Soviet Milk

by Nora Ikstena

  My mother now came into my room quite frequently. Or I would wander into hers. We ate our supper. We curled up in bed, sometimes in silence, at other times exchanging a few words. The dog went from room to room with us, not wanting to be left alone.

  ‘I’ll have to learn to live differently,’ she said to me one evening. ‘I’ve become used to you.’

  ‘Me too.’ We had our small, isolated life. Somewhere was another life, but we had ours.

  My mother often left a light burning all night in her room. If I didn’t fall asleep right away, I would hear her going to the kitchen to brew coffee and going back again. Sometimes it seemed to me she didn’t sleep at all. All around her bed encyclopedias and other books were scattered. And sketches, which for the most part I didn’t understand. I recognized medical instruments in some of them, and in others, a woman’s crotch. They were frightening. I didn’t tell my mother about my first gynaecological examination at school. It was painful and repulsive. Of course, I thought about my mother, about her daily work at the ambulatory centre. I didn’t understand why she’d chosen such work. A small inner voice taunted me: ‘Guess, guess this little riddle.’ But racking my brain got me nowhere.

  One night I saw that my mother was asleep with the light still burning in her room. I took out the coffee mugs, collected the apple cores and bread crusts. Apples and black rye bread were my mother’s favourite food. I turned out the light. The window was half-open. She kept it like that, to let some air into the smoke-filled room. Fresh, fragrant night air flowed in. Moonlight illuminated us.

  My mother was sleeping on her left, her face turned to the window. She slept calmly. I sat across from her on a small stool. Her face was covered with freckles, like mine. In the winter they had faded somewhat, but were still visible. She had a high forehead on which tiny wrinkles were slowly forming. Once in a while she used to place her hand on my forehead and say, ‘Never look surprised; never frown.’ But she herself frowned often. Her nose was fine and narrow, with a small hump. Her eyebrows and lashes were dark brown, her ears small and close to her head, with small lobes. Now and then she opened her mouth and quietly snored for a while in her sleep. My mother’s face looked almost beautiful. Fear, so often another occupant of this room, had disappeared. There was just silence, the fresh night air and the moonlight. And my mother’s face.

  I sat for a brief while, then left for my own bed. It was hard to fall asleep. I went straight into a dream. I was standing by my old wardrobe. The large oval mirror should have shown me full-length, but I could only see half of me. My hands were crossed over my chest. At first I seemed to see my grandmother. I had her face – her prominent cheekbones, humped nose, grey eyes and high forehead. Then the image in the mirror changed and I saw myself as my mother, her eyes closed, asleep. And then I saw myself with a lightly glowing skin as if taken from a greetings card, but nonetheless myself.

  In the morning, as usual, I brought a big mug of coffee into my mother’s room. She had risen already, sat down before the broken mirror on her bedside table and was brushing her hair.

  ‘Give me the brush. I’ll help you,’ I said.

  My mother often had tangled hair at the back, which she patted down and tied with an elastic band.

  ‘It has to be combed for once,’ I said, and began to untangle Mother’s hair.

  She submitted, lit a cigarette and sipped her coffee.

  ‘I had a lovely dream. I saw myself in the mirror, first as your mother, then as you and then as me. Your eyes were closed and you were sleeping.’

  My mother put her cigarette and coffee mug down on the bedside table. She clasped my hands and placed her face in them. Then she kissed them and quietly repeated, ‘Be vigilant. Keep your eyes open.’

  *

  I hadn’t seen them for several years. During the spring break my daughter asked if we could finally go to Riga together. Apparently my mother and stepfather thought I no longer wished to see them. They wanted to discuss my daughter’s move back to their flat. There were all sorts of reasons to go.

  The morning we went to catch the train happened to be warm and sunny, although it was still March. We walked holding hands. As always, I felt as though my daughter was leading me. She was so happy, rushing along, almost dancing. Just as happily the March snow thawed into meltwater and flowed away. Even in shady spots the snowdrifts were shrinking. I felt as if I were setting out on a forgotten road after many years of winter.

  In the small, neglected railway station a fire sputtered feebly in a wood stove. An exhausted night-owl was snoozing on a bench. My daughter knocked on the window of the cashier’s booth. The cashier slid open the heavy rag curtain and punched out two tickets for us.

  ‘Mamma, come,’ my daughter said. ‘You get the best feeling if you wait for the train at the end of the platform.’

  Only a few passengers were waiting for the Riga train. We headed for the end of the platform. I joined in with my daughter’s ritual. Where the platform finished, the tracks disappeared in the distance between the fields on one side and the forest on the other. There in the springlike morning haze it had to appear: the train that, after all these years, would take me to the city from which I’d been banished. It would take me to my mother and stepfather, whom I had hurt so much.

  In the distance the train roared. It was approaching to take us away from this Golgotha.

  The journey was long. Lonely stations slid by the window, followed by the Rumbula Forest corridors, where Jews had been shot. I daydreamed back to a student party in one of the Rumbula’s community gardens. Having downed our strong, sour gut-rot, I was looking for somewhere to sit down. The allotment garden was surrounded by a temporary fence supported by posts. Small for its role, covered in moss, each post had a cross scored into it at the top. Cabbages, beetroot and potatoes to provide for our Soviet pigs would grow abundantly here, for bodies from military executions fertilized the soil.

  The journey was slow. The train rolled into Šķirotava railway station, from where tens of thousands of Latvians were deported to Siberia. Nothing had changed since that day when my daughter and I had gone into our remote country exile. People were living in the same world, with identical sectional wall units, crockery sets and coffee tables, in identical flats, with identical doormats. They were irreproachable. For in Šķirotava – which means ‘place of separation’ in Latvian – no one was separated any longer. Husbands were not separated from wives, nor children separated from parents, nor grandparents from grandchildren. No longer separated to become slaves of the twentieth century, to fertilize the vast earth of the motherland.

  I also thought about my father, from whom we had been separated right here.

  The journey was long. I observed my daughter. Her happy girlish face, her chin pressed against the carriage window.

  We got out at Riga station.

  ‘Let’s walk, Mamma. Let’s not take the tram,’ my daughter suggested. ‘The weather is so nice and you haven’t been here for years. Riga is lovely.’

  Yes, the March sun was making it lovely, even though the streets were wet, full of mud and slush.

  We decided to sit on a bench in Vērmanis Park. I lit a cigarette. My daughter ate an ice cream.

  The passers-by seemed to be dressed for a special occasion. The bright colours and the sun were dazzling.

  ‘Let’s go further along Kirova Street,’ my daughter said.

  ‘Kirov married Elizabete,’ I said, laughing. ‘Before, this street used to be called “Elizabete”.’

  ‘Fine, Mamma. Along Elizabete to Valdemāra Street, who has now married Gorky. How all the streets have been renamed!’ my daughter remarked happily.

  ‘Aren’t you too smart for a fifteen-year-old?’ Her joy warmed my heart.

  On a corner we went into a chocolate shop to buy a treat for ourselves. On the shelf were rows of marzipan figurines called Dārgais – ‘Dear One’.

  ‘Can we afford a marzipan owl?’ my daughter asked me quietly.

/>   ‘Today we can afford everything. Even a marzipan owl.’

  We walked hand in hand. My daughter’s contentment was tangible.

  ‘Amptmanis Briedītis married Zaube, Nītaure remained an old maid, but Mičurins married Tompsonu.’ She was counting the streets and calling out their ‘married’ names, the new ones, and the original names.

  Nothing had changed in our short street. The new technical school, the library for the visually impaired, the peacetime apartment blocks on one side, the kindergarten on the other side.

  At the flat my mother and stepfather welcomed us. We embraced, and I saw their eyes fill with tears. While the table was being laid, I went into my room. It was sunny and clean, my books lined up neatly on a shelf, on the table a vase of tulips, my daughter’s books and keepsakes, the bed covered with my mother’s fringed, embroidered blanket. Soon my daughter would be living here.

