The Hidden Letters of Velta B.

by Gina Ochsner

  I could not say the same for myself. Assailed by strange longings I could neither name nor describe, I made a poor grunt, jabbing at the hard clay with my shovel in jerky, awkward movements. Not like Father. The shovel was a natural extension of his arm and his digging was a smooth unbroken cycle, like a song that had become a prayer.

  And he certainly needed to dig. You won’t find this anywhere in the newspapers, but in the months following the Soviet Union’s collapse, a series of strange and tragic deaths seized town and country. First, a poet from Lubana awoke from a dream in which she was a wolf, bit her husband’s neck, and killed him in the bed they shared. Not long after that, a saxophonist in a klezmer band went crazy and killed his fellow band members—all seven of them—and then beat himself to death with the saxophone. It was tax season. A few weeks later, after swimming in the nude in the newly thawed Aiviekste River, a civil engineer built himself a flying machine and died after falling from a great height. His grieving widow later succumbed to a mysterious urge to throw herself in front of the Daugavpils–Minsk train.

  As the local grave digger, your grandfather Eriks was the first to hear about it all through a black phone in our kitchen. In the Soviet days, when someone needed burying, we’d get a knock on the door, but after the fall, orders came from the cemetery’s new director and owner, Mr. Zetsche. Though none of us had ever laid eyes on the man, his reputation of largesse preceded him. A German-born businessman, he’d married a Latvian woman of enormous wealth: her family owned a sugar refinery and choice property near Lake Lubans. At his own expense, Mr. Zetsche had installed the phone. You may laugh at this, but we felt smart and privileged to have it: everyone else in town had to go to the post office and place an order to make or receive a call. Through the winters of 1992 and 1993, this phone sounded with increasing regularity. One day brought us news of an overwrought copy editor who had a bad case of frayed nerves and a rope long enough to hang herself. Your grandfather roused your uncle Rudy and me early one morning—all hands to the shovels.

  Even then, I sensed that as lowly as our work was it mattered that we did it well. Our work connected us to the living and the dead, to things beneath the earth and above it. When I watched your grandfather working—sanding the boards; measuring once, twice, thrice to make sure the joints married snugly; drilling holes in the coffin for those who asked for it—I often thought he was a holy man performing a holy office. On the day of the copy editor’s funeral, we watched a cluster of women dressed from head to toe in black and a procession of men in black hats walk toward the Jewish section of the cemetery. The coffin, a pine box with a domed lid and handles all around, must have been heavy because every ten paces or so the pallbearers stopped and set it on the road to rest for a few seconds.

  In bigger towns, Jews had their own cemeteries, but our town was just small enough that we all had to be buried together. Well, near one another. The Jewish graves were separated from everyone else’s by a low stone wall. The wall, Father explained, was there to keep the Jews settled. Jews were like Gypsies, always on the move, always prepared to wander, and when they disappeared, it was their way to leave no trace of themselves behind, not even their dead. But in his thirty years of caring for the cemetery, Father said, with a hint of pride, not a single stone, pebble, or blade of grass had been disturbed.

  Once at the burial site, four men lowered the box with ropes. Your grandfather had offered to help, but his being Baptist was a mark against his assistance. And so we hovered discreetly should someone need us; for what reason we couldn’t imagine. That evening, after everyone had left, Father raked the sandy pathways between the graves so that the spirit of the copy editor couldn’t follow the footprints back home to the living.

  The thing you must remember is that most people, including me, speak out of ignorance. We open our mouths and a universe of all we don’t know rushes out in a collision of sound and folly. At fifteen years of age, I knew very little about Latvian Jews. Rudy knew even less. Rarely did Jews earn a mention in the history books we read at gymnasium, which made them seem all the more exotic and fascinating to me. In Daugavpils we’d learned of a Jewish man who’d been denied an entry visa to Israel and flung himself out of a fifth-story window. “Jews must be really sad—killing themselves like this,” I surmised one night, as Rudy and I crawled into our beds.

