THE WOMAN WHO WAITED FOR LOVE AT THE WINDOW
photo installation by an unknown author
This photograph comes from the photo album of my maternal grandmother, Selma Leis (1911–2003), a schoolteacher who was born and raised in Pärnu.
The photograph, by an unknown photographer, is probably from the 1940s, though that isn’t certain.
It shows the second-floor window of a wooden house on Vana-Sauga Street, and in the window, a woman.
About this picture and this woman, my mother Malle Leis (1940–2017) — who moved into her own mother’s childhood home
in the Pärnu suburb when she started secondary school (my grandfather was a dairyman and the family lived in several places around Estonia) — felt it necessary to tell the following story.
She was a woman who often sat in the window, and when the curious women of the neighbourhood asked what, or whom, she was waiting for there, she always answered: “Love!” My mother added that the love this woman waited for never came into her life, and also mentioned that the woman had “negroid” features — an old port-town detail…
Mothers surely pass on to their daughters their milieu’s attitudes toward relationships, “traditional” family values, marriage, infidelity, relationship violence and children.
Among other things, I heard from my mother that once a man cheats, he will keep on cheating,
that a child is too great a burden for some people, and, through this woman’s story, the realisation
that it is pointless to wait for great love at a window.
My mother herself, however, was fortunate enough to find in my father, Villu Jõgeva (1940–2019),
an exceptionally loyal and supportive lifelong companion.
An enlargement of the old photograph is displayed inside an old wooden window frame.
The first version of the work belongs to the collection
of the Pärnu Museum, as does the original photograph.
