Soviet Milk

I was now into my second term at school. I could not let my marks slip after finishing the first term so well. The wunderkind had begun to pay attention to me, which was a great honour. We had a heavy course load. Military training had been added to the curriculum. We all had to lie on our stomachs on the school’s smelly gym mats and spread our legs wide (which amused the boys no end, for the girls were not allowed to change into trousers), then aim a rifle at a target and pull the trigger when the instructor yelled ‘Shoot!’ Anyone who couldn’t follow his orders received the instructor’s favourite line: ‘Po druzhbe dvoyechku’ – ‘For friendship’s sake, do it twice.’ His cruelty paralysed us all. He was quick to dole out 2s – the lowest grade on your report card – which could ruin a high grade average. After the shooting exercise we had to don gas masks, removable only at the instructor’s order. One friend fainted because it turned out that her mask’s valve was closed. She nearly suffocated while waiting for the order.

I hated that short, fat instructor. In my imagination he became the culprit for this Soviet absurdity of parallel lives. Then a ray of light pierced my hopelessness. A call for applications to a cultural history group appeared on the school bulletin board. The meetings would take place outside class time. Of course I applied.

Three students came to the group’s first meeting: myself, the wunderkind and one other girl. We were introduced to Teacher Blūms, who looked as if he came from another world. He had a high forehead, bushy, longish hair and a thick beard. He didn’t even look like a teacher. He spoke in a quiet voice and what he spoke about was quite otherworldly.

We were to begin with poetry. At these meetings we were to learn what our school curriculum had missed out. Our first text was a poem titled ‘Krasta runa’ – ‘The Seashore Speaks’ – written by a poet only ten years older than us. Teacher Blūms recited – and we three sat transfixed. Just a moment ago, we had been gasping for air in our gas masks, waiting for our orders. Now we were standing on the seashore, where waves rose and broke.

With Teacher Blūms, my new parallel world burgeoned at lightning speed. In the Gorky Street library I found the poet’s first published book. The slimmest of slim volumes, already the worse for wear. I shoved it into my boot and strode out of the library. And I read it from the first poem to the last and back again from the last to the first.

The director at the ambulatory centre now seemed to look at me with suspicion. Several times she commented on my slipshod appearance, which, according to her, didn’t do credit to a doctor who was seeing patients. My workload was reduced to a minimum, but during consultation hours the corridor was packed to overflowing. Therefore, at least for the time being, the directortolerated my presence.

I had once more fallen under the spell of Winston. Jesse had taken great pains to hide the half-book, but I found it nonetheless. Winston followed me everywhere. Like a shadow that walked ahead of me whenever sunlight fell on my back, as if mocking each step I took. He accompanied me to and from the ambulatory centre. He stood behind me in the consulting room and, shamelessly, didn’t even turn away when my patients undressed. In the evenings, I often saw him slithering by outside my window. In my dream he had become the man from my grandmother’s story, the one who slept in a ditch, covered with a church windowpane. He protected his face, protected it from a view of the future, where a boot trampled the face of humanity. He had been warned to do so. Now Winston firmly told me to do the same.

Poor Jesse tried hard to pull me away from his spell. On my days off she appeared early. She encouraged me to go into the garden or for walks. She forced me to get involved in making our lunches. She bought a live carp from a neighbour. The carp king himself: he was enormous, with a moustache. He was so beautiful that we decided to lengthen his life. We slid him into a tin tub full of rainwater. I sat by the tub and looked on as the big fish circled. Jesse warned me not to grow attached, for his end would come no matter what. But I sat and occasionally churned the water, so that the king would have enough oxygen to breathe. Gratefully he opened and shut his mouth and flashed his golden mirrored sides in the tub.

‘But Jesse, how can we kill him? Look at his beauty,’ I said.

‘With a big knife.’ Jesse said. ‘You’ll hold him, while I will smack him on the head with the knife handle and then slit him at the gills. We’ll roast him in the wood stove on the coals.’

‘Jesse, you’re not listening to me. What a beauty, how can we kill him?’

‘Better come and hold this: he will make several suppers,’ Jesse persisted, tying an apron around her waist and arming herself with a big knife.

It wasn’t easy. The king resisted and evaded us like the devil himself. He slapped us with his tail, he jumped into the air. It was a difficult battle. But Jesse’s big hands were powerful. The head was off – but the king was still moving. The mirrored scales flew to all sides under Jesse’s sharp knife.

Our evening meal was delicious. The king melted in our mouths.

‘I’m telling you,’ Jesse said, ‘I’ll go fishing myself. There are a lot of fish in the river.’

‘I’ll go with you,’ I said to Jesse gratefully. At least for the moment, Winston’s shadow had disappeared.

Attendance at our cultural history group increased with every meeting. Already we were twelve. Each Wednesday meeting with Teacher Blūms introduced something new. So all week we had a new poem or painting, a historical building or symbol to think about. This was so exciting that my interest in the ever more senseless subjects taught at school diminished markedly. For example, in social studies we had to recite our new state leader Comrade Gorbachev’s first speech, which he began by extending his sympathy for the death of his predecessor, Comrade Chernenko, who had for a short while replaced the rapidly deceased Comrade Brezhnev’s successor, Comrade Andropov. We had to learn by heart that:

My head threatened to burst. What we had learned from the comrade’s speech was slowly eroded by what Teacher Blūms was reading to us: ‘Whoever takes hold of the realm and wants to manipulate it will have no peace. The realm is a sacred vessel that should not be interfered with.’

I started to hate my school subjects. I needed my head for the other, more meaningful things being planted there by Teacher Blūms.

One Wednesday he asked all of us to meet at the bus station the following Saturday, bringing knapsacks with sandwiches and tea. Our group was to make an excursion. I had already planned to go to my mother’s house, but Teacher Blūms’ invitation was enticing. After all, as it was the winter holiday, I’d still have time to visit my mother.

That Saturday morning, after several hours, the bus halted at a remote country stop. Outside it had iced over, although there was still no snow. Following our teacher in single file, we crossed an untended field to reach an old church. The door was half-open. The teacher closed it temporarily. We stood outside the church. He told us about the people who had built and cherished it, who had come here to pray, to christen their children, to hold weddings and funerals. About the bell-ringer, who had gone deaf from the ringing, about the minister, whom the bell-ringer had betrayed, and about the altar painting that had disappeared.

Having concluded its story, he opened the door to the church. Inside were ruins, on which bushes and saplings had sprouted. Through the broken windows we could see a bleak sky. A mute church bell hung above us.

We all looked up.

‘See,’ our teacher said, ‘the bell had its tongue torn out. It can no longer ring.’

Later, by a campfire near the church, over sandwiches and tea, the teacher asked us what thoughts the bell had inspired.

As always, the wunderkind had to be different. He said that the bell had been lucky in a way, because it never had to worry about holding its tongue again.

Everyone, including Teacher Blūms, laughed heartily.

‘And what do you say?’ the teacher asked me.

Everyone gazed at me in silence. The fire was crackling. The flames and the silence burned my cheeks.

‘That bell reminds me of my mother.’

The silence and the crackling grew louder.

My daughter came during the winter holiday. For Christmas Jesse had set up a spruce branch with large cones in her room. She had dusted and washed the floors.

In the kitchen Jesse’s cooked peas were drying in their pot. Jesse had wanted to make it a beautiful Christmas, but I had shown no interest. She was probably offended. She had left our clean, tidy house and the holiday treats she herself had prepared. She had not returned for the holy days, not even for New Year’s Eve.

My daughter was busy in the kitchen. For the first time in days the enticing smell of food invited me to get up and dress.

‘I doubt Jesse will come again,’ I said from my room. ‘You too will soon stop coming.’

‘Mamma,’ my daughter called back from the kitchen, ‘now, you can’t give up just like that. I’m stewing ribs with sauerkraut. Before the New Year your stepfather queued at the butcher’s for hours, and we bought the sauerkraut in the market. They send their best wishes to you, and also a little gift.’

Stewed ribs and sauerkraut. A gift. The small things in life. I felt a pang of pain at the thought.

With great effort I put on warm trousers and a jacket. I had already hurt Jesse, my good, faithful friend. I didn’t want to hurt my daughter too.

She was quietly humming in the kitchen. Just as Jesse did, she was breathing life into it. The pot was simmering away. Warmth emanated from the wood stove. The coal and the ribs in the sauerkraut wafted their aroma.

‘Mamma, the coals are ready. Let’s put in potatoes in their skins. Do you have potatoes?’

‘Potatoes? Maybe. If Jesse brought them, maybe we have some.’

My daughter exclaimed happily, ‘Look! Here are some in the pail in the pantry. I’ll wash them.’

I sat down at the kitchen table, lit a cigarette and gazed at my daughter’s movements. They were womanly and domestic, joyful and considered. How she raised the pot’s lid and tasted the contents, how she added salt, how she scrubbed the potatoes and lined them up on a neatly folded towel to dry. How she organized the dishes, knives and forks on the table, how she put butter in the small dish, and the candle and spruce branch in a tiny vase.

We sat at this festive table in this island of our lives. She talked enthusiastically about her school, about the wunderkind and Teacher Blūms, who was the cleverest person in the world.

‘Mamma,’ she said, ‘do you remember how you made me up to be two people – a split personality – for our school carnival? Now I really am a split personality. One half is taught at school, the other is taught by Teacher Blūms.’

Suddenly she became embarrassed. She asked, ‘Mamma, will you be offended if I tell you something?’

‘I won’t be offended.’

‘Teacher Blūms took us to an abandoned church, where we saw a bell that had lost its clapper. Afterwards he asked what we thought about the bell.’

‘What did you answer?’

‘I said that the bell reminded me of you. Everyone was silent and I didn’t have anything more to say. It was quite a dreadful silence, but I couldn’t explain briefly why that bell reminded me of you. That’s why I kept silent.’

‘And why did the bell remind you of me?’

‘Because it often seems to me that someone has stolen your joy in life. They’ve torn it out of you like that bell’s clapper. And you can’t ring any more – just like the bell. Are you offended?’

I gazed at her. My flesh and blood. Her longing for life was stronger than the evil that gnawed on me.

‘You’re not offended?’

‘No, of course not. You’re my joy.’

After the meal we dressed warmly and went outside. It had snowed for three days. The bright sun covered the white earth with its veil. We headed for the river down our accustomed path.

‘Along the way let’s stop by Jesse’s,’ my daughter said. ‘Jesse is a good person and no one should hurt her.’

My daughter threw a snowball at a window of Jesse’s modest house. After a moment she came out, warmly wrapped and happy to see us.

‘Jesse, what a lovely day!’ my daughter called out brightly. ‘Let’s go to the river.’

We went as a threesome. My daughter walked in the middle, her arms around the two of us.

The golden ball of the sun rolled out over the white river. We stood dumbstruck, moved by the radiant silence.

Then my daughter exclaimed, ‘Let’s slide on the ice! Mamma, Jesse, let’s slide!’

She grabbed our hands and we raced for the river. We slid back and forth until we collapsed in the soft snow. For a moment all three of us lay there, holding hands. Gazing at the sun.

After the winter holidays at my mother’s, I continued to attend Teacher Blūms’ group and to distance myself from the school curriculum. This began to bring down my high marks. My form teacher was concerned. I promised to pull myself together. My grandparents were also worried. Had I too much to do – with the school and the cultural history group as well? No, I insisted, everything was fine. Privately I fretted about one thing: that my form teacher and my family might start to look askance at Teacher Blūms. I forced myself to master the school curriculum. I learned all that foolish history and social studies, wrote required compositions, became a model of obedience in military studies, somehow scraped through in chemistry, physics and algebra – and my grades began to improve once more. All this in aid of a single objective: Teacher Blūms had promised to take us to Leningrad and to the Hermitage during the spring holiday. If I received a good report, no one would object to the trip. Grandmother sighed, because she remembered how badly Leningrad had turned out for my mother.

‘Please stop,’ I said to her. ‘Don’t ruin the trip I’m so excited about.’

The trip was a good excuse for not visiting my mother during the spring holiday. I wrote to her explaining that a wonderful trip was on the cards for me – to Leningrad. She sent me a postcard with a view of the River Neva and its bridges, surely from her time in Leningrad. On it were only two sentences: ‘Have a wonderful trip. My greetings to Neva and Teacher Blūms.’

I could hardly believe it, but it did happen. On the second day of our spring holiday, we were sitting in a second-class carriage on the Riga–Leningrad train. I had studied until I was sick to my stomach and Teacher Blūms had kept his word.

The next morning, having hardly slept, we headed straight for the Hermitage. We stood at the end of an impossibly long line, ready to draw on all our reserves of patience, for it was very cold. Beside us, a stream of foreigners flowed rapidly into the building. They had arrived in comfortable buses and were welcomed inside without spending any time out in the cold. As we queued and froze, we took turns to leave the line to hop and run about a bit. It was well past lunchtime when we got into the Hermitage.

After the first two exhibition halls my head started to spin. I found a bench and sat down. Here was a world to sweep you off your feet. I didn’t attempt to understand Teacher Blūms’ descriptions. I just allowed his words and the paintings to flow through me like fine grains through a sieve, catching here and there, and sprouting in the fertile soil of my imagination.

Time stood still. We wandered through the halls as if possessed. Soon we were close to exhausted. Then I saw a brilliant green moon set in a black painting. I sat on the floor before the painting and could not leave. The painting drew me into its darkness and its light, which were fighting each other in the small, square-framed space. I was there between the green moon and the darkness into which everything vanished – me, my mother, my grandmother and step-grandfather, the hamster in its cage, the tiny clay figure I had made. Everything spiralled as if in a whirlpool, then vanished into darkness.

I came to my senses. Teacher Blūms was saying, ‘You fainted by the Kuindzhi.’ The frightened members of my group stood around me. The museum guards had brought a glass of water.

At night we went to see how the bridges are raised over the Neva. The bridge jaws gaped open and rose majestically to meet the star-filled heavens. Below flowed the river that I was to say hello to from my mother.

My daughter came to see me four weeks after her spring holiday. She had grown thin. She spent her time in her room or in the kitchen gazing apathetically out of the window. Something had happened.

We weren’t accustomed to questioning one another. In the evening muffled sobs issued from my daughter’s room. I stepped inside.

‘Mamma,’ she said through tears, ‘after the Leningrad trip they let Teacher Blūms go. Someone told the headmistress that I fainted by a painting and he was let go. But that’s not all.’

‘You fainted by a painting?’ I asked.

‘Yes, I was tired and I had my period. Besides, that painting was incredibly beautiful, just the darkness and a green moon. I looked at it for a long time. Then suddenly it was as if the darkness drew all of us into it – me, you, Grandmother and Step-Grandfather, and the little clay baby. It grew dark in front of my eyes and I fainted.’

She cried so dreadfully, weighed down by a great guilt that should not have been hers to carry.

‘That’s no reason to dismiss a teacher.’

‘It was only an excuse, Mamma. It turns out they had been watching our teacher from the very first day our group met. It turns out that someone among us reported everything, absolutely everything, to the headmistress. She relayed everything on to the KGB.’

I sat by my daughter’s bed, listening. A wave of suffocating hatred washed over me. It was as if the ghost of Winston was standing outside the window. The marks of his torture were visible – he was hardly recognizable. He had been forced to confess and to accept ‘their’ truth. This spectre that had burdened me for so long now also burdened my daughter.

‘But that’s not all, Mamma,’ she said, through tears. ‘A week after the trip, the head called me out of class and led me to a room beside her office. It was like that time when we had graffiti scrawled on the pavement. There, in that room, sat a dreadful man. Dreadful, Mamma, with a massive head, light hair and evil eyes.’

I stroked my daughter’s head. Shudders passed through me as if rushing in from a distance – from the stand of young spruce trees which my father had tried to protect, from the cold suitcase in which my mother had hidden me, from the old professor who had reported our talk about God, from the Engels Street room in which I denied everything, from Serafima’s husband’s ugly face, from my Soviet cage, where I went on living without the courage to eat my child. I fought with all my strength against this battering. My hands must not tremble. I must comfort my crying child.

‘He asked me, “Did Teacher Blūms take you to a church?” straight out like that. I was so frightened by his evil expression that I just trembled and said nothing. Then he walked behind me, Mamma, he placed a hand on my shoulder and said in a chilling voice, “You won’t graduate from this school, and you’ll never be accepted at a university if you don’t answer.” And, Mamma, I said he took us! I said he took us, Mamma,’ my daughter sobbed. ‘I should have lied, said that he didn’t take us, but I told him the truth, that he took us.

‘The evil man went on tormenting me. “Did he read poetry and other texts to you that aren’t in the school curriculum?” I said he did read them, and I was crying. I should have lied and said he didn’t, but I told him the truth, that he did read them. Mamma, I should have denied everything and lied. And then he returned to his desk, pulled out a blank sheet of paper and a ballpoint pen and placed them both in front of me. And in just as cold and calm a voice he said, “And now you’ll write all this down. You’ll write that Teacher Blūms took you to a church and read poetry and other texts that aren’t in the school curriculum to you. And you’ll sign – your name, surname and class.”

