I began to go out in the evenings, leaving my mother with Jesse. Jesse sat faithfully beside her in the garden and listened to endless tirades about Winston, this new stranger who had completely overshadowed Ishmael.
With frequent turning and consultation, the pages of this half-book began to disintegrate. Looking for sturdier paper, my mother eventually took our calendar and wrapped the book in that. The inscription on it in red said ‘Novij 1984 god’ – ‘New Year 1984’. She crossed this out and wrote in black ballpoint: ‘Summer 1984.’
I hated this half-book wrapped in a calendar. It had stolen my last summer with my mother and led her even further into a fantasy world, away from life, the blooming garden and the balmy river.
I floated through my daughter’s departure as if wrapped in mist. My daily reality had blended with Jesse’s book. My life no longer felt as though it was mine. July and half of August sped by at savage speed. Eventually Jesse took the book away and hid it somewhere. She could no longer look on as I ruined my last few days with my daughter. I admired my daughter. She didn’t show her disappointment and patiently tolerated my odd absence, while carefully packing the things she would be taking to Riga. She had found a part-time job at the post office, to earn some pocket money, and in the evenings she wasn’t home, but she never came back later than midnight. Maybe she was in love? There was no time for her to tell me about it. Jesse found this the most painful thing. The day she took the book from me, she said that I was behaving like her mother, who had left her on the orphanage steps with the note: ‘I don’t want this gift.’
‘Are you even aware,’ Jesse said, ‘that she’ll never be with you in the way she is now? She’ll move on into her own life. She’s an intelligent and good-natured girl – she’s a blessing. What are these devils tormenting you?’ Jesse spoke as if delivering a sermon.
My devils – my besi – I had tried to talk about them with Serafima, but she hadn’t believed me. Or refused to believe me. But Jesse saw them in me.
‘Mamma, I’m not going to take my old school uniform. I’ll leave it in the wardrobe.’
We were sewing a new uniform – a skirt, a checked blouse and a blazer – and my daughter was busy chasing away my besi.
‘I won’t take my school bag either; it’s worn out inside. Nor the ski boots; they pinch my feet. And, if it’s OK, I’ll leave the fairy-tale books. I won’t have time to read them now. The dog’s collar I’ll put in the lower drawer of the wardrobe. Maybe you’ll get another dog. And don’t forget to water my Christmas cactus now and then. And, please, don’t overwater the tiny green plant with snakeskin star flowers. Mamma, what do you think: should I get a fringe cut? Maybe I should have a bob? You know, I’ll leave my neckerchief. There’s no sense in taking it along. All right? And here are some other bits and pieces – stones, chestnuts, the herbarium. They won’t be in your way, will they?’
‘No, they won’t be in my way, my child. I’ll be fine with them in my cage. I’ll pick them up every couple of days, blow off the dust, air the room, water the flowers. Slavery is freedom, child. I’ll be right here, waiting for you.’
Slavery is freedom. I learned that from my book.
The night before my daughter left we sat for a long time in the garden. The August night was humid and warm. Then my daughter asked, ‘Mamma, does any child remember how her mother’s milk tasted?’
‘I think they can’t. You can’t have memories that early.’
We sat on in silence.
I returned to Riga and my grandparents. In the whirl of beginning at my new secondary school, for a while I forgot about my mother. Even though I had my own spacious room, I often slept on the pull-out chair in my grandmother and step-grandfather’s room. We wanted to be together as much as we could manage.
The new school was tough. It was enormous. Some of the classes took place in the old building, some in the new. The two buildings were joined by a long glass corridor and riddled with smaller and larger labyrinths of corridors, along which one had to get around every day. There were only a few newcomers in the class. Classmates kept their distance from each other just as the teachers kept their distance from the students. The headmistress sat alone in her office. Approaching her was strictly prohibited. Everything was quite the opposite of my experience at our small country school. In those first weeks of September I almost missed the rainy beetroot and carrot fields, the early mornings when we used to sit all together by the heaps of green stalks and leaves, and warm soup was brought to us there in the fields.
Everything here was different. Sterile, clean, cruelly lit by the bright ceiling lights. Everyone in this city school was competing to be the best. And the head, a vast woman with grey hair and the shadow of a moustache, encouraged all of this. When she appeared in the corridors, everyone froze. Even the gym teacher, who at least matched her in physical volume.
The romance of the beetroot fields was exchanged for twice-weekly school cleaning. On cleaning days, classes ended earlier. We had to scrub the floors and radiators, to make up for what the cleaners missed.
When the work was done, the headmistress would emerge. She wore a large white glove on her right hand for inspecting the areas we had cleaned. Of course, grey and sometimes even black smudges would appear on the white glove, to be followed by a lecture in the great hall. All Soviet students bore responsibility for honestly done work. All young communists’ consciences must be as white as her glove – before it acquired the stains of someone’s shoddy work.
During these lectures in the stuffy, low-ceilinged auditorium, my conscience started to ache for Bambi. I suddenly understood the poor hamster. Mentally, I begged his forgiveness. What’s more, as I waited to be liberated from the stifling hall and the head’s penetrating voice, I remembered how my mother had sympathized with Bambi and eaten the mushrooms, not knowing if they were safe or deadly.
I began to question my grandmother and stepgrandfather about their life. Were things always like they were now and how the announcers told us it was on TV every evening?
My step-grandfather said one shouldn’t dwell on the past. Nothing would change here. The Russian boot would be here for ever. And, for God’s sake, he added, above all, I must not to talk about any of this in school. Even with those I considered my friends.
But I was not to be stopped. I told my grandparents about the time my mother got drunk after Brezhnev’s funeral, about the red-white-red Michaelmas daisies on her table and about all she had said about Latvia.
My grandparents stared at me in horror, then they both started to cry. My step-grandfather brought a photograph album from the stack in my room.
‘This autumn you’ll be a big girl,’ he said, ‘but you must understand that this has to stay in our house. Because nothing, absolutely nothing will change here.’
‘You have to live with how things are, Sweet Pea,’ my grandmother added.
But my step-grandfather’s album was like a fairy tale. A tale of Latvia before I was born and even before my mother was born. My step-grandfather was in it, wearing a beautiful official uniform, in knee-high boots and holding a flag at the Freedom Monument. The sepiatoned image muddled the colours. ‘Two red stripes and one white,’ my step-grandfather said. ‘We had our own state and our own flag.’
Now tears also filled my eyes, because my mother had said the same thing. All of this had seemed to me no more than her own dark nightmares, but now it turned out to be the truth.
What to do with the truth? The school timetable included six Russian language and literature classes every week. And we had to study the Communist Party Congress documents, which repeated the same meaningless phrases again and again. All of these empty phrases had to be memorized, then recited.