High Tide

Ieva’s Tree

These days Ieva spends a lot of time wandering the train tracks.

The tracks wind throughout Riga. Ieva likes the spots where they come together in thick clusters — by the Daugava Stadium, by the Matīss Prison, under the Gaisa Bridge. And she likes the spots where narrow, rusted tracks lead to nowhere. Where the buildings are falling apart, the factories are shut down, and the railway ties are separated by fields. There are a lot of places in Riga that look like World War II just ended.

Ieva likes them and isn’t afraid.

She wanders.

It’s a habit characteristic of living dangerously.

She has a dog and a child, and often gets into trouble with those train tracks. Because she takes the dog and her daughter with her when she goes walking. Her brother says no smart woman would do that. But Ieva isn’t a smart woman, that’s the thing. She’s not even a woman yet. She’s like a blind child with a seeing-eye kid and dog.

A blind child feeling around for a way out.

She likes to roam through desolation, where the city drops away — ditches, marshland, trenches, and construction sites. The outer limits. Where there are lakes like eyes and rivers like veins. Where the flesh of the earth is as thick as a fox’s coat — rust colored reeds and white splinters. Her daughter snaps reeds in half. The dog sniffs at something. Ieva watches the current. Their trio makes her think of bird watchers, or geologists in the desert. No one’s in a hurry.

They move as slowly as clouds that are seeing this world for the first time and don’t understand its hierarchy, can’t grasp what the most important things here are, what they should pay attention to.

Ieva wanders and doesn’t think; she hopes that, while she wanders, her thoughts sit in a room somewhere in her head and patch the shreds of her life back together stitch by stitch. While her thoughts are busy doing this, she wanders.

And someday her thoughts, those seamstresses, will wake her and present her with a new suit — her fixed life. Then she’ll finally settle down and stop wandering.

On their way back downtown, Ieva, her daughter, and the dog cross the iron bridge over the canal. So they don’t have to take the boring route to the Vidzeme highway. The water churns far below the beams, and her daughter throws pebbles into it.

At that moment a train crawls out of the woods just outside the city. They’re right in the middle of the bridge when the conductor sounds the horn. Ieva looks back. There’s no place to run. Her daughter is too young and the dog clueless — they won’t know how to flatten themselves against the rail for the train to pass.

Ieva doesn’t remember much more after that. She hoists her daughter under one arm, grabs the dog by its scruff and gallops toward the end of the bridge, leaps over the beams. They make it.

Then all three of them sink into the grass on the embankment. Her daughter reaches out to break off the tip of a reed. The dog, a little offended, licks the fur on its back.

As the train rushes past, its wind tears at her hair and clothes. Her thundering heart settles only once the train is out of sight.

Idiot! Who are you to cross over that bottomless pit and drag others along with you? Where’s your lighthouse, your beacon?

It’s died out.

Ieva rents a room on Ģertrūdes Street in the apartment of an old woman; a room with a view of absolutely nothing.

What is nothing? The airless shaft of the courtyard and the sagging windows of the adjacent building. A few clotheslines crisscross the sky. By turning a crank, you can raise your laundry up there, into the sun. And at night you reel it back into the dusk — dry, lightly cured by smog and the smell of car exhaust.

Now and then a man’s naked white ass comes into view in the brown frame of the window to the left of the central stairwell.

So is that something?

It reminds her more of nothing.

And Ieva’s room doesn’t have any luxuries like a clothesline with a crank. The bathroom is in the hallway. Her daughter pees in the sink. Some nights she gets the urge to do the same, but overcomes it.

The dog stands with its front paws on the windowsill between the flowerpots and freezes like sorrow in frost. He watches the birds.

The birds are crows. So are crows birds?

It reminds her more of nothing.

Ieva talks into a cellphone. Her hair is cut short. A lean, boyish face. She looks out the window at the once ornate, but now run down balconies of the building across the courtyard.

As she listens to the voice on the other end, she takes a dark violet men’s dress shirt from the back of the chair. The shirt has pale red stripes. She puts the phone down on the bed for a second. Presses the shirt to her chest and looks into the mirror on the wall.

She shakes her head as if she doubts her reflection. Then she picks up the phone and puts it back to her ear. There’s nothing but a disapproving silence. Then a voice firmly says:

“But you’re not even listening!”

Ieva says:

“Stop, Mom, I’m listening. I know it all. It’ll be fine.”

Her voice is carefree, but her face forms a painful expression as the last words leave her mouth. As if she were screaming in despair, howling without a sound.

“Stop,” Ieva says into the phone. Please, God, so her mother won’t pick up on it. So no one finds out about this facial expression. A non-expression of a non-creature. A living face of a living thing. It’s not what she is. This desperate plummet in an anti-gravity room.

Phones are a wonderful thing — communication without a face. All you have to do is calmly say the words “it’ll be fine, Mom,” and you’ll believe it yourself. The tension in your mouth fades; only the veins at your temples throb for a long time after, like the adrenaline rush after committing a crime. Emotions are supposedly closely connected to mimicry. Relax the muscles in your face and the rest of you relaxes as well. The only downfall is that mimicry, in turn, is closely connected to mimicry.

Pretending. But how else can she adjust to the rat race beyond the window? Nature is fascinated by Ieva’s species — humans. May there be the continual births of girls and boys, a balance — half and half, may they procreate, and may they die when the time comes. But nature has no interest in people as individuals. It’s up to each person separately to determine how he spends his time here.

The relaxation of facial muscles is enough for Ieva.

But the eyes? When she relaxes them her eyes betray her in the tenth of a second and fill with tears. She tips her head back as if her eyes were two dark, glass bowls filled to the brims, and she has to take them somewhere.

Take them to safety.

She’s successful. Doesn’t spill a drop. The moisture slowly reabsorbs into the inner corners of her eyes. It’s horrible, tell me, my dears, where am I? On the blade of a knife, on the cusp, in a foreign territory? Something could happen at any moment. It scares her to think she could one day start screaming with sound. And somewhere where it would be completely inappropriate.

Ieva returns to the conversation. Resurfaces from her inner silence with the phone to her ear.

Her mother is saying:

“What others want, he does. No pretenses, and that’s the problem. Some people can walk that fine line without crossing it, you know? But he’s a criminal element. I studied his astrological chart, his Moon is in Leo, what can you do.”

Silence.

Ieva sits on the bed and focuses on the worn paint of the floor. The dog comes over to her and rests its head on her knees. She pets him mechanically.

“You’re not listening again,” her mother says after a pause.

“I am, Mom, but…”

“He’s that type. Sitting in prison only because prison is like death.”

Ieva asks:

“When will he be free of me?”

“He’ll be free of you once he learns to love life. It could happen one day. Sometimes it’s important to just live for that day.”

Ieva thinks for a moment.

“And when will I be free of him?”

“When your mind frees itself from him. Did you do what I taught you last time?”

“No,” Ieva lies.

“Well! How can I help you when you won’t even try? I can’t do it for you. On the night of a full moon, sit at a table, light a candle, tie a red thread around it, hold the ends in one hand, then cut the thread with scissors and wish him all the best. Wish him good health, freedom, and happiness — but without you! And for yourself, wish for your mind to free itself from him. You’ll see, you’ll feel better. The moon can do amazing things.”

Ieva remembers the night the full moon floated large and dull as a ghost ship through Fanija’s kitchen window, melting the curtains with its icy glow. The white windowsill and lace curtains shone in the dark. Everything the moonlight touched turned black and white, even the candle she had lit, the red thread, and Ieva herself. She murmured a prayer and cut the thread. The two ends remained in her fingers.

What small results, she had thought.

All these years with Andrejs.

And two thread ends in her hand.

It didn’t feel better.

“Fine, Mom, I’ll do what you say. I just have to wait for the next full moon. But today I want to drop Monta and Dārcis off at your place.”

“You’re going to go see him?”

“Yes.”

“Idiot. He’s using you — when’ll you finally get it?”

“Thanks for the kind words. Bye!”

Ieva cuts the conversation short and throws the phone onto the bed.

She takes off her T-shirt. Looks at her breasts in the mirror. Nothing wrong with them.

Her face still looks good, too. When we’re young our faces are like uncharted maps — smooth, flat. As they age they acquire Bermuda Triangles, underwater territories, landslides, avalanches. Her mom’s face doesn’t show signs of wear, or stress, because she never blames herself for things. But Ieva will definitely get wrinkles, 100 %. Ieva is a single, black splotch. She’s sick of it, but what can you do? She’s got that kind of personality. Everything she does is a result of inspiration, nothing else. She works in an office supply store, and the other saleswomen are always surprised at how much of what she does comes from inspiration alone. “Some days you’re so creative, but others you’re totally out of it,” says Gunta. Gunta is young, pretty, and — most importantly — always cheerful. Cheerful people are never out of it, and it’s a good thing if you meet someone like that in your lifetime. When everyone else has a heart full of sorrow and complaints.

Ieva puts on the violet dress shirt. She’s also young and pretty, so what. Sometimes it kills her.

A disheveled head of hair emerges from under the pile of blankets on the bed.

“G’morning,” Monta says. “Where are you going?”

“We’re going to Grandma’s because Mommy is going to go see your father. Time to get up and brush your teeth.”

Monta runs to the window and hugs the dog, who is once again frozen in vigilance.

“Dārcis is coming to Grandma’s?”

“Of course! Put his collar on.”

The south-facing side. Pigeons scrabble on the outer windowsill of the small, sunny room.

Their landlady Fanija sits on the edge of the bed among pillows covered in crocheted slips. She looks like an amber mummy, in her white blouse and the same wavy grey hairstyle actress Zarah Leander wore in her prime. Fanija looks at the peeling floor paint with great interest and occasionally pokes at it with her cane.

She says to Ieva:

“Come look at my country house, Ieva — here and here. And there, too. And this one here, look, an old man with an upturned nose, two white dogs… and this one’s a map of Latvia. Where are you headed, Ieva? That shirt looks good on you, it’s a nice men’s dress shirt, isn’t it? You don’t see that much these days, women going with this kind of extravagant style, but it really is an extravagance, isn’t it, Ieva? What’s more — winners aren’t judged. Can I call you Eva? Y’know, I was once lucky enough to fall in love with a boy a lot like you… yes… it was in Paris in ’37; my mother was an actress in Baty’s theater… Theatre Montparnasse… That won’t mean anything to you, but if you’d seen the old façade of the Montparnasse theater, believe me, it would change your life… Baty was staging Flaubert’s Madame Bovary… It was a good show. They played pieces from Lucia di Lammermoor. Donizetti… My mother was one of the four beauties who voiced poor Emma Bovary’s thoughts… like a Greek chorus. The boy played Leon — he was a very beautiful man, and how he sang! I was seventeen, he was my first love. I almost went insane, but I couldn’t show it… When Emma shouted ‘love is not better than marriage’ on stage, I always started to cry. She stood in a cheap and dirty hotel room and screamed — love is not better than marriage! Imagine how awful it was, Ieva!.. I think his name was Charles, the boy. He came to our place for lunch.”

