THE SCENE OPENS IN A MODEST PARLOR IN the home of Anna Ilzina, a surgeon and the widowed mother of two teenage daughters. The year—the 1950s, in Soviet-controlled Riga, Latvia. One of the daughters, 16-year-old Ilze, suffers from aftereffects of a pulmonary disease, exudative pleurisy, and under doctors' orders she must remain absent from school and spend the next year in a sanatorium.
An avid, enthusiastic student, Ilze complains to her mother, wishing, she says, for freedom from this bleak prognosis. Ilze yearns to become as active and lively as before the doctors' pronouncement about her future. As Ilze recounts it now, her mother, who always believed that God could heal everybody, learned from the girls' piano teacher that people were being healed in Riga through relying exclusively on God. The teacher, Alma Tilmane, had herself just recently been learning of this good news, about what were called Christian Science healings, when she became acquainted with two practitioners of this Science, Mr. Janis Brenners and Mrs. Olga Miks.
The piano teacher told Ilze's mother about the possibility of healing. Since Anna had lost her brother to consumption, she worried about her daughter's future. So, even though the girl was taking a lot of medicine, her mother decided to try another avenue. At this time, although every religion was forbidden under the Soviets, Ilze remembers that no one could even talk about Christian Science. Nevertheless, her mother contacted the piano teacher to find help, and she in turn introduced them to one of the Christian Science practitioners, Olga Miks.
