by Nora Ikstena
Jesse fell silent. The potatoes and mushroom sauce on her plate were getting cold.
‘Jesse, you have such great stories!’ my daughter said.
I was sitting in the kitchen at the table, Jesse on one side, telling the story while her meal got cold, my daughter on the other side. Everything slid past me: Jesse’s story, the garden beyond the window, the warmth of my daughter’s arm as she brushed against me taking away the dishes. Everything slid by.
*
That autumn, when I started my first university course, we were still sent to a distant Soviet kolkhoz to help with the harvest. Even there a sense of change hung in the air. Everyone – the administrative staff as well as the common workers – drank from morning till night. We were squeezed into a couple of multistorey buildings that stood in the centre of the region. From there we were taken to do hell’s work. The rotted grain had to be shovelled together with the good grain, probably to increase the overall volume. The same with the potatoes, which were gathered by a terrible old harvester machine. It held boxes where we had to pile stones and then the potatoes on top. In the midst of all this the drunken Soviet kolkhoz director kept shouting, ‘May this whole kit and caboodle go to hell!’
The month dragged on until it felt like a year. We had to survive this interim station where they had managed to strand us once again. I spent the evenings in bed with a small flashlight and Zarathustra. He asked pointed questions of me, to which for the moment I had no answers. My hands still reeked of rotten grain. Before my eyes flashed the potato harvester, while the stones in the potato boxes rattled on into my sleep.
One day in the drying-kiln I accidentally waded into some bilge. My legs were drenched to the knees. No one was able to drive me back to our barracks that day. After returning with the others and spending a sleepless night, by morning I had a high temperature. My university colleagues covered me with their blankets, left me the tea kettle and went out to the fields. I remained on my own.
I slept in a feverish semi-consciousness. My broken sleep brought strange visions. I was knocking at the door of our building in Riga. Oddly it was locked. People leaned from the windows – but they had all died. There was Mrs Migla, whose baby had died on the train to Siberia. His little body had been rolled down the railway embankment between stations. And Mrs Frišs, who used to tell how she had been saved from the Nazi executioners in Siberia, and Mrs Mežinskiene, who didn’t talk about anything. And there, high up, was my mother leaning out of the attic ventilation window. She had something clenched in her fist. She let go. A large key landed at my feet. The windows closed one by one and everyone disappeared, including my mother. I picked up the key, cleaned the sand off it and tried to unlock the door. But the key got stuck and I couldn’t turn it either way. I very much wanted to get into our flat, where my grandparents were probably having their supper. My mother might even be there too since she had thrown me the key. But the door would not give. I awoke in a sweat, bundled in blankets in the clammy room.
My illness took some time to subside. I was allowed to go home. There, cared for by my grandmother and stepgrandfather, I gradually got back on my feet, although I was often ill again during that first year of university. The days passed monotonously. Only my mountains of books could transport me into a different life. Jesse visited now and then, with greetings and gifts from my mother.
I managed to get good marks in the spring term, although I suffered the consequences. I would read until I felt sick. Often while immersed in a book, I would suddenly feel nauseous and have to run to the toilet. Like my childhood reaction to milk, it wasn’t because I didn’t like something about The Odyssey or The Brothers Karamazov, but because the words made my head spin.
Now the first year was behind me. Once again summer was beginning and I was going to stay with my mother. We hadn’t seen each other at all during my long winter of illness and reading.
She had come to meet me at the train station. She stood by the flowerbed, strange and distant. It was like that time she had come to meet me at school and we didn’t know how to behave. We hugged. My mother’s hands were covered in gashes, which she had become used to. I tried to look at her face, which I had last seen in that nightmarish sleep, when she threw our door key down from the attic window.
We walked in silence, as usual.
Surrounded by the signs of early summer, the road led my mother and me towards a new life. It promised that everything would truly turn out well. Indeed, our road was beautiful. White and blue anemones greeted us from the edges of ditches. The sky was clear. Somewhere in the distance a cuckoo made its bubbling sounds. The birches still showed that bright, bare greenness that dazzles one’s eyes. My mother’s cigarette smoke mingled with the spring air and heralded something unknown, something fresh and appealing. It drove away the sadness of separation and comforted my aching soul.
It really was a wondrous summer. Laughing and joking around, the three of us tied the wire brushes at speed. We wanted to amass sufficient money to spend on all kinds of small things. ‘Like manna from heaven,’ Jesse exclaimed, when we returned with treasures for the soul and the flesh.
Late one evening in midsummer I talked my mother into coming for a swim in the river. There was no one on the bank, so we could swim naked. My mother undressed covertly, as if she was shy. But once in the water she said, ‘Warm as milk.’ For a while we floated there together. The moonlight threw a bright path across the water. My mother swam into it and I swam beside her. We swam until we were nearly out of strength, then turned back to the bank.
*
She left at the end of August. That autumn was particularly rainy and dank. We had to keep the wood stoves burning constantly so that our hands wouldn’t freeze as we tied the wire brushes. From the world outside Jesse brought alarming news. Everything was truly about to change. Freedom was close at hand. On those evenings she talked like a prophet.
