Soviet Milk

by Nora Ikstena

  Mothers who have given birth to and raised ten children shall be awarded the order ‘Mother Hero’, and mothers who have raised nine children will receive the order ‘Mother Glory’, mothers of six children will be awarded the ‘Mother’s Medal’ Grade I. In socialist states all children have equal rights; these are not dependent on their ethnic origin, race, place of birth, economic status.

  I never raised questions among my women patients, never counselled anyone to have an abortion. But giving birth and letting a child enter this world in this time and place seemed to me as senseless as everything else that was going on around us. We were cut off from the world. We were destined for a somnambulant existence and condemned to call it life. And I found myself at the heart of this somnambulism. I, one of the rank and file, day after day promoting and pursing senselessness.

  But I wasn’t thinking straight. Who else but my daughter could shine a beam of light into this sleepwalking existence? She suffered this exile at my side. Driven from a brilliant Soviet medical career, from its congresses, its bribes and backhanders. Excluded from science and its wondrous future discoveries. Banned from taking part in the most amazing discovery of all: human fertilization outside the human body.

  During these empty days I had time to dwell. Scenes from the past resurfaced. I remembered my father telling me that he and my mother had had several opportunities to leave Latvia for Germany at the end of the war. Mother had been eight months pregnant with me. There was time before the Red Army invaded Riga. People were fleeing wherever they could, risking their lives, hiding in the forests by the sea, waiting for fishermen’s boats bound for Gotland, in Sweden. My parents had had relatively safe opportunities to leave. But my mother had refused. She wanted her child to be born in her native land.

  My mother’s decision determined not only her life but also my father’s life and mine. Unwittingly, I blamed her for everything. And I remembered myself at my daughter’s age. When my mother used to weep in the kitchen every time she received the usual refusal to visit her brother in London, I didn’t feel sorry for her at all. But, unlike me, she was such a good and caring mother. She cherished me – just as my daughter now cares for and cherishes me.

  During those empty days I used to go into my daughter’s room. There, in contrast to my chaos, everything was so touchingly neat. My mother’s and stepfather’s pictures in her handmade frames, propped against the old table lamp. A clay squirrel and a small clay dish, moulded with her own hands at a ceramics workshop. Her books and notebooks in neat piles; under the desk a bowl of water for the dog. My stepfather’s sharpened coloured pencils in a wooden box, one of my medical encyclopedia volumes, with pressed flowers and herbs filling its pages, on the windowsill snail shells, which she had found on the riverbank. The old wardrobe, with her underwear and warm tights in neat piles in the drawers and, at the back, a hanger with her school uniform.

  The dog wagged its tail politely, but continued to wait for her. I closed the door and went back to my smoke-filled room.

  *

  My mother rarely entered my room. Yet every time I returned from my grandparents, her fragrance seemed to linger there. Maybe she had slept in my bed for a while? I unpacked the washed and ironed laundry and prepared for the next school week. My mother almost never asked me how her mother and stepfather were. Just acknowledged their greetings to her.

  I didn’t tell my mother that her room in the flat had now been turned into mine. The books remaining from my mother’s library had been neatly organized on shelves. On the day I arrived, a vase of flowers stood on the desk alongside a plate of tasty morsels. My grandmother had certainly aired the room, because the cigarette smell that used to permeate the sofa and large armchair was barely discernible. Now the curtains smelled of soap powder. My bed was always made up and on it a clean stack of the clothes and underwear that I had left the previous time.

  Two days a week and for several days at a time during holidays I lived in this paradise. Later my room acquired a white hamster whom I named Bambi. He hated his cage. He used to race around in it like the devil faced with a cross. My presence meant Bambi’s freedom. He was allowed to run around my room to his heart’s content, leaving a trail of tiny droppings behind him. He used to wait for me, like waiting for an ally. Once Bambi disappeared for a whole night, and no matter how we called and looked he didn’t respond or allow himself to be caught. In the morning our Polish neighbour from the floor below stood by our door holding Bambi. He had got into her toilet through the sewer pipe and was somewhat dazed and bruised. Holding him by the nape of the neck, my step-grandfather said, ‘Old chap, we all have to live in a cage. Get used to it.’

