The Attack
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 Matīss Kaudzīte 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.