All language subtitles for Rocks.in.My.Pockets.2014

One overcast late April day in 1949

a poacher passing my grandparent's house

on his way to set traps and catch small animals like hare or beaver

noticed my grandmother Anna

standing in the middle of a shallow river

fully clothed.

Apparently, she forgot, or didn't think of,

putting rocks in her coat pockets to do a good job of drowning herself.

Now, many years later, I live in New York

and I think I would know the right brand of rope

if I decided to hang myself.

I would rub the rope with a bar of soap

so that the friction of the separate strands would be minimal

and sliding of the rope through the slipknot tightening the noose

would be swift and successful.

I would think of stripping from the waist down

because I've read somewhere

that sudden and violent strangling causes a person to piss and shit herself

as the intestinal muscles go lax.

I wouldn't want whoever discovered me hanging in my bedroom

have to clean the shit and piss off me.

It would be hard enough already seeing my dead body,

to clean the stinky stuff, too.

But then, when I think of it,

if I stripped down before hanging myself, the shit and piss would be on the floor,

that would be no good either.

One has to be considerate to one's fellow men.

I'd use adult diapers.

I think you can tell

that this is a subject I have thought a lot about.

It is very clear to me what exactly needs to be done

and what the potential obstacles are on my way to success.

So, the story about my grandmother

standing in the middle of a shallow river without rocks in her pockets

makes me think she had an idea of what she wanted to achieve

but she didn't have an intelligent plan.

It surprises me

because in her small native town she was the brightest student of all

and her father rallied the money of his relatives

and some rich town folk

to send Anna to a very good boarding school

in the big city of Riga.

- Study well. - He told her.

- Education will bring you opportunities.

It was the 1920's in the conservative country of Latvia

where no one expected a woman to get good education.

Women were supposed to get married

and have as many children as their frail bodies could carry.

Even the brightest boys weren't able to get good education.

Education was a costly enterprise

and it required sacrifices from all participating parties.

Anna studied well,

aware of the sacrifices made, and the responsibility weighed on her.

When she graduated,

she looked around at what her options were.

In the 1920's Latvia

there were not that many opportunities

for a woman with a good basic education who wanted more.

She had to take a job as a secretary.

She was 20, very pretty and intelligent.

In no time she found a position with an entrepreneur.

This entrepreneur had a past of great ups

and even greater downs.

His enterprising spirit combined brilliant ideas

with a lack of attention to detail or thorough knowledge.

For example, when he meddled in politics

before the failed revolution of 1905 against the Tsarist Regime,

he locked himself in a secret apartment in Warsaw,

and for two years painted Tsarist Russia's one hundred rouble notes

to create funds for his party to stage a revolution,

only to discover in the end that he had made a tiny mistake.

There was an odd feather on the Tsar's double-headed eagle

The party didn't want to risk agents being arrested

when they were buying weapons with clearly counterfeit money,

so they put the work of two years into burlap sacks

and burned them in a remote forest clearing.

Then the entrepreneur switched parties

and briefly collaborated with random Russian forces,

which tried to take over Latvia after it got its independence in 1918.

But then, after a ferocious fight,

random opportunistic German forces took over the disputed territory

and recognized the entrepreneur as a collaborator of their enemies.

He was handed over to a firing squad to be shot.

The soldiers fired at the line of five men in front of them

who all fell over the precipice.

The entrepreneur regained consciousness among four dead bodies.

He discovered that, miraculously,

the only body part a bullet had damaged was his pinky.

It was shot off.

He heard the officers ordering the soldiers

to make sure that all five men were dead.

He sensed his opportunity, as it was getting dark.

Swiftly, he disappeared into the nearby swamp and hid there

while the Germans with their dogs searched for him.

The entrepreneur, Indulis, had a son, a daughter and a wife.

His wife was solid as a rock.

Though begrudgingly, she still supported his endeavors,

despite the proof that the man, her husband,

had an erratic, adventurous and improvisational approach

to business and politics.

He was in a position of power. Then he was not and was almost shot.

He got money. He lost money.

Then, after Latvia gained national independence,

its political and economic situation stabilized.

The wife, Elsa, borrowed money from her father

for her husband to open a low risk, stable income business

of building ships.

She wanted her husband to settle down to one thing,

one business, one party.

This was the entrepreneurial office my grandmother Anna entered.

She had never seen a man like her new boss before.

He was not conventionally handsome,

but with his dark hair, dark eyes, strange crooked nose

he made an almost startling appearance next to an average blond Latvian male.

Besides his striking looks,

he was energetic and interested in things around him.

Look, he even took opera singing lessons despite the fact that he was already 50!

He definitely didn't care about other people's opinions or ridicule,

a totally unusual sight for a girl from a small town

where everybody operated on the notion of "what would the neighbors think".

He had friends and acquaintances in Riga's high society.

Well known writers, politicians, businessmen of Latvia

would call in to his office.

Anna was fascinated by her boss.

She couldn't wait for the next workday to arrive.

Soon she found that he couldn't do without her services.

He couldn't type, his thoughts ran too fast and too wild

for writing coherent business letters.

His spelling in German and Latvian was horrendous.

He made mistakes with numbers!

Anna felt elated that she could serve this amazing,

unusual, and as far as she could see great man.

She started to wear a new dress to work, a conservative office dress

but with a deeper V neckline than her modesty had previously allowed.

The V cut was outlined with white lace, which accented her peachy skin.

The strategy worked.

Her boss's eyes now lingered

on certain parts of her dress a bit longer.

She was hoping he would notice

the woman tucked inside that dress.

Her aspirations, the sacrifices

made by her family for her future didn't matter now.

She was in love for the first time and it was a question of life or death!

The intensity of that feeling, of course, was biologically determined,

as her fertility aligned with her sensitive, imaginative mind

and the maturity of her body.

Her mind, though, was the weak spot.

It was like a badly wired building.

It didn't show right away.

When an adventurous man of a certain age

is presented with a choice between the security of his business,

which is a jail of boredom to him

and a young woman who reminds him

of the land of opportunities of his own youth,

that certain man doesn't really have a choice.

The divorce was ugly.

In the beginning Indulis's wife didn't understand why he was leaving.

