Soviet Milk

by Nora Ikstena

  ‘Look, Mamma, everything is in blossom around us. We could sit in our garden, chat with Jesse, whip up a strawberry mousse, walk in the fields, swim in the river…’

  ‘Hug me. Hug me tightly and kiss me,’ my mother said. Suddenly her face was revealed to me in the sharp light of the sun. It had aged all at once. The smooth skin hung loose, dark hollows lay under her eyes, and deep lines of sorrow stretched away from them, as if etched into her hard face by the constant flow of salty tears.

  I hugged my mother and kissed her.

  ‘You’ve returned. I called you back so fervently, you’ve returned. Everything will be fine, Mamma.’

  *

  They eventually signed me out towards the end of August. The female doctor in charge treated me as if I were the lowest creature on earth. A mother, a doctor – but a Tvaika Street psychiatric patient. They filled me with enough medication to fell a horse. I allowed them to.

  My daughter and Jesse came to help me pack and to take me home. They tried to talk about all sorts of trivia until we were standing outside the asylum gate.

  ‘Listen! Never again will you have to be here,’ Jesse said with determination.

  My daughter held tight to my hand. She led me as if I were an unruly goat who might slip away from her at any moment.

  ‘I stole your summer,’ I said to her.

  ‘There are still a couple of weeks left. We’ll be able to go mushrooming,’ she replied matter-of-factly.

  My clean, orderly home and garden welcomed me. What pains the two of them had taken! My room smelled of apples. There was a vase of Michaelmas daisies on the table, which had been laid for a meal. Life was waiting for my return.

  They busied themselves around me, warmed up food, unpacked our bags. I looked on. I wanted to stop what was happening as one stops a car in order to hitch a lift. But all that was happening passed me by. I wanted to say, ‘Jesse – stop fussing! We’re on the Milky Way, playing, dipping our legs in until our feet disappear.’ But I was silent. I looked on as they organized me to go on living.

  ‘I’ve managed to get work for you,’ Jesse said happily. ‘Tying wire brushes. To clean off rust. You can make good money. There’s no need for any documentation; the work will be formally in my name.’

  ‘Tying wire brushes?’ My daughter was not convinced. ‘But Jesse, maybe Mamma can still go and talk about a job at the ambulatory centre?’

  ‘Nothing will come of it there,’ Jesse said. ‘Word has reached them. They know everything that happened.’

  ‘Tying brushes, Jesse – that’s magnificent, thank you. I’ll tie wires with all my heart and soul.’ I said it genuinely, but my daughter and Jesse heard irony in my voice.

  ‘Can you get something better? How much disability compensation will you get and when?’ Wounded feelings could be heard in Jesse’s words. ‘I’ll help you in the beginning. I know how. It’s not complicated work,’ she continued.

  ‘Fine, Jesse, fine. We’ll tie brushes.’

  I felt weak and went to lie down in my room. My daughter covered me with a blanket.

  ‘Sleep for a while, Mamma. Rest,’ she said, stroking my head.

  Half-asleep, half-awake, I heard my daughter talking with Jesse.

  ‘She’s given up completely. She’s smarter than all of us, more courageous than all of us. She’s an excellent doctor, Jesse, she knows about saving lives. But, Jesse, she also knows how to die. How can we support her? Why should she submit to this injustice? She was supposed to work at the Leningrad Institute! But now you’re going to teach her to tie wire brushes! What is this life in which I have to betray Teacher Blūms and my mother doesn’t want to live at all?’

  ‘Don’t talk like that,’ I heard Jesse say, trying to comfort my daughter. ‘This is the hand that we’ve been dealt. We’re worn out from carrying heavy burdens. Everything has to be accepted with humility, even wire brushes. Then you’ll regain your strength of soul.’

  ‘Jesse,’ said my daughter, ‘you speak beautifully, as if you were a book.’

  I dozed off. Sleep set me free. Then they woke me for dinner.

  *

  The new school year soon came round. My form teacher took particular care of me. She continued to wear a black ribbon in her hair. Several times she asked how my mother was. I answered politely that everything was fine. One day she called me into her cramped cubbyhole of an office.

  ‘You can’t let things slide in any subject. Your marks have to be exemplary.’

