Soviet Milk

by Nora Ikstena

  My mother gave us a look so full of sadness that I grew ashamed of my coltish joy.

  ‘It’s probably time for you to go to the railway station,’ she told my grandparents. ‘For you too. Keep them company. Then you’ll have to go straight to the dance.’

  Why did she always make everything so gloomy? On the way to the railway station I burst into tears. How can one keep on not wanting to live? Even on my graduation day not wanting to, probably also the day I was born not wanting to. ‘You saved her from the claws of death. How can she repay you like that?’ I said to my grandmother and step-grandfather, who walked beside me in silence. My step-grandfather stopped now and then, to catch his breath. My grandmother took his bag.

  In the station we hugged.

  ‘You won’t die, will you?’ I said – just as I had as a child.

  ‘We won’t die, Sweet Pea, we won’t die.’

  That evening I didn’t want to see my mother again. I walked as far as the river and back again to the softly lit community hall, where the dancing was beginning.

  I had a feeling he would ask me to dance a slow number with him. ‘I Just Called to Say I Love You’ crooned from the speakers, and the school’s naughtiest and most attractive boy was heading diagonally across the hall towards me. In the beginning we danced a bit apart from each other. I placed my hands on his shoulders and he somewhat fearfully put his around my waist. But it was such a good feeling that we moved closer to each other. I tried not to be taller than him. He touched my neck with his nose. The hall’s parquet floor disappeared beneath my feet.

  In the warm June night we walked to the river. He gathered small flat stones and flipped them across the water. The stones touched the surface of the water several times, flew the next bit of distance, then sank.

  At our house he first kissed me on the cheek, then pressed his lips to mine, which I held tightly pinched together. This was my first kiss.

  I carefully opened the front door so as not to wake my mother. Her door was open and her room was empty. Through the open window I saw her cigarette glowing faintly in the garden. She was sitting by our festive table, which was still laden with plates and lemonade glasses.

  ‘Mamma, why are you sitting here alone in the dark?’ I asked her, stepping out into the garden.

  ‘I’m afraid, my child. I’m afraid,’ she whispered.

  She had never called me that before. And she had never talked of fear.

  My anger with her dissipated into the warm night.

  I hugged my mother tightly. ‘Mamma, don’t be afraid. You just need to want to live, Mamma. You need to want to live and all will be fine. I love you, Mamma.’

  *

  It was a sun-drenched summer. Although my mother and stepfather had invited my daughter to come with them to the seaside for a month, she decided to stay with me until mid-August. Everything this summer seemed to play a part in our farewells. Our dog died, probably from eating rat poison. We buried him beside Bambi.

  I avoided going into my daughter’s room, where everything was gradually being packed for her departure. On her desk stood a daily flip calendar: the summer of 1984 was being turned over, page by page.

  Jesse became a frequent visitor. She arrived to help, to tidy, to prepare this and that. The ambulatory centre was closed for a month, so Jesse, who was working part-time in the book archives at the church, slipped me a few things to read, to shorten my long, sleepless nights.

  Jesse also told me about books whose covers were torn, so as to obscure their authors and titles, and cut into pieces to be fed to a shredding machine. About books stacked in lorries and driven away into the unknown.

  One evening Jesse brought me a section of a book which had drawn her attention because of its special paper and type. It was in Latvian but looked nothing like the thin, grey-paper products of our publishing houses.

  ‘A section of a book is also a book,’ said Jesse, proud of her find.

  I flipped through the pages aimlessly. Then I chanced upon a dialogue which sent shivers down my spine.

  ‘Do you believe in God, Winston?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then what is it, this principle that will defeat us?’

  ‘I don’t know. The spirit of Man.’

  Who was this Winston who was asked about God just as I’d been asked on Engels Street before going to Leningrad?

  I read on. The whole dialogue sounded as if the speaker was standing right beside me, in my narrow room, as if he was describing my life right now.

  *

  We could have had a lovely last summer together, if Jesse had not brought us that portion of book. My mother devoured it, and Jesse and I counted the days until the ambulatory centre would reopen. Jesse regretted her find from the bottom of her heart. We even debated taking the book away from my mother, but the consequences would have been unpredictable. In the beautiful light summer evenings in the garden my mother talked only about her ‘book of revelation’, which Jesse had rescued from the archives.

  I began to go out in the evenings, leaving my mother with Jesse. Jesse sat faithfully beside her in the garden and listened to endless tirades about Winston, this new stranger who had completely overshadowed Ishmael.

  With frequent turning and consultation, the pages of this half-book began to disintegrate. Looking for sturdier paper, my mother eventually took our calendar and wrapped the book in that. The inscription on it in red said ‘Novij 1984 god’ – ‘New Year 1984’. She crossed this out and wrote in black ballpoint: ‘Summer 1984.’

  I hated this half-book wrapped in a calendar. It had stolen my last summer with my mother and led her even further into a fantasy world, away from life, the blooming garden and the balmy river.

  *

  I floated through my daughter’s departure as if wrapped in mist. My daily reality had blended with Jesse’s book. My life no longer felt as though it was mine. July and half of August sped by at savage speed. Eventually Jesse took the book away and hid it somewhere. She could no longer look on as I ruined my last few days with my daughter. I admired my daughter. She didn’t show her disappointment and patiently tolerated my odd absence, while carefully packing the things she would be taking to Riga. She had found a part-time job at the post office, to earn some pocket money, and in the evenings she wasn’t home, but she never came back later than midnight. Maybe she was in love? There was no time for her to tell me about it. Jesse found this the most painful thing. The day she took the book from me, she said that I was behaving like her mother, who had left her on the orphanage steps with the note: ‘I don’t want this gift.’

  ‘Are you even aware,’ Jesse said, ‘that she’ll never be with you in the way she is now? She’ll move on into her own life. She’s an intelligent and good-natured girl – she’s a blessing. What are these devils tormenting you?’ Jesse spoke as if delivering a sermon.

  My devils – my besi – I had tried to talk about them with Serafima, but she hadn’t believed me. Or refused to believe me. But Jesse saw them in me.

  ‘Mamma, I’m not going to take my old school uniform. I’ll leave it in the wardrobe.’

  We were sewing a new uniform – a skirt, a checked blouse and a blazer – and my daughter was busy chasing away my besi.

  ‘I won’t take my school bag either; it’s worn out inside. Nor the ski boots; they pinch my feet. And, if it’s OK, I’ll leave the fairy-tale books. I won’t have time to read them now. The dog’s collar I’ll put in the lower drawer of the wardrobe. Maybe you’ll get another dog. And don’t forget to water my Christmas cactus now and then. And, please, don’t overwater the tiny green plant with snakeskin star flowers. Mamma, what do you think: should I get a fringe cut? Maybe I should have a bob? You know, I’ll leave my neckerchief. There’s no sense in taking it along. All right? And here are some other bits and pieces – stones, chestnuts, the herbarium. They won’t be in your way, will they?’

  ‘No, they won’t be in my way, my child. I’ll be fine with them in my cage
. I’ll pick them up every couple of days, blow off the dust, air the room, water the flowers. Slavery is freedom, child. I’ll be right here, waiting for you.’

  Slavery is freedom. I learned that from my book.

  The night before my daughter left we sat for a long time in the garden. The August night was humid and warm. Then my daughter asked, ‘Mamma, does any child remember how her mother’s milk tasted?’

  ‘I think they can’t. You can’t have memories that early.’

  We sat on in silence.

  *

  I returned to Riga and my grandparents. In the whirl of beginning at my new secondary school, for a while I forgot about my mother. Even though I had my own spacious room, I often slept on the pull-out chair in my grandmother and step-grandfather’s room. We wanted to be together as much as we could manage.

  The new school was tough. It was enormous. Some of the classes took place in the old building, some in the new. The two buildings were joined by a long glass corridor and riddled with smaller and larger labyrinths of corridors, along which one had to get around every day. There were only a few newcomers in the class. Classmates kept their distance from each other just as the teachers kept their distance from the students. The headmistress sat alone in her office. Approaching her was strictly prohibited. Everything was quite the opposite of my experience at our small country school. In those first weeks of September I almost missed the rainy beetroot and carrot fields, the early mornings when we used to sit all together by the heaps of green stalks and leaves, and warm soup was brought to us there in the fields.

  Everything here was different. Sterile, clean, cruelly lit by the bright ceiling lights. Everyone in this city school was competing to be the best. And the head, a vast woman with grey hair and the shadow of a moustache, encouraged all of this. When she appeared in the corridors, everyone froze. Even the gym teacher, who at least matched her in physical volume.

  The romance of the beetroot fields was exchanged for twice-weekly school cleaning. On cleaning days, classes ended earlier. We had to scrub the floors and radiators, to make up for what the cleaners missed.

  When the work was done, the headmistress would emerge. She wore a large white glove on her right hand for inspecting the areas we had cleaned. Of course, grey and sometimes even black smudges would appear on the white glove, to be followed by a lecture in the great hall. All Soviet students bore responsibility for honestly done work. All young communists’ consciences must be as white as her glove – before it acquired the stains of someone’s shoddy work.

  During these lectures in the stuffy, low-ceilinged auditorium, my conscience started to ache for Bambi. I suddenly understood the poor hamster. Mentally, I begged his forgiveness. What’s more, as I waited to be liberated from the stifling hall and the head’s penetrating voice, I remembered how my mother had sympathized with Bambi and eaten the mushrooms, not knowing if they were safe or deadly.

  I began to question my grandmother and stepgrandfather about their life. Were things always like they were now and how the announcers told us it was on TV every evening?

  My step-grandfather said one shouldn’t dwell on the past. Nothing would change here. The Russian boot would be here for ever. And, for God’s sake, he added, above all, I must not to talk about any of this in school. Even with those I considered my friends.

  But I was not to be stopped. I told my grandparents about the time my mother got drunk after Brezhnev’s funeral, about the red-white-red Michaelmas daisies on her table and about all she had said about Latvia.

  My grandparents stared at me in horror, then they both started to cry. My step-grandfather brought a photograph album from the stack in my room.

  ‘This autumn you’ll be a big girl,’ he said, ‘but you must understand that this has to stay in our house. Because nothing, absolutely nothing will change here.’

  ‘You have to live with how things are, Sweet Pea,’ my grandmother added.

  But my step-grandfather’s album was like a fairy tale. A tale of Latvia before I was born and even before my mother was born. My step-grandfather was in it, wearing a beautiful official uniform, in knee-high boots and holding a flag at the Freedom Monument. The sepiatoned image muddled the colours. ‘Two red stripes and one white,’ my step-grandfather said. ‘We had our own state and our own flag.’

  Now tears also filled my eyes, because my mother had said the same thing. All of this had seemed to me no more than her own dark nightmares, but now it turned out to be the truth.

  What to do with the truth? The school timetable included six Russian language and literature classes every week. And we had to study the Communist Party Congress documents, which repeated the same meaningless phrases again and again. All of these empty phrases had to be memorized, then recited.

  My life divided into parallel worlds. After school I worked hard on my homework for the next day, but in the evenings I listened to my grandparents’ stories. They knew so much.

  Up to the first autumn break I got excellent marks in the new school. My average mark in school was exceeded only by our school’s wunderkind. A mathematician and an honours student, no one could compete with him. I admired his quick mind. Indeed, I came to trust him so completely that I wanted to share my parallel-world stories with him. I wanted to talk about our Latvia being mocked by the Soviet Union and Germany, about refugees, about executions and deportations to Siberia, about the ones who remained and were silenced, as we, the third generation, were already silenced. I wanted to talk about my mother, who lived in a desolate place in the country because she could not live two lives – and could not accept a life of mockery, as Latvia had been mocked. I wanted to share all this but I didn’t. I obeyed my step-grandfather, who knew what he was talking about.