  When I arrived the next time, my grandmother had provided a lady friend for Bambi: a tiny brown hamster whom I named Rozālija Vējaslota – Rosie Tumbleweed. We hoped she would calm him down and help begin a serene family life in his cage. Rosie became pregnant. Bambi mostly slept indolently, curled in a corner of the cage. Rosie busied herself gathering shavings to make a nest. Bambi showed no further interest in her. The former freedom fighter was unrecognizable.

  And then, on my next visit, something horrendous happened. Rosie’s nest began to move and out tumbled the tiniest of tiny furless creatures, squeaking softly. On seeing them Bambi reared up on his back paws, shook himself and, grabbing the first newborn in his front paws like a carrot or a slice of potato, began to devour it, starting with its head. He was gobbling his own children, and with relish. My grandmother pulled Rosie’s nest out of the cage, along with the rest of the squeakers. During the night they all died and, after a few days, so did Rosie. Gradually Bambi returned to his old ways. He lived for his free time outside the cage.

  I despised Bambi. I wished he had died. What had he lacked in his cage? Food, a warm lair, a wife and children: had he ruined it all solely because he wanted to run around in my room?

  I resolved not to let Bambi out of his cage ever. Week after week he waited for me, hoping for my mercy. I arrived, he reared up with his paws pressed against the cage bars and as good as beckoned to me: ‘Please, please let me out.’ But my heart had hardened.

  One of the Sundays when I was leaving Riga spelled the end of Bambi. My grandmother said, ‘He hasn’t eaten for almost a week.’ Curled up in a corner, he slept quietly. He’d lost his soft round tummy. When I entered the room, Bambi didn’t react. There was none of the usual pleading ritual. I bent over the cage and saw that Bambi was breathing very feebly. He had hidden his tiny snout in his nest, his white fur coat moved weakly up and down. I felt sorry for him and opened the cage door. ‘Bambi, you old monster. Come on out, let’s race. Bambi, come out, there’s freedom here.’ But Bambi continued to sleep and breathe almost unnoticeably. After a moment, as I was watching, he convulsed and stiffened, his snout and paws turned rigid. Paying no attention to my grandmother’s and step-grandfather’s objections, I wrapped Bambi in a cloth napkin, then in a sack and the sack in my school bag. ‘You don’t have anywhere to bury him here,’ I said, bid them goodbye and left for the station.

  Outside the train window the stations trundled past one after the other. I wasn’t thinking of the passengers, whom otherwise I would have looked over carefully to see if there wasn’t some suspicious character among them. I didn’t think about the path through the old graveyard, where I usually drew a deep breath and tried to race without looking to either side. I didn’t even think about my grandparents, who were always on my mind when returning to my mother’s. I would often start crying at that thought, pressing my nose against the train window. Instead I thought about Bambi, who, wrapped in the napkin, was going to his place of rest in the garden by our house. Where to bury him – under the apple tree or the jasmine, or simply by the fence – for the crime of devouring his children? Without a grave mound. Maybe I was to blame for his death. Most likely he died of his yearning for freedom. But had I sentenced him unjustly? How can one eat one’s children and then die from yearning for freedom?

  Wha
t usually seemed a long journey passed quickly this time. Our small station came along suddenly. It was nearly spring. In the evenings the light held for a long while. That meant I could walk in the graveyard unconcerned because it was still daylight. White anemones were blooming by the fence. Maybe Bambi should be buried right here in the graveyard? I wasn’t brave enough for that. Besides, I wanted to show Bambi to my mother. Although Bambi didn’t deserve flowers, I still picked a tiny bunch.

  My mother was drinking coffee, smoking and reading in her room. Her window was open, overlooking the spring-like garden. She was happy to see me.

  The dog sniffed at me. I unpacked my bag and took my bundle in to my mother’s room. I said, ‘Bambi died. Can we bury him in the garden?’

  ‘What happened?’ asked my mother.

  ‘He ate his children and afterwards died longing for freedom,’ I replied.

  ‘A brave hamster,’ my mother said.

  ‘You call that brave?’ I exclaimed, and all my suppressed tears – tears for leaving my grandparents, but also for losing Bambi, for our moments of freedom together – all my tears spilled out.

  ‘Brave, you say? To eat his own children?’ I cried inconsolably, struggling with the feelings of hate and love that were tearing me apart.

  ‘By brave I meant his determination for freedom,’ my mother said. ‘Let’s go and bury Bambi.’

  My crying slowly calmed. We left the dog in the room and went out into the budding garden. Where, then? Under the jasmine or the apple tree, or simply by the fence for his sinful deed?

  ‘You must forgive the dead,’ said my mother. She took a spade and dug a small hole under the apple tree. I covered it with anemones and laid Bambi there. The white hamster lay among white flowers. Two strokes of the spade and he disappeared from our eyes, merging with the fragrant, black soil.

  My mother lit a cigarette and for a while we lingered by Bambi’s grave.

  ‘But why did he eat his children?’ I asked my mother.

  ‘Probably he was saving them from being caged,’ Mother said, and hugged me tightly. She was trembling all over, and her heart was beating violently. I hugged her back equally tightly. For a moment we stayed there. The aroma of the freshly dug soil mingled with the smell of cigarette smoke. Somewhere in the distance a nightingale twittered. Soon the cherries would blossom.

  *

  My tiny consulting room was slowly suffocating me. My patients multiplied. They circulated information about me and drove to see me from ever more distant regions, armed with flowers, boxes of sweets and fresh farm food. The overseers had forgotten about me, thinking that I was harmless in this far-flung place and that the penalty for my Leningrad ‘crime’ was severe enough.

  My former city colleagues didn’t seem to care how I was. In fact, they were afraid to show they cared and so risk ruining their blossoming and well-paid careers, now supplemented by trips to friendly USSR countries and even to the rotting West. They all knew that the penalty for contact with me would be a visit to the infamous corner building with its KGB overseers, its prison cells and pre-deportation holding tanks. Freedom had been dangled before me in the form of studies in Leningrad. I hadn’t known how to deal with it. For this I’d been sent into exile in this stifling room at the ambulatory centre.

  I had succeeded with my Serafima experiment several times. Women who couldn’t get pregnant followed my instructions, brought me their husband’s sperm, and the miracle, as they called it, happened. In their eyes, I became a miracle worker. But there was no miracle in this, just a casual, lucky happenstance, to which I lent my hand and some of the medical tricks I knew. Somehow, this tempered my sense of humiliation. It added up to more than the daily round of gynaecological examinations and diagnoses which I could do with such precision and ease that it felt like a game of patience. I shook a mental fist at the head doctor, who, in his gloomiest dreams, could never have envisaged that I, the exile, could repeat something like this.

  Still, it’s possible that exile saved me. I had experienced the death of only one patient. Had I remained in the meat-grinder that was Riga, I would have had to accept that patients’ deaths are normal. An unavoidable medical statistic. I do remember the senselessness of that one death. The woman’s labour pains had been dragging on, which in itself was not unusual. She was exhausted. Her pulse was weak and the baby’s heartbeats ever fainter. I made the decision to do a caesarean section. In the operating room I was assisted by a student who still had much to learn. The anaesthesia took effect well. I did the section and took out a healthy, strong baby boy. I still needed to stitch the wound closed. I signalled to the student with my head that his help was no longer needed. Then, as I looked on, the student took his gloves off over the woman’s open womb, and all the sweat-covered talc that was inside the gloves fell into the wound.

  He stood there wide-eyed as the talc mixed with the woman’s blood, stunned by what he had done. I threw myself at the wound, trying to clean it, but there was little that could be done to save the situation. Although the woman immediately received doses of antibiotics, after a few days she was diagnosed with a septic infection and a generalized poisoning. We didn’t succeed in saving her. The head doctor wrote up the case as an accidental death, because the student was the son of a very good friend of his, a high-ranking official. Before me unfolded the great scientific road to Leningrad. That night I created a chilling scene for my family at home. I swallowed sedatives with my vodka, then locked myself in the bathroom and howled.