Fanija sinks into her thoughts. Ieva waits. Until Fanija finally stirs, like she’s wriggling out of a bog of memories.

“You’re not in the least bit similar to him, but there’s still something… a gesture… a look, when you come in.”

Ieva looks at the veins on Fanija’s hands. Ieva doesn’t have time to wait.

She says:

“I want to pay in advance.”

Fanija looks at her blankly. Old people can sometimes suddenly flare out mid-sentence — like a candle that’s been tipped over. Ieva puts her money on the table.

“For the room.”

Fanija nods, but Ieva doesn’t know what for. She backs up toward the door.

“I’m going now. I’ll be back tomorrow. I’m going to visit my husband.”

As she reaches the door, Fanija speaks, surprising her.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, Ieva, I find you incredibly nice. Just remember to always put the bathroom key back in its place. I don’t have a spare.”

Ieva, Monta, and Dārcis stand in the front hallway of the apartment. Monta leans against the wall and holds Dārcis by his collar. Ieva puts on the necklace Andrejs gave her — the Virgin Mary hanging from a woven cord. We’re all set to go with our collars on, Ieva thinks.

“Let’s go!”

And they go.

She drops her daughter and the dog off at Pērnavas Street, where Monta is quick to fish her mother’s white guinea pig from its sand-filled aquarium and drop it on the ground — much to Dārcis’s barking delight and the guinea pig’s mortal fear. Ieva listens through her mother’s complaints and suggestions, then heads back into the street after a wash of goodbye kisses from Monta. She puts on her headphones and turns on her CD player, listens to Laurie Anderson’s album “Bright Red.”

Remember me is all I ask

And if remembered be a task forget me.

This long thin line. This long thin line.

This long thin line. This tightrope made of sound.

This music is like a frosty glaze forming over an oppressive heat. Over life’s distorted faces, broken-down by the black ice of passion, over the fire-filled bodies, markets, sales, weddings, births, and funerals. The music climbs over the dusty streets and freezes these things in moments, echoes, reflections. It fits in perfectly with Ieva’s own Ice Age.

She turns the volume up as far as it will go and shrinks into a corner of her world. Her mother just told her, “Read your life like a book, and with pleasure! It’s your privilege and yours alone.” Ieva skips ahead few tracks and watches as the city shifts in crystalline arcs.

All of these faces, her species. Ieva is able to participate when the music plays, to once again breathe in the air so many others have breathed for millions of years.

Watch your life as if it’s a movie — with an aching.

You had that rusty old car

And me I had nothing better to do.

You picked me up. We hit the road.

Baby me and you.

We shot out of town

Drivin’ fast and hard

Leaving our greasy skid marks

In people’s back yards.

We were goin’ nowhere.

Just driving around.

We were goin’ in circles.

And me I was just hanging on.

In the Central Market Ieva breaks through the hundred-headed mass and thinks about Monta. Her soft, silk-like skin, her clear eyes, the warmth so newly ignited in her heart! The way she looks along at the road ahead.

Stay with Grandma, be good, don’t give Grandma any trouble! Mommy’s going to go see your father. To visit.

For now Monta doesn’t have any questions. It’s what has to be done, obviously the entire world works like this. Mommy has to go see Daddy, who Monta doesn’t remember. She doesn’t know where he lives; all she knows is that she has to wait for him to come home. A priori love. She has to wait for Daddy like she has to wait for Santa Claus. But even Santa comes around more often — once a year.

Now and then Monta throws out a question that’s like a slap in the face — she asks Ieva about Aksels. She still remembers Aksels.

Where’s Ocela?

Ocela’s in Heaven.

There’s no use waiting for Ocela.

Ieva fills her prison-visiting bag with things from the Central Market. Black tea, the simplest kind, loose, granulated if possible. Bacon. She spends a lot of time looking at the hanging hunks of pig meat at the stand; she’ll miss the train if she doesn’t hurry. But she has to hope the bacon will be the real thing, smoked in alderwood, not chemically dyed brown. An entire kilogram of onions. Herbs, cheese, mineral water. Candy — thin, chocolate-filled wafers coated with a sugary glaze.

And the most important thing — cartons of cigarettes. She won’t buy them at the store, but at the market pavilion at the intersection where they’re cheaper. Where under-the-table merchants with raw and weathered faces shout into the crowd: Spirt, vodka, sigareti! Ieva gives one of them twenty lats, takes the cigarettes, and waits for her change. The man turns his back to her, as if she didn’t even exist.

When he starts to walk away, Ieva grabs his sleeve.

“What do you want, lady?”

“Ten lats.”

“You nuts?”

The man swears and shakes Ieva off, but as he turns to leave his eyes flick to the opening of her shirt above her breasts.

Ieva automatically brings her fingers to her chest.

The tin pendant Andrejs had given her, the Virgin Mary on a woven piece of string. Warm from her body heat. The merchant most likely has a similar one around his neck — and if he doesn’t, then someone he knows definitely does. A pendant made in prison. A class marker.

The man mumbles something, gives Ieva her ten lats, and then they’re parted by the flow of marketgoers. You don’t touch your own. Don’t screw over your own. Who were you planning on cheating? One of your kind? Have you completely lost it?

Eagle bites the weasel.

Weasel bites back.

They fly up to nowhere.

Weasel keeps hangin’ on.

Together forever.

And me? I’m goin’ in circles.

And if I open my mouth now

I’ll fall to the ground.

Ieva pushes her way out of the pavilion. The sweat-drenched stench makes her dizzy, nauseated. She closes her eyes and breathes deeply through her mouth. Beads of sweat form at her temples.

She just has to get through it.

Summer has finally relaxed the muscles of its face.

If it rains, it’s torrential, sudden and unruly. If it’s sunny, the light is open and raw. The fields are cleared and filled with scavenging birds and dust clouds.

Ieva settles in the diesel train with her bag like she’s planning on being there for life. For four hours she stares out the window, as if she could absorb the future through her pupils from the mute lips of the scenery outside.

The moon can do amazing things, her mother had said.

Ieva remembers the last time she visited Andrejs.

He’d given her his shirt.

Ieva remembers herself in the prison’s hotel room, in front of a female guard. They stand face to face, both silent and with feet slightly spread apart.

Ieva unbuttons her dress.

For a moment their eyes meet. The female guard looks down. She puts her cool hands on Ieva’s shoulders, then slides her fingers down over Ieva’s collarbone, around her bra, and down her ribs.

Thighs.

Knees.

Ankles.

As she stands Ieva looks down at the wellspring at the back of the guard’s head where her dark hair forms a small whirlpool. The axis of the skull, Ieva thinks offhandedly. Children are born with open wellsprings, and then the skull grows shut. Then they build schools, churches, and prisons. Someone has to do it.

The guard is squatting and inspects Ieva’s sandals one by one. One winter, when it was ungodly cold, Ieva had lined her boots with folded newspapers. She remembers the female guard who had unfolded and skimmed over each newspaper in annoyance.

Someone has to do it.

Ieva buttons up her dress.

While she does that the guard prods the loaf of bread with a long needle; then the needle is dragged through the block of butter. The needle is put down and the guard opens the bottle of mineral water, puts it to her lipsticked mouth and tastes the contents.

The guard sits next to one of the nightstands. She methodically opens the carton of cigarettes, takes out each one and puts it back. Dumps the contents of Ieva’s backpack onto the bed.

The guard flips through Ieva’s journal, then tosses it onto the table.

The guard says:

“You can’t bring that.”

Ieva nods. Thoughts are a scary thing — grenades, guns, narcotics.

“They’ll come get you tomorrow at ten,” the guard says.

She gathers up all the items to be temporarily confiscated and leaves. Ieva sits down so her shaking legs don’t betray her, and waits. There’s a knock at the door.

Another guard brings in the prisoner and leaves. The prisoner is dressed up in a suit. He stays standing by the door, grinning stupidly.

He approaches her cautiously, stands for a moment, then pulls her into his lap. Her smooth cheek against the bristly roughness of his.

They lean with their elbows on the windowsill because there’s nothing to really talk about. The window is open and sunlight streams in through the bars. Andrejs moves close to the bars and calls out — kss, kss, kss! A cat is walking along the meticulously raked strip of sand between the prison hotel and the zone fence. The cat freezes, looks up at the window, then walks on with purpose, its tail twitching.

Andrejs turns his head.

“Tell me what it’s like out there.”

Ieva gets flustered.

“I can’t.”

“Why.”

“It all changes so often. You’d have to see it for yourself.”

At some point the room is finally filled with the gentle shadows of twilight. Flies buzz around the final rays of sun over the strip of sand. These rays are so curious, so full of magic and freedom, that Ieva can’t think of anything better than what those flies are doing — dancing for the setting sun. Except the window is barred.

Andrejs hands Ieva an icon stitched into a plastic slip.

“I wanted to give you this.”

Ieva reads it:

“‘Be not afraid! Open your heart to Christ — the Lord…’ John Paul… Do you believe in God?”

Andrejs answers:

“Don’t know.”

Ieva reads on:

“‘Fools — this life was meant to given away, and nothing more…’ To who?”

“What do you mean ‘to who?”

She asks:

“Who are we supposed to give our lives to?”

Andrejs scratches the back of his head.

“Like I know… It was written in a book. Here we call those things icons. I make them myself. Got nothing else to do.”

Night. Light from the watchtower searchlights moves diagonally across the ceiling of the prison hotel room. Ieva and Andrejs lie in bed. Bodies rigid, naked, without touching. It’s hot. Now and then the guard alarm sounds outside.

Ieva asks:

“Where’d you get the suit?”

Andrejs answers:

“From donated clothes. Norwegian.”

“It looks good.”

“Thanks.”

Silence.

Andrejs’s hand moves and rests gently on Ieva’s chest.

“You’ve gotten pretty fragile. Like a skeleton.”

Ieva laughs.

“Like a skeleton!”

“Don’t do that. Eat more. You’ll get ugly.”

Silence.

Ieva says:

“I’ve got to save up. I’ve eaten nothing but water for a while now. It’s got nutrients in it, too, for real. Just have to get used to it.”

Ieva’s eyes in the darkness. Andrejs also pretends to sleep.

Then she suddenly sits upright in bed.

“Something was here! In the dark. Something evil! What’s that noise?”

After a brief silence Andrejs answers:

“The alarm outside.”

Ieva shouts:

“No, no! Here! There was something evil moving around in here.”

The massive May moon fills the window — an agitated red, and completely dead. The air is alive and pulsates with the chirping of crickets.

“This is a prison, Ieva. And you’re sleeping next to a murderer, by the way. Or did you forget that?”

Ieva leans on her arm and looks into his face. The moon shines through her eyes, her forehead is white in the glow.

