Читать книгу High Tide - Inga Abele - Страница 7

Turns Out—We’ve Lived

She doesn’t need any more advice—models, examples. Maybe she’s just on a whole new level, but right now she doesn’t need it. She doesn’t read books, newspapers, or magazines, doesn’t use the internet or watch TV, doesn’t go—God forbid—to the theater. It’s like being wrapped in a blanket up to your chin: you see and hear everything, but can’t move a muscle. Everything is right there around you, within arms’ reach. She wanders the house and now and then picks up something, grabs onto something, touches on something. A sentence from a newspaper, a phrase from a Mexican soap opera, an idea from Proust. They’re all always going to be right.

On her walks, Ieva goes around the forest in circles. Then on her birthday she asks herself a question—why do I walk in circles, like a dog chained to a post? Because of my fears? Only because of my harsh, bitter fears? I can walk in a straight line, she tells herself—and whenever I want. But when she does finally walk straight she only feels like she’s actually getting anywhere. Her surroundings change, but the content doesn’t. Big cities are all essentially the same, and every country has farmers wearing plaid, made-in-China shirts. Any new place that she ends up she eventually has a close group of friends a lot like the last. The group will always have a mentor, a lover, someone she’ll betray, someone who’ll betray her, an enemy, and friends she can talk to and with whom she can find spiritual healing, rather than wasting money on therapy.

Once in a while she breaks from the campaigns, the marathons, the expeditions, and returns to the doghouse and sits next to her chain. Sits absolutely still, like a Bedouin gazing into the distance, and then writes. Script writing is usually complicated, but all of her scripts are about the same thing. All very clichéd, and when she tries to make excuses to the director he tells her: I need you precisely for the clichés. Because the ending needs to be something predictable.

Her scripts are about how nothing happens because nothing can ever happen. Not a single molecule is lost in the eternal cycle between the earth and the heavens. Only a pure soul can hope to break free from the carousel of life and death, into the cosmos through the tunnel of light and at a speed that makes everything down to the smallest particle feel simultaneously heavy and weightless. Everything shrinks until it disappears, until it’s erased from the memory of the world along with time. But to live your life until your soul is pure—don’t laugh, it’s not that easy—you have to become a Buddha, a Christ, or a Mohammed. You have to become light itself, a pure soul. Then you can be on your way. But it’s a long way and you’ll be scrubbed, doused, and wrung clean until then. Those few mistakes that will haunt you, jolt you awake at night, and force you to keep going on, these mistakes that you carry with you your entire life—in the end they’ll destroy you. But keep thinking about them, keep thinking. It’s gratifying to keep picking away at them. It will heal you.

Eventually she doesn’t even write the scripts herself anymore, just touches up those written by others and sends them in. She takes the finished product and objectively embellishes them. She’s done work like that before—adding details to bulletin posters in her school days, a pioneer in the last generation of an aggressive Soviet empire. Her homeroom teacher called it “giving life” to something. “Take it to Ieva,” the teacher often said, “she’ll give it some life.” And Ieva would take her black marker and give the dull pencil sketches some life, be it Lenin or the Easter Bunny. A wavering shadow in the distance, a gleam in Lenin’s eye, and the tense muscles in his jaw, something she’d seen in her father’s face when he shaved in the morning. And Lenin would come to life. The Easter Bunny would, too.

Everything is proof of it—this forced gift of existence—even the tired face of a small-town bus driver in the early morning; it speaks of longing, the endless patience you have when scrutinizing good fortune that has unexpectedly dropped into your lap. And what does life offer in return… the quiet hum inside the bus where you can warm up, a change from the frozen and bleak winter landscape… What does it offer in return? A kiss goodbye from your wife before you head out, and the mildly bitter taste of coffee with cream? The early morning fog and a dead moose on the side of a road? Like an Indian who gets glass beads in exchange for gold, you trade the suffering of existence in return for the smell of baking bread. The feel of a dog’s wet nose against your hand. The look in your children’s eyes. A bird feeder. May it all bring you joy, says this opposing, unwanted, huge opportunity—Life. Truth everywhere, like rows and rows of weeds that need only a bit of rain to grow: a handful of TV shows, a handful of philosophical essays, a handful of tight-lipped snobs, a handful of bartering vendors.

