Strange Heart Beating by Eli Goldstone

Author:Eli Goldstone [Eli Goldstone]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783783519
Publisher: Granta Publications
Published: 2017-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Ursula is staying in a wooden cabin on some land that belongs to wealthy friends, both doctors in Riga. The cabin is set up with a double bed, a kitchenette, a desk and a cot, piled with dozens of paperback books and a blanket.

‘That’s my nook,’ Ursula says, fondly. ‘I wish I could take it with me when I leave.’

She heats a pan of water on the gas stove and ushers me into one of the folding chairs. She finds her phone and asks me to choose some music while she gets changed behind a large screen that has been fashioned out of a faded pink material embroidered with gold thread that breaks and falls away in large patches. When she rematerialises I am still sitting in the same place, staring at the phone she has given me, not knowing how to find music on it. I say, ‘I couldn’t decide,’ and she says, ‘Hmm. Come on. Anything at all. I have the world at my fingertips.’

‘Anything will do,’ I say, because I’m sick from having listened to Brahms for days but can’t think of a single other composer, musician or band. I want to appear relaxed, so I scan the room for something to rest my eyes on in an interested fashion. I gaze out of the window, which is open but covered with mesh to prevent insects from coming in. I’ve been bitten several times by mosquitoes, and, as usual, the bites have swollen and are a constant irritation under my socks and where the cuff of my trouser leg grazes them. The sky is grey and mottled. Ursula props her phone in a teacup, which acts as a sort of sound amplifier. It is a pretty terrible excuse for a speaker, but I can’t help but be faintly charmed by her. She is thin and therefore brittle-looking, but her eyes and jewellery both flash with colour and she expresses herself with broad gestures of her hands. Every movement she makes looks substantial. She pours us wine.

‘The tea…’ I say, stupidly. I’ve no idea why I’m so concerned with drinking tea all of a sudden. She glances at me while she fills our glasses with a purple Cabernet and smiles.

‘The water is for my hot water bottle,’ she says. ‘I feel the cold.’

When the water starts to steam, she pours it into a little yellow hot water bottle, which she wraps in a shirt and holds between her legs while we talk. She tells me she had originally travelled around rural Latvia to interview people who had returned to their country following the declaration of independence in the nineties. She grew tired of hearing and writing about violence and went back to Riga to stay with her doctor friends, the ones whose land the cabin sits on. They offered to put her up here and she stayed for several weeks, sorting through her notes to some extent, but mainly, as she puts it, ‘being alone’.

‘It’s so hard to be alone these days,’ she says, absent-mindedly running a finger around the rim of her glass.

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