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Love on Hold
| Article
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19598 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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10 / 1991 |
2,308 Words |
| Author
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Gail Regier
Gail Regier teaches creative writing at the University of
Central Florida in Orlando, and writes frequently for
Atlantic, Harper's Magazine, and the American Scholar. |
THE EXILED HEART
A Meditative Autobiography
Kelly Cherry
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 1990
268 pp., $24.95
Latvia is best known to Americans as one of the three small Baltic states annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940 whose agitation for independence led to a military crackdown last winter. This book shows another side of Latvia. The true story of an American writer who tried for fifteen years to marry a Latvian composer, it is a record of the subtler methods used by the Soviets to keep their population in line--and a record of the struggles love shapes in the human heart.
In 1965, Kelly Cherry was a young college graduate treating herself to a year-long tour of Europe. Her idea of Russia came from the nineteenth-century novels of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev; she was not interested in politics or the conflict between capitalism and communism that polarized Europe in the postwar era. Traveling in Eastern Europe, she learns that the natives are friendly, but careful in ways that do not occur to someone who has not lived in a police state. On a train she meets a young man carrying a briefcase and a sword, who turns out to be the son of the former Polish ambassador to Brazil. His parents buy her a meal and encourage the two to make a date to meet later, but in public they pretend not to know her.
In Moscow, she meets Imant Kalnin, a young composer, and the two fall in love during her hectic four-day stay. Several years later, after a failed marriage in the United States, she returns to see Imant. He is married but seeking a divorce, and the two decide that as soon as they can they will marry and Cherry will live with him in Latvia. Their few months together are a whirlwind romance, punctuated with the humor of language difficulties and cultural misunderstandings. (At a café, Cherry is refused admission because her black tights are like those worn by Russian prostitutes, until Imant laughingly explains that she is an American). Cherry is amazed, and her companions amused, by the secret police who follow them in souped-up white Volgas and photograph them in nightclubs with trick cigarette lighters. She learns that one must show one's passport to check into a Soviet hotel, but that there are also many "underground" hotels, small rooms tucked away in family apartments.
While Imant shows Cherry around Latvia, she teaches him the slang
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