Soviet Milk by Nora Ikstena translated by Margita Gailitis

I’ve got a trip to the Baltic States coming up shortly, so was delighted to hear Latvian writer Nora Ikstena at the recent European Writers’ Festival. Her book Soviet Milk—one of those under 200 page novellas from Peirene Press—relates the stories of an unnamed mother and daughter in a post-war Soviet Latvia. Their stories are told in alternating narratives, in passages which are often short, anecdotal and only broadly chronological. Yet you’re left with a vivid picture of these two main characters, their relationships and lives shaped by the Soviet cage that occupied Latvia at that time.

The novel starts with two births, both followed by traumatic events. The first is the daughter’s, in October 1969, where the mother went missing for five days after giving birth. The baby was given camomile tea by grandma, then formula by the clinic, and never drank her own mother’s milk. The second birth is the mother’s, in October 1944, in a damp and cold maternity ward, its windows shattered by bombs. The baby is bound to her mother’s chest and taken to their country house, but then soldiers come for their spruce trees, and when he resists, the father is beaten and thrown into a lorry, leaving the mother to walk back to Riga alone with her baby.

The mother of the 1944 baby becomes the grandmother of the story, and she and her second husband provide a home and sanctuary for that baby and their granddaughter for the rest of the novel. Thankfully, as their daughter is an unusual girl. She studies hard, excels in scientific subjects and is set on becoming a doctor. She shows zero interest in boys, but when dispatched to a local dance by her mother and aunt becomes pregnant and gives birth in 1969. She qualifies in medicine, gives herself whole heartedly to her career in obstetrics and gynaecology, while having few maternal feelings, and leaving the day to day care of her little girl to the grandmother. But there’s more to her behaviour than dedication to her career. Her remoteness at home, as she shuts herself in her room amongst a chaos of books, papers, cigarettes and booze is accompanied by occasional outbursts of rage, which frighten her daughter. The mother is aware of her demons, and when she meets her biological father again, returned from Siberia, drunk and destitute, she fears he has passed on a self-destructive gene to her.

The mothers’ brilliance is such that she’s given the opportunity to study and work in Leningrad, an incredible honour for a female doctor from Riga. I loved this description of her Russian female colleagues, who survived on coffee, cigarettes, caffeine ampoules and boiled beetroot. They dressed in thick pullovers and wide trousers, sported boyish haircuts and were obsessed with deciphering the mysteries of fertility and infertility. Unfortunately things begin to unravel in Leningrad—I won’t spoil but a meat-tenderizing mallet is involved—and the mother is recalled to a furious head doctor in Riga, dismissed, and told she will never work in a city hospital again. Sometime later she’s sent to work in an ambulatory clinic for women in the countryside, a typical punishment meted out by the Soviets for doctors stepping out of line (seen too in Christian Petzold’s wonderful film Barbara.)

It’s in the countryside sections that the daughter’s character really comes into her own. Her loss is vividly evoked as she sits on the railway embankment, looking back to Riga and desperately missing her grandparents, who are themselves distraught at this separation. But she gets on with life, enjoying her school and proud to be reciting Russian poet Mayakovsky for a school event, not really understanding why her mum calls the Russians lice or refers to the erection of a statue to a Russian diplomatic courier as boot-licking. The daughter also takes on more responsibility at home—lighting the fire, cooking—when her mum is working, but also when she’s at home, drinking and smoking or obsessively reading Moby Dick. There are some wonderful descriptions of rural life here: the schoolchildren picking beetroot in the vegetable fields at the start of the school year, the mother and daughter mushroom picking in the early autumn. But even here anxiety is never far away. There’s a tense scene as the daughter watches her mother deliberately cook and eat a mushroom they can’t identify, that may be poisonous. This is one of several moments when the girl sees her mother almost self-destruct.

Despite her mental fragility, the mother is indefatigable in her role as a country doctor. Word spreads quickly that an excellent and sympathetic doctor has come to work in the village, and women queue for hours on both sides of the corridor to see her, some for abortions, others for fertility problems. Her fine diagnostic skills are attributed by some to magic, as if she’s some kind of shaman. Yet she’s aware of the brilliant career she might have had, framing her anguish and resentment at the Soviet regime now through the lens of one Winston, the character she discovers in the torn pages of a book discarded on a rubbish heap. The slow decline of this remarkable woman, the increasing domestic chaos in which she lives, is one of the saddest things. As the daughter steps into the role of carer, we understand her comment earlier in the novel, the role of mother was to become mine.

When the daughter goes back to the city to attend secondary school in Riga, the novel opens out again to give us a broader picture of life in this Soviet dominated society: the academic pressure at school, the compulsory daily tasks for schoolchildren no longer beet picking, but school cleaning, the military training. Yet it’s the mid 80s and there’s change in the air. The daughter and her friends defy the head teacher to attend the funeral of a writer they’ve been reading in the unauthorised study group led by brave Teacher Blüm. Then there’s Chernobyl. Sadly, the mother is unable to join in the collective joy in the summer of 1989 when Lavia’s liberation from Soviet Russia seems just around the corner, The people out there were transformed: elated and happy, armed with flowers, folk songs and little red-white-red flags. Nor did she watch with her family, in amazement, on television later that year, the scenes of people climbing over and tearing down the Berlin Wall.

So this is a moving story of family relationships, particularly the mother-daughter relationship, which take place in Latvia, recovering from war, then occupied by the stronger and implacable Soviet Union. I was reminded at times of Julia Franck’s autobiographical book Worlds Apart in the extent to which people’s lives—and life-and-death choices—were determined by historical events and the ideology of the state. Yet there’s hope towards the end, as the daughter, representing the next, younger generation of Latvians, shares in that joy at the fall of the Berlin Wall, and looks to the future.