‘I refused to write. The evil man got up from his desk once more, Mamma. He stood behind me once more, but this time he put both hands on my shoulders and squeezed them so hard it hurt.

‘“You do know, of course, how life has turned out for your mother” – that’s what he said, Mamma. “By tomorrow you’ll be expelled from school, and your good marks won’t help you.”

‘He turned me around to face him. His face grew red and he was yelling.

‘“Comrade Blūms’ sort poisons our young, poisons and leads them away from the Soviet path. If I had my say, he would be in prison. Unfortunately, these are no longer the times for that. But he will not set foot in this school again. Never again. Write!”’

How my child wept then. I tried to comfort her.

‘And then, Mamma, the door opened and the headmistress came in. Her face was hard and mean. She sat down at the desk, crossed her thick fingers and started talking just like that evil man.

‘“Now you have the opportunity to ruin the rest of your life. The others have already written their pieces and signed.”

‘“All the eleven others?” I asked through tears.

‘“All eleven and without such melodrama,” she replied.

‘Mamma, that means the wunderkind had already written his confession! And then the head added, “If you didn’t have such good marks, I wouldn’t go so easy on you. Write and sign it.” And then, Mamma, I did write it.’

My daughter was crying so dreadfully that my heart was breaking.

‘I wrote that Teacher Blūms took us to a church and read poetry and other texts that aren’t in the school curriculum. I wrote and I signed my name, surname and class.’

I brewed some camomile tea with honey for my daughter. She drank it and fell asleep, having wept until her tears ran out. When I heard her breathing calmly, I closed her bedroom door.

The darkness in my room enveloped me. I opened the window. Outside, spring was in the air. I lit a cigarette. The shudders slowly receded.

The sky was unusually bright. I stepped into the garden. Such a star-filled sky! Directly above my head flowed the Milky Way, unreachable and infinite. I gazed at it all night until dawn. I gazed until the Milky Way vanished and a cockerel began to crow in a neighbour’s yard.

Without Teacher Blūms, school felt empty. I tried not to catch the wunderkind’s eye – although he behaved as if nothing special had happened. I avoided meeting the rest of the group, but when I ran into them accidentally in the school corridors, they also behaved as if nothing had happened. Everyone had spring on their minds. Just a little over a month and the summer holidays would begin. I had caused so much worry for my grandparents. After the interrogation, they worried about me so much that it became a burden. They had decided to rent a couple of rooms by the sea and spend the summer there. I decided to go to my mother’s.

I managed my schoolwork as if on automatic pilot. I learned all that I was assigned. My form teacher was keeping an eye on me. In history and social studies classes I was forced to work much harder than my classmates. I submitted, and spent all my time studying. I counted the days left until the end of the school year. I had a calendar in which I crossed off every day that passed.

It was already the end of April when the country was shaken by the explosion of the Chernobyl power station. The school director tripled our military instruction classes. On the instructor’s orders we put on and took off gas masks until we were sick and tired of it.

My form teacher told us about the doctors and volunteers from Latvia who now had to go and help in Chernobyl. As an example she mentioned her son, who was a doctor. Her duty as a mother was to convince her son that his place was in Chernobyl. She had succeeded in doing so. Now her son had gone to the nuclear disaster site to help the victims.

I didn’t understand this teacher’s dedication. Encouraged by her, her son had put himself in harm’s way. But I didn’t have to understand anything. I had only to heed what constituted duty to our great motherland, and to have the courage characteristic of a responsible Soviet citizen.

I gazed out of the window and the teacher’s words passed me by. On the other side of the street, the tall chestnut trees had burst into leaf. Soon the trees would be in blossom. I would leave the city, run through fields, swim, sit for hours on the riverbank, encourage my mother to go for walks, and we wouldn’t go to bed until late in the warm evenings. I would drag my mother out of her lair littered with books, ashtrays, apple cores and coffee mugs, and we’d pick the first chanterelles in the woods. I would read all that Teacher Blūms had recommended. I’d read all that was on my mother’s bookshelves. I would read to spite the man with the evil eyes, to spite the headmistress and my other eleven classmates who had denounced Teacher Blūms, to spite myself for denouncing him too because I was intimidated. I hated my fear. The summer seemed like a liberation from what felt like a young offenders’ institution. I only had two more years of it to endure.

‘I am proud of my son.’ The teacher’s words called me back to the class.

Two weeks later, when the chestnut trees were almost in blossom, tragic news ran through our school. Our form teacher’s son, the doctor, had been killed in Chernobyl. She walked around dressed in black with a black ribbon tied in her hair. Everyone expressed their sympathy to her. She had to wait for a zinc coffin to bring her son back from his duty abroad, which she had encouraged him to fulfil.

In her sorrow she became even harsher. Although it was almost the end of the year, she harangued us with new history to learn, adding more and more homework and tests.

While we were doing the tests, she would disappear into her office. Her muffled sobs could be heard through the wall. We hunched over our notebooks so that we wouldn’t have to look at each other. Towards the end of the hour, having dried her eyes, she would come back into the classroom. She would bark, ‘I am proud of my son. He fulfilled his duty.’

I saw how a cage had materialized around her, how she had shrunk and mutated into a hamster devouring its child. It was so real and horrifying an image that I felt sick. There was a numb silence in the classroom.

The summer didn’t bring the liberation I had anticipated. The day before I was to leave, Jesse appeared at our front door in a state of near collapse. She stammered, ‘Your mother is alive. They transferred her to the big new hospital right here in the suburbs.’

‘Jesse, what happened?’

We sat her in the kitchen and made her drink my grandmother’s tea. Soon she was able to tell us what had happened.

After my last visit, my mother had withdrawn completely. She hadn’t even gone to the ambulatory centre for the paltry two days a week she was still meant to work. ‘I really don’t know,’ Jesse said, ‘but I think she was let go from her work.’ When it got dark, she had sat outside, gazing at the sky. Jesse had tried to talk to her without success. All she got was broken phrases, answers for the sake of answering.

Jesse had tried to cheer her up: ‘Summer’s coming, and all three of us will be here together. Everything will be OK.’ My mother had turned to Jesse, looked at her in a funny way and said, ‘Yes Jesse, yes. Everything will be OK. We are all only human.’ And my mother had gazed upwards again, into the darkness.

On the evening of that day, Jesse had come by after work to make dinner. The door to my mother’s room had been closed. Jesse had knocked, but my mother didn’t answer. Jesse had sensed that something was terribly amiss. She had knocked more persistently, but still nothing. The door was locked simply with a small latch. Jesse had managed to get it open.

‘My God,’ Jesse said. ‘She was lying there with her eyes open, her pupils dilated, her hands groping at the air around her. Scattered beside her lay two packets of pills – she had swallowed the contents of both.’

My grandmother bent her head. ‘The road to hell,’ she repeated, ‘the road to hell.’

Jesse continued. She was allowed to go along with my mother, who had nearly died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. Her stomach had been pumped out. Now she was still in intensive care but her condition had stabilized. Jesse was not allowed to see her, but they would let in a daughter or her mother.

Jesse talked for about twenty minutes. But to me it felt like twenty years of talking, and those years went by right here in our kitchen, where outside the dandelions were already blooming in the yard and soon the lilacs would join them. My grandparents would sit beneath those lilacs, happy once more to feel the first spring warmth. And toddlers might play in a sandpit at their feet, and the birds would take sand baths. But I had no time for that spring. I had to grow up fast, faster than the words flowing from Jesse’s mouth. And I had to be brave to hear out her story.

‘Jesse, stay the night with us. Take a bath, rest,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ my grandmother agreed weakly. ‘Jesse, stay with us.’

‘I will try to go and see her tonight. First I must phone the hospital.’

‘Sweet Pea, you won’t go alone, will you?’ my grandmother asked.

‘I will go, and I must go alone.’

At the end of Lenin Street, the tram turned off towards a pine forest. It was half-empty. I sat at a window. Everything my grandmother had given me to take along lay in my lap: a toothbrush, toothpaste, slippers, a dressing gown, a hairbrush, soap, underwear, warm socks. Beyond the window, in the woods, bushes were sporting their first spring green – so bright they dazzled me. Near the hospital some old ladies were selling spring flowers.

It was the busiest visiting hour. People were hurrying over the stone slabs of the hospital entrance hall, to bring their loved ones home-cooked food, flowers and life’s necessities.

The doctor on duty in intensive care listened to me attentively. He set my passport next to my mother’s.

‘You’re very young,’ he said. ‘Are you sure you want to see her now?’

‘Yes,’ I answered.

I followed the doctor down never-ending corridors. It felt as if we were descending deeper and deeper into the underworld. At last the sign ‘Intensive Care’ appeared in blue lights.

‘She’s not conscious. Poisoning one’s system with pills is life-threatening,’ the doctor said as he opened the door to the ward.

My mother lay in bed naked to her waist. Adhesive patches stuck to her chest were connected to tubes which in turn led to various pieces of medical equipment. On a nearby monitor the line of her heartbeat zigzagged.

I smoothed my mother’s hair. It was matted as always. I stroked her ear, her neck and chest. She was warm. Warm and quiet, she slept, transmitting her life signal to the metal box.

After a while, the doctor came in.

‘I think we’ll pull her through,’ he said. ‘You too must help to call her back.’

Three days later, my mother regained consciousness. She was transferred to the regular ward. My grandmother and I sat on either side of her, while my step-grandfather waited outside on a bench so that my mother would not get too emotional during this first encounter. She ate a couple of spoonfuls of our broth, closed her eyes, andsaid just these few words: ‘It’s a pity.’

My grandmother had a long talk with the doctor. Their decision had been made. They were ready to transfer my mother to the psychiatric hospital, where she would have to stay for at least a month under medical supervision. She would have to be medicated.

‘We have no choice,’ he explained. ‘She tried to take her life. Consciously tried, despite being a mother and a doctor.’

The summer passed me by. Both by the sea with my grandparents and in my mother’s house with Jesse, all we thought and talked about was her. I went to see her at the psychiatric hospital three times a week. I had to sign in. The hospital orderly would attach a doorknob to the door and let my mother out for a walk with me in the madhouse yard.

We walked in circles or sat on the broken benches. Mother smoked greedily and constantly, as if I had brought her the elixir of life in cigarette packets.

‘Say hello to Jesse,’ she said. ‘And Mother and Stepfather.’ She repeated the same thing again and again. I could not muster the courage to ask the question that was tearing me in half.

‘How is the sea?’ she asked. ‘Do you also go over to our house? Jesse must be taking good care of it.’

She asked and I answered with a brief yes or no, for sure, good, as always.

‘You don’t want to talk to me,’ she concluded, suddenly offended.

‘You don’t want to live,’ I threw back.

‘I don’t want to,’ Mother responded.

‘So what will happen now?’ I asked.

‘They’ll sign me out after a month, after determining what category of disability support I fall into. Then I’ll return home. I want to be at home. It’s dreadful here. Inside.’

‘And we, Mamma, will we have to live in constant fear for you? I’m afraid for you. I’m afraid, Mamma. I’ve been afraid since my early childhood.’

