Soviet Milk

by Nora Ikstena

  Her gaze spoke of utter defeat. Just a bit longer and I would be leaving. I was still swimming in an enormous, clear blue sea, where the waves played their tambourine against the pebbles and promised a wondrous future.

  One morning my mother woke me while it was still dark. ‘Get up and dress warmly,’ she said, laying a raincoat and rubber boots beside my bed. My heart leapt in excitement. We were going mushrooming. Lately I hadn’t been able to convince my mother to go to the woods. Usually I went on my own and stayed close to the forest’s edge because I was afraid of getting lost. But now as a pair we’d be able to criss-cross the forest to our hearts’ content. Following close on the heels of the heatwave, the August squalls were the right time for mushrooms. We were united in our conspiracy. We would go wherever the forest paths led: whatever it took to attain a full basket of king boletes.

  The day was just dawning as we made our way into the forest. The sky was overcast. A warm mist lay in the meadow. A solitary bird was jabbering away. He dragged his beak along a tree trunk, announcing his presence. My mother and I padded on into the forest, where a mushroom kingdom awaited us. The overcast sky slid open a crack and a feeble sunbeam crept out, then grew stronger. Soon golden light flooded the forest. Dew trembled in spurs of fir, pine, birch and aspen trees and ferns. The spider’s webs sparkled.

  We walked in silence, concentrating. Talking could scare them. Beneath ferns, among aspen trees, squatted scaber stalks with chubby stems and deep red caps. Further on, a thick blanket of black leaves concealed ugly green milk caps. Then at intervals along the forest path giant boletes exploded from the soil, surrounded by small slippery jacks, clusters of chanterelles and orange milk caps. Gypsy mushrooms and copper brittle gill buttons lay cradled in the moss. We maintained our silence, though we felt like yelling for joy. My mother’s glasses began to steam up. Eventually she tore them off and put them in her pocket. In a meadow beyond the forest we found white horse mushrooms. These were large, powerful balls lifted by strong stalks, veiled by floating skirts. Our baskets were filling up.

  We sat down in the sun at the forest’s edge to catch our breath and rest for a moment. My mother unwrapped some sandwiches. The fragrance of moss beneath us, of the mushrooms in our baskets and the bark behind us, was golden as the sky.

  ‘I don’t remember how you taught me to differentiate between them,’ I said to my mother.

  ‘Between the safe mushrooms and the deadly ones?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘how to tell the edible from the poisonous. I don’t remember how that happened.’

  ‘We went together. I described and pointed them out to you. I also don’t remember exactly.’

  ‘Now I simply know. I walk, pick and know.’

  ‘Don’t be so confident. You still have to be careful.’

  ‘If I don’t know I don’t pick the mushroom.’

  ‘But how do you know that you don’t know?’ my mother asked.

  ‘I don’t know how, I simply know. I know that from you.’

  Having finished our sandwiches, we were silent once more. We crossed the meadow to reach a stand of lime trees. Their leaves had already started to yellow. Dried blossoms were drifting from the oldest trees. There weren’t supposed to be mushrooms here. Yet through the leaves on the ground peeked red stalks with grey caps. Their shapes were like the boletes, but their colours were new. Beneath each cap was a strange yellow-gilled sponge. I didn’t recognize these mushrooms. My mother examined them with acute interest.

  ‘Do you know these?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, starting to cut the mushrooms and to put them in the basket.

  ‘Why are you cutting them, then?’

  ‘I’ll have to check them out,’ my mother answered.

  On our way back, the sun disappeared and a light rain began to fall. Exhausted, rain-soaked, with full baskets, we returned home.

  I was convinced that once my mother looked over the mushrooms found in the lime tree copse, she’d throw them on the compost. But she cleaned them carefully and made a separate pile for them. I felt a pinch of the old fear.

  ‘Mamma, you aren’t going to try those mushrooms on yourself, are you?’ I spoke up when the pots on the wood stove were already bubbling and the pans were sizzling.

  ‘There are only two possibilities: either they’re safe or they’re deadly,’ my mother said. I noticed an odd kind of fascination in her eyes.

  ‘Are you not afraid you’ll die?’ I asked in despair.

  ‘No, I’m not afraid. But we don’t know if death is certain from them,’ my mother snapped back, continuing to clean the boletes, chanterelles and orange milk caps.

  I wanted to grab those damn colourful pretend-boletes and throw them on the fire.

  But my mother boiled them. She tasted them that very evening.

  ‘See, they turned out to be safe mushrooms after all,’ she said calmly, when I brought up her big mug of morning coffee.

  I sat down on my mother’s bed and looked on as she lit her first cigarette. I thought about what had really happened. Was she playing with life and death? Was she the most courageous woman in the world, who wanted to know what she didn’t know? I reached for her blanket-covered legs and pressed my face against them. Thus we sat there for a moment.

  *

  The usual hamster’s wheel of the ambulatory centre began again. The hot summer had done its work. They came and came, mainly wanting to get rid of their foetuses. I thanked my exile for ridding me of the means to do this for them. I just confirmed that they were pregnant. I didn’t try to tell them how the tiny foetus can evade the instrument attempting to scrape it out of the mother’s womb. Or that this is effected knowingly by both of us, my patient and me. Or that the man often knows nothing and prefers to know nothing about it, for these are women’s concerns in a woman’s world.

  I often thought of the woman who’d been chanting in the church. Finally she came to see me. As I had anticipated, her right breast had been removed. But she radiated determination and vitality. The doctor in the city had told her that for the time being she had no reason to worry. The malignancy had been cut out and she was free of it for now.

  I told her that I had gone up to the church several times but had found it empty.

  Well yes, no one except her ever went there. But now she would go again and more often. Because she had to thank the Giver of Life, for the malignancy had been stopped. The one who had given birth to the Healer had healed her.

  She left me a tiny picture: the same icon to which she had been chanting. And she gave me a slim wax taper to light when I felt sad.

  On the point of leaving, she turned around and asked how I had been able to diagnose her malady.

  ‘That’s just from experience,’ I said. ‘Medical experience.’

  ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘I see that you can see more clearly.’

  She said goodbye and left.

  I opened the window to air the room. The September wind whipped up a maelstrom of yellow leaves which flew into the room, scattering the papers on my desk. The picture of the Virgin had fallen face down. ‘Pokhozha na vas’ – ‘Just like you’ – was written on the back.

  *

  As always, the school year began during the beetroot and carrot harvest. The autumn squalls did not let up. Drenched, we squatted on our boxes, cutting off beetroot tops and twisting off carrot tops. The piles in the field appeared interminable. I swore to do everything possible so that I would never, ever again have to sit rain-soaked on a box, wearing freezing mud-caked gloves and cutting off beetroot tops. A year from now I would join the Young Communist League. Then it would be summer and I would move back to the city and enrol in a secondary school. It would be the start of a new era.

  The work in the kolkhoz fields dragged on. Our classes, therefore, only started in October. Having gone from the wet fields into the bright, warm classrooms, we needed at least a week to get back into the rhythm of school. Our kurtkas, pullovers and rubber
boots were replaced by school uniforms. Instead of eating in the field kitchen, where tea, bread and great vats of stew had been brought to us and consumed with relish on the spot, lunch was now in the school lunch room.

  ‘It’s good that you won’t have to slave any more,’ my mother said one evening. ‘Everything will be different in the city school.’

  I sensed the pain of parting in her voice. The pain that for all these years I’d got to know in my very bones. The years of exile had brought us closer.

  At school we were rehearsing Anna Sakse’s Pasakas par ziediem – ‘Fairy Tales about Flowers’. I was given the part of a jasmine plant. In the evening my mother and I role-played the fairy tale’s ending. She was the artist who loved painting in many different colours and who wanted to be begged by the jasmine to give it colour, and I was the jasmine who refused to bend or to beg.

  ‘It’s a beautiful fairy tale,’ my mother said. ‘Life often makes one bend.’

  But I had fully entered my jasmine character. I wouldn’t bend and I wouldn’t beg. Even if my face was splashed with paint, I would stand straight or I would break. And I played my role very well. In a white costume made from an old sheet, on the steps of the small stage in the school music room, I stood unshakeable, even when the artist spattered me with yellow paint. A splash of paint even caught me in the face. People laughed. But I stood stiff as a post, looking straight in the faces of everyone laughing, until they fell silent. The narrator’s voice rang in the silence: ‘Try to bend her – she’ll break.’

  Soon life dragged us from a fairy tale into ghastly reality. Brezhnev died on 10 November. Everyone had thought that he was immortal but he died. The school hung a large picture of him draped with a black mourning ribbon in the gymnasium. What would happen next? We were convinced that war would break out.

  The day of Brezhnev’s funeral, our school was given a holiday, on the condition that we watched the funeral on television.

  This seemed like idiocy to my mother. She had bought two bottles of wine and was drinking in her room. Still afraid that war was imminent, I settled down in the front room. I turned on our television and saw how the army and statesmen had gathered at the Kremlin in Moscow. They were playing a funeral dirge. The most awful thing was that they dropped Brezhnev’s casket into the waiting hole with an enormous clatter. No one saw it, but it’s very likely, judging from the noise, that he tumbled out of his casket, turned over and fell into his grave on his face. A dreadful thing to imagine.

  After Brezhnev’s funeral no one felt much like talking. A terrible sense of foreboding hung in the air. My mother drank every evening. Three days after the funeral, on 18 November, she lit candles. She laid three rows of Michaelmas daisies on her table: two of red flowers and between them one of white. Her pupils were dilated and she was talking strangely. I was afraid to be in the same room with her. Now and then I opened the door to her room to see if she was all right.

  ‘Maybe a miracle will happen. Maybe now a miracle will happen,’ she mumbled.

  ‘Mamma, be reasonable. What miracle?’ I grabbed her shoulders and shook her. ‘Now there won’t be a miracle but war. Mamma, there’s going to be a war, maybe even a nuclear war, and we are all going to die!’ I almost screamed. I was afraid of the war and once again afraid of my mother.

  ‘I wish Latvia the best!’ She emptied the second bottle of wine. She was thoroughly drunk.

  I rolled her into bed, covered her and in despair searched her room and her handbag. I threw all the tablets that I found into the stove.

  All night I sat by my mother’s bed, now and then feeling her forehead and for her pulse. Sometimes it raced like mad and other times it was feeble, almost imperceptible. Occasionally her heavy breathing was interrupted by a flood of words. My mother was talking in her wine-and drug-induced sleep. About the miracle that would happen, about freedom, about the triple-striped flag that would fly – the red, white and red again, about God, who would bless it, about Latvia, which would live for ever. Then she paused, breathing heavily. Then screamed – ‘It’s breaking, breaking, breaking.’ Then fell silent again.

  I lay down beside her and pressed myself close. I was trembling all over. If her pulse had slowed any further, I would have run to the neighbours and called an ambulance. But gradually her breathing grew calmer and less erratic. Sweat beaded her forehead. I wiped it away. The candles burned out on the table. Their fragrance blended with the aroma of the Michaelmas daisies. I opened the window and the tranquil air of November filled the room.

  *

  The war did not start. Slowly the quotidian round was smothering me. Soon I would be alone with this daily routine. The autumn would become winter, the winter, spring; spring would turn into summer and then my daughter would leave. Already shrivelling, life’s hot-air balloon would deflate even more. And my life, slinking from home to the ambulatory centre, from the ambulatory centre back home like a whipped dog, would shrink away too.

  I had to work harder to manage my patients. The impression that I was seeing through them grew stronger. With one glance I could tell what was ailing them. Almost all my diagnoses turned out to be correct. My patients returned again and again to their miracle doctor.

  Then my powers to perform miracles were put to the test. One morning, walking down the corridor with its waiting women, I noticed her immediately. Although there were no free seats left except beside her, no woman had chosen to sit there. They were keeping their distance. Her face attracted attention instantly: it was neither a woman’s nor a man’s. As did her hands – she had taken off her gloves and crossed her hands in her lap. The palms were enormous, the fingers, powerful. These were not a woman’s hands.

