High Tide (14 page)

An Attack on Places/Things, or The Sacred Resources

 

 

Ieva
does everything with drive. Even life.

Because places and things are so passionless. “Created only for ourselves—no, not even for ourselves, but for some inexplicable need,” as writer MatÄ«ss KaudzÄ«te once put it. And it takes time for you to understand what they mean to you. A morning on which you stand with your face to the sun in a glittering corner of a Riga microregion, the blowing wind, and the scent of crushed grass on a soccer field. You are alive and young. A night out with friends on the granite steps by the river. Ships and seagulls bob in the current. You are happy. A moment with your mother as she puts a cool hand to your forehead when you curl into the couch next to her and cry as meekly as a kitten, you're thirty or more years old, but it hurts so much, Mommy! Her cool hand on your forehead immediately melts the heartache. In your past remain the bend in the road, the tram tracks, a cloud of dust, and your time.

 

The first time Ieva travels to Milan for some European conference, she spends her free time wandering the wide, overgrown boulevards, listening to Austrian journalist Michael Schulter's monologue:

“And the main thing that left Western society speechless when the Iron Curtain fell was that there was nothing behind it! You have nothing! Everyone thought you'd all pull out these masterpieces from hidden drawers, just like the masterpieces of the people who were convicted as dissidents, driven out, or who emigrated by choice. You had those kinds of huge works, true, but it turned out you could count on one hand the exceptions in the vast majority that remained immobile and indifferent. How do you judge that? Where are the sacred resources of Eastern Europe? Maybe there aren't any at all?”

Ieva looks into his thin face and sharp eyes, which are partially obscured by his round glasses—in the stark daylight their lenses shine like scrying crystals—and she feels she has no opinion. She is the very immovable mass Michael is talking about.

And suddenly, without warning, a scene from her memory washes over her—Gran's footprints in the roadside sand, butter so yellow it's as if the cows were fed nothing but marigolds.

Why this memory? She shrugs. Michael doesn't get an answer.

 

But when the plane from Copenhagen breaks through the layer of clouds over the Baltic Sea and resurfaces over the eastern coast, Ieva glues herself to the round window. Piltene—a dark dot on the map. Mordanga—a fleck. The Venta and Lielupe Rivers—golden hairs. The absurdly tiny fir trees—thick combs with an occasional deer among them. What would they all be without the heat coursing through Ieva's veins? Piles of wood people call homes? Water? Pine forests? They're self-explanatory. Coldness, foreignness.

For some reason this morning, Ieva has the strong feeling that Gran isn't dead. That she's living with Roberts in their seaside cottage. Ieva borrows a car from friends to drive out for a visit. More than ever, more than a child is capable of, she believes it's possible to drive straight into the past. That there's an island somewhere where everything that once was is alive and well, where it's possible to go and see your past self draining a cup of milk at the wax-cloth covered table. Why not, if the taste of milk from your childhood is still on your tongue. The cows were milked early when the sun first rose, then the milk poured into an enameled, metal can, covered with the white saucer with the chipped, gold rim, then set in the front hall on a stone block. Outside a hot summer day lights up, covered with a dewy, sun-kissed glaze. There's no refrigerator at home. One cup of milk has already been poured and set on the table for you, the little one, live-culture milk at its natural temperature with a thin, sweet layer of yellow cream settling on the surface. As you start to drink it three small, brown pancakes are placed in front of you, and then the cow pokes its head through the open kitchen window. Gran places a “Selga” brand cookie on the cow's long, narrow tongue, and it disappears like fine dust on a wet grindstone. Oh, Ieva knows about this spectacle, the cow's tongue—lithe and scratchy, like an incredibly strong tentacle that almost always tries to pull in Ieva's little hand, tear off a hair ribbon, or drool all over her apron. As she's watching the cow, Ieva knocks her milk over with her elbow. “That's enough!” Gran scolds the cow, not Ieva, and pushes its darkish blue head outside and closes the narrow blinds. The cow heads toward the sea and Ieva catches up to it halfway. The morning has begun.

It could be that nothing has happened yet—it's still fall. The stove is lit. The big water kettle hisses. Gran takes a cast iron pan with a mustard-marinated roast out of the oven and goes to the pantry to get the apple wine. Ice blows in from the front hall. A white dog with a black head sleeps on the edge of the well-worn armchair, until it slides off and lands with a rustle into the pile of onions covering the floor like a thick rug all the way to the window. There's a porcelain sugar bowl on the table with one handle missing and a sprig of lingonberries painted on its side. And a silver spoon placed in raw cane sugar.

Later, the bed will be made for you in the other room, a scratchy linen sheet put down and a rag quilt on top, heavy as a person. You'll shiver for more than ten minutes in the freezing bed as you wait for it to warm up. The light will go out, you'll talk about this and that. Maybe you'll get a bedtime story, or a story from Gran's childhood. You'll warm up as you stare at the low, whitewashed ceiling beams. And the sleep you finally slip into will be a calm and welcoming return to a world that never ends.

