by Inga Abele
The most interesting person to Monta is Ilmārs, who lives in the eighth room.
Ilmārs is an antiques dealer with an inclination for photography. In his spare time he hangs around the apartment in his sweat suit and drinks a lot of green tea, which is why you’ll almost always run into him in the kitchen. He has a ruddy, goatish face, grey beard, and watery green eyes. Rubbing his bare belly, which always pokes out from under his short T-shirts, Ilmārs inflicts listeners with horror stories from the lives of the Riga elite.
He brings Monta back to Ieva and gushes in appreciation at the typewriter.
“Oh, you’re a poet?” he whispers and brings Ieva’s hand to his lips. “It’s a pleasure to meet you. Ilmārs.”
Ieva explains that the typewriter had already been here, but Ilmārs shakes his head in disbelief. He’s never seen it before. From that moment on Ieva was carved into Ilmārs mind as The Poet. In other words—a Muse.
“Come,” he says. “I’ll show you what life is! All you’ll have to do is write it down.”
He puts his finger to his lips and leads Ieva into the dim hallway. Germanic shouts come from the half-open door of one room—some boys are watching a documentary on Hitler. The shouts mix with passionate and heavy breathing; the singer and her boyfriend are probably having sex in their room. Ilmārs motions for Ieva to listen at another door—the Art Academy students are fighting, a plywood stool splinters against the door and Ieva escapes back to her room.
“You didn’t even see the bathroom—an extremely fascinating creature spends all morning sleeping in there!” Ilmārs calls after her in disappointment.
Some time later Ilmārs brings home and gives his Muse an Ērenpreiss-brand bicycle. Incredibly old and heavy, but in working condition.
“Extremely valuable! An antique!” Ilmārs boasts.
She keeps the bike down in the courtyard, locked up with an iron chain to a maple tree. Dragging it up and down the stairs would be suicide. The bike opens up an entirely different Riga to her; it glides easily and lightly, relaxing the hectic streets, smoothing the nervous lines in the city’s face. The bike reminds her of an old coal iron or the first pair of skis in the world—broad, substantial things that would let life could coast along without change. The stores, cafés, people, even the sky and the trees, even the river is wide open—all because Ieva herself is open. Her thumb poised, ready to ring the bell. Her lips ready to smile, her heart ready to answer.
Monta starts attending kindergarten. She’s still little, but they have no other choice—Lūcija refuses to take her, says it’s still too tiring for her to babysit.
It doesn’t seem like kindergarten bothers Monta too much. She’s a social soul and very independent, the kindergarten teacher says to Ieva with a reassuring smile. She has cause to smile—Pampers have finally secured the market in Riga. The teacher won’t have to change any more cloth diapers. Even Monta is dropped off at kindergarten with a stack of Pampers in her bag.
Sometimes Ieva stops by the cast iron fence and watches the kids play in the green oasis set in the middle of the muddy, cobblestoned city. So loud and happy, as if the world were without war, sadness, defeat, and victory… They’ve only just come into the world, but have such wise eyes, such age-old stares. But with all the bitter memories extinguished in their mothers’ wombs. Like freshly washed clothes bleached and dried in the sun and wind, they’re once again ready for fun and games, fun and games…
God help me understand what a child is—and that I have one.
This is what Ieva prays for from the other side of the fence.
She knows full well that it’ll come to her sometime later in life. She’ll find out.
For now it’s all the same: work or home. Work or home. She doesn’t get any of it.
Now, of course, she’s got a different job. Boris and Ieva never had the same idea of a work schedule. During the time they moved to the new apartment, Boris felt Ieva was asking for too many days off.
So it’s without worry that she goes to the Central Market to find work. They always need sellers there and they work in shifts. She even gets days off! It’s a luxury in this madness. And what’s more, their apartment is fantastic! They have their own life—it is what it is, but it’s their own.
And Pampers aren’t the only thing that have taken the city by storm—the first cellphones have arrived as well. Als, the owner of the mandarin orange stand, ceremoniously presents her a giant Benefon, a brick with an antenna. So I can always get a hold of you, he says. After only a few minutes of use the receiver heats up like an ember and electric jolts start to course through your brain.
Ieva’s parents also have cellphones. Ieva takes a black permanent marker and writes her mother’s number directly over the kitchen sink. They have a great relationship now. But when was it not great? Love is the foundation of everything; it just gets forgotten sometimes in the commotion of the day. Even a mirror fogs over if you look too closely into it; the image becomes distorted.
Aksels has grown very secretive. He’s stylish, he likes taking risks, he’s polite and brave—all reasons why he’s eventually gained the respect of the Old Riga party-crowd. Strange, almost underground literature-type books start showing up in the apartment—Indian mystic Osho’s Diamond Sutra or Perfection of Wisdom in a black hardcover, ridiculously battered Russian-language copies of Castaneda, Kerouac, Hesse, Camus, Flannery O’Connor. Some nights he gets home very late and brings a loud group of people with him. Ieva joins in, why not?
They smoke marijuana.
Everyone smokes marijuana.
Ieva tries it, too.
At first nothing happens. Ieva laughs and takes a deep hit, never skipping her turn as it’s passed around. After a while she realizes that even when she’s not laughing, all the muscles in her cheeks are tensed. She tries to fight it, but can’t. Her head feels clear and filled with happiness, and she’s the reason why. Her body stops listening to her brain. The room does the same—the walls aren’t listening to the ceiling, and even the door has bowed out like the ribs of an animal.
With a silent scream Ieva runs into the stairwell and crouches down by the banister. Down below is a roaring, smoldering abyss that reaches for her little by little like waves in the sea. The walls are crashing in on her from the other side. Peace and safety exist only in the cramped space where she’s crouched. When Aksels comes to get her, she murmurs in terror:
“Don’t! Don’t touch me!”
You can’t mix alcohol with weed, Aksels tells her matter-of-factly later on. Some people react that way. From then on Ieva is always hesitant to smoke up.
Ieva also discovers something much worse and more ruthless than weed—jealousy. As she sits at home with Monta in the evenings, she tries to imagine what Aksels is doing out in Old Riga. With his friends. Ieva knows he’s with his friends, but why so late?
Oh, Aksels says, I ran into so-and-so—well you don’t know them anyway! What’s the point in explaining?
One Saturday, when Monta is at her grandmother’s, Ieva heads to Old Riga. Aksels and his friends usually hang out at the bar M6; she goes in, but it’s dead and quiet. The only people there are Aksels and some extremely drunk girl. They’re sitting at the massive wooden table; Aksels turns around suddenly and addresses Ieva—Hey! It’s too late to run, she’s been spotted.
Aksels widens his eyes in surprise.
“What’re you doing here?”
Then he introduces them:
“Dace! Ieva!”
And he orders Ieva a drink.
Ieva slowly takes off her jacket and doesn’t know how to act. Aksels just smiles, then goes to chat with the bartender. She can tell by how he walks that he’s either had a lot to drink, or a lot to smoke. Dace turns her whitewashed face to Ieva. She has a shaved head, black liner around green eyes, and ears full of silver studs.
“He said,” Dace whispers secretively, “that I have horrific eyes. Do I?”
Ieva doesn’t respond. She can see that
Dace is excited and concerned by what Aksels has said.
Aksels comes back, packs a small amount of weed into his bowl, lights it, and immediately passes out. The bartender whistles patiently and piles bananas in a bowl.
Dace has to get going. She muscles on her leather jacket, kisses the sleeping Aksels on the cheek, and leaves. She has long, deer-like legs that end in black lace-up boots. She has a free gait. Ieva definitely doesn’t. If only Ieva knew herself, she might know what kind of gait she has. Right now she doesn’t know anything about herself.
Except that she has become addicted to Aksels. It’s a terrifying revelation. She leaves him in the bar asleep, dead to the world, and sprints through the streets toward home. As she runs she shoves people out of the way, apologizes, trips, and wonders—what’s it like to be a man? To have a spear instead of a cave? With which to invade caves meant for spears, acquire them, inhabit them, conquer them, and then move onto new conquests. How, for example, how can you tell another human being they have horrific eyes? And to say it in a way that makes the other person ignite like a brush fire and burn so long that the point of ignition bursts straight forth, breaks through the layers of blood and bone. What does it feel like to have a spear instead of a cave?
Time is slowly running out—at least that’s what it feels like to Ieva. She sometimes confronts Aksels when he comes back home toting an entire group of Daces, or when he doesn’t come home at all.
“You get some rest,” Aksels says. “Don’t worry about me.”
“How can I sleep when we live together, but you’re never home? Maybe we should live separately.”
Aksels laughs:
“Don’t be stupid. I can’t live without you! Come out with me at night if you want to be with me.”
“You’re the one being stupid. How can I go out? I have Monta.”
At the end of the summer Aksels becomes a punk. He finally finds his religion. Where there used to be all sorts of music at home, even the stuff brought in by Aksels—Laurie Anderson’s “Bright Red,” Nina Hagen, Boris Grebenshchikov, Tsoi, Odekolons, Brian Eno, Nine Inch Nails, or even good old Pink Floyd—now they’ve all been replaced by the Sex Pistols.
A September evening flutters over the city streets like a starched linen sheet. Ieva puts on “Yesterday” by The Beatles. Piano and vocals. Clarity. Music that lets you exist without having to touch the ground.
When Aksels gets home he takes the cassette out and throws it behind the bed.
“Why’d you do that?”
“It’s shit.”
“Why…”
“Listen, let’s cut the small talk. Come here, I’ll tell you about Sid and Nancy.”
They lie down on the bed very close together—shoulder to shoulder, breathing in unison—and for the umpteenth time Aksels tells the punk legend about Sid Vicious and his girlfriend, the blonde, curly-haired Nancy. The punk Romeo and Juliet. Monta is right there, crawls up and settles between them and quietly twirls a strand of hair around her finger. She also listens to the nightly story about that day in October, when in room number 100 of Hotel Chelsea the police arrested Sid for the murder of Nancy, stabbed to death with a hunting knife.
“When he was let out on bail on February 2nd, he overdosed on heroine. And since then, February 2nd has been Sid Day. He once said: Make anarchy your mother. Create as much chaos and confusion as is in your power, but don’t let them take you alive.”
“Anarchy in the UK” is playing, washing like waves over their still bodies.
Aksels calls Ieva his Nancy, but she’s not a real Nancy. She has too broad of a horizon. For example, try as she might, she can’t understand why Tsoi, or The Beatles’ “Yesterday” have suddenly become complete shit this fall.
“It’s like you’ve switched on some kind of tunnel vision,” she tells him. “I can’t do that.”
Dace understands Aksels a lot better. She’s also become a true punk—wears black, torn fishnet tights, short skirts with studs and a red silk blouse. Aksels and Dace can talk about the things that interest him because Dace doesn’t respond critically.
One warm, dark evening Ieva rides her bike home from work and suddenly notices them in a crowd. They’re high, drunk, doped up on something else, and are staggering down the sidewalk, leaning against each other for balance, and holding hands as passers-by move out of their way.
Ieva holds her breath as she follows them, slinking after them like a tiger—slowly, secretly, but her heart threatens to hammer a hole through her ribcage. From this perspective it’s clear that Aksels and Dace are a real couple—two Riga punks, not some MTV punk wannabes with their rich parents’ credit cards in their wallets and CD players clipped onto their belts. Not some bored and spoiled dumbasses who stand in the streets at night drinking beer in their tattered leather jackets, but spend the mornings sitting in offices in white button-down shirts drinking coffee—no. They’re real street punks: unshowered, shaggy, young, and wonderful. It’s like they’re on the edge of a blade, always on teetering on the fence, and their gentleness is their fearsome cries in the face of the world, and their challenge is the timid call to see how full of love and strength they are—useless invitations!
They stop by some hedges and Aksels disappears into the dark to pee; Dace waits under the wind-rattled streetlight—a delicate, black gravestone for Aksels’s and Ieva’s love. Ieva stops torturing herself, gets back on her bike and rides home. An hour later Aksels and Dace show up, along with a few friends they met on the way, Ieva makes tea, breathes in the smell of the weed, and when Aksels passes out Dace tells her:
“Do you know what he said to me today? I asked if he’d kill me if I asked him to, and he said no—never!”
Dace cries, smears mascara down her cheeks, tears at her tights with her black-painted fingernails. Ieva says nothing, just thinks. She’s suddenly become very calm—of course, my dear, that’s how it has to be because I’m his Nancy. In spite of everything, I’m his Nancy.
So sometimes Ieva finds Aksels in the bar by himself, they have a drink, talk in the basement of M6, and then Aksels looks intently at her and says:
“I look at you and you know what I think? I want you, I want you so badly, always.”
He’s high and distant, he doesn’t use tissues when he has a runny nose, just turns away, pinches his nostrils and blows, he’s a real punk, and Ieva isn’t even disgusted by it. He’s real. That’s the thing—Aksels is very real.
He gets on the bike, Ieva walks next to him in a wild, flower-printed dress. It’s evening, and Brīvības Boulevard is full of people, busy with cars. Aksels rides in the street, isn’t able to keep his balance, swerves dangerously, and rides in circles. Buses line up behind him, forming a chain, but don’t honk their horns. People look back at them and shout—a punk on a bike, look! And Ieva is next to him in her flowery dress and orange flats on her feet.
Such a peaceful evening, filled with happiness.
Aksels asks Ieva to dye his mohawk red and black. He sits on a stool in the middle of the room and looks at the birch tree outside. His hair is beautiful: light and slightly wavy. Ieva can’t dye it.
“Think it through! It’ll look bad on you.”
“Who tells a punk what he can or can’t do?”
Aksels winds up in a bad mood and comes home the following night blackout drunk. His hair is a stiff, black crest. He slurs that Dace did it for him.
“Where did she do it?”
“At the carpentry shop!”
At the carpentry shop! Ieva hasn’t been there in the longest time. Maybe Dace lives there now! That’s why Aksels only ever comes home toward morning.
Insane jealousy, spite, and exhaustion crash simultaneously down on Ieva like sudden blindness. She can’t see anything anymore, nothing real, no future, and no light at the end of the tunnel.
Aksels explains:
“Stop freaking out! It doesn’t matter because I only love you, you’re my Nancy. Everything else is just something secondary.”
Before he falls asleep he reaches for Ieva, forcefully grabs her thigh, latches onto her like a bear clawing into her side, tearing at her, then he mumbles something and passes out. Ieva watches his exposed face, unveiled by sleep, deformed by drinking. Then she watches the flies circling the light bulb above the bed.
Outside the rain is coming down hard.
When Ieva was little, Gran was always fighting the flies—she’d put screens in the windows, go after them with a fly swatter, and poison them with chemicals from a black and white mister. Here the window facing the street is always open, you can watch flies in their natural state. They congregate in the room, dance, listen to “Love Kills” by the Sex Pistols, and then disappear as quietly as they came.
Ieva checks on Monta in her bed, straightens the blanket, goes to the kitchen. Right now it’s mostly empty. A strange guy is sitting in his underwear on a stool by the wall—he has his arms wrapped around his body and his legs crossed. The curve of his ribs sticks out on his back like sharp swords under his thin skin. Probably some student. Ieva searches the shelves for a bottle of red wine—and she finds one, thank God! The white wine is always the first to go.
“Ahoy! How’s it going?” Ieva asks the guy.
“Can’t complain,” he answers.
Ieva nods to him, pours him a generous glass of wine. There’s no further conversation. Ieva drains the remainder of the bottle in one go.
She goes back to her room, turns on the small wall lamp and looks at the remains of Aksels. With anguish in her face, she gets a pair of scissors and cuts off his mohawk. The black, foreign pieces litter the pillow. After that she opens the scissors wide and resolutely drags them across the veins of her left hand.
Odd, there’s almost zero pain. Only that horrible anxiety where you feel like a bowl with a crack in the side and the contents dripping out. The awareness that hangs in the chamber of your skull like a bat flapping its wings wildly—soon enough it will be washed away, too. Solder it shut, sew it up, fix the hole!—her brain screams. Ieva looks at her arm—it’s such a thin arm. With such important blood. She would’ve never thought that blood itself was the content. And when it drops to the ground, you can’t gather it back up again.