Free High Tide by Inga Abele

collection of photographs like these hidden under the false bottom of his nightstand.
    Andrejs would study how time had changed his daughter’s face. When she was born she had looked exactly like him, like she’d been shaped in a mold, a tiny copy of him, an imprint in dark metal. Then her face started to change, jump from his features to Ieva’s expressions and back again. Of course, a lot depended on the angle of the photo and the lighting, but in the end Monta became Monta. It was impossible not to notice it.
    He’d timidly beg Ieva to bring Monta with her. And Ieva would firmly answer that her daughter would never set foot in a prison or ever breathe this prison air.
    â€œAnd if I die?” he asked.
    Ieva shrugged.
    And that’s how she was, a straight-up bitch. It was because of her Andrejs was in prison, because of her and that ass Aksels, but see, she made herself to be this noble, white dove who visited him like a dream once a season. But she was absent at the same time. Naiveté—or rather, what was it called again?—immaturity. Exactly.
    An immature infant. And a bitch. She comes to prison, but doesn’t breathe the air. That idiocy comes from books, of course. I am what I am, and where I am is where I am. But see—it’s easier to deny reality, to linger in the dream, to pretend, to observe.
    Stupid.
    Independence and betrayal. The entire breed of book readers are traitors. Because they use words however they see fit, and they’re as sly as foxes. They’ll forever twist the world into something they like better. Everyone else sees black, but they say it’s just the opposite of white. Obviously you can say it like that, too, but it will always be connected to a selfish purpose so tangled it’s sickening.
    That was when the fight started. The time when he gave her his shirt as she left because it was pouring outside. May showers—loud and spattering, or in a gleeful disarray.
    And she never came again. Just sent back the shirt with a note— Everything’s over for real now. Ieva.
    There wasn’t actually a fight. He’d just told her what he was thinking. And suddenly it was over. So their time together had been based on nothing but lies—on lies and silence. But that had been clear for some time.
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    That time she had showed up kind of disoriented. Like she was in the room, but not.
    And then suddenly—she asked if she could talk to him about Aksels.
    The trump card. He even swayed a little, he hadn’t been expecting it. They never mentioned things like that. Because, first and foremost, they both had their own version of what had happened.
    And second, the walls had ears. All the walls in the Soviet Union had ears; they couldn’t be so naïve to think that a prison that had never been reconstructed would be clean of wire taps.
    But she asks—can they talk about Aksels?
    And then she just went off with almost no segue—she reminded him of a person up to their knees in seawater and with the tide coming in fast. He could tell right away that she had been holding it back. She’d probably spent those four hours in the train talking to herself.
    About how, see, he shouldn’t have shot Aksels. That it had been a kind of neurosis, and now how were they supposed to fix it? That she hadn’t done right by Aksels, but instead turned him into some kind of animal.
    Jesus Christ! Andrejs had just looked at her and smiled. If she had been anyone else but his Ieva, he would have yelled back at the top of his lungs. Obviously it had all been a load of bullshit. That scrawny, sickly drug addict, and that whole history and theory they had been drifting on for years like on melting ice. Eternal love. I want to die in your arms. My life and death are yours, and your life and death are mine.
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    â€œIeva,” Andrejs had asked, “tell me the truth—don’t you know that you were both completely