After Brezhnev’s funeral no one felt much like talking. A terrible sense of foreboding hung in the air. My mother drank every evening. Three days after the funeral, on 18 November, she lit candles. She laid three rows of Michaelmas daisies on her table: two of red flowers and between them one of white. Her pupils were dilated and she was talking strangely. I was afraid to be in the same room with her. Now and then I opened the door to her room to see if she was all right.
‘Maybe a miracle will happen. Maybe now a miracle will happen,’ she mumbled.
‘Mamma, be reasonable. What miracle?’ I grabbed her shoulders and shook her. ‘Now there won’t be a miracle but war. Mamma, there’s going to be a war, maybe even a nuclear war, and we are all going to die!’ I almost screamed. I was afraid of the war and once again afraid of my mother.
‘I wish Latvia the best!’ She emptied the second bottle of wine. She was thoroughly drunk.
I rolled her into bed, covered her and in despair searched her room and her handbag. I threw all the tablets that I found into the stove.
All night I sat by my mother’s bed, now and then feeling her forehead and for her pulse. Sometimes it raced like mad and other times it was feeble, almost imperceptible. Occasionally her heavy breathing was interrupted by a flood of words. My mother was talking in her wine-and drug-induced sleep. About the miracle that would happen, about freedom, about the triple-striped flag that would fly – the red, white and red again, about God, who would bless it, about Latvia, which would live for ever. Then she paused, breathing heavily. Then screamed – ‘It’s breaking, breaking, breaking.’ Then fell silent again.
I lay down beside her and pressed myself close. I was trembling all over. If her pulse had slowed any further, I would have run to the neighbours and called an ambulance. But gradually her breathing grew calmer and less erratic. Sweat beaded her forehead. I wiped it away. The candles burned out on the table. Their fragrance blended with the aroma of the Michaelmas daisies. I opened the window and the tranquil air of November filled the room.
The war did not start. Slowly the quotidian round was smothering me. Soon I would be alone with this daily routine. The autumn would become winter, the winter, spring; spring would turn into summer and then my daughter would leave. Already shrivelling, life’s hot-air balloon would deflate even more. And my life, slinking from home to the ambulatory centre, from the ambulatory centre back home like a whipped dog, would shrink away too.
I had to work harder to manage my patients. The impression that I was seeing through them grew stronger. With one glance I could tell what was ailing them. Almost all my diagnoses turned out to be correct. My patients returned again and again to their miracle doctor.
Then my powers to perform miracles were put to the test. One morning, walking down the corridor with its waiting women, I noticed her immediately. Although there were no free seats left except beside her, no woman had chosen to sit there. They were keeping their distance. Her face attracted attention instantly: it was neither a woman’s nor a man’s. As did her hands – she had taken off her gloves and crossed her hands in her lap. The palms were enormous, the fingers, powerful. These were not a woman’s hands.
When she timidly entered my consulting room I was surprised by how diminutive she was. Surely that’s why her palms looked so enormous. I asked her to describe all her ailments and to undress for examination.
‘Will you really examine me?’ she asked in disbelief, the timbre of her voice low and husky. ‘In several places doctors have refused to do so. But I need to know what I am,’ she said, and tears sprang to her eyes.
‘Calm down,’ I said, handing her a glass of water. ‘Everything will be fine. What’s your name?’
‘I’ve an odd name,’ she said. ‘Jesse. It was given me by my foster mother in the orphanage. I’ve always struggled with this name, although I work as a charwoman.’
I washed my hands and looked on as she slowly unwrapped her heavy clothes. It seems I had inspired her trust, for she continued to tell me about herself.
‘When I grew older, my orphanage mother showed me a piece of paper that had been included in my blanket when I was abandoned at the orphanage. Written on it was: “I don’t want this gift.” She told me that Jesse means “a gift”.’
Undressed, she was very uncomfortable. She tried to hide her private parts with her large hands. She stood before me, one of God’s bitter jokes. A small man’s body with a woman’s crotch. In the place of breasts not even the tiniest of buds – it was a man’s chest.
I did my examination.
Dressed once more, she gazed at me with gratitude.
I plucked up my courage and said, ‘Externally you’re partly a woman, but internally you’re partly a man.’
She looked at me as if she had been informed of a malignant ailment or infertility. Then she broke into tears. Through her sobs she repeated, ‘No, I am a woman, I am a woman, I am a woman…’ Finally, calming down a little, she asked, ‘Can that man not be cut out of me?’
‘That can’t be done. Something else could be tried, but unfortunately I don’t have the ability to help you.’
‘Thanks for not turning me away,’ Jesse said as she closed my consulting-room door.
I sat there, as much a fool as Jesse. My exile had bound my hands. I couldn’t compete with God, although just then I wished to more than anything. The Leningrad Institute was unreachable, but it was there that new discoveries were being made in hormone therapy. Only this might provide Jesse with a path to a happy life as a woman. She would never be pregnant and carry a child, but she might experience the growth of breasts or some other feminine miracle.
Everything comes full circle. The snow-covered bridge over the River Neva and my naive question to the drunkard at the God’s Ear café: ‘Is Jesse only a man’s name?’
My head was fit to burst. This damned cage, in which I could do nothing. I opened the window. There she went – Jesse, God’s gift, whom I couldn’t help. Suddenly she turned, took off one glove, waved farewell and raised two fingers in a victory sign.
The war did not start and life moved on in its accustomed tracks. I turned fourteen. Now I could join the Young Communist League. I had to learn the statutes. Our literature teacher said I could recite, for example, Ojārs Vācietis’s poem ‘Noraisot kaklautu’ – ‘Taking off My Neckerchief’ – to mark the poet’s death in November. I took several of his collections out of the library. It was strange how one man could write such diverse poems. I liked this one: ‘Man ir smeldzīga, smeldzīga nojauta, ka tā pasaule, kurā es dzīvoju, var daudz ātrāk par tavu būt nojaukta’ – ‘I have a painful, painful intuition that the world, where I live, can be demolished much sooner than yours.’ But that would not appeal to the Komsomol, so I obeyed the teacher and was rewarded with my Communist Youth badge and membership card.
This year winter seemed short. Already in February it was warm and sunny. We waited for spring and rehearsed our songs for the 8 March concert. My heart was filled with an unusual joy. Though its light was still wintry, the sun was melting snow drifts and icicles. Birds silenced by winter could now be heard singing. Everything was moving towards a thaw, towards spring. Then the holidays would come, then the final school term, and primary school would be finished. And my first summer without rows of beetroot, cucumbers and carrots would begin, after which would follow an autumn in the city – at a new school with new school friends.