‘Forgive me, I’ll try. I’ll try! Forgive me,’ my mother repeated, in fits and starts, as she smoked.

‘Look, Mamma, everything is in blossom around us. We could sit in our garden, chat with Jesse, whip up a strawberry mousse, walk in the fields, swim in the river…’

‘Hug me. Hug me tightly and kiss me,’ my mother said. Suddenly her face was revealed to me in the sharp light of the sun. It had aged all at once. The smooth skin hung loose, dark hollows lay under her eyes, and deep lines of sorrow stretched away from them, as if etched into her hard face by the constant flow of salty tears.

I hugged my mother and kissed her.

‘You’ve returned. I called you back so fervently, you’ve returned. Everything will be fine, Mamma.’

They eventually signed me out towards the end of August. The female doctor in charge treated me as if I were the lowest creature on earth. A mother, a doctor – but a Tvaika Street psychiatric patient. They filled me with enough medication to fell a horse. I allowed them to.

My daughter and Jesse came to help me pack and to take me home. They tried to talk about all sorts of trivia until we were standing outside the asylum gate.

‘Listen! Never again will you have to be here,’ Jesse said with determination.

My daughter held tight to my hand. She led me as if I were an unruly goat who might slip away from her at any moment.

‘I stole your summer,’ I said to her.

‘There are still a couple of weeks left. We’ll be able to go mushrooming,’ she replied matter-of-factly.

My clean, orderly home and garden welcomed me. What pains the two of them had taken! My room smelled of apples. There was a vase of Michaelmas daisies on the table, which had been laid for a meal. Life was waiting for my return.

They busied themselves around me, warmed up food, unpacked our bags. I looked on. I wanted to stop what was happening as one stops a car in order to hitch a lift. But all that was happening passed me by. I wanted to say, ‘Jesse – stop fussing! We’re on the Milky Way, playing, dipping our legs in until our feet disappear.’ But I was silent. I looked on as they organized me to go on living.

‘I’ve managed to get work for you,’ Jesse said happily. ‘Tying wire brushes. To clean off rust. You can make good money. There’s no need for any documentation; the work will be formally in my name.’

‘Tying wire brushes?’ My daughter was not convinced. ‘But Jesse, maybe Mamma can still go and talk about a job at the ambulatory centre?’

‘Nothing will come of it there,’ Jesse said. ‘Word has reached them. They know everything that happened.’

‘Tying brushes, Jesse – that’s magnificent, thank you. I’ll tie wires with all my heart and soul.’ I said it genuinely, but my daughter and Jesse heard irony in my voice.

‘Can you get something better? How much disability compensation will you get and when?’ Wounded feelings could be heard in Jesse’s words. ‘I’ll help you in the beginning. I know how. It’s not complicated work,’ she continued.

‘Fine, Jesse, fine. We’ll tie brushes.’

I felt weak and went to lie down in my room. My daughter covered me with a blanket.

‘Sleep for a while, Mamma. Rest,’ she said, stroking my head.

Half-asleep, half-awake, I heard my daughter talking with Jesse.

‘She’s given up completely. She’s smarter than all of us, more courageous than all of us. She’s an excellent doctor, Jesse, she knows about saving lives. But, Jesse, she also knows how to die. How can we support her? Why should she submit to this injustice? She was supposed to work at the Leningrad Institute! But now you’re going to teach her to tie wire brushes! What is this life in which I have to betray Teacher Blūms and my mother doesn’t want to live at all?’

‘Don’t talk like that,’ I heard Jesse say, trying to comfort my daughter. ‘This is the hand that we’ve been dealt. We’re worn out from carrying heavy burdens. Everything has to be accepted with humility, even wire brushes. Then you’ll regain your strength of soul.’

‘Jesse,’ said my daughter, ‘you speak beautifully, as if you were a book.’

I dozed off. Sleep set me free. Then they woke me for dinner.

The new school year soon came round. My form teacher took particular care of me. She continued to wear a black ribbon in her hair. Several times she asked how my mother was. I answered politely that everything was fine. One day she called me into her cramped cubbyhole of an office.

‘You can’t let things slide in any subject. Your marks have to be exemplary.’

‘I am trying.’

‘I know where your mother was this summer. And then there’s the Blūms case. You have to be exemplary so that no one can accuse you of anything.’

My harsh form teacher’s face suddenly thawed. She clasped my hand and began to speak quite differently.

‘Dear child, you have to keep your chin up. You can’t slip up in any way. You have to be the best.’

Dear child? I was stunned.

‘I’m often afraid for you,’ she continued. ‘Afraid you might fall apart. All your troubling experiences with your mother.’

I suddenly felt sorry for her. ‘Teacher, everything will be fine. My mother is better, and she has someone who looks after her.’

‘Good. That’s very good,’ she said, and offered me a sweet. ‘But all this must stay between us two, agreed?’

‘Agreed, Teacher.’

My marks improved. My combined autumn and winter school report was very good. For both the school holidays I forced myself to go to stay with my mother. She had settled, to a degree. Jesse supplied the brush bases and the wires, and my mother had become adept at tying them, demonstrating as much talent in this as she had in consultations with her patients. In fact she was earning just as much. For each of the school breaks she supplied me royally with pocket money – fifty roubles.

I brought gifts for my grandmother and stepgrandfather back with me from each of those visits. Sometimes my mother baked a cream of wheat cake, other times I brought home a roast chicken, and other times she made stuffed cabbage. Everything she made tasted good.

In the middle of January, the headmistress called us all into the large auditorium. We were to listen to a lecture read by the wunderkind. His topic was the first issue of a new literary journal. Along with the head, the wunderkind ridiculed and slandered the journal from the first page to the last. ‘Is this poetry?’ the head almost yelled. ‘“One should not climb on a toilet, for then big, black footprints are left on a white cistern.” Is that poetry?’ She asked and answered her own question, and glared at the assembled students in the hall. All this public derision of the journal only increased our interest in it. The first issue was passed from hand to hand and read from cover to cover. Teacher Blūms would certainly have recommended it as obligatory reading.

