by Inga Abele
Pretending. But how else can she adjust to the rat race beyond the window? Nature is fascinated by Ieva’s species—humans. May there be the continual births of girls and boys, a balance—half and half, may they procreate, and may they die when the time comes. But nature has no interest in people as individuals. It’s up to each person separately to determine how he spends his time here.
The relaxation of facial muscles is enough for Ieva.
But the eyes? When she relaxes them her eyes betray her in the tenth of a second and fill with tears. She tips her head back as if her eyes were two dark, glass bowls filled to the brims, and she has to take them somewhere.
Take them to safety.
She’s successful. Doesn’t spill a drop. The moisture slowly reabsorbs into the inner corners of her eyes. It’s horrible, tell me, my dears, where am I? On the blade of a knife, on the cusp, in a foreign territory? Something could happen at any moment. It scares her to think she could one day start screaming with sound. And somewhere where it would be completely inappropriate.
Ieva returns to the conversation. Resurfaces from her inner silence with the phone to her ear.
Her mother is saying:
“What others want, he does. No pretenses, and that’s the problem. Some people can walk that fine line without crossing it, you know? But he’s a criminal element. I studied his astrological chart, his Moon is in Leo, what can you do.”
Silence.
Ieva sits on the bed and focuses on the worn paint of the floor. The dog comes over to her and rests its head on her knees. She pets him mechanically.
“You’re not listening again,” her mother says after a pause.
“I am, Mom, but…”
“He’s that type. Sitting in prison only because prison is like death.”
Ieva asks:
“When will he be free of me?”
“He’ll be free of you once he learns to love life. It could happen one day. Sometimes it’s important to just live for that day.”
Ieva thinks for a moment.
“And when will I be free of him?”
“When your mind frees itself from him. Did you do what I taught you last time?”
“No,” Ieva lies.
“Well! How can I help you when you won’t even try? I can’t do it for you. On the night of a full moon, sit at a table, light a candle, tie a red thread around it, hold the ends in one hand, then cut the thread with scissors and wish him all the best. Wish him good health, freedom, and happiness—but without you! And for yourself, wish for your mind to free itself from him. You’ll see, you’ll feel better. The moon can do amazing things.”
Ieva remembers the night the full moon floated large and dull as a ghost ship through Fanija’s kitchen window, melting the curtains with its icy glow. The white windowsill and lace curtains shone in the dark. Everything the moonlight touched turned black and white, even the candle she had lit, the red thread, and Ieva herself. She murmured a prayer and cut the thread. The two ends remained in her fingers.
What small results, she had thought.
All these years with Andrejs.
And two thread ends in her hand.
It didn’t feel better.
“Fine, Mom, I’ll do what you say. I just have to wait for the next full moon. But today I want to drop Monta and Dārcis off at your place.”
“You’re going to go see him?”
“Yes.”
“Idiot. He’s using you—when’ll you finally get it?”
“Thanks for the kind words. Bye!”
Ieva cuts the conversation short and throws the phone onto the bed.
She takes off her T-shirt. Looks at her breasts in the mirror. Nothing wrong with them.
Her face still looks good, too. When we’re young our faces are like uncharted maps—smooth, flat. As they age they acquire Bermuda Triangles, underwater territories, landslides, avalanches. Her mom’s face doesn’t show signs of wear, or stress, because she never blames herself for things. But Ieva will definitely get wrinkles, 100%. Ieva is a single, black splotch. She’s sick of it, but what can you do? She’s got that kind of personality. Everything she does is a result of inspiration, nothing else. She works in an office supply store, and the other saleswomen are always surprised at how much of what she does comes from inspiration alone. “Some days you’re so creative, but others you’re totally out of it,” says Gunta. Gunta is young, pretty, and—most importantly—always cheerful. Cheerful people are never out of it, and it’s a good thing if you meet someone like that in your lifetime. When everyone else has a heart full of sorrow and complaints.
Ieva puts on the violet dress shirt. She’s also young and pretty, so what. Sometimes it kills her.
A disheveled head of hair emerges from under the pile of blankets on the bed.
“G’morning,” Monta says. “Where are you going?”
“We’re going to Grandma’s because Mommy is going to go see your father. Time to get up and brush your teeth.”
Monta runs to the window and hugs the dog, who is once again frozen in vigilance.
“Dārcis is coming to Grandma’s?”
“Of course! Put his collar on.”
The south-facing side. Pigeons scrabble on the outer windowsill of the small, sunny room.
Their landlady Fanija sits on the edge of the bed among pillows covered in crocheted slips. She looks like an amber mummy, in her white blouse and the same wavy grey hairstyle actress Zarah Leander wore in her prime. Fanija looks at the peeling floor paint with great interest and occasionally pokes at it with her cane.