  “They don’t have a land of their own. That’s why they are so sad,” Rudy said, smoothing the wispy fuzz above his lip and under his chin. Two years ahead of me at school, with only a half year left before graduating, Rudy had acquired all kinds of opinions and pseudo facts. For example, it was his opinion that Jews in the larger cities like Daugavpils were not well liked because they had more money than everybody else, though the Jews in our little town were as bad off as the rest of us. According to Rudy, Jews were the reason why unemployment in Latvia was on the rise. And the émigré Jews from Russia were the worst kind because they didn’t even bother to speak Latvian, which didn’t seem so bad to me, but many people, including Father, maintained that the sound of Russian fell hard on the ears. Your grandmother felt the same way. I don’t love Russian, she said, and the way she stretched the vowel in that word love expressed the measure of her dislike.

  At that time in my life, I listed toward the melancholy and dramatic. While I washed dishes, I sucked my cheeks in so as to affect the gaunt look of a poet gripped by an esoteric thought. Or, if I was scrubbing potatoes, I might fix my eyes on the lane outside the window and adopt a meditative gaze. I can tell you about it now and we can laugh together at my silly posturing, a product of adolescent fancy and boredom, but at the time, it seemed very important to me to strike just the right pose.

  At the time, my only friend, Jutta Ilmyen, felt the same way as I did about tragedy, drama, and romance. She talked a lot about suicide and the futility of life—all while contemplating the sky and sighing. She lived in the house opposite ours and looked, according to town gossip, suspiciously German, though in actual fact she was a Jew whose family had come from Belarus somewhere. The house where her family lived had sat empty for seven months, the owners having gone to Australia just like that. In month number eight, the Ilmyens arrived with their many suitcases, an elegant horsehair divan, and a droopy eared donkey named Babel.

  Mrs. Ilmyen spoke passable Latvian and always said lab dien, good morning, to us when she passed us on the lane. She claimed that her family had been granted automatic Latvian citizenship on account of their having been in Latvia several decades before the occupations and annexations. About Mr. Ilmyen we knew very little: he translated important legal documents in an office somewhere in Daugavpils. It was a job that kept him quite busy as many Latvians from Australia, Canada, and the U.S. had arrived in droves to reclaim ancestral properties that had been illegally seized during the Soviet regime. Your grandmother wasn’t sure about Mr. Ilmyen’s status as a Latvian or his political leanings. But she admired Mrs. Ilmyen’s smart fashion sense, and because of this, I was allowed to visit Jutta. In their home, everything seemed exotic and better: the lace of their curtains hanging in their windows had yellowed more elegantly than the muslin hanging in our windows. And though I knew it was true that the rain pelted our houses equally, it seemed to me that the rain fell from their eaves more musically than it did from ours. And whereas we had only a few books in our home, they had dozens, and in those rare moments of sideways afternoon light, the gilt spines of the books glowed and exhaled a smell of old leather. In a small cabinet where Mr. Ilmyen’s chess medals were mounted on black velour, they kept a special silver candelabra. And this was the great thing about the Ilmyens—they were all smart. At least half the chess medals inside Mr. Ilmyen’s case belonged to Mrs. Ilmyen and a few even belonged to Jutta.

  And the Ilmyens were kind. Once, when I fell against their fence, I cut my hand. Mrs. Ilmyen, who worked part-time at the clinic, rushed outside with gauze and a bandage. She had my hand cleaned and wrapped before I had a chance to have a proper cry. Likewis
e, after those rare moments of depression when Father got so drunk he couldn’t stand, it was Mr. Ilmyen who rolled him up in flour sacks and carted him all the way from the river to our house. “Mr. Ilmyen is a very fine person,” Father would say on these nights, as he wrapped his arms around his sides and swayed like a dizzy pendulum. “Even if he does speak Russian.” But in the morning, when his head hurt him terribly, the ache was not associated with the drink but with the way Mr. Ilmyen had dumped him onto our kitchen floor. He would foster a low-grade dislike of Mr. Ilmyen, which Rudy told me had far more to do with the fact that the minute the Soviets packed up Mr. Ilmyen had laid claim to one of the better fishing spots on the river and Father had not quite adjusted himself to that harsh reality.