  During the autumn break I went to my mother’s. Jesse met me at the railway station. Her face showed distinct signs of anxiety. I hadn’t seen my mother for almost three months.

  ‘It’s a vale of tears,’ Jesse said as she walked beside me. ‘She now goes to the ambulatory centre only a couple of times a week. The rest of the time she is slowly self-destructing. I try as hard as I can, but nothing works. I clean the house, but she doesn’t let me into her room. It’s good that you’ve come.’

  My mother was lying in bed in a heavy bathrobe. Scattered around were books, ashtrays, half-eaten apples. The small bedside table was loaded with coffee mugs, and half-empty pillboxes lay littered beneath it.

  She smiled slightly when I entered.

  ‘So you’ve come, city girl,’ she said as she lit a cigarette.

  The air in the room was stale. I opened the window.

  ‘Mamma, look what I’ve brought. Pears, a persimmon and edible chestnuts. Do you remember? The Central Market is full of them, and they’re not so expensive now.’

  My mother touched the yellow pears and the flame-coloured persimmon.

  ‘They’re probably very fragrant,’ she said. ‘But I can’t smell them.’ She inhaled apathetically.

  ‘I’ll stay with you for the whole week. Get up,’ I said. ‘We have to clean this room.’

  My mother submitted like a child. She sat in the kitchen while I tidied her room. In the evening I heated a large tub of water. I helped her to wash and scrubbed her back. I brushed her tangled hair and cut her toe-and fingernails.

  ‘I do pull myself together a couple of times a week. I have so little strength. I don’t want anything,’ she said. ‘Jesse tidies this and that.’

  ‘Tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, could you bake an apple cake?’ I diverted my mother’s thoughts. ‘We have to celebrate our birthdays.’

  During the days that I was at my mother’s, she livened up somewhat. She listened with interest about my new school, about our evening stories, about the wunderkind with whom I wanted to share some stories but refrained.

  ‘Mamma,’ I said, ‘I didn’t believe what you said. Now I know, you were right about Latvia.’

  ‘You’re a smart girl,’ my mother said.r />
  We invited Jesse to our birthday celebration and to share our apple cake. She came in her best clothes, her hair prettily curled.

  At our festive table Jesse took out a small box. It was the only gift she had been given by her foster mother in the orphanage. She wanted to give it to us.

  ‘Open the box,’ Jesse said to me.

  I opened it. Inside was a gold ring, a bit of candle wax and a dried twig.

  ‘Jesse, aren’t you sorry to give it away? It was a gift to you, after all,’ I said.

  ‘It was freely given. I freely give it away,’ Jesse said, laughing.

  We sat late into the night, talking nonsense. I looked on as my mother returned to life. Jesse was happy here with us.

  *

  ‘Now it will be like this for ever. She’ll come during school holidays, sometimes on weekends. Sometimes, when she’s busy at school, she won’t come. When she falls in love, she’ll come even more rarely. This is how itwill be now, Jesse.’

  ‘You’ve been in bed for three days in a row. Get dressed. Let’s go for a walk.’ Jesse never lost hope that I’ll be able to crawl out of my hole.

  ‘Cigarettes and books have torn you away from real life. Those damned pills too,’ Jesse mumbled, gathering mugs and ashtrays.

  ‘They make it easier for me, Jesse,’ I said. ‘If only for a moment, I’m in another world.’

  ‘What’s wrong with this world?’ Jesse asked. ‘Tell me what’s wrong with it? In the mornings the sun dawns, in the evenings it sets. The days pass peacefully. We don’t have serious ailments, we’re not starving. We have our homes.’

  ‘Jesse, when you talk like that, I almost start to believe you.’

  ‘Admit it, admit this truth,’ Jesse continued. ‘Then you’ll be free for once.’

  ‘But Jesse, I’ve never been a slave to them – the cigarettes, the books and the pills.’

  ‘Truthfully you’re not?’

  ‘I’m not, Jesse. This is why I feel free.’