Displaced Persons 2: The Last Supper in New York

My father wasn’t a man who reacted well to the word ‘no’. To show willing, I began reading the memoir with aid of a dictionary, for my Latvian vocabulary had atrophied around the age of 4, when I started school and began to absorb English. I understood Latvian as it was spoken at home, but I’d resented spending Saturday mornings at Latvian school, with the predictable result that I was not adept at either reading or writing the language.

Translated, this is how the memoir began:

“I keep thinking there is someone out there, standing by the gate. It could be I don’t see too well. At home, I walk around without my glasses. Or maybe the lilacs grow so thickly in that spot that it’s possible to imagine all kinds of things. But today is only February 24th. The lilacs aren’t in leaf yet. And still I keep seeing him. Is it some sort of reflection? Some horrible trick of the imagination that echoes what happened that night long ago?

That night, there was a figure standing by the gate.”

She had me. Slowly, sentence by sentence, I stayed with her.

My father decided that the questions hanging over my marriage needed more than parental sympathy. He put me in the car and drove us 8 hours across the U.S. border, to Greenwich, Connecticut, where lived a New York psychiatrist we both knew. She was Latvian. She had agreed to see me. Before we had had children, my husband and I had travelled to Latvia, then still Soviet, down-trodden and oppressive, in company with her and her family - an American husband and three young boys. Her boys were now grown, and I had two children, and wanted to know Can This Marriage Be Saved?

In Greenwich, my face at the car window was puppy-dog eager and wide-eyed at street after street of great houses surrounded by gardens landscaped into disciplined beauty. The psychiatrist's house was modern, approached along a sweeping driveway, with a metal sculpture - forms of rusted metal welded together - on guard to one side on the grass. Inside, my eyes roved over kilims, antiques and modern furniture, ethnic and modern sculptures, abstract paintings, paintings by children, and plants, ten feet high by the swimming pool and the single arch of orchid blooms in a corner.

In a book-lined room, we got down to it.

Afterwards came relief, and a migraine. I'd been given direction, a fresh point of view, and permission to look after myself. Why did I need permission? When had I given away power to decide my own life? The hardest advice: I was not to expect anything from my husband. He was who he was (for the first time, I heard him defined outright as an alcoholic, with 'depressive tendencies'). I would not be able to fix him. Change had to come from him. If I chose to stay within the marriage, I had to learn to make a life of my own, without resentment. "Take care of your own needs and expect nothing from him." I felt lighter, but suddenly very, very tired. It had helped to talk, but hard decisions now had to be made.

To have come this far and turn back before seeing New York seemed a waste. So I found myself in the Metropolitan Museum of Art the next day. Still thrilling to have set my feet on New York's fabled pavements on a sunlit, clear, breezy day, I walked into an upstairs sculpture room. A head. A circle. Something else. Then this: a long, long sculpture, It was wood and it was The Last Supper and it stopped me in my tracks. The figures didn't speak to me - they cried out Stop! Look! I searched out the card. Self Portrait looking at The Last Supper. The artist had re-interpreted Leonardo da Vinci's famed fresco and created solid form. Opposite was a lone figure in wood, looking at The Last Supper as I was looking. The faces of the disciples were expressive not only in expression, but according to the kind of wood used, its grain, the way it had been worked, rough or smooth, detailed or crude. The table seemed alive with action and noise, and in the centre of the tumult sat Christ. Christ was rock, the face beautiful, serene, at peace, radiating stillness, radiating love. The figure opposite, the watching figure, was unfinished, a bare block of wood, imperfect, incomplete, only feet and a face expressing a little awe, a little wonder, a little fear. A simple face, aware of the presence of greatness.

I opened my bag and took out tissues, for I was crying, and I carried on crying in the express elevator to the roof. The sculpture had somehow cut open the lid clamped onto my emotions, and there was no stopping them, until I was out in the air, and surrounded by city views, high above Central Park.

Back in England, I signed up for a writing course at London's City Lit. The Siberian memoir had come with me from Canada. The train to London got me to the City Lit early, and I began to use that time to sit with the pages and translate. As the pages in English accumulated, I found myself agreeing with my father. Someone had to do something with this. I had no idea who.