It didn't make sense to her,

with their two children grown now,

business getting more stable with every day,

them getting older, wiser, physically slower

(not getting in trouble with firing squads anymore),

this was a prime time to enjoy life,

not throw it away for some "secretary"!

Elsa begged for an explanation.

- I want to have more children, - He declared.

The answer was plausible but cruel,

because his wife was in the middle of menopause

and she could not possibly deliver him more children.

- I feel my gene pool is very good.

- Look, how dashing and smart my son is!

- And my daughter, too.

- Our newly independent Latvian nation needs

- smart and industrious people like me and my offspring.

- If I can't participate in politics,

- then at least I want to serve my country with my genes.

It was true.

He always wanted to serve a higher purpose,

that's where his political adventures were coming from,

the need to influence, to make an impact.

What a pain it must have been for this man to feel

that his excellent genes, his most amazing sperm

was just wasted away on a woman who couldn't procreate,

while a 20 year old woman could get pregnant

from just sleeping in his vicinity.

- An excellent breed of 10 children

- should come out of this union

- and do international miracles for the small provincial Latvia.

One thing he didn't think of, however, was the gene pool of the other side,

that of his brand new wife.

With all his curious mind, Indulis never inquired

why some of Anna's relatives didn't live up to their potential

and why some of them had mysteriously perished

at the tender ages of 18, 20, 25 and 30.

Even if he had the inclination to find out,

Anna's father had strictly forbidden all family members

to discuss family secrets,

thus keeping them safe under the lids of graves.

But Indulis didn't even ask!

Like with his other ventures,

he had a great plan without going too much into detail.

The moment Indulis divorced his first wife,

the luxury carpet under his feet was yanked out.

His former father-in-law wanted his loan back

with an interest so high

that it suggested he was a new business enemy.

Indulis paid him off,

but new creditors appeared one after another

and they all wanted their loans back with inflated interest on top.

Indulis's business was ruined in no time.

With his new wife

he hid from his creditors in a rented country house

where they conceived their first child.

But Indulis was not interested in his creditor problem

or the possibility of going to jail.

He was getting more and more possessed with jealousy.

The hunched over peasant who passed by,

the young farmhand

who found things to do in the house too often.

They all seemed to look at Indulis's new wife

with inappropriate interest.

- Her husband is old, she is young,

- he can't possibly satisfy her in bed

- so I may have my chance here.

What if he indeed didn't satisfy his young wife?

That thought clearly was coming from a man

who had just divorced a woman

who in her early fifties was at her sexual peak.

While a freshly pregnant woman of 21

is just barely beginning to understand her own body and sexual needs.

Anna was more inclined to puke in the morning

and needed cuddling in the evening.

But he wouldn't see it.

He needed to move Anna away from the other men's prying eyes.

With all his failings, Indulis still had an idea-generating brain.

Turpentine would become the savior, of his business and private life.

He went back to the city, to his previous investors,

and made a new proposal.

- Turpentine is on the rise in the market!

- People need paint solvent to paint their houses.

- Latvia is covered with pine forests, and turpentine comes from pine trees.

- It's easy and fast.

Smelling money, the investors forgave Indulis his debts

and gave him the means to build a turpentine factory.

He built it in the middle of the forest,

with the closest neighbors three kilometers away

and hired three of the ugliest men to help him.

The business slowly took off.

Anna was now locked in the middle of the forest,

surrounded by people

who didn't have an appreciation for sophisticated conversation,

under the watchful eye of her husband.

Indulis threw a fit every time a man passed her by

closer than he imagined was appropriate.

- It is your fault! Your hair is glowing in the sunshine!

She covered her hair.

Everything else was already covered with

baggy clothes and oversized boots.

Instead of shining in a high society spotlight

as she had hoped,

she was living the same peasant's life she had tried to escape a few years ago.

She went back to her parents, as we always do when we are unhappy

and have the crazy idea that if they created us,

they might be able to uncreate us,

unravel the last two or three years

so that we could start from the point where things went wrong.

A cowardly dream of going back into the womb.

That's what they told her.

- Don't be a coward. Just bear it out. - Anna's mother said.

- You made a choice and you stick by it.

- There are no other options.

Her father didn't say a word.

Sacrificing his money and the precious hope to educate

his bright, clever daughter

now seemed futile and ridiculous.

She couldn't even marry well!

Education is milk spilled into the river.

So Anna went back to her husband and bore him another child.

And another. And another. And another.

The Big Depression hit the turpentine business hard

because it was connected to other businesses hit by the depression.

Now Indulis wished he was producing milk or cottage cheese.

And it wasn't too late.

He bought two more cows and, to save money, let the milkmaid go.

Now it was Anna's task to milk the cows, take them to the pasture and feed them.

To grow strong, children needed milk.

The house they lived in was cleverly built right by the factory,

but not so smartly, on top of a sandy mountain.

There was no way to dig a well by the house in the sand.

A cow needs 10 buckets of water a day. They had 4 cows.

It meant that 40 buckets of water just for the cows

had to be brought up the steep slope from where the river was.

Every day.

There was one person in the family,

who was young and strong enough to be able to do it.

Anna went to the river every day, filled the 40 buckets

and looked with longing at the calm surface of the water.

Death seemed appealing and sweet.

Then the cow mooed, a child screamed reminding her of her duties.

- You made a choice and you stick by it. There are no other options.

Living far away from other people's eyes didn't weaken Indulis's jealousy.

What was Anna looking at when she sat by the water,

pretending to fill up the buckets?

Was there a man hiding in the bushes across the river?

Indulis insisted on having sex with Anna every day

hoping she would squeal at least once,

denoting her physical pleasure or her devotion to him.

But whatever he did in bed she still looked past him,

as if on the wall

there was something more interesting, more enticing.

That feeling of becoming one at the peak of lovemaking, where was it?

Every house in Latvia has a name,

so Indulis had named their house "Shields",

thinking it should shield them from the evils of the outside world.

But now he felt that his own wife had a shield

and there was no way he could get through to her.

Was it another man? Or was it her family that she missed?

Indulis was holding his wife in his arms,

but she was slipping away from him, unavailable, distant, elusive.

He didn't consider that most of the time

his wife was either pregnant or breastfeeding.

He didn't think that her empty stare into space

was a sign of inner pain, a longing to leave the physical self.

In 1940 the Soviet Union illegally annexed Latvia

and enforced the Soviet system on Latvian territory.

