High Tide (12 page)

 

Aksels and Ieva! She's the one taking aim. On the sunny day of January 15
th
.

 

Ieva realizes that it's been years since she's thought of Aksels. She remembers his face. See his eyes, but without any expression in them. Notices the small, birdlike silhouette at the end of the barrel. It suddenly seems to her that January 15
th
never happened to them. That it was a story about two other people in another life.

 

She lets out a low cry and rubs her hand over her face as if trying to wake herself up. Peter grabs her arm in concern, she pushes him away, gets up, and heads toward the back of the hall, where there are tables set with lunch refreshments. In one long gulp, Ieva drains a bottle of mineral water, then another. The movie has sucked the energy from her; she feels like all that's left of her is an empty shell.

The movie ends before the trigger is pulled. An open ending.

There are a few seconds of dead silence, and then there is applause. Barbara takes the CD out of the player and goes to her seat, searching for Ieva's face, but Ieva doesn't even wave. She's standing alone at the back of the hall by a white, cloth covered table, wolfing down some brown cake with whipped cream. She's cut off a huge chunk, loaded it onto a plate, and is wolfing it down.

 

Peter catches up with her at the park. He's standing in the wind—gasping for breath and his hair blowing around him.

“Maybe we can have dinner together tonight?”

Tonight, Ieva thinks. She'll pull herself together by tonight.

“Sure.”

“I'll call your room…”

“I don't know when I'll be back. I was going to take a walk.”

Peter shakes her by the shoulder.

“Then call me—room 311, on the third floor. You'll call? Around seven, eight? Promise? I'll be waiting.”

He hurries back. Probably back to the café for yet another glass of wine to celebrate Barbara's movie.

 

It's still a beautiful January day.

The Spree River. Some school. Benches. The sun. Children shouting.

Wind and leaves. The anti-autumn. This is what April could be like in Latvia. Or Indian Summer.

I could be happy just to be happy, Ieva thinks. Happy about the river, or Berlin. Look, Möbelhaus Kern—such pretty, light-colored sofas and dark leather cushions! Except something has jolted her heart with such unease that she can't enjoy the cushions.

A Deutsche Post boy rides up to the furniture store on his bike with its yellow mail pouches.

“What's the date today?” she asks him.

“January 15
th
,” the boy answers, and with one look Ieva sees herself like in a mirror—standing bewilderedly in front of a shop window with her dopey, lost-in-the-past eyes. She steps aside as if in apology.

Aside. Aside. Aside.

More than anything right now, she wants to be in this moment and in her skin.

 

She stands on the Alt-Moabit Bridge. The Spree flows under it dark and fast, but can't pull out to sea the handful of ducks and geese stubbornly fighting the current. On one of the bridge pillars, someone has written in graceful lettering—
Alla heisst Gott.

 

The fresh air gives her strength to exist. When she gets back to the hotel she's exhausted, but calm. She spreads out on the bed and lays motionless hour after hour, enjoying the hotel's anonymous emptiness, the fact that there are so few of her things here, so little of her life.

To be alone. To not think of anything. To extract these hours from the flesh of her being.

Evening slips in unnoticed. She had dozed off from staring at the ceiling. She takes a cold shower, gets dressed and calls Peter. He doesn't pick up. After fifteen minutes she calls again, then decides to go down to his room. What if his phone just isn't working?

The soft, red hallway swallows all sound. Ieva knocks at 311. After a moment Peter opens the door—half naked. A towel wrapped around his hips.

“I was asleep,” he said. “Didn't hear your call. Come in!”

Ieva clearly senses the hidden advance in his lithe, tan back, the crease in the material of the towel around his waist, and the provocative look in his eyes. The nature of woman is to inspire man. And what then? When there's nothing left to inspire, to satiate them?

The blood quickly rushes to her cheeks. She lowers her eyes.

“No, thank you! I'll wait in the restaurant,” she says briskly and heads for the stairs.