You'll wake up around midnight, the heat of the inglenook against your cheek already cooled to a lukewarm breath. The scratching of mice behind the peeling wallpaper, the resin-like light of the moon… thoughts of nothing. A complete sinking into the heart of the night.

These, Michael, are my sacred resources. Behold, a sugar bowl, a silver spoon, a quilt as heavy as a person. Maybe they'll outlast us. But they'll never again live the life that I see through my eyes. Come, Michael, and look into the drawer of Eastern Europe.

Kurzeme

 

 

The
rain has been coming down hard all night. Puddles form on the ice.

Wind blows the fog toward Riga. Ieva keeps on driving. After years and years she's gotten up the courage to drive out to the Zari house.

 

The smells of the Kurzeme region. Is it sentimentality that comes with age? Back then she had no idea what destiny had in store for her, a nineteen-year old waiting at the bus stop.

 

The Zari house. Andrejs's parents live there now. Rooms. Familiar smells. After so much time spent in lifeless offices and air conditioning where the atmosphere is dead—here it's fragrant. Curtains, the door, steps. Everything has a history, even the paint on the walls. The tears well up from the smells alone. Memories swim before her eyes, ghosts. Ieva standing in the big room with an iron in her hand just after Monta had been born, ironing tiny clothes.

Monta once told her about a memory she'd had of summers at the Zari house: “There's the road, the sun is shining, the wind blowing, and me and the dog.” She'd said it with such happiness in her voice. What can a two-year-old possibly remember? But, see, she remembers. Oh, sentimentality. But Kurzeme has a certain
something
. Rugged land. Wind from the sea. She's so lucky that destiny bestowed these things upon her.

Andrejs's father is napping in the cool of his room upstairs and cries when he sees her. He grows airier every year, like some kind of butterfly. And more gentle. He used to be tough as a rock. He ruled over everything—animals and people. Was the final word for the women, the livestock, the men. Ieva can't stand it. He's lighter. Soon the wind will blow him away like dust. She can't stand it. It makes her want to cry. Scream. But there's no point. There are no tragedies in Kurzeme. Everything here is self-explanatory. The tears stream like sap from birch trees in spring. There's no need to scream; this suffering is imagined. She has to say her goodbyes and go on with her life.

A young woman with large, naked breasts lies on the wide bed in the central room, nursing a baby. A hundred thoughts rush through Ieva when she looks at the baby. About Andrejs's father, sitting in the next room waiting to be blown away by the wind. About Andrejs's grandmother, still large and heavy in her grandson's absence, but whose eyes are as teary as all the rest, who squeezes Ieva's hand as she looks up at her and asks—what reason do I have to stay here? And she knows the answer already. To stay for the sake of staying. To live for the sake of living. To be happy for the sake of being happy. Even though just once she'd like to hear: Because you're needed. We all need you. Hang on until the end. In this network of hands and hearts. This network of touches and glances.

 

Smells and a brilliant sun. Andrejs's mother walks her out—they get in the car and drive over hills and muddy roads. They both cry. They both hide their eyes and know full well that they can't hide them. The sun betrays them. Skin, pores, wrinkles, wet eyelashes, bright eyes and pitch-black pupils like moving mirrors, wetness smeared across temples and outside over the fields—it glistens. They have to part ways. Ieva is ready to accept even a single word laced with reproach, but it doesn't come. Mothers are smart. They have to part on good terms. Andrejs's mother stays on the hill, wipes her eyes with her handkerchief and heads back. Goes her separate way. Ieva honks the horn a few times in farewell.

From the depths someone whispers: All is well. The seaside villages are dipped in the red March sun as it sets. Ieva loves Kurzeme. She can smell it. It nourishes her.

 

Aksels

 

 

He
invites me to meet up with him.

We drink our morning tea on the terrace by the estuary. Next to us is another never-ending meeting—where the river flows into the calm sea. We drink strong, yellow tea that makes the blood in our temples sing like violins. We're alone, with the exception of a few birds flitting about by our feet.

The sun is already high in the sky, but the clammy cold of last night still hangs in the air. Dew glints on some of the stone tables. Flies rest motionless on the banisters, and the granite floor is still covered in the layer of sand blown onto it overnight. The server reclines in a folding chair he's put out in the sun, and smokes his first cigarette of the day while reading the paper. Now and then he pushes a hand back through his hair. The smoke that trails thinly up from his cigarette is carefree and winding, freely floating off into the great blue. I feel the structure of this city slowly course through me, saturating the cells of my body with its light.

I start to distinguish between the smells that hide shyly in gardens and those that aggressively rush in from the levee. I can visualize the shadow the black church steeple casts onto the central square, and how it always trips up the paperboy as he runs by with a newspaper bundle in his arms. I realize: if I lived in this city permanently, I'd have to huddle under a blanket with a mug of tea in the middle of the day just to fight off the chills from the persistent blue and razor-sharp cold of the sea.