  Lunch passed quietly. My daughter talked about school and her achievements in chemistry and literature. My mother and stepfather now and then cast affectionate looks my way. I sat at the beautifully laid table. They all loved me, but I wasn’t there.

  After lunch I went out for a walk. My familiar walk to the hospital. Ambulances sped by. Someone was being driven to safety. To be saved, to be kept alive – in this city, in this cage. Because life mattered more than anything.

  I decided to stop halfway, at the small park where my mother used to take me to the swings in my childhood. The fragrance of hops and chocolate from nearby factories still mingled in the air.

  It was early afternoon. The park was full of melting snow and empty of people. On the paths the city’s chubby pigeons fluttered about, and sparrows preened their feathers in the sun. The old swings were still there.

  I sat on a swing and pushed off from the slush of snow and mud. I swung higher and higher. Above was the blue canopy of the sky. Below the earth’s port of remorse. In between, swinging, I breathed fitfully. Through the small hole in the suitcase, where my mother had hidden me to keep me safe.

  *

  That night my mother didn’t come back. She just phoned from the railway station, saying that she was quite all right. She had decided not to stay the night but rather to head back home. I saw how painful that was for my grandparents.

  As always during these visits, my grandmother ran a bath for me. It was the most peaceful feeling: to sit in a warm bath, hearing the television from my grandparents’ room.

  That night they didn’t turn on the television. For a while there was silence. I lay in the bath, now and then submerging myself in the water so as not to hear the unusual silence.

  After a while my grandmother spoke: ‘We’ve lost her. What will happen to her? What, for God’s sake, will happen to her?’

  I heard my grandmother start to weep and my stepgrandfather try to comfort her.

  ‘The main thing is that everything is all right with our Sweet Pea.’

  ‘Who is to blame?’ repeated my grandmother brokenly. ‘She grew up surrounded by love. When we returned from Babīte, the windows here were shattered, it was cold, we hadn’t anything to eat. I exchanged my African fur coat for dried sugar beet. My jaw grew sore from chewing at those beets. There was nothing else. But they gave me milk to spare in my breasts. She sucked mother’s milk until she was three years old. She was a healthy, strong child. What happened to her?’

  I sat in the bathtub and my grandmother’s weeping reached me there. After a while she opened the door.

  ‘Sweet Pea, do you want me to wash your back?’ Her eyes were still red.

  She took the worn sea sponge that we had brought from the south, soaped it and gently rubbed my back.

  ‘Like a dulcimer,’ she said lovingly. ‘You are like a dulcimer.’

  I don’t remember my mother ever washing my back. We didn’t have a bathtub; that was a city pleasure. As was the touch of my grandmother’s hand on my back.

  I took my favourite photograph album to bed with me. My grandmother had lined up all the albums on the lowest shelf of the bookcase. There was my stepgrandfather’s youth, and an album of my grandmother’s young days, and an album of movie stars and my mother’s childhood and teenage album, in which was written in blue ink: ‘As you grow, may your spirit grow in clarity.’

  The album was thick with padded cloth covers, a gift to my mother on her fifteenth birthday. It was the key to my mother’s life before me. She danced through it, a small ballerina in a white tutu, a girl with two braids by a birch tree, in a haystack, a soil-covered girl in a potato field, a swimmer with dripping hair, a folk dancer, her arms outstretched under a banner with Stalin’s words: ‘We are for peace and keeping peace’, an exemplary student in uniform with the first-aid cross on her left arm, a figure taking part in a procession wearing a starched kerchief, helping her stepfather hold the May Day flag.

  Then she grew bigger – like me. She had short hair, wore trousers and black sunglasses. She stood by a river, casting a fishing line, but the rod was smudged and it looked like she was casting a black-and-white rainbow across the river. Then she was standing at the far end of a boat by the motor, her arms flung high as if the entire world belonged to her and she was happy, as happy as a person can be in this world. Now the same expression, having clambered onto a large rock. Now wearing a dress which reached to her knees, around her head a wide bandanna and sunglasses. Then the last pictures in the album. Someone had photographed her several times by barbed wire with a sign in two languages – Russian and Latvian: ‘Za provolokami ne khodit – smertelno’ and ‘Aiz drātēm neiet – nāvējoši’, both meaning, ‘Don’t go beyond the barbed wire – danger.’ But the photo was so full of life: the unbounded, endless seashore, the white sand of the beach, her wind-blown hair and her embroidered dress.

