by Inga Abele
“Even the tiniest bumps are like earthquakes,” Aksels says.
Ieva touches her lips to his forehead, which is damp from the pain.
Another hundred and twenty-four kilometers.
When they get off at the stop for Zari, at the intersection of four roads, Andrejs is already waiting for them. The car is thumping with music, and when Ieva sees his face through the window she grows annoyed. Aksels stands with his body twisted sideways and breathes in the night air.
“Greetings, kids,” Andrejs says. “Hop in!”
There are two gypsy hitchhikers already in the car.
The kitchen at the Zari house is warm when they get there. The rest of the rooms are unkempt and cold. Andrejs and the gypsies drink champagne and talk about the forest. Where they can get wood, and how much money they could make sawing lumber.
Andrejs says:
“I want to go back. I’m sick of that city. Ieva, what d’you say we move back out here, to the countryside?”
Ieva sits next to the stove warming her hands, seething. She drinks a glass of champagne and waits for the gypsies to get out. Aksels sits at the end of the table and drinks nothing. Just answers if someone asks him a question.
“You’re alright, guy, just kinda quiet!” one of the gypsies says and claps Aksels on the shoulder. Aksels breaks into a sweat from the pain.
“What’s that face for—you disrespecting me?”
Aksels shouts back:
“You shit!”
They both jump to their feet and stand face to face, each with an arm raised back and ready to strike. Andrejs gets up and pushes them apart.
He says:
“Enough! There’ll be no fights in this house!”
After midnight, after the gypsies have left and Aksels is asleep on the mattress set up on the floor by the big window, Andrejs and Ieva sit and talk quietly by the last of the dying embers in the open mouth of the stove.
Ieva pleads:
“Give me your gun and teach me how to shoot it.”
Andrejs gets his gun and while Ieva’s inspecting it, asks:
“What’re you guys up to?”
“He’s dying.”
“He looks fine to me.”
“He only looks it. We have to call tomorrow for the test results.”
Aksels’s voice comes from the direction of the big window:
“We don’t have to call anyone. I know what the results are.”
A thousand giant stars shimmer in the window when Ieva finally takes off her top layer of clothes and curls up next to Aksels.
Aksels whispers into her ear:
“Why’d you bring him into this? He’ll turn you in.”
“Him?”
Ieva even laughs:
“He’d never.”
The full moon is shining on the other side of the house. But it can’t be seen from the kitchen. Andrejs sleeps on a cot next to the stove.
The morning of January 15th arrives.
A brilliant sunny morning. The blue of the sky, the green of the fir trees, the snow, and the coastal sand join to form a braid. Aksels has been listening to the tendrils of wind knocking against the windowpanes since midnight. It’s a new day second by second.
Ieva and Andrejs wake up. Andrejs lights the stove and makes tea. Ieva gives Aksels a shot of diazepam so he can get up. She also gives him painkillers and a glass of water, but talks with Andrejs over her shoulder:
“Give me the gun and then leave us alone.”
Once Aksels has gotten dressed and had some tea, Andrejs gives Ieva the gun and walks out of the house.
Aksels asks:
“Where’d he go?”
Ieva says:
“Don’t know. Away.”
There’s an awkward silence. The forgotten teakettle whistles on the stovetop, a sharp line of steam shooting toward the ceiling. Aksels looks helplessly at the teakettle.
“Well then—be good!”
“I’ll try.”
Again, silence.
“Don’t cut your hair short—it looks bad on you.”
Then he starts to tease her:
“You’re totally going to get fat once you turn thirty.”
Ieva scoffs:
“No I won’t!”
“Let’s bet on it!”
“Forget it, I’ll never get fat!”
“Let’s bet a fur coat. A great, big, shiny fur coat you can hide in. I’ll send you that coat from the other side when you’re a big fatty.”
With that his energy is spent. Silence.
“It’s hot in here,” he complains, once again sweating from the pain. “Let’s go.”