She says:

“Stop reminding me all the time! I’m sleeping next to a person. That’s how I want to see it.”

Andrejs doesn’t know what to say, and just waves her off like he would a fly. Ieva sinks back against the pillow and continues:

“We have a daughter. A daughter, Andrejs.”

“I want you to bring her with some day.”

“She’ll never, ever set foot in here!”

Morning. Ieva lines dishes on the shelf. All that’s left on the nightstand is a watch. Outside it’s pouring rain and thundering. Andrejs sits on the bed, smoking nervously.

She sits across from him and picks at the corner of the blanket. He gets up and starts pacing the room.

He says:

“They’ve forgotten. It’s already five after.”

Ieva forces a laugh:

“That would be just perfect — to forget about us in prison!”

Andrejs asks:

“How’ll you get to the bus stop? It’s pouring and cold — take my shirt.”

Ieva pulls the shirt on over her dress.

He says:

“Just think, my shirt’ll be free in a few minutes.”

There’s a knock at the door.

Andrejs looks at Ieva.

“Everything that’s happened, and prison — but I haven’t turned into some kind of animal, Ieva. You hear me?”

A guard with a wide, official face comes in.

They’re taken away.

Prison hallways.

A maze of hallways, the door that opens and shuts with a bang. For a brief second they’re able to see each other through the glass door.

The prison gate.

They return Ieva’s passport.

She steps out into the rain, right into the core of it, this mess of intoxicating freedom, water, and sand. It won’t even let her breathe in — just exhale. Endlessly exhale as she looks back at the white fence, then back out toward the city and the future, which slowly but surely draws closer through the slanted torrent of water from the heavens.

The moon can do amazing things, her mother had said.

Ieva snaps back from the window when she hears the station announced over the speakers, her stop. She turns the Virgin Mary pendant from Andrejs over in her fingers, and then she’s on the platform. Dingy piles of leaves litter the concrete under the green benches, stray cats laze about, and everything is surrounded by a slow, small-town calm.

This is how I’ll get lost, she thinks. I’m already lost, disappeared, a rat among rats, a grey cat among grey cats, that alcohol merchant at the Central Market gave me my change because I already belong to a class, I’m one of them, one of the imprisoned, who’ll forever feel their scars and pain against the ones who imprisoned us.

Ieva gets into the only taxi waiting on the other side of the station.

“To the prison?” the driver asks, studying her and the bag.

All she has to do is nod.

You count my vertebrae when I light the stove. Loved by the touch of your fingers, they ignite one after the other and glow in the dark like embers.

Later I’ll walk you to the station and you can warm your hands in my embrace. Dig deep into the ash to the embers, to the spine-like fire.

Look at the stars up there!

So high.

You’ll take out a burning ticket.

The train will come, sputtering and cold. There’s a terribly cold emptiness under my heart; it counts your steps to the train stairs. Look out the window before your view is blocked by the grey bridges! A cat warms itself by a fire on the platform.

Wave goodbye.

“Here’s your prison, honey!”

Ieva presses five lats into the fat, hairy paw of the taxi driver and slams the door. She didn’t see anything — not the road, the church, the overpass! Not even the pretty sandy clearing before the prison.

There’s a new broad, ugly staircase leading to the prison accounting department waiting room, and a large window at the landing. Ieva’s silhouette is visible in the sunlight as she heads to the second floor. Everything smells strongly of whitewash.

After that is a long hallway with many doors — all on the left-hand side. The hallway looks robbed and forgotten. Ieva tries every other door, but each one is locked. Only the second to last door opens.

The room is filled with light. The outskirts, clearings, the second floor. A Soviet-era building with gigantic windows. A coffee cup sits on the windowsill; curls of steam rise from the black liquid, feeling their way upwards and forming condensation on the edge of the blinds, backlit by the sun.

Three women raise their heads from where they sit at their desks. One of them is eating a salad from a plastic container.

Ieva says:

“I need to pay. For a visit.”

“Ludmilla!” the women call out.

The one eating carefully wipes her fingers in a paper napkin and opens a ledger.

Coffee steaming away on the sunny windowsill. The smell of mayonnaise from the salad.

The woman by the window turns, takes the coffee cup, blows on it, and drinks. The woman by the door turns a radio knob; a jumble of sounds as the signal jumps from station to station.

Ieva counts out her money for the woman at the middle desk and signs the ledger.

Ten or so people are waiting in the prison yard for visitations. A guard comes out to them, loudly calls a name, and the person called goes inside. Ieva and an older woman with two fully-packed plastic bags remain outside. The old woman fishes hard candies out of her pocket, tosses them in her mouth, and grinds them like a horse.

A group of flushed men runs by — young guards in army boots. They run, buttoning up their jackets, their guns dragging on the ground. Ieva watches them.

The guard comes back outside and calls Ieva’s name. She follows him to the passport window, holds out her passport, but then quickly pulls it back and puts it in her pocket.

She mumbles:

“I… no… I have to go somewhere else!”

A stern-looking officer brings his freckled face close to the glass.

“You’re here for a visit?”

“I — just — I’m dropping something off.”

“Next window!”

She goes to the next window, takes off Andrejs’s shirt, folds it as best as her trembling hands will let her, and places it on top of the groceries. The official stares in surprise at the half-naked woman in front of her. Let her! Ieva catches a whiff of the bacon. She feels sick.

She pulls her coat on over her bare skin.

Then she rips a page from her notebook and writes: “Everything’s over for real now. Ieva.”

She walks along the sandy road toward town. Now and then she glances back as if she can’t believe it — back at the prison where she’s left Andrejs alone. Ieva walks on, letting go of something close with each step she takes, violently cutting the ties that would otherwise take forever to untangle painlessly. She makes it to the merciless core of freedom — traitor! — the chaos of air, fire, and earth. Don’t describe it as beautiful, that’s what Andrejs would have said, but how else can she put it? That second in which, despite everyone and everything, you take those first steps on your path, in your own moment of being? Because Ieva can’t go on lying anymore.

So long, marriage! Take care, church, and the words of the pastor — in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer, until death do you part! So long, love — where did you go? Time, come judge me! But no one else is going to do that. I have to judge myself.

And you shouldn’t lie to yourself, shouldn’t lie to anyone — freedom is always right there with you. You just get up one morning and go.

Freedom is always within arms’ reach.

The trip home lasts twice as long because she tries not to think about anything. And when you think of nothing, time drags on. The wheels of the train clang, the thick, grainy August air thumps in the open windows, nothing is happening.

Ieva doesn’t seem aware of herself or others — she stares at the window. It’s growing dark.

Now she’s alone. She’ll have to figure out how to live on — naked, without Andrejs’s shirt. But she wants to put off that train of thought.

People look at her, study her face. People see everything. That’s what the species is like.

She puts on her headphones, “Bright Red,” cloaks herself in the icy fringe of the music. One by one, the passengers break down and dissipate, frozen in frosty crescents. All that remains is the darkness, the darkness, the darkness, and the inviting red eyes of the semaphore, so trustworthy and present along the entire road of life.

So here are the questions: is time long or is it wide?

And the answers? Sometimes the answers

just come in the mail. And one day you get that letter

you’ve been waiting for forever. And everything it says

is true. And then in the last line it says:

Burn this. We’re in record.

Ieva gets out at the Central Station in Riga and keeps walking along the Railway Bridge, crossing the river. Her fingers feel for the Virgin Mary around her neck. No one stops her; she doesn’t think about whether or not she’s allowed to cross here. She wants to throw the Virgin Mary into the deepest part of the Daugava River. Let the stream weave her into the sand and sediment. The Virgin Mary is most definitely on Andrejs’s side, Christ is on his side, and both of them — Mother and Son — look down on Ieva disapprovingly from the heavens.

The Railway Bridge.

Riga shines evenly on both sides.

A black river down the middle. No sweet little Daugava here, friends. It’s a massive current, wide and threatening.

It’s raining.

Trains move in both directions on the bridge. Ieva presses closely against the rail when they go past. The conductors look at her in surprise.

Over the middle of the Daugava Ieva sees a dark figure walking toward her. She slows her pace and crosses to the other side of the bridge. The figure crosses, too. It turns out to be a uniformed Railway Bridge guard with a nightstick on his belt.

“Your permit, please!”

Ieva answers:

“Permit? I don’t have one.”

The guard orders:

“Then you have to go back! You can’t walk on this bridge.”

Ieva looks over his shoulder, the river once again throws the rushing sound of her own blood back into her ears.

“No walking?”

The guard is annoyed:

“No! Like you’re from another planet… No one can walk on the Railway Bridge. Turn around! And fast. Otherwise the police will get involved.”

Ieva goes back, and on the way she rips the Virgin Mary from around her neck and throws her over the rail into the water. Ieva falls into the wet grass next to the bridge supports and pounds the ground with her fists. Why can’t she live to honor this beautiful, thick grass?

A thought suddenly comes to her that has her immediately on her feet.

What if she’s?…

Pregnant!

She trips and stumbles as she moves and only now realizes that she’s completely frozen, hanging around the bridge with just her jacket and no shirt, and in a downpour no less!

She buys a pregnancy test in a 24-hour pharmacy and races across the wet sidewalks to Fanija’s apartment. The city smells like it never has before.

Thank God she’s at least able to be alone tonight!

Ieva goes quietly into her room, closes the door, and opens the window. The coolness of the mud in the courtyard rises up between the buildings to meet the night sky. It’s so rare she gets to be alone. She melts with the dimly glinting creases in the curtain.

Morning. She has to wait until morning.

She sighs heavily and undresses, puts on a soft cotton t-shirt, and falls asleep clutching Monta’s big stuffed bear.

A yellow-green and bright sun shines through the maple tree and draws a shifting, trembling design on the staircase. Fanija opens the bathroom door on the landing. Ieva stands and studies the pregnancy test, which slowly reveals a single line.

Fanija speaks:

“Ieva, I already told you to make sure to put the key back. I couldn’t get into my bathroom all day yesterday!”

Ieva answers:

“I’m sorry.”

Fanija asks:

“What’s that?”

Ieva:

“A test. I’m not pregnant.”

Fanija tries to understand the situation, then dismisses it with a wave of her hand and says:

“So no miracle, then.”

Ieva asks:

“Miracle?”

Fanija answers:

“Sure. It would’ve been a little angel sent to the rescue. But no.”

She continues:

“You know, it’s been two years since my son disappeared — I told you once already — he went out one morning for milk and just never came back… yes, Ieva, let’s go… and you know, after that a large bird landed on my windowsill and tapped on the window a few times, clearly, slowly, with a pause between each one! And then I understood! I understood everything!”

Ieva offers Fanija her arm, and they slowly head back up the well-worn stairs. Fanija continues:

“Thank you, thank you! That bird, you know, it tapped maybe three times. And, quite frankly, I understood. I’ve already waited two years. I have to wait one more, Ieva. My son’ll return in a year. A miracle, right? But I understood.”

