12. 1. 1956.
Dear Mr. Kalniņš,
Then let me shake your hand and wish you — a happy New Year!
It’s all so late on account of the festival in Sydney, then work at home, and even being occupied with writing. But the new year is still young and good wishes — are never too late.
I just received your letter with my piece about Inge. I hadn’t been to Wyong, and the letter had been waiting there for a good while. During this time I have written something, that is, finished something that had been started ages ago, and I’m sending it to you for your perusal. I’m sending you a “carbon copy” which I already rewrote, and one copy stays with me. So, if this piece of writing could be sent to the competition, then you wouldn’t need to bother with returning the piece, just indicate whether it is suitable or not. The neater one, which I’ve got, is the same, with a few minor changes, and a few small additions. But in general, it’s the same. Please read it and tell me what you think. I almost think that this story about tending the graves would be more suitable than the one about Inge.
We celebrated the Cultural Festival well. The children gained a lot. We were billeted by a family with two daughters, a little older than mine, the older one 16, and the younger one 12. Mine are 14 and 10. There was much to enthuse about, observing these two city girls. The younger one dances ballet, there was a piano in the home — they all hit it off very well. Though it was quite a way from the centre of town, and we had to sit in electric trains every day for hours on end. But that’s all part of the city. The children speak Latvian more confidently now, are beginning to write in Latvian, and are playing the piano more. But eventually all these good influences will fade away.
I myself had renewed longings — to be away from here. They even offered me rooms and piano students. But I can’t work it all out yet. The money’s all gone, too. Now I hope to go to the neighbour’s bean fields and earn enough for the first month, were I to take up the offer of the room. But I don’t see how I could carry it through. I feel better now than I did last winter. I could write too, if only there was more time. But I’m doing something.
It was lovely at the mixed choir concert. It grabbed the heart. But what use is our fettered singing? The exhibition, because of the space, looked very grey to me. The unofficial one looked almost better. And the ball was beautiful too. Only I didn’t feel good, for the quite female thing that I hadn’t put on the right dress. But still, the ball was beautiful. You will have heard all about it.
If only I could go to Melbourne next year. Will you wait? Or do you again have some such personal things to do, that there’s room for no one else?
I understand, I understand, how it was with your writing. And there wasn’t anything in Sydney worth coming such a long way for. Only it was lovely, to see the get-togethers, and the people hungry for contact, how they jostled about at the beginning and end, and during each interval at all the events, to look for familiar faces in the crowd. It was warming, a warm voice or two, warm words.
Thanks for the poem about the smoke. As you tell it, then after all women have remembered you at Christmas time, in the first and the second coming of youth alike. It’s a pity you haven’t got a good summer weather-wise. Here it is just right. At present we’re picking tomatoes, working from morning till night, then on free days — off to the sea. It is good at the beach, in the ocean’s waves, even the sharks forgotten, and the lifesavers are there on the lookout, anyway.
A friend of Inese’s arrived today, and all three girls went off up the mountain into the bush. I will go and make some raisin bread for them for when they return, all walked out. If you lived closer, you could come for coffee. In the garden, some really lovely daisies are flowering.
Greetings, Yours, E. Dzelme
P.S. Thank you for the advice that the work being sent to the competition should be accompanied by my real name. Then altogether there will be three names: my code name, my “nom de plume”, and the real one …
19. 1. 1956.
Dear Mr. Sarma,
I see that I’ve written your other name. It wasn’t intentional except that I was thinking of you. I’ve started calling you Mr. Sarma in my thoughts. So be it, this time.
I just finished writing the second copy of the “Tending of the Graves in Ļaudona”. I would very much like to hear your thoughts, but I don’t expect to get a letter from you this week. I want to send it to England this week. I don’t know whether I would have done this without your prompting. For one, I would not have had the guts, and two — I’m not very ambitious. But this time, if I did get lucky, the importance wouldn’t be so much for ambition’s sake, as for the possibility of writing again. That’s why it must be the best it can be. I wrote about the tending of the graves from my heart, the same as I did about the Aiviekste. It’s really about the same time and place. Since it is so close to my heart, it’s hard for me to tell whether anything good has come out of it, or not. I’m a bit doubtful about the long sentences, but they occurred unintentionally, subtly matching the Ļaudona way of speaking. I feel that often I slip into it, that is — I lose my own way of speaking, and use the language of the region I’m describing. That maybe isn’t bad, but in moderation. Like like everything good in life.
In my letter, which I sent with my story, I didn’t even mention your thoughts about my writing, that is, the effect they have on me. That was probably because again I was sending off a piece for you to critique. So that, while being happy about your words of praise, I was, in a way, asking for new, similar good words, and that would not be good.
Now that your will have already given your critique on the new work, I can acknowledge that the words you write in your letters are much more important than those Stern, or someone like him, prints in the paper. Your words strengthen me and protect me against whatever external thing might hurt me. I think — your words — are those of a friend. A friend’s critique is always the most important, even though it never gets read by the rest of the world, and “brings no fame”. It brings advice and support and that’s more important. I’m so pleased that you said that I need a discerning reader already. Then there’s hope that I can write, and that also some day will have more time to do it.
I’ll wait till Saturday for you letter, and even if it still has not arrived, I’ll send off the “Tending of the Graves”, and I don’t know if I’ll be doing the right thing or not.
When I finish a work, I feel great relief that for a few days I won’t have a guilty conscience that I’m not doing anything — then it starts again, and I have to begin something new. I don’t know whether it’s the right feeling to have, but I trust myself more when I’m writing than when I’m drawing. Along with that there’s more satisfaction while I’m doing it, but not so when it’s finished, for the product feels somehow more removed from me, than does a finished drawing. The written work seems to live its own life and I don’t know whether it’s the same life as I would have wished for it.
22. 1. 1956.
Yesterday I got your letter. Big thanks! It was so comforting and lovely, that I could hardly bear not answering you straight away. But I didn’t have a minute to spare. Today is Sunday. We have a visitor, a Latvian. That interrupted the day’s work for a moment, and now, towards evening, I’ve got a bit of free time, which I can’t use for anything else. So I can get down to writing to you. I’m so pleased that you like the Tending the Graves story. I’ll cross out what you suggest. What I really wanted to say was that the minister gave notice about the Grave Tending day at the previous sermon at the church. But I should have written it the way the minister said it, mentioning only the ev. Lut. Congregation — it wasn’t put that way. I wanted to send it off yesterday but it was too late for the post, and since I have to correct it, the sending will get put off till next week.
I have a half-finished story about bean picking in the neighbour’s field. I read it through straight after reading my piece on the Ļaudona folk and thought the same as you — ought I not send something more modern? The piece about the neighbour would be more so. Reading it, it seemed quite fresh to me. But it’s not finished, and the Ļaudona Folk is also written with conviction. If they don’t like it, it’s not my fault. It wasn’t written for them anyway, and that’s good. I wrote it for those people back then, and for those times. I thought about writing it even then, when I was going home from the tending of the graves along Ļaudona’s main road, which was strewn with rose petals. It was beautiful. If I have a lot of pathos in this piece, and sentiment — then it’s because that’s how it was at that time, and it would be hard to depict it differently. I wouldn’t. Full stop.
I’m working a lot on my tomatoes, passion fruit, and on the neighbour’s beans. I’m glad that you like Ļaudona Folk. There are still more parts to that poem.
Yours, E. Dz.
P. S. Sometimes I want very much to be with you, but then I wonder — can seeing someone necessarily bring one closer?
1. 2. 1956.
Dear Mr. Kalniņš,
Not long ago I sent you a letter, but it feels like I haven’t written to you for ages. It’s because the finished letter stayed here with me for a good while, un-posted. I’m getting restless, because I’m not doing anything. Already 10 days have passed with nothing but farm work. Nothing’s been written. My head is full of all kinds of trivia. My thoughts get distracted. It’s also very beautiful here. It’s a beautiful summer with rain and sun, with lots of greenery around. My children are healthy, and yesterday they both started the new school year. They are so lovely and battle so hard. And when the holidays are over, and they are away at school all day, I am sadder. When I see them go off to school in the mornings, I go out on the hill, where the road leads down and they go off, then I could laugh and cry about myself. I fly beside them in my thoughts, and begrudge the whole green valley — and then come to my senses and pull myself together, and slowly start coming back to where job after job awaits me.
I finished picking beans for the neighbour, but the work didn’t last long and I didn’t earn much. Then, going away from home, I was happy, and returning to where the children were waiting for me — again I felt happy. Now again I am cloistered in my narrow patch of obligations. Tomatoes, passion fruit, cow, calf, dishes, food preparation etc. I feel stifled. But I mustn’t long for more air, then it’s worse. It’s always harder to breathe in an airless place if you think about its airlessness. Better think about something else.
You ask how I liked Meilerte-Krastiņa. I confess, I didn’t like her at all. I don’t know how to talk about art very cleverly any more (maybe I never could, but now less than ever), and I just say what I feel. And with Meilerte’s work, I felt bored. What can I do! I like when a person changes, searching and grasping, but not talking in the same style for 20 years. I don’t know what it would have been like in some other space – the space was criticised – but here, Mailerte seemed to me to be lifeless, washed in with small brush strokes. I don’t remember Stīpniece from my academy days, but if I met her face to face, I might remember. I found her works seemed to lack colour, but there was a warmth in the faces, which was captivating. Both Dzidra and I liked the unofficial exhibition, where there were works from lots of artists. There we both took off our shoes, as there were no other people around, and in utter peace after a lot of running around, walked among the motley little pictures and enjoyed ourselves. You could note there the odd little tune from many a larger symphony, which these artists, one day, perhaps will paint, perhaps could paint! One way or another, this exhibition pointed toward the future, to guessing it, sensing it.
Please don’t look for some weighty truth in the thoughts expressed here. They are not irrefutable, not deeply considered.
Today, in general, I’m in a rebellious mood. I would like to do something crazy. For example, not milk the cow, but go up the mountain and look at the clouds. Already in the morning, I acted very determinedly and, leaving the others eating breakfast, ran off to the bush to pick blackberries. You can’t pick much in half an hour, and in my hurry I pricked my arms up to the elbows. Now they’re all stinging – but one has to do something with one’s hands, if they’ve been driven only to do work for 10 days. At least they should be allowed to reach for blackberries.
I read the extract from Blicava’s novel in the Australian Latvian. The life depicted there is like I remember it. Just perhaps richer, for she talks about 100 guests at the celebration on mid-summer’s night, and we never had that many. But otherwise, it’s a similar sounding life. At the moment, I’m reading nothing. I’ll have to get hold of a good book as soon as I get my cheque for picking beans. It’s stupid to live so far from others. At least books could be exchanged for reading. Last year I did swap some with the Sydneysiders, but it’s a bit too far, and the sending becomes difficult.
The big cultural dividends from the Cultural Festival have already faded away. In any case, I probably didn’t absorb much of the real, ready-made culture whole, for I look at everything in my own way. In the mixed choir concert, I felt great joy about our folk songs. They carried off my heart in a great happiness, and then, suddenly, the choking reality — realising where we are … Then too, I was warmed by the searching out of friends in the crowd, how everyone was waiting, looking for people they knew, inspecting each other in a kind of daze. That’s probably all I retained from it. Meeting people I’d seen before. But above all, in a strange city, the endless riding in electric trains. I think it also turned my daughters off the big city. They want to have everything that’s in Sydney, they say, but they don’t want to live there. How to provide it for them? In general, I haven’t carried out any of the things I’d hoped to for their benefit. The new school year has begun, and we’re still here. Nothing has changed. I’ve frittered away my money, and time too. Shouldn’t I have done it differently? The way I’m always plotting to — take the children and take off? Thinking about it, I’m in torment. Am I a coward? Or is there no other way, than to stay here? I can’t even imagine spending the winter here, but it’s already begun. I need money, a lot of money, or also more strength than I have.
You see — it’s not good to go round and round like a bee in a bottle — over what can’t be changed. I’ll just plug my ears and eyes and write. Maybe I could get to some book, and that would help me. Oh forgive me, this is turning out to be such an unsettled letter, and long.
You write your novels, being able to work it all our calmly and write. You have your own room, garden, and peace. Maybe one day I’ll have them too. It’s a pity that I can’t write a journal properly, for if nothing else, it’s a multifarious existence here, which could be useful in the future. I’m writing for too long now, because I’m restless.
Yours, E. Dzelme
P. S. Now that I’ve been writing this letter for so long, I feel like tearing it up. It’s one of those where I’m trying to unburden myself of all kinds of heaviness. Meanwhile, I’m not game to do it completely and the result is neither here nor there. I’ll send it anyway, because the next one won’t be better, but I want to be with you in some way.