  ‘I am trying.’

  ‘I know where your mother was this summer. And then there’s the Blūms case. You have to be exemplary so that no one can accuse you of anything.’

  My harsh form teacher’s face suddenly thawed. She clasped my hand and began to speak quite differently.

  ‘Dear child, you have to keep your chin up. You can’t slip up in any way. You have to be the best.’

  Dear child? I was stunned.

  ‘I’m often afraid for you,’ she continued. ‘Afraid you might fall apart. All your troubling experiences with your mother.’

  I suddenly felt sorry for her. ‘Teacher, everything will be fine. My mother is better, and she has someone who looks after her.’

  ‘Good. That’s very good,’ she said, and offered me a sweet. ‘But all this must stay between us two, agreed?’

  ‘Agreed, Teacher.’

  My marks improved. My combined autumn and winter school report was very good. For both the school holidays I forced myself to go to stay with my mother. She had settled, to a degree. Jesse supplied the brush bases and the wires, and my mother had become adept at tying them, demonstrating as much talent in this as she had in consultations with her patients. In fact she was earning just as much. For each of the school breaks she supplied me royally with pocket money – fifty roubles.

  I brought gifts for my grandmother and stepgrandfather back with me from each of those visits. Sometimes my mother baked a cream of wheat cake, other times I brought home a roast chicken, and other times she made stuffed cabbage. Everything she made tasted good.

  In the middle of January, the headmistress called us all into the large auditorium. We were to listen to a lecture read by the wunderkind. His topic was the first issue of a new literary journal. Along with the head, the wunderkind ridiculed and slandered the journal from the first page to the last. ‘Is this poetry?’ the head almost yelled. ‘“One should not climb on a toilet, for then big, black footprints are left on a white cistern.” Is that poetry?’ She asked and answered her own question, and glared at the assembled students in the hall. All this public derision of the journal only increased our interest in it. The first issue was passed from hand to hand and read from cover to cover. Teacher Blūms would certainly have recommended it as obligatory reading.

  But in February something ghastly happened. In the seaside resort of Jūrmala a young poet was pushed out of a window in a tall apartment block. He was the poet whose poem we had read for our first workshop:

  The sea rises and crashes, rises and breaks apart again (Others rise and crash, rise and break apart again.)

  He gazed out at me from the obituary in the paper with curly, longish hair, square-framed glasses and a manly face. How could he be dead?

  I discovered the date and location of his funeral. I told the girl who shared my desk at school that I would go to the funeral, even if it was during class time. She was a great gossip and soon all the class knew of my intention. More and more people applied to go. Now we were almost the entire class, except for the few who were afraid.

  On the day of the funeral we attended the first two classes. Then we gathered in the cloakroom to get ready for the trip. Our form teacher and the headmistress caught us on the school steps. Someone had informed them, of course.

  ‘You won’t be going anywhere,’ the head said, her face white with anger. Our form teacher stood beside her wringing her hands.

  My classmates kept looking at me.

  ‘We’re going,’ I said t
o the head. ‘All of us are going.’

  I suddenly felt the same power I had that time in primary school when the sweaty man was challenging me about my mother.

  ‘We are going,’ I repeated, while a feeling of nausea rose inside me, for I remembered how the head and the KGB man had forced me to incriminate Teacher Blūms.

  ‘We are going,’ I said again as clearly as I could. ‘And then you can expel us all.’

  Our group started on our way. The head and my form teacher remained outside on the steps on that freezing February morning.

  We pooled our money and brought some flowers. By the time we reached the graveyard, they were frozen. And there was a sea of people there. We mingled with the crowd, never again to be separated from it.

  *

  Jesse was a real master with the wire. Patiently she taught me this new trade. In the beginning my hands were hurt, but slowly I became more skilful. It was mechanical yet, in its own way, creative work too. The wires had to be drawn with a special bent needle through the holes of a wooden base and then nipped off in equal lengths. Jesse wondered at my dexterity. ‘Well, you used to sew up women’s flesh.’ And she fell silent, thinking perhaps that I could be offended by this mention of past times. But those doors were closed. The wire brushes formed a large pile. At the end of the week Jesse brought boxes into which she carefully packed the brushes. She was paid in cash for them. She continued to clean at the ambulatory centre. She also continued to tell me about the patients there who wanted consultations and kept asking when I would return. She thought she was keeping my spirits up.

  As I drew each wire through the base of the brush, a calm space grew in my head. It was something like sleeping, only with open eyes and hands in movement, repeating their gestures over and over. The work steadied me. It also prepared me for something that was irretrievably closing in. As Jesse had said in that half-whisper to my daughter: everything must be accepted with humility, even wire brushes. Then we can regain our strength of soul.

  I had almost given up reading. Neither Ishmael nor Winston haunted me any longer. I now saw them as poor lost souls belonging inextricably to this world – a world I would have to leave behind sooner or later. And there was no way they could help me at that point of departure.

  I tried to put aside the very best for my daughter. Two days before her arrival Jesse had gone to the nearby town to hunt for groceries. She had her ways and her favoured places. Green peas, peppery sausage, occasionally oranges or squid – all under-the-counter wonders, not to be found on store shelves. As a brush assembler I could afford much more than I’d been able to on my monthly wage at the ambulatory clinic.

  When she came for her spring holiday, my daughter told me about the poet’s funeral. And how afterwards at school and in the atmosphere generally something had changed.

  ‘Mamma,’ she said, ‘something is near at hand. Everyone can sense it, but no one is talking aloud about it yet.’

  I listened to her enthusiastic voice and kept quiet about my premonitions.

  Jesse had an urge to mock my daughter’s enthusiasm. Waving a dishcloth over her head, she exclaimed, ‘Freedom or death!’ then fell silent, glancing at me with guilty eyes.

  ‘Jesse, don’t treat her like a brainless child,’ I said. ‘And, really,’ I added, ‘all of us are the living dead here.’

  Silently Jesse handed dishes to my daughter, who dried them. On the table the old clock went on ticking.

  *

  The last year of secondary school sped by. Before the exams my form teacher once more called me into her cubbyhole office.

  ‘You’ve studied so hard that you’ve earned it.’

  ‘Earned what?’ I asked.

  ‘We could excuse you from the final exams.’

  I was struck dumb by this offer.

  ‘Why, Teacher?’

  ‘It’s a lot of pressure and, taking into account your mother’s problems, one never knows how your nerves will react.’

  I felt as if she had doused me with cold water. Maybe she intended it for the best, but this pity degraded me lower than the floor we stood on.

  ‘Thank you, Teacher, but I would be happy to sit my exams. You don’t need to worry about me.’

  ‘Think hard about it,’ my form teacher said. And, leading me out of her cubbyhole, ‘Remember such a possibility exists.’

  That day I didn’t go home after my classes. I went to the small park where my grandparents often used to take me when I was younger. It still had the same broken benches, potholed paths, overgrown flowerbeds, littered sandpits and old swings. It was a spring afternoon. The only people there were an old couple sitting in the sun. I put my schoolbag down beside the sandpit and sat on the swing. I pushed off with my feet and began to swing myself higher and higher. A tingling began in my stomach. I swung higher still. My mother wasn’t pushing me on the swing. She had never taken me to the swings; I had no such childhood memory. I was swinging on my own. I tried not to touch the ground with my feet, not to brake this free-flowing movement. The warm spring wind in my hair. A cloudless sky above my head. I embraced the gifts of living and breathing.

  After a long walk I came home late. My grandparents tried not to show their anxiety, although I saw it in their eyes. They had got used to my routine – school, home, homework, school, rare visits to see my mother.

  After supper and homework, sleep came quickly. But sleep brought a dream I had had before. I’m clinging to my mother’s breast and trying to suck on it. The breast is large, full of milk, but I can’t get any out. I don’t see my mother, she doesn’t help me, and I’m left to struggle with her breast on my own. Suddenly I succeed and a liquid flows into my mouth. But this time it’s not bitter – it’s as sweet as camomile tea with honey. I suck and drink and drink to my heart’s content from my mother’s soft, warm breast.