  Here, in the quiet countryside, I had a strange dreammany times over. I was standing in an empty field. Two women approached me. I recognized them: one was Serafima, the other was the dead woman. Serafima came to me and said that she was not alive. The dead woman said she was the one who was alive. I stood there, confused, not knowing what to say. The alive one was dead, the dead one, alive. I woke drenched in sweat.

  It was early morning. My daughter was quietly setting out dishes. She was getting ready for school. I smelled the delicious aroma of coffee. She was brewing it for me. It had been no more than a bad dream. The pain in my breast subsided.

  *

  As was our custom, I brought a large mug of coffee into my mother’s room, without sugar or milk.

  ‘I had a dreadful dream last night,’ she said. We weren’t accustomed to recounting our dreams to each other. Dreams were dreams; reality was reality.

  The reality was this: we were alive. Mundane things shaped our days, the days became weeks, the weeks, months, the months, a year. They stuck together very much like the lumps of clay in our ceramics workshop, which I attended twice a week at the community centre. The fresh clay stood there in large blocks, wrapped in cellophane. It reminded me of the large block of butter that the storekeeper cut into small pieces with a wire much like the one that cut the clay. Our instructor was a sculptor who came from the city and, like my mother, always smelled of cigarettes and alcohol. As the workshop began, she would distribute wire-cut lumps of clay. She showed us various techniques: for example, how to fashion a clay box from a paper pattern. Yet we were free to knead and shape the clay as we saw fit. Follow your instincts, the instructor used to say, pulling her knobbly beret over one eye, wrapped in a piece of clothing she called a poncho and lighting up her next cigarette with relish. We followed her instructions.

  In the beginning the clay was tough to knead. It resisted my fingers. Gradually it warmed, then became soft and malleable. I already had a couple of clay dishes with scalloped edges at home, also a squirrel and two medals with the inscription ‘Greetings on 8 March’, surrounded by appliquéd, colourfully glazed flowers. These were intended as a surprise for my mother and grandmother on International Women’s Day. But today I wanted to make something special.

  In my mind’s eye, I saw my mother’s drawing. It was a vague memory. I tried to recall how the foetus looked inside a womb. Very like a large bean, yet with discernible human features. Somewhat curled up, drawn into itself. It wasn’t easy to
shape. At first my foetus was just an indistinct mass. I kneaded it with my fingers, rolling it on the table, now stretching it, now compressing it. Seeing my confusion, the instructor asked me what I was trying to create. A baby still in her mother’s womb, I replied. She extinguished her cigarette and helped me to create a smooth, curved shape. ‘You don’t have to make a precise image,’ she said. But I wanted to create it exactly as my mother’s precise drawing appeared in my memory. Now the head was turning out too big, and the arms and legs were too spindly and small.

  Angered at my helplessness, I punched the clumsy baby into a lump again and tried anew. Everyone else was shaping the usual charming dishes and animals. Once more I kneaded out a smooth ball, rolled it on the table and made a lovely curved shape, much as the instructor had done previously. I was afraid to handle it further, afraid to blunder again and find another clumsy baby in my hands. I gazed at the smooth, mute shape. Would I be able to breathe life into it? The instructor was already coming to inspect our work and to correct what we had done. I didn’t have the courage to touch my curved shape any more.

  I stood there with my hands tightly fisted. I could do nothing for myself, nothing for the clay baby, who lay on the table unborn. Frustrated, I decided to destroy it altogether. I stamped my fist into the curved shape. The instructor came over and said, ‘I see you’ve managed to do it.’ I gazed at the three-part chrysalis. The outline of a tiny human being was clearly discernible. It wasn’t as precise as my mother’s drawing, but it was there. I gave it to my mother. I think she hid it somewhere. At least I never noticed it anywhere at home after that.