The second thought is about life. He’ll tell Ieva about it someday. And she and all her smart people will pale at the idea. Because they’re all liars. Shelves stuffed full with books. Fakes! Because a person can come up with one, two great thoughts in his lifetime, but then there are people who knock out a book a year. It’s obvious to Andrejs that they just make money in the name of boredom. That’s how that world works—the less sense you have, the more others will take advantage of you.
Three thoughts, what lies. Three is impossible.
He’s told Ieva that. She drove him nuts with her talking, pissed him off. He had felt so unprotected, so forced into solitude and darkness, that he had screamed it right into her face—I hate know-it-alls!
She’d screamed back—but I crave knowledge!
A yeller. She’d been consistently raised like that, to be proper and positive. Undisciplined and lazy.
Oh, Ieva. His Ieva. What’s wrong with him!
At times he’s actually pretty scared. Things will just fall into place and this wave builds up inside him. Then he becomes afraid of himself. Something hidden deep within him shifts; something he’s never known and will never know about. At moments like that, both life and death seem trivial, and an intense pain rips through his heart. No, not pure pain, but some kind of twisting, a rope of aching, longing, rage, hope, and dread; it runs so deep that it constricts his entire chest.
He can’t breathe and he’s afraid of himself. At moments like that he’s happy his heart has destined him for loneliness. God forbid someone else has to have this wave crash over them as well. Only Andrejs can bear that weight. He holds this wave like Atlas holds the world on his shoulders.
The woman resting on his shoulder moves. His collarbone must be digging into her cheek.
Andrejs quickly reaches his free hand behind his back to grab a cushion, and tosses it in the corner of the couch. Then he puts his arms around the woman and draws her down with him. There’s a tickle in his chest, and even though this movement lasts maybe a second, he feels like he’s caught a giant fish and is sinking into the depths of the ocean.
The woman mumbles and doesn’t want to lie down, and struggles a bit, the idiot, she probably thinks he’s going to start groping her, but he doesn’t intend to. Alright fine, maybe he thought about it a little, but he’s only human, he can see she’s tired from work, and also from preparing the roast, so let her just sleep. Her cheek presses against his shoulder, a string of drool hangs from the corner of her mouth onto his shirt like a silvery thread.
“Sleep!” he strokes her hair. And sniffs it. Strange. Her scent isn’t really something that would make him want her right now. He sensed that from the start. But he can’t exactly push her away, either. Like there’s a secret flowing through her. That’s a good thing. He likes a woman with a secret.
She makes a noise like a content cat when he strokes her hair, then drifts off again. Makes sense—it’s nice with the two of them together. Close, cozy.
And it’s nice here in the warmth, nice for Andrejs to think about Ieva without interruption. These thoughts always drag him away from wherever he is, carry him through the air and to a strange and enormous house, where it takes a long time to inspect and check all the cellars, intersecting hallways, antechambers, rooms, mansards, stairwells, pantries, attics, guest rooms and hidden passageways, and then clean and catalog them until next time. Tonight he’s just getting started. Until he’s made it through it all. Let this Demeter sleep. There’s nothing left to miss out on. That’s how time works.
Ieva’s visits were beautiful in their slow pace. There was no rush. “We’ll be back tomorrow at ten!” the guards would remind them as they left. And then time would suddenly start back up for Andrejs, whose life orbited a bewitched circle, where the same actions took place every morning, every night, and every year, forever winding up back at the beginning; a life where the mirrors are frozen and always reflect the same image. He had been shunned from time both physically—in prison—and spiritually—within himself.
But then one morning Ieva would show up and time would start again.
Even the guards noticed it because they said they’d be back in the morning to separate them. Andrejs suddenly became worthy of keeping track of time—this body the court had sentenced to age hidden from sight. Something overflowed and pushed out, the floodgates burst open—a powerful torrent rushed forward from 10 am through 10 am the next day, and it took his breath away to see how elastic and shifting time was, how material and flowing it was.
On those days he hated the clock. On those days the clock once more had meaning, and it mocked him as much as it could, like someone born to be a prison guard—someone with tormenting in their blood, someone who makes sure you’ll never forget them.
He and Ieva would sit and exchange unhurried words, they could see the prison wall from the window and watch inmates wander around the yard like livestock, like a dazed flock in bluish parkas or white shirts, depending on what season it was. Sunspots moved across the floor. They talked about neighbors, Ieva’s job, his friends and prison life, their parents, money, and Monta. Andrejs would look at photographs of his daughter, if Ieva had been able to conceal them well enough in her clothes, and say he’d put them in a plastic binder. He had an entire collection of photographs like these hidden under the false bottom of his nightstand.
Andrejs would study how time had changed his daughter’s face. When she was born she had looked exactly like him, like she’d been shaped in a mold, a tiny copy of him, an imprint in dark metal. Then her face started to change, jump from his features to Ieva’s expressions and back again. Of course, a lot depended on the angle of the photo and the lighting, but in the end Monta became Monta. It was impossible not to notice it.
He’d timidly beg Ieva to bring Monta with her. And Ieva would firmly answer that her daughter would never set foot in a prison or ever breathe this prison air.
“And if I die?” he asked.
Ieva shrugged.
And that’s how she was, a straight-up bitch. It was because of her Andrejs was in prison, because of her and that ass Aksels, but see, she made herself to be this noble, white dove who visited him like a dream once a season. But she was absent at the same time. Naiveté—or rather, what was it called again?—immaturity. Exactly.
An immature infant. And a bitch. She comes to prison, but doesn’t breathe the air. That idiocy comes from books, of course. I am what I am, and where I am is where I am. But see—it’s easier to deny reality, to linger in the dream, to pretend, to observe.
Stupid.
Independence and betrayal. The entire breed of book readers are traitors. Because they use words however they see fit, and they’re as sly as foxes. They’ll forever twist the world into something they like better. Everyone else sees black, but they say it’s just the opposite of white. Obviously you can say it like that, too, but it will always be connected to a selfish purpose so tangled it’s sickening.
That was when the fight started. The time when he gave her his shirt as she left because it was pouring outside. May showers—loud and spattering, or in a gleeful disarray.
And she never came again. Just sent back the shirt with a note—Everything’s over for real now. Ieva.
There wasn’t actually a fight. He’d just told her what he was thinking. And suddenly it was over. So their time together had been based on nothing but lies—on lies and silence. But that had been clear for some time.
That time she had showed up kind of disoriented. Like she was in the room, but not.
And then suddenly—she asked if she could