Soviet Milk Read online

  She hopes that her mother and aunt are no longer standing at the door like the mythical Cerberus, ready to push her back through the seven circles of hell. To make sure, she’ll stay a little while longer. Then she’ll leave, will sit by the lake and afterwards go home, as if she had danced her fill and the young man who accompanied her home had been too shy to come in.

  She settles in a corner and, gazing at the dancing couples, almost cheers up. Then a young man saunters towards her across the dance floor. She hopes he’ll change direction but soon it’s clear: he’s coming straight for her. Politely, he asks her to dance. She doesn’t even remember that she could say no. She simply gives him her hand and they join the dancers. He waltzes with assurance. Now and then his cheek touches hers and she realizes that this isn’t unpleasant. Between dances they do as the other couples: stand apart, not knowing what to do with their hands, waiting for the next song to begin. After the tenth dance he suggests they have some wine. There’s a crowd at the tables but he easily slips through the crush and surfaces with two full glasses. They sit down at the side of the room.

  She’s going to be a doctor, a scientist.

  He is working in a mechanics workshop for the time being. How did she happen to be here?

  She’s staying with her mother’s sister at the farm.

  How does she like it in the countryside?

  Fine. If she had her books, she could live in the country.

  How does she plan to earn money?

  She’ll be a scientist.

  Ah. He’d like to study to be an aviation engineer. Would she like to dance some more?

  No.

  Can he accompany her home?

  Yes.

  The January night is unusually warm. They walk down to the lake, which is still not iced over. He gathers some flat stones and shows her how to make them skip. Just as her thoughts skip over the surface when she tries to understand Feuerbach. The stone brushes the water’s surface and then flies up again, but to earn her diploma she’ll have to explain Feuerbach’s atheism – the stone sinks.

  He invites her to drink some tea with him, in a nearby guard’s hut, where they spend the night.

  *

  After my father’s death I slowly grew to hate both my mother and our general situation. Troubled by her own history, she urged me to learn everything my teachers wanted, not to talk back and to be an active member of the Communist youth organizations. My mother was protected by my stepfather. Once a soldier in the victorious army of the Great Patriotic War, both his service in the guard of Latvia’s president and his brother’s voluntary enlisting in the German army were obscured by this illustrious background. The bloody polka of history.

  My mother and stepfather would discuss their brothers late into the night. My stepfather’s brother had been executed as a traitor, before which he’d been tortured for some previous, unspecified betrayal. ‘Those Russian dogs,’ my stepfather would mutter. I didn’t understand. He had marched shoulder to shoulder with those dogs almost as far as Berlin, and enjoyed May and November festivities with them, and received a food parcel with rarities such as dry-cured sausage, instant coffee and marinated pickles and tomatoes.

  My mother’s brother was alive and well in London. He owned a cloth factory and sent packages with things unseen here: beautiful fabrics, skeins of wool and patterns, from which my mother sewed our clothes. Twice a year my mother sent the Soviet agencies a request for permission to visit him. Twice a year she received an official reply with the decision netselesoobrazno – non-essential. Her ten-year communication with the regime ended once again with netselesoobrazno: the response to her last request for permission to go to London, for her brother’s funeral.

  Despite these absurdities, my mother continued to raise me as an honourable and faithful young Soviet citizen. Yet within me blossomed a hatred for the duplicity and hypocrisy of this existence. We carried flags in the May and November parades in honour of the Red Army, the Revolution and Communism, while at home we crossed ourselves and waited for the English army to come and free Latvia from the Russian boot.

  Having honourably fulfilled my hypocritical role at school, I grew bookish and withdrawn. When a professor living on the floor above us died, the new tenants simply jettisoned his library via the window. An enormous heap of books built up in the yard. My mother didn’t hide her disapproval when I lugged the old multi-volume medical encyclopedia up the stairs, but she didn’t object, so as not to widen the breach between us.