3. February
I just re-read your last 3 letters. In one, written just before Christmas, the words are more melancholy. You say — all the past is better than now. And that makes me do some rethinking. I shouldn’t worry over nothing. There’s still time enough for that. But now there could still be happiness too, if one knew how to grab hold of it. And there are still moments of happiness, there is still the odd dream or two. I will not worry. I won’t mindlessly lay waste to the present, which, one day, will be the past, off which one day I will have to live.
It oughtn’t to be that way though, that, as the years go by, one gets gloomier and sadder. But perhaps it’s inescapable. How reprehensible then, to throw away these living days, the way I throw them away! For nothing, and no one. So I’m going to be happy about each moment as much as I can, because it’s worth much more than, in my moroseness, I give it value. I ought to go to hear Andrejs Eglītis. It wouldn’t even be all that hard, only needing the courage to face the extrication battle. In a letter you say that perhaps in the past, you have valued and loved those times and people too little. Now, and in the past, I have thought the same about myself. And when I think such thoughts, I sometimes want to hug everyone who has been good for me by being the way they were, and give them thanks.
Yours, E. Dz.
25. 2. 1956.
Dear Mr. Kalniņš,
I’ve written you a couple of letters just now, and relegated them to the waste bin, because they were too full of my unhappiness, restlessness, not knowing what to do, etc. Today is Saturday, and till midday, I was busy baking bread, making butter, etc. But it was delicious bread, its smell filling the whole house, and it gave me some peace. That’s been missing in the last few days. I couldn’t get any time to myself, and thus, picking tomatoes, I was in a bad mood. A terrible useless restlessness, gloom and despondency.
Your quote from Rilke is valuable. And — maybe that’s not the most difficult route — to take hold of the tangible world through great love. What I should do next, what I should start — I don’t know. I grab on to the nearest thing that seems most precious, and also the easiest, most comprehensible. I don’t know if one day I will have big ideas, but one or two realisations will turn up, wanting to see the light of day, and they will have to be shown the world, not just a mere reflection of reality. But I don’t yet have the strength and courage. Above all, I don’t have the space or the time alone to devote myself to that. Thus I also go crazy sometimes, that I am so weak, without a life of my own. But it does no good. I will wait now, to see whether my “Ļaudona Folk” have attracted any attention. Even if they were just mentioned — it would sustain me. But the battle to get on with it, and to make time for work, I suppose I’ll have to do by myself.
You still haven’t left your job as editor. It must be important to you. For one or two beginners like myself, your word can mean a lot. To show the way, which direction to go. For what is there for a youngster to listen to. To the written word of the critic? Too little. It’s always been that young beginners have made their way most securely in close consort with a wise support.
You drink wine and spill drops onto fine carpets. That’s good. No sensible person should bring into their house something more precious than people themselves. In this century we are already such slaves to our surroundings, our inert inventions.
Evening.
Inese and I went together to pick blackberries this afternoon, treading through grass, through bushes and culverts, getting thoroughly exhausted. It’s a real tropical climate here. It rains and rains, and is hot. In the last few days, it’s been sunny in the afternoon, so that it can pour down in buckets again at night. And this description doesn’t even give a real clue as to how much!
Yes, in the afternoon it was really quite sunny and we went berry picking. We put on long pants and big gumboots, otherwise we dare not even show ourselves there. At the bottom, there’s a little creek, fields where the grass reaches up to our waists, and all around there are blackberry bushes, trees, palms etc. On both sides of the valley there are hills with forests, almost like in Sigulda. Down there we tread about, sweating appallingly, scared of black snakes, and of being torn by the blackberry thorns. But in the end, it wasn’t all bad. Above was a big storm cloud, magnificent, as you would expect, the sun was playful, and everything was endlessly vivid. One needed only to disengage from one’s own paltry miseries, one’s suffering both spiritual and physical. To forget the effort and the overheated body, forget home, which isn’t home, look up at the dramatic cloud and rejoice — How beautiful it all is! And I did it, too! I keep doing that. Then I don’t know — whether I’m lying to myself when I see beauty and exult, or when I see only my misery, and suffer. Coming home, along the pleasant road, which winds across the valley from one hill to the other, down by the little bridge, we took off our big boots and waded in the creek. There was sand and brown pebbles, like in a real brook.
I came out onto the road and was already waiting for Inese, who couldn’t finish splashing about quite so quickly. Like Diana! She was a vision, brown curls, brown eyes, slight, sleek and strong. And when I called her, she raced towards me with a mirror, a large oval mirror, and I really was startled — is it really Diana coming towards me? No. And yes. She had lifted the mirror from the sandy creek bed — last year a car drove over the edge there. It was a car mirror.
But my Diana tied it in some vines near the slim trunks of two eucalyptus trees, which, having shed their bark, were shining silver. And scored her initials with a stone there under the swaying mirror.
If you had seen her, this brown creature, you would have liked her too, and been gladdened by her, same as I. That was yesterday’s best. In the night it rained here like never before. Now I’m cooking blackberry jam. That is also a job which calms me, as I think about long-gone times. Only — these trifles eat up my crumbs of time, which are left over from tomato picking. So it goes, like a machine I cannot stop, nor reset, whose direction I can’t change. Only steal a moment or two along the way.
It’s still morning, and generally in the mornings I feel happy about the glory of the new day. Maybe I feel some sort of hope, that, with its richness, it could make me happy. If evening comes and I haven’t made any progress — it all gets heavier and heavier. But it’s good that I can fall asleep and sleep well. In the night, I think over things, work them out, feel them through. Often in restless dreams, I sense the next day’s happenings. Often in the mornings, on waking, I get a inkling of what’s to come from the dreams, but I don’t know when it will happen, how it will happen, how really it will happen, and what I should do to avoid it, if it bodes ill, or how to attain it if it bodes well. It’s strange, almost shocking, to be in such loneliness, abandonment, and to go along such a path where no normal person would go. I mean — someone who’s spirit and flesh are united in normal fashion. I feel in myself such division, physically serving my everyday existence, slaving away with absolutely nothing to spare, but spiritually flowing out in my lonely waiting, looking for escape, finding none.
Oh — no, this isn’t a letter that I’m writing now! Not a letter but a diary. But save it anyway.
[Continued March 8]
8. 3.
A few days ago I received your two letters. Warm thanks for your many good words. No, you do not make it worse for me, coming into my everyday life. You make it easier, support my secret thoughts and hopes. And thus give me strength. What oppresses me, you ask? So much could be said about it, and all of it such that one doesn’t want to say anything about it. Leave it be this time. Only it’s not as though after a few years I will settle down to my lot. Even as an old grandmother I’ll still try to escape from my situation. Only how? Maybe then it will be easier. Because the main trouble is the issue of the kids. A wife and husband can split. You can’t disconnect from the children’s father, even if you can do it in legal terms.
What oppresses me is that I lose my life. To be able to bear my daily existence, I have to deny that I am human, a woman. I must stay numb, so I don’t feel anything. I must only endure. That I do, but life passes by, un-lived. I only live off some imaginings, some puff of wind, whose occasional caress reminds me that I am alive.
What oppresses me? You say. What also oppresses me: how to discard one human without destroying all that is human. How can I not acknowledge as human the father of my children, accept that he can be recast, like those knobs on the big saucepan. Salvation has been promised to all. Why isn’t there so much strength in me as can find, and value another human such that he doesn’t have to be discarded?
I would like to find a way to bring him to a better way of being. I won’t find it — I have thrown away my life for nothing. He does not want to change and grow. He is selfish and narrow-minded, thus — a fool. For his selfishness he is capable of sacrificing everything, even his children, for he can’t see into another person, not even his children. And yet – why should he be like that? So piteous, so nasty, even sadistic towards people and animals, it’s like — he’s possessed by the devil. His egotism strangles him like the skin of a werewolf. I think when he dies, his evil will roll off him like a shell and all that will be left will be a crippled, small soul, tortured by stubbornness, self interest etc.- there — vulnerable and blind — and thus God will accept it and take pity. Why can’t I manage to take pity?
I have started a story on a similar theme. Only I haven’t managed to sort it out yet. But I’ll do it some day. Some time, something has to change, at least enough to let me work, if not live.
Thank you for Andr. Eglītis’ signature. I didn’t go to Sydney. Also, I don’t get much out of performances and personal inspection. I had imagined that Andr. Eglītis would talk with pathos, even much pathos — and that somehow put me off. I thought — I would be being whipped towards some great nationalism and of course you can’t lead me anywhere on a chain — so I had no great desire to hear his political performance. And poetry, I prefer, just like you, to read to myself, rather than listen to it. Still, I would have gone if I could have managed to extract myself from here.
I have different ideas about your novel, with the Biblical theme, than the Lutheran gents. I think the Biblical theme will actually attract readers, not frighten them away. Isn’t religious truth being sought now even more than previously? And – of course you didn’t intend it for religious propaganda, just a novel with a Biblical theme, which can transport one into bygone eras, or — bring ancient tales into our lives, make them comprehensible, investigate their mores. With great pleasure I’ve been reading and rereading Lagerkvista’s ‘Barabas’ and I’ve also read Douglas’ ‘The Robe‘ about Christ’s crucifixion. I’m quite attracted by Biblical themes, stories about heroic people, mysticism, all the stuff that was heard in childhood and yet never properly clarified, any illumination grasped sometimes more, sometimes less. You can’t even get a better theme, if one has the strength and time to go into it in depth. Go for it! And one thing for sure — humans haven’t changed since Adam’s time, so you can’t go wrong.
What do you say about Osv. Lācis’ story in the literary supplement? I don’t know why, but his hero grates and evokes anger. No, I cannot acknowledge him. He is so small and I need air reading about him (I mean the hero).
I would also like to write about love. Anšlavs Eglītis hasn’t dared to do that for many years, I think. Didn’t he nevertheless start off that way? I remember some work of his which I read as the first New Wave writing, and that was about love. But I can’t remember whether it was good or what the impression was.
I can’t give any opinion about a collaborative novel. We’re not subscribing to Laiks [Times]. Such a novel can really only be after all — fun, just for fun!
You mention some countryman who wrote his wife a 60 page separation letter and it brings to mind a poem by Heine, which I can’t remember by heart, but it beautifully describes how he received from her 12 pages of writing in ornamental script about how she no longer loves him and in the end it went something like this:
… Doch hab’ ich keine Angst …
Man schreibt nicht so ausfurlich
Wenn man den Abschied nimmt …
Is that countryman really serious about the business of separation?
I had been thinking about writing a book even before you mentioned it, but it stayed more in the realms of fantasy. I don’t want to rush in and then fail. It must be the best it can be, and that takes time. Only I’m wondering whether I can start with a novel? Whether I will be able to build a strong enough structure? I’ve also thought the subject of Vik. There could possibly be two parallel characters, Vik and some other, who meet, and yet don’t really meet, and whose lives each go their own way, even though in the same surroundings and sort of connecting.
If only I could chat with you. Like it was in those days at the academy, when the odd word said by a friend would now and then come to mind and keep one on the right path.
Greetings to you, E. Dzelme.
P. S. This letter is again so long! It must be because I’m not writing anything else. I can’t get moving. But I can’t simply because I’m afraid of the controller of the house. I will write to you soon. And will again wait for a Sunday letter.
13. 3. 1956.
Dear Mr. Kalniņš,
I received again one of your letters written on a Sunday, and for that I want to give you — a Sunday thank you! Even though it’s just a work day, I’ve escaped from my incarceration for a couple of hours and — I feel like it is Sunday.
I came to Wyong to the dentist. Not a very pleasant task. But I just went to the post office, unlocked my post box and wished for a letter from you, to help me bear the toothache. There was a letter, and the tooth issue went smoothly. Yesterday one of my letters to you set off. Today, this is the reply to the letter I received from you, and it is quite excessive, outside the usual order of things, for no letter should be answered so quickly. It was the result of two Sunday-like things combining — your Sunday letter, and my Sunday illusion here.
You say I must have a sensitive conscience. I don’t know why you think that. I also don’t know whether it is sensitive? It — is, and it isn’t. Sometimes I do things, or don’t do them, and feel good without any feelings of guilt at all, and this has happened with just such things as remembering or forgetting birthdays and the like. Later, several years on, I sometimes can’t understand how I was able to behave so entirely without conscience.
