“The River” by Laura Vinogradova and Kaija Straumanis [Excerpt]

Today’s #WITMonth post is a preview for an Open Letter title coming out next summer, which isn’t even available for sale anywhere yet. It’s River by Laura Vinogradova, translated by Kaija Straumanis, and part of Straumanis’s “Translator Triptych” coming next summer. The novel was the Latvian representative for the European Union Prize for Literature in 2021, and has received a lot of attention throughout the Baltics. Here’s the jacket copy:

“Sis, I want to tell you about the river. About me in the river. It makes me shiver, tremble. It makes me laugh. It’s been so long since I’ve felt this alive . . .”

Rute is no stranger to displacement and loss. As a child she and her older sister, Dina, were subject to their mother’s romantic whims, moving from house to house, boyfriend to boyfriend. Then, when the sisters were in their late twenties, Dina disappeared. In the decade that has since passed, Rute has become a husk of her former self, going through the motions in work, life, and love, composing daily letters to Dina in the hopes they’ll one day see each other again. 

When the sisters’ biological father, Jūle, dies, Rute unexpectedly inherits his country property. Curious about this man she’s never really known, she takes the opportunity to flee the city, the people, herself. But once in the countryside she meets Matilde, the young, single mother from next door who (along with her brother Kristof) was practically raised by Jūle. Rute learns about Jūle, a generous soul whose door and heart were always open to those less fortunate. 

Haunting, sparse, and echoing Scandinavian greats like Kjersti Skomsvold, Laura Vinogradova’s River is a tightly crafted work that defies resolutions and endings, instead hailing the importance and beauty of the personal journey to one’s internal truths and external freedoms.

 The book isn’t quite available for preorder yet, but stay tuned, and we’ll let you know when it is!

Before

Dina likes Rute’s place. There’s a warmth to it. The kind of warmth that is oblivious to the weather outside. As soon as she steps into her sister’s apartment, Dina takes off her boots and socks and stands for some time, barefoot, soaking up the warmth. Rute has heated floors; Rute has everything.

—What are you doing? Rute laughs.

—Have you been outside?

—No, I’ve been working. What is it?

—The wind, little sister, the wind.

—There’s wind in here, too, Rute laughs again and blows into Dina’s face.

Laura Vinogradova

Then they drink coffee. Rute orders a pizza. Dina’s eyes wander around the kitchen; they hungrily take in every beautiful detail, because Rute’s place is beautiful. Warm and beautiful. Sometimes Dina wants to call her out on it. Tell her she’s spoiled. Tell her Stefans has spoiled her. Because Dina can’t escape. She can’t escape the cold, the loneliness. And sometimes she feels like she can’t even try. Can’t be free, doesn’t deserve to be free. And then she gets angry at Rute. Because Rute shouldn’t be living in an apartment like this. Shouldn’t have heated floors or love, shouldn’t be stringing fairy lights from all the shelves.

Rute has a jar of kombucha fermenting on the windowsill. When Dina sees it, she chokes on her coffee and laughs while wheezing.

—What’s that? she points to the jar.

—Kombucha, Rute says.

—Why is there lace over the top of it? Dina laughs again.

Rute pouts and says nothing.

—It reminds me of something. Dina grows thoughtful and stops laughing.

—Kombucha? Rute’s voice drips with sarcasm.

But Dina shakes her head. The pizza is delivered. The sisters eat, their fingers greasy, and forget about the kombucha.

—Walk me out? Dina asks, but Rute shakes her head.

—I want to get a bit more translating done.

They hug each other tightly; Rute blows Dina a kiss, and the door closes behind her.

After that, everything happens too fast to make sense of it. Too fast to scream, too forceful to fight back. Dina gets off the No. 6 tram at the Mārkalne stop and heads for home. The street she’s walking down is quiet and empty, with a few cold cars and a red minivan parked along the side of the street. It’s a snowless, windy January, and Dina retreats deeper into her scarf. It happens in a second: three men jump out of the van, grab her, and pull a bag over her head. They lift her like a rag doll and toss her into the back of the van. No screams. No movement. Dina freezes and gives in having, at some point in her life, stopped fighting back.

She lies silent in the back of the van and tries to think. Is she hurt? Will she survive this? Will it happen quickly? But she can’t think clearly. Her goddamn mind is trapped in this bag. Everything is trapped, even her fear. She doesn’t feel afraid. What she feels are her pants, wet, cold, plastered to her skin. She’s pissed herself. They seem to have left Riga because the van is driving straight, smooth, and fast. Dina is curled up into a ball, lying in her own urine, with a bag over her head. Suddenly, she realizes what Rute’s kombucha reminded her of.

*

At the time, Dina would have been around ten years old. One day their mother, without a word, had taken her and Rute to live with Aigars. No, we’re not going back home, their mother had told the girls, and they never brought it up again. Their mother loved Aigars just as much as she’d loved Vladimir before him, and Igor before him, and Jānis somewhere in between. Aigars wasn’t bad, he left the girls alone. He never spoke to them, and the girls quickly learned to remain silent. If they talked or laughed, it meant a black eye for their mother. Their mother loved Aigars even with her black eye, so the girls weren’t worried.

Kaija Straumanis

The sisters didn’t have their own room at first, instead sharing one with their mother and Aigars. They were set up on the floor behind the wardrobe, with a quilt to sleep on and a small night light. But it was still dark. Each night, Dina had to listen to their mother’s panting and snoring, and Aigars’s moaning. Dina and Rute wet their “bed” on the very first night. Dina had been embarrassed to tell their mother, but she worked up the courage and finally did. The girls were given a clean sheet, but the same thing happened the next night and the night after that. Dina woke up on a quilt that was wet and a sheet with a large yellow stain on it. She pulled on her jeans and went to school, but she could feel that damp cold on her legs the entire day. She didn’t say anything to their mother again—they didn’t have that many clean sheets, and their mother was busy. Aigars wanted to spend every second with her. He didn’t like it when she wanted to play with Dina and Rute.

The girls spent several months sleeping behind the wardrobe. They wet the bed every night. Sometimes they couldn’t tell if it had been only Dina, or only Rute, or both of them. They’d study the stains on the sheets, trying to make sense of it, but what did it matter? Either way, the bed was wet. Either way, it stank. Either way, they had to sleep there again. Every morning Dina would pull back the sheet and hope it would be the last time, that everything would dry out and she wouldn’t wet the bed anymore. But she did. And so did Rute.

Then they got their own room, and in the process of moving them their mother saw their sleeping space for the first time. She saw the piss-stained sheets. The cotton quilt they used as a mattress had started to mold. Their mother said nothing; neither did the girls. Urine isn’t something you talk about.

Having their own room was better. They had their own beds and were given special mattress covers to go under the sheets. Dina’s bed stayed dry the first few days, and she was happy because she thought she’d conquered bed-wetting. There was one morning when Rute’s bed was wet, but she was still little. She couldn’t hold it in.

One night, Dina woke up needing to pee. But the toilet was outside, and to get to it, she’d have to go by Aigars’s room. What if she woke him and he got angry? What if he took it out on their mother? Because he did that when he got angry. The times he got angry like that it seemed that their mother didn’t love him after all, but that wasn’t true. She did love him. She’d cry, rub ointment on her bruises, and go on loving him.

Dina got an idea. On the table was a jar of water used for rinsing paint brushes. She’d pee in there. She squatted, positioned the jar under herself, and tried to aim in the dark. She filled it completely, a bit of warm urine dripping onto her hands. But Dina was pleased with her solution. Her bed would stay dry, and she wouldn’t reek at school. She found a few more jars in the courtyard and secretly stashed them in their room. She filled those, too. When she ran out of jars, she peed into a vase that was in the girls’ room because Aigars didn’t like vases. And when she ran out of vases, she peed in the bowl that sat under the flowerpot.

On rare occasions she would take the jars out to empty them. Very rarely. And so, the urine-filled jars would turn dark, cloudy. They looked like jars of kombucha. Now she remembers.

*

The van stops. Dina is dragged outside and through the bag she can feel the damp sea air. She recognizes it because Vladimir, whom her mother had loved, had lived by the sea. The sea air makes up a bit of her childhood air. We all start at childhood. She takes a deep breath of the damp air and savors it. And there’s a sharp pain on the back of her head. Then darkness.

River by Laura Vinogradova, translated from the Latvian by Kaija Straumanis, will be available from Open Letter Books in the summer of 2024.