They find the birch trees at the far end of the pasture. The blinding ice crystals of snow are melting under the sun. Aksels limps over to the thickest birch and puts his hands on it. Looks up at its slender branches. Then looks at the ground.
He stands under the birch. Looks to Ieva, his eyes squinted.
“Well,” he says. “I’m ready!”
Ieva says:
“I’m not. Haven’t kissed you yet.”
She goes up to him and looks him right in the eyes, searching for his like a falcon hunts a swallow.
She asks:
“You really want me to do it?”
And then in an instant she’s embarrassed because she sees that her doubt cuts him deeply. She kisses him quickly on the lips and steps back from the tree, fifteen paces.
Andrejs comes out from the cover of the pines.
“Don’t drag the barrel on the ground!”
“Ignore him,” Aksels warns.
Andrejs says:
“Think about what he’s making you do! It’s ridiculous!”
“Ignore him, shoot!” Aksels shouts.
Ieva lifts the shotgun to her shoulder to take aim and keeps backing up.
“Wait for me! Wait for me there!” she shouts and can’t shoot. Aksels stands with his hands stuffed in the pockets of his coat and watches her. She looks at Aksels down there at the tip of the barrel, he’s no bigger than a bird. Ieva stumbles as she keeps backing up and backing up, Aksels waits, watches her intently, starts to panic. Ieva can’t shoot.
A great force steals the shotgun from Ieva and swings it hard back at Aksels. Ieva knows what’s coming and turns to run, her hands pressing hard against her ears. She runs and screams. Doesn’t even know herself if it’s out loud or internal.
Then—externally, or who knows, internally—there’s a mighty crack. A cry.
Ieva trips, falls to the ground, her hands grab at the snow. She hears absolutely nothing; then a distant hum in the sky. She looks up—an airplane.
Andrejs comes over to her with the shotgun. He offers her his hand, then pulls her to her feet. He’s stunned.
“I’ll go get a shovel.”
Ieva staggers after him. They get to the kitchen and sit down at the table. Andrejs pulls a bottle of brandy from a cupboard and pours two glasses. Ieva drinks. Andrejs drinks.
For a moment Ieva gets dizzy, as if someone has clubbed her over the head. She screams:
“You shot him? Aksels? You?”
Andrejs goes to the shed to get a shovel. He says:
“Bring the green blanket with you when you come back out.”
Ieva follows after him in slow disbelief. Andrejs has been digging hard and is already up to his waist in the ground.
Aksels is lying by the birch. Slumped over onto his once painful side. A small, red mark has formed in the white wool of his sweater, right on the chest.
Ieva looks at his face and screams in horror—it’s not Aksels anymore. Strangely limp, shrunken, small. A thing. An object. Aksels isn’t here anymore.
Ieva hands Andrejs the blanket. He wraps Aksels up in it and says:
“Otherwise he’ll get sand in his eyes.”
Ieva takes the red wool scarf from around her neck and wraps it around Aksels’s head.
Andrejs says:
“Don’t do that—they say you won’
t be able to move on with your life until the scarf rots away.”
“I don’t want to move on without him anyway!”
Andrejs says:
“I’ll close his eyelids.”
“No, not you!”
Ieva leans over Aksels and draws her fingertips down over his eyelids. Accidentally touches his neck. His head is still warm. Ieva screams:
“Why did you shoot him! It was our thing!”
Andrejs carefully buries Aksels’s body in the yellow sand and says nothing. Ieva has never seen anything so yellow before.
“It was supposed to be different! You ruined everything! Now it’s God knows what!”
Andrejs stays quiet.
“I didn’t want it like this,” Ieva digs her nails into the cold ground in horror. “Come out, Aksels, it’s all wrong!”
In this moment, Andrejs thinks Ieva’s lost her mind. Her brittle nails break quickly, red bursts forth from her fingertips against the rocky soil. Andrejs grabs her under the arms and pulls her away from Aksels’s grave. She kicks and claws at the ground.
In this moment, Ieva has not lost her mind. Her mind is clearer than ever before. She only thinks that what happened in the snowy field is a lie. That it’s a game in which Aksels is smirking and watching from the sidelines, winking his left eye in his usual way.
Ieva strops struggling in Andrejs’s arms. She musters all her seriousness and calls out meekly in the direction of the grave:
“Aksels, come on! That’s enough.”
Nothing happens. Andrejs lowers Ieva to the ground.
The ground is wide open.
Ieva runs over to the shotgun, picks it up, and aims it at Andrejs.
“Get the hell away from here, go very far away,” she says to him.
“Oh please,” Andrejs answers coolly.
He turns to leave, but remembers his shotgun and takes it away from Ieva without another word.
“I never loved you, never!” she screams.
Then he really leaves. Gets in his car and drives away. Warm air swirls around the roof of the car, but the car itself is a dark, brown thing that slowly melts into the hot chaos of pine trees and glaring snow.
Ieva heads back to the house, now and then looking over her shoulder as if to mark an unseen point on a map that she’ll have to remember for the rest of her life.
Once inside she’s immediately overcome by a sadness so piercing it could break through her skin. Look, the knife Aksels touched last night, and the bread loaf; look, the curtains that were put up when she and Aksels still lived here that summer. The heat of the full summer moon that she doesn’t want to think about. Summers like that often involve something that destroy happiness—a fight, depression, or ignorance—but every memory from the time they spent together seems happy.
His grave will always be visible from the kitchen window.
Andrejs will never be able to sell the house to strangers.
Ieva leaves the house for a bit, leaves the weighty sadness behind her.
She takes a pencil and tears a page from her notebook and sits down by Aksels’s grave. Sunlight foaming on glossy stones. A coolness that hangs over the white plane of ice. Damp, rich earth. Ieva writes a poem in memory of Aksels. In Russian, for some reason. The poem has lines about how every angle here is straight, but you’re twisted into a circle.
She writes and feels like an idiot. Behold, there lies Aksels. Shot dead. Here. And she’s writing a poem.
Aksels, forgive me!
But she doesn’t know how to comprehend Aksels’s existence without the poem, what he meant to the world. Right now Ieva is as exposed as topsoil in the middle of January. Ieva is a raw piece of meat. She doesn’t even need to work up to it, the poem just spills out.
Words have almost no meaning. Aksels’s meaning isn’t in words, isn’t in content. Ieva senses Aksels’s existence in movement, in the stream that has been set in motion by his death, that flows away through bodies. The sense of this movement seems to erase every moment of betrayal and weakness in real life.
A stupid poem. Consolation for the weak. Pointless.
She has to live on somehow. A Judas.
Aksels, forgive me.
A mare and her foal come into the pasture not far from her. Both animals stop at the barbed wire fence. Ieva watches the foal as it nurses. It’s a hefty mare with shaggy legs. Her foal is also strong and healthy; its broad back is like a yellow tray carrying bits of hay and the tip of a fir branch. Ieva walks toward the foal. It comes right up to her and nips at her wherever it can reach, just like a lively foal would do.
Ieva pushes it away.
“You’re biting!”
The foal gets angry and nips at her even more, and Ieva has to get away from it. No velvety lips, no pensive, violet-colored eyes. The foal is biting like crazy, full to the brim of spiteful life, so full of boiling blood that it could burst.
The things Aksels will never see again.
At night Ieva wakes up to the sound of a quiet movement in the distance. As if the wing of a guardian angel had slipped over her shoulder in the black darkness.
She lifts her head and listens to the night.
Silence.
But through the silence—a siren. And glaring lights in the window.
She throws on her clothes, yanks on her boots and clambers down the stairs, tripping on her laces and almost falling headfirst into the cement steps.
Morning is just dawning in the wintery fog. She sees the dim headlights of a car and dark, stooped over silhouettes. She runs into the illuminated circle. Aksels has been dug up. One policeman is smoking, the other is unwrapping her red scarf to uncover Aksels’s face. Andrejs sits hunched up on a rock, holding the shovel.
