‘Dear child, you have to keep your chin up. You can’t slip up in any way. You have to be the best.’
Dear child? I was stunned.
‘I’m often afraid for you,’ she continued. ‘Afraid you might fall apart. All your troubling experiences with your mother.’
I suddenly felt sorry for her. ‘Teacher, everything will be fine. My mother is better, and she has someone who looks after her.’
‘Good. That’s very good,’ she said, and offered me a sweet. ‘But all this must stay between us two, agreed?’
‘Agreed, Teacher.’
My marks improved. My combined autumn and winter school report was very good. For both the school holidays I forced myself to go to stay with my mother. She had settled, to a degree. Jesse supplied the brush bases and the wires, and my mother had become adept at tying them, demonstrating as much talent in this as she had in consultations with her patients. In fact she was earning just as much. For each of the school breaks she supplied me royally with pocket money – fifty roubles.
I brought gifts for my grandmother and stepgrandfather back with me from each of those visits. Sometimes my mother baked a cream of wheat cake, other times I brought home a roast chicken, and other times she made stuffed cabbage. Everything she made tasted good.
In the middle of January, the headmistress called us all into the large auditorium. We were to listen to a lecture read by the wunderkind. His topic was the first issue of a new literary journal. Along with the head, the wunderkind ridiculed and slandered the journal from the first page to the last. ‘Is this poetry?’ the head almost yelled. ‘“One should not climb on a toilet, for then big, black footprints are left on a white cistern.” Is that poetry?’ She asked and answered her own question, and glared at the assembled students in the hall. All this public derision of the journal only increased our interest in it. The first issue was passed from hand to hand and read from cover to cover. Teacher Blūms would certainly have recommended it as obligatory reading.
But in February something ghastly happened. In the seaside resort of Jūrmala a young poet was pushed out of a window in a tall apartment block. He was the poet whose poem we had read for our first workshop:
He gazed out at me from the obituary in the paper with curly, longish hair, square-framed glasses and a manly face. How could he be dead?
I discovered the date and location of his funeral. I told the girl who shared my desk at school that I would go to the funeral, even if it was during class time. She was a great gossip and soon all the class knew of my intention. More and more people applied to go. Now we were almost the entire class, except for the few who were afraid.
On the day of the funeral we attended the first two classes. Then we gathered in the cloakroom to get ready for the trip. Our form teacher and the headmistress caught us on the school steps. Someone had informed them, of course.
‘You won’t be going anywhere,’ the head said, her face white with anger. Our form teacher stood beside her wringing her hands.
My classmates kept looking at me.
‘We’re going,’ I said to the head. ‘All of us are going.’
I suddenly felt the same power I had that time in primary school when the sweaty man was challenging me about my mother.
‘We are going,’ I repeated, while a feeling of nausea rose inside me, for I remembered how the head and the KGB man had forced me to incriminate Teacher Blūms.
‘We are going,’ I said again as clearly as I could. ‘And then you can expel us all.’
Our group started on our way. The head and my form teacher remained outside on the steps on that freezing February morning.
We pooled our money and brought some flowers. By the time we reached the graveyard, they were frozen. And there was a sea of people there. We mingled with the crowd, never again to be separated from it.
Jesse was a real master with the wire. Patiently she taught me this new trade. In the beginning my hands were hurt, but slowly I became more skilful. It was mechanical yet, in its own way, creative work too. The wires had to be drawn with a special bent needle through the holes of a wooden base and then nipped off in equal lengths. Jesse wondered at my dexterity. ‘Well, you used to sew up women’s flesh.’ And she fell silent, thinking perhaps that I could be offended by this mention of past times. But those doors were closed. The wire brushes formed a large pile. At the end of the week Jesse brought boxes into which she carefully packed the brushes. She was paid in cash for them. She continued to clean at the ambulatory centre. She also continued to tell me about the patients there who wanted consultations and kept asking when I would return. She thought she was keeping my spirits up.
As I drew each wire through the base of the brush, a calm space grew in my head. It was something like sleeping, only with open eyes and hands in movement, repeating their gestures over and over. The work steadied me. It also prepared me for something that was irretrievably closing in. As Jesse had said in that half-whisper to my daughter: everything must be accepted with humility, even wire brushes. Then we can regain our strength of soul.
I had almost given up reading. Neither Ishmael nor Winston haunted me any longer. I now saw them as poor lost souls belonging inextricably to this world – a world I would have to leave behind sooner or later. And there was no way they could help me at that point of departure.
I tried to put aside the very best for my daughter. Two days before her arrival Jesse had gone to the nearby town to hunt for groceries. She had her ways and her favoured places. Green peas, peppery sausage, occasionally oranges or squid – all under-the-counter wonders, not to be found on store shelves. As a brush assembler I could afford much more than I’d been able to on my monthly wage at the ambulatory clinic.
When she came for her spring holiday, my daughter told me about the poet’s funeral. And how afterwards at school and in the atmosphere generally something had changed.
‘Mamma,’ she said, ‘something is near at hand. Everyone can sense it, but no one is talking aloud about it yet.’
I listened to her enthusiastic voice and kept quiet about my premonitions.
Jesse had an urge to mock my daughter’s enthusiasm. Waving a dishcloth over her head, she exclaimed, ‘Freedom or death!’ then fell silent, glancing at me with guilty eyes.
‘Jesse, don’t treat her like a brainless child,’ I said. ‘And, really,’ I added, ‘all of us are the living dead here.’
Silently Jesse handed dishes to my daughter, who dried them. On the table the old clock went on ticking.
The last year of secondary school sped by. Before the exams my form teacher once more called me into her cubbyhole office.
‘You’ve studied so hard that you’ve earned it.’
‘Earned what?’ I asked.
‘We could excuse you from the final exams.’
I was struck dumb by this offer.
‘Why, Teacher?’
‘It’s a lot of pressure and, taking into account your mother’s problems, one never knows how your nerves will react.’
I felt as if she had doused me with cold water. Maybe she intended it for the best, but this pity degraded me lower than the floor we stood on.
‘Thank you, Teacher, but I would be happy to sit my exams. You don’t need to worry about me.’
‘Think hard about it,’ my form teacher said. And, leading me out of her cubbyhole, ‘Remember such a possibility exists.’
That day I didn’t go home after my classes. I went to the small park where my grandparents often used to take me when I was younger. It still had the same broken benches, potholed paths, overgrown flowerbeds, littered sandpits and old swings. It was a spring afternoon. The only people there were an old couple sitting in the sun. I put my schoolbag down beside the sandpit and sat on the swing. I pushed off with my feet and began to swing myself higher and higher. A tingling began in my stomach. I swung higher still. My mother wasn’t pushing me on the swing. She had never taken me to the swings; I had no such childhood memory. I was swinging on my own. I tried not to touch the ground with my feet, not to brake this free-flowing movement. The warm spring wind in my hair. A cloudless sky above my head. I embraced the gifts of living and breathing.