  And here it all was: the truth about the wretched, hypocritical creature we call man. A muddle of blood vessels, convolutions of intestines, glands and secretions, lymph nodes and arteries, phalli and vaginas, testicles and wombs. In this narrative, death was just an accidental, unavoidable stopping point.

  *

  Thinking about my mother, about her birth and mine, I can’t help thinking about predetermination, or maybe some great, incomprehensible plan. I picture my mother not as a medical student in Soviet Latvia carrying an unwanted baby in the grey Riga autumn but instead with a bandanna tied around her forehead, her fat tummy half-bared, in that parallel world where freedom reigns and The Who are singing at Woodstock.

  In spite of the historical impossibility, there was something of the flower child in my mother. She wasn’t afraid of experimenting with herself and spent periods in a haze – whether through the use of some substance or thanks to her refusal to countenance the place and time in which she was fated to be alive. I remember her once, drunk on wine and high in a field of dandelions by the hippodrome, where the horses no longer raced. For her the hippodrome was evidence of some other, carefree and unfettered life. She ran through the dandelions like a young mare, and I skipped alongside getting under her feet. Out of breath, she lay down among the dandelions and I flopped down with her. There we lay, and the world had no limits.

  *

  I achieved my dream: the Riga Medical Institute accepted me. Officials there clung to the pre-war tradition by which doctors all came from Jewish families. Newcomers found it hard to break in. But I was difficult to stop.

  On the kitchen table stood an unknown departed’s skull, which my stepfather had dug up in an abandoned country graveyard and steeped in various liquids until it had achieved a bluish-white sheen. Morning and night, eye to eye with the skull, I recited my Lord’s Prayer of bones in Latvian and Latin: Spārnkauls – os sphenoidale, pakauša kauls – os occipitale, deniņu kauls – os temporale, paura kauls – os parietale, pieres kauls – os frontale, sietiņkauls – os ethmoidale, augšžokļa kauls – maxilla, vaiga kauls – os zygomaticum, aukslēju kauls – os palatinum, asaru kauls – os lacrimale, deguna kauls – os nasale, mēles kauls – os hyoideum…

  My best friend was the anatomy lab’s Cadaver Mārtiņš, as he was known. For a measure of vodka he would let you into the locked rooms at night. He would fish the required body part out of the formalin tank for me. I could spend hours dissecting, preparing and sewing it up. To solve life’s puzzle you had to use death’s rebus as a guide.

  An old professor noticed my diligence. He said that I had an unusual drive to unlock the body’s secrets for a young woman. Also that my mind was too clever and wouldn’t do me any good in the long run. He said I must learn to accept that the key to life or death did not lie in my hands. He insisted that there is something more than existence, something we may not mention. The old man had nothing to lose. One evening, finding me bent over a uterus in formalin, he asked, ‘Do you believe in God?’ This was hard to answer, given that all references to anything divine had been erased from printed materials under the Soviet regime.

  ‘I still haven’t had the opportunity to meet Him,’ I said.

  *

  I was seven or eight years old when I temporarily became nearly mute. It was a lovely autumn afternoon. A friend and I were collecting the leaves that were beginning to turn yellow around the hippodrome. From over the trees, the smell of burning grew pervasive. It didn’t seem suspicious
because people often used to burn things in their gardens in the autumn.

  But the smell became stronger and suddenly, through the hippodrome roof, enormous flames shot out. They leapt along the beautiful building with unbelievable speed, and soon human yells as well as ambulance and fire engine sirens could be heard. We stood as if turned to stone, gazing at this disastrous scene, our pockets full of leaves. My mother flew from one of the ambulances. Screaming, she rushed to the firemen, grabbed a pail, scooped up water from a marshy ditch and raced in the direction of the fire-riddled building. Crying miserably, I ran to be with her. The firefighters caught up with us among the stands in the main arena, just as the burning roof collapsed.

  In the ambulance, they injected my mother with something to calm her. Stuttering, I struggled to say only one word. I remember that short journey from the burning hippodrome to our building so well. I led my mother by the hand. Staring blankly, she obediently came along with me. I continued to cry and to stammer that one word: ‘home’.

  It was a real Walpurgis Night. The calming effect of the injection soon wore off and my mother spent the night demolishing her room. My grandmother locked me in the bathroom, while my step-grandfather tried to get into my mother’s room. ‘Butchers,’ she screamed, ‘butchers, butchers, butchers!’ My grandmother stood weeping at the glass door, pleading for her to be quiet. Then my mother began a long, wailing cry. Soon, worried neighbours were knocking on our door. Then all went silent. A silence that blended into the darkness of the bathroom, where I sat sobbing and still trying quietly to say the word ‘home’.

  *

  It was a lovely summer’s day in 1977. In the morning after night duty, the head doctor called me in. He said an opportunity had arisen to supplement my education in gynaecology and endocrinology in Leningrad. After the abattoir – as we called night duty in our jargon – with its ever-spinning wheel of births, caesarean sections, scheduled legal and spontaneous abortions, myomas, polyps and cysts – to go to Leningrad and concentrate on science seemed incredible. I had to go to Engels Street to apply and submit to a short interview. It was just a formality.

  I was tempted by this antechamber of hell on Engels Street. Maybe I would be let into paradise; maybe I would have to pay for it in blood. I fortified myself with coffee and a caffeine ampoule. I headed past our building, where my stepfather was preparing breakfast while my mother braided my daughter’s hair for school. Past their life, where I didn’t fit, but inhabited it like a ghost from another world to whose mystery I was increasingly drawn.

  Just a formality, the head doctor had said. I was going to the building in whose cellars four years before my birth, just as a formality, the newly formed Soviet regime in Latvia had slaughtered innocent people, and their blood had coursed away through specially constructed gutters to mingle with Riga’s waste water. The prisoners crowded into tiny airless rooms with naked bulbs overhead had waited either for death or to be deported to Siberia. Such were those times. Crimes against the regime were an everyday occurrence. I had to go through the formality of this circle of hell. Leningrad was waiting for me with its new scientific discoveries and free spirit, which oppressed Riga was not allowed.

  Inside the Engels Street building an elegant gentleman in civilian clothes led me to his office.

  ‘You’re a very talented young doctor, but you have a complicated background. Make your replies to my questions brief and clear. Did you ever meet your father?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you know he was a traitor to his country?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘If you had known, would you have contacted him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did your mother ever talk to you about your brother?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you know that he was engaged in spreading anti-Soviet propaganda in London?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you ever want to meet him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What exactly did you mean by these words, which were said on — at — o’clock in the anatomy laboratory: “I still haven’t had the opportunity to meet him”? Who is this he?’

  ‘God.’

  ‘Do you believe in God?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Thank you. We will notify your head doctor of our decision regarding your studies in Leningrad.’

  In the afternoon the head doctor phoned to congratulate me on being given the opportunity to supplement my education in Leningrad. An hour later we had to rush to the hippodrome, which was consumed in blue flames. I managed to throw all sorts of ampoules into my bag. I was furious and determined to save the people. I know they injected me with a sedative. I don’t remember any more.

  *

  When my mother returned from Leningrad, suddenly she no longer had work. She was withdrawn. She only emerged to make coffee or tea. Our lives went on in two parallel worlds. In our room the morning started early. My step-grandfather prepared breakfast, my grandmother ironed my school uniform and braided my hair. I organized my school books, notebooks, pencil case and pencils, fountain pen and rubber. Then my grandmother accompanied me to school, holding my hand all the way.

  I studied hard but always counted the hours until school was over and my step-grandfather would be waiting for me outside. He was noticeably older than the other parents, but he was always handsomely dressed and distinguished-looking, being so tall. Walking home from school, we often lingered about the queues at the meat and dairy shops, in the hope of picking something up there, ‘thrown out’ as if to animals, as we used to say in those lean years. Afterwards we would stop again, to queue at the kiosk for the evening newspaper. Only then would we go home to sausages with potatoes and sauerkraut.

