Soviet Milk

by Nora Ikstena

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

I had carried and given birth to a child, but I had no maternal instincts. Something had excluded me from this mystery, which I wanted to investigate to the very core, to discover its true nature. I disappeared for days so I wouldn’t have to feed my child. My milk was bitter: the milk of incomprehension, of extinction. I protected my child from it.

In the end I was heartily grateful to Russia’s diplomatic courier for getting shot precisely at our railway station,

Time grew particularly burdensome on these days. I felt weighed down, as if I could never be free.

I despised Bambi. I wished he had died. What had he lacked in his cage? Food, a warm lair, a wife and children: had he ruined it all solely because he wanted to run around in my room?

You’re like me in my dream,’ she said. ‘Outdoors, in the middle of a circle, where you’re being pulled on both sides, and it hurts.’ I didn’t understand this dream. But yes, each time these partings hurt. I tried to get accustomed to the pain and to be joyful about the reunion that came with each changeover from mother to grandparents and back.

And my life, slinking from home to the ambulatory centre, from the ambulatory centre back home like a whipped dog, would shrink away too.

‘I’ll have to learn to live differently,’ she said to me one evening. ‘I’ve become used to you.’ ‘Me too.’ We had our small, isolated life. Somewhere was another life, but we had ours.

My passion had turned into a pitiful routine, a dead end.

I gazed at her. My flesh and blood. Her longing for life was stronger than the evil that gnawed on me.

We pooled our money and brought some flowers. By the time we reached the graveyard, they were frozen. And there was a sea of people there. We mingled with the crowd, never again to be separated from it.