High Tide

The Extinguishing

How beautiful the clouds are!

Along with the wind and the sun, they’re the best painters in the world. The sky is a canvas. Sometimes the clouds are joined by the full moon and the reflection of the earth in droplets of fog.

Masters of the chiaroscuro.

And then there comes a day when, as the clouds are painting, a person happens to tilt his head back to look up at the sky. Rays of light slide across his face. A never-ending cycle of extinguishing and flickering. You don’t know where to take your next step because the earth blazes up in front of you, but in your eyes — it opens up wide. When it dies out it gets as dark as a peat bog pothole. You end up jumping from one spot to another so often that the earth trembles. When the clouds are painting light and dark.

The same thing happens in a person’s life — a sunny corner can suddenly become overcast.

The only remaining letter after Ieva’s brother Pāvils was born (from Lūcija’s sister to Lūcija).

Lūcīt!

I’m once again rushing out to visit you. Yesterday I ran around like a mad dog, but wasn’t able to find everything you asked for. I bought two bras, I could only find them in one store and only in a size 5. The sales lady said I should buy two sizes up. If they’re too big you can cut off and re-sew the buttons. I couldn’t find the straps you wanted, not even cotton or gauze. I’ll run over to the pharmacies on Ļeņina Street, maybe I’ll find something in that neighborhood, but I doubt it. There hasn’t been any cotton or gauze in the city for two months. We’ll have to think of something else.

I can’t get myself to calm down — I keep thinking and crying about the negligence of those doctors. It’s interesting that they all say the same exact thing, that the trauma will fix itself, but you say that your son is completely crippled. Maybe it’ll really be like that, a month or so will go by and he’ll be a normal boy. Definitely name him Pāvils. It’s an old, good name. But you haven’t even asked what his father thinks. Okay, I’ll stop here, I won’t wait for you to write back. If you can, call me, I’m putting in 2 kopeks.

With love to both of my heroes

(give the containers back right away, and wash the grapes)

This letter is addressed to Lūcija in the 7th ward. The word “ward” has been stubbornly crossed out, and the word “room” is penciled next to it in different handwriting. As if to say — there’s no one sick in here! And yet, and yet…

It’s been only a little over a year since Ieva was born, but that sunny corner is now overcast. Ieva’s mother has already yelled at her husband. Ieva’s father has managed to upset her. Any woman sitting at home with a child has an imagination more vivid than any writer — it doesn’t take much to get upset. They barely talk to each other anymore. Only when absolutely necessary: when it’s about food, the time, or sick relatives.

After a long and tormenting period of thinking it over and finally deciding to have a second child, Lūcija puts her trust in destiny and doctors, and her in mother’s words that everything with a second child is twice as easy, and silently, deep down secretly hopes that after the baby is born her sky will clear up again. Like it had with Ieva.

But it doesn’t. It grows even darker. Pāvils is in no hurry to be born. The doctors don’t properly monitor her. Then the baby is far overdue and the poisoning starts. The labor itself is difficult, and Pāvils survives, but his movements for the rest of his life are palsied, even though his mind is exceptionally sharp.

And there’s something else — a kind of malicious termite inhabits Lūcija’s brain after his birth. There are a few days in the first month where her head aches so intensely she throws up and she isn’t even able to take care of Pāvils herself. She lies motionless in a dark room. A typical, unexplainable migraine — so says the doctor. The forever-busy, mercurial Pauls is not happy about this. Even though he loves his daughter and son, he’s not ready to quit his job for them. And what’s more, Pāvils needs special care.

They decide to send Ieva to the seaside village where Lūcija’s parents live. At first the grandparents are concerned, but when their granddaughter arrives and laughs for the first time, they feel as if they’ve been given an unexpected present. Every night, Gran gives her granddaughter a bath in a large tin bowl set on a warm stove. As she scrubs Ieva’s back, Ieva faces the stove, inspects the kitchen utensils — clangs the pots, plays with the foam skimmers, touches the enamel cups and saucepans hanging from hooks.

Brother and sister grow up apart from one another. Lūcija and Pauls never separate, even though their married life isn’t harmonious and Lūcija only feels happy once in a while. No sunlight shines into their Riga apartment because it’s unforgiving to Lūcija’s melancholy eyes. How does that first crack in the structure of a person’s life form? Is it the moment when assumed moral obligation is replaced by reality?

When the clouds start to paint, the sun grows overcast.

