“An official is always right,” he later joked about his bad luck.
I’ll place a dream about my Fatherland under my pillow,
one day I’ll meet with it again and be happy,
and sleep as soundly as a baby in its mother’s arms—
even in the suffering of death.
This poem by Jaunsudrabiņš, “For the Deported,” is always written on the first page of Pauls’s day planner. A free Latvia has always been his dream. He was disillusioned rather intensely at a young age — the deportation of his loved ones and the suffering of legionnaires.
Like every child who grew up during the war, the most important thing to Pauls is safety. He doesn’t seek out confrontation, doesn’t alter decisions, is careful with his finances, and always has a little pocket money for Ieva.
“But in moderation! There are sprinters and there are marathoners,” he’d say. “Speed is the death of a marathoner.”
Pauls is a marathoner, but very upbeat. Ieva thinks he could have been a fantastic actor had he wanted to. But even actors have to cross the line now and again, and that was something Pauls could only do in his dreams.
Even the theater pales in comparison to the streets. People don’t go to the theater — what’s happening in the streets is more interesting. The founding and collapse of banks, political parties, governments. Office workers are plucked like reeds by the raging storms of political powers. Many nights Pauls comes home from work completely withdrawn and sits in the small kitchen emptying a half-pint bottle of brandy.
“So I don’t have a heart attack!” he explains. “Today I had to explain again to the new minister why the last one made such a mess.”
Aksels lucks out and gets a carpentry job at the Academy of Music. It’s easy enough. Ieva sometimes goes to visit him in the academy’s basement — to make love, since they can’t at home. They put a blanket down on the floor. The dark vaults are warm and smell of wood glue, and dusk is filled with the sounds of the academy students’ nightly practices.
Ieva isn’t as lucky in finding a job. She diligently looks through the want ads in every possible newspaper. For the most part people are looking for secretaries — young women with a high school education, good Latvian and Russian language skills, and computer skills. English language skills will be considered an advantage. Ieva’s young — she has the necessary education and even understands some English. But she has never in her life seen a computer.
One night Pauls says:
“No problem! Come see me at work tomorrow!”
The next day Ieva trudges up the huge staircase of the Ministry of Finance and watches the young women strut confidently through the plush-carpeted hallways. That’s what a secretary has to look like in the capital — long blonde hair, a thin gold necklace, and an immaculate suit.
Ieva’s father sits her down at his desk. Hm, Ieva thinks, so that’s why he likes his job — the centuries-old oak desk asks no questions and embraces you in its sanctuary, which smells lightly of warm paper and sealing wax.
“Look!” her father says. “This is called a mouse. And that’s the monitor. Did you really not have a computer class in school?”
There were, they did have classes like that, where the teacher sat with his droopy mustache hanging over his desk and made them fill notebooks with writing on the basics of programming, showed them photographs and once took them on a special trip to the teacher’s lounge, where the school’s only computer sat under a cover in a locked cabinet — a real monolith! At least that’s what her classmates had told her; Ieva had been home sick that day.
Now she puts her hand on the mouse and moves it across the desktop. And the movement of her hand is reflected on the monitor: a white arrow moves around the screen. It’s complicated, but at the same time so simple. Something in Ieva’s mind is good at connecting her hand with the screen. Her father teaches her how to boot up and shut down the computer, how to open a new Word document, and Ieva heads home in a good mood. All that’s left to get is a suit, and she’ll be a secretary!
But it’s not that easy.
The first job Ieva gets is in some automobile club owned by twin Armenian brothers. Ieva’s diligent, writes press releases, and handles commercials for the radio and television, issues membership cards. Until one night when she stays to practice with the computer and she notices some flat-out lies. It’s advertised that the automobile club has a couple thousand members, but she can see on the computer — there aren’t more than a couple hundred! The following day she tells Olga, the office manager, a prissy Russian woman with long, buffed red fingernails. It’s just some kind of mistake, Olga says. The next day the Armenians fire Ieva.
Now a bit smarter, Ieva tries out a position at a construction firm. The director, a small and chubby old man, never misses an opportunity to pinch her butt. For a while Ieva pretends not to notice, but one morning when the director asks to recite some poems he’s written for her, she loses it and starts laughing hysterically.
The repercussion comes soon after. The office hosts an associates’ evening — Ieva fills bowls with fruit, lights candles, gets a fire going in the fireplace — if a secretary wants to get her pay on time, she has to be capable of more than working with a computer or speaking English! The director calls Ieva into the room with everyone else and offers her a glass of cognac.
“But you know I don’t drink,” Ieva says.
The next second the director throws the cognac into her face.
Ieva even tries placing an ad—Looking for secretarial work. The next day the phone at the Eglīte apartment rings non-stop with calls from what are basically pimps. A gruff voice breathes into the receiver:
“Are you interested in work over the phone?”
“What kind of work is it?” Ieva asks before she gets what’s going on.
“A certain way of talking over the phone, you understand?”
Ieva understands and yanks the phone cord out of the socket. There’d been no sex in the Soviet Union. Now the city was full of so-called escort clubs — cropping up like mushrooms after the rain. Sex over the phone and in saunas, escorts, strip teases, massages. Once she was approached in the square facing the National Opera by a man with a pathetic droplet of perspiration at the tip of his nose. He’d said:
“Do you want to be a model? You’ve got a great rack and long legs.”
Ieva grows tired, but doesn’t give up. Everyone in this insane city needs a job — but does that mean she won’t find one? Riga swarms like the entrance to a beehive in the spring, and pulls Ieva along with it — young and with her hair in the wind. Each new day brings hope, but each night brings dark defeat.
She applies for a job at an advertising agency. They need advertising agents for the publisher of the largest illustrated magazine. Her interviewing director is a lean, bearded-type in a plaid jacket who dozes lazily in the rays of sun falling across the large desk. Ieva tells him outright: