But the third thing was explained to her in a roundabout way—through a story. Her Gran, the person who gave her this advice, had worked before World War II as a servant for a rich family in Riga. She’d only worked for them a month to save up enough for a place to live in this new city.
“Sweetheart,” she had told Ieva, “I knew full well I’d only work for them a short time, so I put up with everything with dignity and had enough strength and energy for each new day. When I left them after a month they cried and didn’t want me to go because they had never had a servant as good as me.”
This story meant that everything would eventually pass, even life. Maybe whatever it was would last more than a month, but it would pass. Each view, each landscape, even you. It’s a solution, at least until the moment you’re more sick of life than of death, when all you see on the horizon are black, burnt-out clearings, when you hate life so completely that your body is overcome by agonizing tremors just thinking about it. Thank you, Gran.
Because, honestly, Ieva doesn’t call herself a girl anymore, and sometimes even says that beautiful word—middle-aged. Yes, right now she’d like to consider herself middle-aged. She’s already experienced middle age physically—the thought came to her on the morning of her thirty-third birthday. On that morning she felt she was standing at the very top of a mountain. And this mighty, craggy mountain ridge extended in both directions, its outline melting into the distant golden sunrise. The ridge was tall and black, but oddly enough there was plenty of oxygen and her blood wasn’t coursing out of control. Instead there was a damp, refreshing easterly wind, up there the stars were twinkling, meshing in the blueness like white knots. Things were very good. Right now things are very good, she’s not thinking about the road here or about the climb down; everything is here and now, everything is halfway. And the only thing that hurts is the awareness that she has climbed up from the direction of the sea, but has to descend into the desert. The knowledge stings a bit, like a once-broken collarbone that aches every time it rains. But you get used to it.
Then the day comes: her life is halfway over and she’s walking through the woods on a fall morning. The golden asp leaves rustle around her, the earth exhales coolly, and the sky is as blue as her boyfriend’s eyes. And her life is half-over and, now and then, something will happen as time goes on. For example, there have been a lot of births, a few deaths, there will be something that will ache in her over her entire life, something she will never be able to fix, something she will have to dismiss—and so on and so forth. She walks through the woods and feels that she’ll soon reach that critical point when the cup will be full, and when the handle breaks it won’t go unnoticed. The cool glass of the milk bottles from her childhood and the triangular tetrapacks with the word MOLOKO on them—she can’t forget those either. Or the piles of the newly-freed country’s money in suitcases, her first real paycheck—an entire roll of colored paper—frozen kidneys and peed pants, her first time with a boy she would never see again, her first time in an airplane, her first time abroad and seeing strange things. The person you slowly but completely left because he was fading, even though he begged you to stay. Your heart’s betrayals, your wild, spiteful spirit and brief moments of respite, your contracts with your conscience, your father and mother, and your travels near and far, when you fell in love with cities, the sky, or entire regions of uninhabited land.
Love doesn’t always have to be about people, no, not necessarily. You can fall in love with a city, its many smells, how quiet it is under the snow. Small and large streets and the dusk in the glowing windows that awakens a desire in you, when you stand in the streets with your eyes glazed over simply from wanting to experience every imaginable life, everything behind those windows. You want to tear them from the walls and place them in your chest simply because you know and understand it all. Simply because you love these blinds, curtains, shades, the fraying bits of carpet behind the flowerpots against the walls and windows. A quick or fancy dinner, cats on windowsills, and boiling pots in kitchens. And how calm he is when he comes home from work. And how she tilts her head for him to kiss her cheek. Here is your victory, your life in these basic, little things that everyone will gulp down until the end of time like they’re dehydrated and, when they’re drunk from it, roam along the courtyard walls, craving only that eternal shift between night and day. The shade and a nap on a striped couch while he makes you tea. A moment within yourself in the cozy warmth, when the hands of the clock don’t stab at your dry, tired eyelids like steel knives. You’ll crave the solitude of an old woman, her cat, her parties, and bed full of crumbs from the grandchildren, especially in November, and inside is bright and cozy while outside it’s dusky and cool, and a little freezing. Outside where you stand with your only heart and life in your chest, knowing it all—but how?—and loving, loving, loving it.
But there is only this moment in the present, this excessive, ruthless sense of awareness, and the acrid scent of the earth.
Why do I walk around with an orchestra playing in my head?
And she starts to crack like a pine tree. Her bark peels—layer by layer, falling off in flames. The forest breathes and grows, stands modestly, doesn’t try to prove anything, just exists. She knows the forest is perfect, but the forest itself doesn’t know that. Existence asks too much of a person, too much of this complicated structure, this ball of nerves with a heart, brain, and eyes—how can it forget? It’s an endless struggle, a whirlwind of activity, tendencies, thoughts, instincts, responsibilities—and if not those, then at least the slightest inkling of them now and then. Lifting your hand to change channels on the TV, taking the grilled cheese out of the toaster oven or just running the red light at a packed intersection. Or like when you get back home after being abroad for a long time and, as you look out onto the silky reeds under the sliding shadows of clouds, you ask yourself—who’s the one seeing all this?
Or when you’re in a new place and get word that your mother has died. I don’t want to hear it, your tired, scarred, cynical heart cries. Your heart doesn’t want any more pain. But something inside you trembles, shivers—a tiny, significant dream right before you wake up, or the screech of an animal as loud as an overworked motor—and you get the piercing realization that your next breath could never come. But it does, and you’re simultaneously thrilled and inexplicably disappointed. Because the question of the heart remains. If someone was once close to you, very close, and is now dead, and you imagine their heart, which you’ve never seen, but can pretty well imagine—and why shouldn’t you—as a once functional, but now stiff, immobile shell at the bottom of a grave. And you try to imagine what the heart is doing down in that grave. Has it cultivated a soul, that sought-after pearl, or not? Most likely not. There isn’t a pearl down there, no archeologist has ever found a pearl in place of a heart. It’s unheard of. Maybe you yourself are the pearl, the fruit and creation of this strange life, but the sudden stillness of the heart, the coup of that flesh, which you possibly loved more than your own, can drive you insane in its stillness and assimilation to the earth. And the decomposition of the heart, its imperceptible transformation into earth and worms, soil, roots—it hurts you, and you’re ready to dig it up out of the dirt, bring it into the daylight, this useless thing that has no spark, no movement, no echo. It’s an obsession.
But her thoughts have peeled away; at least that’s done with. She takes a hesitant step away from the lee side of a pine tree and moves forward. Sand mixed with black soil, so loose that she sinks down into it up to her ankles. A firebreak freshly tilled in the anticipation of forest fires. There won’t be any more fires. Her thoughts have peeled down to the moist, living pith. Down to her being, to the present, free