Soviet Milk

by Nora Ikstena

  ‘He beat his wife, whom we had succeeded in impregnating.’

  ‘What did you succeed in?’ The head doctor’s face turned deep red in his fury.

  ‘We impregnated his wife, because he couldn’t manage it. She brought the sperm, we warmed it and injected it into her.’

  ‘Do you understand the line you have crossed? You are banished. You won’t get work in any of the city’s hospitals. And you can thank that ex-soldier of the Great Patriotic War, since he signed a request that you should not be criminally prosecuted. You deserve to be. You deserve to be put in prison.’

  ‘I would like to be in prison.’

  ‘You’re not normal and I don’t understand why God has given you such talent.’

  ‘God, as you know, doesn’t exist.’

  ‘Out of my sight! Get out! Get out!’

  I walked out into the corridor and drew into my lungs the familiar smell of disinfectant and medication. I was banished from my paradise. Prison would have been my redemption. Nothing made sense any more.

  *

  Gradually I got used to my new life, to my mother’s good and bad moments, and stays with my grandparents that were marked by sad farewells. I was still young, but I sensed that on the inside I was growing up. I was responsible for my mother. No one knew her light and dark sides better than I did. No one else stood ready to catch the next moment when she would want to leave her life behind.

  Sometimes she would come home unexpectedly early, roast a crackling chicken and bake a delicious apple cake. We would eat while the dog waited under the table for tasty morsels. My mother would tell me strange stories, things no one had ever told me before. She said that we had once been free. I didn’t understand. We’d had our own nation. But we have our own nation, I protested: the Soviet Union. Before it was only Latvia, my mother said. Her face took on that familiar, fearful grimace. There was only Latvia, she repeated, without the Russian lice, which won’t live in their own homeland but crawl all over us. In our school there were two classes of Latvians and one of Russians, and we got along well. Why lice?

  We country children were all equal. In summer at the kolkhoz we would squat with sunburned backs and soil-covered feet and hands in infinitely long beetroot and cucumber rows. We weeded and counted the endless metres remaining until we met a quota approved by a fierce woman brigadier. If she found even one weed, you had to weed another portion. In the autumn, school began after the harvest. First the vegetables had to be dug out with pitchforks and piled up, then their tops had to be cut or twisted off. Sometimes it was freezing, other times it rained. But we continued to cut and twist. Our young proletariat worked their fingers to the bone. Freedom was that tiny glimmer of happiness when, soaked through, we would drag ourselves home and dry out beside a hot stove, fortified by fresh clothes and dinner.

  ‘They’re raising new slaves,’ my mother used to say. What she said often seemed incomprehensible to me – about freedom, and the lice and the slaves. I became used to her living in her own world, which I accepted in our calm coexistence. At school I did not talk about life at home, which was so different from the lives of my school friends.

  One morning something strange happened in our small village. Nearby, on the high street, someone had scrawled in chalk: ‘Let’s grind the Russians into flour – that’ll fulfil our food quota.’

  An investigation was launched at school. Everyone denied everything. The Russian class viewed everyone else with suspicion. Rumours circulated that the culprit was one of the grown-ups.

  After two days, I was called out of class to the headmistress’s office. Beside the head sat a man in a grey coat. The head told me that the comrade wished to talk to me.

  A feeling of deep dread rose inside me. I was terrified that I would be left alone with this comrade in the headmistress’s office. I must have turned so pale that the headmistress made me sit down and poured me a glass of water. ‘Your heart is pounding,’ she said. ‘Maybe we should call the school nurse? Maybe later?’ She looked at the comrade, who sat at her desk unperturbed, drumming on it with his fat fingers. ‘No, now. Leave,’ he said to the head harshly.

  We were alone in the office. The comrade grabbed my shoulder and painfully yanked me around to face him.

  ‘Now stop shaking and answer my questions,’ he said. ‘Has your mother ever told you anything that is not taught in school?’

  I started to cry. And in an instant I understood that the only ones suspected of the chalk graffiti on the street were my mother and me.

  ‘Calm down and answer my question. Unless you answer you will not leave this room,’ the comrade shouted.