‘Maybe the time has come to put the wire brushes behind us?’
‘Jesse, do you think there’s room to be found for freedom here?’ I answered with a counter-question.
Jesse looked at me as if I were a hopeless case and exclaimed, ‘How long are we going to sit on the fence?’
That night I couldn’t get Jesse’s words out of my head. Unable to fall asleep, visions came to me of a long road with crowds of cripples moving slowly along it. Tottering, they dragged themselves forward, driven by some tantalizing dream. Yet they were after all limping towards life. I wasn’t on that road. I didn’t see myself there. The road came to a fork – one branch led the cripples along an earthly road and the other was the milky way to heaven. There will be plenty of room there, Jesse. There will be space for freedom. Life will have healed over and our lives will be released into the wide world.
Time was moving more quickly. Sometimes I sat in my room for days on end, smoking and staring, as morning became midday, midday became evening, and evening became night. Jesse noticed that I was switching off. She decided to come to live with me. On my active days, we would eat a late breakfast, tie a batch of brushes, then prepare for lunch. Towards evening, Jesse would go to clean at the ambulatory centre. I would try to read something, but the letters slid past my eyes and nothing stuck, nothing stayed with me.
When Jesse returned, we would talk about my daughter. We were waiting for her. This second year felt harder than the first. She had to study and read so much that she had less and less time outside her course even to come and see us. Jesse spoke up to ask if I wouldn’t like to see my mother and stepfather. We could pull ourselves together, crawl out of our wire-brush den and go to the city. But I had no such desire. Sometimes I actually felt my strength draining away. Nothing hurt, I had no fever, just an odd condition of weightlessness.
Often I couldn’t sleep at night. Jesse guarded my sleeping pills like a prison officer and dispensed them as parsimoniously as communion wafers. They were my redeemer and my joy. That tiny white pill – one and a half or two – which transport
ed me away from the cripples’ earthly road even if only for a moment.
My daughter came at Christmas. Only for a few days, but she came. She brought gifts – my mother had knitted a hat for me and mittens for Jesse. My stepfather had made a pair of candle holders with his own hands. My daughter gave Jesse and me each a crocheted angel, bought on a street corner from an old woman who also had an angelic air about her.
My daughter herself was the greatest Christmas gift for Jesse and me. She had grown more beautiful, more serious and more adult. Possibly she was in love, but she wouldn’t talk about it. Instead she talked about books and theories and begged to borrow Moby-Dick from me, as well as the book about Winston, which Jesse had hidden along with the sleeping pills.
She told me about my mother, who was spoiling her, and about my stepfather, who had experienced sudden heart palpitations, but they had called an ambulance in time and everything was fine once more.
After our supper, she went to her room. Jesse had made up a bed for her and lit the wood stove. It was already midnight when she came into my room. She sat on my bed. As usual, we spent a while in silence.
Eventually she said, ‘Mamma, do you remember how you drew a mother and a baby – that picture with the two of them dancing around happily joined by an umbilical cord?’
‘Maybe,’ I said.
‘I have a strange feeling that that is not how it is with us. For us the cord is cut – yet it seems you still hold me with it. We are still connected by a sort of transparent but very strong cord, and I sway along with you, everywhere you sway.’
She didn’t wait for my answer but pulled up my blanket, kissed me, wished me a good night and left the room.
*
I didn’t go to my mother’s again until the spring. Jesse came to the city a couple of times. She didn’t hide that she was worried about my mother. More and more my mother would sit for hours in her room gazing out of the window at a single point. The ceiling of her room had yellowed with the cigarette smoke. Jesse’s tone conveyed unspoken reproach at my not coming to visit more often.
‘But do come this summer, this summer for sure,’ she repeated. ‘That will be a prompt for her to pull herself together and to connect to life again.’
It seemed to me that since I was born I’d been trying to get my mother to connect to life. As a helpless infant, as a child of limited understanding, as a fearful teenager, as a young woman. And she always seemed to be striving to turn out her life’s light. So we struggled – always ending in stalemate. Although one day the light would be extinguished for ever.
Out in the streets, the summer of 1989 was on fire. The people out there were transformed: elated and happy, armed with flowers, folk songs and little red-white-red flags. Life flooded the gardens, courtyards, roads, fields and cities. I wished that like the ninth wave it would crash through my mother’s small, smoke-filled room, wash away all of history’s injustices and miserable coincidences, including being born exactly then and there – crash in and let life in with it.
But my mother didn’t leave her room. She didn’t leave even when Jesse and I, crying with happiness and helplessness, told her that she had to join hands with people throughout our three Baltic countries who wished to be free. We would form a living human chain in which every person had their place. Every one of us would become part of that causeway of human beings, extending our hands to each other, and no one would be able to destroy us again.
But my mother wouldn’t come out. Jesse and I stood hand in hand with many others and cried not for joy at the freedom which was close by but because of our heartache for my mother, who refused it.
I left earlier than planned for the city. I knew that I was leaving the entire burden on Jesse’s shoulders. With every passing train station I distanced myself from my mother’s stifling room, where she gazed at the August garden through the half-open window or maybe simply stared at a point in the distance and saw nothing.