For example, I will confess something which occasionally torments me. I didn’t go to visit my friend, when she was sick and died, and I never saw her again. From high school times, it was my childhood’s longest friendship. Later, she studied Law, and I went to the academy, and we rarely met. But it was my fault. Then once, by accident, I met her young husband in Riga, on a tram, and he begged me to visit Alice for things were quite difficult for her in hospital. She had tuberculosis. Of course I didn’t know that she was so ill. But that time I didn’t go because I didn’t have enough money on me, to buy some polite card (which would suit my ladylike appearance at that moment) and because the money I had on me was intended for something more lighthearted, which I was on my way to just then. What it was, I don’t know anymore. I only know that to go to my friend, I would have had to postpone my pleasant outing and arrive empty handed. I didn’t do it. And I never saw her again. I don’t think I even felt guilty at that time. And that’s not the only example.
I don’t know whether we discard people because they don’t give as much as we want? In actual fact, things probably go a bit differently. Life carries us off on a different current, and this other newness carries us away from the old, and there’s no going back. It looks bad. But maybe that’s not so bad.
However, this time you hadn’t pricked my conscience. I mean you seemed to want to imply that in reference to that book of Australian poetry. Of course I feel indebted to you many times over, but that wasn’t meant to be payment for some debt. It was for something else. Once I sent you a book by Eglītis and you enthused about it a lot. And thus, to provide you pleasure again, I sent you another book. I wanted to make you happy. What that is, I don’t know, but it’s not a guilty conscience.
Good that you allow me to love my neighbour. I think I am doing just that. All our family loves him, even though my husband puts him down in all kinds of ways behind his back. Nevertheless, even he can’t deny some kind of attachment to him, because he’s decent soul, that neighbour. I’ve written my memories about bean picking with him. I did that immediately afterwards. Now, I should rewrite it, or maybe send it to you as is. I’m afraid of the house patrol, which hasn’t occurred for a long time, and in those pages it will find illicit, insubordinate things — things deemed to be stepping outside the bounds of holy matrimony, but put in stronger terms.
Several of your lecture notes are still with me, and I’ll add them to the next larger posting. The topic of your next talk is very enticing. It’s sad that you haven’t written it out, and sad that I can’t get to hear it. If I lived in Melbourne, then on a moonlit evening, I would implore you for rendezvous where you would read your discourse for me. Hm? — But that would also be a matrimonial transgression and so anyway, nothing would turn out then either. I would like to read your “Susanne” which has brought you such renown. I’ve also tried to read the Bible but I can’t make any progress, and I’m not very familiar with all the characters.
You say to write about the neighbour in diary form. That would be wonderful — I love writing like that so much. But I don’t dare. Or else then I must send it away to you every few days. And here I must say — after all I would be a bit embarrassed. If I really took the neighbour into my heart for a while, then the diary pages would be full of all kinds of things. The funniest thing is, that it would be the plain truth and yet, at the same time, illusion and lies. All that I experience is, after all, ripped away from me right from the start. As soon as I feel something, I curtail it and look at it from a distance. Maybe that’s why, when I let myself go and write about myself, I write as though removed from myself, as you put it.
The sun is gradually returning to us here, but it’s been raining so long that everything has become rotten and mouldy. The piano keys don’t rise up after you press on them, the air doesn’t come into the room, if only the window is open. But the sun is returning, and maybe we’ll also have a lovely autumn, in part.
What is your latest novel about? About Zemgale? And what will be the next one? Don’t catch cold on moonlit nights, and farewell! All the best, Yours, E. Dzelme
27. 3. 1956.
Dear Mr. Kalniņš,
It’s already time to wish you Happy Easter! And let it then be thus — may you swing high!
Yesterday I sent you a letter — a diary page, and am afraid lest it, and this, disturb you this week. I remember that last year you wrote that during this week you experience religious feelings. It seems at the moment I don’t experience anything like that. I just live day by day, and my days are laced with only those things that are happening within myself with the changing times. I do try to celebrate holy days, but I feel more remote from them than at any time previously. Everything goes past me unnoticed, even all the old traditions, it seems.
Today, Inese is 14 years old. She is about 4 inches taller than I. Now I must start to scold, because she no longer holds her posture so straight, and like all those who shoot up in height so fast, is starting to stoop. But she’s not even really tall yet.
Dad gave her a sofa bed. All the time she was sleeping on a fold-up army bed, like at camp. Now it will be better for her. Underneath, there are two drawers, one of which, near her head, I already stuffed full of books, which she must needs poke her nose into even before rising! What can be done!
Dzidra is giving a wall vase, so that Inese can put flowers there above her bed. This time I “fell short” — and present giving didn’t happen, just the baking of sweets and cakes.
This morning there were a few spare moments between the laundry and the dishwashing, and I nearly finished my story about the neighbour. I don’t know how it is, or isn’t. It ought to wait for a while, and then on re-reading it, I would be able to see it better. Maybe it’s just material for something else. Maybe I’ve gone on too much, or not enough. You read it, and then I’ll hear from you! — I don’t dare keep this chronicle with me. That could land me in big trouble. One day maybe together we’ll rewrite all that I’ve sent you and am sending you, and then we’ll be able to discuss more freely what needs doing. The story about the neighbour perhaps has rather a monotonous form — only the discussions between two people. But it could have a second part. Which nevertheless might still turn out to be more of the same, but stronger, and with more conflict.
How much I want to write, when I get started, and when I’m not being hounded for a while. How much I would like to announce to you — the novel is finished! And if I was allowed, maybe it would quite soon happen just so.
But at the moment the tractor is growling in the paddock, giving me notice that I am to go to sow beans. I’m going.
28. 3. 1956.
I can’t send the story. The everyday stuff doesn’t give me any chance at all to get it ready.
Swing, if not elsewhere, then in the swings of storytelling.
Yours, E. Dz.
7. 4. 1956.
Dear Mr. Kalniņš,
Thanks for the letter, I just got it. There’s trouble about the writing at the moment. But so be it! Couldn’t such a small matter be permitted over and above the norm?!
Why are you investigating me? You want to know what I am like? You can’t know what a person is like until they’ve been thrown into this or that situation or circumstance. People keep on changing? Or not? You talk about what is dominant in me, mother or woman? And then you say that I’m like Kristine — I sacrifice myself. I’ve never thought that Kristine sacrificed herself. Kristine takes what she passionately loves. That’s not sacrifice. If she went to Akmentiņš, she would be sacrificing herself (God only knows to whom). Yes, with Kristine it was a different issue to mine. But maybe there is a certain similarity. With me it was approximately like Princess Gundega. I told myself (felt in my heart) “Enough! The first one who comes over the bridge!” Well — it seems that life is not a fairytale.
My Easter celebrations weren’t great. Very empty. At Christmas — there were some presents, at Easter that seemed extravagant. You see, women seem to have regrets about what once belonged to them, unable to forget what was once given, what has been theirs. Generally, men and women experience the same kinds of feelings. Some people are alike, and others are alike, and between the first and second groups, there is no similarity. Pain doesn’t frighten me out of falling in love with someone, because pain, after all, is the normal basis of my life. Happiness comes and goes. Pain stays. The sting of pain freshens the air. A climate for art. The dazes of happiness can last only for a certain period. I’m not familiar with prolonged happiness. Maybe it was there in my youth, living in my mother’s care. Sunny, harmonious, calm. But I was lazy. A dreamer. Only pain prodded me to start working. But it has its limits. If things are so black that you can no longer carve your unhappiness into your work, then it’s too much. I maintain that for me it’s still not too much, if only I wasn’t prevented from working. And was allowed to get carried away once in a while. Just now in the Ceļa Zīmes [Sign Posts] I read a short review about some philosophy book — The Meaning of Love. That explains a thing or two. Sometimes I have been surprised at myself, that I can attach so much importance to such a trifling thing as love. How can such half-fantasy, half-puff-of-smoke absurdities take me over, physically and spiritually? I see that what I have felt and also put into words is also the subject of discussions by big men. Just now I wrote to my friend in America that love renders one divine, indestructible. Yes, if these floodgates of dreaming were let loose, I don’t know what would happen. The lost life would create havoc with the heart. You already sense that and give warning about it. To do something, for my freedom’s sake, before it’s too late. By all the dates, it’s already too late. Only life, mercifully, occasionally lets one fool oneself and others.
Your additional news about the numbers competing in the short story competition floors me — 42 and still coming! No, when I wondered whether there would be prize, I could not imagine so many. Now how can I get out into the light? How can I squeeze through a crevice in the rock? Run away and hide somewhere for a few months and write, write like mad. But what about the children? You can’t hide them away. They have to go to school. Besides — to run away and live somewhere — I’ve no money. I should have thought of that when I went to the Culture Festival, when I had a little bit of money and six weeks in the school holidays. I’m racking my brain, and the time is flying. Soon I won’t be able to fool – not me nor anyone else, because that youthful ardour, still secretly pulsing away somewhere, will have dried up. When I think about it, I know what demonic laughter sounds like. It rings in my ears. Then it’s as though I must laugh thus, and it’s all over.
7. 4. 1956.
Today we went to the sea side. There was a clean, autumn freshness in the morning, but very warm in the afternoon. The sea was again magnificent. Waves — just a mass of foam, like Champagne. The water was warm too. But I had a cold. Still, I swam. I tried not to get my head wet, but one wave, quite gently but firmly, pulled me down and immersed me in the foam over my ears. After that — what was the point! I frolicked about along with the others. Now my head feels a bit groggy, but maybe I’ll get through with no repercussions. In the last 10 years I haven’t been permitted the indulgence of getting sick. That is regarded as malingering. And it must be said, in this regard too, a person can survive more than is usually imagined.
I should put a signature on, and in places make thorough corrections on, my story about the neighbour. But I’m afraid of taking it up again and feel very bad about this uncompleted, un-freed up part. I’m writing letters, idling about and avoiding things, day in, day out, whatever else I do. All the time, these unexpressed thoughts rock me, I go about as in daze and dare not free myself to write freely. But in the end I will have to do that. There’s no improvement of circumstances in sight. Oh what torture is this inability to work freely.
8. 4. 1956.
Sunday. I wrote you a small sketch, a depiction from memory. I wrote it to explain to you what Dianas are like. It’s quite charming, I think. Together it will make a novel. You’re always longing for a novel from me. Do you have an idea of what your next one will be? Will it be another Biblical theme?
I asked my Inese, what could be the meaning of the title of your modern poetry magazine Meanjin? I explained to her the contents. They are also learning something at school about modern poetry. Inese answered me thus: “Then it’s just Meanjin and it doesn’t mean anything and you can’t translate it.” So it’s a word that means it doesn’t mean anything. When Inese read my story about the husband and wife and I asked “How was it?” she pinched her nose with her fingers and poked out her tongue. Fair criticism.
10. 4. 1956.
This morning I slept in a bit, but rose with some sort of pleasant lightness. The air had a touch of autumn, in the room there was the scent of apples, children were getting up and readying for school — I too had the feeling that I would go somewhere, do something freely and joyfully.
But the day commenced and little things shrouded me, layer after layer, and worst — eternally I have to feel his presence, excessive and stifling.
I am a little crazy in that regard. I need solitude now and again. He doesn’t need it, which is our biggest problem. At times, at moments, I would be able to bear him, but not all the time. I suffocate. I become fossilised. I feel like an animal, vegetating, not living.
Going by the average person, I’ve had an above normal need for solitude for a long time.
I remember during my time at the academy, I was living with my colleague, Irma. She was as lovely and good a girl as one could wish for. We had become quite attached to each other. We lived somewhere on Brīvības Street near the old Gertrude’s Church, on the 5th or the 6th floor. Sometimes in the evening I left my drawing class and secretly ran home so that for an hour, or half an hour, I could be alone in my room. I didn’t do anything there. But I needed that to keep on an even keel. At home (at Ķikuri) there was solitude in abundance. We had five rooms, counting the kitchen and the verandah, and you could always add to the list the garden, the meadows, the woods, the granary, the barn, the hayloft, and they were all duly used in their turn. Even though we really didn’t bother one another, no one was ever offended if anyone took their work, whatever it was they were doing, and went into another room, either closing the door or just leaving it ajar. That was normal. Here that is suspicious, not normal, and has to be investigated, to see what’s going on. I can’t stop deploring that, and it eats me up.
This morning I was so happy for no reason. Perhaps because yesterday for one hour I was away from home, going to the shop and along the way there, all the scattered pieces of my being came together and were whole again for a brief while. That part of me that is always rending and hanging suspended somewhere in the ether above me, came down into my body and I was healed and happy.