  *

  ‘Mamma, I was accepted! I was accepted, Mamma!’ She almost tripped over the pile of wire brushes as she stormed into the house. Breathlessly, she told me about her strange summer of studying behind heavy curtains, so that the sun wouldn’t tempt her to go outside. She described the national competition through which girls from country schools who had kolkhoz and Soviet farm recommendations and who only got grade 3s out of 5 in all their subjects might still be accepted at university. She described the old professor who had saved her life in the literature exam: she had been unlucky, drawing a topic to defend on contemporary life difficulties in the novel Zīda tīklā – ‘The Silk Net’.

  Jesse and I had waited so long for her. The summer had felt endlessly hot. Working at those wire brush piles, despite my skill, I always had fine scratches on my hands, which became inflamed in the heat. My fitful, dream-filled sleep reminded me of the summer when I was expecting my daughter. Memories of blurry visions: of a light that shines into me as I stand at the window, that gathers behind my breastbone and pierces painlessly through me to emerge from my head. However much I wanted to, I couldn’t turn my head to see if it was all the same light. Intrusive thoughts about children as the fruit of sin assailed me. I contemplated bastard children brought up by wild-animal mothers or left in baskets at rich people’s doorsteps or set afloat in rivers. I considered maidservants made pregnant by their masters, who jumped into rivers or died at the hands of quack doctors. I dwelt on women abortionists of the offspring of sin, who had gone mad, been driven away or burned on pyres.

  Here she was: my daughter. Not a bastard, nor the fruit of sin. Thirsting for life, she lay in our garden, where Jesse’s multicoloured autumn blooms and her yellow dill flowers spread their fragrance.

  ‘Mamma, come and lie down beside me,’ she said. ‘The sun is still so gentle and the grass is warm.’

  I went out into the garden and lay down beside her. She took my hand.

  ‘You’ve got lots of scratches from those brushes, Mamma. You have to go back to the ambulatory centre, at least try to. Do you know what happened in the city’s streets this summer? Your stepfather said
it was unbelievable. It looks as though everything is about to change and we will be set free. Maybe you can even try returning to the city. You’re a brilliant doctor after all. You’ll find work for sure.’

  I clasped my daughter’s hand tightly and said, ‘Yes, freedom is close at hand, I feel it. It’s no longer far away.’

  ‘I never know when you are speaking from the heart and when you are speaking just for the sake of saying something,’ my daughter said.

  ‘I throw the dice for words from the heart. Let them fall as they may.’

  Jesse was calling us to lunch. She set out tiny new potatoes with a wild chanterelle sauce and freshly salted pickles.

  ‘Maybe you’d like milk with this,’ Jesse suggested. ‘We have some here, from a neighbour’s cow, milked fresh yesterday.’

  ‘No,’ my daughter replied immediately. ‘Jesse, definitely no milk for me.’

  ‘Do you still get nauseous from milk?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know, but better not to try it,’ my daughter said, cutting me short.

  For a while we ate in silence. Then Jesse suddenly began to tell the story of a loner who had gone off into the hills because he was disappointed in people and the world they had created. She talked breathlessly as if she’d waited a long time for an audience. Where did she get these stories? From the discarded newspapers, or the torn and shredded books?

  Forgetting the delicious meal, she went on: ‘He took with him only his cane, which was more faithful even than a dog. The cane helped the loner to climb the steepest hills, cross the most dangerous passages, traverse the longest of roads, which led him away from the world that had chosen the wrong path. The loner didn’t have the power to lead so big an entity as the world onto the right path. That’s why he left: at least he need not be a factor in others’ choices. Leaning on his cane, he had gone sufficiently far to feel his absence from the world. Amid hills under a wide blue sky, he had air to breathe freely and an unpoliced road under his feet. But this first impression, as so often, turned out to be deceptive, for pretty soon the loner started to grumble – first to himself, then at his cane. Thus he spent several years, until he suddenly realized that, having left the world while leaning on his cane, he still had no right to call himself a loner. When he came to a bridge over a fast-flowing river, the loner threw his trusty cane into the current. That wasn’t easy; for many years they had walked hand in hand. Now it seemed to the loner that he had freed himself from his last earthly burdens. Yet, no matter how far he went, more and more often the loner felt that he was dragging along all the world’s burdens. And now he had to carry them alone, for he no longer had a cane…’