In the lecture halls September passed as if we were in a trance. No one talked about literature or historical Balt grammar. Everyone – lecturers and students – behaved as if set free from imprisonment. The only thing that mattered was what was happening outside. The mighty Soviet monolith was tottering, collapsing, and no one could tell if the consequences would be the devastation of an earthquake or as it was in the Bible when God created a new, beautiful world out of nothing. Would it be a paradise or hell?
One sunny October afternoon, we lived and breathed nothing but the People’s Front Congress. The people demanded the return of their mother – the land of their birth. My grandmother and step-grandfather didn’t hide their tears of joy.
In the evening Jesse telephoned. She couldn’t talk. Tears stifled every word. My mother had died. I had to hurry back immediately.
I arrived on the last train. Jesse met me at the station. She had shrunk into a tiny creature, her face ridged with pain and tears. We walked along the leaf-strewn road. The beginning of October was oddly warm.
‘I don’t know. I don’t know what she did to herself,’ Jesse sobbed. ‘I came back from the ambulatory clinic and she was lying there – dead. A doctor came and certified her death.’ Jesse cried like a child.
I walked beside her, not yet understanding. The news of my mother’s death seemed unreal, invented. Even though weeping Jesse testified to its truth by every sound she made.
With our neighbours’ help, Jesse had carried my mother into the garage. She lay on the long table in her old housecoat and woollen socks, her hair in a ponytail. Very likely she hadn’t brushed it.
I touched my mother’s hand. It was cold and covered with gashes from the wire brushes. I took her hand and tried to warm it in mine, but it made no difference.
‘Heat up some water, Jesse,’ I said. ‘Let’s wash her.’
In the mixed dimness of electric lamps and candlelight I unbuttoned my mother’s housecoat. Jesse helped me to undress her. It seemed to us that my mother must feel cold, so we covered her to her waist. Jesse brought warm water, alcohol and towels. I wet the towels and first carefully cleaned my mother’s face. In the corners of her eyes she still had remnants of sleep, and a crumb of bread in a corner of her mouth. Her lips were dry and chapped. Then I carefully washed her breasts – which I had only seen once during a night swim, when we had slid into the river naked. They were cold, white, with a scattering of tiny freckles. I touched them. They rose from my dream warm and full of mother’s milk, and the milk flowed life-giving and infinite. I rested my head on my mother’s breasts, and my warm and salty tears fell upon my mother’s cold flesh.
The next morning I returned to Riga. There was much to do before the funeral. My grandmother and step-grandfather divided the tasks. We worked together, trying not to show our emotions. Jesse remained with my mother and cried for all of us.
The unusually warm October air flowed through the open window into the kitchen, where we were eating our supper in silence. I gazed at my grandmother’s pale cheeks and at my step-grandfather, who had bent over his plate so we wouldn’t see the tears falling into his food.
Tomorrow we would have to bid farewell to my mother. When the table had been cleared, my grandmother asked me to stay a little in the kitchen. After a moment she returned with a small bundle wrapped in white cloth, mottled with rust stains. She untied it.
On the kitchen table under the wan lamplight, my grandmother unwrapped the tiny parcel. It was a baby’s first shirt and bundled within it was a horseshoe with a couple of nails. So that the infant would be lucky in life. It belonged to my mother, once the tiniest of tiny infants. And the horseshoe was a lucky one that my grandmother had found for her on the war-ravaged road, so that her life might be peaceful.
It was a strange funeral. Without anyone to lead my mother into the next world in accordance with the ancient Latvian custom, the funeral took place in silence. The October sun and its golden leaves strewed the paths. There were four of us at the graveside: my grandmother, my step-grandfather,
Jesse and I. An endless stream of women unknown to us flowed by, leaning down and placing flowers on the grave mound. A blanket of deep red, then white, then deep red Michaelmas daisies.
Jesse and I lit candles. May my mother rest in peace. Several women embraced me, without a word. But a young woman of about my age came up to me and spoke in Russian.
‘My mother, Serafima, called your mother my father.’ She smiled. ‘Without your mother, I would not have been born. That was in Leningrad. Now we live here. Serafima died, but she always said that I should find your mother. Sadly, I have only managed now.’
‘Your mother was my father’ – it rang in my ears.
In the evening I lingered in my mother’s room. Jesse had brought in autumn flowers. Everything had been cleaned and put in order, but on the table stood my mother’s ashtray with the last cigarette butt and a half-drunk mug of coffee. I looked up at the ceiling, where Jesse had done her best. She had scrubbed at the dark-yellow smoke stains and managed to clean away almost all but a tiny circle in the centre.
I lay down on my mother’s bed. My mother’s fragrance was there – and not there. Maybe Jesse had changed the bedding. Under the pillow I felt something hard, wrapped in paper. As I unwrapped it, into my lap fell a tiny clay baby. Suddenly I remembered it word for word, as if in black and white, a simple story of which even the tiniest fact could not be verified because no proof of it existed except in my memory. I had wanted to recreate a foetus out of clay.