High Tide (8 page)

That night they let him go. Enlisted him in the reserves. He knew that he would never kill anybody again. Not even Ieva.

Something had ended, the passion suddenly broken. Turns out his fate had been hanging at the end of such a fine strand of hair. Now it had matured, fallen out and slipped away. The shedding of an unnecessary skin.

How strange—when love was flowing through him he didn't need anything, not even his only shirt. He had done terrible things, but they could all be justified. His, Andrejs's, love.

Now that it had burnt out, he could start anything, though nothing would give him his fill. And he couldn't imagine what more he could need that would fill the massive space surrounding him.

Andrejs didn't even try to understand what happened in his brain when he read the story about Medea. Maybe the two things just fell into place—Medea and the release of his own passions—and both of them had nothing else in common but the horrible events over the course of a single night.

Maybe Aphrodite had never meant to be there in the first place? On that night, had the goddess of love ripped the deeply-lodged, festering arrow from Andrejs's heart, and then disappeared without a trace? Without the core of the arrow his body crumpled like an empty shell.

He remained half way without Ieva, without reason, without a future. He knew that from there on out things would be calm and he would soon be released. He was a broken clock, a defective mechanism—why fight it? They don't keep people like that in prison.

In truth, he should have stabbed out his eyes that very night.

 

“Want some champagne?”

The question spoken into the homey darkness scared the hell out of Andrejs because the woman shot it out as suddenly as a flare gun.

She had been lying there with her eyes open again.

He asked:

“Now?”

“Why not?”

They pulled themselves to their feet, turned on the kitchen light and rubbed their bleary eyes. He watched the movements of her plump elbows. The kitchen was small, and the woman filled the space right away. Andrejs liked this—just watching. He was ready to go sit in one of the corners when the woman said:

“Hand me those glasses!”

“Where?”

“On the shelf by your head.”

He turned toward the wall and came face to face with his own drawing. He stared at it for a long time, as if seeing a ghost, and then asked the woman:

“What's that?”

“Glasses.”

“I see the glasses. But behind them?”

“That? Oh, that. A card.”

 

Andrejs very carefully took two fragile champagne flutes in his calloused hands and handed them to the woman. Then he took the card leaning against the wall behind the glasses and sat on a stool next to the small table. He studied the yellowed paper as intensely as a war refugee who's been pulled from the water and given a passport, and who can't believe this thing could save his life.

The card was drawn with lead pencil on regular notebook paper and then glued to cardboard. Its edges were decorated with barbed wire, which connected at the top in a knot around a red rose. The lettering
For Ludmila—Ruslans
was separated by a date, in which the number two looked like a swan with a proudly curving neck. The drawing also had the North Star and the aurora borealis. Small lettering at the bottom read:
She dreamt that in the Caucasus steppe
…

So she wasn't an accountant! So that's where he'd seen that handwriting and date before! How could he forget?

Andrejs asked:

“Ludmila?”

“Yes.”

She sat on the opposite stool at the table and twirled a strand of hair around her finger. Like she was flustered, clueless. When she lifted her eyes to meet his, they were bright with tears.

“That's the last card my husband sent me.”

She wanted to tell him more, but he silenced her with an impatient gesture. He still couldn't decide if he should go home right away, or later. If he started to talk now, it would mean he wouldn't go home until later.

 

But he started to talk. He hadn't become a heartless monster yet.

“You don't need to tell me. I drew this.”

The expressions on the woman's face changed as quick as the wind, chasing after one another like the shadows of falling leaves—while she sat very stiff and straight, her eyes searching his face to figure out what his words could mean.

“Ruslans and I met at the Central Prison Hospital. He was already admitted when I was brought in. We were together for a week, or less, I don't remember. In any case no more than a week. I was there when he died.”

The woman let out a weak scream, and the tears finally overflowed. She wiped the wetness across her cheeks with the back of her hand. Andrejs handed her a towel, which she immediately bundled up into a kind of squirrel's nest and hid her face in it. He waited patiently for her to look up again.

“You could say I was the prison artist. I framed photographs by sewing plastic wires around the edges, drew on materials using safety pins and colored thread, etched wood, sketched. Ruslans found out and showed me your handwriting. Asked me to draw a card and write the words like you did. He really liked your handwriting. I recognized it right away, but thought that you worked at the prison as an accountant.”

The woman nodded feebly. She rummaged in a drawer without looking away from him and placed a candle on the table. She burned her fingers with the first match.

“Tell me how he died,” she said, her voice somber.

“He died at night. I was writing a letter to my wife, he was lying down. I thought he'd fallen sleep. Then he suddenly started coughing, ran to the door and banged on it like crazy. All at once, about a bucket of blood spewed from his mouth. And then he fell over. I lifted him a bit and held him, but he had already started with the death shakes. The guards came and took him away.”

There was a moment of silence.

“Don't worry, it happened quickly. He didn't suffer. It was over the second he ran to the door. Later the nurses said one of his pulmonary veins had burst.”

More silence.

“But he managed to send the card out. When's your birthday? Sometime in May, right?”

“May second.”

“And what's this about the Caucasus, if it's not a secret?”

“He was a really good person,” she finally said.

“I know. So what about the Caucasus?”

The woman thought for a bit.

 

She dreamt that in the Caucasus steppe—

He lay still, a bullet in his breast…

And yet, I am Ruslan's now,

And will be faithful to my vow.

 

Andrejs propped the card against the windowpane so its edges were surrounded by the reflection of the candlelight.

The woman said:

“We liked poetry, like Pushkin's ‘Ruslan and Ludmila.' I'd read it to him when our kids were still little. Before he got mixed up in that damn gang and robbed that gas station… He was so surprised that there was a poem like that—about us, he said—just imagine! About us!”