Private property was banned.

All land was nationalized.

Indulis's turpentine factory was nationalized, too,

and he became just another hired hand

at the factory he used to own.

The Soviets confiscated two of the family's cows

and one of the horses.

The other two cows and the horse that were left were nationalized,

meaning, the family had to take care of them

but if a Soviet official needed a cow or a horse,

they had to give it up.

The family had become renters of their own livestock.

Indulis's enterprising spirit was crushed.

Not only that, the political beliefs

that he so passionately defended with his lost pinky were crushed, too.

His idealization of socialism

evaporated just a few weeks after the Soviet take-over.

He decided to write a thorough critique of the Soviet system

so that the young and brave wouldn't be seduced ever again

by the high sounding concepts of equality and solidarity.

But, before he even could start,

Nazi Germany attacked Soviet Russia and invaded Latvia,

using it as a doorway to Russian territories.

Now the Nazis imposed their order,

which was based on the idea of supernatural rights for Germans

to take anything that belonged to non-Germans.

They took Indulis's remaining two cows and the horse.

A Nazi resistance movement, partisans, formed in the forest.

A group of partisans came to Indulis's house one night

and demanded meat, bread and vodka.

- We'll burn your house if you don't give us food every week.

They threatened.

The partisans mainly consisted of former Soviet officials,

and they had preserved the attitude of men in power.

Well, they did have power.

They had guns and matches.

But all the food-producing animals of the family

had already been confiscated by the Soviets and the Nazis!

Anna walked along the river

to a house that she knew bred rabbits.

Rabbits were considered a poor man's food.

She got the rabbits for cheap.

Anna brought the 4 young, still puffy fur balls back to her house.

She was inexperienced with rabbits,

and couldn't tell which was male, which female,

so she kept them together till their coats grew slick

and one of them started to mount the others.

Anna then separated the three females from the male

and watched how they made soft nests in the hay

in the corners of their wooden boxes.

The newborn rabbits were the most helpless creatures she had seen.

The three rabbit mothers obsessively cared for their young.

Then one morning, Anna found one of the nests empty.

Only the mother was in the box.

- Was it a fox? - Anna wondered.

But it wasn't a fox.

Anna realized that the mother had eaten her children.

The rabbit looked at Anna

with eyes that denoted no guilt, no remorse.

She was ready to mate again.

Anna stared back at the rabbit mother and cold apprehension grasped her heart.

- You can be free if you let your children die.

The partisans arrived in the dark.

They woke Anna and Indulis by knocking on their bedroom window.

The fact that they knew which window to knock on made Anna uneasy.

- They are watching our house. - She whispered to Indulis.

Anna walked out and went straight to the barn.

The partisans followed.

She pulled out the rabbit that had eaten her young

and handed her to the partisans.

The rabbit was kicking her legs desperately,

as if she didn't want to join the resistance movement.

- What do you want me to do with this?

The oldest partisan asked, leaning on his shabby shotgun.

- Shoot it? No.

- You slit its throat, skin it, and give me the meat.

- We'll be back in two hours.

And he pulled out a box of matches

and shook it in front of Anna with a menace.

Anna nodded. The partisans left.

She went back into the house.

Indulis, slowed by back pain, was only now putting his coat on.

- I can't do it, - He said.

- I've never killed anything in my life. I'll sharpen a knife for you.

With a knife as sharp as a razor blade, Anna returned to the barn.

- It's either you or me.

She told the rabbit.

Without hesitation, not to allow a thought or feeling,

Anna took the rabbit by her ears, lifted her up and swiftly slit her throat.

The rabbit's legs kicked for a while, then the kicking stopped.

Anna watched the blood stream out of the throat.

Inside, she felt some callousness arise

and cover the pot of her sensitive soul tightly, like a lid,

keeping the steam of emotion from pouring out.

- Life and death are my business now.

Anna thought.

- Rabbits die, my children live.

Mobilized by the need to survive, Anna dissolved her soul's desire to die.

Her physical self had to get her family through the difficult times.

After violent battles, the Russian troops chased the Germans out of Latvia

and reestablished Soviet order once again.

Indulis's plan from the good times,

the plan to produce ten offsprings

who would contribute to the glory of independent Latvia

now seemed ridiculous.

Independent Latvia had ceased to exist with the Soviet occupation.

What man would want to support that evil empire

with his talented children?

Also, Indulis was running out of steam.

After the eighth child, he started to regard sex as a straining exercise

that he couldn't muster the spirit for.

He preferred spending his evenings alone, writing.

But the main reason his old plan

now seemed ridiculous to everyone observing

was that his eight offsprings were barely surviving.

The four skinny little boys and four sickly looking malnourished girls,

all dressed in rabbit skins,

were considered by neighbors as unfortunate runts

who wouldn't have the chance to grow into fully developed adults.

There was no money in the household!

Indulis received a pension, a few roubles,

which he promptly gave to Anna for domestic necessities.

He felt,

as for his input to the household, that this was enough.

For the rest of the time he locked himself in the attic, writing away.

Anna had no scruples about using the new system to her advantage.

She went to a local Soviet representative

and told him that as a mother of eight, she needed a cow.

The Soviet Union had a low reproduction rate.

Families who had more than three children were highly promoted.

As all the cows

in the Soviet Union were national property,

the official gave Anna a neighbor's old cow.

From another neighbor, Anna was given a horse for transportation.

Now she was back to the business

of carrying water up the slope to the cow and horse.

Still, even with the milk and rabbit meat, there was not enough food in the house.

Anna took her children to the forest and taught them to gather

whatever was edible there - berries, mushrooms, bark, moss.

The children took pride in their knowledge of forest edibles.

No one was better at telling the right kind of boletus

from the poisonous kind.

No one else knew that a certain kind of toxic mushroom

was edible after exactly 3 minutes 34 seconds of boiling.

This knowledge gave Anna's children a sense of a secret power,

invisible to neighbors who only saw

pale, dirty, skinny kids wearing hideous rabbit hides,

carrying a bunch of useless twigs out of the forest.

Anna used her children's pride in their knowledge of the forest

to promote another kind of education.

- Study well.

She told them when they went to primary school.

- Education will bring you to the land where rivers are filled with milk,

their banks are made of bread and cakes grow on trees.

