Ieva looks at him and now and then runs a hand through his hair. Touches her lips to his eyebrows, eyelashes, ears. Ieva loves Aksels. In this exact moment. In this exact moment.
That black guy wrecked Aksels’s hip while they were fighting on the ice. One night Ieva wakes up to a stifled cry in the pitch-black room. Terrified, she feels for the lamp. When the light bursts harsh and bare into the room, she sees that Aksels’s face is covered in sweat and he’s barely able to catch his breath from the pain. In the kitchen, the refrigerator lets out a loud whir and falls silent. Ieva rummages in the shelves for all the stashes of weed she can find. Aksels asks her to turn off the light, it’s hurting him. Ieva opens the curtains and turns out the light. They lie in the reddish glow of the city. Hold each other by the hand and wait for the drugs to kick in. They don’t. Ieva carefully frees her fingers from his and feels along his side downwards, even though he tries to stop her, pushes her hand away. But Ieva keeps going, even forcefully, while she stares unblinkingly out the window where the evening wind ferries light and shining clouds. Aksels’s hip is hot and swollen like a chestnut about to burst.
For a second Ieva pulls her hand away; she sees the true extent of misfortune.
The following morning they go to the clinic. Ieva sends Als a text message saying he shouldn’t expect her at work. Als answers she shouldn’t expect to have a job tomorrow. And if that wasn’t enough, the eggs burn in the pan, and Aksels starts making excuses. Says he doesn’t want to go to the clinic, Ieva should just go buy more weed. Like a geezer asking his old lady for his morning dose of vodka. Then Ieva flares up. A few plates shatter against the peeling kitchen wallpaper. White shards rain down on the strange and silent rusty fragments that lay about their kitchen like sleeping goliaths, these things that barely resemble an old gas stove, small propane tanks, and cast iron radiators. It’s a new January morning outside — a chilled aquarium bubbling with the icy greens, reds, and blues of the sky.
To get weed, Ieva screams, to get weed! She snatches the lit cigarette from Aksels’s fingers and smashes it into the sink. Always with this disgusting smoke, I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe, Ieva screams, but Aksels smirks in confusion. You dick around here day after day, or go drinking downtown, but I have to work in the market and freeze while I watch picky old women paw mandarins with their chubby fingers and ask — Where are these from? From Latvia, I tell them, from across the river in Mārupe! They puff up like pigeons and swear at me, then go away. Als writes down everything I say behind my back, in a black notebook. He hates it when I upset the customers. Then he docks my pay, sneering with his stupid Chechen — or whatever he is — face. Minus ten lats, he says, or minus five. Depends on the day. But all the while Aksels sits around in front of the TV and smokes the weed bought with the money Ieva earned! How do you think Ieva likes that!
But all she really wants to say is that he needs to go to the clinic. He gets it and pulls on his jacket. And for that she loves him. For often respecting her seriousness. For the simultaneously simple and painful gesture with which he finally gets to his feet and pulls on his old leather jacket.
Ieva looks in every possible place for her passport, finally finds it in the hallway under some dusty bicycle parts. Aksels, it turns out, has a different name written in his passport. Ieva decides the name Aksels suits him much better. He looks at his passport as if in wonder. He’s sweating just from waiting. The stairwell reeks of piss. They’re both twenty-one years old.
Ieva remembers — they’re taking the tram. She doesn’t remember which line. Aksels stands opposite her and looks out the window. He’s dealing with the pain. His face glassy and his eyes steel.
They sit next to each other at the clinic. Rest their hands on each others’ knee in this strange world; the background whines with the sound of a dentist’s drill and the foreground is full of patients struggling to find a seat on the long benches lining the halls.
Aksels is called in and Ieva goes with him. He doesn’t have a patient card, he’s not registered and has never been to this clinic. They’re sent from one office to another until they find the right one. A good amount of money is spent to get him registered somewhere. Destruction whimpers quietly in every corner: pensioners sputter and curse, sweating mothers sigh heavily as they hold their babies.
They need to X-ray Aksels’s side. He undresses and lies down on the table. Ieva stands back a bit like his escaped shadow and watches silently. The nurses try to position Aksels’s hips in the right angle. He digs his mouth into Ieva’s palm and screams noiselessly in this dark, warm abyss. Ieva glances fondly at his hips. They’re as beautiful as they always are, so slim. The skin of his groin like light velvet. His penis darker, regal, and haloed by golden hairs. She’s happy the nurses get to see it, too. She cries out of pride. Everything happens at once and doesn’t want to stop. They can’t X-ray his hip. He screams through her hand, bites her fingers until they bleed. The doctor decides to administer anesthesia. A needle sinks into Aksels’s vein, and his body instantly goes slack, as obedient as a ragdoll. His hips are positioned into the right angle. The lens moves toward the only place on his body that is void of beauty, the place that has opened the door to chaos.
He’s out of it for a long time, laid out on a brown, pleather couch. His body is wracked by chills, he’s freezing. Ieva covers him, wraps him in a blanket. She sits next to him on a white stool, motionless, while Aksels is broken by the nightmares of narcosis. It’s hell for both of them — Aksels’s convulsions and Ieva’s motionlessness, their mutual isolation. Finally they both come to in the same world; Aksels opens his eyes, but they’re not his own. They’ve switched him out from where he used to be.
Ieva helps him dress. The nurse comes in and hands Ieva his hip X-rays and a referral to the hospital, then anxiously asks them if Aksels doesn’t want to wait here longer for the anesthetic to wear off. They shake their heads “no” almost in unison.
Outside the city has snowed over, ice crystals crunch underfoot, children run around with red cheeks and lips shiny from sucking on icicles. Tires creak, the tram tracks sing, street sweepers clear snow with silver shovels. The sun burns the piles of snow along the sides of the street like fire. No road has ever, nor will it ever, seemed so long as those few hundred meters to the tram stop. Now and then the wind pushes loose bricks of snow from the clubbed branches of the linden trees. Aksels supports himself on Ieva’s shoulder — rather, he’s slumped against it. He feels so heavy, waterlogged. A few times he falls onto a pile of snow and wants to rest there. Ieva doesn’t let him. C’mon, let’s go, she says, c’mon, c’mon! Ieva isn’t thinking of anything, not even the tiniest thought. C’mon, c’mon, c’mon.
In truth, Ieva has nothing more to say. She asks Andrejs to take them to the hospital tomorrow. The sun shines brightly as Ieva smokes at the gate of Andrejs’s mechanic shop, and he looks at her with lazy, half-lidded eyes. Of course I’ll help, he says, when have I ever not helped you…
The icy wind blows the smoke back into her face, the contours of her lips are red and raw. You’ve totally wasted away, Andrejs says. Of course, Ieva says and looks away, it’s from the stress.
Andrejs asks: