhospitable corridor with a tender light. It bestowed sense on a senseless era.

  That evening I stayed later at the Institute. The conversation with Serafima had stirred a longing for my daughter, a feeling I hadn’t had for a good while. I wanted to comb her long, rebellious hair, to braid it properly. With my mind’s eye I saw the room where the three of them were having their dinner: my daughter, my mother and my stepfather. My stepfather was surely reading a historical novel about the Stalingrad battle, my mother was knitting or mending something, and my daughter was carefully doing her mathematics or handwriting homework. On the television the news programme had ended and Nora Bumbiere and Viktors Lapčenoks were singing ‘Laternu stundā’ – ‘In the Lantern Hour’.

  I left the Institute at the lantern hour, just as the gaslights were coming on, and hurried to get to the River Neva before they raised the bridges.

  Larisa Nikolayevna had become accustomed to my late arrivals home. That night she was waiting for me in the kitchen. She was pale, and on the table before her were a glass of water and a tiny medicine bottle. Serafima had come home with her face badly bruised. Her husband had gone crazy over some trivial thing – drunk, probably. They had had words and he had begun to hit her. Larisa Nikolayevna had helped Serafima wash her
face, placed compresses on it and brewed a calming tea. Then Serafima had gone back home. Larisa Nikolayevna had not managed to go to sleep yet.

  Something took hold of me. I took the meat-tenderizing mallet and, without removing my coat, went out into the stairwell and over to Serafima’s flat. The door was half-open. Serafima’s husband sat drinking in the kitchen. She had fallen into a painful sleep in the semi-darkness of the back room. ‘O sosedka, prisyad,’ he said – ‘Ah, neighbour, have a seat.’ We drank a shot each. ‘Vydyom pokurim,’ I said – ‘Let’s go out.’ We went out into the stairwell and lit up. ‘Khorosho pyotsya,’ he said – ‘That was a good drink.’ Then I pulled out the meat-tenderizing mallet and hit that bastard in the face several times. And, being drunk, he just howled as if he was being slaughtered.

  *

  Sometimes after school I would make for my mother’s ambulatory centre and wait for her there. They had one long, narrow corridor, always filled with women sitting on benches, tightly packed together. Some of them were pregnant. My mother tried to give each one as much time as she needed. She often finished work late in the evening.

  Usually, I would go straight home after school and prepare supper, which my mother would eat later more out of politeness than hunger. Exhausted, she often went to bed without undressing. I would pull off her boots and cover her with a heavy blanket. I would have to wait for the wood to burn down to cinders before I could close the stove door and go to bed. The dog and I would settle down nearby. The coals smouldered and glowed. Every few evenings I would bake two potatoes in the coals – one for me, one for the dog. When they were ready, we shared this tasty treat and life didn’t seem so bad after all.

  The school’s New Year break was drawing near, and my temporary release with it: I’d have two weeks to spend with my grandmother and step-grandfather. At school I had a couple of friendly schoolmates to return to. And a half-year of exile with my mother was over.

  After receiving our report cards, we got ready for a carnival. Uncharacteristically, my mother decided to join in. She mixed some dyes in a pail, tied knots in the corners of a sheet and soaked it. When it was dry, she folded the sheet in half, sewed up the sides, cut out a hole at the top, and the result was an unusual and splendid sack dress. Then she sat me down near the kitchen window and, pulling a few things from her nearly empty cosmetics bag, she began to make me up. We rarely touched each other. Yet now her fingers slid over my forehead, she patted down my nose and cheeks, gave finishing touches to my eyelids, chin and eyebrows. Her hands and clothes smelled of medicine, which was my mother’s usual fragrance. That smell, along with her touch, awakened in me a love I had not felt before: love for my mother.

  When she handed me the mirror, a child’s face glared back at me that was divided between good and evil. The fearful grimace on one side was set off by a black furrow that ran from my nose to my chin and a still-blacker eyebrow. The other side was as if sprinkled with gold powder, bright with a happy mouth, its corners turned up. ‘Who am I?’ I asked my mother. ‘A split personality,’ she replied. In school, getting lost in a crowd of elves, rabbits, squirrels, Snow Whites and gingerbread men, I felt myself admired. I did not win the prize for the best costume, but in my heart I felt that the Split Personality had won.

  Joyfully, I ran home in the late evening. Maybe my mother would be waiting and dinner would be ready. The next day I would be leaving for two weeks. I wanted to put my arms around her neck and kiss her in thanks for this beautiful carnival, for the Split Personality, which she had conjured up like a miracle worker.

  Outside the house a frenzied dog was waiting for me instead. Inside was dark and cold. Neither the pot-bellied stove nor the cooking stove had been fired up. From the corridor, I could hear strange wheezing. My mother was lying in bed, beside her a bottle of alcohol and some white tablets. Around her neck was an old man’s necktie, with which she had tried to strangle herself. I rushed to her, tore off that damned necktie and propped her up. She choked and coughed, then vomited up a liquid with more of those white tablets floating in it. All night I brewed tea for her. She obediently drank it, and vomited now and then. When she fell asleep, I crawled in beside her. I slept, hardly breathing, my head pressed to her left breast, to be sure that her heart was still beating.