She wanted her children to succeed.

The knowledge of the forest gave them self-reliance.

The knowledge of books gave them a chance to conquer the world.

And it gave her an opportunity to free herself.

Soviet schools were free for all,

a perfect way to get rid of another mouth

demanding food at the family table.

One after another, Anna pushed her children out of the nest

to far-away boarding schools.

With the house empty,

callousness that had covered her feelings started to peel off.

There is a weeping willow leaning over their grave.

Indulis died first, at age 79.

Then, 3 years later, Anna, at age 50.

He was lucky to live so long.

But 50 seems a bit premature.

- What did your mother die of? - I ask my father.

A doctor might ask you this kind of question.

- Has anyone in your family had ulcers?

Has anyone in your family had cancer?

Do you smoke?

Smoking is a choice one makes,

but having skin cancer run in your family is certainly not.

You catch your enemy if you know where to look for it.

In the bathroom

I look at my evacuated fecal matter before flushing

and ask: - What did my grandmother die of?

My father's answer is vague.

- Her heart just stopped beating in her sleep.

- She had a weak heart, you see. - A weak heart!

Can I point out that no one with a weak heart would be able to

carry 40 buckets of water up that slope from the river to the house.

But there are seven more of her children I can ask.

- She was just worn out,

- carrying all those buckets full of water day after day.

- That night she had to hurry to get the hay into the barn before storm.

Afterwards, she just lay down,

and she died in her sleep out of sheer exhaustion.

Right.

When you are very tired, you better not fall asleep.

- She had a weak heart.

- Her doctor prescribed her heart medicine.

- I think, she accidentally might have taken too much

before going to sleep.

Accidentally overdosed heart medicine?

The most popular medicine in the Soviet Union after the war

prescribed for all heart conditions was diazepam,

in other words, Valium.

It was supposed to treat anything from heart palpitations

to alcoholism, to excessive anxiety

to mental deficiency,

which is what depression was for Soviet doctors.

- I was not there, so I cannot tell you.

- I just know she died in her sleep

- and there was an empty bottle of sleeping pills next to her bed.

- I found her in the morning when she didn't get up at her usual hour.

- I think, her heart was acting up at night

so she took more medicine than prescribed and that did it.

What exactly was in that bottle next to her bed?

- Did you do an autopsy?

- Oh, there was no need.

- The causes of her death were natural.

- She died in her sleep. End of story.

Let it be, she died in her sleep.

Her eight children who all survived the Second World War

as well as hard post war years, living in a most remote place,

each got a college education and a few of them even masters degrees.

But they still felt like survivors

and had a notion that no one from the outside

could possibly understand what they all went through.

They formed some sort of a club of 8

that promoted certain mythology.

Mother was the center of the Universe!

They never said an unkind word about her.

Father, they didn't know him very well.

In his later years father was too old and too wrapped

in writing his bitter observational notes on the Soviet regime

to really give time and attention to his young.

His notes were so venomous that when one of the brothers

discovered them after their father's death,

he burned them.

There was no need to get in trouble over a dead man's paperwork.

The Mother, on the other hand, was perfect.

She was The Forty Buckets of Water Carrying Saint,

making sure that everyone she gave birth to lived.

She died in her sleep from physical exhaustion

and a worried heart about her children who each had flown out of her nest.

If she died in her sleep, how do you explain

that 10 years before a poacher dragged her fully clothed out of the river?

And that a neighbor did the same thing a few years later?

- A brief lapse of judgment.

- Her life was hard. Why are you asking?

- I want to know the origins of excitability and intensity of my brain,

- I want to understand the electric surges that pass through the fat of my brain

- lighting it up like a nighttime city at the peak of late activities.

- I want to know where the blackouts come from,

- the pain and the suffering that follows.

- It's your own brain.

- The way it operates is your own fault.

- Your grandmother had a life harder than you could even imagine.

- Leave her alone, you spoiled brat.

But my grandmother must be at the center of my brain.

She is standing, confused, in the water, not understanding why she doesn't sink.

I think like her.

I want to survive, but I don't want to live.

When my brain is idle, it starts eating itself.

If she died in her sleep,

how come her warm, loving granddaughter Miranda

hung herself soon after her son was born?

My cousin Miranda had not thought it out thoroughly, though.

It was a plan of somewhat slow self-strangling

and she had some miscalculations in her timing too,

as her husband arrived from his errands

just in time to pull her out of the slowly closing noose.

She never forgave him.

- You have no control over me. One day, despite you, I'll carry it out.

She told him.

Poor man, he was in love with his wife, the way she used to be.

She used to have a lively spirit

and her way of looking at the world was that of an artist.

Colors excited her.

Wild, surreal images flew through her imagination

like short visual poems.

In fact, she was studying art and had no intentions to marry.

Maybe this was what appealed to the man,

the challenge of a nice, decent woman

who wanted to be an artist.

He had set his eye on a difficult goal

and had to apply pressure on Miranda and her family to get his prize.

He was a dashing fellow, too, not to dismiss his charms.

One summer night

Miranda took me to look for wild orchids.

It was the brief moment around Summer Solstice

when everything explodes with blooming.

Nature's way of assuring that seeds and fruit ripen

before the first frost in late August kills life and growth.

The meadows smelled of lilies and the warm air embraced us.

The magic of the night made us feel close, we both reacted to the smell of flowers,

the colors and shapes with the same excitement.

But at that moment there was a slight difference between us.

The world seemed full of promise to the 16 year old me.

But to her, at age 22, it was closing in.

- This is my last summer. - She said sadly.

I thought she meant the last summer as a single woman.

- You don't have to marry!

I have to please the people I love.

She said somewhat cryptically.

She married that fall.

I spent two hours crying at her wedding. It felt like a funeral to me.

The last time I saw Miranda, she was breast-feeding her first child,

soon after her attempted suicide which was written off as postpartum depression.

Mental illness was considered a failing of one's will,

a sign of weak character and thus a sin.

Postpartum depression, on the other hand, was a temporary lapse of one's character,

explained by a hormonal disbalance and thus more acceptable.

The newborn was the most beautiful baby I had ever seen.

Together with his mother they looked like Madonna and baby Christ.

Except, Miranda's eyes weren't quite present,

as if she was looking at something that nobody else could see.

