by Inga Abele
You’ll wake up around midnight, the heat of the inglenook against your cheek already cooled to a lukewarm breath. The scratching of mice behind the peeling wallpaper, the resin-like light of the moon… thoughts of nothing. A complete sinking into the heart of the night.
These, Michael, are my sacred resources. Behold, a sugar bowl, a silver spoon, a quilt as heavy as a person. Maybe they’ll outlast us. But they’ll never again live the life that I see through my eyes. Come, Michael, and look into the drawer of Eastern Europe.
Kurzeme
The rain has been coming down hard all night. Puddles form on the ice.
Wind blows the fog toward Riga. Ieva keeps on driving. After years and years she’s gotten up the courage to drive out to the Zari house.
The smells of the Kurzeme region. Is it sentimentality that comes with age? Back then she had no idea what destiny had in store for her, a nineteen-year old waiting at the bus stop.
The Zari house. Andrejs’s parents live there now. Rooms. Familiar smells. After so much time spent in lifeless offices and air conditioning where the atmosphere is dead—here it’s fragrant. Curtains, the door, steps. Everything has a history, even the paint on the walls. The tears well up from the smells alone. Memories swim before her eyes, ghosts. Ieva standing in the big room with an iron in her hand just after Monta had been born, ironing tiny clothes.
Monta once told her about a memory she’d had of summers at the Zari house: “There’s the road, the sun is shining, the wind blowing, and me and the dog.” She’d said it with such happiness in her voice. What can a two-year-old possibly remember? But, see, she remembers. Oh, sentimentality. But Kurzeme has a certain something. Rugged land. Wind from the sea. She’s so lucky that destiny bestowed these things upon her.
Andrejs’s father is napping in the cool of his room upstairs and cries when he sees her. He grows airier every year, like some kind of butterfly. And more gentle. He used to be tough as a rock. He ruled over everything—animals and people. Was the final word for the women, the livestock, the men. Ieva can’t stand it. He’s lighter. Soon the wind will blow him away like dust. She can’t stand it. It makes her want to cry. Scream. But there’s no point. There are no tragedies in Kurzeme. Everything here is self-explanatory. The tears stream like sap from birch trees in spring. There’s no need to scream; this suffering is imagined. She has to say her goodbyes and go on with her life.
A young woman with large, naked breasts lies on the wide bed in the central room, nursing a baby. A hundred thoughts rush through Ieva when she looks at the baby. About Andrejs’s father, sitting in the next room waiting to be blown away by the wind. About Andrejs’s grandmother, still large and heavy in her grandson’s absence, but whose eyes are as teary as all the rest, who squeezes Ieva’s hand as she looks up at her and asks—what reason do I have to stay here? And she knows the answer already. To stay for the sake of staying. To live for the sake of living. To be happy for the sake of being happy. Even though just once she’d like to hear: Because you’re needed. We all need you. Hang on until the end. In this network of hands and hearts. This network of touches and glances.
Smells and a brilliant sun. Andrejs’s mother walks her out—they get in the car and drive over hills and muddy roads. They both cry. They both hide their eyes and know full well that they can’t hide them. The sun betrays them. Skin, pores, wrinkles, wet eyelashes, bright eyes and pitch-black pupils like moving mirrors, wetness smeared across temples and outside over the fields—it glistens. They have to part ways. Ieva is ready to accept even a single word laced with reproach, but it doesn’t come. Mothers are smart. They have to part on good terms. Andrejs’s mother stays on the hill, wipes her eyes with her handkerchief and heads back. Goes her separate way. Ieva honks the horn a few times in farewell.
From the depths someone whispers: All is well. The seaside villages are dipped in the red March sun as it sets. Ieva loves Kurzeme. She can smell it. It nourishes her.
Aksels
He invites me to meet up with him.
We drink our morning tea on the terrace by the estuary. Next to us is another never-ending meeting—where the river flows into the calm sea. We drink strong, yellow tea that makes the blood in our temples sing like violins. We’re alone, with the exception of a few birds flitting about by our feet.
The sun is already high in the sky, but the clammy cold of last night still hangs in the air. Dew glints on some of the stone tables. Flies rest motionless on the banisters, and the granite floor is still covered in the layer of sand blown onto it overnight. The server reclines in a folding chair he’s put out in the sun, and smokes his first cigarette of the day while reading the paper. Now and then he pushes a hand back through his hair. The smoke that trails thinly up from his cigarette is carefree and winding, freely floating off into the great blue. I feel the structure of this city slowly course through me, saturating the cells of my body with its light.
I start to distinguish between the smells that hide shyly in gardens and those that aggressively rush in from the levee. I can visualize the shadow the black church steeple casts onto the central square, and how it always trips up the paperboy as he runs by with a newspaper bundle in his arms. I realize: if I lived in this city permanently, I’d have to huddle under a blanket with a mug of tea in the middle of the day just to fight off the chills from the persistent blue and razor-sharp cold of the sea.
“More tea please,” I say to Aksels, and in the moment the tea slowly pours from the teapot into my cup, a whirlwind of clarity rises up inside me so strongly that my chest tingles, almost like when you step up to the very edge of a cliff. I suddenly know that the dead come back to life and how they do it. I know how the living come back dead. I know what it’s like to be a bird, a dog, and a spider, I oversee everything in this exact moment of time, a few seconds that last an eternity. The wind blows my hair across my bare shoulders and it’s a loving caress. The city looks on with seeing eyes. I no longer have to count on the rare handouts from friends. From here on out, every new morning, every stranger will be a friend and an embrace—joyful and dramatic. We are all trapped in life.
The contour of the sea is wrapped in a haze. I can fly. And I can not fly, there’s no difference anymore. There’s no need to separate these concepts.
“Such a clear morning,” I say to Aksels.
Someone’s feeding seagulls from a barge and the water looks like goose bumps. The breeze surrounds us. Reflections dance on the surface of the tea.
“Like the one before you died,” I say.
“Yeah.”
“Do you think I described it well enough?”
I can tell he doesn’t want to talk, just look out onto the horizon. He doesn’t see any point in talking things out. But there’s an excitement eating away at me like before a long-awaited vacation. I ask and ask. And finally he starts to talk. He tells me about what I haven’t written.
Once he and Ieva had talked about making a life together, about moving into a house, about how they could someday actually live—with everything living entails—with tea in the morning, dinners, flowers on the windowsills, and kids. They’d been walking along the dirt road with the birds of summer singing around them. Ieva had gotten pebbles stuck in her sandals.
“The roof is leaking and one of the corners of the stove is broken,” Ieva had said. “Where’ll we start?”
This daily complexity surrounding a simple road.
“Let’s make a deal—we’ll live once we’re thirty, but not until then,” Aksels had answered.
“Life is too long for a single happy life,” he says now. “Life always consists of many lives.”
Back then Ieva had nodded and thrown her sandals with a whoop into the green fields. So long, pebbles! They both still had ten years to that looming thirty—ten years was a lifetime. They seemed a perpetual cycle of euphoric days and nights without an end in sight; an unbroken happiness.
We’ll live after that. This terrifying phantom at the end of it a
ll. After that.
“We believed that ‘after that’ would never come,” Aksels says.
And it never did.
Aksels died. Ieva, on the other hand, has never loved life enough to want to live—to actually live. It’s her own fault. You need to immerse yourself in life like sinking your hands into the earth, you need to concentrate. Sprout roots. Break a sweat to earn a vacation. Nothing ever comes easy, Ieva’s Gran used to say. Yes, nothing ever comes easy.
“Why do people accept all these ridiculous rules as self-explanatory—only because they’re subject to them?” Aksels asks.
“I don’t know, I’m too lazy to look into it,” I answer. “And it doesn’t interest me. It’s boring.”
Ieva was the same way. She lived without living, and that’s her weakness. She was a bird picking at crumbs with wise ignorance. Morsels of sun.
“But if you really think about it,” I say, “the only reason we’re sitting here is because she’s remembering you right at this moment.”
To a random observer this could look to be a strange kind of celebration—the sea, the morning, and seagulls. And two people sitting next to one another in silence. A little over ten minutes while drinking tea. To both of us, these minutes are the entirety of Aksels’s life.
Aksels rests his chin in his hand and looks at me thoughtfully. He’s stayed young. Beautiful, welcoming, and as cool as ice. My face already shows signs of aging. For a second I think about how different we are, but only for a second. All I want to do is turn my hands palms-up toward the sun and soak up this moment. To unfurl the flowers, shake out the pollen, let out the buds. Be like a sponge and absorb the impossible—the absence of time. With the scent of seaweed and the feel of another person’s gaze.
I ask flat out:
“What do you think? Is a person given only one love in their lifetime, or several?”
“What’s love?” he asks.
What’s love? The hot hand of the sun slides heavily down the back of my neck. The wind whips the shorter hairs at my temples. This world is my home. Here I choose a person who will observe me for many days and nights—is that love? I’m tired. Happy. Then… sad. With disheveled features, ugly, and content. Young. Middle-aged. And old. And someone wants to observe me. Even like this. As everything. Forever. Love. Maybe that’s an observation?
“Well… in spite of it all, we always find a way in life to be together for a few moments,” I say.
“Destiny,” Aksels jokes.
“The encyclopedia of life.”
“The abridged version.”
“Of pictures.”
“For kids.”
“What’s the point of it all?”
“Nothing,” I laugh. “Insomnia and lack of appetite. Movies and books.”
“A good metabolism.”
“Metabolism, of course. And that’s a lot. I don’t know about other worlds, but this planet only has one criterion—life.”
After that I ask:
“Aksels, can art be a cookbook? The living teaching the living is like the blind leading the blind.”
“Eh, that’s not true—if the living weren’t able to give the living any advice, there’d be a lot more dead people.”
Aksels smoothes his blonde hair with his hands, then stretches. His beautiful arms cut into the sky like lightning.
“Thanks for the tea,” he teases, feeling his pockets. He puts on his sunglasses; I’m clearly and starkly reflected in their black lenses. “I’ve got to go do my things.”
“Of course.”
He leaves, and in that moment the sun over the sea becomes slightly overcast. The sky grows muggy, as if someone has breathed onto a blue mirror.
Your absence. We’re strong; we have to unravel it all piece by piece.
Take care.
Ieva’s Tree
These days Ieva spends a lot of time wandering the train tracks.
The tracks wind throughout Riga. Ieva likes the spots where they come together in thick clusters—by the Daugava Stadium, by the Matīss Prison, under the Gaisa Bridge. And she likes the spots where narrow, rusted tracks lead to nowhere. Where the buildings are falling apart, the factories are shut down, and the railway ties are separated by fields. There are a lot of places in Riga that look like World War II just ended.
Ieva likes them and isn’t afraid.
She wanders.
It’s a habit characteristic of living dangerously.
She has a dog and a child, and often gets into trouble with those train tracks. Because she takes the dog and her daughter with her when she goes walking. Her brother says no smart woman would do that. But Ieva isn’t a smart woman, that’s the thing. She’s not even a woman yet. She’s like a blind child with a seeing-eye kid and dog.
A blind child feeling around for a way out.
She likes to roam through desolation, where the city drops away—ditches, marshland, trenches, and construction sites. The outer limits. Where there are lakes like eyes and rivers like veins. Where the flesh of the earth is as thick as a fox’s coat—rust colored reeds and white splinters. Her daughter snaps reeds in half. The dog sniffs at something. Ieva watches the current. Their trio makes her think of bird watchers, or geologists in the desert. No one’s in a hurry.
