Exiled, I went out into the hospital’s car park. At intervals the ambulances would bring new patients to the emergency entrance. I gazed at the lighted windows. The dimly lit wards, the bright lights of the operating theatre, the dark blue of the morgue. All these were mine no longer. I was driven out into a world for which I cared nothing. A world in which I had been unnecessary since birth.
I inhaled smoke deeply into my lungs. I wanted to draw out this moment before I’d have to go home and face my mother, stepfather and daughter. I wanted to delay seeing their bewildered faces, half-happy perhaps, but mostly reflecting the shadow of fear. Their calm lives would be subjected to the unknown once more. It was snowing lightly. I decided to make a detour. Along Miera Street as far as Lenin Street. Maybe somewhere there would be mandarins for sale.
On Lenin Street blue stars were twinkling. The city was being decorated for the New Year celebrations. Opposite the brightly lit Riga Fashion salon I was overcome by a desire to have my hair washed and styled. Inside, hairdressers were rushing around a few well-tended, fragrant women. I stood there clutching my old suitcase, reeking of cigarettes and the hospital. Beneath my hat, tied with elastic, my hair had gone several days without washing and had never been coloured. No one paid any attention to me. I stood there for a moment longer, then walked out. It had been an idiotic impulse.
Thinking of Serafima, I stopped at the St Alexander Nevsky Orthodox Church. Did she tell her abusive husband the truth? Did she suffer because of that truth? Would she be able to protect her child?
I crossed the street and walked past Café Flora. The majority of us medical students had no time to sit in such freethinker cafés. Our days were spent in auditoriums, our evenings and nights in the anatomy lab. Idling in a café seemed like a foolish waste of time.
At the crossing, a granite Vladimir Ilyich Lenin greeted me. Lenin had cooked up all of this bitter misery, and for more than half a century thousands had had to stomach it. I was born into this mess and I would have to die in it. I didn’t even have the memories that my parents had. My father used to talk about the time when Latvia was independent, and about the Milk restaurant, which stood where the Hotel Latvia now reached for the sky. He and my mother had met there during a break between lectures and had a delicious meal. And then they had taken a walk around the nearby Freedom Monument, which was known as Milda. This was separated from Lenin’s statue by a lime tree-lined avenue, and the statues had their backs to each other. For one lats a street photographer had taken a picture of my mother and father standing beside Milda.
Lenin had also turned his back on the Orthodox cathedral, which had been converted into a planetarium. It was a civilized gesture, as if he knew nothing of the distant lake in Siberia where, on his orders, hundreds of Orthodox priests had been drowned.
Yes, God doesn’t exist. I had already confirmed that. But there is a heaven and there are stars. And I had been driven out of my paradise.
I stepped inside the planetarium to get warm. To one side was Dieva auss – God’s Ear. This was another café that I hadn’t managed to visit as a student. I ordered coffee with a shot of Balsam spirit. The patrons around me looked relaxed. They were sitting on the floor. Some were throwing matchboxes around. Maybe it was a game known only to them. Cigarette smoke curled in the air.
I sat in a corner and truly felt that I was in this non-existent God’s ear. I had wandered in there on the way out of my paradise. A gaunt man with long hair approached my table. He had ordered two more Balsam shots and wished to get acquainted. He claimed to be thirty-three – the same age as Jesus when he died.
‘That’s my age too,’ I said. ‘Is Jesse only a man’s name?’ I asked, having privately already baptized him ‘Jesse’, like in the Christmas hymn.
‘That’s a brave question,’ he responded. ‘What do you do for a living?’
‘I was a doctor,’ I said.
‘And what now?’
‘Do we have any idea of what comes next? Is there any sense, living here, in thinking about what’s next?’
‘You have a point,’ Jesse agreed keenly. ‘Living here, there’s little sense to life. The world goes on outside. For a whole decade, while we cowards sit in these cafés,’ he whispered, ‘they are dying for us.’
‘Who are they?’ I whispered back.
‘Jan Palach, who in 1969 set fire to himself and died in the centre of Prague.’
‘My daughter was born in ’69,’ I told Jesse.
He seemed not to hear and continued: ‘Janis Joplin and Jimmy Hendrix – they overdosed in ’70. For their and our freedom.’ Jesse’s voice grew louder. ‘For freedom in general, understand? And also Jim Morrison, the very next year. While we putrefy here and pretend to be underground heroes. There’s nothing real here, either on the streets or in the cafés. Everywhere’s just a pitiful existence. Everyone everywhere is pretending, not living. On the streets pretending to be obedient Soviet citizens and here we pretend to be dissidents. There’s no freedom here.’
I listened to Jesse, to the names which meant nothing to me. I only knew two irrefutable facts about this period: a daughter had been born to me, and recently at the physiology laboratory in Cambridge a woman’s ovum had been artificially fertilized, which I had discovered from a journal sent by my uncle from London in a parcel of clothes.
Jesse – I wanted to interject into this whispered flood of words – Jesse, do you even realize what that means? There’s no mystery, there’s no divine will. Nor is there any freedom – either to be born or to die. This medical manipulation proves that.
But Jesse grew tipsy and continued to whisper about freedom snatched from us and someone living and dying for us.
Eventually, his whisper died away. Jesse crossed his hands, let his head droop and fell asleep. His long hair spread across gaunt shoulders.
I quietly stood up and left God’s Ear.
A glass of warm milk and over it a freshly formed skin. Milk soup. Fruit jelly in milk. Those were my worst trials at school. In our country school drinking milk was obligatory. I hated milk and all that was associated with it. I struggled with it as if with an invisible devil trying to possess me, no matter how hard I resisted. I tried to drink it in great gulps, not breathing through my nose, so as not to taste it. After drinking my glass of milk, as often as not I would rush to the school toilet and try to make myself sick.
My school day was divided into pre-milk and post-milk. The pre-milk time just before lunch was unbearable. I had trouble concentrating. Flashing before my eyes were – not continents or pistils and stamens, not catheti or hypotenuses, but glasses of milk. In the afternoon, however, I was attentive and observant. I could work out a square root and recognize a double infinitive. Everything fell into place as soon as that damned taste of milk disappeared from my mouth. Unfortunately, my battle with milk became ever more noticeable, until the teacher wrote in my daily journal that my mother should come in for a meeting.
I dragged myself home like a whipped dog. My mother and I lived separate lives. It wasn’t good to get her involved in my milk secret. Now it couldn’t be helped.
The next afternoon, during biology, I saw through the window my mother approaching the school. She was wearing a flimsy coat and a crocheted beret. I saw how she stopped before the flowerbeds to light a cigarette. She had become one with her cigarettes. Our clothes were always permeated with the stench of cigarette smoke. In a strange way I preferred this to the smell of milk.