Her mother’s mother, Gran, used to say: You’ll never know where you’ll lose something or where you’ll find it, and, if you knew where you’d fall, you’d put a pillow down first. In many ways Gran hadn’t outgrown childhood. She had never experienced passion, never been disillusioned, but had remained an innocent; that was her destiny. Her cheerful daily greetings were proof she had never discovered herself, her own anger, or her deeply hidden doubts. Doing so would mean being sent into freedom, out of the Garden of Eden. She had stayed in Eden, playing in rows of sun-ripened, wild strawberries. And among the bustle were all life’s sentences: her parents’ deaths, her husband and children, the people she loved. But she never said “love” because she didn’t know the word, hadn’t evolved to words. Gran had been her parents’ pride and joy, a helper at the dairy farm with her white apron and silky ash-blonde hair, someone who had never grown to know hatred. More precisely, she was oblivious to any daggers of hatred aimed at her. Instead they went through her like she was nothing, because she didn’t believe in bad people—just people. Her only sins were her pride and self-reliance. She always had tickets for sugar and bread, but also always had more for extra things. A kind word and a helping hand, the sense to put others before herself… She believed it was her choice and responsibility. She didn’t need anything from the Lord God, just some nice Lutheran Christmas songs and spiritual peace. She hadn’t unlocked that little door in her heart that led to spite. She stayed in her bud, her entire life spent in it and as a child. God and humanity attack these kinds of people more than anyone else because there’s something obnoxious about them. But neither God, nor humanity can use their endless recipes for disaster on these people because these people lack any trace of hate—and God can take a vacation since there’s no one to peddle vices to. Having fulfilled her duty to everyone she loved, Gran quickly retreated to her inner child, back into that bud. A small, polite girl who always walked on the sunny side of the street. And that’s how she ended her journey. She was stuck in her helpless innocence, and then all the world’s charges were piled on top of her. Stay helpless as a baby, an animal, a prisoner, a fool, an alcoholic, a one-legged bum in a tunnel—and the world will quickly chafe you until you bleed, and you’ll understand why you’ve always needed God. You put Heaven on a pedestal while you still have the strength. And when you grow weak you see the devil. Not the one with horns and a tail, but the devil in the hurried compassion of the fast-paced world, the one that will kill you with kindness.

Longing for paradise is nothing different from longing for a strong pair of hands. Forget all the understanding, the kindred souls and greatness of spirit—the most important thing is an Eden of two strong hands when you can’t go on anymore, when your mind stops working, when you’re just a naked, trembling mass of bare and rotting nerves, a substance without a clear point of view. When you’re just a scrap of flesh.

After this experience, after Gran’s passing, Ieva lost all illusions she had of herself. No one person can do it all. And though Ieva was capable of a lot, she couldn’t maintain the clarity of that stream of goodness. She could fight like a tiger, but it wasn’t her thing. There was a story about Ieva—Eve—in the Bible, who ate the forbidden apple and gave it to others, recklessly spreading the poisonous contraband and barreling into death and sin, the dualism between good and evil, the battle between God and Satan. There she was, at the very crossroads of it all, with her black marker in hand. She gave life to everything that crossed her path—sin, holiness, and life itself. She’d never be able to protect anyone, only challenge them. And to what? To life, or death. To find the seven differences between these two pictures.

