High Tide (21 page)

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?”

LÅ«cija 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?