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.