Ieva asks:

“How old are you now, Fanija?”

Fanija answers, a bit short of breath:

“Eighty-four, Ieva. I’m bored of waiting and paying a pretty sum for this apartment, but what can I do? Think about it! But I’m doing well. I found a fifty-santim coin on the stairs today. How d’you like that?”

As they go up, Ieva listens to Fanija’s words, understands what she says, and asks questions. But at the same time she feels with every cell in her body how much she misses Monta’s smell and face, the dog’s energy, her mother’s unsolicited advice, the playground and store, shopping and trains, and the sky — wide open one morning and closed the next.

And she manages to see Andrejs — it’s a tenth of a second, a scene from her memory of one spring morning at the Zari house — maybe it’s the flicker of the sunspots underfoot that triggered it? Ieva remembers a similar morning with sun, she sees Andrejs, how he looks as he stands in the apple orchard next to the stone rubble of the barn, where all the trees are blossoming. There’s a chainsaw at his feet and, as he looks at the twisted sweet cherry tree in front of him, he says to it:

“Your turn.”

The tree looks back at him.

He picks up the chainsaw and checks the gas level.

He glances at the neighboring tree, a maple sapling.

“Don’t look so smug. You’re next.”

At that moment Ieva calls to him:

“Leave me the maple.”

Andrejs looks intently at Ieva, who is kneeling in the shade under a silver yew-tree, and reminds him of a large, talking bird.

“What do you need it for? It’s not even a fruit tree.”

“Leave it. Please.”

Her voice sounds so strange.

And that tree is still in the yard today. You can touch it if you want.

Ieva sees this scene and immediately forgets it because her phone rings; it’s her boss calling to tell her that they ended up finding another intern to take her place, she causes too many problems — her kid is sick, she’s got to go who knows where to see her husband. Got it, thanks. Ieva manages to think it’s the hand of fate. She has to find a school, she wants to study something. Before she gets completely lost in the fray. And she has to finally go see a doctor. How much longer can she lose weight and walk around feeling sick to her stomach if she’s not pregnant? And at least she paid this month’s rent in advance; she’s got an entire month — she’s rich with time!

Then a thought rips through her mind like a bullet: that it hasn’t been made official in any church, that anything could happen, and that this book called her life is still without an ending — it’s not good and it’s not bad, and yet — it’s her life, this uninsured, death-bound expedition, this unrepeatable morning full of pigeons and the shadows of trees, the sun, and Fanija’s stories. Full of future get-togethers and laughter. This book — the privilege of reading it is hers, and hers alone.

January 15th

There’s nothing good about a 200-plus-pound black guy emerging suddenly from the shadows and jumping you. Ieva’s happy for anyone who hasn’t had to experience that.

At first Ieva doesn’t understand what he wants, he just comes at them. In the moment his heavy hand comes to rest on Ieva’s shoulder, when she catches a whiff of his hot breath, acrid from eating Latvian garlic toast, and when she understands the true consequence of trouble — this is the moment he first sees Aksels. Aksels stands next to her in the biting December wind, and the white light by the entrance of Polārs Bar sways, pulling his face from the framework of the night. The black guy immediately shoves Ieva to the side and lunges for Aksels.

Ieva lets them fight. She senses that something awful could happen right then, but god dammit, she can’t do anything about it. Ieva screams out something, but her voice drowns among the sounds of the slush-covered street.

The black guy throws Aksels down onto the ice. The puddles on the sidewalk are frozen over, dark as onyx. Shit, Ieva says to Ningela, the gypsy or Indian woman who materializes in the Polārs doorway. Shit, Ieva says, see what the Āgenskalns neighborhood has become! Blacks and Indians! But Ningela doesn’t understand. Ieva’s speaking Latvian, but Ningela only knows a few words of the language.

Ningela pushes back a few nosy people who flicker like shadows in the bar’s entrance, and then slams the door. Enough, Ningela shouts out at them in Russian, enough! — but the black guy doesn’t hear her. Tell him to stop, tell him that’s enough, Ningela screams, hoping Ieva will put an end to it. The black guy’s boot flashes in the light of the weak lamp. Aksels is there, in the dark, on the ground, on the ice, or who knows where. Ieva grabs a board leaning against the wall and hits the black guy across the back. It stops him for a second, and Aksels manages to get away. It’s what Ieva has been hoping for this entire time, that Aksels would run if anything ever happened. Ieva doesn’t know why he didn’t run when he had the chance that night. Maybe his pride was at fault. Ieva had underestimated him — Aksels, it turns out, isn’t someone who runs.

It’s only when Ieva slams the board into the black guy’s back that Aksels clambers awkwardly across the ice and into the darkness. Right then his fate was already sealed, he just didn’t know it yet. Ieva takes off after him.

Then she yells at Ningela for a while longer from the darkness at a safe distance, while Ningela stands on the steps of the bar, her white slippers reflecting a weak glow in the never-ending curtain of snow. Ieva understands enough of what Ningela is saying to know people think Ieva and Aksels snitched to the cops. That the cops busted them for 30 grams of marijuana. That Ningela’s daughter was arrested and that they now blame Ieva and Aksels. Ieva doesn’t know who told them that bullshit. While Ieva and Ningela are shouting at each other, Aksels stands behind Ieva, she feels him against her back — his mute presence, his support. The black guy leans against the front of the bar, short of breath and seething, spitting dark drops of blood from his split lip onto the white snow. He pulls a joint out of his shirt pocket. A third of it has already been smoked, and he slowly and calmly lights it up again. He’s even blacker against the falling snow and the cold glare from the bar. Ieva can smell the heavy scent of weed, even through the mush of snow and rain. Son of a bitch! Where did he come from! Fuck! Ieva and Aksels leave. Empty-handed.

Nothing changes much after the night that black guy kicked Aksels. Ieva goes to work, but Aksels sits around at home. A friend pays back a debt — homegrown marijuana from the countryside, and a bit of cash. Aksels jokes that you can’t have the bad without the good. Every cloud has its silver lining. He says this, Ieva’s pigeon-grey love with a silver lining. This lining shines all around him — in his hair, his skin, fingertips. A glimmering vein around his dark rainbows.

That’s how they spend the last night of the year — pressed close together on a mattress. The first morning of the New Year arrives and Ieva looks intently at his eyes when they open. At how they move, his eyes, at what they look like. It’s so wonderful, life. Liveliness. The life, the liveliness that hides in Aksels.

Aksels doesn’t contemplate life.

Ieva is the first to wake up and watches Aksels closely, resting on her right elbow as he lies half awake. He rubs his forehead, then his face contorts as he untangles himself from his dreams, and his eyes fly open. His eyes search, they’re in the moment, they find Ieva, and they clear. Ieva freezes, afraid to breathe. He looks at her silently for a moment, then smiles and reaches for a cigarette. Nothing out of the ordinary. This is how their mornings start. For two years Ieva has had no greater secret than the man next to her.

A week later he can’t even get up if he’s sitting, or sit down if he’s standing. He says Ieva’s being ridiculous and has her go buy weed. Ieva smokes less so that he can have twice as much. The usual kindness toward everyone and everything that comes from smoking up. The thrilling generosity. Ieva doesn’t say a single negative thing to Aksels. They almost stop talking completely. When they eat dinner, Ieva knows to go get a fork, or glass, or knife, even if he just looks at her. Until he tells her — enough. He’s sick of seeing this warmhearted nurse everywhere, stop it, Ieva! And she stops. And just looks at him with wide, frightened eyes.

She’s scared of how shivers run through her bones when she looks at Aksels. She can’t avoid it. Countless times she’ll go to kiss him, to simply and lightly touch her lips to his; Ieva does this every time he starts to say something, or when he watches TV, or when he quietly smiles to himself. And he’ll impatiently wave her off, but not reprimand her. Aksels knows — if he reprimands her at a moment like that, he’d cut her to the depths of her heart. But he also knows that when Ieva kisses him, she’s trying to hold onto a part of him, and that cuts him a hundred times deeper. I haven’t even gone anywhere yet, he thinks, hope dies last, don’t you know that, dear Ieva? He can’t bring himself to say it out loud.

Ieva looks at him and now and then runs a hand through his hair. Touches her lips to his eyebrows, eyelashes, ears. Ieva loves Aksels. In this exact moment. In this exact moment.

That black guy wrecked Aksels’s hip while they were fighting on the ice. One night Ieva wakes up to a stifled cry in the pitch-black room. Terrified, she feels for the lamp. When the light bursts harsh and bare into the room, she sees that Aksels’s face is covered in sweat and he’s barely able to catch his breath from the pain. In the kitchen, the refrigerator lets out a loud whir and falls silent. Ieva rummages in the shelves for all the stashes of weed she can find. Aksels asks her to turn off the light, it’s hurting him. Ieva opens the curtains and turns out the light. They lie in the reddish glow of the city. Hold each other by the hand and wait for the drugs to kick in. They don’t. Ieva carefully frees her fingers from his and feels along his side downwards, even though he tries to stop her, pushes her hand away. But Ieva keeps going, even forcefully, while she stares unblinkingly out the window where the evening wind ferries light and shining clouds. Aksels’s hip is hot and swollen like a chestnut about to burst.

For a second Ieva pulls her hand away; she sees the true extent of misfortune.

The following morning they go to the clinic. Ieva sends Als a text message saying he shouldn’t expect her at work. Als answers she shouldn’t expect to have a job tomorrow. And if that wasn’t enough, the eggs burn in the pan, and Aksels starts making excuses. Says he doesn’t want to go to the clinic, Ieva should just go buy more weed. Like a geezer asking his old lady for his morning dose of vodka. Then Ieva flares up. A few plates shatter against the peeling kitchen wallpaper. White shards rain down on the strange and silent rusty fragments that lay about their kitchen like sleeping goliaths, these things that barely resemble an old gas stove, small propane tanks, and cast iron radiators. It’s a new January morning outside — a chilled aquarium bubbling with the icy greens, reds, and blues of the sky.

To get weed, Ieva screams, to get weed! She snatches the lit cigarette from Aksels’s fingers and smashes it into the sink. Always with this disgusting smoke, I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe, Ieva screams, but Aksels smirks in confusion. You dick around here day after day, or go drinking downtown, but I have to work in the market and freeze while I watch picky old women paw mandarins with their chubby fingers and ask — Where are these from? From Latvia, I tell them, from across the river in Mārupe! They puff up like pigeons and swear at me, then go away. Als writes down everything I say behind my back, in a black notebook. He hates it when I upset the customers. Then he docks my pay, sneering with his stupid Chechen — or whatever he is — face. Minus ten lats, he says, or minus five. Depends on the day. But all the while Aksels sits around in front of the TV and smokes the weed bought with the money Ieva earned! How do you think Ieva likes that!