She says to Ieva:
“Come look at my country house, Ieva—here and here. And there, too. And this one here, look, an old man with an upturned nose, two white dogs… and this one’s a map of Latvia. Where are you headed, Ieva? That shirt looks good on you, it’s a nice men’s dress shirt, isn’t it? You don’t see that much these days, women going with this kind of extravagant style, but it really is an extravagance, isn’t it, Ieva? What’s more—winners aren’t judged. Can I call you Eva? Y’know, I was once lucky enough to fall in love with a boy a lot like you… yes… it was in Paris in ’37; my mother was an actress in Baty’s theater… Theatre Montparnasse… That won’t mean anything to you, but if you’d seen the old façade of the Montparnasse theater, believe me, it would change your life… Baty was staging Flaubert’s Madame Bovary… It was a good show. They played pieces from Lucia di Lammermoor. Donizetti… My mother was one of the four beauties who voiced poor Emma Bovary’s thoughts… like a Greek chorus. The boy played Leon—he was a very beautiful man, and how he sang! I was seventeen, he was my first love. I almost went insane, but I couldn’t show it… When Emma shouted ‘love is not better than marriage’ on stage, I always started to cry. She stood in a cheap and dirty hotel room and screamed—love is not better than marriage! Imagine how awful it was, Ieva!… I think his name was Charles, the boy. He came to our place for lunch.”
Fanija sinks into her thoughts. Ieva waits. Until Fanija finally stirs, like she’s wriggling out of a bog of memories.
“You’re not in the least bit similar to him, but there’s still something… a gesture… a look, when you come in.”
Ieva looks at the veins on Fanija’s hands. Ieva doesn’t have time to wait.
She says:
“I want to pay in advance.”
Fanija looks at her blankly. Old people can sometimes suddenly flare out mid-sentence—like a candle that’s been tipped over. Ieva puts her money on the table.
“For the room.”
Fanija nods, but Ieva doesn’t know what for. She backs up toward the door.
“I’m going now. I’ll be back tomorrow. I’m going to visit my husband.”
As she reaches the door, Fanija speaks, surprising her.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, Ieva, I find you incredibly nice. Just remember to always put the bathroom key back in its place. I don’t have a spare.”
Ieva, Monta, and Dā
rcis stand in the front hallway of the apartment. Monta leans against the wall and holds Dārcis by his collar. Ieva puts on the necklace Andrejs gave her—the Virgin Mary hanging from a woven cord. We’re all set to go with our collars on, Ieva thinks.
“Let’s go!”
And they go.
She drops her daughter and the dog off at Pērnavas Street, where Monta is quick to fish her mother’s white guinea pig from its sand-filled aquarium and drop it on the ground—much to Dārcis’s barking delight and the guinea pig’s mortal fear. Ieva listens through her mother’s complaints and suggestions, then heads back into the street after a wash of goodbye kisses from Monta. She puts on her headphones and turns on her CD player, listens to Laurie Anderson’s album “Bright Red.”
Remember me is all I ask
And if remembered be a task forget me.
This long thin line. This long thin line.
This long thin line. This tightrope made of sound.
This music is like a frosty glaze forming over an oppressive heat. Over life’s distorted faces, broken-down by the black ice of passion, over the fire-filled bodies, markets, sales, weddings, births, and funerals. The music climbs over the dusty streets and freezes these things in moments, echoes, reflections. It fits in perfectly with Ieva’s own Ice Age.
She turns the volume up as far as it will go and shrinks into a corner of her world. Her mother just told her, “Read your life like a book, and with pleasure! It’s your privilege and yours alone.” Ieva skips ahead few tracks and watches as the city shifts in crystalline arcs.
All of these faces, her species. Ieva is able to participate when the music plays, to once again breathe in the air so many others have breathed for millions of years.
Watch your life as if it’s a movie—with an aching.
You had that rusty old car
And me I had nothing better to do.
You picked me up. We hit the road.
Baby me and you.
We shot out of town
Drivin’ fast and hard
Leaving our greasy skid marks
In people’s back yards.
We were goin’ nowhere.
Just driving around.
We were goin’ in circles.
And me I was just hanging on.
In the Central Market Ieva breaks through the hundred-headed mass and thinks about Monta. Her soft, silk-like skin, her clear eyes, the warmth so newly ignited in her heart! The way she looks along at the road ahead.
Stay with Grandma, be good, don’t give Grandma any trouble! Mommy’s going to go see your father. To visit.
For now Monta doesn’t have any questions. It’s what has to be done, obviously the entire world works like this. Mommy has to go see Daddy, who Monta doesn’t remember. She doesn’t know where he lives; all she knows is that she has to wait for him to come home. A priori love. She has to wait for Daddy like she has to wait for Santa Claus. But even Santa comes around more often—once a year.
Now and then Monta throws out a question that’s like a slap in the face—she asks Ieva about Aksels. She still remembers Aksels.
Where’s Ocela?
Ocela’s in Heaven.
There’s no use waiting for Ocela.
Ieva fills her prison-visiting bag with things from the Central Market. Black tea, the simplest kind, loose, granulated if possible. Bacon. She spends a lot of time looking at the hanging hunks of pig meat at the stand; she’ll miss the train if she doesn’t hurry. But she has to hope the bacon will be the real thing, smoked in alderwood, not chemically dyed brown. An entire kilogram of onions. Herbs, cheese, mineral water. Candy—thin, chocolate-filled wafers coated with a sugary glaze.
