Trafika Europe 3 - Latvian Sojourn

… jar, lid, jar, lid, jar, lid, jar, lid, jar, lid …Nadezhda Mihailovna performed the synchronized routine moves.

There is a wonderful emptiness in her head.

It does not hurt, humiliate, despise, or denigrate.

Having scrambled out of bed, she puts on water to boil for tea. Turns on the taps to fill the bathtub. She greets her stocky, thickset frame in the large mirror. Her belly button seems to her to be the most ludicrous of all – not a small, lovely button, like the ones seen in TV commercials, but a wrinkled troll’s eye – now closed, now open. She also has a hard struggle with hair, it grows back in an instant, especially under her arms. Nadezhda Mihailovna pours her favourite bath gel in the path of the water stream gushing into the tub. Whenever she buys the product in the shop, the saleslady reminds her that it is meant for men. But she likes the sharp, stimulating fragrance, which envelops her long after she has taken her bath. A bath is her third nirvana, immediately after her bed and the woods. Sometime in the future, when she can afford it, she will have only this trinity – bed, woods, bath. Hope exists so that it may be fulfilled. Not so very long ago she could not envisage even in her dreams that she would have a bathtub.

99