Soviet Milk

by Nora Ikstena

Times and religions had commingled.

Yet beside the mountains of medical textbooks lay a half-read Moby-Dick. It spoke of her longing for a life of the mind that remained beyond her grasp.

I wasn’t afraid of Uncle Sam, or of nuclear war; I was afraid of my mother.

He was lying among words advocating the diversion of rivers, the conversion of churches into storehouses for mineral fertilizers, and the destruction of the literature, art and sculpture of our Latvian heritage. Thus he lay: one of the many who had surrendered quietly, dying in an obscure corner because he could not adjust and swallow humiliation, shame, dishonour and disillusionment.

We carried flags in the May and November parades in honour of the Red Army, the Revolution and Communism, while at home we crossed ourselves and waited for the English army to come and free Latvia from the Russian boot.

And here it all was: the truth about the wretched, hypocritical creature we call man. A muddle of blood vessels, convolutions of intestines, glands and secretions, lymph nodes and arteries, phalli and vaginas, testicles and wombs. In this narrative, death was just an accidental, unavoidable stopping point.

To solve life’s puzzle you had to use death’s rebus as a guide.

‘Do you believe in God?’ This was hard to answer, given that all references to anything divine had been erased from printed materials under the Soviet regime. ‘I still haven’t had the opportunity to meet Him,’ I said.

we sipped our spirits and pondered Brodsky’s poetry. He said that life was a pendulum which, once swung to the left, had only to swing back again. Just six years earlier he had been banished from Russia. He was now wandering somewhere on the streets of New York.

My milk was bitter: the milk of incomprehension, of extinction. I protected my child from it.

Her hands and clothes smelled of medicine, which was my mother’s usual fragrance. That smell, along with her touch, awakened in me a love I had not felt before: love for my mother.

But medicine had outpaced Jesus. Everything was explicable and understandable. There was no need for faith. And Jesus had been prohibited. In His place, we were to believe in a real ‘lotus-land’ – that is, in Communism, under which everything would belong to everyone and euphoria would reign.

There was only Latvia, she repeated, without the Russian lice, which won’t live in their own homeland but crawl all over us.

Freedom was that tiny glimmer of happiness when, soaked through, we would drag ourselves home and dry out beside a hot stove, fortified by fresh clothes and dinner.

While we putrefy here and pretend to be underground heroes. There’s nothing real here, either on the streets or in the cafés. Everywhere’s just a pitiful existence. Everyone everywhere is pretending, not living. On the streets pretending to be obedient Soviet citizens and here we pretend to be dissidents. There’s no freedom here.’

Holding him by the nape of the neck, my step-grandfather said, ‘Old chap, we all have to live in a cage. Get used to it.’

All Soviet students bore responsibility for honestly done work. All young communists’ consciences must be as white as her glove – before it acquired the stains of someone’s shoddy work.

It seemed to me that since I was born I’d been trying to get my mother to connect to life. As a helpless infant, as a child of limited understanding, as a fearful teenager, as a young woman. And she always seemed to be striving to turn out her life’s light.

The mighty Soviet monolith was tottering, collapsing, and no one could tell if the consequences would be the devastation of an earthquake or as it was in the Bible when God created a new, beautiful world out of nothing. Would it be a paradise or hell?