It is what it is. A glance and a disarming spark that either happens or doesn't. And sometimes that spark flares up in a moment shared between two people.

But she doesn't need that anymore.

 

Peter clinks his glass against hers. The glass wall of the Arus Hotel restaurant extends along the edge of the river. The restaurant looks out onto the rushing Spree, the dark depths of which catch hold of as many reflections as there are stars in the sky.

He opens a packet of cigarettes and offers them to Ieva. She declines.

As he lights one he idly says:

“I'm not addicted to cigarettes! I just smoke them for pleasure.”

“And pleasure? You're not addicted to that?”

They laugh again. It's easy to spend time with Peter because he is so damned confident, so bright and ironic.

And then he grins wickedly.

“I was in Latvia once.”

Ieva asks:

“What did you think?”

“It was five years ago. I was looking for a translator for my book. I only found one Hungarian translator in the entire country—some old guy about a hundred and thirty years old, a complete Methuselah. I flat-out told him not to translate my book, and went on to Lithuania. You're like an Indian tribe—locked into yourselves, resolved to be withdrawn.”

It's not exactly flattering. Ieva decides to fight back.

“Writers are more of a tribe,” she laughs. “But you look pretty meticulous. You took care of the translations for your book yourself? You're your own manager, right? Y'know, Peter, I'd like to know—doesn't your life as a writer suffer from your life as a performer?”

Peter's dark eyes narrow.

“How do you mean?”

“I watched you when you read the fragment from your play. You calculate how many smiles each of your jokes will get. And if the audience doesn't react the way you're used to, you break down, feel out of place in your own skin. Don't you become the dependent one, then?”

Check.

Smiling, he draws on his cigarette and leans back in his chair.

“There isn't any writer's life or performer's life. There's only one life. Mine.”

Then he serves up an unexpected question:

“What about you? I've been watching you all week. Are you happy with your life?”

And mate.

Ieva can't find the words.

“You're an amazing woman in everything you do. How come whenever you tell a story you always finish it by saying you wish it had been different? Does someone else make your decisions for you? And if not, why don't you do what you want to do? It just seems that the whole time you're living
this
life, you're thinking about a
different
one instead. So tell me, are you happy with
your
life?”

 

Luckily, Ieva's phone rings, granting her some time to think of an answer. It's Monta. Missing her mother and not at all surprised to hear she's in Berlin. They talk for a good half hour. Screw the roaming fees.

 

When Ieva looks back at Peter, her doubts have subsided. She won't stitch black and white together anymore. Only white with white. And black with black. The answer can already be seen in her face when she speaks:

“What was it you asked?”

“Are you happy with your life?”

“Y'know, our Latvian tribe has this poet, Ziedonis, who once said: Happiness is only the order of all things. I'd say that happiness is an open ending.”

“Well put, and even a bit ironic. But how come your eyes look so sad?”

“Because today's January 15
th
. That's all. Let's take a walk along the Spree.”

 

The Temptation of the Fog

 

 

The
sunset is totally insane, Ieva thinks.

And where are they all going…

Tonight the sunset is pure madness, this is what she thinks.

And what she thinks has no meaning. The word “insane” hasn't meant anything special for some time now. People shout it in the streets when they want to make others think they still feel something. And she has no clue what madness or insanity really are. Just words.

So we need to get rid of them.

And that orange, flaming eye through the bluish veil of mist and the fragile claws of night reaching for the white, disheveled clouds… Something dramatic was happening there, something strange. Over the woods themselves.

How can you say it, what do you call it, how can you find the words?

She looks again a few moments later—there's nothing there anymore. It's extinguished.

That's a good word—extinguished.

Extinguished.

She looks out a different window. A group of kids runs around the courtyard in the half-dusk and calls for a dog to follow them. It's always like that—always following them. Her daughter did it, too, step by step. Going somewhere. But she had so wanted to protect them. The dog and her daughter. And everyone else.

There's no way she can.

Fog settles over the yard.

