– Tell me about meeting dad.
– We met through friends when I was seventeen. Well, I kind of liked him immediately . He was just back from the army – he was twenty-two, already working.
– Were you two somehow different from other young people?
– I don‘t know, well, he was polite, well-read, we‘d talk a lot. Me, I wasn‘t ever exactly like other girls. I was always the dreamer, I read a lot and my view about the world was highly influenced by books.
– Tell me about dating him.
Nobody really cared where you came from, what blood you had – be it blue, green, or whatever… We were all supposed to be equal. We didn‘t really have social gaps like we do know, we were 'evened out'
– On our first date, we climbed up to Napoleon‘s Hill by the river, and we talked a lot, it was new for me, I didn‘t have anyone as close before him. Later we would talk, hang out in the nature, go to the movies. We would never go to cafés – Orbit, Tulip, Metropolis were places frequented by older people, young folks never went there.
– What would you talk about?
– I think it was mostly silly nothings. We weren‘t making up a new system, a new world. Dad did like to talk about his father though, how he didn‘t like the system.
– Tell me about an adventure.
– We were good kids, and what adventures could we have – we went out for a year, we got married and then the baby came, it was enough of an adventure on its own. But once we were in collective farm – we would have to go to work there – and my friend and I decided to run away. We hitchhiked and some man picked us up – eventually, I felt something was wrong, he was zig-zagging a lot, we only realized later that he was drunk off his ass.
– I remember you told me dad was quite rebellious, had long hair and was kicked out of school?
– Well, back then I didn‘t ask him about it. Nobody really cared where you came from, what blood you had – be it blue, green, or whatever… We were all supposed to be equal. We didn‘t really have social gaps like we do know, we were “evened out.” Even though your dad did actually have blue blood, sort of, his grandparents were deported to Siberia because of what they were.
– What would you do with dad when you did not go out on dates?
– We hung out with friends. We always talked a lot. I don‘t know, we wouldn‘t go dancing or anything. Dad would play the guitar, we would sing – we always had some company, because his mom brought up not just him and his brothers, but also two kids from foster home, and we would all hang out together.
We would listen to the Voice of America – the free radio – it broadcast the news. We would only listen to music from foreign radio stations. If you looked at the caricatures in newspapers, young people would always be long-haired, with bell-bottom jeans and carrying VEFs (portable radios made in Riga) blasting music. We listened to Bee Gees, Led Zepellin, Michael Jackson and all the others… It was kind of like a hole in the wall for us, a peek to the rest of the world. I felt like something wasn‘t exactly right, but I didn‘t understand very clearly why exactly we weren‘t free, where was that freedom people sometimes talked about. We knew that the rest of the world was somehow different, but we didn‘t know precisely how.