I reminded her of our walk looking for wild orchids the summer before.

It meant nothing to her.

I felt betrayal stab my young heart.

She was in the river, far away from me, and she was not turning back.

The husband, who still loved her,

and still had a mad hope that Miranda will

become the woman she once was, brought her to a psychiatrist

who put her on antidepressants, a handful of pills a day.

In the Soviet Union

psychiatry was a department of the chemical industry,

it definitely was not about healing one's soul.

The pharmaceuticals that were supposed to treat depression were hardcore

and about as precise and useful as a hammer is

for cutting one's fingernails.

Miranda descended into the thick chemical cloud

and no one ever heard from her soul again.

20 years and another child later,

she carried out her final and most successful plot.

At the mental hospital

where she was under 24-hour surveillance,

she still managed to jump off the 5th floor roof.

By then, she was guided by mysterious voices.

They pointed out to her the gaps in the surveillance system

and how to use them to her advantage.

She finally fulfilled her dream.

She broke free.

Her husband took care of their two children all by himself

and insulated them from his wife's family.

Only the three of them knew what they had gone through.

The rest of the world was just crazy.

Here's an odd thing -

you never learn from other people's mistakes.

Only from your own.

I was next in line to do just the same thing.

I always knew I wanted to be a free, independent woman,

a writer, an artist, a bohemian,

but a man I was obsessed with at age 21 proposed.

I said yes, thinking I would postpone the wedding

till we fell out of the obsession.

I was a master at postponing things.

But I got pregnant

and my parents insisted that we do the right thing.

- What would the neighbors say! - They cried out.

- We are respectable people in our community

- and we are not going to lose face because of you!

I was well educated and smart,

but I still couldn't overcome a failing of my character

to please the people I love at the expense of my dreams.

I married the guy,

and soon started to have fantasies just before sleep

that pregnant as I was

I would take an airplane to Kamchatka,

and free myself from the shackles of marriage.

Then my son was born.

It was an exhilarating thrill.

The ecstasy of seeing his face,

connecting with him made me drunk with happiness

and full of sweet satisfaction.

I felt adult.

I felt I was given a responsibility beyond belief,

like driving a bus with 300 people over a treacherous terrain.

I wanted to be an adult finally, and I wanted to give my son a good life.

But, strangely, I started having another sort of fantasy

right before sleep.

In this scenario,

I would get up quietly,

without disturbing my husband, put on a bathrobe,

take a cord from the workshop, go up to the attic and hang myself.

That fantasy was soothing at night. It made me feel free,

it made me feel like I had options again.

But in the daylight it seemed disturbing.

I needed to talk to somebody.

- Has anyone in your family committed or tried to commit suicide?

The local psychiatrist looked at me with a stern expression.

Her eyes were bloodshot and milky.

Her husband, an ear, throat and nose specialist,

had unlimited access to pure alcohol,

the power of which he believed in so much that he treated most of his patients,

including himself, with the spirits.

His wife obviously had access to some psychotropic medication

and it was apparent that before she prescribed them to anybody

she first tested them on herself.

The sacrifices doctors must make.

- Yes. - I said, letting the truth out,

although I knew my parents would disapprove.

- My cousin tried to hang herself after she gave birth.

- Aha! - The psychiatrist said,

her watery eyes looking at me like blank billboards.

- How about you? - She asked.

- Those fantasies of yours about hanging yourself,

what do you think of them?

- Well, those are only fantasies.

- I would never commit suicide.

- And why not?

- Because I tried it once, when I was 18.

- It showed me that my body had

- a stronger will to live than my mind had the will to die.

- Were you depressed?

- Not at all.

- I was just thinking a lot about the meaning of all -

- living, learning, thinking, feeling,

- falling in love, falling out of love, having children.

- It all ends with death anyway. Is there any meaning in it at all?

- I still don't know the answer.

She stood up and said firmly

: - I am putting you on suicide watch

- and you are going to the mental hospital

- the moment I find a car to take you there.

There was a strange relief

that I didn't have to go back to the cage that waited for me at home.

This was my chance to escape, to make myself free again,

to return to the state when I was 16

and had no responsibilities, only opportunities.

But what was in front of me?

Very few people walked out of Soviet mental hospitals mentally whole.

The few young, brilliant men I knew

who went into a mental hospital to avoid the draft into the Soviet Army,

which at that time meant certain death in the Afghanistan war,

were never as brilliant again, or even coherent.

On my way out to the car I glanced at the mirror in the hall.

Instead of me I saw Miranda's face.

- You'll be all right. - She said.

- They'll force you to take all the pills,

- but the pills won't harm you if you drink a lot of water.

- How did this happen to me?

- You wanted to run away. This is your chance. Take it.

- But that's cowardly. I made choices. I have to stick to them!

- The choices you stick to will take you to the grave.

How does a fox get out of a trap that snapped her ankle?

She gnaws her leg off to run free.

After the mental hospital I divorced the man,

which was quite hard, because no one divorces in my extended family.

There are separations, threats of leaving one's spouse,

maybe mistresses and lovers but never a divorce.

- Oh, she brings shame to our family! - The relatives said.

- Better divorced than dead. - My mother replied.

All those revelations

about the history of her talented daughter's mental instability

made her a bit snappish.

It was the fault of her husband's family.

My mother didn't know she married into a family of mental cases.

Her own family was mentally robust,

maybe not the best educated, but hey,

everybody was at least mentally stable!

My mother decided that

as a representative of the mentally stable people

she was a better judge of what was good for bringing up a child.

She took my son into her own hands.

I was left with nothing to hold in my hands.

No husband, no child, no house.

From my brief venture into adulthood

I returned to become 16 again, and was able to start over.

This time I'll fulfill my destiny.

I've always imagined that the knack for arts

in my father's family came from my grandfather Indulis.

After all, he was the one who hand-painted sacks and sacks

of Tsarist Russia's one hundred rouble notes in 1903.

But my father was adamant: the art gene was not coming from Indulis.

- Your grandmother Anna, she was the artist of the family.

- It's her gene. - Do you have any paintings?

- Any intricate knits by her?

- You want proof? I don't have proof.

- She was too busy with eight children, two cows, a horse,

- killing and skinning a rabbit a day

- to be able to trifle with paintings and tapestries.

- If there is no proof, how do you know she was an artist?

