‘Aren’t you too smart for a fifteen-year-old?’ Her joy warmed my heart.
On a corner we went into a chocolate shop to buy a treat for ourselves. On the shelf were rows of marzipan figurines called Dārgais – ‘Dear One’.
‘Can we afford a marzipan owl?’ my daughter asked me quietly.
‘Today we can afford everything. Even a marzipan owl.’
We walked hand in hand. My daughter’s contentment was tangible.
‘Amptmanis Briedītis married Zaube, Nītaure remained an old maid, but Mičurins married Tompsonu.’ She was counting the streets and calling out their ‘married’ names, the new ones, and the original names.
Nothing had changed in our short street. The new technical school, the library for the visually impaired, the peacetime apartment blocks on one side, the kindergarten on the other side.
At the flat my mother and stepfather welcomed us. We embraced, and I saw their eyes fill with tears. While the table was being laid, I went into my room. It was sunny and clean, my books lined up neatly on a shelf, on the table a vase of tulips, my daughter’s books and keepsakes, the bed covered with my mother’s fringed, embroidered blanket. Soon my daughter would be living here.
Lunch passed quietly. My daughter talked about school and her achievements in chemistry and literature. My mother and stepfather now and then cast affectionate looks my way. I sat at the beautifully laid table. They all loved me, but I wasn’t there.
After lunch I went out for a walk. My familiar walk to the hospital. Ambulances sped by. Someone was being driven to safety. To be saved, to be kept alive – in this city, in this cage. Because life mattered more than anything.
I decided to stop halfway, at the small park where my mother used to take me to the swings in my childhood. The fragrance of hops and chocolate from nearby factories still mingled in the air.
It was early afternoon. The park was full of melting snow and empty of people. On the paths the city’s chubby pigeons fluttered about, and sparrows preened their feathers in the sun. The old swings were still there.
I sat on a swing and pushed off from the slush of snow and mud. I swung higher and higher. Above was the blue canopy of the sky. Below the earth’s port of remorse. In between, swinging, I breathed fitfully. Through the small hole in the suitcase, where my mother had hidden me to keep me safe.
That night my mother didn’t come back. She just phoned from the railway station, saying that she was quite all right. She had decided not to stay the night but rather to head back home. I saw how painful that was for my grandparents.
As always during these visits, my grandmother ran a bath for me. It was the most peaceful feeling: to sit in a warm bath, hearing the television from my grandparents’ room.
That night they didn’t turn on the television. For a while there was silence. I lay in the bath, now and then submerging myself in the water so as not to hear the unusual silence.
After a while my grandmother spoke: ‘We’ve lost her. What will happen to her? What, for God’s sake, will happen to her?’
I heard my grandmother start to weep and my stepgrandfather try to comfort her.
‘The main thing is that everything is all right with our Sweet Pea.’
‘Who is to blame?’ repeated my grandmother brokenly. ‘She grew up surrounded by love. When we returned from Babīte, the windows here were shattered, it was cold, we hadn’t anything to eat. I exchanged my African fur coat for dried sugar beet. My jaw grew sore from chewing at those beets. There was nothing else. But they gave me milk to spare in my breasts. She sucked mother’s milk until she was three years old. She was a healthy, strong child. What happened to her?’
I sat in the bathtub and my grandmother’s weeping reached me there. After a while she opened the door.
‘Sweet Pea, do you want me to wash your back?’ Her eyes were still red.
She took the worn sea sponge that we had brought from the south, soaped it and gently rubbed my back.
‘Like a dulcimer,’ she said lovingly. ‘You are like a dulcimer.’
I don’t remember my mother ever washing my back. We didn’t have a bathtub; that was a city pleasure. As was the touch of my grandmother’s hand on my back.
I took my favourite photograph album to bed with me. My grandmother had lined up all the albums on the lowest shelf of the bookcase. There was my stepgrandfather’s youth, and an album of my grandmother’s young days, and an album of movie stars and my mother’s childhood and teenage album, in which was written in blue ink: ‘As you grow, may your spirit grow in clarity.’
The album was thick with padded cloth covers, a gift to my mother on her fifteenth birthday. It was the key to my mother’s life before me. She danced through it, a small ballerina in a white tutu, a girl with two braids by a birch tree, in a haystack, a soil-covered girl in a potato field, a swimmer with dripping hair, a folk dancer, her arms outstretched under a banner with Stalin’s words: ‘We are for peace and keeping peace’, an exemplary student in uniform with the first-aid cross on her left arm, a figure taking part in a procession wearing a starched kerchief, helping her stepfather hold the May Day flag.
Then she grew bigger – like me. She had short hair, wore trousers and black sunglasses. She stood by a river, casting a fishing line, but the rod was smudged and it looked like she was casting a black-and-white rainbow across the river. Then she was standing at the far end of a boat by the motor, her arms flung high as if the entire world belonged to her and she was happy, as happy as a person can be in this world. Now the same expression, having clambered onto a large rock. Now wearing a dress which reached to her knees, around her head a wide bandanna and sunglasses. Then the last pictures in the album. Someone had photographed her several times by barbed wire with a sign in two languages – Russian and Latvian: ‘Za provolokami ne khodit – smertelno’ and ‘Aiz drātēm neiet – nāvējoši’, both meaning, ‘Don’t go beyond the barbed wire – danger.’ But the photo was so full of life: the unbounded, endless seashore, the white sand of the beach, her wind-blown hair and her embroidered dress.
The long days and nights of the spring break prepared me for this new life without my daughter. I tried to spend as much time as I could at the ambulatory centre. My patients squeezed me dry and I allowed them to. I muddled their names, forgot them and got lost in the Babel of their diagnoses. When I closed my eyes at night, I was haunted by their genitals. My passion had turned into a pitiful routine, a dead end. I no longer lived along with my patients’ hopes and fears. In fact I now reacted with indifference, even to an appalling diagnosis. I simply referred them elsewhere. But they returned: they didn’t want any other doctor.
Even Jesse secured a charwoman’s job at the ambulatory centre. ‘How nice. I’ll be working right here near you,’ she said, when we ran into each other in the corridor.
Morning and evening, Jesse was a reminder of the cage in which I lived and worked. I had figured out several hormone formulae which might, just possibly, lead Jesse in the direction of womanhood. But it was clear that it would be impossible to apply them in the reality in which both Jesse and I were living. Each of us was bound to care for our own burdens: I for my patients, she for her cleaning. Outside lay freedom: for me to be a scientist and Jesse, even partially, to be a woman. In the meantime we looked after our cages.
Lonely in the evenings without my daughter, after the long workday I invited Jesse to come with me to the river to drink my patients’ gifts.