They move as slowly as clouds that are seeing this world for the first time and don’t understand its hierarchy, can’t grasp what the most important things here are, what they should pay attention to.
Ieva wanders and doesn’t think; she hopes that, while she wanders, her thoughts sit in a room somewhere in her head and patch the shreds of her life back together stitch by stitch. While her thoughts are busy doing this, she wanders.
And someday her thoughts, those seamstresses, will wake her and present her with a new suit—her fixed life. Then she’ll finally settle down and stop wandering.
On their way back downtown, Ieva, her daughter, and the dog cross the iron bridge over the canal. So they don’t have to take the boring route to the Vidzeme highway. The water churns far below the beams, and her daughter throws pebbles into it.
At that moment a train crawls out of the woods just outside the city. They’re right in the middle of the bridge when the conductor sounds the horn. Ieva looks back. There’s no place to run. Her daughter is too young and the dog clueless—they won’t know how to flatten themselves against the rail for the train to pass.
Ieva doesn’t remember much more after that. She hoists her daughter under one arm, grabs the dog by its scruff and gallops toward the end of the bridge, leaps over the beams. They make it.
Then all three of them sink into the grass on the embankment. Her daughter reaches out to break off the tip of a reed. The dog, a little offended, licks the fur on its back.
As the train rushes past, its wind tears at her hair and clothes. Her thundering heart settles only once the train is out of sight.
Idiot! Who are you to cross over that bottomless pit and drag others along with you? Where’s your lighthouse, your beacon?
It’s died out.
Ieva rents a room on Ģertrūdes Street in the apartment of an old woman; a room with a view of absolutely nothing.
What is nothing? The airless shaft of the courtyard and the sagging windows of the adjacent building. A few clotheslines crisscross the sky. By turning a crank, you can raise your laundry up there, into the sun. And at night you reel it back into the dusk—dry, lightly cured by smog and the smell of car exhaust.
Now and then a man’s naked white ass comes into view in the brown frame of the window to the left of the central stairwell.
So is that something?
It reminds her more of nothing.
And Ieva’s room doesn’t have any luxuries like a clothesline with a crank. The bathroom is in the hallway. Her daughter pees in the sink. Some nights she gets the urge to do the same, but overcomes it.
The dog stands with its front paws on the windowsill between the flowerpots and freezes like sorrow in frost. He watches
the birds.
The birds are crows. So are crows birds?
It reminds her more of nothing.
Ieva talks into a cellphone. Her hair is cut short. A lean, boyish face. She looks out the window at the once ornate, but now run down balconies of the building across the courtyard.
As she listens to the voice on the other end, she takes a dark violet men’s dress shirt from the back of the chair. The shirt has pale red stripes. She puts the phone down on the bed for a second. Presses the shirt to her chest and looks into the mirror on the wall.
She shakes her head as if she doubts her reflection. Then she picks up the phone and puts it back to her ear. There’s nothing but a disapproving silence. Then a voice firmly says:
“But you’re not even listening!”
Ieva says:
“Stop, Mom, I’m listening. I know it all. It’ll be fine.”
Her voice is carefree, but her face forms a painful expression as the last words leave her mouth. As if she were screaming in despair, howling without a sound.
“Stop,” Ieva says into the phone. Please, God, so her mother won’t pick up on it. So no one finds out about this facial expression. A non-expression of a non-creature. A living face of a living thing. It’s not what she is. This desperate plummet in an anti-gravity room.
Phones are a wonderful thing—communication without a face. All you have to do is calmly say the words “it’ll be fine, Mom,” and you’ll believe it yourself. The tension in your mouth fades; only the veins at your temples throb for a long time after, like the adrenaline rush after committing a crime. Emotions are supposedly closely connected to mimicry. Relax the muscles in your face and the rest of you relaxes as well. The only downfall is that mimicry, in turn, is closely connected to mimicry.