I felt that way this morning. But the day began, and everything is back as before. Good that I can still steal the odd moment. I’ll do the washing now and run back here on and off when I can. Maybe I’ll be able to continue the diary page I’ve begun, which is intended for a story. I came across it, having begun it some time ago. I’ll just need to copy it from the crumpled scrap of paper. Happiness is after all just as necessary for work, as pain. Maybe even more. Happiness is the source of the desire to create, what gives us material, while pain is what gives us strength for the creative process. (Exactly the same as for any birth … )
See, I can chatter on endlessly, while sitting as though on hot coals lest someone comes! But to do what I really want to, call it a story or a novel, that I can’t do. For that I need more courage. It’s a holiday when my husband drives off to attend to some business. But it happens only for 3 hours in every 3 months. Then I usually manage only to unwind a bit: walk around the, look at the trees, the sky, listen to the sounds — the birds, the quiet of the forest. Then, when I feel halfway healed and could start to work, the time is up. Only with much effort do I sometimes use my free moments by immediately working.
Today I’m happy. I don’t know why. Don’t know what I’m anticipating. Everything is the same. But I’m still alive and tenacious, like a creaking tree that doesn’t fall.
The neighbour is to return home again. He’s been working away from home for about a month. I miss his whistling. Of course that’s silly. But I have to admit that’s how it is. —Maybe I feel happy because he will be back in his fields, whistling. A pitiful joy. If he returns, it will show that he too, cannot escape his destiny, that he cannot find a way out and everything goes back to how it was before. Terrible. But that’s how it is. There’s no escape from that which you have made of yourself.
11. 4. 1956.
Every day I say — that I won’t drink coffee any more. Every morning I drink it again. It’s using narcotics to get over apathy. Not apathy, but all that must be overcome.
Today there was also the aroma of apples and the morning is clear and fresh, like autumn, real autumn. But today there is no joy. I can’t get free of the ties of this life, and it’s hard to come to that realisation all over again. I haven’t done anything, and that hurts. Just bits, a few pages written, rewritten, which right now seem silly and useless. And that is all. Look for a maid’s position in Wyong? Run, and travel, and work? To do everything at home just the same, except going to the fields, and instead, out of my wage, paying someone to help my husband. Isn’t it all madness? If there was a nursing position at the hospital, I would go. There I could earn a bit. But as a maid — I don’t know. I just don’t know what to do. I can’t put anyone in my place. I can’t leave the children on their own. It would be the end of them. To go to Sydney, start up there — I don’t have the means. That still has to wait. But for what? Talking about it I feel a noose around my neck. All day I feel it. I don’t dare think about it — then I would hang myself on it. Maybe after all to look for a maid’s position, maybe enough will be left over for me to save something. Here, I can’t manage to do anything anymore, not draw, not write. And yet, the latter I can, a little. If I could be freed of him for one month. Only. Not even a day.
13. 4. 1956.
Dear Mr. Kalniņš,
I’m sending you your lecture notes. Forgive me for keeping them so long.
I also send you A Woman’s Journal — continued. Please read it in conjunction with that which you already have. Maybe these pages won’t even fit. Where it’s marked with a red cross might be a good place to end it. Or if the next bit is suitable — put it all together. But if the piece I’m sending now doesn’t suit the first lot at all, then it will have to wait.
I had written a small, additional piece and it was taken from me two years ago already. If I could get hold of it, maybe it would be useful. It was a longish piece about going forward into the wind. Maybe that would have been most suitable. But since it was a completely spontaneous creation, I can’t replicate it.
It’s possible that tomorrow, together with the girls, we’ll all go to the movies. A very rare occurrence. It’s some film about Egypt. Tomorrow I’ll receive a bit of money that’s still owing to me for bean picking.
Things feel very strange at the moment — like an overstretched string, at breaking point. But it mustn’t break.
Maybe there will be a letter from you. Only I don’t know whether I can get to the post office to get it.
What are the other women writers and poets doing? How is Mrs. Kreišmane living? Have you visited her recently? You once wrote that you love visiting there very much. Tomorrow is Saturday. It’s the last of the warm weather. Maybe we’ll go for a swim in the day. We’re a bit worried about getting colds as the nights are quite cool already, but we could do with another swim before winter. These last days have been halfway free for me. Maybe it’s the “calm before the storm”. Soon beans will need picking! Only I can’t make proper use of this calm. I can write letters, but as soon as I start writing stories, I fear being interrupted. When I start writing something for a story — I feel very vulnerable. I overflow into the whole space, which is necessary somehow — and then I can’t collect myself together fast enough when danger approaches. Can you imagine such a situation, that your son was against your writing and would try to catch you out doing such a crime? You wouldn’t be able to write. Sometimes, when things are sick, they are all sick. That’s how it is for me. But once upon a time I had so much sun, that maybe I’ll get through it.
How are your critics? What did you manage to get done while battling them? I’ll wait for your letter. Write about yourself too, not only about me. Yours, E. Dz.
17. 4. 1956.
Dear Mr. Kalniņš,
Yesterday I got your letter and in return I’m sending you a whole pile of stuff. Pages of Ķikure’s Journal have been copied only up to the red X, which I mentioned in the previous letter. If it works, add it to what’s already there. I don’t know why I feel that though these were written with the same impulse, maybe they are in a different style. You’ll be able to see.
The idea of writing about the incident with the gin bottle isn’t bad. Though I’ll have to write not about this Easter, but about a christening at the same place, even more influenced by gin. At Easter, we didn’t drink at all and were very quiet, though I could write about that, too. Only it’s hard for me to write about personal things because of the circumstances here. That’s why I haven’t finished those other pages of journal that I started, either. For the sake of some respite (from fear) I’d like to start writing a story, which doesn’t involve me.
Yes, my letters are becoming rather revealing, but for me, writing letters is about the same as expressing it in stories, only freer. That’s one thing, then secondly — from time immemorial, I’ve searched for someone to whom I can scream it all out. Then, that is what gets called the friendship. You say that you don’t have friends that way. You are “built” differently.
I have thought about the fact that your letters don’t change. That you reveal yourself up to a certain point. I don’t believe that you aren’t also plagued by bigger doubts, fears, despair, unhappiness and the rest, but you’re silent about that, you don’t need to show it. At least not to me, being myself such a ball of doubts and struggles. I wouldn’t have anything to calm anyone else with. And yet, that’s not quite right. I know that from writing to my friend. When she comes to me with something that is depressing her, then I make myself (it’s true, I’m not lying) strong enough to calm her, be there for her, reassure her, etc. It’s a two-way thing of give and take. Other times I’m doing the wailing and she’s calming me. That doesn’t happen between you and me. You listen to me, and talk about me, but your “you” stays with you. But I don’t think that should necessarily change, or that if I’m revealing myself, you should do so, too. That can be determined only by your inner feelings. Otherwise there’s no point. I usually gain strength from it, if I scream all the agony out, as long as I know the listener can handle it with patience. I think all this talking is an inquiry into the self, searching and clarifying. I do it noisily, which is why I have friendships with long letters, that is, openhearted letters. I think that how you are in letters, is how I am in love. There, I declare myself scantily. I try to go across the ice like a cat, and not reveal my feelings. Then, I usually prattle on about everything else except what is, and cause myself suffering. But to give love away too much — also causes suffering, it seems. So, – perhaps I don’t lose anything. I have more illusions, fantasies, less truth.
You say I’m trying to understand the new generation — they are really just my kids, as yet. How will it be when I will have to understand my children’s children — I don’t know. I suppose you don’t have any of those yet and your children have already left you in part, for they’re taken up with their own lives. But you mentioned closeness with your son, so that you understand.
If I lose my daughters, it will be only my own fault. I can’t keep up with all they invite me to, but I’ll have to do it.
It’s a pity that I can’t get to listen to your story about love. That’s a topic that women are endlessly hot for.
Well, I’ll have to finish now after all, or you won’t be able to find any beginning or end to it all.
Greetings, Yours, E. Dzelme.
20. 4. 1956.
Dear Mr. Kalniņš,
This evening I received your letter. I was afraid that it wouldn’t be there, but I waited. I needed it. Following your suggestion, I’ve already started — writing bits every day. But it won’t be any sort of story or novel. Material for that — maybe. I’ve a terrible desire to have a chat. When I start writing some story, and I hope to do that soon — then this nonsense won’t be so necessary.
I read your “Love”. It also seems to me, if I can speak openly, that a meditation upon, and a story, are slightly different things. But only because the meditation contains life’s bitter words, even ridicule and trouncing, but in a story there’s wonderful gentleness. You can’t even put the two together. But maybe that wouldn’t have occurred to me if I had not read your letter and thought about it beforehand. The story is very lovely. Inviting very conceptual, vital consideration. I can’t judge the rest, but it is moving, their sitting in the chair, the crazy poetising, then falling asleep.
Kn. Lesiņš very often begins his stories with such thoughts. J. Ezeriņš too, who was apparently his (Lesiņš’) role model.
So then I’m faced with yet another competition? It seems strange to battle like that, but I suppose I’ll have to do it. If there’s someone who is capable of distinguishing the good from the weak, then it’s a pleasure to think about even the bickering. Even though you can’t judge everything that way, and those that go unnoticed can contain qualities that aren’t to be found in the good ones. But perhaps some standard has to apply. I’ll wait for information and instructions from you. You remind me to get ready for the painting competition too! Madness!
Do I go to the piano at all? I do, but it’s nothing significant. I have to get hold of some new sheet music. For myself I could still keep on playing the same pieces, but for the sake of my permanent overseer-style public, I ought to take something new. I play Chopin, Mozart, sometimes Schubert, for I have his music but I can’t play it for long. Same for Liszt. They seem to empty themselves quicker for me. Not Chopin. Him I can take again and again for years on end. But I can’t play him without a break if I’ve got a heavy heart. Then he starts to feel rather depressing, as thought everything is pointless, and I start to fall into despair. For strength I then play Mozart — there, there is form, a more abstract music, not so many exposed feelings. Lately, in similar circumstances I want to play Bach. At the moment I’ve been lax about music, not playing very cleanly, skimming through this and that, which I haven’t had time to learn properly. The piano has gone out of tune and so my music-making turns out rather woebegone. Before winter I intend to order new sheet music, and then I might do something better. But will I manage to do it all? Of course, nowadays music feels like a luxury to me, like everything else. That’s the thing I can least allow myself for lack of time. And I know too, that those moments when I’d like to play myself, I ought to devote to my daughters, to push them along. Without pressure, you can’t learn music. Dzidra loves playing, but she likes to take great liberties in her playing, and that mustn’t be allowed. Learning music is a pedantic thing at the beginning (and right to the end in a certain sense), and I lack the strength to control the girls. Inese hardly plays at all. I don’t want to think about how different it could be if we were living in Sydney, or somewhere else where there were more Latvians.
My letter, which I sent before getting your last one, was written more or less in answer to your question — what do I gain from my American friend? Our letters have been very similar to the ones which we are now exchanging. I usually write more, she writes less. Topics? She is learning music in some music college, so we include that in connection with life’s battles. And everything else — children, love, despair, hunger for life, loneliness, the search for knowledge, books, people — and again disillusionment, torment, loneliness, exile. I think we both gain. Sometimes it’s enough just that there is a letter, to be able to see that another suffers, lives, struggles, hopes. Sometimes consolations, anger, advice, other times irritations, a place to cry out our pain. Sometimes too, the pleasure. Particularly of course, at those rare times when there’s been a falling in love. Then there’s always something to share, not so much events as the measuring and assessing of feelings — what it all means. Someone once said “those in love and those who are drunk talk to themselves”, and the letters are the talking to oneself.
You have made me think of myself the same way as did that lovely Sydney lady. You have repeatedly chided me lest I fall prey to some illusion. Maybe that’s good, maybe not. I don’t know, so … …
28. 4. 1956.
I added the scattered and confused dots on the previous bit of writing — which was interrupted a week ago. Today, everyone went to the seaside. I have three free hours. I have a cold, and couldn’t swim. I could have gone for some sea air and sun, but this time I chose to stay at home. Here it’s rare that one can have a couple of hours of solitude. Though I have been given a task — I have to water the beans, but there will also be some spare time. And most important — solitude.
Yesterday I got your letter. Very good! Anticipated, and also bringing happiness. It seems that my last fat letter with your lecture notes, pages from Ķikure’s journal, pages from my journal, and my letter to you — hasn’t arrived yet. You don’t mention anything about it, even though your letter was written exactly a week after I sent mine. It would be awful if you didn’t get it. But I’ll hope for the best. Nothing has gone missing so far.