  I thought that being Jewish was some sort of vocation and that with the right paperwork and attention to detail anybody could become one. Jewishness was like a job or a calling—the most important one, because Jews were God’s chosen people. I knew this because I read the Old Testament and everywhere in those books it seemed God looked out for the Hebrews, hurling thunderbolts and even afflicting the heathens with hemorrhoids. I wanted that kind of attention from a God who parted waters so that his chosen could walk on dry ground. If I had to wander through a desert as the Hebrews of old did, I wanted what they had: unmistakable guidance in the form of pillars of clouds by day and fire by night. But I knew being Jewish wasn’t going to be all fun and games. Jews were special—so special they had to suffer for it. And the more they suffered, the more special they became. How exhausting! How dramatic!

  I demanded that Jutta teach me how to be a Jew, and she did try. To start, one rainy afternoon she pulled from her father’s bookcase a Hebrew prayer book. Within four seconds, I realized my folly. Not only did the letters swim all over the page like birds trapped in strange cages, but Jutta insisted that I read the letters backward from right to left. If that wasn’t confusing enough, each letter, according to Jutta, carried special symbolic meaning, and certain arrangements of the letters were more symbolic than others, and some people, she said, spent their lives looking for the right arrangements. “What are they trying to arrange?” I asked, and Jutta blinked as if I had just asked the unthinkable. “The true name of God,” she breathed reverentially.

  Mother unwittingly reinforced my admiration of the Ilmyens and my desire to be more like them. Each night after Rudy and I climbed into bed, instead of saying prayers or kissing us as other mothers did, she bent over us and breathed: “Rudy, Inara: be geniuses.” Mother said this each night because each morning she had to get up at five thirty to ride the bus to Daugavpils where she cleaned houses for a few elderly men who had more money and more things than we did; she assumed they obtained these items through their intelligence. The smartest people in our town were the Ilmyens, and so I decided that my clearest path toward brilliance, and thus Mother’s affection and approval, would be to study Jutta and learn how to think like a genius. If I became more Jewish in my heart, if I could suffer somehow for my pains, and thus become slightly more special to God, that would be an added plus. To this end, on the nights before big exams, I studied with Jutta. We conjugated all the regular and irregular German verbs or recited Mr. Gepkars’s history lessons. The stones, children! Then our talk turned to hopelessly tragic things such as the possibility of romance in a small town for a girl like me—a girl with bad skin, big hips, and eyes set a little too close together. “Oh, don’t worry so much, Inara,” Jutta would say. “Just put a little lipstick on and always remember: boys like boobs. When you walk, lead with your chest.” And then we’d practice walking up and down their narrow wooden hallway, our chests thrust out. We wore Jutta’s dress shoes, which weren’t exactly high heels, but they weren’t flats, either. All the while Mrs. Ilmyen made comments in Russian from the kitchen: “Imagine you are swans gliding on water. Glide, girls, glide.”

  This I loved: practical bits of advice from a bona fide genius. Jutta was the sister I had always wanted, a confidant who understood me, accepted me, and offered minimal corrections when I said or did something stupid, which I suspected was far more often than I even imagined.

  While you were scrubbing markers at the far edge of the cemetery, Mrs. Zetsche—Mildi—came to see me. She had to cross the yard and let herself into the shed, and I could tell this bothered her. She is one for formalities and protocols. I believe this had to do with her involvement with equestrian society. Why did she come? We are not family, and we belong to a different social milieu. Before you were born, I cleaned for her, and because of this, I think she felt obligated to pay her respects. She is a fragile soul and, I do believe, a tormented one as well. She is seeking absolution. “Have I done the right thing?” she asked. Such a lifetime of hurt and woe in those words. The truth is, the Zetsches are at the center of the knot that is our town and our family.

  You well know a knot is a snarl, a tangle. You cannot pull one end without troubling the other. But I said to her, Yes, it is enough.