“More tea please,” I say to Aksels, and in the moment the tea slowly pours from the teapot into my cup, a whirlwind of clarity rises up inside me so strongly that my chest tingles, almost like when you step up to the very edge of a cliff. I suddenly know that the dead come back to life and how they do it. I know how the living come back dead. I know what it's like to be a bird, a dog, and a spider, I oversee everything in this exact moment of time, a few seconds that last an eternity. The wind blows my hair across my bare shoulders and it's a loving caress. The city looks on with seeing eyes. I no longer have to count on the rare handouts from friends. From here on out, every new morning, every stranger will be a friend and an embrace—joyful and dramatic. We are all trapped in life.

The contour of the sea is wrapped in a haze. I can fly. And I can not fly, there's no difference anymore. There's no need to separate these concepts.

“Such a clear morning,” I say to Aksels.

Someone's feeding seagulls from a barge and the water looks like goose bumps. The breeze surrounds us. Reflections dance on the surface of the tea.

“Like the one before you died,” I say.

“Yeah.”

“Do you think I described it well enough?”

 

I can tell he doesn't want to talk, just look out onto the horizon. He doesn't see any point in talking things out. But there's an excitement eating away at me like before a long-awaited vacation. I ask and ask. And finally he starts to talk. He tells me about what I haven't written.

Once he and Ieva had talked about making a life together, about moving into a house, about how they could someday actually live—with everything living entails—with tea in the morning, dinners, flowers on the windowsills, and kids. They'd been walking along the dirt road with the birds of summer singing around them. Ieva had gotten pebbles stuck in her sandals.

“The roof is leaking and one of the corners of the stove is broken,” Ieva had said. “Where'll we start?”

This daily complexity surrounding a simple road.

“Let's make a deal—we'll live once we're thirty, but not until then,” Aksels had answered.

“Life is too long for a single happy life,” he says now. “Life always consists of many lives.”

 

Back then Ieva had nodded and thrown her sandals with a whoop into the green fields. So long, pebbles! They both still had ten years to that looming thirty—ten years was a lifetime. They seemed a perpetual cycle of euphoric days and nights without an end in sight; an unbroken happiness.

We'll live after that. This terrifying phantom at the end of it all. After that.

“We believed that ‘after that' would never come,” Aksels says.

And it never did.

Aksels died. Ieva, on the other hand, has never loved life enough to want to live—to actually live. It's her own fault. You need to immerse yourself in life like sinking your hands into the earth, you need to concentrate. Sprout roots. Break a sweat to earn a vacation. Nothing ever comes easy, Ieva's Gran used to say. Yes, nothing ever comes easy.

 

“Why do people accept all these ridiculous rules as self-explanatory—only because they're subject to them?” Aksels asks.

“I don't know, I'm too lazy to look into it,” I answer. “And it doesn't interest me. It's boring.”

Ieva was the same way. She lived without living, and that's her weakness. She was a bird picking at crumbs with wise ignorance. Morsels of sun.

“But if you really think about it,” I say, “the only reason we're sitting here is because she's remembering you right at this moment.”

 

To a random observer this could look to be a strange kind of celebration—the sea, the morning, and seagulls. And two people sitting next to one another in silence. A little over ten minutes while drinking tea. To both of us, these minutes are the entirety of Aksels's life.

Aksels rests his chin in his hand and looks at me thoughtfully. He's stayed young. Beautiful, welcoming, and as cool as ice. My face already shows signs of aging. For a second I think about how different we are, but only for a second. All I want to do is turn my hands palms-up toward the sun and soak up this moment. To unfurl the flowers, shake out the pollen, let out the buds. Be like a sponge and absorb the impossible—the absence of time. With the scent of seaweed and the feel of another person's gaze.

I ask flat out:

“What do you think? Is a person given only one love in their lifetime, or several?”

“What's love?” he asks.

 

What's love? The hot hand of the sun slides heavily down the back of my neck. The wind whips the shorter hairs at my temples. This world is my home. Here I choose a person who will observe me for many days and nights—is that love? I'm tired. Happy. Then… sad. With disheveled features, ugly, and content. Young. Middle-aged. And old. And someone wants to observe me. Even like this. As everything. Forever. Love. Maybe that's an observation?

“Well… in spite of it all, we always find a way in life to be together for a few moments,” I say.

“Destiny,” Aksels jokes.

“The encyclopedia of life.”

“The abridged version.”

“Of pictures.”

“For kids.”

 

“What's the point of it all?”

“Nothing,” I laugh. “Insomnia and lack of appetite. Movies and books.”

“A good metabolism.”

“Metabolism, of course. And that's a lot. I don't know about other worlds, but this planet only has one criterion—life.”

 

After that I ask:

“Aksels, can art be a cookbook? The living teaching the living is like the blind leading the blind.”

“Eh, that's not true—if the living weren't able to give the living any advice, there'd be a lot more dead people.”

 

Aksels smoothes his blonde hair with his hands, then stretches. His beautiful arms cut into the sky like lightning.

“Thanks for the tea,” he teases, feeling his pockets. He puts on his sunglasses; I'm clearly and starkly reflected in their black lenses. “I've got to go do my things.”

“Of course.”

He leaves, and in that moment the sun over the sea becomes slightly overcast. The sky grows muggy, as if someone has breathed onto a blue mirror.

Your absence. We're strong; we have to unravel it all piece by piece.

Take care.