Your letter was lovely. It’s so good when you allow one to see into your room too. It’s cold — winter’s coming. But I quite love winter. Used to love it. Here the house is not built for winter, and always somewhere there’s a draught blowing. In Australia, I feel better in the summer. You should acquire a few “hot water bottles”. Then you could sit wrapped in your blankets, and at your feel put a hot bottle. Then you won’t be cold.
I’m stealing these free minutes. Outside, it’s sunny. And I’m allowed to flow out over the whole surroundings. I have the feeling that, if I’m in the presence of someone who doesn’t understand me (and yet who keeps some kind of attention on me, a surveillance and an uninvited guardianship), it’s as though I’m always forced to retreat, withdraw into myself — not live, not feel, not be happy. When I’m alone, or in a crowd, which has nothing to do with me, even when quite close to people, I somehow flow out over the whole space. I’m here, where I am, and also up there on the mountain, or in the valley, as I look across it. There are people who can evoke this feeling in me till I’m flying, till I flow into the very wind, a blade of grass, perhaps even miles away. That’s what I call becoming like the gods. Then I also exist outside myself, am liberated and empowered to do much more than when I’m numbed, within myself. All that can best be released in me by another person. That’s when I think I’m in love. Even though then one must use some different word.
You say that women enjoy torturing those they fall in love with. I don’t think that’s for the sake of torturing. And yet, if it is so, it’s the men’s own fault, what gets let loose. For centuries, what men have demanded from women is — beauty. Shamelessly, they make mention the swan necks, coral and rose lips, marble breasts, hands, legs. For centuries, millions of women have been born without these swan necks, alabaster fingers, etc. What should they do? Scatter ashes over their heads? Most of them, artificially and otherwise, make themselves as good as they can, and then they put themselves to the test. An axe is tested on a tree. A woman tests her abilities on a man. Puts her beauty to work and watches, how effective it is. Putting herself to the test like this is the most natural thing. The more sharply a woman feels some shortcoming in herself, the more she gets to suffer. Maybe it’s some trifle, which no one notices. Maybe it’s not even a fault, which is most often the case, but she feels it to be a fault, knows that she’s not first class merchandise, and in order to forget it, and to make the viewers forget it, she makes them fall in love with her, without any other intention than to strengthen her power.
Such action also has another incentive — if a woman is liked by one man, she is also more quickly noticed by others. Men are stupid. Sorry! — If she dares not straight away approach the one she fancies, she conquers someone close to him, thereby catching his attention. Now he does take notice of the woman. She conquers him. Isn’t it so?
It’s a game. This game can become interesting for its own sake. Then you get — a vamp.
Just about every woman has transgressed this way. Otherwise men don’t notice them. Full stop.
You say that there’s another possibility, that a woman torments herself and the object of her desires because she cannot reveal her feelings because of their depth, their enormity. That’s true. I know that one (as well as I know the first one). But I don’t value this characteristic very highly. In a way, it’s cowardice. Rather too much conceit. Fear of not getting, nor being able to give everything as brilliantly as was imagined. I think it was exactly this characteristic I have paid for with my life. Eternally, I fled. Eternally, I didn’t give myself permission. Eternally, I looked for I don’t know what. Then I began to be afraid of loneliness, emptiness. And I said, “Enough. The first one who comes … ” etc. I already told you. Many have behaved like this. Some have been lucky. But another was impatient, allowed her feelings to fool her, or even for spite, didn’t listen to the warnings of her heart. And thus, tumbled.
Yours, E. Dz.
10. 5. 1956.
Dear Mr. Kalniņš,
Today I got all three of your letters. I really didn’t have the courage to start talking, afraid I wouldn’t find the words I really want to say, that would be of use, and not cause you pain. I know no words can help. I only ask that despite your loneliness, you survive. May you have the strength. Thinking of it, I would like to be with you, but that also wouldn’t help.
I can only talk about everything as before, and pull you momentarily away from your thoughts, perhaps relieve you from them for a moment. Maybe you’ll become impatient, because you’ll want to stay with your thoughts, but perhaps it will nevertheless do you good to be diverted from them for a while.
Now you understand better my uncontrollable talking and self-disclosure. In your letter (6. 5.) you said “ … because then I can imagine that I’m not alone, that some human being is listening to me”. That’s the way I talk to you all the time, — to feel someone is listening. But my woes are different, not so sudden and intense, as yours are now. However, your letters aren’t arriving any more, and many days have passed already. If only you could write to me now and then. Do it, as long as it gives you some relief, and don’t force yourself if it’s hard for you to do.
I was longing so much for your letter. I was waiting for it on 4th or 5th of May. Coming home from school, Inese usually brings them to me. There was no letter, and I had to think about my dream. I’ll describe it to you: I was in a crowd of people. People were getting into carriages to go somewhere. I was offered a seat by someone I very much didn’t want to sit next to … Another, to rescue me, quickly made space for me next to him and I sat there. I don’t know who the people were, but the first one I found unpleasant, and with the second I felt safe. We travelled along. Then suddenly, the horse stopped. The road was blocked. Piles of gravel and sand had been dumped there. On one pile, there were candles. Some woman had done it. For some minor insult’s sake, but I don’t know what. The trip and the dream ended.
When I thought about it in the morning, I couldn’t guess what would happen. But I knew it would be something bad. When there was no letter, I connected that with my dream. I wondered whether something bad had happened to you. Whether I’d done something wrong myself?
Now I understand my dream. For a second time, I confidently waited for your letter. On Tuesday, 8. 5., when I was in Wyong myself. But as far as I remember, the dream occurred before the first time that I waited in vain. What should I think? How could I have sensed what hadn’t happened yet? I don’t want to confuse you with my empty tales of dreams. But I am convinced that events lie in front of us the same as they lie behind us. There is something fate-like and we have to accept it, because we are too small to divert it. Just last week I dreamt about odd little things and wrote about them in my diary because they came true. Last night I also had a bad dream. The rock on which I was trying to climb, while looking for the path, came falling down, with me on it. I vividly, physically felt the clumps of rock, which surrounded me, breaking, and I had to fall down. Then I had to calm myself, know that it was just a dream, otherwise it meant it’s over for me.
Has anything else bad happened to you? You mustn’t give in. I need you! That’s an awful thing to say. But I don’t mean it exactly the way it sounded. But it is the truth. But not the reason you have to stay strong. When you hear this, you must surely remember yet other reasons to be strong. I can’t find the words to say what I mean — it’s approximately this: you must overcome in yourself, with the power of your mind, and heart, whatever it was that destroyed your son. Someone has to conquer that. Even if only in the mind.
I don’t know whether I can bother you with my words at the moment — but I’m doing it anyway. And I even count the days and think about how much time has passed, how long you have been alone already, as though that could help somehow. But that’s what I do.
11. 5. 1956.
I’ll only be able to send you this letter today. I wrote it yesterday, sitting up late in bed, so the handwriting is not great. Late yesterday evening, Inese brought your letters. On Fridays, she stays in Wyong after school and doesn’t catch the school bus, but takes the ordinary bus, which leaves an hour later. She orders the week’s groceries and gets your letters, when there are any. So no one knows about your letters, and today it will be very hard for someone, (me or Inese), to get out of the house to go to the post office. I would like to send you a telegram. It’s such a long time since I’ve been with you with my words, and it’s your most difficult time.
I’ll try to send this letter somehow. I’ll have a look and add a few pages of my journal, written some time ago. Perhaps not all — there’s lots of silly stuff there too, and so it might affect you at this time. I’m sorry I didn’t send this letter when I began it last week. But I thought to myself, be patient. Maybe you are writing and that’s why you’ve been silent. Of course, that letter would be useless to you, what with its contents, but I was worried that you are too alone. And then it doesn’t matter what it’s about, as long as it distracts you for a moment from your heaviest stuff.
How can it be that you have nowhere to go? That’s what you say. Lots of people might not be a good idea, but you could go to someone who doesn’t expect you to talk too much. Go and visit Mr. Misiņš. No, he ought to visit you. He has a good, alive heart.
I think several people will have called on you by now, even more than you need.
Thank you for the information about how and where the prize giving for the stories will happen. Thank you for enhancing my good reputation. It’s good to know that someone has faith in me.
If you want to write to Ansl. Eglītis, you can add stuff from my letter. I won’t write to him after all. He maybe remembers me a little from the academy days. I also met him once in Germany.
You are dealing quite severely with your novel, starting to rework it right at the end like that. As I read it, I wanted to say — be patient — but reading your next letter, 6 / 5, I’ve nothing more to say. I’m afraid to say a word.
The distance is so awful. I wish I could go and see you. I wouldn’t be able to drive away your sadness. But still. People need people.
I’ll write you again. Yours, E. Dzelme.
11. 5. 1956.
Whether it’s good or not, I’ll write to you every day. Today, all day, I thought about you. After all, we are all so connected. I can’t even dream of getting to see you as I wish to. I would light a fire in your room, but if that’s not possible — then at least the electric heater, and get you something hot to drink. That’s all that a woman can think of to do. But it’s something. Every noise I’d bring into your room would be unnecessary and painful — and still, it would be better that they be there. But I can only think about it.
I hope that soon you will write me something. This week, you will need much strength. Today, I sent a letter off to you. I didn’t manage a telegram because I couldn’t get away from the house. In the evening, I could have, but then the post office is shut. How little I can do for you, when you’ve given me so much.
In your last, longer letter, you write about not being able to reply the way you’d like, and give back in return, as much as you should. You give me so very, very much. I’m sorry that you, goodness knows why, destroy your letters and aren’t satisfied with what you say to me.
Believe me — all that you say to me is valuable, longed for, and gives me an enormous amount. Why? I don’t know whether here one should analyse, so acutely, each feeling and thought, etc. I need you. That is all. And you have been very good to me.
If only now I could make things easier for you for a moment. How very much I wish I could. And I’m mad at myself that I won’t even be able to manage to get to the post office today. What’s the use of talking …
At the moment we’ve got rain here. I hope that you have some visitor, or some thought, memory, or simply endurance, that looks after you.
12. 5. 1956.
I’m going to pick beans again today. I’ve been doing that for about a month now. I’ll think about you, about all that we call life, and that is so hard to understand. The further we go, the harder it is. In the beginning, it was so easy and lovely … Into the room, Mother would bring snow-covered washing, that had frozen stiff, and the room filled with the freshest breath of life. Such clear crystals of snow, glistening fresh, that filled the heart with peace.
When I think about home, I always come to a stop, an emptiness, from which there is no escape — my mother lies in a grave in Germany. Dear Mr. Kalniņš, we must still look for something in this life. We have to have faith till the end. However bitter it might feel. All of life is an endless saying goodbye, and also an endless road onwards. If only I could go to be with you.
Don’t we, after all, overestimate the goodness of human beings in these times? We spoil them too much with words about — everyone being divine. They are — and are not. When people are overly, endlessly assumed to be good, evil breeds. I would also like to judge, and sentence.
Yours, E. Dzelme.
13. 5. 1956.
Dear Mr. Kalniņš,
Today is your first Sunday alone. Maybe you will have written to me about how you spent the day. It’s very late, and I’ll only be able to write you a few lines. I’m very tired physically, and shaken up spiritually. I’m thinking about you – probably there are many selfish motives for desiring you to get through it all strongly, but – thank God – it’s not just selfishness. With all my heart I would like to lift the heaviness off you, even just the smallest, smallest bit. If, up to now, the distance between us didn’t make much difference, then now, I wish it wasn’t there, so I could do something. I have the feeling that because of the distance, I can’t remedy anything, not give you respite, even for the shortest while. That renders one weak and unsure. For myself, I have a strange joy and a heart full of vague hopes: I received a letter from my friend in America containing a cutting from “Laiks” that my sister, Austra Lācis, [in Siberia] is looking for me. Tomorrow, I will send a letter to the address in America, in the state of Pennsylvania. Then I will wait for a reply. Maybe I will be able to start writing to my sister.
It’s an odd feeling. As though then, I too, could still be a real human being. You say that I have a healthy soul – I don’t know. I’m struggling to keep it so. But how long can I do it? Humans are strong, but they can also break, even when they, themselves, least expect to. You know that. Tomorrow, I will tell you a story.
14. 5. 1956.