  I have always felt a little sorry for Mrs. Z. Your grandparents’ feelings toward the Zetsches were more complicated. They were of good pedigree, Mother said, well-papered. Also Mrs. Z. had married a German. This distinction automatically elevated her status with Mother and Father as they have always held in high esteem all things German. Your grandfather longed for, and though it is a sin, even coveted, German-made autos. Your grandmother yearned for a Bavarian clock. She wanted those long chains bobbed with pinecones, the dark wooden birdhouse from which bright yellow chirping flew out on the hour. Germans, your grandparents believed, possessed sound, practical minds, and therefore, your grandparents felt they could understand them better than they could Russians. Germans had helped a great many displaced Latvians after the war and that was no small thing. So, when Mrs. A. at the post office told us that the Zetsches were making inquiries about properties for sale, Mother visibly brightened.

  The Zetsches arrived in a BMW for their first visit, a Mercedes for their second, an Audi for their third. They made quite an impression with these fine cars polished to a glassine shine that cut through 1993’s winter of torrential rains. As they skirted the larger potholes, in the glossy side panels we spied our faces reflecting a mixture of awe and envy. Where were they going? To view the many properties put up for sale. Latvians were leaving the smaller towns in droves to find their fortunes in Riga or even Sweden or Ireland. Velta and Ferdinands’s old manor home was located upriver. Would the Zetsches build too close to our ancestral property? What kind of neighbors might they be? All we knew of Mr. Zetsche was the sound of his tinny voice through the black telephone. And as much as Mother admired German things, I think she was a little afraid of the Zetsches. That is until we saw them get out of their car outside the post office.

  Short. Impossibly short. We’d never seen such short people. Everything about them was in perfect proportion but presented in the miniature. I believe Mrs. Zetsche wore a child’s shoe size, and Mr. Zetsche could not have topped 120 centimeters, and this in custom-made leather loafers with tall heels. They sped from one property to another, and from the town gossip, it became clear that the earlier rumors were true: they were buying up property left and right, and had plans to occupy a manor within the month. That property has something to do with why Mildi came to see me. She has a sheaf of papers that I’d like you to have. They are important. Perhaps you’ll consider burying them, which is what our family has always done with anything truly valuable or precious. “Have I done the right thing?” she asked. What I heard was Is it enough? I looked at her sad eyes and said, “Yes. It is enough.”

  You never knew the manor as I did. I never knew it as my own mother did. I could not know it as Velta had. Every town, village, and hamlet has at least one of these ancient stone-and-thatch houses from the old days, sitting lonely, boarded up, closed off. Hidden by oaks and spooling bracken, they possess the irresistible allure of ruin and decay, spur myth and speculation. Such was the way with ours. North of the river, surrounded
on all sides by a dense wood of alder, pine, and birch, it seemed like an animal denning deep among reeds and twigs and river mud, reluctant to come out into the light.

  “Don’t go into those woods,” Mother often warned us. “Strange howls and whispers stretch across the water,” she’d say, her eyes wide and her voice low. “The Ghost Girl rises up from the river. And that means somebody will soon drown. Water always wants to take a life.” When I heard this, shivers rippled up and down my spine. But it only made your uncle Rudy more determined to explore where he shouldn’t.

  It was your uncle Rudy’s conviction that the old manor was built of wood and held together by stubbornness, communal memory, and a little plaster. Not a single brick had been used in its construction, but the plaster had been coated so many times with rust-colored paint that, despite years of bitter winds and driving rain, it still bristled a bright iron-oxide color. On those covert missions, I was not the twelve- or thirteen-year-old Inara with bad skin and stringy hair that wasn’t quite blond and wasn’t quite brown. I was one of the legendary White Tights, a Baltic female counteroperative, a femme fatale forest partisan engaging the Soviets in necessary resistance.

  Skulking beside me, your uncle Rudy always carried his slingshot and, strapped to his back, a bazooka-size beet launcher, one of Uncle Maris’s inventions. Whatever we intended, whatever we thought we’d discover, we were always disappointed: covered in thirty years’ worth of grime, the first-floor windows afforded a limited view of empty rooms and what looked to be only a few sticks of furniture and a spinning wheel draped in sheets. An oven stretched from floor to ceiling, the brown glazed tiles darkened by time and disuse. I imagined oil lamps lit at twilight, a fire casting a warm glow, shadows flickering on the walls, the reedy moan of an oboe spilling through open doorways to the dark ponds. Paintings of women making hay, an attic full of steamer trunks and rattling ghosts. Beautifully irrelevant things.