Her eyes meet his in the glow of the yellow light and she immediately starts to cry. It’s as if someone has hit her over the back, knocked her to her knees, grabbed her by the hair and commanded—cry!
Only one sentence revolves around her head—What are you doing, Andrejs!
He came back! He dug up Aksels and confessed to the police!
One of the policemen takes down Ieva’s name, last name, and address.
“Your husband shot your boyfriend out of jealousy. We’ll need to question you. Get in the car.”
Ieva can’t speak. She feels the massive force that suddenly stuffs your life into a drawer, a folder, a system, or a file—it always flows out from questionnaires, forms, transmitters, the worn-out codes hammered into your brain in a poorly lit room. It flows from these officials; the night and their uniforms turn them into giants made of a different, more noble stuff.
They push her into a car that reeks of cigarette smoke. The door slams shut, the headlights bounce over the mounds of snow and the thawing road. She continues to cry for Andrejs, who is waiting with the two remaining police officers for the coroner. The policeman driving the car looks at her with sympathy and fishes an already-opened bottle of brandy from under the seat.
“Take it—a time-tested aid,” he says. “There’s nothing you can do anymore.”
Once they’ve finished questioning her, Ieva is brought back to the Zari house and released—like a young, domesticated wild animal that now has to learn how to survive on its own in the woods. She doesn’t have the energy to go back to Riga. And that’s a good thing because, and Ieva doesn’t really know why, the next night they bring back Aksels’s body. No one says anything about the morgue, doesn’t even hint at it. Maybe because it’s winter and Ieva is penniless?
Aksels is laid out on a stretcher. Ieva has them carry him through the warm kitchen, where she’s been sleeping on the cot, and place him next to the wide-open window of the far room on the second floor.
People say they’re afraid of the dead. It doesn’t even occur to Ieva to be afraid. It’s her Aksels! So beautiful and pale. Now and then she caresses his head. His jaw is set in a stubborn expression. Eyelids fine as silk, frozen to his irises. The stubble on his face and his hair keep growing. His hands
are positioned in a ridiculous way, Aksels never held his hands like that! Ieva discovers that the index fingers of his hands are tied together with fishing line. She carefully cuts it away because she’s convinced it’s hurting him.
They’ve done an autopsy. The front of his sweater has been cut open and then sewn up with surgical thread. Aksels is flat as a board—they probably took a lot of him for themselves. Ieva hopes they’ve left his heart untouched.
She spends each night with Aksels. Touches his cheek, lights a candle she found in a kitchen drawer. Drinks brandy straight, pulls it into herself like fire.
There’s a full moon. It flashes its white face over Aksels. During the day there’s sun. A few flies crawl around Aksels in the morning light. But January flies are so groggy that they don’t even think to feed on him. They just bask on him in the warm sun.
Gran shows up, sits in the kitchen and cries, forces Ieva to eat something.
Andrejs’s father drives out and slaps Ieva across the face and calls her a whore who’s ruined his only son. Andrejs’s mother and Gran cook together, and the kitchen fills with thick steam and sniffling. Andrejs’s father drinks Ieva’s brandy.
Later that night everyone goes looking for Ieva and finds her lying next to Aksels, her eyes strangely bright. She’s running a fever.
The next day Lūcija arrives—as usual, whenever Ieva truly needs saving. She’s brought Monta with her. Monta showers her mother with kisses, then climbs into the bed next to Aksels, pokes his cheek with a finger, then immediately pulls back and starts to cry.
“Why is Ocela so cold?”
Lūcija says:
“Why are you keeping him here? Are you out of your mind?”
Ieva answers defensively:
“They brought him here.”
Nothing here is as it should have been. This mess, this commotion, it’s ridiculous. Aksels wanted to rest in peace. And now it’s the exact opposite of what he wanted.
Aksels is taken to the morgue, but Ieva is taken to the hospital—her toes are frostbitten. Two days later there’s a beautiful funeral at the old manor house. Aksels is buried in the local cemetery next to his mother, Stase.