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?”