- It's the character, my dear.

- She had the eye, ear and sensitivity of an artist.

- You never walked with her in the blooming meadows of the Summer Solstice.

- She had a wild imagination.

- Colors, shapes and smells made her see magic.

What Anna was not able to do, I was determined to at least try.

The world around me threw a tremendous resistance to my plan.

- You can't be an artist.

- Artists drink and die from liver failure.

- You can't be an artist. Women artists are all whores.

- You don't have an arts education and it's too late to get one now.

- An artist is not a serious occupation.

Well. What was my alternative?

The madhouse? Suicide? Pharmaceuticals?

Standing on the razor thin line between madness and sanity

I slowly started to move to where I wanted to be.

That thin line does not allow one to travel with a lot of luggage.

Husbands, children, possessions have to be left behind.

No one learns anything from anybody.

And why should they?

Life seems to be random without any purpose.

You procreate and then you die.

Why not just skip that one step and die before the procreation?

The next in line was our beautiful cousin Linda.

In early childhood she was the best dressed of us all,

and we, the other cousins, admired her beauty.

She exuded a certain coldness that comes with the sense of superiority.

In her teenage years when her parents came to visit our family

she wouldn't even come out of the car to greet us.

She just sat there in the front seat

looking beautiful and bored for two and a half hours

while the parents caught up on the latest family gossip

and the weather forecasts.

I was impressed with her courage not to comply with family pressures.

I wished I could stay in my room

reading the complete works of Victor Hugo

and never come out to greet any visiting relative,

but I was afraid to displease my mother.

- Come on, don't be rude. - She pushed me into the living room.

Although never nice, Linda never seemed rude.

Beautiful people are forgiven all kinds of things.

Homely people are left only with envy.

Besides being beautiful, Linda was stunningly smart.

The few times she descended to talk to me

she simply stated

: - My average grade on my last term's report card was 5.

5 was the highest grade.

Whatever I tried

cheating, private tutors, even studying I could never raise my average above 4.2.

- 4.2 is my average. - I admitted.

She just distantly smiled, got back in the car and closed the door.

She was not afraid to hurt my feelings.

A person with an average grade of 4.2

just didn't deserve a conversation with her.

Where do all the smart people go after they graduate from school

with the most amazing grades and other superior honors?

They go to the university that is the hardest to get into

and thus the most prestigious of them all.

The famous Riga Institute of Medicine.

To get in you have to pass 4 oral exams.

When Linda arrived with her application to the first exam,

she saw a huge crowd of institute hopefuls,

each of them holding an application with the exact grade average as Linda.

In the face of such fierce competition Linda flinched.

At the forth exam, she sneezed before giving an answer

and didn't make the highest grade.

She didn't get in and had a major meltdown.

To soothe her nerves, her parents bought her a house.

Linda got a job at a hospital,

as her next year's application would look so much better

with work experience related to the field written in.

She became more humble.

Now she would actually get out of the car and talk to me.

- Come and visit me. - She invited.

Her house was big.

I was impressed that she owned it.

- When I get accepted into the institute

- I'll rent out one of the rooms to get extra income.

Wow. She had a business sense, too!

The next summer, she successfully passed all the exams

with the highest grades and got into her dream institute.

Just before fall we met at a family celebration.

- You'll see. I'll be the best student, I'll beat them all.

She boasted.

Sure, she could do that, I had no doubts.

- And get ready for a wedding. I am getting married next summer.

- Married?

Such certainty was odd for a girl who had never had a boyfriend.

Yes, beauty alone can take you far, but to get married you need practice.

- Yes. I rented the room. His name is Ivars.

- Come and visit us.

- A renter?

It was not clear to me how a renter would transform into a groom,

but obviously I didn't have all the information

to successfully argue that point.

Having set a goal to beat them all, Linda started to study intensely.

She had a lot to cram in

: there are 206 bones in the human body

and she had to know all the names both in Latin and Latvian.

There are 640 skeletal muscles,

and endless amounts of cardiac muscles and smooth muscles.

She had to know them all.

Her memory was working overtime.

I visited her one late November evening.

- Meet my "renter" Ivars.

She actually winked when she said "renter"!

Ivars was a nice looking fellow,

handsomely blond and impossibly flirtatious,

or maybe his ambition was to get along with everybody.

In any case, we hit it off.

Not sure how far I could take my own flirtations with Ivars

without offending Linda, in case something serious was going on.

I decided to poke around.

A very innocent question.

- How did you guys meet?

- I needed the room, she had the room, and here I am.

- We met at the orientation at the institute.

- I noticed Ivars right away.

- He, too, was drawn to me.

- After the orientation we talked for two hours in the park.

- It was wonderful! I offered to rent my free room,

- and he kindly took it in order to be closer to me.

Ivars saw me off at the door.

- Come and visit again. - Maybe.

- Maybe I can call you? - What for?

- I am a renter, understand, not a boyfriend.

- It's ambiguous to me.

- Not so ambiguous to me. I got no money to rent another place,

- this is dirt cheap. I'd be a fool to let it go.

- She is very pretty.

- Beauty without a heart and sense of humor

- loses its appeal after 15 minutes of conversation.

- Save me.

- Gotta go.

- Linda's getting married!

My mother said a few months later.

- Apparently, her renter either proposed or is about to.

- I heard her renter called it off. She is heart broken.

- But he hasn't moved out, so she has hope.

- The wedding is scheduled for July 15th.

- It's all set!

- She'll pass her final exams in May

- and start preparation for the wedding in earnest.

- She studies like a devil, that girl,

- with no sleep and no rest

till all the pages in the books are memorized.

In July, Linda put on the wedding dress she had bought six weeks before,

put on a flower crown with the bridal veil attached

and slowly danced in the garden alone.

Her renter called the ambulance.

She violently resisted the paramedics,

screaming that the wedding has been announced

and Ivars had betrayed his promise to her.

The renter had a hard time to convince the paramedics

that he was not engaged to Linda

and she was hallucinating about the promises that were never made.

Linda's parents, too, had a hard time believing him.

- She told us you promised to marry her.

- I am only a renter! We were never intimate!

- And I've never promised her anything!

- Only a renter?

- With the rent so cheap? You can't be so stupid!

When Linda got out of the mental hospital, she went back to her house.

