“What does she do by herself all day?”
“Sleeps. What else?”
Mother smiles. What does she do by herself all day? Time’s a real son of a bitch, she thinks.
Time always pretends it’s something else. Sometimes it pretends to be a person. Time pretends to be people’s wrinkles, scars, saggy bits. Sometimes it’s faraway, unreachable roads. Time pretends to be a road that leads to the sea — over hills, past hidden places, past mysterious destinies that are never understood, over roofs, chimneys, castles and huts, fields of cow-wheat and forget-me-nots, and under the silvery smooth beech trees of manor houses. Sometimes it pretends it’s the sea itself. And the sky. Sometimes it pretends to be gravestones, children, the elderly. It pretends to be your veins, your teeth, your dentures, or eyes. In Mother’s eyes, these days time usually pretends to be the wall opposite her bed. The window is time. Day and night. Light and dark. Time is yellowed photographs — black and white, figures disintegrating under her failing vision (what time hides from Mother is that these figures are her own faces throughout the years, her children and her husband). Time is a clock that has stopped. Sometimes Mother’s fingers are time — she holds them up against the light and studies them for hours like a child.
“I wanted to ask you something.”
“What, Mom?”
“I hope it won’t be like that, but if I… If I end up like her, shoot me! Or get rid of me some other way. I’ll write a letter of permission ahead of time. I’ll keep it in my purse with my ID.”
“Mom! Don’t talk like that around her!”
“See, you’re thinking of her again. I’m not blind or deaf — that kind of talk is fine around me.”
“Stop it. At least stop making it all about you for a little while.”
“I’ve done nothing else my entire life but put myself second — I wonder why she never bothered to do the same!”
There are no more words. They fall silent and hug, then stand next to Mother’s bed. A shadow falls over her face. Mother sticks out her chin — this is how it should be.
Warmth! She also craves that heat. She’s grown almost completely cold. Tomorrow night’s high tide will extinguish her.
A napkin wipes the remains of chocolate from the corners of Mother’s mouth. The voices above her keep talking.
Mother finally remembers — she remembers. There were female voices back then, too!
Like a garment cut from nothingness with magic scissors, like a paper crane made of light — she draws closer to the memory — the warm nose of a foal nuzzles her, its breath hot — she has to get a bridle on it!
Mother leans toward the memory, avoiding the invasive spoon, her toothless mouth now and then gulping the cottage cheese. Her bony fingers tear at the blanket corner in her lap, and she remembers…
. . The voices are coming from the kitchen. She is still in part a child, but also in part a woman, on that border when time ties the first rosy knots at the tips of a girl’s chest. She’s at her mother’s house in the country. There’s a celebration tomorrow. The spring weather is hot, and the cherries, hackberries, and lilacs are blooming. The kitchen door is open and almost every woman from the seaside town is in there baking, cooking, slicing meat, and grinding onions.
The thick, juicy grass lies flat in the garden like a green, hairy beast, and the leafy branches of the apple trees spill in through open windows. The screams of animals being slaughtered for food has stopped and their rolled-up hides lay haphazardly next to the barn, because the tanner is drunk on beer and sound asleep next to the doghouse. The boys are tickling his mustache with a reed, and he smiles in his sleep. Everything smells of sweat and music. Striped cats purr and wind around the porch pillars.
Steam rises above the pots on the stove, rattling the tin covers like bells. Laughing children dart around the grownups with the neighborhood dogs, stealing slices of smoked bacon meant for tomorrow’s bacon rolls. The women scold them and wipe their own sweaty foreheads and flushed necks with white handkerchiefs. They pass around a bottle of lingonberry brew, which you can only have a little bit of at a time, because it’s quite strong, quite sacred, quite devilish!
Uncle Jānis blows a horn on the roof of the shed — the song is “The Sea Needs a Fine-Spun Net”—he doesn’t know that in a few days the sea will take him in place of the net, and then the women will be cooking for his funeral instead.
Uncle Jānis plays his horn, then comes inside, sits at the end of the table, chats with the women and manages to get a few sips of brew. The women swat him with their handkerchiefs and blush when he pinches one of them in the thigh. His voice is pure, unfiltered fire, strong like the lingonberry brew. The children eye the trumpet on the corner of the table, poke at its yellow, brassy shine, breathe in its metallic scent.
Mother goes outside. It’s hard for her to hold herself straight against this bold thundering of life that tears through the air and slams against her little body like the waves crashing against the breakwater. For the first time in her life, she simultaneously feels deep pain and joy. The sweltering happiness in the kitchen and the passionless existence of the blue skies over the sea, with the fragrant clusters of white flowers in the twilight—
— it’s hard for her to be outside for long, her heart is being torn to bits by the cold and lonely wind. She wants to go inside, closer to the fire. Rather, she wants it all together, to pour these two worlds into one cup and drink it. To see: is it really like oil and water, can they never mix? To bring the cold inside, or to bring the heat outside.
Soon enough both worlds melt into one, because something happens that night, something secretive. She is recruited—
— because on her way inside she almost runs into a woman. There, in the front hall, is their neighbor, Maija. Maija’s right hand holds a bundle of onions and is pressed to her chest, but her left hand is balled up by her mouth — her white teeth biting into her thumb. She is listening from the other side of the kitchen door to what Jānis is saying to the other women. The adults have said more than once that Maija is crazy about Jānis.
Maija looks at her with dark eyes. At the motionless, angular silhouette of a teenager in the doorway against the blue-green horizon over the sea. It’s bad to eavesdrop, they both know that. But the woman at the kitchen door burns like a fire, even though her frame is small and her hair is soft and long. Voices can be heard from the kitchen—
“Child,” Maija says and puts a finger up to her lips. Her eyes gleam like a cat’s.
“No, no!” the child cries out, burned by this fervor.
Then the door opens and someone comes out. Maija lets her into the kitchen ahead of her, into the thicket of steam and life. They cut onions, laugh, cry and never again mention what happened. All she does is now and again steal a glance at Maija. Maija is a woman. She, too, is now a woman. A bowl of fire. A tiny, bright flame, until the Star comes — The One That Brings the Rain—
Mother speaks:
“Sweetheart.”
Silence.
She opens her one good eye. She is welcomed by the white square of the window and the black fog the Dark One pulls over her vision.