But in February something ghastly happened. In the seaside resort of Jūrmala a young poet was pushed out of a window in a tall apartment block. He was the poet whose poem we had read for our first workshop:

He gazed out at me from the obituary in the paper with curly, longish hair, square-framed glasses and a manly face. How could he be dead?

I discovered the date and location of his funeral. I told the girl who shared my desk at school that I would go to the funeral, even if it was during class time. She was a great gossip and soon all the class knew of my intention. More and more people applied to go. Now we were almost the entire class, except for the few who were afraid.

On the day of the funeral we attended the first two classes. Then we gathered in the cloakroom to get ready for the trip. Our form teacher and the headmistress caught us on the school steps. Someone had informed them, of course.

‘You won’t be going anywhere,’ the head said, her face white with anger. Our form teacher stood beside her wringing her hands.

My classmates kept looking at me.

‘We’re going,’ I said to the head. ‘All of us are going.’

I suddenly felt the same power I had that time in primary school when the sweaty man was challenging me about my mother.

‘We are going,’ I repeated, while a feeling of nausea rose inside me, for I remembered how the head and the KGB man had forced me to incriminate Teacher Blūms.

‘We are going,’ I said again as clearly as I could. ‘And then you can expel us all.’

Our group started on our way. The head and my form teacher remained outside on the steps on that freezing February morning.

We pooled our money and brought some flowers. By the time we reached the graveyard, they were frozen. And there was a sea of people there. We mingled with the crowd, never again to be separated from it.

Jesse was a real master with the wire. Patiently she taught me this new trade. In the beginning my hands were hurt, but slowly I became more skilful. It was mechanical yet, in its own way, creative work too. The wires had to be drawn with a special bent needle through the holes of a wooden base and then nipped off in equal lengths. Jesse wondered at my dexterity. ‘Well, you used to sew up women’s flesh.’ And she fell silent, thinking perhaps that I could be offended by this mention of past times. But those doors were closed. The wire brushes formed a large pile. At the end of the week Jesse brought boxes into which she carefully packed the brushes. She was paid in cash for them. She continued to clean at the ambulatory centre. She also continued to tell me about the patients there who wanted consultations and kept asking when I would return. She thought she was keeping my spirits up.

As I drew each wire through the base of the brush, a calm space grew in my head. It was something like sleeping, only with open eyes and hands in movement, repeating their gestures over and over. The work steadied me. It also prepared me for something that was irretrievably closing in. As Jesse had said in that half-whisper to my daughter: everything must be accepted with humility, even wire brushes. Then we can regain our strength of soul.

I had almost given up reading. Neither Ishmael nor Winston haunted me any longer. I now saw them as poor lost souls belonging inextricably to this world – a world I would have to leave behind sooner or later. And there was no way they could help me at that point of departure.

I tried to put aside the very best for my daughter. Two days before her arrival Jesse had gone to the nearby town to hunt for groceries. She had her ways and her favoured places. Green peas, peppery sausage, occasionally oranges or squid – all under-the-counter wonders, not to be found on store shelves. As a brush assembler I could afford much more than I’d been able to on my monthly wage at the ambulatory clinic.

When she came for her spring holiday, my daughter told me about the poet’s funeral. And how afterwards at school and in the atmosphere generally something had changed.

‘Mamma,’ she said, ‘something is near at hand. Everyone can sense it, but no one is talking aloud about it yet.’

I listened to her enthusiastic voice and kept quiet about my premonitions.

Jesse had an urge to mock my daughter’s enthusiasm. Waving a dishcloth over her head, she exclaimed, ‘Freedom or death!’ then fell silent, glancing at me with guilty eyes.

‘Jesse, don’t treat her like a brainless child,’ I said. ‘And, really,’ I added, ‘all of us are the living dead here.’

Silently Jesse handed dishes to my daughter, who dried them. On the table the old clock went on ticking.

The last year of secondary school sped by. Before the exams my form teacher once more called me into her cubbyhole office.

‘You’ve studied so hard that you’ve earned it.’

‘Earned what?’ I asked.

‘We could excuse you from the final exams.’

I was struck dumb by this offer.

‘Why, Teacher?’

‘It’s a lot of pressure and, taking into account your mother’s problems, one never knows how your nerves will react.’

I felt as if she had doused me with cold water. Maybe she intended it for the best, but this pity degraded me lower than the floor we stood on.

‘Thank you, Teacher, but I would be happy to sit my exams. You don’t need to worry about me.’

‘Think hard about it,’ my form teacher said. And, leading me out of her cubbyhole, ‘Remember such a possibility exists.’

That day I didn’t go home after my classes. I went to the small park where my grandparents often used to take me when I was younger. It still had the same broken benches, potholed paths, overgrown flowerbeds, littered sandpits and old swings. It was a spring afternoon. The only people there were an old couple sitting in the sun. I put my schoolbag down beside the sandpit and sat on the swing. I pushed off with my feet and began to swing myself higher and higher. A tingling began in my stomach. I swung higher still. My mother wasn’t pushing me on the swing. She had never taken me to the swings; I had no such childhood memory. I was swinging on my own. I tried not to touch the ground with my feet, not to brake this free-flowing movement. The warm spring wind in my hair. A cloudless sky above my head. I embraced the gifts of living and breathing.

After a long walk I came home late. My grandparents tried not to show their anxiety, although I saw it in their eyes. They had got used to my routine – school, home, homework, school, rare visits to see my mother.