  *

  Serafima didn’t come to see me for at least a week. I didn’t look for her. Larisa Nikolayevna told me that Serafima’s husband was in hospital. A drinking buddy had attacked him in the stairwell. Otherwise everything was peaceful. We continued our research at the Institute. The first snow of winter left a thin layer of white on the bumpy pavements and the shabby rooftops. The Neva had not yet frozen over. Edged in white, the bridges looked romantic. Christmas was just around the corner and I recalled the windows in our old Riga flat covered with heavy blankets, my mother lighting candles on the tree and, with my stepfather, quietly, practically whispering, singing the carol:

  Es skaistu rozīt’ zinu Lo, how a rose e’er blooming

  No sīkas saknītes, From tender stem hath sprung

  Tā rozīt’, ko es minu Of Jesse’s lineage coming,

  No Jeses cēlusies… As men of old have sung…

  Celebrating Christmas was prohibited. The Christian holiday was replaced by fireworks, by the many clocks on the Kremlin chiming in the New Year, and an announcer’s voice proclaiming in Russian, ‘S novym godom, tovarishchi! S novym schastyem!’ – ‘Happy New Year, comrades! Here’s to new happiness!’

  I walked along the snow-covered Neva bridge and quietly sang, ‘Es skaistu rozīt zinu.’ We all used to think that Jesse in this hymn meant Jesus. Such a miraculous story, believable only if one had faith. My mother and my stepfather had never talked about Jesus. I read about him in the old professor’s books, the ones I had lugged up to my room from the pile discarded in our yard.

  But medicine had outpaced Jesus. Everything was explicable and understandable. There was no need for faith. And Jesus had been prohibited. In His place, we were to believe in a real ‘lotus-land’ – that is, in Communism, under which everything would belong to everyone and euphoria would reign. For the time being, nothing indicated that this had been achieved. Already thirty years had passed since the war, but no one was complaining. The words of a Soviet song fitted our idyllic view of the world:

  Varen plaša mana zeme dzimtā, lauki, meži, saules staru plīvs. Un es nezinu starp zemēm simtām, kur vēl citur cilvēks ir tik brīvs.

  Mighty vast my land of birth, its fields and forests, rippling sunbeams. Of hundreds of other lands, I don’t know anywhere man can be so free.

  But for a short while Jesse – Jesus – lifted me away from this, my destined time and place, away from the life into which I had mistakenly been born. My birth obliged me to be alive: an absurd happenstance. There were so many who more than anything had wished to live but hadn’t been born. Who decided this?

  That evening I noticed that my women colleagues were oddly quiet and reserved with me. The usual joking around and tall stories were missing. Missing too were our usual evening drinks. The next morning I learned why. In the corridor two men dressed identically were waiting for me. I had to leave the Institute without delay to return to Riga and there meet with my head doctor.

  Crying, Larisa Nikolayevna helped me to pack. I described the men to her. I confessed that it was I who had beaten Serafima’s husband. And that I didn’t regret it. Larisa Nikolayevna was convinced that this was the last time she would ever see me and that I would be arrested on the train or possibly at Riga’s railway station.

  I was surprised how calm and fearless I felt. So this was what the end of the road would be like. No one was waiting for me at the station. I took my place in a second-class carriage, where the passengers were already unpacking their bundles of hard-boiled eggs, bread, sausage and pickles. The attendant was jangling glasses of tea in their filigree metal holders. As the train began to move, savoury aromas wafted about and I politely refused several offers of food. When a
ll grew quiet, the aroma of food gave way to that of sweat. I walked out into the corridor to smoke. The train sped along and the night sped with it. This might be the last free night of my life. It was taking me back to my tenuous roots – to my mother, my stepfather and daughter. I had betrayed them. I was returning as one driven away, sooner or later to be stoned. I hoped they would arrest me at Riga station and so save me from confronting my family.

  On returning to my seat, I slept for a brief while. The din of the train rocked me. In my dream I saw my father. The newspapers that always littered his room had been organized into a large black-and-white cross. He lay there with his eyes open, breathing in and out heavily. I approached him and said, ‘Close your eyes, you’re dead.’ He continued to breathe, wordlessly confirming that he was alive.

  At Riga station too I found no one waiting for me. A holiday mood was in the air. Spruce trees were being sold in the station square. I took the third tram to reach my meeting with the head doctor. Riga seemed like a dishonoured young girl, her head hung low in the tranquil, late-December air. People in long queues outside shops shifted from foot to foot. On a corner mandarins were being sold. The lucky ones got to buy them by the kilogram. The year 1977 was giving way to 1978. On festive tables you would be sure to find potato salad and sausage, and Sovetskoye shampanskoye – Soviet champagne. Life trapped inside this bubble would keep on at its established pace. I was hoping they would arrest me at the head doctor’s office.

  In the hospital corridor the head doctor didn’t greet me, just nodded for me to enter his office. He locked the door. Then he sat down at his large desk, glaring, and pounded his fist on the table.

  ‘You’ve destroyed not only your career but mine too. I put in a good word on your behalf. I was interrogated about you. A doctor, a woman, a mother, beats up an ex-soldier and hero of the Great Patriotic War. How do you justify your actions?’