Yesterday, I promised you a story – now I’m trying to work out whether I dare tell you a sad story? You have enough sadness of your own, but you won’t want to listen to something chirpy either. I will tell you about my father. I remember him fairly well, even though I can’t really judge what he was like as a person. While he was with us, I loved him more that I did my mother. Maybe that’s because I was the oldest sister and I think my mother had less time for me. Maybe it was also that my mother was there all the time, and my father wasn’t, because he worked out on the fields, and also went away from home on business. Then, as we waited for his return, there was a greater sense of attachment.
My father was shot by the Bolsheviks in March, 1919. When the Bolsheviks took over, my father and others, including a couple of neighbours fled to Riga. (He was head of the local council.) I remember, one evening, a number of men had gathered at our house. They put on false beards (which my father had stored somewhere in a cupboard from the days when they went hunting in the gentry’s forests), and having said their good-byes, they drove away. My father came back after about a month. My mother was worried. But my father said – I haven’t done anything wrong. I will take responsibility for my actions, if they put me in prison. It won’t be so bad. For a month, he lived with us at home. Then they came for him. That day he had gone somewhere. My mother sent me and my sister off to meet him on his way home, to tell him that men from the new regional government were waiting for him – i.e. police. My father was travelling together with our farmhand. I remember that, in my child’s mind, I wanted to beg my father not to go home, even though my mother had not said that. I only had to say that they were waiting for him. Because of the presence of the farmhand, I didn’t dare say what was on my young mind. Maybe he would have listened. But maybe it wasn’t possible for him to escape anywhere any more.
My father was taken to the prison in Madona. He must have remained there for 10 weeks. Then he was taken to Pļaviņas.
On 26 March, some neighbour, who had been in Pļaviņas, hurried to our house and told us he had seen our father. Together with others, he was being taken away from the courthouse. He had called out to the neighbour to tell his wife she must look after the children alone from now on, because he’d been sentenced to death.
My mother immediately set off for Pļaviņas (3 to 4 hours by horse and buggy). She didn’t see anyone, find anyone. She was warned off with threats, not to show herself there if she valued her life. She mustn’t have valued her life too much that day, for not knowing what to do, she started running towards Daugava or somewhere, but Mrs. Malta, (professor N. Malta’s wife, who was living with us at that time because there was famine in Riga) who was with my mother, brought her back in the buggy. That night, my father was shot and buried in a mass grave with five others, somewhere among the pines behind Pļaviņas.
In Spring, when the Germans arrived, they were dug up and buried in the cemetery. Part of my fathers skull, near the temple, was missing. The doctor couldn’t tell whether it was from a shot at close range, or a blow.
In the dungeon where they spent their last day awaiting their execution after they’d been sentenced, my father’s letter to us, written in pencil on the door jamb, was found. They cut it out with a saw, and this thin little board, (which has now broken in half) is still with me. The writing is a bit faded, but still readable, written with an indelible pencil. My father was taking his leave of us and saying that the road from the court to the grave meant nothing to him, because he was to die innocent.
Whether it was so, whether he said it for my mother’s sake is not relevant. The handwriting really was the same as usual. Under his script, someone else had also wanted to write something, but it was an unreadable, trembling writing, which flowed into unfinished words. Each had born his destiny differently.
I’ve thought about this little piece of wood — maybe it ought to be framed and put in the archive here, bearing witness to the course of our nation’s history? But maybe the archive here is of a different nature.
Thereafter, our mother took it as her life’s work to carry out our father’s last request — to look after the children. She gave us a sunny, lovely, quite carefree and unforgettable childhood and youth. She brought us up to be decent human beings. I dare to say that because you would be hard pressed to find a lovelier and more striking girl than my sister. She too married the head of the local council, and for that she is now in Siberia.
Yesterday, I received a small cutting from the paper with her name. It felt like the whole world had returned to normal, and everything, including me, could once more start living. But it’s an illusion. Still, for the sake of this life that once was, for my parents, and also for my sister, I don’t want to go to waste, I want to accomplish something.
My mother died because of me. I should make up for her early demise.
She observed my life the way you observed your son’s life. She watched till she couldn’t stand it any more. One morning, when it was still dark, she started to scream and rant and rave. One might have taken it to be madness, but actually there wasn’t any madness there. She cried out all the things that had been tormenting her. She also understood that this torrent would carry her off, if she gave in to it. She grabbed some kind of knitting, wanted to knit, but couldn’t because her hands were shaking too much. She couldn’t, was powerless to control it.
I remember what she said — and try to keep to it. Even though I’ve side-stepped the most important point. She said — that my husband must go away, that we mustn’t stay together. Otherwise the first one that would be crushed would be me, and then the children. Only then would it be him (my husband). I know it’s the truth, and I’ve kept my eye on that fact all these years. I dare not break down. The next ones to follow would be my children.
I would have collapsed long ago, if my mother hadn’t done so sort of in my stead. I persevere. But how long will it be in my power to do so?
I understand that your son also made a somewhat similar sacrifice. People can destroy each other.
In my journal which you have as Ķikure’s journal, I had written that in life it is generally not so much a case of blasting with cannons but rather death by small, needle stabs, killing with morning slippers, and more people fall this way than on the battle fields of war. For your sake, I crossed it out. I thought it sounded exaggerated. But now, when I know what has happened to you, I see that what I wrote is not an exaggeration.
And still, life can be beautiful, sunny as God’s own heaven. Life is beautiful and worth living (for me that foundation was set by my mother, and so it remains).
I don’t know whether I should send you this letter? That was another life that I’ve written about here, and you can’t be tormented like that. It’s heavy stuff, and you’ve already too much heaviness of your own. I don’t know what to do? I just want to give you a rest from your worries.
Yours, E. Dzelme.
P.S. Now that I’ve finished this letter, I am so upset that my hands and legs are shaking. How can I send you such a letter. I wanted to provide you with only warmth and peace for a moment. I must be out of my mind. I will play some Mozart for you.
17. 5. 1956.
Honourable Mr. Kalniņš,
I wrote you another letter, but it must remain un-posted. Perhaps after all, you need to be left in peace more than I want to do that. There is still no letter from you, which makes me think about your heavy battle. On top of everything come all the duties and perhaps a lot of very practical logistics which have to be organised, like it or not.
I want to get a letter from you, which would show me that you feel strong. I couldn’t wish for anything more now — just get through it all. I’m wondering — will you stay there, or will your other son not ask you to go and stay with him? Then I would lose you in a way. I wouldn’t be able to write so often, nor send my works back and forth so easily. I’m not doing anything else, just playing piano in the evenings. When I do that day after day, my fingers revive and I warm to it and want to do more and more. But I can’t. I get carried away, but here there’s nowhere else for me to go. I don’t know which way to turn, lately, with all my ideas. The girls are on holidays — 10 days. I thought I could go somewhere together with them, but that’s just dreaming. It’s a wonder that I could have dreamt it at all — but one has to fool oneself somehow. I have a patched-up reality. I often make do with such. What else can I do? Maybe there will be a letter from you tomorrow. Your first lonely Sunday is over. Something will grow, if only illusions. Today is a very grey, cool and wet day. Maybe tonight, we’ll have to light the fire
3.6.1956.
Without your help, nothing will happen – I dare not keep these journal pages here with me, they will disappear, no matter how well I try to hide them… So – I’m sending them to you. They can collect there and then at the end we will see how and where we can pull them all together.
Did you have a look at “A Woman’s Journal” that I sent you? Do the first and second parts go together? That is, the one I sent you after you said that the first piece could be sent overseas to some magazine? If they could be sent, then they would have to now be marked as “fragments” because later they would have to be included in that overall “Journal” that I wanted to write in sonnet form. Big plans I’m making! Similar things have been done by Gide – “Pastoral Symphony,” “L’école des Femmes”. I haven’t read his own ‘Journal’. I don’t know if anything will come of my plan, but I think I could write it better in Journal form than any other way.
No news yet from my sister. I don’t think we will be able to write more broadly. Also I don’t want to burden her with my troubles. But if we can correspond, then of course the first thing will be – how are you? And what can you do, but say it the way it is?
It is so cold today. My hands and feet are frozen as I write. Now I should write something else. But I can’t get started. I know that I have to go out into the fields. I don’t even know how I’ll be able to excuse myself that I haven’t already done so. But I don’t want to. I want something more. I want something, that isn’t.
You ask – are all women unhappy? Probably not. Some men are unhappy too. Of both – some are happy. At least for a while. That’s good. For a while… If never – that’s not good. Even a good person can make someone else unhappy. At fault, are society’s norms. Each person ought to shape them for themselves. But in general, that isn’t done, and how can you do it, if two of you are together? They have to have the same rules. But what if they are different? … Oh, I shouldn’t talk. I’m very incoherent today. You’ll have some deciphering to do. How do you warm you room? Do you have a fireplace? We have one in the lounge room, but there’s nothing in the bedrooms. It’s impossible to write or read there now. All you can do is go to sleep, otherwise you freeze on the spot.
Eucalyptus leaves burn beautifully. They even burn when they are quite green, not dried out. If you throw a eucalyptus branch on the fire, the room is instantly full of flames, heat, and that characteristic smell that burning leaves give. It’s a nice pastime. I didn’t want to do anything else just now, just to stay in the room and be by the fire. Yesterday I got so cold – it had rained, and the peas had been standing wet all day. They had to be picked, like roach fish from a net. Have you ever picked roaches from a net? I have. Aiviekste’s roaches, which had got tangled in father’s net. It was some Sunday in spring, when the waters of the Aiviekste flowed over into the ditches and only the very tops of the osier bushes along the river bank showed above the water… You say that you ought to write poetry in reply to my letters. Right now, I feel like writing poetry. But I don’t like hammering words into lines. I want to write poetry with the sort of rhythm that you can’t grasp and that doesn’t repeat. That’s as free as the swaying of swallows in the air and yet – follows its own natural laws. But I can only dream about that, maybe sometimes put it into prose. No – I am not a poet, like you say. I live in prose. I love prose. Even though when I was young, not a day went by that I didn’t read a poem. But it was just – like decoration. Well, sometimes we do think and feel in poetic form. Perhaps.
Yours, E. Dz.
E. Ķikure
In the Lemon Orchard
(Journal Entry)
Today all day I have been picking “passionfruit”, these fruit for which I do not know the Latvian name. They have to be taken off the big vine, and fallen ones collected from the ground. We have them growing in rows, right among the lemon trees. The lemon trees are to be found in the very furthest corner of the orchard. The rows of passionfruit reach all the way to the house. The furthest part we call the lemon orchard. That name makes me feel good. It makes me think of very blue skies, the sun’s heat, shadows, the humming of the breeze. There’s some kind of magic in our lemon orchard. Something hinted at by my title.
Lemons flower and fruit at the same time. All the little trees are full. When I first saw them, I was touched. It gives the lie to the saying “There is a time to flower, and a time to bear fruit”!.. For the first time, I saw insatiability in nature. Where the will to live is all imposing. Now I’ve become used to it.
Lemon blossoms have a bitter-sweet perfume. Very refreshing. The smell is a mixture of Mayday tree blossoms and jasmine. Sometimes it feels like a cloud of the perfume has been quietly sleeping, hiding somewhere and then suddenly it bursts forth and engulfs you, intoxicating.
But the lemons with their bright, sharp yellow, left alone by insects, hide a potency, essence, that has to be diluted to discover its blessings. The gleam of the lemon provokes restraint, suggests a taboo.
Our lemon orchard always becomes overgrown with grasses. A thousand flowers blossom and dry out, produce their seed pods. There is always some sort of unbounded wilderness under the lemon tree branches, where the pale pattern of the parched earth shines through the millions of tiny flowers, seedpods, all kinds of burrs, and bits of soft fluff. Seems that carefree breezes play there. As though taking a break. Without particular purpose or care. I used to sometimes pause there for no reason, sit down among the warm grasses and flowers and tried to listen for something. Bird songs echo from the forest and valley, the lemon orchard is full of grasshoppers, tiny winged insects, the buzzing of bees and wasps. I try to hear everything. But I sense, that it’s myself that I most want to hear. And it’s there that I can better listen, discover, see.
Since I have known Joe, I do not go to the lemon orchard. I had even quite forgotten about it. Then one day I suddenly headed for the orchard. I had seen Joe working in the valley and I remembered the lemon orchard. I walked through it all. In the other corner, at that place there I used to sit, I paused. I allowed myself a moment’s leisure – I stood and looked at Joe. I glanced over the whole valley, and saw how lush it was. Had I not also done that before, stood there looking? I allowed myself the luxury of doing it again. He was down below, hurrying with his horse, from row to row. Murmuring to his horse, clinking something on the plough, conquering it all with his effort. Maybe he noticed me. He knew that I had gone into the lemon orchard because his dog started barking, and he looked up. I wandered from tree to tree, stood for a while in the shade under the branches, and then in the sun, between the trees, and then hurried out of the orchard. Now he could start whistling, I thought. And as I was going out of the gate, when I suddenly slowed down a little – he started whistling. It was not like the bland, quiet radio tune he had been droning out lately, it was something I had not heard before, his own rich and splendid melody.