Maybe she should call these kids inside? So they can smear their muddy fingers on the walls and steps, eat cookies in the dark of the room, at the foot of the bed. So they can squeal and dance among the pillows, secretly play with her lipstick and, one after the other, suddenly grow up.

Like corn kernels exploding high over the midday heat.

When kids grow up, they instantly distance themselves. They become continuous even though, frankly speaking, it seems like just five seconds ago they were nothing more than an orgasm.

There are a lot of little deaths in life. Though no one probably thinks of these fragmentations like that. So what are they called?

She doesn't know.

Kids glide through their childhoods and continue being continuous.

It's wrong. Like all the grownups who carry the many lives they've lived within themselves, continuing and continuing on.

She could call them in—like recruiting an army—pass out chocolate rations for survival and smile bitterly at them, rewarding them for their nerve to come inside with their muddy shoes. But the dog will probably drop ticks, fat like overripe grapes, and the kids will trample them and smear them over the floor. She doesn't have time to wash the floor tonight; she has to protect her idea. A kind of basic task, egotistic. She has to be with herself. So trivial! And what's more—what a sunset! The shouts of the kids in the courtyard. They live in an entirely different world, a world she knows nothing about. That world will blossom when hers wilts. Every moment, thousands of worlds simultaneously blossom and wilt. A moment of chaos in your head—God, when am I going to have time to wash THESE dishes?! What time did he leave? It seems like it's been forever. But no, just a few hours. Maybe, if she were someone ELSE, she'd be able to take a nap in the middle of the day?…

Where are they calling that dog over to? Where will they wander off to, where will they go with their unkempt, tangled hair and frozen, red hands? Wherever it is, there'll definitely be some kind of danger: a marsh, quicksand, a quagmire, a steep bank of sweetly flowering, poisonous Daphne bushes or something else equally alluring… Maybe she should protect her daughter, call her in, keep her under her wing? Once upon a time those kids had been her daughter.

At one time she still entertained the hope that she'd be able to protect all of them.

From everything.

But no. It's not possible. She has to be with her own self tonight. In a completely grammatically incorrect sense. A small task, because the goal is small. She is nothing more to the history of the world than an ant is to Mont Blanc. That's why it would be best to go, bless the dog and the kids, gather them up, and feed them or something. But her goal is minute, and her suffering will be great, because he who puts others before him is happy—only she still puts herself first more and isn't even ashamed of it. She's come to enjoy withdrawing further and deeper into herself. And someday she'll have to pay for all of it.

This fog!

One time at the Central Market, a gypsy woman had told her fortune: “You'll start from zero many times over, it's a gift you have. But only to a certain extent.”

Marking boundaries. Building a wall? No use—she doesn't have the skill. You can't start anything by force. It's just—I choose to believe. Again and again from the beginning. Ieva looks around carefully. If there had been anything left over, even a grain of sand, she could cultivate a pearl out of it.

She could keep it together.

Everything is scattered. Live half your life and realize that everything is scattered.

But at night she can feel there's a river. Not a single time in her life, not a single territory through which this river flows, isn't a part of the river itself. The heart of the river is somewhere in the distance—there, from where the river flows, or there, to where it flows.

While she washes dishes she suddenly grabs a pencil and writes on a paper towel—Oh, this fog! How she'll wind up paying for this sentence! Half of her unhappiness is her imagination and curiosity. She'll withdraw from life with each letter, paddle away from existence, until she'll no longer be able to pave a path back to the simple scene beyond the window. Farther and farther away—like a stream down a mountain. Like the Earth from the sun. She'll continue. She'll be far. And wide. She won't tell her daughter how much she misses her, because she won't know how to find the right words. She'll spend days hammering out the same passages, struggling to formulate love in short sentences on paper until others will simply accept it. She'll spend her entire life studying, but never learn how to write the word “sunset.”

It's insane—where did it all go! It was just there, she thinks, looking out at the grey sky. And the courtyard is empty. They're all gone.