Inga Abele - High Tide

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 talk to him about Aksels.

The trump card. He even swayed a little, he hadn’t been expecting it. They never mentioned things like that. Because, first and foremost, they both had their own version of what had happened.

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.