  Then, to my own surprise, I did calm down. I took a deep breath and said, ‘Yes, she did tell me how a baby is created. She’s a doctor, she knows this, and now I also know. That’s not taught in school.’

  The comrade looked as if he’d been dunked in icy water. My fear was receding. In its place grew a feeling that there was nothing he could do to me. He would never, under any circumstances, find out what I knew: about freedom, about the lice and the slaves. He would never find out.

  The comrade looked uncomfortable.

  ‘Is that all she’s told you?’

  ‘No, not all. She’s drawn how a baby lies in a mother’s womb and how hard it is for it to get out. And in general, how hard it is to be born.’

  I took heart. I saw how the comrade’s sweaty countenance deflated. How he pulled out his dirty handkerchief and wiped his face.

  ‘Great strength is needed,’ I said, ‘for the baby to crawl out of its mother. Usually that takes place with his or her head first.’

  ‘Thanks, that’s enough,’ the comrade said. ‘I have no more questions.’

  He stood, opened the door and called in the head, who had been waiting obediently outside.

  ‘Everything is in order,’ the comrade said.

  I saw enormous relief in the headmistress’s eyes. She led me back out into the corridor, told me that I could have the rest of the day off and patted my head quite kindly.

  I snatched my school bag from the classroom and my coat from the locker and headed for my beloved embankment by the railway tracks.

  I settled down on a tree stump. This was my freedom, my time. From afar an overnight train roared its approach. Those trains never stopped at our station.

  When the din of the train had faded, silence set in. In that silence, my heart beat calmly and I feared neither the dark forest nor the animals it harboured. And I wasn’t afraid of my mother, only terribly worried about her. And I knew it would be like this until death separated us.

  It was a strange evening. I boiled a pail of water, got an old brush and went out into the street. The dog followed me. I poured hot water over the chalked graffiti and, with alternate sluicing and scrubbing, the words gradually disappeared. Now and then, lights in the surrounding houses marked out curious onlookers, but no one stared for long. Even after darkness fell, I continued to scrape away at the asphalt with my brush. When I finally went home, all that remained was a blurred chalk residue.

  *

  Exiled, I went out into the hospital’s car park. At intervals the ambulances would bring new patients to the emergency entrance. I gazed at the lighted windows. The dimly lit wards, the bright lights of the operating theatre, the dark blue of the morgue. All these were mine no longer. I was driven out into a world for which I cared nothing. A world in which I had been unnecessary since birth.

  I inhaled smoke deeply into my lungs. I wanted to draw out this moment before I’d have to go home and face my mother, stepfather and daughter. I wanted to delay seeing their bewildered faces, half-happy perhaps, but mostly reflecting the shadow of fear. Their calm lives would be subjected to the unknown once more. It was snowing lightly. I decided to make a detour. Along Miera Street as far as Lenin Street. Maybe somewhere there would be mandarins for sale.

  On Lenin Street blue stars were twinkling. The city was being decorated for the New Year celebrations
. Opposite the brightly lit Riga Fashion salon I was overcome by a desire to have my hair washed and styled. Inside, hairdressers were rushing around a few well-tended, fragrant women. I stood there clutching my old suitcase, reeking of cigarettes and the hospital. Beneath my hat, tied with elastic, my hair had gone several days without washing and had never been coloured. No one paid any attention to me. I stood there for a moment longer, then walked out. It had been an idiotic impulse.

  Thinking of Serafima, I stopped at the St Alexander Nevsky Orthodox Church. Did she tell her abusive husband the truth? Did she suffer because of that truth? Would she be able to protect her child?

  I crossed the street and walked past Café Flora. The majority of us medical students had no time to sit in such freethinker cafés. Our days were spent in auditoriums, our evenings and nights in the anatomy lab. Idling in a café seemed like a foolish waste of time.