She couldn't study anymore. Her brain was damaged by the breakdown.

Still, she insisted on living in the house alone.

- I'll be getting married by next summer, you'll see.

There was a man in her neighborhood who saw the despair of the woman.

I don't know what he thought.

In Latvia sexual relations are sometimes regarded

as a cure for suppressed hysterical tensions in a woman.

Maybe he wanted to help,

maybe he saw an opportunity to release his own tensions.

He started to visit Linda in her big lonely house

and apparently they had sexual relations

because she got pregnant.

She was triumphant!

Pregnancy was still a great lever to force someone to marry you.

But the man, it turned out, already had a wife and two daughters.

Though unfaithful, he was loyal to his family.

There was no way he would divorce.

- But you have to and you will. - I'll will make you.

Day and night Linda sat in her bed, concentrating.

She was certain she had the power to make the man marry her.

Her forehead broke into sweat with the effort.

But nothing happened.

Then she got up and went to confront the man's wife.

- You have to let him go. We are in love and I am expecting.

- I am expecting too. - The wife said and slammed the door.

Linda dressed in her white bridal dress and slowly danced in the garden.

A distressed neighbor called the ambulance.

When I saw Linda again, her daughter was five.

A smart little thing who could tell

when her mother's judgment was somewhat sound

and when she was off her pills.

Most importantly, she knew how to get what she wanted

by threatening to call an ambulance.

Linda had lost her beauty, the luster of her face gone.

She was aware that sometimes she couldn't tell fantasy from reality,

but then, who of us really can?

She was constantly in and out of mental hospitals

and her life depended on the pills she took, handful a day.

The aspirations? The dreams?

The ambitious goals?

All gone.

Nobody really knows

when my younger cousin Irbe started hearing voices.

She was shy and didn't talk about herself,

so no one really knew what was going on in her life or in her heart,

or in her ears, for that matter.

Irbe studied music and although she was quite good,

she only spent two years at the Conservatory

where the young and talented refine their skills.

It may have been for economic reasons that she dropped out.

The Soviet Union had collapsed a few years before

and schools started to impose tuition fees.

Irbe's parents couldn't quite afford it

and rather than straining their meager budget,

Irbe decided to earn money herself.

There may have been heartbreak too,

otherwise why did she have to move from Riga,

the city she loved, to a small, ugly town to teach music to high school kids.

The business of voices slipped out by chance

in a conversation with her much older, protective sister

who was not going to drop the subject.

- Well, yeah.

- I get daily guidance from the voices.

- Like what?

- Like, go into the bathroom, close the door and slit your wrists.

The small hairs on her sister's arms stood up. But she kept her cool.

- And why haven't you done that?

- Because the moment I raise the blade,

- the voices start to laugh and say, "just kidding".

- They are testing my trust, I think.

- Why would you even listen to them?

- They have done good things for me.

- Once they told me to get off the side of the road, like, right now!

- And when I did, a car ran off the road

- right where I would have been!

At her sister's insistence Irbe went to a psychologist.

At that time Latvia started to have experts

who knew how to heal souls without the help of chemicals.

But, apparently, Irbe's voices told her what to tell the psychologist

so she would appear perfectly normal.

Very clever voices at that.

- There is nothing wrong with her. The psychologist told the sister.

- Stop pushing your agenda and leave her alone.

- You could use some anti-paranoid treatment,

- if you want my opinion.

What worried the sister was that Irbe lived alone.

She had breakfast alone, dinner alone

and she rarely picked up a phone to talk to anybody.

The sister came to visit Irbe again

to see if there was a new message from the voices.

But Irbe was calm, collected and kind.

She made peppermint tea and each had a cup

with crumbling pieces of biscuit on the side.

Seeing her off, Irbe hugged her sister.

The warmth of her body, the sweet, still childish smell,

a vague feeling of premonition enveloped the sister.

Did she hug me a second longer than usual?

Did she linger at the door because of something unsaid

or because of something being plotted

behind those beautiful, gentle eyes?

Right after her sister left, Irbe closed the curtains.

She took a chair, climbed on it

and checked the hook the curtain rod was attached to.

It seemed strong, capable of holding 60 to 80 kilograms.

Then she took the rope

that the voices had told her to buy at the local hardware store

and made a perfect noose.

The other end she tied tightly to the curtain rod.

Irbe put her head into the noose and jumped off the windowsill.

She was discovered the next day when she didn't show up at work

and the frantic calls of her sister

convinced the building's super to enter her small, tidy apartment.

Why, I thought,

are there voices that would do such a thing to a young, promising woman?

Once, at a rural bus stop,

I saw a very old woman immersed in her own happy world.

She noticed me looking at her and smiled.

- Yes, I hear music.

- It is like listening to a radio that no one else can hear.

- The most sweet, heavenly music in the world.

- Oh dear, I wish you could hear it!

And she continued to hum along,

swinging her head in the rhythm of the music known only to her,

smiling the most ethereal smile.

What did the old woman do to deserve this great music

while the young woman who had hardly started her life

succumbed to terrible voices with a knack for destruction?

I've never found out what my diagnosis was.

The doctor who examined me and lead my treatment

at the mental hospital told me that it was so bad

that I would never be able to get a teaching position

nor any other position of responsibility.

Without disclosing what the verdict was

she said I was a mental cripple.

My parents bribed the doctor

and she rewrote her initial diagnosis into something much milder

to allow me to at least finish my studies.

- You will never be able to walk and talk ever again

- without those pink and green and yellow pills.

The doctor predicted.

- I saw your paperwork.

My veterinarian sister said one day many years later.

- You are a certified nutcase.

- We didn't tell any of our relatives because you'd be ostracized.

- But now, after Miranda, Linda and Irbe

- I don't think it's that important to keep it mum.

- Maybe it is even good to tell everybody so that they know what's in their genes.

- So, tell me already, what is it?!

- Schizophrenia.

Right.

As if anyone even today knows what schizophrenia is.

Anybody and anything could be schizophrenia.

- And what was the rewritten diagnosis?

- Manic depressive.

- Manic depressives at that time

- were allowed to handle books and a few people.

- Well, don't you think,

- if our parent's bribe made such a change in the diagnosis,

- could this doctor have changed it again under a new bribe?

My sister squinted at me.

- Don't even think you are normal!