After supper and homework, sleep came quickly. But sleep brought a dream I had had before. I’m clinging to my mother’s breast and trying to suck on it. The breast is large, full of milk, but I can’t get any out. I don’t see my mother, she doesn’t help me, and I’m left to struggle with her breast on my own. Suddenly I succeed and a liquid flows into my mouth. But this time it’s not bitter – it’s as sweet as camomile tea with honey. I suck and drink and drink to my heart’s content from my mother’s soft, warm breast.

‘Mamma, I was accepted! I was accepted, Mamma!’ She almost tripped over the pile of wire brushes as she stormed into the house. Breathlessly, she told me about her strange summer of studying behind heavy curtains, so that the sun wouldn’t tempt her to go outside. She described the national competition through which girls from country schools who had kolkhoz and Soviet farm recommendations and who only got grade 3s out of 5 in all their subjects might still be accepted at university. She described the old professor who had saved her life in the literature exam: she had been unlucky, drawing a topic to defend on contemporary life difficulties in the novel Zīda tīklā – ‘The Silk Net’.

Jesse and I had waited so long for her. The summer had felt endlessly hot. Working at those wire brush piles, despite my skill, I always had fine scratches on my hands, which became inflamed in the heat. My fitful, dream-filled sleep reminded me of the summer when I was expecting my daughter. Memories of blurry visions: of a light that shines into me as I stand at the window, that gathers behind my breastbone and pierces painlessly through me to emerge from my head. However much I wanted to, I couldn’t turn my head to see if it was all the same light. Intrusive thoughts about children as the fruit of sin assailed me. I contemplated bastard children brought up by wild-animal mothers or left in baskets at rich people’s doorsteps or set afloat in rivers. I considered maidservants made pregnant by their masters, who jumped into rivers or died at the hands of quack doctors. I dwelt on women abortionists of the offspring of sin, who had gone mad, been driven away or burned on pyres.

Here she was: my daughter. Not a bastard, nor the fruit of sin. Thirsting for life, she lay in our garden, where Jesse’s multicoloured autumn blooms and her yellow dill flowers spread their fragrance.

‘Mamma, come and lie down beside me,’ she said. ‘The sun is still so gentle and the grass is warm.’

I went out into the garden and lay down beside her. She took my hand.

‘You’ve got lots of scratches from those brushes, Mamma. You have to go back to the ambulatory centre, at least try to. Do you know what happened in the city’s streets this summer? Your stepfather said it was unbelievable. It looks as though everything is about to change and we will be set free. Maybe you can even try returning to the city. You’re a brilliant doctor after all. You’ll find work for sure.’

I clasped my daughter’s hand tightly and said, ‘Yes, freedom is close at hand, I feel it. It’s no longer far away.’

‘I never know when you are speaking from the heart and when you are speaking just for the sake of saying something,’ my daughter said.

‘I throw the dice for words from the heart. Let them fall as they may.’

Jesse was calling us to lunch. She set out tiny new potatoes with a wild chanterelle sauce and freshly salted pickles.

‘Maybe you’d like milk with this,’ Jesse suggested. ‘We have some here, from a neighbour’s cow, milked fresh yesterday.’

‘No,’ my daughter replied immediately. ‘Jesse, definitely no milk for me.’

‘Do you still get nauseous from milk?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know, but better not to try it,’ my daughter said, cutting me short.

For a while we ate in silence. Then Jesse suddenly began to tell the story of a loner who had gone off into the hills because he was disappointed in people and the world they had created. She talked breathlessly as if she’d waited a long time for an audience. Where did she get these stories? From the discarded newspapers, or the torn and shredded books?

Forgetting the delicious meal, she went on: ‘He took with him only his cane, which was more faithful even than a dog. The cane helped the loner to climb the steepest hills, cross the most dangerous passages, traverse the longest of roads, which led him away from the world that had chosen the wrong path. The loner didn’t have the power to lead so big an entity as the world onto the right path. That’s why he left: at least he need not be a factor in others’ choices. Leaning on his cane, he had gone sufficiently far to feel his absence from the world. Amid hills under a wide blue sky, he had air to breathe freely and an unpoliced road under his feet. But this first impression, as so often, turned out to be deceptive, for pretty soon the loner started to grumble – first to himself, then at his cane. Thus he spent several years, until he suddenly realized that, having left the world while leaning on his cane, he still had no right to call himself a loner. When he came to a bridge over a fast-flowing river, the loner threw his trusty cane into the current. That wasn’t easy; for many years they had walked hand in hand. Now it seemed to the loner that he had freed himself from his last earthly burdens. Yet, no matter how far he went, more and more often the loner felt that he was dragging along all the world’s burdens. And now he had to carry them alone, for he no longer had a cane…’

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 transported 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.

On the paper my mother had scrawled:

About a month after my mother’s funeral, Jesse came to our flat in the city. She had continued to live in my mother’s house, tending the garden and at first walking to the graveyard almost every day.

After our bathtub ritual, about which Jesse used only one word – heavenly – we prepared for supper. My grandmother had made a special effort: a roast with vegetables, a cream of wheat mousse for dessert. We were setting the table when, from the other room, where the television was turned on, my step-grandfather shouted.

‘This can’t be true! Quick, quick – come here!’

Scared, we ran to him. On the television thousands of people were shown climbing onto the Berlin Wall and tearing it down bit by bit. There, on the screen, reigned an uncontrolled joy, euphoria, the sound of yelling and streaming tears.

‘This can’t be! It can’t be!’ As if transfixed by the

screen, my step-grandfather repeated it over and over. And yet it happened right in front of our eyes. Our four pairs of eyes – mine, my grandmother’s, my stepgrandfather’s and Jesse’s. Only my mother’s were missing.

Jesse clutched her head and said, ‘We really will be free. Why couldn’t she listen to my words?’