  In the evenings the television would be on. It informed us in Russian and Latvian about the thriving country in which we lived. My grandmother hung on every word of our great leader Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev’s long speeches. She was convinced that Brezhnev had ill-fitting dentures. She claimed to be afraid that they might fall out of his mouth.

  Occasionally on these evenings I went to see my mother in her room. It was filled with books, piles of papers, dirty cups and ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts. Apathetic and bored, my mother would be sitting on her bed, flipping through notes. She paid little attention to her visitor from next door. I would sit for a while, looking at her and her room, then quietly leave.

  I remember the afternoon when, instead of my stepgrandfather, I found my mother waiting for me. She kissed me, took my school bag and told me that we were going to the market. We almost never shopped in the market because everything there was expensive. Dark-skinned men displayed large suitcases full of wonders: fragrant yellow melons, avocados, bunches of white grapes and orange fruits which they called hurma–persimmons. My mother allowed me to choose whatever I desired. I chose two avocados, a persimmon and a handful of some nuts – my mother said these were edible chestnuts and I thought this incredible.

  This market day was so different from our usual days. After buying our foreign fruit, my mother sat me down at a table in the market café. She ordered hot chocolate for two and asked me if I would like to go to the country with her. She had been offered a job at a small ambulatory health-care centre. It would be good for us both – to have a little house of our own, a garden and possibly a cat or a dog. I sat holding my bag of fruit and with childish rapture tried to envisage this brand-new, lovely life. But what about my grandparents?

  ‘You’ll come to visit them as often as you wish,’ my mother said.

  Walking back, the nearer we came to our home, the more impossible this opportunity seemed. In the kitchen I saw them both, visibly devastated. Obviously my mother had already talked to them. She left the three of us alone. We hugged each other and cried. It couldn’t be helped.

  *

  While I was supplementing my studies in Leningrad, I stayed at Larisa Nikolayevna’s old-fashioned flat on Neva Prospect. The old woman turned my fantasy world into reality.
She refused to call St Petersburg Leningrad and remembered not only, as she said, bylaya roskosh – the times of former grandeur – but also the time of the city blockade, when people had to eat newspapers and glue. She wasn’t interested in medicine, but in the evenings she could talk for hours about Yesenin. She did not consider him a great poet, but the rumours of his disappearance or death interested her. ‘Thus many of ours have disappeared,’ she would say.

  I wasn’t interested in conspiracy theories. In the mornings I went to the Institute. There I met up with my Russian female colleagues, who survived on coffee, cigarettes, caffeine ampoules and boiled beetroot. They dressed in thick pullovers and wide trousers, sported boyish haircuts and were obsessed with deciphering the mysteries of fertility and infertility. They conversed in an intelligent Russian, now and then interspersed with robust swear words. In the evenings they drank diluted spirits but by morning they were fresh and attentive, bent over their microscopes.

  Exhausted by endless examination of cell samples, in the evenings we sipped our spirits and pondered Brodsky’s poetry. He said that life was a pendulum which, once swung to the left, had only to swing back again. Just six years earlier he had been banished from Russia. He was now wandering somewhere on the streets of New York. In Leningrad, we shuffled along on the thin ice of freethinking.

  Larisa Nikolayevna’s neighbour Serafima was a decent Russian woman who submitted to her husband’s abuse. He was a war invalid who drank and beat her. The more he hit his wife, the more she loved him. And she never lost hope of becoming a mother. Every morning and evening she would creep quietly into the pantry, where she had hidden her tiny icons and candles. There Serafima would pray to the Mother of God for a baby. She often came to visit us, always bringing a treat: cabbage-stuffed pirogi, vareniki dumplings, meat patties or borscht. We would eat in Larisa Nikolayevna’s kitchen and Serafima would sing a mournful song about a child who won’t come to its mother: ‘Miloye ditya, kak zhe ya bez tebya’ – ‘How can I be without you, my baby?’