- There are official medical papers in the cellars of the mental hospital.

- There are 3 long interviews with you, tests you filled out

- and graphs with your behavior.

- Your family's history supports the story.

- It's in the genes.

- You were designed to be crazy.

I am at the supermarket checkout counter,

getting a pineapple, organic chicken thighs

and a pack of brown rice

when I feel the faint but familiar feeling inside.

It is like a poke of a needle

somewhere deep inside my chest, just below my heart.

- Oh, no! - I think.

- Not this again!

It is about to start and I am not ready for it.

I am never ready for it.

This is not about the white noise of my everyday thoughts,

that something terrible is about to happen to my family or my friends,

and there is nothing I can do about it,

that I am a useless piece of shit, the most offensive human being ever,

that everything I do is lame and harmful to other people,

that hanging myself would be a relief to humankind,

actually hanging myself, hanging myself, hanging myself...

It seems I can't get away from the thought of hanging myself!

No, I am not talking about those everyday thoughts

that I navigate through like a ship in a sea

full of dangerous reefs and underwater rocks.

It's a normal part of my life and I know how to steer my existence

through those treacherous waters.

This is different.

Once or twice a year,

out of the blue, for no reason at all, a little needle pokes me from the inside,

and the pain it causes gradually grows into an enormous balloon

overpowering my not so small or frail body.

This balloon is empty inside,

but its edges are like hundreds of razor blades slashing my soul.

For six long weeks, all I feel is emptiness and pain.

When I get to the door of my building, the pain is so strong that I can't breathe.

I can barely hold the grocery bags.

- Hi!

My friendly neighbor says, walking out of the elevator.

- How are you?

She is used to my friendliness and I don't want to disappoint her now.

- I am fine. - I say.

I feel like a fake, an imposter.

The half smile I force on my mouth almost cracks my facial muscles.

It hurts.

- How are you?

I am hoping my neighbor won't notice that my eyes are actually blank,

that I feel neither the usual warmth, nor friendliness,

that I am possessed by something bigger than I can hold,

intolerable pain that I try to hide, ashamed to show it to people

who are not paid to listen to my troubles.

Because with the weight of the pain so great

how can I lean on another person?

It might take them down, too.

And they don't deserve that.

The pain inside grows bigger and bigger with each moment.

Now only my skin defines its limits.

The pain owns me completely.

By the time I walk into my apartment and put the groceries down on the counter

I am ready and willing to do anything to stop the pain.

I look at a kitchen knife with longing.

Some time ago I used to extinguish my college friends' cigarettes on my hands

to distract the inner pain with physical pain.

But I am older now and I have learned that

burning holes in your skin is indulging your insanity,

not fighting it.

There is nothing I can do. I have to weather it out.

I have to get through it, suffer the symptoms, the fever, aches,

hoping that time will take care of it.

The funny thing is, I don't acquire immunity

after this bout of sickness.

Like a pendulum, it comes swinging back.

I do remember the pink, green and yellow pills

that my Latvian doctor insisted I take.

I do not take those pills.

They would dull my pain, make it more endurable.

The soft pillow of pills would enwrap my existence

and distort the perspective.

My perspective, which is that

I have to walk the thin line between sanity and insanity,

keeping a fragile balance.

If my pain is dulled, I might forget that I am prone to insanity

and might make a decision

that only normal people are allowed to make.

Like, buy a house, get married, have children again.

I make no mistakes.

I work to fulfill my destiny.

I am not a whore, nor a bohemian, I don't excessively drink nor do drugs.

I am a respected member of my community.

I am a working artist.

This is my work in progress.

I have to continue to live to complete it.

I knock on the door of my neighbor.

- Hey, you said you are a bit overwhelmed with preparation for your party.

- Can I help you with anything?

Her eyes light up. - That would be amazing! Thank you!

While she is hastily managing 15 different dishes in the kitchen,

I sit at a living room table,

patiently cutting a cardboard sign that says 40.

Her husband is turning 40 and this is a surprise party for him.

The sign I am cutting out is pretty meaningless

on the scale of the Solar System,

tomorrow it'll be thrown out in the garbage and forgotten.

But today it connects me with people.

As the guests come in

I show them where to put their coats and point them to the bar.

We chat. We laugh.

I move the muscles of the mask that covers my pain.

It becomes a face again.

The feeling of warmth and love melts a small part of my pain.

I am a tiny particle in the bigger body of humanity.

Acknowledging it and extending my hand to other people

saves me from slashing my wrists with a kitchen knife.

I was reading the complete works of Victor Hugo

for the second time when my mother opened the door.

- Don't be rude. Come and greet your visiting relatives.

- But mom! I am at the most interesting place!

- Put the book down. The relatives won't be here forever.

- The book will wait.

With a sigh I put the book down and grumpily went to see the relatives.

I saw talking to people as a waste of time.

They never seemed to offer the rapture that a good book did,

nor did they possess an interesting character

like the people in a book.

Besides, coming from my personal quiet to a living room full of relatives

was always a shock, like entering cold water.

But once I was in that water, it soon became warm.

The little snippets of gossip, the judgments rendered of the neighbors,

there were always stories to hear, some characters to examine.

I just had to make an effort.

An effort my mother made me make.

I do feel grateful to her forever

for forming a habit of going out and talking to people.

Because the stories the voices of live people tell you

are very different from the stories

told by the voices that no one but you hear.

Being alive and sane is an every day effort.

Right before sleep I have a fantasy

that I am passing by my grandparents’ house

on an overcast April day in 1949.

I see my grandmother Anna fully clothed

standing in the shallow river.

Although 40 years old at that time, she looks much older.

I run to the edge of the bank and step into the cold water

that stings my thighs and stomach.

- Anna! - I call out to her.

She turns around, her face streaming with tears.

She is breathing fast and shallow.

I approach her and would like to hug her

but as we've never met we are practically strangers.

Besides, my family is not big on hugging.

I hope that she'd know somehow without the hug that I care.

- Here, take this.

I pull out of my pockets six heavy rocks,

three in each hand, and I stretch them forward to her.

- You put them in your pockets

- and lie down at the bottom of the river.

I explain.

- You fool!

She says and stops sobbing.

She takes the rocks from me.

- If I do that, I'll drown!

And she throws the rocks,

one after another, far into the river.