It’s harder for people who are reserved. Reserved people are quiet for years and years, and then they jump off a bridge. But those who constantly hound their friends by whining about their pain and paranoia, they’re the ones who keep themselves alive. Knock, and the door will be opened unto you. Maybe not quite opened, but something will definitely change—if that makes you happy. Maybe new wallpaper. Moving to a new apartment. A new perfume. A new perspective. And a new picture. If an irrational hope sparks in your veins now and again, it could even be the moment when you’re on the train reading a book translated into Latvian, and in a brief flash you realize that you understand the author, the main character, and the life of the translator. For a second, all three of these personas unite in you, not in a linear sense, but in a predestined, glowing arc. You get inside and can suddenly see through to the bottom of a frozen lake, to the stillness of the undercurrent between motionless water lilies. Then you turn the page and it all disappears. You’re back in your own body, you have to buy milk for the kid, and a heart to cook up for the dog—a giant, red, cow heart—and bring it all home, you have to be a hunter because all around you are nothing but frozen, wintery fields that destroy everything warm and alive.

At times it seems best to not go anywhere, to not read anything, to not say anything. Because this world is like the colored bits of glass in a kaleidoscope. Turn the barrel—see something beautiful. Turn it again—see something entirely different, but still beautiful. Ieva knows that the symmetric shapes in a kaleidoscope are created by a system of mirrors; it’s the mirrors’ fault, they can only create things that are symmetric… too symmetric. So symmetric it’s scary. Honestly, not even truth is that symmetric—only death is. But mirrors can’t work any other way.

She’s not a reserved person, she isn’t. She walks through the woods and talks to trees, dogs that cross her path, and will even talk to strangers now and then. But she steers clear of giving and receiving advice. She’d like to make it through the woods without a chaperone. She doesn’t need an encyclopedia of plants or a map. At least not now. But she does need the woods. A full-blown forest with trees, moss, and that intoxicating scent of the sky—the cold air and the icy dampness of tree roots under a blanket of ferns in the fall. It’s the best in November. Or in the heavy, stuffy July swelter, when everything is dry to the bone and like the forest itself is storing up fire, it’s as withered as an old miser hunched over his pile of riches and as dangerous to itself as a propane tank by an open flame. The forest is in her schema and in the schema of others like her, her chemical make-up contains this secret element—the woods. But then she goes to the desert and observes its inhabitants, observes its elders, who understand that they can’t go anywhere. You can’t take shelter from anything in the desert because there isn’t anywhere you can hide. All you can do is stand still in the narrow shadow of your hut and gaze into the distance with chewing tobacco stuck under your mustache, or without the tobacco. Just sit and observe, without any progress. No forest, no progress. The elders sit and look into the distance and watch the imperceptible, forever shifting traces of wind and water on the sands.

But those who have a fire inside them, they put the fire out as best they can—Ieva included. She separates herself so the fire no longer reaches her thoughts. All her running around is nothing more than putting out fires. And sometimes she takes the dog along with her because it’s no good going out by herself. Some of the scenery opens up in her chest like a crashing wave of joy. Other times it’s like slow foam at her feet. Other times still are like a shot to the veins—like a burning that makes her heart beat rapidly and sweat break out on her forehead. Something always opens up to her when she goes walking. Oh, this small illusion of movement. She doesn’t need anything else.

People just need to be understood, she thinks to herself. The world needs to be understood. People are like shoes—you can’t fit every one onto the same shoetree. The leather of every shoe has unique curves, seams, wears. And it takes time to see this.

She’s already been on her share of carousels—there’s nothing wrong with that. After a typically calm breakfast, she throws herself into the passage of time, lets herself be rattled apart so she overflows with awareness and all the trivialities that keep her alive. She pours the tiny, crushed pieces at the foot of her impasse, wails, cries, and then everything is quiet for a while, wonderfully quiet, still and frozen and beautiful. The world works like a well-oiled machine with parameters, barometers, altimeters and chronometers. You like long and short distances, beginnings and ends, and are particularly fond of the middle ground. Going to work, home and car loans, children and parents, even unmarried godmothers. If it weren’t for the cold and the constant rotation, who knows if you’d be able to value that small mechanism—the stirrup, hammer, or anvil, whatever that little bone is called—the balancing mechanism in your ear that keeps you upright. Your vestibular apparatus.

The red substance of everyone’s blood is the same—slow-flowing and completely saturated with time and diverse archives. It’s always a hot substance; however, which creates more? Time or blood? And if it’s both, why live beyond that? After there’s no one left on earth to tuck you in, to accept you with implicit love, to take you exactly as you are. To take joy in watching what you do, in whose eyes you would simply be good… When there’s no one left like that, who will you be able to be yourself in front of? Because you always find a bond with those who tuck you in, or throw you a rope to pull you ashore, or who profess something to you in the world of absolute chaos in which we have to live, where the sun alone moves along the same path and where daylight creeps over the windowsill like ivy. Other than that, everything has changed. And you’re not being told anything revelatory, but rather—and aren’t the values of the modern world strange?—the same old things you need to survive. Even Ieva has been told something like this. Two—no, three—things for survival. The first two are: never sit on stone before you hear thunder, and don’t stand in drafts. Obviously, these have to do with the same damn bundle of nerves. They get damaged by cold and drafts—you’ll start pissing blood if you don’t watch out. You’ll shrivel up like a gnarled branch if you’re not careful.

But the third thing was explained to her in a roundabout way—through a story. Her Gran, the person who gave her this advice, had worked before World War II as a servant for a rich family in Riga. She’d only worked for them a month to save up enough for a place to live in this new city.

“Sweetheart,” she had told Ieva, “I knew full well I’d only work for them a short time, so I put up with everything with dignity and had enough strength and energy for each new day. When I left them after a month they cried and didn’t want me to go because they had never had a servant as good as me.”

This story meant that everything would eventually pass, even life. Maybe whatever it was would last more than a month, but it would pass. Each view, each landscape, even you. It’s a solution, at least until the moment you’re more sick of life than of death, when all you see on the horizon are black, burnt-out clearings, when you hate life so completely that your body is overcome by agonizing tremors just thinking about it. Thank you, Gran.

Because, honestly, Ieva doesn’t call herself a girl anymore, and sometimes even says that beautiful word—middle-aged. Yes, right now she’d like to consider herself middle-aged. She’s already experienced middle age physically—the thought came to her on the morning of her thirty-third birthday. On that morning she felt she was standing at the very top of a mountain. And this mighty, craggy mountain ridge extended in both directions, its outline melting into the distant golden sunrise. The ridge was tall and black, but oddly enough there was plenty of oxygen and her blood wasn’t coursing out of control. Instead there was a damp, refreshing easterly wind, up there the stars were twinkling, meshing in the blueness like white knots. Things were very good. Right now things are very good, she’s not thinking about the road here or about the climb down; everything is here and now, everything is halfway. And the only thing that hurts is the awareness that she has climbed up from the direction of the sea, but has to descend into the desert. The knowledge stings a bit, like a once-broken collarbone that aches every time it rains. But you get used to it.

Then the day comes: her life is halfway over and she’s walking through the woods on a fall morning. The golden asp leaves rustle around her, the earth exhales coolly, and the sky is as blue as her boyfriend’s eyes. And her life is half-over and, now and then, something will happen as time goes on. For example, there have been a lot of births, a few deaths, there will be something that will ache in her over her entire life, something she will never be able to fix, something she will have to dismiss—and so on and so forth. She walks through the woods and feels that she’ll soon reach that critical point when the cup will be full, and when the handle breaks it won’t go unnoticed. The cool glass of the milk bottles from her childhood and the triangular tetrapacks with the word MOLOKO on them—she can’t forget those either. Or the piles of the newly-freed country’s money in suitcases, her first real paycheck—an entire roll of colored paper—frozen kidneys and peed pants, her first time with a boy she would never see again, her first time in an airplane, her first time abroad and seeing strange things. The person you slowly but completely left because he was fading, even though he begged you to stay. Your heart’s betrayals, your wild, spiteful spirit and brief moments of respite, your contracts with your conscience, your father and mother, and your travels near and far, when you fell in love with cities, the sky, or entire regions of uninhabited land.