But all she really wants to say is that he needs to go to the clinic. He gets it and pulls on his jacket. And for that she loves him. For often respecting her seriousness. For the simultaneously simple and painful gesture with which he finally gets to his feet and pulls on his old leather jacket.

Ieva looks in every possible place for her passport, finally finds it in the hallway under some dusty bicycle parts. Aksels, it turns out, has a different name written in his passport. Ieva decides the name Aksels suits him much better. He looks at his passport as if in wonder. He’s sweating just from waiting. The stairwell reeks of piss. They’re both twenty-one years old.

Ieva remembers — they’re taking the tram. She doesn’t remember which line. Aksels stands opposite her and looks out the window. He’s dealing with the pain. His face glassy and his eyes steel.

They sit next to each other at the clinic. Rest their hands on each others’ knee in this strange world; the background whines with the sound of a dentist’s drill and the foreground is full of patients struggling to find a seat on the long benches lining the halls.

Aksels is called in and Ieva goes with him. He doesn’t have a patient card, he’s not registered and has never been to this clinic. They’re sent from one office to another until they find the right one. A good amount of money is spent to get him registered somewhere. Destruction whimpers quietly in every corner: pensioners sputter and curse, sweating mothers sigh heavily as they hold their babies.

They need to X-ray Aksels’s side. He undresses and lies down on the table. Ieva stands back a bit like his escaped shadow and watches silently. The nurses try to position Aksels’s hips in the right angle. He digs his mouth into Ieva’s palm and screams noiselessly in this dark, warm abyss. Ieva glances fondly at his hips. They’re as beautiful as they always are, so slim. The skin of his groin like light velvet. His penis darker, regal, and haloed by golden hairs. She’s happy the nurses get to see it, too. She cries out of pride. Everything happens at once and doesn’t want to stop. They can’t X-ray his hip. He screams through her hand, bites her fingers until they bleed. The doctor decides to administer anesthesia. A needle sinks into Aksels’s vein, and his body instantly goes slack, as obedient as a ragdoll. His hips are positioned into the right angle. The lens moves toward the only place on his body that is void of beauty, the place that has opened the door to chaos.

He’s out of it for a long time, laid out on a brown, pleather couch. His body is wracked by chills, he’s freezing. Ieva covers him, wraps him in a blanket. She sits next to him on a white stool, motionless, while Aksels is broken by the nightmares of narcosis. It’s hell for both of them — Aksels’s convulsions and Ieva’s motionlessness, their mutual isolation. Finally they both come to in the same world; Aksels opens his eyes, but they’re not his own. They’ve switched him out from where he used to be.

Ieva helps him dress. The nurse comes in and hands Ieva his hip X-rays and a referral to the hospital, then anxiously asks them if Aksels doesn’t want to wait here longer for the anesthetic to wear off. They shake their heads “no” almost in unison.

Outside the city has snowed over, ice crystals crunch underfoot, children run around with red cheeks and lips shiny from sucking on icicles. Tires creak, the tram tracks sing, street sweepers clear snow with silver shovels. The sun burns the piles of snow along the sides of the street like fire. No road has ever, nor will it ever, seemed so long as those few hundred meters to the tram stop. Now and then the wind pushes loose bricks of snow from the clubbed branches of the linden trees. Aksels supports himself on Ieva’s shoulder — rather, he’s slumped against it. He feels so heavy, waterlogged. A few times he falls onto a pile of snow and wants to rest there. Ieva doesn’t let him. C’mon, let’s go, she says, c’mon, c’mon! Ieva isn’t thinking of anything, not even the tiniest thought. C’mon, c’mon, c’mon.

In truth, Ieva has nothing more to say. She asks Andrejs to take them to the hospital tomorrow. The sun shines brightly as Ieva smokes at the gate of Andrejs’s mechanic shop, and he looks at her with lazy, half-lidded eyes. Of course I’ll help, he says, when have I ever not helped you…

The icy wind blows the smoke back into her face, the contours of her lips are red and raw. You’ve totally wasted away, Andrejs says. Of course, Ieva says and looks away, it’s from the stress.

Andrejs asks:

“Why are you smoking?”

Ieva answers:

“To calm my nerves.”

Andrejs smirks.

Andrejs shows up on time. They’re already waiting in the courtyard. Aksels gets in the back, stretches his leg out on the seat. Ieva sits up front next to Andrejs. She shows him the X-rays — a couple of dark and mysterious landscapes — and the long bones of Aksels’s legs through the fog of flesh. As they drive they pass cars, high-rises, bridges, and streetlamps. The sun is shining again and the fields of snow glitter blue and violet.

Ieva says:

“Can I smoke in the car?”

Andrejs asks:

“Why do you need to?”

The wind whips at the smoke through the open window together with strands of Ieva’s hair, pulling them into the open sky.

Ieva repeats:

“To calm my nerves.”

He asks:

“You really believe that?”

She nods.

Wide, smooth hallways of stone stretch in all directions at the Cancer Research Center like forgotten czarist-era cavalry arenas with their high ceilings. The sun is unbearable. Its destructive power comes through countless windows, its rays of light dancing with tiny particles of dust in the air as people walk past.

The doctor examines the X-rays, shakes his head, and asks Aksels to undress. Aksels takes off his clothes without a second thought; he’s spent most of the last days doing the same thing. Ieva doesn’t budge an inch. When the doctor asks the nurse to shave Aksels’s hip so they can run tests, Ieva takes the razor from the nurse’s hand.

He stands in a spot of sun like a slim, careless being. Ieva kneels down and shaves the front of his hip. The hollow under his hipbone around the ugly, swollen thigh. The fine, unruly hairs burning in the soft light. One by one they fall to the ground, where the cold shadows instantly extinguish them like sparks. Ieva wants to kiss his hips, but her despair has robbed her of feeling, she can’t feel her own face. A minute later they sink a thick needle into his leg. Aksels grabs onto the edge of the table and grits his teeth so hard his lips turn white.

The doctor asks to speak to Ieva out in the hall. He says something about bone cancer, the fastest of the slow deaths. Asks if Aksels has sustained any injuries. Tells her to call in a few days to ask about the test results. He disappears back into his office as Ieva turns to run.

She runs, no, she goes, but the air lifts and carries her until she can’t keep up anymore — galloping from one end of the hallway to the other. The air washes over her and slams into the walls like foam, smearing against the window blinds. Andrejs stands at the window opposite of where she finally stops. Ieva chokes on air, is out of breath, and goes to him. Andrejs looks at her long and hard and says he loves her. Can you honestly not shut up, Ieva says, if only for a second, please, for Aksels… Andrejs can’t. He hurts her with his heavy and endless love even when she’s sobbing and gasping into his sleeve, even when Aksels emerges fully-clothed from the doctor’s office and walks over, his crutch tapping against the cool tile floor. He walks toward the two of them with infinitely drawn-out, long, uneven steps, cool and indifferent, right up to the two of them, who are looking at him as if he was limping straight for Heaven’s door.

Back at home Aksels says to Ieva:

“So what now?”

Ieva answers:

“I don’t know.”

He gets angry:

“You do too! You talk to the doctors, so please, enlighten me!”

Ieva says nothing. Aksels knows. He’s only pretending he doesn’t get it.

He tries a different approach:

“How long do I have left?”

“At most — two months. We have to call back January 15th for the results.”

Silence.

“Hey,” he says. “Don’t let them take me.”

Ieva doesn’t know how it happens, but people acclimate. That fascinating acclimation mechanism when faced with the unavoidable — no, what is she saying — when faced with anything that lasts more than a few hours. She remembers that first night: they’re both smoking on the balcony, and it’s briskly cold. When they sit with their backs against the wall all they can see over the concrete-block railing are the stars, which are truly glowing. Between them is the small birch tree, white with bare branches — it grows on the balcony through a crack in the bricks. Below them is the city center, the laughter of pedestrians scattered over the icy sidewalks like red, crystal apples, and the shining reflections of billboards on the cobblestones. Thank God the Christmas market carousel has quieted down. It’s hard for Aksels to sit, he folds his jacket under his leg and stretches it out toward the horizon. He’s on clonazepam to override the pain and anxiety. He’s pale, weak, with bright feverish eyes, and smokes cigarette after cigarette and rambles on. It seems he’s talking about how important it is for people not to hurt one another. Expands on the topic. And then he’s plowed down by sleep, like slipping into a coma. Ieva drags him back inside. Holds his head in her lap and suddenly hates whoever wants to take this beautiful, warm doll away from her, this doll she can never get enough of. She starts to cry, even though at moments like this tears usually avoid her like she’s fire. Ieva and Aksels love movies, run piles of them through their old Panasonic the way other people run loads of clothes through the wash. It takes away the ability to feel anything. Any time she starts to suffer, she remembers some actor or actress in a similar situation and the way they handle it. Contort their faces while the cameraman mercilessly milks the moment with his lens, drawing out the tears, screaming in terror — she has no doubt that the actors are experiencing instead of acting. But it’s not the actor or actress that drives her crazy, it’s the director and cameraman, and all of these gigantic industries, machineries, the desire to run dry and scan sorrow onto a screen for all to see, to not turn away from the vein that has been brought forth and torn like an oil line. And after that, when something happens to you personally, you’re just not able to cry anymore.

But, Ieva says, fuck all of that. Precisely because on that night with Aksels at the balcony door, Ieva cries. She cares fuck-all about the movies. Even if hordes of gorgeous, magnificent actresses had pornographically poured their tears, snot, and spit in front of the camera, knowing that the lens was capturing every movement of even the tiniest movement of the muscles on their faces — even then, Ieva would have cried one more time. All she thinks about is how someone wants to take the heavy, slumbering head in her lap away from her.

Of course anything can happen in life, but not all because of some shithead black guy! Not because of that idiot Ningela, who puttered around behind the counters at Polārs, wrapped in her sickly-sweet renditions of Indian perfumes. Not even because of the bar itself — the shittiest of all bars, the dregs of the Āgenskalns barrel, that dump. Spending time in there, no matter the season or time of day, always gave you the overwhelming feeling of sitting deep underground. Or rather — at rock bottom. The stale smell of cigarettes, worn-out couches, a TV somewhere in the background soundlessly playing MTV while the audio system up front blasts something entirely different… The stale, cigarette-like regulars, who call themselves artists or life artists, but who are really just broken clocks, each bullshitting and babbling about the time they were actually meant to stop in.

All she wanted to do was buy some weed from Ningela’s daughter, but that black shit had come out of nowhere and thrown Aksels down onto the ice. Well, and then his hip got banged up, and then misfortune quickly started to fester. It’s so stupid! Not like this, not like this — Ieva begs as she cries, her tears rolling down her face in the dark and into Aksels’s hair.