The woman stood and opened the refrigerator. She pushed the champagne toward Andrejs, having suddenly grown very calm. He opened the bottle just as calmly and poured the chilled liquid into the glasses. In the reflection of the flame, the bubbles dancing in the sparkling wine seemed like lonely planets.

 

Andrejs lifted his glass:

“Well then—to us! To all of us.”

The woman nodded, and they both drank. Bliss—ice-cold bliss.

The woman spoke:

“And yours got better?”

“What?”

“Tuberculosis?”

Andrejs rubbed his cheek. The champagne made him feel very alive.

“There was actually nothing wrong with me. Time was running out. The last thing people had on their minds back then was prisons. There was famine in the prisons, actual famine, unemployment, and insanity. In order to survive I ground sugar into powder and inhaled it. A lot of people did it. And man, the lung spots it would produce on the X-rays! Say what you want, but the food in the hospital was much better. But after a while I started to think I really was sick. Every night the taste of blood in my mouth, at first in my dreams and later for real. You spit and see blood. Every night. Nothing during the day. During the day—powdered sugar.”

They'd emptied their glasses. The woman reached across and poured another.

“But the night Ruslans died… It was like—what's so terrifying about it, people die! I was in for murder. That's how it went.”

He said it before he realized what he was saying, and looked at the woman. She looked straight back at him. There was no fear in her eyes, no surprise, no questions, just an unwavering stare.

“But that night he died, it happened so fast. Didn't even take five minutes. He was alive, and then all of a sudden I was holding him in my arms and everything was covered in his blood. The guards came and took him away. And then it was quiet again. I went back to my bed and found the half-written letter to my wife. I couldn't finish it, the pen moved around the paper on its own, my thoughts had left me. Just five minutes—and it was like the letter was finished by someone else. Understand?”

He downed the champagne and gritted his teeth. Words, words. The devil had once again urged him to wear his heart on his sleeve. There was no point. He should have left when he had the chance.

“Another drink, artist!”

The woman poured the rest of the champagne. A good woman. A woman was supposed to be like that—warm as a bread oven. He wanted to tell her everything, but it wasn't possible. There are certain thoughts you should keep to yourself.

“If I can, I'll recite a poem for you.”

 

This kind of courage made him break into a sweat. Ieva had always encouraged him to write poetry, but he'd never been good at it. Ieva, on the other hand, was—you could even say that she put everything that happened down on paper. Like photography, but what you could do with photography was still entirely different from whatever prompted words. Write what you felt the moment you opened your eyes this morning, she'd urge him. He sat down with a piece of paper and sighed and complained until he was done. He thought it needed to turn out good if he gave into Ieva's pushing. But it wasn't good, he knew so. Ieva thought so, too; she was quiet for some time after she'd read it. “I woke up early, the alarm clock rattled like a chainsaw…” It went something like that, and it wasn't like it didn't make sense. What Andrejs saw was nothing like the morning or an alarm clock on the paper, but rather his own useless, Sisyphean battle with language, with words. And this nerve-wracking battle left that particular morning in its wake, that morning—one of many, but so unrepeatable. He hadn't known how. But now?

 

—black woods surround you, wipe your forehead

black swamps surround you, stay here and live

the teeth of the white dog cannot reach to bite you

black fields hold their hissing hands out to you

take shelter behind the pine forest, gather dropwort

black swamps surround you, wipe your forehead

your retreat to the ninth breath was not in vain

keep your sorrow behind you, your joy in your arms

there will be a sharp fog when you open your eyes

the teeth of the white dog cannot reach to bite you

the breath and the palm, they will guide you

black woods surround you, don't cry, but sing…

 

He had been left alone in the dark expanse and tore the lines from deep within his chest like flaming bullets, like his life depended on it. They died and were born from the death of the last, joined like the links in a chain of logic that only he understood, and they held fast. In it wavered his childhood, moments from the murder, serving his guilt and time, glimmers of Ieva and Monta, of his mother and father, and the black woods—places that, when he saw them, always caused a sharp ache in his heart because you could also love a place to the point where seeing it made your chest feel it was on fire.

Then the poem was over and he snapped out of it, thrown back into the shallows, into a strange kitchen where he'd said too much and, even worse, bared his soul through words.

Because of that third glass! Hadn't life taught him all good things come in twos? Two cigarettes. Two glasses. Have a third and the rest of the numbers are redundant.

 

Andrejs rushed out of the kitchen and started pulling on his coat in the dark hallway. The woman followed quietly behind him like a cat and turned on a tiny, yellow wall lamp. She stroked his shoulders, neck, unshaved cheek, everywhere she could touch his skin.

She whispered:

“Such a beautiful poem. Did you come up with it in prison?”

“No, just now. And what about you?”

“Me—what?”

“He's dead, but you've moved on?”

“Yes, slowly. What else can you do?”

“Prisoners. We're prisoners in this life. Us. Everyone.”

He yanked on the door.

“Unlock it!”

The woman obediently found the key in a basket and put it in the lock. When Andrejs was already on the threshold, she suddenly and quietly asked:

“What about the roast?”

 

Andrejs hugged her to him. Strange lips like an undiscovered steppe.

Screw the steppes, Ludmila, let's forget the steppes and our words, you were Ruslans's Ludmila, but you'll be my Demeter, the fertile earth herself! Someone discovered us long ago, gave us words hundreds and thousands of years ago. How I ache, how I search for this Giver of Words, I want to shake his hand and thank him for his creation—I sense that we won't be the ones to give words, that time will grind us down and scatter our dust thrice over a broken field, the goddess Demeter and me, your mortal beloved—but I'd still like to look into the face of the Giver of Words, he is all-knowing! Look into the eyes of the Giver of Words, and finally find peace.