Love doesn’t always have to be about people, no, not necessarily. You can fall in love with a city, its many smells, how quiet it is under the snow. Small and large streets and the dusk in the glowing windows that awakens a desire in you, when you stand in the streets with your eyes glazed over simply from wanting to experience every imaginable life, everything behind those windows. You want to tear them from the walls and place them in your chest simply because you know and understand it all. Simply because you love these blinds, curtains, shades, the fraying bits of carpet behind the flowerpots against the walls and windows. A quick or fancy dinner, cats on windowsills, and boiling pots in kitchens. And how calm he is when he comes home from work. And how she tilts her head for him to kiss her cheek. Here is your victory, your life in these basic, little things that everyone will gulp down until the end of time like they’re dehydrated and, when they’re drunk from it, roam along the courtyard walls, craving only that eternal shift between night and day. The shade and a nap on a striped couch while he makes you tea. A moment within yourself in the cozy warmth, when the hands of the clock don’t stab at your dry, tired eyelids like steel knives. You’ll crave the solitude of an old woman, her cat, her parties, and bed full of crumbs from the grandchildren, especially in November, and inside is bright and cozy while outside it’s dusky and cool, and a little freezing. Outside where you stand with your only heart and life in your chest, knowing it all—but how?—and loving, loving, loving it.

But there is only this moment in the present, this excessive, ruthless sense of awareness, and the acrid scent of the earth.

Why do I walk around with an orchestra playing in my head?

And she starts to crack like a pine tree. Her bark peels—layer by layer, falling off in flames. The forest breathes and grows, stands modestly, doesn’t try to prove anything, just exists. She knows the forest is perfect, but the forest itself doesn’t know that. Existence asks too much of a person, too much of this complicated structure, this ball of nerves with a heart, brain, and eyes—how can it forget? It’s an endless struggle, a whirlwind of activity, tendencies, thoughts, instincts, responsibilities—and if not those, then at least the slightest inkling of them now and then. Lifting your hand to change channels on the TV, taking the grilled cheese out of the toaster oven or just running the red light at a packed intersection. Or like when you get back home after being abroad for a long time and, as you look out onto the silky reeds under the sliding shadows of clouds, you ask yourself—who’s the one seeing all this?

Or when you’re in a new place and get word that your mother has died. I don’t want to hear it, your tired, scarred, cynical heart cries. Your heart doesn’t want any more pain. But something inside you trembles, shivers—a tiny, significant dream right before you wake up, or the screech of an animal as loud as an overworked motor—and you get the piercing realization that your next breath could never come. But it does, and you’re simultaneously thrilled and inexplicably disappointed. Because the question of the heart remains. If someone was once close to you, very close, and is now dead, and you imagine their heart, which you’ve never seen, but can pretty well imagine—and why shouldn’t you—as a once functional, but now stiff, immobile shell at the bottom of a grave. And you try to imagine what the heart is doing down in that grave. Has it cultivated a soul, that sought-after pearl, or not? Most likely not. There isn’t a pearl down there, no archeologist has ever found a pearl in place of a heart. It’s unheard of. Maybe you yourself are the pearl, the fruit and creation of this strange life, but the sudden stillness of the heart, the coup of that flesh, which you possibly loved more than your own, can drive you insane in its stillness and assimilation to the earth. And the decomposition of the heart, its imperceptible transformation into earth and worms, soil, roots—it hurts you, and you’re ready to dig it up out of the dirt, bring it into the daylight, this useless thing that has no spark, no movement, no echo. It’s an obsession.

