And second, the walls had ears. All the walls in the Soviet Union had ears; they couldn’t be so naïve to think that a prison that had never been reconstructed would be clean of wire taps.
But she asks—can they talk about Aksels?
And then she just went off with almost no segue—she reminded him of a person up to their knees in seawater and with the tide coming in fast. He could tell right away that she had been holding it back. She’d probably spent those four hours in the train talking to herself.
About how, see, he shouldn’t have shot Aksels. That it had been a kind of neurosis, and now how were they supposed to fix it? That she hadn’t done right by Aksels, but instead turned him into some kind of animal.
Jesus Christ! Andrejs had just looked at her and smiled. If she had been anyone else but his Ieva, he would have yelled back at the top of his lungs. Obviously it had all been a load of bullshit. That scrawny, sickly drug addict, and that whole history and theory they had been drifting on for years like on melting ice. Eternal love. I want to die in your arms. My life and death are yours, and your life and death are mine.
“Ieva,” Andrejs had asked, “tell me the truth—don’t you know that you were both completely insane?”
“And what about you?” she asked.
“I happened to be there. If I had a second chance, I’d do it again.”
First of all, so you wouldn’t. Second, because I hated him. He got on my nerves.
Ieva had jumped to her feet, her face pale, spots at her temples.
“You just don’t get it! So if we really were insane, then you’re sitting in prison because of two complete jackasses? Think about that! You’re wasting your life because of two idiots?”
That was uncalled for, he thought. Then he answered—“Yes!” And what else could he say, when she had him cornered like a rat?
Yes!
Like Croesus, squandering lives.
Total bullshit.
He has to think about it every day.
They both went to the kitchen. Fried some eggs and bacon, carried the pan to the room and ate. Then they went to the second floor TV room, sat next to each other in the soft, red chairs behind the potted palm. At night they made love, and it was good for her. Insanely good for her—Andrejs felt it. Maybe she was seeing someone out there, on the outside, but he didn’t care. For him the sex always seemed secondary. It was like being lazy. The important part was for her to be next to him, for her to feel good, and then he was also able to sink into that whirlpool. That was the last thing. And he’d wash away his anxiety, stress, the sediments of time, wash it all away. Lightning struck and traveled down through the lightning rod, down to Ieva’s world. Then it was a new morning, sparkling and clean. A new page could be turned. A pure, white page, still clean of any marks. That’s what the sex was like for Andrejs, but for her? Who knows.
She didn’t say anything.
That night, toward morning, the light of an unusually bright full moon flooded the room. He tried hard to convince himself that he was asleep, but in reality was laying wide awake with a deathly weight on his chest, hugging the precious body next to him—and then she woke suddenly with a scream.
He wasn’t able to calm her down, even though he was able to pull her into his lap, stroke her hair and her ribcage and knobby knees. She sat there, curled into a ball, and whispered that she’d sensed an evil in the room!
The devil had been in the room. Andrejs rubbed her back and tried to calm her, said the devil didn’t exist, it was something people had made up, but she cried and told him her dream: she and Aksels had been standing high up on a hill, everything was green and happy, and there was a rainbow behind them. But when they had taken each other by the hand, gashes appeared on their palms and blood streamed onto the ground.
Jesus, at that moment Andrejs would have been ready to shoot Aksels ten times over, riddle his dead body with more and more holes, so he would go to hell once and for all. That little shit, that son of a bitch! He was in Ieva’s dreams, even though he was long dead. He stomped around Ieva’s dreams!
Andrejs wasn’t able to fight him, no one can fight in dreams, because you don’t break into dreams, you’re invited in. Andrejs could only hate him—hate him more than he had ever hated anyone else in the world.
And he said this to Ieva—said that at this exact moment she was with a murderer.
Told her not to call it what it wasn’t.
And that she was a bitch if she let Aksels wander freely in her dreams, while she was sleeping with Andrejs. And that this institution, in case she didn’t know, was built for people just like Andrejs, because out of a hundred people who feel hatred, only one will actually pick up the shotgun, and that person is him, and he doesn’t regret any of it.
Ieva had looked at him with such fear, the bluish whites of her eyes glazed over in the moonlight. He could tell by her breathing that what he had said was slowly sinking in.
“You shot him only because you’d learned how to kill in Afghanistan?”
But of course! The shotgun had been right there, loaded, and what’s more—Ieva had handed the gun to him herself. But of course, love! When would he have had another opportunity to get rid of the little bastard who’d ruined his entire life?
But he didn’t say that—because that thought was as wispy as a rose-colored, papery autumn sky—that he had possibly caught himself in his own lies. Now he was saying one thing, but at other times, like when he was sitting in the dust of the prison yard, watching the wind tug at the leaves of the elm trees, and Ieva was so far away at the other end of the world past the barbed wire fences and one hundred twenty-four kilometers of forest, rivers and bogs, or when they made love, he was able to break free of himself, from the biting harness, he felt her contented breathing, and at those moments Andrejs could do the unthinkable—let all the happiness of the world flow into Ieva, because she herself was valuable, because she was worth it. And if she loved that son of a bitch Aksels, then at those moments—even though it was unthinkable—he was able to let himself imagine that she was even allowed to love Aksels. Even Aksels! And at those moments some kind of serpent, vibrant as a Latgalian wool mitten, would hiss into Andrejs’s ear that this was the kind of true love written about in the Bible. A love that didn’t hate, wasn’t jealous, didn’t destroy, wasn’t submissive, just carried you toward the sun—carried, carried, carried you, forever carried you.
But that wasn’t something Ieva needed to know.
He only added that he was the only one who could call her a bitch and, forgive him, but if he hears someone else call her a bitch, he’ll slit their throat.
“You’ve made me your personal swamp,” she said calmly after a pause.
Maybe it was then that she had already made up her mind.
Then they probably both finally fell asleep.
In the morning it was overcast, and the air was full of the bewitching scent of spring buds, but Ieva was unnaturally pale and silent. Even that usually beautiful final hour they had, during which they normally dressed, cleaned up, and wallowed in thoughts of parting, memories and glances—now it was hard as stone. And the guards had forgotten about them.
Once they’d dressed they sat stiffly on the beds facing each other, looking like they had met for the first time in their lives. The time came for them to go their separate ways, but the guards didn’t come. The black tentacle of the clock slowly slid to four minutes past ten, then to ten minutes past ten.
The room grew darker and darker, until finally the black-blue cloud outside broke open with a mighty crack, struck the earth with a blinding thorn, and unleashed a