  When she timidly entered my consulting room I was surprised by how diminutive she was. Surely that’s why her palms looked so enormous. I asked her to describe all her ailments and to undress for examination.

  ‘Will you really examine me?’ she asked in disbelief, the timbre of her voice low and husky. ‘In several places doctors have refused to do so. But I need to know what I am,’ she said, and tears sprang to her eyes.

  ‘Calm down,’ I said, handing her a glass of water. ‘Everything will be fine. What’s your name?’

  ‘I’ve an odd name,’ she said. ‘Jesse. It was given me by my foster mother in the orphanage. I’ve always struggled with this name, although I work as a charwoman.’

  I washed my hands and looked on as she slowly unwrapped her heavy clothes. It seems I had inspired her trust, for she continued to tell me about herself.

  ‘When I grew older, my orphanage mother showed me a piece of paper that had been included in my blanket when I was abandoned at the orphanage. Written on it was: “I don’t want this gift.” She told me that Jesse means “a gift”.’

  Undressed, she was very uncomfortable. She tried to hide her private parts with her large hands. She stood before me, one of God’s bitter jokes. A small man’s body with a woman’s crotch. In the place of breasts not even the tiniest of buds – it was a man’s chest.

  I did my examination.

  Dressed once more, she gazed at me with gratitude.

  I plucked up my courage and said, ‘Externally you’re partly a woman, but internally you’re partly a man.’

  She looked at me as if she had been informed of a malignant ailment or infertility. Then she broke into tears. Through her sobs she repeated, ‘No, I am a woman, I am a woman, I am a woman…’ Finally, calming down a little, she asked, ‘Can that man not be cut out of me?’

  ‘That can’t be done. Something else could be tried, but unfortunately I don’t have the ability to help you.’

  ‘Thanks for not turning me away,’ Jesse said as she closed my consulting-room door.

  I sat there, as much a fool as Jesse. My exile had bound my hands. I couldn’t compete with God, although just then I wished to more than anything. The Leningrad Institute was unreachable, but it was there that new discoveries were being made in hormone therapy. Only this
might provide Jesse with a path to a happy life as a woman. She would never be pregnant and carry a child, but she might experience the growth of breasts or some other feminine miracle.

  Everything comes full circle. The snow-covered bridge over the River Neva and my naive question to the drunkard at the God’s Ear café: ‘Is Jesse only a man’s name?’

  My head was fit to burst. This damned cage, in which I could do nothing. I opened the window. There she went – Jesse, God’s gift, whom I couldn’t help. Suddenly she turned, took off one glove, waved farewell and raised two fingers in a victory sign.

  *

  The war did not start and life moved on in its accustomed tracks. I turned fourteen. Now I could join the Young Communist League. I had to learn the statutes. Our literature teacher said I could recite, for example, Ojārs Vācietis’s poem ‘Noraisot kaklautu’ – ‘Taking off My Neckerchief’ – to mark the poet’s death in November. I took several of his collections out of the library. It was strange how one man could write such diverse poems. I liked this one: ‘Man ir smeldzīga, smeldzīga nojauta, ka tā pasaule, kurā es dzīvoju, var daudz ātrāk par tavu būt nojaukta’ – ‘I have a painful, painful intuition that the world, where I live, can be demolished much sooner than yours.’ But that would not appeal to the Komsomol, so I obeyed the teacher and was rewarded with my Communist Youth badge and membership card.

  This year winter seemed short. Already in February it was warm and sunny. We waited for spring and rehearsed our songs for the 8 March concert. My heart was filled with an unusual joy. Though its light was still wintry, the sun was melting snow drifts and icicles. Birds silenced by winter could now be heard singing. Everything was moving towards a thaw, towards spring. Then the holidays would come, then the final school term, and primary school would be finished. And my first summer without rows of beetroot, cucumbers and carrots would begin, after which would follow an autumn in the city – at a new school with new school friends.