But her thoughts have peeled away; at least that’s done with. She takes a hesitant step away from the lee side of a pine tree and moves forward. Sand mixed with black soil, so loose that she sinks down into it up to her ankles. A firebreak freshly tilled in the anticipation of forest fires. There won’t be any more fires. Her thoughts have peeled down to the moist, living pith. Down to her being, to the present, free of the past, the future, genetics, ancestry and contemplation, from high school certificates and notices from detention centers. It suddenly seems to her that this spiritual peace is thievery. Like an unending and painful embodiment of others’ lives—it was such a deep hole, but now it’s just a thick layer: the woods, the road, and the sky. That has to be proof of suffering, she wants to shout, but falls quiet. And if that ends up being the only chance to keep going? Stoop down and grab a handful of your shadow along with the sand—nothing but the woods, the road, and the sky. And you. A thickening of matter, an accidental obstacle to the sun’s rays, a being without genes, without ancestors, without a past, or a future. An observer, someone who has seen one or two of the most beautiful moments of her life in nature. There aren’t many of these moments, but there are some, and she can’t stop thinking about them. She thinks she’ll even remember them in her final hour, like fog snaking through the city on a sweltering summer morning. The movements of fog animals in the empty city streets, when the mist slips its tendrils into the ancient river valley. Movement without movement. Or when the first snow falls on the lake in the forest. A black, clear mirror that glitters endlessly, a disappearing curtain of white, an army of snow, billions of flakes that cease to exist as soon as they touch the clean, black void.

Yes, but was there ever ugly scenery in the woods? Wasn’t the darkening sky every fall evening when, if you were able to persuade yourself to stop for a few seconds in a clearing to see a pair of ravens fly off with a low “craw-craw,” to see the white jet trails of a plane in the gleam of the setting sun turn redder and redder, and the fine lace of the north-facing treetops grow mysteriously blacker and blacker against the rich yellow sky… wasn’t that beauty? Just like the concentrated color of an expanding sunset before the night thickens, before the earth sinks into itself—there’s no sign of the ideas the wind carelessly sowed where the forest stands in the crisp, wintery stillness, immersed to its roots and tips in a meditation only it can know. A beauty for itself, yet simultaneously meant for her to see. Meant for her, a single body so small in this large clearing. And the glimpse of life that finds her in that moment is rapid and just as insignificant as a train whistling as it leaves an empty station. An essentially unnecessary gesture, a superfluous signal without an addressee; because there isn’t anybody here, just the surge of tracks from horizon to horizon and the inky wall of frozen spruce trees, along which the train carries its cry and the warm electric glow of its windows.

She once read, though who knows where: You’ll fall from grace more than once, but it’s okay. It boggled her mind and she thought it over for a long time. It seemed to her that someone was playing a sick joke. What she saw as a sin was nothing more than a lesson to someone else? She couldn’t believe it, but at the same time felt the tiniest hope that this sentence could take responsibility for its words. And what was sin, what kind of word was it? As someone once told her, like the greatest Dostoevsky novel in its both satanic and holy natures, sin was not what people called upon when chasing murderers and thieves to the gallows, oh no, that was another, much more brutal matter, undeserving of that fine whisper of a word “sin”. Sin, he’d said—look into your heart, look at the momentary shivers of hate, desire, pride, envy, gossip, and jealousy that are born in it—that’s sin, locked up in your heart’s emotions, the same heart that also has forgiveness and the eternal balance of peace hidden in it; look at the agitated surface of your blood and you’ll have something to confess to—it doesn’t matter to whom, a priest, the sea or the Holy Mount Kazbek; measure how level your heart is and you’ll find that it’s not the other person you hate, but rather what he provokes in you, your dishonest desires and weaknesses. That’s what you hate, not him, he’s not at fault; he’s like a child, how could he be at fault? But these ripples of resistance coming from your heart are yours, they have your eye color and your facial expressions, not yet put into words or to use. Your heart hides sin in its thoughts. Then suddenly this—you’ll fall from grace more than once, but it’s okay. Get up and move on. Don’t make the same mistake twice. If only she could graft this thought onto her body, like cultivating a double-blossom flower in hopes for a thriving species.