The next morning Ieva cries differently, but again about Aksels. Then the next night about something else entirely, but still about Aksels. But on the next night — she doesn’t even cry anymore, just sits thinking nothing, shot up on diazepam, and grinding her teeth. Making a game of it, tensing and relaxing the muscles in her jaw. This is acclimation, you get there without even realizing it. And already thinking ahead. Thinking ahead. It’s a horrible betrayal. To think ahead about Aksels. Who’s left on the side of the road like a broken clock, while the tram whips past and carries her farther away. Away.

Ieva says:

“But what do you mean — don’t let them take me?”

Aksels smiles crookedly:

“Remember Sid and Nancy?”

Aksels’s idea slowly crystalizes in Ieva’s mind, and when it finally hits her it scares her beyond reason. Her eyes go wide:

“You want — ME to?”

“Yes, you. Who else? Listen, Ieva, I haven’t lived long, but I’ve lived how I’ve wanted. Seriously. And I want to die how I want.”

Ieva leaves the room and slams the door.

“Forget it! What are you thinking? I’m not capable of murder!”

The pain wakes Aksels up in the middle of the night. He’s convulsing like he’s been thrown on high voltage wires. After he takes all the medication he can, he lies limp and moaning. Ieva changes his sweaty shirts and sheets, four sets over the course of the night. They’re soaked through.

Toward morning Aksels says:

“Please, shoot me with a shotgun. From fifteen paces.”

Ieva cries.

“I can’t shoot you like some animal!”

“Please. If you love me.”

Ieva screams:

“Then I’ve never loved you!”

Aksels screws up his face. Maybe it’s a smile. He stares at the ceiling and says:

“Make anarchy your mother. Create as much chaos and confusion as is in your power, but don’t let them take you alive.”

Ieva presses her hands over her ears.

Eventually Aksels convinces her to drive out to the countryside.

Sid and Nancy in room 100 of the Hotel Chelsea. An eternal secret only for the two of them. This time Sid will die. Sid fills Nancy’s head with words, about how he wants to lie down by the birch trees at the far end of the pasture, where the first buttercups of summer always bloom. No one will know. It’ll be their secret.

Ieva has never been able to imagine this kind of helplessness, hasn’t even been able to feel it. She doesn’t want to accept Aksels’s illness. She should, because there’s no way out — no way out! There are moments when Ieva’s mind blazes magnificently clear and fierce like a newly sharpened knife. She understands that there’s no way out, just a life continued without Aksels.

Life hasn’t asked for Ieva’s thoughts on any of the coldhearted things it has to offer. It is what it is. And that’s that. She’s never wanted any of it. Aren’t they fantastic, elegantly sadistic gifts for a single person who has nerves, feelings, a mind, and heart? How can she accept all of them, she doesn’t have enough hands! Generously, lavishly, life — thank you for showing me your real face so soon.

If all this was about her, Ieva would care less. But the life of one person, a whole person, stands before her. Like something untouchable has caressed her, something flowing out from an icon and through the stained glass windows of a church.

She has to accept it.

Crystal clear winter days hold steady in the skies, blue as seals with numbers on their haunches, slowly digesting time, my forehead is hot, Ieva thinks, thinks, thinks. She can’t think of anything.

Ieva senses that she could find salvation in faith, and watches the sky. Sunsets are amazing, but nothing more. The sky is silent.

And Aksels is still here beside her. They have to get ready. Ieva’s forehead is hot. As long as she keeps busy she can stay calm. But when she’s by herself, she cries.

Aksels says:

“You’re too attached. That’s your flaw.”

Ieva’s so offended she doesn’t know what to say. She even blushes.

She cries:

“Flaw! Flaw?”

Aksels says:

“You actually enjoy suffering. You have a thing for it. You’re happy now that you have something to suffer over.”

He says:

“Me, I’m not attached to anyone. There’s no one I’d cry over if they died.”

It’s an unholy nightmare, all of these conversations. Chaos. Lies. Carelessness, fleeing. Pretending the whole time like they’re talking about someone else, not about themselves. Ieva’s bloodshot eyes and the worry that she feels nothing. Everything’s happening so fast.

One night when Aksels has fallen asleep on the couch, Ieva sneaks over to him with scissors. She looks at his face for a moment. Then she gathers her courage and quickly cuts a lock of his hair. She thinks she’s pulled it off, and turns quickly to leave the room. At the door she looks back — Aksels is watching her. He sees her, silently. The only movement is in his eyes as his pupils contract and dilate.

Ieva opens a window.

“What fresh air!”

The air downtown is terrible, but Ieva thinks it’s good enough just because it’s air.

Aksels wants weed.

Ieva doesn’t give it to him, hides it. He gets angry.

Ieva asks:

“Do you even know why you’re dying?”

Topics like these bore Aksels, he doesn’t want to talk about them.

She says:

“You’re dying because you’ve lost your mind. From all this shit.”

Aksels shakes his head.

She says:

“Yeah, you lost your mind. There’s nothing worse than losing your mind. And now you’re dying.”

Aksels says:

“It’s my choice. Give it to me.”

“I’m going to be all alone!”

“You’re only thinking of yourself!”

Ieva’s eyes bulge from their sockets in grief.

“And you’re only thinking of yourself!”

Aksels says:

“Everyone thinks only of themselves. It’s how it should be. Give me the weed. It numbs the pain.”

Ieva calls Andrejs:

“Do you still have that old shotgun?”

Andrejs says:

“Yeah.”

“Does it work?”

“Yeah. I shot a wild boar with it yesterday.”

“Where are you?”

He says he’s at the Zari house. Trying to saw firewood.

That’s bad, Ieva thinks. Sid and Nancy’s plans are in danger of falling through. But Andrejs says:

“Come on over. I’d like it if you did.”

“Will you help me?”

“Of course. When have I ever not…”

It’s morning when Ieva goes into Aksels’s room and says — Ready? Aksels replies — Ready.

An idea needs time to grow, like an oak needs time to grow from an acorn into a tree.

There’s no reason to worry about being late. At 4 a.m. an invisible caress on her shoulder and a whisper — now! And it begins. The road forward. Or the backtrack. Or something entirely different.

But first you need an idea.

It’s the afternoon of January 14th. Ieva calls Andrejs.

She says:

“Hi, Andrejs.”

He answers:

“Hey, Ieva.”

Silence.

Ieva finally speaks:

“We’ve got a few more things to take care of here, and then we’ll be on our way.”

Silence.

Then Andrejs answers:

“I love you, Ieva.”

Ieva shouts angrily:

“Cut it out, will you! Come pick us up at the crossroad tonight. Aksels can’t walk.”

Ieva’s ready to announce Aksels’s name to the mailman, the police, Andrejs — to anyone, one hundred times and more in a row. Aksels’s name is smooth as a sea pebble that she can turn over in her mouth and caress with her tongue.

“I’ll be there.”

Andrejs hangs up.

Ieva has a brief vision of Andrejs hanging up the phone and looking out the kitchen window. She’s seen it so many times before. Over the wood panel table covered with a white tablecloth; the kitchen is filled with the brilliant light reflected by the snow-covered pine trees, the blueness of the sky, and the glistening sun over the wintery fields. It’s unbearably cold in the kitchen, the winter dust collects on every dark-stained surface and rough wooden shelves.

Even back then, Andrejs never kept the house warm enough when Ieva wasn’t home.

She doesn’t pack anything to take with and dresses for spring, even though outside is a bright January morning. Aksels says something about anticyclones. That they’re mountains, invisible mountains, radiant and bursting with sun — with diamond surfaces.

Surfaces shift, golden ridges collapse and crumble into little ripples in the windshields of passing cars, in window blinds. Yellow sparks melt in the whites of both their eyes. Ieva asks:

“So what are cyclones?”

To Aksels cyclones are the depths of the sea, rolling streams, and fertile dampness.

They’re sitting in the kitchen. Before, Aksels never ate much because he smoked weed. Now he’s nauseated from the pills and drinks just a bit of coffee with milk. Ieva’s nauseated from life. From everything that’s happening. She stopped eating when Aksels stopped eating. Not on purpose, no. Just — it’s the two of them. And in a way Ieva is Aksels. When he stopped eating, so did she. It’s simple, really. Now they’re like bony scarecrows with only a little straw left. Monta is plump and energetic, she knocks over her cup of milk and lets out a squeal.

Ieva says to Monta:

“Why does Monta knock her milk over every morning?”

“No! Mommy knocks milk over every morning!”

“Monta does!”

“Monta doesn’t know!”

“Then Monta has a bad memory!”

“No! Mommy does!”

It’s hopeless to argue with Monta, especially on the mornings she wakes up terribly happy.

Ieva dresses Monta. Monta grows suspicious.

She whines:

“No wool tights!”

Ieva says:

“Monta isn’t going to daycare. Monta’s going to Grandma’s! Grandma has cold floors.”

“No Grandma’s! Spiders!”

It’s strange with Grandma. Sometimes Monta’s happy to go to Grandma’s, but other times she sees spiders when she’s there. Today is a spider day. Monta protests and squirms, but Ieva finally gets her dressed.

Ieva’s also dressed; she turns to Aksels and says:

“I’ll take Monta to my mom’s, and then we’ll go.”

Her voice catches in her throat when she sees his face. How he’s watching her and Monta. He’s caught them being full of life.

In the moment she was dealing with Monta, Ieva forgot. Forgot everything else in the world, Aksels included. She lost herself in the action and became the action herself. The sun plays on the ridged icicles behind the window. Ieva holds Monta’s scarf in her hand and can no longer find words. There’ll be many more scenes just like this one after Aksels has died.

Aksels is sitting in a chair with his bad leg stretched out in front of him and is intently watching Monta. His expression belongs to him and him alone, and God only knows if he’s even aware of what lies behind it. It’s some kind of great vibration, the nature of things, that pulls him in. He watches Monta run through the hallway and for a moment sees the turning of the world’s gears. Like some incredibly old toy, a teddy bear handed down from child to child and loved to the point its worn, plushy seams suddenly burst, spilling dust and stuffing and sand — and you can see that the bear’s voice box still worked, crackling as it forms the words: I love you, you love me, I’m alive, you’re alive…

These words gather in the gap, the distance, the space between them. Aksels touched by death, and Monta touched by life.

And what Aksels has asked Ieva to do — wasn’t it in actuality a childish thing to ask? Wasn’t it something a monarch would ask? Death wanted to take him to that faraway pasture, but Aksels had Ieva, thank God, he had Ieva. He could count on that even in death. And now he will walk ahead like a lord, Ieva will follow behind him leading Death by the reigns, that greyish horse with the dark, ugly muzzle of a hyena, she’ll lead it and saddle it, and Aksels will get up in the saddle instead of being tied up and dragged behind… Aksels will get up in the saddle. Yes, it really was free will.

Ieva calms down and wraps Monta in the scarf. She’s realized that she constantly continues the dialogue in her subconscious — is it right, the thing Ieva’s promised to do?

Like a clock — tick tock, tick tock.

They hadn’t done anything yet. Everything could still change. And yet — nothing could change ever again.

Every few moments there had to be an affirmation, a contribution. And if a moment came and the affirmation wasn’t there, it could only be undone by a hundred other moments that did have affirmations.

It was a massive military draft, and Ieva had been called up.

Ieva says to Monta:

“Give Ocela a kiss!”

Monta goes to Aksels and gives him a kiss. Ieva’s scared — Monta will say something, something that will make him realize he’s seeing her for the last time; today and tomorrow will be the last time for scenes and observations.

“Hurry up, Ocela, she’ll overheat!”

Aksels throws her a surprised look — she’s being pretty harsh! But he immediately understands that it wasn’t out of place. Ieva is organizing his death, that harshness is clearly to be expected, so he says nothing. Ieva doesn’t apologize, not even with a look. Better to be harsh than to break down.

Ieva and Monta head out the door.

That evening Ieva and Aksels go to the bus station. Ieva is ready to say to everyone they pass — hey, look at Aksels! This planet will disappear tomorrow! A star will fall! You can look at him and make a wish, and he’ll make it all come true! Aksels looks at her disapprovingly, as if she’s stupid. But there isn’t even a hint of irony in Ieva as she buys two outgoing tickets knowing full well that she’ll only be buying one for the trip back.

The bus is warm, narrow, and dark. A strip of tiny blue lights lines the sides of the aisle. Aksels isn’t able to find an empty seat that would let him painlessly position his bad leg. He sits on the raised floor at the back of the bus; rather, he lies down on it and leans on his elbow. The other passengers stare at first, but quickly forget their surprise and doze off. Not a whole lot can be seen in the dark. Ieva crouches down next to him.

“Even the tiniest bumps are like earthquakes,” Aksels says.

Ieva touches her lips to his forehead, which is damp from the pain.

Another hundred and twenty-four kilometers.

When they get off at the stop for Zari, at the intersection of four roads, Andrejs is already waiting for them. The car is thumping with music, and when Ieva sees his face through the window she grows annoyed. Aksels stands with his body twisted sideways and breathes in the night air.

“Greetings, kids,” Andrejs says. “Hop in!”

There are two gypsy hitchhikers already in the car.

The kitchen at the Zari house is warm when they get there. The rest of the rooms are unkempt and cold. Andrejs and the gypsies drink champagne and talk about the forest. Where they can get wood, and how much money they could make sawing lumber.

Andrejs says:

“I want to go back. I’m sick of that city. Ieva, what d’you say we move back out here, to the countryside?”

Ieva sits next to the stove warming her hands, seething. She drinks a glass of champagne and waits for the gypsies to get out. Aksels sits at the end of the table and drinks nothing. Just answers if someone asks him a question.

“You’re alright, guy, just kinda quiet!” one of the gypsies says and claps Aksels on the shoulder. Aksels breaks into a sweat from the pain.

“What’s that face for — you disrespecting me?”

Aksels shouts back:

“You shit!”

They both jump to their feet and stand face to face, each with an arm raised back and ready to strike. Andrejs gets up and pushes them apart.

He says:

“Enough! There’ll be no fights in this house!”

After midnight, after the gypsies have left and Aksels is asleep on the mattress set up on the floor by the big window, Andrejs and Ieva sit and talk quietly by the last of the dying embers in the open mouth of the stove.

Ieva pleads:

“Give me your gun and teach me how to shoot it.”

Andrejs gets his gun and while Ieva’s inspecting it, asks:

“What’re you guys up to?”

“He’s dying.”

“He looks fine to me.”

“He only looks it. We have to call tomorrow for the test results.”

Aksels’s voice comes from the direction of the big window:

“We don’t have to call anyone. I know what the results are.”

A thousand giant stars shimmer in the window when Ieva finally takes off her top layer of clothes and curls up next to Aksels.

Aksels whispers into her ear:

“Why’d you bring him into this? He’ll turn you in.”

“Him?”

Ieva even laughs:

“He’d never.”

The full moon is shining on the other side of the house. But it can’t be seen from the kitchen. Andrejs sleeps on a cot next to the stove.

The morning of January 15th arrives.

A brilliant sunny morning. The blue of the sky, the green of the fir trees, the snow, and the coastal sand join to form a braid. Aksels has been listening to the tendrils of wind knocking against the windowpanes since midnight. It’s a new day second by second.

Ieva and Andrejs wake up. Andrejs lights the stove and makes tea. Ieva gives Aksels a shot of diazepam so he can get up. She also gives him painkillers and a glass of water, but talks with Andrejs over her shoulder:

“Give me the gun and then leave us alone.”

Once Aksels has gotten dressed and had some tea, Andrejs gives Ieva the gun and walks out of the house.

Aksels asks:

“Where’d he go?”

Ieva says:

“Don’t know. Away.”

There’s an awkward silence. The forgotten teakettle whistles on the stovetop, a sharp line of steam shooting toward the ceiling. Aksels looks helplessly at the teakettle.

“Well then — be good!”

“I’ll try.”

Again, silence.

“Don’t cut your hair short — it looks bad on you.”

Then he starts to tease her:

“You’re totally going to get fat once you turn thirty.”

Ieva scoffs:

“No I won’t!”

“Let’s bet on it!”

“Forget it, I’ll never get fat!”

“Let’s bet a fur coat. A great, big, shiny fur coat you can hide in. I’ll send you that coat from the other side when you’re a big fatty.”

With that his energy is spent. Silence.

“It’s hot in here,” he complains, once again sweating from the pain. “Let’s go.”

They find the birch trees at the far end of the pasture. The blinding ice crystals of snow are melting under the sun. Aksels limps over to the thickest birch and puts his hands on it. Looks up at its slender branches. Then looks at the ground.

He stands under the birch. Looks to Ieva, his eyes squinted.

“Well,” he says. “I’m ready!”

Ieva says:

“I’m not. Haven’t kissed you yet.”

She goes up to him and looks him right in the eyes, searching for his like a falcon hunts a swallow.

She asks:

“You really want me to do it?”

And then in an instant she’s embarrassed because she sees that her doubt cuts him deeply. She kisses him quickly on the lips and steps back from the tree, fifteen paces.

Andrejs comes out from the cover of the pines.

“Don’t drag the barrel on the ground!”

“Ignore him,” Aksels warns.

Andrejs says:

“Think about what he’s making you do! It’s ridiculous!”

“Ignore him, shoot!” Aksels shouts.

Ieva lifts the shotgun to her shoulder to take aim and keeps backing up.

“Wait for me! Wait for me there!” she shouts and can’t shoot. Aksels stands with his hands stuffed in the pockets of his coat and watches her. She looks at Aksels down there at the tip of the barrel, he’s no bigger than a bird. Ieva stumbles as she keeps backing up and backing up, Aksels waits, watches her intently, starts to panic. Ieva can’t shoot.

A great force steals the shotgun from Ieva and swings it hard back at Aksels. Ieva knows what’s coming and turns to run, her hands pressing hard against her ears. She runs and screams. Doesn’t even know herself if it’s out loud or internal.

Then — externally, or who knows, internally — there’s a mighty crack. A cry.

Ieva trips, falls to the ground, her hands grab at the snow. She hears absolutely nothing; then a distant hum in the sky. She looks up — an airplane.

Andrejs comes over to her with the shotgun. He offers her his hand, then pulls her to her feet. He’s stunned.

“I’ll go get a shovel.”

Ieva staggers after him. They get to the kitchen and sit down at the table. Andrejs pulls a bottle of brandy from a cupboard and pours two glasses. Ieva drinks. Andrejs drinks.

For a moment Ieva gets dizzy, as if someone has clubbed her over the head. She screams:

“You shot him? Aksels? You?”

Andrejs goes to the shed to get a shovel. He says:

“Bring the green blanket with you when you come back out.”

Ieva follows after him in slow disbelief. Andrejs has been digging hard and is already up to his waist in the ground.

Aksels is lying by the birch. Slumped over onto his once painful side. A small, red mark has formed in the white wool of his sweater, right on the chest.

Ieva looks at his face and screams in horror — it’s not Aksels anymore. Strangely limp, shrunken, small. A thing. An object. Aksels isn’t here anymore.

Ieva hands Andrejs the blanket. He wraps Aksels up in it and says:

“Otherwise he’ll get sand in his eyes.”

Ieva takes the red wool scarf from around her neck and wraps it around Aksels’s head.

Andrejs says:

“Don’t do that — they say you won’t be able to move on with your life until the scarf rots away.”

“I don’t want to move on without him anyway!”

Andrejs says:

“I’ll close his eyelids.”

“No, not you!”

Ieva leans over Aksels and draws her fingertips down over his eyelids. Accidentally touches his neck. His head is still warm. Ieva screams:

“Why did you shoot him! It was our thing!”

Andrejs carefully buries Aksels’s body in the yellow sand and says nothing. Ieva has never seen anything so yellow before.

“It was supposed to be different! You ruined everything! Now it’s God knows what!”

Andrejs stays quiet.

“I didn’t want it like this,” Ieva digs her nails into the cold ground in horror. “Come out, Aksels, it’s all wrong!”

In this moment, Andrejs thinks Ieva’s lost her mind. Her brittle nails break quickly, red bursts forth from her fingertips against the rocky soil. Andrejs grabs her under the arms and pulls her away from Aksels’s grave. She kicks and claws at the ground.

In this moment, Ieva has not lost her mind. Her mind is clearer than ever before. She only thinks that what happened in the snowy field is a lie. That it’s a game in which Aksels is smirking and watching from the sidelines, winking his left eye in his usual way.

Ieva strops struggling in Andrejs’s arms. She musters all her seriousness and calls out meekly in the direction of the grave:

“Aksels, come on! That’s enough.”

Nothing happens. Andrejs lowers Ieva to the ground.

The ground is wide open.

Ieva runs over to the shotgun, picks it up, and aims it at Andrejs.

“Get the hell away from here, go very far away,” she says to him.

“Oh please,” Andrejs answers coolly.

He turns to leave, but remembers his shotgun and takes it away from Ieva without another word.

“I never loved you, never!” she screams.

Then he really leaves. Gets in his car and drives away. Warm air swirls around the roof of the car, but the car itself is a dark, brown thing that slowly melts into the hot chaos of pine trees and glaring snow.

Ieva heads back to the house, now and then looking over her shoulder as if to mark an unseen point on a map that she’ll have to remember for the rest of her life.

Once inside she’s immediately overcome by a sadness so piercing it could break through her skin. Look, the knife Aksels touched last night, and the bread loaf; look, the curtains that were put up when she and Aksels still lived here that summer. The heat of the full summer moon that she doesn’t want to think about. Summers like that often involve something that destroy happiness — a fight, depression, or ignorance — but every memory from the time they spent together seems happy.

His grave will always be visible from the kitchen window.

Andrejs will never be able to sell the house to strangers.