And the most important thing—cartons of cigarettes. She won’t buy them at the store, but at the market pavilion at the intersection where they’re cheaper. Where under-the-table merchants with raw and weathered faces shout into the crowd: Spirt, vodka, sigareti! Ieva gives one of them twenty lats, takes the cigarettes, and waits for her change. The man turns his back to her, as if she didn’t even exist.
When he starts to walk away, Ieva grabs his sleeve.
“What do you want, lady?”
“Ten lats.”
“You nuts?”
The man swears and shakes Ieva off, but as he turns to leave his eyes flick to the opening of her shirt above her breasts.
Ieva automatically brings her fingers to her chest.
The tin pendant Andrejs had given her, the Virgin Mary on a woven piece of string. Warm from her body heat. The merchant most likely has a similar one around his neck—and if he doesn’t, then someone he knows definitely does. A pendant made in prison. A class marker.
The man mumbles something, gives Ieva her ten lats, and then they’re parted by the flow of marketgoers. You don’t touch your own. Don’t screw over your own. Who were you planning on cheating? One of your kind? Have you completely lost it?
Eagle bites the weasel.
Weasel bites back.
They fly up to nowhere.
Weasel keeps hangin’ on.
Together forever.
And me? I’m goin’ in circles.
And if I open my mouth now
I’ll fall to the ground.
Ieva pushes her way out of the pavilion. The sweat-drenched stench makes her dizzy, nauseated. She closes her eyes and breathes deeply through her mouth. Beads of sweat form at her temples.
She just has to get through it.
Summer has finally relaxed the muscles of its face.
If it rains, it’s torrential, sudden and unruly. If it’s sunny, the light is open and raw. The fields are cleared and filled with scavenging birds and dust clouds.
Ieva settles in the diesel train with her bag like she’s planning on being there for life. For four hours she stares out the window, as if she could absorb the future through her pupils from the mute lips of the scenery outside.
The moon can do amazing things, her mother had said.
Ieva remembers the last time she visited Andrejs.
He’d given her his shirt.
Ieva remembers herself in the prison’s hotel room, in front of a female guard. They stand face to face, both silent and with feet slightly spread apart.
Ieva unbuttons her dress.
For a moment their eyes meet. The female guard looks down. She puts her cool hands on Ieva’s shoulders, then slides her fingers down over Ieva’s collarbone, around her bra, and down her ribs.
Thighs.
Knees.
Ankles.
As she stands Ieva looks down at the wellspring at the back of the guard’s head where her dark hair forms a small whirlpool. The axis of the skull, Ieva thinks offhandedly. Children are born with open wellsprings, and then the skull grows shut. Then they build schools, churches, and prisons. Someone has to do it.
The guard is squatting and inspects Ieva’s sandals one by one. One winter, when it was ungodly cold, Ieva had lined her boots with folded newspapers. She remembers the female guard who had unfolded and skimmed over each newspaper in annoyance.
Someone has to do it.
Ieva buttons up her dress.
While she does that the guard prods the loaf of bread with a long needle; then the needle is dragged through the block of butter. The needle is put down and the guard opens the bottle of mineral water, puts it to her lipsticked mouth and tastes the contents.
The guard sits next to one of the nightstands. She methodically opens the carton of cigarettes, takes out each one and puts it back. Dumps the contents of Ieva’s backpack onto the bed.
The guard flips through Ieva’s journal, then tosses it onto the table.
The guard says:
“You can’t bring that.”
Ieva nods. Thoughts are a scary thing—grenades, guns, narcotics.
“They’ll come get you tomorrow at ten,” the guard says.
She gathers up all the items to be temporarily confiscated and leaves. Ieva sits down so her shaking leg
s don’t betray her, and waits. There’s a knock at the door.
Another guard brings in the prisoner and leaves. The prisoner is dressed up in a suit. He stays standing by the door, grinning stupidly.
He approaches her cautiously, stands for a moment, then pulls her into his lap. Her smooth cheek against the bristly roughness of his.
They lean with their elbows on the windowsill because there’s nothing to really talk about. The window is open and sunlight streams in through the bars. Andrejs moves close to the bars and calls out—kss, kss, kss! A cat is walking along the meticulously raked strip of sand between the prison hotel and the zone fence. The cat freezes, looks up at the window, then walks on with purpose, its tail twitching.
Andrejs turns his head.
“Tell me what it’s like out there.”
Ieva gets flustered.
“I can’t.”
“Why.”
“It all changes so often. You’d have to see it for yourself.”
At some point the room is finally filled with the gentle shadows of twilight. Flies buzz around the final rays of sun over the strip of sand. These rays are so curious, so full of magic and freedom, that Ieva can’t think of anything better than what those flies are doing—dancing for the setting sun. Except the window is barred.
Andrejs hands Ieva an icon stitched into a plastic slip.
“I wanted to give you this.”
Ieva reads it:
“‘Be not afraid! Open your heart to Christ—the Lord…’ John Paul… Do you believe in God?”
Andrejs answers:
“Don’t know.”
Ieva reads on:
“‘Fools—this life was meant to given away, and nothing more…’ To who?”