You have to be the most careful when driving in the car, yes, of course. That is, if you can even look up. Oh, secret… locked chest of time… serious and melancholy expression… impossible closeness. A bowl that cannot be filled even when there is too much, a cup that cannot be emptied—human! If you consider how many gears need to fall into place for even a shadow of intimacy, a figment of intimacy, an imitation of intimacy to be possible… But if it’s true intimacy, the immensely aching, desperate attempt to overcome time and bodies and to make out the darkest chasms within each other? Then to be able to look each other in the eye after all of it—isn’t that a miracle? And when you’re in the car you see the right side of his face. The right side is supposedly from God. So it’s the best one. The first one to be lost in war. But it’s also the most beautiful, without a doubt. And the road itself is beautiful, as is the destiny of the landscape rushing by to flash and reflect in your face and eyes, to change.

That’s why you’re careful when he offers to take you to Paris—well, maybe not Paris, but maybe to Helsinki, Tukums, Kaliningrad or Lake Baikal. The road shines in his eyes and it’s always beautiful. No one is more beautiful than a person on the road. He’s carefree and pulls you along with him. The road, the beauty, an aching. But hold on to even the tiniest piece of your critical mind. We grow more irrational with every year and, it’s very possible, may someday even understand Russia—no, nonsense, we don’t have to understand Russia, just blaze through it wild and barefooted, doling out their penance. But try to maintain even the tiniest bit of your critical mind, so things don’t totally backfire, so the dark Russian land doesn’t swallow you up. Or at least maintain your belief in yourself. Leave yourself the freedom to wake up the following workday and walk to the lake and back. You won’t really go anywhere; you’ll slump into the trolley or your favorite Rolls-Royce and head off to work. But leave that afterglow of freedom in your mind, that possibility to just go down to the lake—and you won’t have to go anywhere. You’ll be at peace.

What’s the reason for her restlessness and desire? It’s simple to the point of cliché. She’s once again overcome by this wave and doesn’t know if the wave is crashing over her, or if she’s the wave itself. Respectively, what’s putting her through her paces: destiny or free will? The reason is ridiculously simple, the same reason why she doesn’t like or read those so-called “books on relationships.” They’re garbage and dangerous. As soon as the words “she” and “he” appear on the page she slams the book shut and throws it into the corner with a crash because it’ll probably be the same old story about that maternal instinct that makes women get involved with jackasses. It could just be Ieva’s own miserable experience making her rebel. Because love has once again come down on her, but not a relationship, God no, there’s no sign yet of that swampland called “a relationship.” She’s been overcome by a clean and pure love, and she’d like to reduce this fire to embers as soon as possible, so everything would once again be ruled by calm and the quiet crackle of coals deep in the ashes. This peaceful state is her favorite: cinders on the outside and a quiet movement in the depths, the hidden smoldering of the coals. She likes it, but it’s not possible to burn anything out faster than it’s meant to, life is fire, love is fire, days are sprouts of light on the stem of an evening primrose, light is fire, and time is fire and warmth. And then comes the high tide, then comes the ninth wave and, if you’re the only one who can’t hold her breath long enough to dive to the next low tide, then grab hold of him and soar over it all.

The reason is so cliché and simple that she’s angry with herself and cries, but she doesn’t want pity. No destiny but her own, no advice, no help. She wants her own experience. Why try to avoid it—so she won’t make mistakes? She needs mistakes, needs them! Fear of mistakes has been stitched into the spacesuits of astronauts and launched off to Mars for years and years. The need to make her own great mistakes surfaced as she trudged through her detached years. She wants the forest and silence, and to see how it’ll all end. And how they’ll start, if they’ll start at all. What she does know is that after the beginning comes the end, and after the end comes the beginning. But whether or not something will outlast her—that she doesn’t know. The most valuable thing she owns is an old Chinese Book of Changes. It hasn’t lied to her a single time. She only turns to this book in rare cases, when it’s no longer possible for her to go on like she usually does. And she’s not looking for keys to the past or future in this book, no. She’s noticed that the most significant thing lacking in a person’s life, and a frightening habit at that, is the ability to be aware of the present situation. She often asks the Book of Changes one question—where am I? And the book has never lied to her, it tells her the place like a well-drawn topographic map: Breakdown.