  At the crossing, a granite Vladimir Ilyich Lenin greeted me. Lenin had cooked up all of this bitter misery, and for more than half a century thousands had had to stomach it. I was born into this mess and I would have to die in it. I didn’t even have the memories that my parents had. My father used to talk about the time when Latvia was independent, and about the Milk restaurant, which stood where the Hotel Latvia now reached for the sky. He and my mother had met there during a break between lectures and had a delicious meal. And then they had taken a walk around the nearby Freedom Monument, which was known as Milda. This was separated from Lenin’s statue by a lime tree-lined avenue, and the statues had their backs to each other. For one lats a street photographer had taken a picture of my mother and father standing beside Milda.

  Lenin had also turned his back on the Orthodox cathedral, which had been converted into a planetarium. It was a civilized gesture, as if he knew nothing of the distant lake in Siberia where, on his orders, hundreds of Orthodox priests had been drowned.

  Yes, God doesn’t exist. I had already confirmed that. But there is a heaven and there are stars. And I had been driven out of my paradise.

  I stepped inside the planetarium to get warm. To one side was Dieva auss – God’s Ear. This was another café that I hadn’t managed to visit as a student. I ordered coffee with a shot of Balsam spirit. The patrons around me looked relaxed. They were sitting on the floor. Some were throwing matchboxes around. Maybe it was a game known only to them. Cigarette smoke curled in the air.

  I sat in a corner and truly felt that I was in this non-existent God’s ear. I had wandered in there on the way out of my paradise. A gaunt man with long hair approached my table. He had ordered two more Balsam shots and wished to get acquainted. He claimed to be thirty-three – the same age as Jesus when he died.

  ‘That’s my age too,’ I said. ‘Is Jesse only a man’s name?’ I asked, having privately already baptized him ‘Jesse’, like in the Christmas hymn.

  ‘That’s a brave question,’ he responded. ‘What do you do for a living?’

  ‘I was a doctor,’ I said.

  ‘And what now?’

  ‘Do we have any idea of what comes next? Is there any sense, living here, in thinking about what’s next?’

  ‘You have a point,’ Jesse agreed keenly. ‘Living here, there’s little sense to life. The world goes on outside. For a whole decade, while we cowards sit in these cafés,’ he whispered, ‘they are dying for us.’

  ‘Who are they?’ I whispered back.

  ‘Jan Palach, who in 1969 set fire to himself and died in the centre of Prague.’

  ‘My daughter was born in ’69,’ I told Jesse.

  He seemed not to hear and continued: ‘Janis Joplin and Jimmy Hendrix – they overdosed in ’70. For their and our freedom.’ Jesse’s voice grew louder. ‘For freedom in general, understand? And also Jim Morrison, the very next year. While we putrefy here and pretend to be underground heroes. There’s nothing real here, either on the streets or in the cafés. Everywhere’s just a pitiful existence. Everyone everywhere is pretending, not living. On the streets pretending to be obedient Soviet citizens and here we pretend to be dissidents. There’s no freedom here.’

  I listened to Jesse, to the names which meant nothing to me. I only knew two irrefutable facts about this period: a daughter had been born to me, and recently at the physiology laboratory in Cambridge a woman’s ovum had been artificially fertilized, which I had discovered from a journal sent by my uncle from London in a parcel of clothes.

  Jesse – I wanted to interject into this whispered flood of words – Jesse, do you even realize what that means? There’s no mystery, there’s no divine will. Nor is there any freedom – either to be born or to die. This medical manipulation proves that.

  But Jesse grew tipsy and continued to whisper about freedom snatched from us and someone living and dying for us.

  Eventually, his whisper died away. Jesse crossed his hands, let his head droop and fell asleep. His long hair spread across gaunt shoulders.

  I quietly stood up and left God’s Ear.

  *

  A glass of warm milk and over it a freshly formed skin. Milk soup. Fruit jelly in milk. Those were my worst trials at school. In our country school drinking milk was obligatory. I hated milk and all that was associated with it. I struggled with it as if with an invisible devil trying to possess me, no matter how hard I resisted. I tried to drink it in great gulps, not breathing through my nose, so as not to taste it. After drinking my glass of milk, as often as not I would rush to the school toilet and try to make myself sick.