When I hurried into the house, my husband had been looking all over for me. But he did not need me for anything. He was not looking for me for any job. He calmed down when he saw that I was carrying lemons. Our lemon orchard is high on the hill, far from the valley.
Later that night, I woke up. I felt that I had been sleeping very serenely, that all my body felt light, rested. Unconsciously I lifted my hand to feel my face, and with some disbelief, some pleasant surprise, I found that I was – smiling. I remembered that I had allowed myself that moment’s luxury. I slept on peacefully, so as not to disturb my smile.
6.6.1956.
Dear Mr. Kalniņš,
Please forgive that I haven’t sent you the letter I finished. It’s already the second one that I’ve written, but one I threw away, and this one I haven’t sent. I don’t know what has happened with me. I had ceased to move. Or – was just moving to get through the everyday stuff, and everything else seemed pointless.
Yesterday I received both your letters, and revived a little. Today somehow these letters have to get posted, so that you get them by Sunday. I haven’t been able to write my story, and that is totally getting me down. I hope that it will get better again, and that I’ll be able to write.
Thank you so much for the addresses of where to send money for the parcel to my sister. Perhaps I’ll send it to Ķiploks. I was also worried about where I would get the money. I don’t want to ask my husband, and now all my meagre savings have been used up. Then came the people going to America, and for a linocut they insisted on giving me 5 pounds. I had to laugh – now tell me there isn’t a God. Now I can again make ends meet.
You write, that there can’t be a higher power, when you see what is happening to us. Often I have to think so too. I stretch my arms out towards heaven and I have to realise – it’s empty. Absolutely empty. There’s no-one there who can hear me. Then I look at myself. Isn’t that what I’m looking for, what I must rely on. And I muse – maybe it’s within me. Maybe I can help myself. Maybe I have some power within me that can save me. But I have to look for it. And not just so I can feel good. But so that I can survive. So that I stay – “in God”
What does that mean? Doesn’t that mean that I don’t have to lose the divine that’s in me? That I must battle on, with clean weapons, so to speak, and then even if I fall, I will not have lost. That’s all the answer I can come up with, when I pray for help.
“I am in God, and He is within me” – I read that a hundred times when I read the tales of the apostles. That’s what I find in life. But will there be something that carries on beyond me, a thought, which will bring it all together – that I don’t know. Is it life – to hold on to what I find within myself, and suffer for it… and is it death – to not think at all but just be like an animal, that grabs and devours, just for itself – that I don’t know either.
The misfortune is, that I have to battle with someone who is of a different mould, whose truth, whose reason for his being – is different. Rules and regulations keep us bound, and are leading us to destruction. But there is one God, and one truth. How can people be so different? Because they can’t, or won’t see the real truth? Because they err? But everyone will be saved? What’s the point of suffering?
When Inese was 4 years old, once, walking past a church in Fellbach (she loved churches) she said to me:
“It’s a pity that God only had one son”
“Why do you think that”, I asked.
“If He had had more, they would have been able to make all the people good. Now, only some of the people are good – and there is war”.
I haven’t managed to think any better than a 4 year old. People have not been taught properly equally, and so there is war, everywhere, always was, and always will be. They pray to someone who isn’t there where they are looking. At least if there could only be some idea of where to look, and whether one should look.
Iksen has made you think the length of stories is not inconsequential. I think you were a little sharp, about the story’s length… It could also be taken as a joke – that stories should take the time it takes to get from one station to the other. But this time the mentioned 20 minutes isn’t out of place. After all, a writer doesn’t have just one theme or one story alone which to lengthen or shorten. And it doesn’t mean that if he takes part in the competition, that he wrote his piece specifically for that. He could be choosing a work he already has. And I don’t think – that a specified time length, that you mustn’t over run, would be some sort of constraint on creation. Oh this is all trivial.
Now you’ll again be having some difficult times with your son’s exhibition opening. I’m sad that I didn’t send you a letter. I was feeling down and in despair. I just didn’t want to think, and do and resist and battle the everyday stuff. For writing letters and sending them is also a revolutionary act.
Keep well! Yours, E. Dz.
8.6.1956.
I’m at The Entrance for a few hours to buy fruit. It’s a beach town, where we come to swim in summer. I sent Rev. Ķiploks money for the parcel, and here at the post office I sent you a few lines.
There’s nothing much good. There’s a letter from my sister’s husband, which made me sad. He does not expect, and probably doesn’t want to return to the old life. It’s like he’s asleep. He has changed.
I was thinking for a long time – what has made him change? Just love of comfort, a happy second marriage? I don’t believe it. It occurred to me: he is proud, he’s from that sort of family (we all are…) a small fault, that he himself holds as even bigger. Since he has married again, it’s destroying him. He doesn’t want to cause trouble, he wants to keep everything quiet. To also find faults in others (and there are plenty). And not to return to anything that might hurt him again. He wants peace and forgetfulness. He wants old age and the end.
He doesn’t believe that we will one day return to our birthplace. Not worth arguing with that. You can not believe. But you can’t not yearn for that. If my children were in Latvia, I can’t imagine dying here and never seeing them. With my dying breath I would go there, and my whole life I’d be plotting how to get there. I still think now – we will return!
OK, enough about that. It was hard for me. But I got over it. There’s something more beautiful than a good life – and that’s the yearning for an even better one.
You might get all my letters at once. That’s because I can’t always send them when I want to. But I know you’ll wait for them without getting anxious, and you will eventually get them. You can write to me whenever you want. I’m more certain to get mail on Tuesdays and Saturdays, but I don’t know when you have to send them in order for them to arrive here on those days. I’m tired at the moment. I wrote to Mrs. Auls in America. But I haven’t done my own writing, and that makes me dissatisfied with everything. I was waiting for a holiday, but that won’t come.
Yes, please, could you put an advertisement in the paper for Mrs. Zagara’s address. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to get a place to say with this Mrs. Zagara if I get to Sydney. I don’t believe it will happen. But – have to behave as if… It’s a pleasant family. At Christmas they said they would be moving out of their temporary home and moving into the big house – and maybe that little house in the garden could become mine! Dreams.
Or – forgive me – wait till my next letter. I’ll still look everywhere, and then if I can’t find the address, then I’ll ask you again to put in the advertisement. Would that be a lot of bother?
Yours, E. Dz.
12.6.1956.
I feel very down at the moment. I’m not getting anywhere. Everything is left unfinished – and the days are slipping by. I have to let everything go. I am losing everything. I have to rip everything out from me and throw it out, down at my own feet. I don’t even have the strength to watch this self-destruction. To watch my own demise. Day after day.
On your recommendation, I cut Green’s piece out of the paper. Today I received Ceļa Zīmes. That’s the first issue this year. Why does it come out so late? In the same paper that had the beginning of Green’s work, I also read that I have been ignored in London, that my Ļaudona characters are too weak to sustain interest. We’ll have to wait and see whether they will publish it sometime, because they say that for all submitted works, first publication rights go to Ceļa Zīmes.
Why don’t I have the right to work? Why doesn’t this torture end?
In the evenings I play piano. Wrecking my eyes – the light doesn’t reach as far as the piano. I ought to realise that myself. But what can I do? I can’t help it, I have to forget everything somehow. And I have to do something that after all is a protest against this life of mine. (And he can’t come to the piano and take away or destroy my thoughts, the way it happens when I’m writing. Maybe just a few nasty incidents like that frighten me and paralyse me for a long time.)
The Symphony orchestra concert you heard, I imagine must have been pretty special, otherwise why would you have gone past your station? So, you were transported to another world by music which you didn’t even want to understand. I’ve heard Sydney Symphony orchestra concerts three times. I’m quite willing to listen to such things even if I don’t have a clue about them. The less I then try to understand, the more I get from them.
But now there’s nothing here except movies. Of 9 films we’ve seen, 3 have stayed in my mind a bit. We will have to stop going every Saturday for the children’s sake. Most of the films after all, are brutal. In Belgium I saw a lot of French films, where the love scenes were depicted with a few looks and a few smiles. Here, everything is drawn out and shown as though it were a physiological lecture with diagrams, not an art work.
But where can we go? And it is good to go. These Saturday evenings have been so good, when you can dress up and leave the house, go somewhere at night, on the road, away.
Only you can’t actually go away anywhere.
Tell me about yourself.
Tell me about something I know nothing about.
Tell me about something beautiful.
Tell me – what is it, that’s worth living for?
Tell me, what is it – that most makes us want to live?
And what is it – that is left? Strange – sometimes it seems that what I often am longing for, wanting to reach, have, experience – is not actually what is left in the memory of one’s past as being most important, best. A lot of what once were the peaks have disappeared, become insignificant, and what sparkles in the memory like something precious is some small incident. Tell me, what is most wonderful in life?
Yours, E. Dz.
P.S. I haven’t found Mrs. Žagara’s address. If an advertisement is not too expensive, please put one in the paper. If I don’t do anything – next year I will still be here (if there’s anything left of me). I’ll send you the money in postal notes.
22.6.1956.
There’s little chance that you’ll get this letter in time – which would be tomorrow. What can I say? Happy Jāņi! [see Wikipedia]. They’ll be over by the time you read this. But I’m saying it to you – now! So it can’t be too late. Tomorrow is Zāļu Day [see Wikipedia].
It’s warm and misty. Occasionally it’s been raining, but that’s just to freshen up the birch branches…
I haven’t been writing to you. I’ve been living in a daze, non-stop, nothing but farm work. But now there will be a bit of a change: I have to organise things for a Jāņu Day gathering. We’re going to have guests. For 4 years here, we’ve been visiting other houses, and nothing has been organised at our place. At last we are going to have to make the effort. There will be about 16 people. I got up before 5 this morning, when it was still dark. I’ve several pots on the boil, and a cake in the oven… And while the others are still sleeping, right here in the kitchen on the corner of the table, I’m writing you a few lines.
At the moment it is good. It is warm from the oven, and I’m reminded of when my mother got up early to get ready for guests, and everything was already humming while we were still sleeping… To follow in her footsteps in life wouldn’t be a bad thing. The bad bit lies elsewhere. When the other will get up, then this peace and pleasant atmosphere will disappear. Then there will be screaming and grumbling, and fighting and getting offended and being rude and I will be to blame for everything, and won’t be able to get my own jobs done, but will always be having to help the other, and to be a useless, good-for-nothing idiot, but without whose hands nothing would get done. There is much to be done today, cooking and baking, wash and clean, “polish” and iron. It would all be nice, if it weren’t turned into a hell.
The cheese is ready and is already on the table. It has caraway seeds in it and has turned out mighty speckled. My grandmother used to make it like that (my father’s mother, actually step-mother) and I always liked her cheese, but I didn’t like my mother’s cheese. Well I’ve managed to have this one turn out like the ones I once admired at my grandmother’s.
I got all your three letters yesterday. No-one had had time to go to the post office before. Inese always had so much to do after school, and other duties, that she hadn’t managed to get the mail.
I won’t have time to answer your letter. I have to stop writing in a minute.
I’ll write after Jāņi. I hope I’ll survive them, all the good and the bad, in one piece. Keep well! Lot’s more to talk about…
Yours, E. Dz.
The light is all steamy. My pots are boiling. It is a moment’s rest.
26.6.1956.
At last, perhaps I’ll be able to write a letter, or journal, or something else. I think my mind is working again. For a long while it was just empty. I didn’t want to put anything into words. There was nothing but feeling repressed, unhappy, grumpy, hopeless, yearning and so on and so on. Everything just in a swirling grey mass, which cloaked the days. Maybe it won’t be any better in future, but one has to hope for the best.
There are three of your letters that I should reply to, but my thoughts just obsess about my self.
Your exhibition will soon be over, and then there will come the silence. And only then will you start to feel that something has really left you, and won’t ever be back. That will still be a heavy time. But take heart, things move on slowly, and then you get used to them. You have to get used to them. And then you’ll be able to get back to work. I’m writing with an awful pen. For Jāņi, everything was tidied up and cleared away so that it’s not easy to find things again.
