ESSENTIAL TRANSLATIONS SERIES 11

Nora Ikstena

Translated by

Margita Gailitis

Edited by Vija Kostoff

GUERNICA

TORONTO – BUFFALO – BERKELEY – LANCASTER (U.K.)

2013

Contents

The Orange

Still Life with Death

Amaryllii

The Son

Naģe

The Shame of Gaveiki

Elza Kuga’s Old Age Dementia

The White Handkerchief

The Orange

It is a cold winter night. They have turned on several electric heaters in their three room flat in one of the city’s apartment buildings. The heating system alone does not suffice. When the children get up in the morning to go to school, they squabble over who will get into the bathroom first, because it has the largest radiator and is always the warmest. If one fills the bathtub full-blast with hot water, then steam rises and it is very like a sauna. After almost suffocating from the constantly turned on gas stove in the kitchen, they had changed over to electric heaters. It is more expensive of course, but the air is better.

The children are asleep; the dog is snoring away on a doormat in the narrow corridor. Her husband has not yet come home. Leaning against the pantry door in the dark kitchen, Ada gazes at the winter skies through the flowers of ice frosted on the windowpane. The refrigerator hums now and then in an otherwise total silence. It is so long since she has seen these flowers of ice. Probably the last time was in her childhood, when they – three children, her mamma and papa – lived in one room in a factory workers’ barrack. With her breath or the tip of a finger, she could melt a hole in the flowers of ice. Jack Frost rattled the corners of the wooden building. The fire in the woodstove burned and in her cosy and warm den of a bed Ada and her sister beat up on their little brother. He always had to suffer because mamma dressed him in the hand-me-downs of the two girls. Dressed in a girl’s double breasted coat with its two rows of buttons, he sat, always somewhat dirtied on the barrack steps and ate his afternoon snack with a spoon from a tin bowl. Mamma wanted the boy to grow big and strong so, when she put him to bed, she crammed his mouth so full of cottage cheese. He would wake in the morning like a hamster storing nuts – with cottage-cheese puffed cheeks.