Ieva’s Birth

For the moment there are only three things to prove Ieva’s birth — I’ll whisper to you what they are — and they can be found in the attic of a building in Riga, in a yellow-painted wooden chest with stylized Latvian folk engravings on the lid. Attic mold hasn’t held back — the contents of the chest are almost entirely overgrown with this fuzzy evidence of time. Fifty or so letters written in different hands have turned into a greenish-black turf; the letters are unsorted, stacked in a pile and secured by a half-disintegrated piece of twine. A foamy grey covers the glossy greeting cards, rings of moisture paint over the ugly color; time brings everything together with a robust drawing. The ugliness betrays its owner, the Soviet era, the era of ugliness. Moisture has eaten away at the black-and-white photographs — amateur handiwork from those times, when every self-respecting Soviet citizen had a small darkroom in his Khrushchev-period brick apartment building. A darkroom with an enlarger, a processer, chemical baths, and an infrared light bulb. With a wave to his family, such a perfectionist would disappear behind the curtain Friday evening, latch the door and, in the reddish-black light, rest a veneer sheet covered with all his treasures across the bathtub. There he’d sit on the closed lid of the toilet and watch intently as the developing chemicals conjured lost time onto the paper. The magnifier could be used to select individual faces from the crowd, and the developer used to regulate the level of bleakness in the facial features. Some photo paper was hard, which made the scene turn out a coffee brown. Other paper turned out gloomy, bluish and slightly pliant. The air in the bathroom would be positively charged, chemically fragrant. And the family would be annoyed because the only way they could get into the combined bath and toilet room to take care of their natural needs was to beg and beg. The photography enthusiast would make up for his offense by letting the children dry the wet photographs, lay them on the cutting board, and let them trim the edges with a straight-edged razor or a special blade. Additionally, whoever was trimming the picture got to choose how wide the white border would be. But God help anyone who forgot and flipped on the bathroom light!

Now the photographs have been cut up by time and humidity — here and there are the white teeth of broad smiles, the black scarves of funerals. The most popular subjects in photographs from that time are various foods and bottles set on banquet tables surrounded by happy guests, or funerals with a somber and grey forest in the background.

What has outlived this moldy turf is a time of receipts, a time of sending postcards, a time without e-mail.

And three little pieces of evidence to Ieva’s birth.

The first piece of evidence — or rather, the first announcement of Ieva’s birth — are small tags, the ones that were attached to gold jewelry in the Soviet Union. Tiny, calligraphy lettering on the cards explains that the gold items were rings made in the Riga Jewelry Factory: item 0611, 583-proof, weight 5.66 grams, price 11 rubles and 50 kopeks per gram, total item price 65 rubles and 00 kopeks. The second ring has a weight of 6.12 grams, total item price 70 rubles and 38 kopeks. Ieva’s mother and father, like two tagged birds, slid these rings onto each other’s fingers, following the worldwide tradition to thus express their trust in a single being among all other beings.

The second bit of evidence is an orange piece of laminated material bound with gauze thread; on it in black ink and in Russian are written Ieva’s mother’s name and surname, her father’s name, that they have a newborn baby girl, weight 3 kg and 50 g, her birth date and time, and her mother’s patient number—71. Red ink lettering indicates five seconds, apparently the amount of time that passed before Ieva’s first cry.

This kind of tag was tied around a newborn’s ankle, while the mother would have a smaller tag tied around her wrist with just her number. Every three and a half hours or so, a steel gurney would be pushed down the long hallway toward the wards carrying tightly wrapped, crying or quiet babies that the ward maid would bring to the mothers. And thus continued the Soviet era individual’s greatest adventure, starting with pregnancy, birth, and the realization that, contrary to what the Soviet grandfathers of biology thought, children weren’t actually clean slates to be scribbled on with the commandments of the Communist party. At least Ieva’s mother Lūcija realized this on the first day of Ieva’s life, she could easily tell Ieva’s voice apart from the other babies on the gurney; and every newborn’s face is its own, unique, almost like its character, already complete and mature at the moment of birth.

The third piece of evidence of Ieva’s birth is a lock of her hair, wrapped in paper and dated around the time she was a year old — a silken and brightly shining substance. Who knows why this lock had been cut off. Maybe to mark her first haircut?

These incredibly personal passages can probably be best explained by the letters between Ieva’s parents. In its paranoia of germs, Soviet science ignored her father. Left him standing on the other side of the hospital threshold, flowers in hand. A real man was supposed to be muscled, hairy, and smelling slightly of body odor, the kind of person who would crack open a bottle of cognac at the construction site and pass it around to his coworkers in honor of his new offspring, not the type to tramp through the flowerbeds surrounding the hospital.

Ieva’s father Pauls doesn’t quite fit this idealistic category of man. He was an engineer in one of the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic’s countless design institutes — a paper pusher in a button-down shirt — who’d met and married his wife right there in the institute, and who was now doing everything he could to get into the hospital to see her, if only for a second. When he couldn’t get in no matter what, he wrote letters. The entire expanse of the Soviet Union, from the Baltic Sea to Sakhalin, was one big letter-writing workshop that constantly wrote and spread myths because citizens at that time didn’t see each other often enough to talk face-to-face, and were always isolated from one another in consideration of the safety of the State. So in this country, people with imaginations and people of action, who were usually divided in society 50–50, were forced to become 100 % imaginative. And what does an imaginative person do when the Cerberus-like ward maids keep him away from his wife and newborn child for an entire week? He either drinks, or he writes letters.

First letter

(from Ieva’s father Pauls to Ieva’s mother Lūcija),

written in black ballpoint pen on a torn-out sheet of lined notebook paper, most likely at home on the evening of Ieva’s birth.

“Dear, dear, dear, Lūcija!”

The happy father admits his bewilderment, joy, and excitement, but this is nothing compared to what she experienced. He knows he has a daughter and that she weighs 3 kg and is 52 cm long. Then come questions:

“How’s your health? Was it bad? And how is our first-born doing? Who does she look like — you or me? What color are her eyes? What does her nose look like? What color is her hair? Is she a loud crier? Is she healthy? Do you need anything — juice or fresh fruit, or something special?”

Immediately following these questions he starts in on choosing names—“our little girl is already tall, we should name her Skaidrīte, so she could be name-twins with Skaidrīte Smildziņa” (here he means the TTT team basketball player Skaidrīte Smildziņa). As far as names, he asks for time to think and for them to decide tomorrow if possible.

Then he writes a bit about the outside world. About how he slept poorly the night before, how he was only able to doze off toward morning. Woke up at half eight. Was late for work and called the hospital once he got into town to find out if there was any news. There wasn’t, and they told him to call after lunch.

He decided to call after two. He was eating when his mother called him and, after giving him an update, congratulated him. A coworker had been standing next to him at the time and had seen him turn red, then pale; then the coworker congratulated him, asked if it was a boy or girl, then went to spread the word.

The new father then called the hospital himself. They told him that “everything is very, very normal and your wife is lying in bed smiling” (it’s possible this is a standard line). “But I already thought as much,” he writes. “After that I didn’t want to work anymore. And tears kept welling up in my eyes for no reason.”

After this the letter includes a description of several congratulations and greetings from coworkers and family members. One person said that they should definitely drink something to the occasion. Another said his wife had experienced a beautiful dream.

By 15:00 Pauls couldn’t stand it anymore and went to beg his boss to let him leave early. His boss asked after the health of his newborn and his wife, asked, if his employee had hoped for a boy or girl. Pauls had grown flustered and answered that he’d hoped for both.

He has no new news, it’s already 16:15, and he has yet to cover the distance between himself and the hospital.

(And it’s true, he had to cover that distance to leave a care package and the letter with the receptionist, and to then slink along the side of the hospital garden in the hopes of catching sight of his wife through the window for a few moments.)

Second letter

(from Ieva’s father Pauls to Ieva’s mother Lūcija),

written in black ballpoint pen on lined notebook paper; the letter indicates that he wasn’t able to see his wife yesterday.)

In the second letter he again writes that he was chased off hospital property at six, so could she please immediately answer the following questions and only then read on.

1. How are you doing in this hospital?

2. How’s your health?

3. Could you write something more about the baby?

4. Are her legs bowed or do they look normal?

5. Do you need anything?

6. What’s new?

7. Is it true new mothers don’t get to see their babies for three days, and only then do you get to feed them yourselves?

8. What do you think of the name Helga?

Third letter

(from Ieva’s mother Lūcija to Ieva’s father Pauls),

in which she lovingly addresses her husband and thanks him for the care package, which she won’t be able to finish off, as “there’s a lifetime of things in it.”)

“So we have a daughter,” she writes, and adds that she was born very small. Other women gave birth to babies weighing 4 kg or more. She’s the image of her father. Lūcija, in turn, held out courageously — there was one small gash, but it was sewn up. Tonight she’ll be allowed to start walking again. Health-wise nothing interesting, just a slight temperature.

She writes lying down because she’s not allowed to get up, but hopes that he’ll be able to read her handwriting. She’ll probably be able to go home in seven days. Their daughter is very beautiful.

“Don’t worry, love, it’s all over now.” That’s how she ends the letter.

The reader must not forget that this correspondence wasn’t brought about by esthetic whim, an attempt at style, or an artistic craze, but life itself, livelihood. The desire to connect and utilize one’s human advantage — words. And with this little stack of letters Ieva Eglīte’s name was pulled from the stream of time.

True, is should be pointed out that the stream of time is always very close by. It’s already reaching with its furry paw of mold for new ground, and this name and surname will also soon be washed away by time.

It should also be said that Ieva Eglīte herself has never known about the existence of her birth certificate, and maybe that’s for the best because, having read these letters, she would never believe that she had been the size of a large cat at the time the pen touched the paper.

But she was.

It becomes clear to anyone who has been present for the birth or death of another person that life is no laughing matter. It can and must be treated as a good, successful joke, but in essence it’s not a joke.

If you’ve been touched by a ray of light, if it’s pulled you from the darkness — that’s no joke.

Sitting on a pretty hill, I often daydream, and this is what I think: there is neither essence in money, nor in the number of women, nor in old folklore, nor in a new wave, but we end up in strange places by feeling our way there, and the only things that belong to us are joy and fear. Fear that we are worse than we could be, and joy that everything is in good hands. And in each dream I can’t resist but run to who knows where. But, when I wake up — I hope you’ll be with me.

— B. Grebenshchikov