It was a heavy week getting Jāņi organised. Just in the last days, the ceiling was being put up in the kitchen (these previous years we had been without a kitchen ceiling), the walls were being painted. Even an electrician came and bored all kinds of holes (we will soon get electricity). In the middle of all this paint and sawdust and general dust, I had to cook pīrāgi (bacon pies), caraway seed buns, steam a hogs head… And wash, wash wash…
On the guest night, I looked at my hands, and thought that there was no chance that I would be able to play some waltz for everyone. My hands were swollen and felt like lead. But finally I played it, performed it, executed it… Everything else went of reasonably well too. The pigs head on the pile of green peas (there weren’t any other kind) looked so burnished and beautiful in the bowl – that I heard someone saying it must be a chocolate head, just for show. Then it was time to hand the knife to the worst of them and he cut delicious-smelling, tender slices, and was full of praise as he handed them around. So too the moment of carrying in the hot food: four children lined up according to height, and carried in the bowls and huge plates (for the plates did look huge in the tiny hands) – Dzidra first, in her national costume, then one of the visiting boys, and Inese and her friend. The guests were delighted. Someone cried out that it was like India, slaves carrying in the food…
But it all didn’t help much, I was exhausted, not so much physically as mentally. I sat down at the table in the same white blouse and checked apron I had on when I accompanied the children out of the kitchen. I couldn’t manage more, I couldn’t remember where my national costume belt was, and if I had gone to change, I would have held up proceedings. So – I stayed as I was – the servant. And still it all went rather well. They ate a lot, didn’t drink a lot, danced a bit, listened to music a bit, spent all afternoon from 2pm till 11 at night. I just regret that I didn’t play my role through to the end. If I’d gotten up even earlier that day, I would have found my national costume belt… But maybe I still wouldn’t have gotten changed – it was another person’s endless uproar and screaming that did me in, so that by the end I was exhausted.
So that I have to forget my slip-up (with the costume) and be satisfied with Dzidra’s assessment, that after all I was the most beautiful, because the other ladies had eaten off their lipstick…
We weren’t able to have the bonfire and various other activities because of the rain. All in all, I have to thank God that I managed the whole thing of having guests such that it was a success. I’m not a practised hostess. And if anyone had seen in what kind of atmosphere I had to get everything ready… That’s that about Jāņi. The celebration is over, and there hasn’t really been a celebration. Maybe just a hint. I’d love to move to some other place and then organise a celebration. But there’s no longer anywhere I can organise celebrations.
Curb that passion – I read somewhere in your letter.
Curb that passion!
It seems to me that all my life I’ve done nothing else but – stay calm! I was the daughter of a widow. Oh, that mother’s fears and trepidations, so that we would grow up – decent! We were her two concerns that she was left to carry on her shoulders alone, and doubly so, because anyone assessing our decency could think – yes, there’s no father to keep them in line. So I learned to curb my passion right from early childhood. Curb it when I was angry, curb it when I was in love. Curbing passion is the primary path to being decent. That decency that I have at times cursed!
Then I worked as a teacher.
And – I curbed my passion. Not for my own sake. But for the sake of hundreds, and more hundreds of young hearts. Being a role model for them.
And more – I married unhappily. And curbed my passion. Someone unhappy, an unhappy wife – also must be decent. But decency demands that – you curb your passion!
Now in the night, when I listen to the beating of my heart, I get afraid, will it stop? How long will it want to continue beating? Will it continue just a bit more? Now – even now – I curb my passion!…
27.6.1956.
The letter is not finished, but last night I got 2 of your letters. Thank you. I will answer them straight away.
Yours, E. Dz.
27.6.1956.
Two letters from you with nice words about all that I have been writing to you.
The highest award for short stories has been awarded to your son! Believe me, that makes me very happy. I don’t know why. I think I feel respect for him because of the works of his that I’ve read in Ceļa Zīmes. The highest award. So it stays in the family, so to speak. Smile!
I wasn’t disappointed that my “Ļaudonieši” didn’t win, but just that I wasn’t smiled upon by such an unexpected windfall that might have got me back on the road. In the end, it will take a lot to get me back on the road. I have to work more, a whole lot more in the field of writing than I am able to do. My circumstances, and also my thoughts get me totally down, so that I can’t see a way out. Now I’m turning back to the old advice – slowly! It’s pitiable advice, but the only one I can use.
I asked you various questions, and you have answered them nicely. Thank you. I will read over them every now and again.
I wanted to ask you simply – what is a man? Because you so often exclaim – “What are women? Who can understand them?” But I knew that to so radical a question – what is a man? – I would get no answer. So I asked something different. From your answers I could surmise – a man is the same as a woman.
To the questions – what is pleasant in life, what is valuable, what is worth living for, what is left at the end of it all – your answers were the same as I would have wanted to say. Perhaps I wouldn’t have known how.
So again I want to say the same as I have said before – men and women are very alike. Only people are not all alike. They are – different.
You know more about me than any one has ever known. You don’t just read what I write – but you also guess why I write it.
In one letter you said, that I unlock everything through experience, rather than through thinking.
That is so.
I think that I even prepare food only by experience, not with knowledge.
My way of being, you could say, is what my husband despises most. I have utterly no reverence for those “life’s wisdoms” which are “essential and understood by every civilised human”.
In general I’m a big fool, and strangely am making every effort to stay that way. I myself have noticed that I wall myself off from the most basic things in life, like I would from germs. I don’t know how far the moon is from the earth, even though I’ve been told a hundred times. I don’t know what a ticket from here to Sydney costs, even though I’ve bought them 15 times. I don’t know things that every school kid knows. But when I hear or read about those things, it’s as though I close off some door and say to them all – stay outside. Something inside me has to stay pure as fresh fallen snow, so that only the most Important things can make their impression there. And if I were to say what that was? Every school child could laugh about it. It could be stillness and nothingness. It could be the leaf from a tree. It could be a ploughed field, where remain someone’s footprints, their efforts, breath after breath, and no-one knows. It sways with new shoots, which rot among the dry grass – and no-body knows. I want to know it. To sense it. Discover it. Hold on to it for one moment…That’s why I protect myself from all that is around me and that I don’t need. Things that I pass as though automatically, not even looking at them, because they are not worth it for me. It’s hard to say what I take and what I leave, but I definitely leave rather a lot. But perhaps, so that I can discover a lot.
Sometimes I wonder myself – is then my soul so poor and meagre, that it has to save itself lest it should be overburdened, as though the space in it were too small and narrow. I don’t know. Maybe it is – paucity for lack of space. Maybe not.
Green says in his piece on what is a work of art, that life is not a work of art, and that if we wrote down everything that we feel, think and so on, there would be nothing of art in it. Reading that, I was thinking that it’s as if I have been trying to live everyday life in a way that would not be so very far from art. At least – that my feelings and thoughts, which take up the larger part of the day, the larger part of life – would be close to art.
Perhaps that’s why you once said about me – “as soon as you start talking about yourself, you talk like an artist”. Maybe that happens largely unconsciously for me.
I also think that anyone from today’s civilisation feels so overcrowded with the paraphernalia of life, that he must flee from it all and has to shut some sort of door, in order to be able to feel the bigger things of life.
Maybe those being born now won’t have to do that, because from the first moments, they will already be thrown into the throbbing of electric trains and general mayhem, and from the get-go will have to adjust to it. Or sink.
You encourage me to play. I don’t need encouragement for that. I can sit at the piano all evening and forget that Dzidra also needs to have a go. Lately I often spend the evenings like that – playing. But will that necessarily give me anything – it may well not. Just playing for its own sake. That’s all. You can play, (and keep learning to play) your whole life, for the sake of sharing that one moment with another likeminded person. I’ve said that to my friend, and I say it to myself. But this moment may never arrive. Usually somewhere something does happen. Bigger, or smaller. Also now, at Jāņi, the music, such as it was, enthralled the people. They became a little morose. It made them long for something. They wanted a change from their everyday. Someone said that after all they will have to start going to concerts in Sydney even if only a few times a year. One woman sat down at the piano and picked out on the keys, something that she had once known how to play, and her husband mused that they might have to buy a piano. Someone said that beans must not be allowed to take all one’s time, and that the girls must also play. Yes, music has that sort of effect on people. Maybe they also saw why I ran out of time to change, and thanked me so sincerely for the evening.
But that’s all very little.
Well, OK, I will accept that you’re right – one day it will give something, this music. For example, also in some other way: some girl just came home with Dzidra, and she wants to have piano lessons. I haven’t told anyone that I play, or that I teach piano. But in the evenings, the sound carries far, and people must have heard that I can play. But I had to wait 4 years for that, and it’s only one girl, who mightn’t really be able to play, and so still nothing good will come out of it.
If farm work didn’t wreck everything that I manage to drill into my hands, then it might have become something I could earn money with. But the hands so quickly lose condition as soon as they have to do heavier physical work.
Still – I play and make a bit of progress, and it’s so lovely to play. And perhaps I’ll gain something out of the night where my music rings out!
I’ve started too many things – drawing, playing, writing – it’s all one, and yet the different techniques don’t allow it all to be one. To conquer each of the techniques one would have to devote whole lifetimes, not snatched moments.
29.6.1956.
It’s a lousy day, that’s why I’m lousy. There’s nothing wrong with the day itself – there’s wind and sun. I like when it’s windy. It would be a beautiful day. But I feel like I’m in a spider’s web, and no matter how I struggle, I stay stuck in the web.
Lately what’s been happening at home prove that my husband is not ok mentally. He is so indescribably highly-strung and becomes quite crazy every time something more major has to be done, that I’m afraid for my life. I have to help him every step of the way, and nothing is good enough, absolutely nothing I do is right. Then the screaming starts, and such a tirade, that anyone who saw it would say it is abnormal behaviour. But no-one else sees it. As soon as someone else appears, he suddenly changes from his quite sadistic behaviour and there’s no sign of what just was. However now he starts talking in such a flood of words, talking to everyone so fervently and cleverly and boastfully, that it becomes uncomfortable to listen to him. Usually it’s putting down Australia and praising Latvia, or boasting about himself, and done with such pathos that he himself ends up white-faced, stumbling over words, shouting madly. People look, listen patiently – and go away. Only I have to stay.
I think he’s – an egomaniac. Inside, he has low self esteem with which he has been struggling for years already, for decades. He tries to hide it with bluster, damning everything else, and a brutal attitude to all living things. It’s like sadism. When there is something new to be done, then I have to be careful, that he doesn’t lose it – and do something bad. It hasn’t been far from that quite often. He has said so himself.
Yes, he is mentally sick – but what can I do? He’s not so sick that someone will just be able to – instantly make him better. But he’s not healthy. And the children and I do the suffering.
There are protection societies for animals, but not for people. I don’t know where to begin. I just about can’t get any writing done. I am afraid. I can’t go anywhere even for half an hour. I am watched like I’m in a prison, and subjected to the craziest insults. I don’t know how long I will be able to bear it. It seems to go in cycles. Sometimes he is calmer. But it’s been very bad for a long time now. Jāņi didn’t seem to take him out of himself, and the preparations drove him so crazy that he still hasn’t gotten over it. His farming blunders come one after the other, but that wouldn’t matter so much, as in Australia there are a hundred ways how to earn money. How it will all end, I can’t imagine. If only there was someone who could convince him to let me and the children move to Sydney, maybe he himself could also work there later. (Some people are working on the railways). But there’s no-one. I don’t know whether I told you that I’m his second wife. The first one left him. When we met, he pretended to be young and unmarried. Now he’s scared of everything lest this family should break up, and yet he’s doing everything to wreck it because he doesn’t know any other way.
What I fear most is that I’ll end up feeling pity for him and won’t be able to do anything against him. Even though I can breathe only when he’s not around, and he destroys everything, and has already destroyed it. Oh, what humans do! If someone had told me, when I was growing up on the shores of the Aiviekste and didn’t know a thing about life…
I can’t do anything. For two days, at moments, I’ve been writing this letter. I look over at the neighbour’s fields, which lie on the hillside, in rows and rows, and they seem awash with freedom… But that’s just an illusion. The sun dances, and the wind, and life flows away like water.
30.6.1956.
The days go by, and my letter gets longer and is not like a letter. More like gossiping over the back fence.
It’s a beautiful day – again sun and wind. It lifts one out of one’s cares. A day, that’s empty, but the heart weaves some sort of illusion into it. Which bends and sways like a fading melody, and – carries one forward. Nothing has ever been different. Nor will it be. Perhaps there is sometimes so much reality, that this melody finds another and just for a moment they sound out together – and then it’s a double illusion. No time for more. The girl has come for her piano lesson and there are other jobs waiting.
Cheers, E.Dz.
