High Tide (15 page)

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.”