  My school day was divided into pre-milk and post-milk. The pre-milk time just before lunch was unbearable. I had trouble concentrating. Flashing before my eyes were – not continents or pistils and stamens, not catheti or hypotenuses, but glasses of milk. In the afternoon, however, I was attentive and observant. I could work out a square root and recognize a double infinitive. Everything fell into place as soon as that damned taste of milk disappeared from my mouth. Unfortunately, my battle with milk became ever more noticeable, until the teacher wrote in my daily journal that my mother should come in for a meeting.

  I dragged myself home like a whipped dog. My mother and I lived separate lives. It wasn’t good to get her involved in my milk secret. Now it couldn’t be helped.

  The next afternoon, during biology, I saw through the window my mother approaching the school. She was wearing a flimsy coat and a crocheted beret. I saw how she stopped before the flowerbeds to light a cigarette. She had become one with her cigarettes. Our clothes were always permeated with the stench of cigarette smoke. In a strange way I preferred this to the smell of milk.

  It was so unusual to see my mother at the school. For others it was a customary occurrence because parents still came to get their children – because of the dark road and the graveyard, which frightened us. I pictured how it would be if she was waiting for me, for her daughter. It was a good feeling. My mother is different. But she is my mother and she’s waiting for me after school. The teacher was saying something about monocotyledonous and dicotyledonous plants, but out there by the flower-beds my mother stood waiting for me.

  The bell rang. A happy stream of students flowed out of school, ready to fall into their parents’ embraces and go home to warm dinners. My mother and I didn’t know how to behave. I went up to her, put my arms around her, the way the others did, and for a brief while we stood like that. Then I took her by the hand and led her inside. The corridors were empty, the cafeteria tidied but still saturated with the smell of milk. The teacher’s office was past the cafeteria. She asked my mother to come in and told me to wait outside. I might as well have gone in too, because the acoustics in the empty spaces carried almost every word the teacher said to my ears.

  ‘Have you noticed her dislike of milk?’

  ‘We don’t have milk at home.’

  ‘But it’s necessary for a growing child’s organism. In school she manages to pour out her daily glass of milk, or give it to a classmate or gulp it down then run to the toilet. Does that seem normal to you?�
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  ‘Maybe she has an allergy to milk.’

  ‘Don’t make me laugh. You’re a doctor. Is there such a thing as an allergy to milk, the healthiest and most noble of foods? Do you not, as a mother, fear that without milk she might not develop fully?’

  ‘Maybe it’s because she never received her mother’s milk.’

  ‘Why is that? Did you have some sort of illness?’

  ‘Yes. I didn’t want to live, and I didn’t want her to have milk from a mother who didn’t want to live.’

  The clock ticked in the empty lunch room. It ticked so loudly that I felt compelled to count the ticks. Beyond the windows pigeons were flapping in the puddles. The milk smell had permeated the lunch-room tables, chairs and walls. And the silence was unbearable. I waited for the teacher to throw my mother out of her office.

  ‘I won’t tell anyone what you’ve just told me. The consequences could be unpredictable. Please talk to your daughter about the milk. We don’t want to torture the child.’

  The door opened and the teacher’s face showed an expressive grimace: you poor, poor child. My mother and I politely said our goodbyes.

  Outside, spring was in the air. Immediately my mother lit a cigarette. How greedily she inhaled and exhaled the smoke into the fresh air! We walked in silence but my heart was skipping joyfully. I was walking home from school with my mother. I wanted this road to go on for ever. If it went on for ever, we could walk in silence and we could talk. Both would be good.

  ‘Let’s take a detour,’ my mother said, as if reading my thoughts.

  We turned off onto the old road that led towards the river. There, to the left of the avenue, stretched a field with an old wooden house at its far edge. Everyone knew that its owner was not quite sane and therefore kept a safe distance from the house. But my mother grasped my hand firmly and led me directly into that fearful zone. There was no one in the house. We could hear cows mooing in the barn. We followed the sound, despite my terrible misgivings. Sitting in there, her eyes like two black dots behind thick glasses, was the old lady, milking her cows. The warm milk was trickling into a pail. I started to feel nauseous and tried to pull away from my mother’s hand, but she held me firmly. The owner of the house poured what she had just milked from the pail into a jar and placed a cup beside it.