Ieva leaves the house for a bit, leaves the weighty sadness behind her.

She takes a pencil and tears a page from her notebook and sits down by Aksels’s grave. Sunlight foaming on glossy stones. A coolness that hangs over the white plane of ice. Damp, rich earth. Ieva writes a poem in memory of Aksels. In Russian, for some reason. The poem has lines about how every angle here is straight, but you’re twisted into a circle.

She writes and feels like an idiot. Behold, there lies Aksels. Shot dead. Here. And she’s writing a poem.

Aksels, forgive me!

But she doesn’t know how to comprehend Aksels’s existence without the poem, what he meant to the world. Right now Ieva is as exposed as topsoil in the middle of January. Ieva is a raw piece of meat. She doesn’t even need to work up to it, the poem just spills out.

Words have almost no meaning. Aksels’s meaning isn’t in words, isn’t in content. Ieva senses Aksels’s existence in movement, in the stream that has been set in motion by his death, that flows away through bodies. The sense of this movement seems to erase every moment of betrayal and weakness in real life.

A stupid poem. Consolation for the weak. Pointless.

She has to live on somehow. A Judas.

Aksels, forgive me.

A mare and her foal come into the pasture not far from her. Both animals stop at the barbed wire fence. Ieva watches the foal as it nurses. It’s a hefty mare with shaggy legs. Her foal is also strong and healthy; its broad back is like a yellow tray carrying bits of hay and the tip of a fir branch. Ieva walks toward the foal. It comes right up to her and nips at her wherever it can reach, just like a lively foal would do.

Ieva pushes it away.

“You’re biting!”

The foal gets angry and nips at her even more, and Ieva has to get away from it. No velvety lips, no pensive, violet-colored eyes. The foal is biting like crazy, full to the brim of spiteful life, so full of boiling blood that it could burst.

The things Aksels will never see again.

At night Ieva wakes up to the sound of a quiet movement in the distance. As if the wing of a guardian angel had slipped over her shoulder in the black darkness.

She lifts her head and listens to the night.

Silence.

But through the silence — a siren. And glaring lights in the window.

She throws on her clothes, yanks on her boots and clambers down the stairs, tripping on her laces and almost falling headfirst into the cement steps.

Morning is just dawning in the wintery fog. She sees the dim headlights of a car and dark, stooped over silhouettes. She runs into the illuminated circle. Aksels has been dug up. One policeman is smoking, the other is unwrapping her red scarf to uncover Aksels’s face. Andrejs sits hunched up on a rock, holding the shovel.

Her eyes meet his in the glow of the yellow light and she immediately starts to cry. It’s as if someone has hit her over the back, knocked her to her knees, grabbed her by the hair and commanded — cry!

Only one sentence revolves around her head — What are you doing, Andrejs!

He came back! He dug up Aksels and confessed to the police!

One of the policemen takes down Ieva’s name, last name, and address.

“Your husband shot your boyfriend out of jealousy. We’ll need to question you. Get in the car.”

Ieva can’t speak. She feels the massive force that suddenly stuffs your life into a drawer, a folder, a system, or a file — it always flows out from questionnaires, forms, transmitters, the worn-out codes hammered into your brain in a poorly lit room. It flows from these officials; the night and their uniforms turn them into giants made of a different, more noble stuff.

They push her into a car that reeks of cigarette smoke. The door slams shut, the headlights bounce over the mounds of snow and the thawing road. She continues to cry for Andrejs, who is waiting with the two remaining police officers for the coroner. The policeman driving the car looks at her with sympathy and fishes an already-opened bottle of brandy from under the seat.

“Take it — a time-tested aid,” he says. “There’s nothing you can do anymore.”

Once they’ve finished questioning her, Ieva is brought back to the Zari house and released — like a young, domesticated wild animal that now has to learn how to survive on its own in the woods. She doesn’t have the energy to go back to Riga. And that’s a good thing because, and Ieva doesn’t really know why, the next night they bring back Aksels’s body. No one says anything about the morgue, doesn’t even hint at it. Maybe because it’s winter and Ieva is penniless?

Aksels is laid out on a stretcher. Ieva has them carry him through the warm kitchen, where she’s been sleeping on the cot, and place him next to the wide-open window of the far room on the second floor.

People say they’re afraid of the dead. It doesn’t even occur to Ieva to be afraid. It’s her Aksels! So beautiful and pale. Now and then she caresses his head. His jaw is set in a stubborn expression. Eyelids fine as silk, frozen to his irises. The stubble on his face and his hair keep growing. His hands are positioned in a ridiculous way, Aksels never held his hands like that! Ieva discovers that the index fingers of his hands are tied together with fishing line. She carefully cuts it away because she’s convinced it’s hurting him.

They’ve done an autopsy. The front of his sweater has been cut open and then sewn up with surgical thread. Aksels is flat as a board — they probably took a lot of him for themselves. Ieva hopes they’ve left his heart untouched.

She spends each night with Aksels. Touches his cheek, lights a candle she found in a kitchen drawer. Drinks brandy straight, pulls it into herself like fire.

There’s a full moon. It flashes its white face over Aksels. During the day there’s sun. A few flies crawl around Aksels in the morning light. But January flies are so groggy that they don’t even think to feed on him. They just bask on him in the warm sun.

Gran shows up, sits in the kitchen and cries, forces Ieva to eat something.

Andrejs’s father drives out and slaps Ieva across the face and calls her a whore who’s ruined his only son. Andrejs’s mother and Gran cook together, and the kitchen fills with thick steam and sniffling. Andrejs’s father drinks Ieva’s brandy.

Later that night everyone goes looking for Ieva and finds her lying next to Aksels, her eyes strangely bright. She’s running a fever.

The next day Lūcija arrives — as usual, whenever Ieva truly needs saving. She’s brought Monta with her. Monta showers her mother with kisses, then climbs into the bed next to Aksels, pokes his cheek with a finger, then immediately pulls back and starts to cry.

“Why is Ocela so cold?”

Lūcija says:

“Why are you keeping him here? Are you out of your mind?”

Ieva answers defensively:

“They brought him here.”

Nothing here is as it should have been. This mess, this commotion, it’s ridiculous. Aksels wanted to rest in peace. And now it’s the exact opposite of what he wanted.

Aksels is taken to the morgue, but Ieva is taken to the hospital — her toes are frostbitten. Two days later there’s a beautiful funeral at the old manor house. Aksels is buried in the local cemetery next to his mother, Stase.

The sobbing is an intangible sea. When a wave hits, Ieva cries. It’s not a voluntary action — not in any way. It’s as if she’s standing in the water with a large, open wound, a sore. When a wave hits, it carries salt with it and it hurts, and the tears come. It’s easy to cry when washing the floor. Then Ieva is bent over and the tears fall straight down instead of in her sinuses, or her throat, or elsewhere. Her tears grow heavy right there on her lashes and drip down. Ieva washes the floor with them.

Ieva works like a scientist in a submarine of tears, matter-of-factly executing the necessary functions for survival — she eats, sleeps, pees. Aksels watches from everywhere. Ieva is embarrassed.

From then on Ieva starts every meal by silently offering the first bite to Aksels. She eats inside of Aksels. Ieva herself is Aksels.

Aksels is also the full moon. When is stands silent and large over Earth, he’s there. At 4 a.m. on the night of every full moon. Before his death, silence was silence. After it, silence became woven with thoughts. If she listens carefully, Ieva can sense Aksels is contemplating there in the silence. She lies in bed, afraid to move, and takes part in his thoughts. It doesn’t have a definite form or direction; Aksels, streaming through the moonlight, contemplates in every direction, intelligently and achingly.

Dung flies — big, fat, active — that’s what real life looks like!

You can only keep something sacred in an abstract form. And put it in the left chamber of your heart. Any icon placed in the picture frame of life looks blasphemous, even though blasphemy is really just life itself. When you cry, someone somewhere is definitely laughing. That’s the way it is and there’s nothing you can do about it. Except store Aksels’s flat, helpless body in your memory.

Helplessness. That’s the second thing Ieva can’t stop thinking about. A child’s helplessness, an animal’s helplessness, a sick person’s helplessness, and an elderly person’s helplessness when faced with an intelligent and capable mind. When faced with strength. Maybe that’s where all faith, hope, and trust hide?

Whose hands will you wind up in when you’re helpless?

From then on time splits — time before Aksels’s death and time after it. Text messages received before and texts messages received after. The date on the packaging of a dried up loaf of bread is before, and Ieva shudders even before she’s read it, even before she knows what she’s read.

And what can she do now that she’s left alone without Aksels? Hope that some day she’ll be overcome by that somber valley to which he took off like a bird with a broken wing? Ieva would know how to die right then and there, but she wasn’t convinced that she would die in the same place as Aksels. Ieva looks for Gran’s Bible — it was supposed to be the book meant for the times fate separated two people and they needed a guide to find their way back to each other. The Bible was in old print, and nowhere did it explain how to die with another person.

Ieva went to church. The services dragged on, the pastor talked about the rich and the poor, and who had a harder time getting into Heaven than threading a camel through the eye of a needle. Everyone repented their sins together, the pastor forgave them in the name of the Lord, and then fed the hungry in two lines with the body and blood of Christ. Ieva swallowed it all and believed, but no matter how achingly she sang along, cried, prayed, and ate, she didn’t see Aksels anywhere in this place. She left while the pastor ground out his last phrases about Christ, whom the pastor obviously loved. What was Christ to Ieva when she loved Aksels? Aksels wasn’t here.

Ieva also searched in the forest. In the trees, in the sky. Aksels wasn’t there.

He wasn’t in the cemetery, either.

He wasn’t anywhere.

Only in as much as his body lay those few nights next to Ieva, completely dead, cold, and beautiful. And in as much as his soul appeared at 4 a.m. on a full moon like a thought weaving through the room.

And maybe not even that was true.

Ieva suddenly understood death.

She understood — there simply wouldn’t be anything more.

The world would never have another person like that.

Somehow she had to live on. Ieva had heard stories about Buddha who, when he saw his first dead body, was unable to go on living and sat under a tree, where he had a revelation that eased suffering. Ieva didn’t have a revelation. She burned a few of Aksels’s things, put his photos and documents in envelopes, and didn’t know which envelope held the meaning of life. The reason to be.

The thread of substance had broken. Ieva continued to exist in body, but only so Monta wouldn’t be left alone.

And every now and then she told her daughter a little story about the time when Ocela had still been with them.

Tell someone about your dreams.

Always, definitely tell someone about the dreams you’ve dreamt. Once you undress the dream with words, you’ll discover the meaning of it.

Explain the dream using the shortest possible words.

Once you undress the dream with words, you’ll see your delusions in the words.

Explain the dream using the simplest words possible.

Be alert.

A few years go by, and then one day Andrejs’s mother calls her up:

“Dear, if you hold any part of life to be sacred — go visit Andrejs in prison.”