Observation.

Justice.

Or something else. Defeat turns into assault, structure into debris. And the characters, they’re the same ones you see in your dreams. Now that she’s in love again, she asks the book and the book answers: Swan. It’s the truth. But unfortunately, she’s not a swan when she’s in love. She’s a cat. And the swan never reaches shore. She laughs at herself—look! She’s in love. But does she need it again, she’s so tired and knows all the horrors of it from start to end, like she knows her multiplication tables, so why, and for what? Again with this sighing feeling of existence, this diploma of life. This stream that pulls her forward and makes the pit of her stomach flutter.

She catches cold so she has time to weigh her options. So she can sit motionless by her kitchen window for hours and watch the landlady, the pigeons, the veins in her hands, the creases at the corners of her mouth in her reflection in the window, her thoughts and feelings, all before she jumps to her feet, calls him, runs and throws her arms around him. Because… is there value in anything without love? Woman has always been and always will be the strength in what’s weak and the great in what’s small, but of her own volition—don’t forget that.

Outside, coincidentally, is the harsh Baltic seaside climate. When she was little she believed it was the only world that existed. There, by the sea, three months of sun and nine months of darkness seemed as natural as being in her own skin. The change of the seasons, the velvety tips of budding flowers, drawing sap from birch, or the patter of green, wet leaves against the roof of the house in fall—she was so close to it all, though her head was no higher than the ferns and her fingertips could just reach Gran’s knobby knees. Granddad Roberts sometimes brought his wrinkled face down to hers, coming into view like a piece of brown driftwood the wind had slowly unrolled from a skein of waves. He’d sing:

Over the fields sweeps

a low spring wind,

a violin cries sadly along.

The violinist plays,

he once was young,

the heart in his chest was once full of love…

And then he’d play the same melody on his silver harmonica.

Back then Ieva had asked:

“Granddad, does that mean your heart isn’t full of love anymore?”

“Always,” he laughed, “my heart is always full of love.”

Roberts smoked by the stove and told Ieva that the glowing rolls of paper he always held between his fingers were also lit by the flame in his heart. Pipes are for those who like breathing in fire, he’d laugh. Then Gran would scold him, call Roberts a smokestack and to stop feeding the child nonsense. But there was no real reason to scold, Ieva had eyes enough to see that Granddad lit them by picking out an ember from the grate.

Ieva hadn’t yet learned to read when Roberts told her all about the nature of clouds. How clouds, this everlasting gloom from fall to spring, were a second sea above the real sea. That up there where birds live, above people’s heads, was another lead-grey surface, which the wind constantly swirled about and chased into waves. It was lit by the sun and the sky above it was just as clear and blue as in the summer. Now, many years later, she’s been to the desert and has already felt that the door is open—she could escape from the swamp to the equator by myriad paths. She just doesn’t want to. She wants to feel like a child again—to be in the depths of the clouds. To be at ease in the depths around her heart.

The screenplay she’s just started is sitting on the table, but right now, as far as she’s concerned, it could be on the surface of the moon.

And what is she looking for? Can she ask anything more of life than the privilege to trust a single living person, and him alone?

And what can she ask of everyone, of the one and only God, of outer space, the Universe, but the desire and basic hope to never betray or hurt another?

On a shelf she finds letters she wrote to her brother as a teenager. And sends her brother a text message—an entire forest of exclamation marks. He responds with a single question mark.

Turns out—we’ve lived, she answers.

There’s proof, you can touch it. A little black notebook filled with words. If you have one free week, an unpaid vacation, or are part of a stay-at-home clinical trial during which you can afford to spend time in a dusty closet, digging through ink-stained, aging pieces of paper, or to look through photographs of the deceased that still retain some kind of discernable contours—you can touch it, this feeling.

Turns out—we’ve lived.