  *

  The long days and nights of the spring break prepared me for this new life without my daughter. I tried to spend as much time as I could at the ambulatory centre. My patients squeezed me dry and I allowed them to. I muddled their names, forgot them and got lost in the Babel of their diagnoses. When I closed my eyes at night, I was haunted by their genitals. My passion had turned into a pitiful routine, a dead end. I no longer lived along with my patients’ hopes and fears. In fact I now reacted with indifference, even to an appalling diagnosis. I simply referred them elsewhere. But they returned: they didn’t want any other doctor.

  Even Jesse secured a charwoman’s job at the ambulatory centre. ‘How nice. I’ll be working right here near you,’ she said, when we ran into each other in the corridor.

  Morning and evening, Jesse was a reminder of the cage in which I lived and worked. I had figured out several hormone formulae which might, just possibly, lead Jesse in the direction of womanhood. But it was clear that it would be impossible to apply them in the reality in which both Jesse and I were living. Each of us was bound to care for our own burdens: I for my patients, she for her cleaning. Outside lay freedom: for me to be a scientist and Jesse, even partially, to be a woman. In the meantime we looked after our cages.

  Lonely in the evenings without my daughter, after the long workday I invited Jesse to come with me to the river to drink my patients’ gifts.

  As every spring, the river sloughed its accumulated winter flotsam out onto its banks. Reborn, it flowed slow and fresh, its waters sparkling at the sky.

  We sat on a bank.

  Our evening by the river was almost silent until we were interrupted by the whirring of wings. A pigeon landed on a driftwood stump nearby. An odd bird, it ducked its head to and fro and stared at us. It wasn’t afraid and didn’t fly away. Now we were three.

  *

  After the spring break, time literally flew. For my literature exam I managed to write compositions not only for myself but also for a boy whom I liked. Although he was the shortest, he was also the naughtiest boy at school. He was the most attractive, too, because his face reminded us of a foreign movie star. His father allowed him to drive his coffee-coloured Zhiguli car, he alw
ays had money, and once at school he treated me to a banana. It was the first banana I ever ate. It looked as though he liked me.

  Now graduation from my primary school was close at hand. My grandmother had managed to find me a white lace blouse, a black skirt with a wide belt and accordion-pleated flounces, and violet-coloured flat shoes, so that I wouldn’t be taller than the boy of my choice when we danced.

  My mother had almost regained her spirits. She dug out a small crimson bow tie. I thought only boys could wear bow ties, but my mother said that this would makemy graduation outfit particularly chic. And she was right. At the graduation neither my male nor my female school friends had bow ties; everyone was talking about it.

  My grandmother and my step-grandfather brought gifts and flowers. They sat beside my mother in the hall. I had the best report card in the school. After the formal ceremony there was some free time before the evening’s dancing. My mother invited my grandparents to come back to our house. This was the first time they had visited us.

  My step-grandfather walked around the garden, the dog following his every step, because he had been used only to women. I led my grandmother into my room. She sat down at my desk and gazed out of the window. Once more I saw tears fill her eyes.

  ‘Stop, please! It’s a celebration today. And in the autumn I’m coming to stay with you.’

  My mother had set a table in the garden with simple refreshments. The apple trees were still in blossom. The white blossoms fell on the table and into the lemonade.

  ‘We haven’t had a bad life here,’ my mother said. ‘We’ll see how I do on my own.’

  My grandmother and my step-grandfather kept quiet.

  ‘What are all these funeral speeches!’ I exclaimed, and kissed them, one after the other. It was spring. I might be in love and had high expectations for the evening dance.

  In the midst of my happiness, the inscription from my mother’s photo album slipped out: ‘As you grow, may your spirit grow in clarity.’