Brother and sister grow up apart from one another. Lūcija and Pauls never separate, even though their married life isn’t harmonious and Lūcija only feels happy once in a while. No sunlight shines into their Riga apartment because it’s unforgiving to Lūcija’s melancholy eyes. How does that first crack in the structure of a person’s life form? Is it the moment when assumed moral obligation is replaced by reality?
When the clouds start to paint, the sun grows overcast.
Ieva’s Birth
For the moment there are only three things to prove Ieva’s birth — I’ll whisper to you what they are — and they can be found in the attic of a building in Riga, in a yellow-painted wooden chest with stylized Latvian folk engravings on the lid. Attic mold hasn’t held back — the contents of the chest are almost entirely overgrown with this fuzzy evidence of time. Fifty or so letters written in different hands have turned into a greenish-black turf; the letters are unsorted, stacked in a pile and secured by a half-disintegrated piece of twine. A foamy grey covers the glossy greeting cards, rings of moisture paint over the ugly color; time brings everything together with a robust drawing. The ugliness betrays its owner, the Soviet era, the era of ugliness. Moisture has eaten away at the black-and-white photographs — amateur handiwork from those times, when every self-respecting Soviet citizen had a small darkroom in his Khrushchev-period brick apartment building. A darkroom with an enlarger, a processer, chemical baths, and an infrared light bulb. With a wave to his family, such a perfectionist would disappear behind the curtain Friday evening, latch the door and, in the reddish-black light, rest a veneer sheet covered with all his treasures across the bathtub. There he’d sit on the closed lid of the toilet and watch intently as the developing chemicals conjured lost time onto the paper. The magnifier could be used to select individual faces from the crowd, and the developer used to regulate the level of bleakness in the facial features. Some photo paper was hard, which made the scene turn out a coffee brown. Other paper turned out gloomy, bluish and slightly pliant. The air in the bathroom would be positively charged, chemically fragrant. And the family would be annoyed because the only way they could get into the combined bath and toilet room to take care of their natural needs was to beg and beg. The photography enthusiast would make up for his offense by letting the children dry the wet photographs, lay them on the cutting board, and let them trim the edges with a straight-edged razor or a special blade. Additionally, whoever was trimming the picture got to choose how wide the white border would be. But God help anyone who forgot and flipped on the bathroom light!
Now the photographs have been cut up by time and humidity — here and there are the white teeth of broad smiles, the black scarves of funerals. The most popular subjects in photographs from that time are various foods and bottles set on banquet tables surrounded by happy guests, or funerals with a somber and grey forest in the background.
What has outlived this moldy turf is a time of receipts, a time of sending postcards, a time without e-mail.
And three little pieces of evidence to Ieva’s birth.
The first piece of evidence — or rather, the first announcement of Ieva’s birth — are small tags, the ones that were attached to gold jewelry in the Soviet Union. Tiny, calligraphy lettering on the cards explains that the gold items were rings made in the Riga Jewelry Factory: item 0611, 583-proof, weight 5.66 grams, price 11 rubles and 50 kopeks per gram, total item price 65 rubles and 00 kopeks. The second ring has a weight of 6.12 grams, total item price 70 rubles and 38 kopeks. Ieva’s mother and father, like two tagged birds, slid these rings onto each other’s fingers, following the worldwide tradition to thus express their trust in a single being among all other beings.
The second bit of evidence is an orange piece of laminated material bound with gauze thread; on it in black ink and in Russian are written Ieva’s mother’s name and surname, her father’s name, that they have a newborn baby girl, weight 3 kg and 50 g, her birth date and time, and her mother’s patient number—71. Red ink lettering indicates five seconds, apparently the amount of time that passed before Ieva’s first cry.
This kind of tag was tied around a newborn’s ankle, while the mother would have a smaller tag tied around her wrist with just her number. Every three and a half hours or so, a steel gurney would be pushed down the long hallway toward the wards carrying tightly wrapped, crying or quiet babies that the ward maid would bring to the mothers. And thus continued the Soviet era individual’s greatest adventure, starting with pregnancy, birth, and the realization that, contrary to what the Soviet grandfathers of biology thought, children weren’t actually clean slates to be scribbled on with the commandments of the Communist party. At least Ieva’s mother Lūcija realized this on the first day of Ieva’s life, she could easily tell Ieva’s voice apart from the other babies on the gurney; and every newborn’s face is its own, unique, almost like its character, already complete and mature at the moment of birth.
The third piece of evidence of Ieva’s birth is a lock of her hair, wrapped in paper and dated around the time she was a year old — a silken and brightly shining substance. Who knows why this lock had been cut off. Maybe to mark her first haircut?
These incredibly personal passages can probably be best explained by the letters between Ieva’s parents. In its paranoia of germs, Soviet science ignored her father. Left him standing on the other side of the hospital threshold, flowers in hand. A real man was supposed to be muscled, hairy, and smelling slightly of body odor, the kind of person who would crack open a bottle of cognac at the construction site and pass it around to his coworkers in honor of his new offspring, not the type to tramp through the flowerbeds surrounding the hospital.
Ieva’s father Pauls doesn’t quite fit this idealistic category of man. He was an engineer in one of the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic’s countless design institutes — a paper pusher in a button-down shirt — who’d met and married his wife right there in the institute, and who was now doing everything he could to get into the hospital to see her, if only for a second. When he couldn’t get in no matter what, he wrote letters. The entire expanse of the Soviet Union, from the Baltic Sea to Sakhalin, was one big letter-writing workshop that constantly wrote and spread myths because citizens at that time didn’t see each other often enough to talk face-to-face, and were always isolated from one another in consideration of the safety of the State. So in this country, people with imaginations and people of action, who were usually divided in society 50–50, were forced to become 100 % imaginative. And what does an imaginative person do when the Cerberus-like ward maids keep him away from his wife and newborn child for an entire week? He either drinks, or he writes letters.
First letter
(from Ieva’s father Pauls to Ieva’s mother Lūcija),
written in black ballpoint pen on a torn-out sheet of lined notebook paper, most likely at home on the evening of Ieva’s birth.
“Dear, dear, dear, Lūcija!”
The happy father admits his bewilderment, joy, and excitement, but this is nothing compared to what she experienced. He knows he has a daughter and that she weighs 3 kg and is 52 cm long. Then come questions: