The Hidden Letters of Velta B.

by Gina Ochsner

  That night, dinner was a grand affair. Mother cooked an eel in its own oil along with penny bun mushrooms and leeks. For once we did not eat cabbage. And though Mother had been the president of the Ladies Temperance League for four weeks now, she graciously turned a blind eye when Uncle Maris lined up the shot glasses and broke out a bottle of bison-grass vodka. We toasted the eel—several times. And with each toast, the eel became more magnificent. At last, when the eel was eaten, Father, ignoring Mother’s frowns, brought out his bathtub vodka. Father had been raised a Baptist, and on principle, Baptists in Latvia did not drink. As Father explained to Rudy and me, drinking wasn’t a sin, but drunkenness was. When he was depressed or when his brother Maris visited us, Father zealously set out to explore the boundary between those two states.

  Father pounded his glass, the signal for a toast, and Uncle Maris raised the bottle. “A story, I’ll tell you a story.” This we loved, Uncle’s verbal arabesques, intricate constructions of lurid detail, supposition, and imagination all delivered with such bombastic gusto that should we doubt the substance of the story we still could be carried along by the power of its delivery.

  “Long ago, there was a secret congress of crows. At that time, crows were as big and strong as cows. With three powerful strokes of their shiny black wings, they could fly from one end of the world to the other. They liked to meet in tall forests and tell stories. But they were proud, and for this, God had to punish them. He scattered them throughout the forests of the world and clipped their wings so that they couldn’t fly properly and had to hop from tree to tree. To make matters worse, God created man and allowed him to multiply. But man couldn’t fly, no, he couldn’t even hop from tree to tree, so the crow decided to haunt man wherever he went by laughing at his clumsy ways, mocking him with cries and calls.”

  I nodded my head. I knew that this was why Mother, who had no time for religion, still hung fish bones in the shape of a cross over our back door. For a crow, she’d explained, hates God in its heart, and the cross or a rifle is the only thing that puts fear into them.

  Uncle Maris drained his shot glass and leaned forward. “But Latvian crows are the meanest. They are not allowed to caw in Latvian—only in Russian—and this makes them screech all the more in rage.”

  “A good story,” Father pronounced.

  “A true story,” Uncle Maris corrected, producing a wad of paper from his pocket. “Language is life, you know.”

  “What’s that?” Mother sniffed.

  “This, my dear woman, is a letter of support—a petition calling for a referendum for a new and improved draft of the language law. The minister of education and everyone in the parliament need to hear how thoroughly we Latvians love our language, how completely we want to preserve and protect it. After all, an unspoken language is a dead language.” Here Uncle Maris looked at Father. “We will be like dead people.” And now Uncle Maris turned his gaze to Mother. “Just think of Inara and Rudy.”

  “Tell me.” Uncle turned to Rudy and me. “What do you know of history? Recite!” Rudy looked at me and I looked at him. I cleared my throat and launched into Mr. Gepkars’s spiel that started with stones and stopped with the Swedes. “The stones, children. The stones,” I cried in the most Pushkinesque and melodramatic Russian I could. “They are so ancient, so sturdy. They record a vertical history of Latvia, and this is why any discussion of Latvia begins with our stones. Let us not forget the stability provided by the Baltic Shield, that Precambrian—”

  “No.” Uncle wiggled a finger in his ear. “That’s nice, but it’s not history.” Uncle nodded at Rudy. “Your turn.”

  Rudy stood up slowly, slowly. Mr. Gepkars had a hump on his back. He’d plod to the blackboard so slowly that if he’d been paid by the hour he would have been a millionaire. And this Rudy imitated, circling the kitchen table as he delivered a weary recitation of how deep, how wide, the changes in our country were as a result of Sovietization, the glorious achievements of that age. From time to time, Mr. Gepkars’s canting tipped from bored indifference to befuddlement, as if in the retelling of this old rhetoric something like actual meaning threatened to rise to the surface. This, too, Rudy managed to convey, all the while bearing that imaginary stone upon his back. It was a flawless impersonation.

  I giggled.

  Mother turned her sharp eye on me. “You should see Inara’s marks in Latvian language class. This last round she nearly failed. And we speak Latvian!”

  “But it’s not her fault when Latvian is the language of instruction only 50 percent of the time in these eastern classrooms. Why are we still catering to the Russians? This is Latvia!” Uncle Maris pounded his crutch on the floor. “If people wish to speak Russian, fine—but they should do it in Russia.” Uncle Maris picked up the letter and waved it overhead. “And if a new referendum hurries them on their way, so much the better.”

  Father pinched the bridge of his nose.

  “Times are changing,” Uncle Maris continued. “And people either have to change with them or move on.”

  Mother bit her lip, thinking. I suppose she was remembering her days as a girl at school. She told me how the teacher strode up and down the narrow aisles, asking questions, tapping students on the shoulder for the answers. When the tap came on Mother’s shoulder, she was so nervous that she answered in Latvian. The teacher took a strap to her forearms—that’s how children in those days were encouraged to remember Russian at the exclusion of all other languages. When we asked her about the scars, she laughed them off, commenting on how they have blended in nicely with so many others and claiming she doesn’t harbor a grudge. But I know you understand how a person can carry a thing like that inside, how an injustice large or small swells in time.

  So what Uncle was proposing now seemed natural and right: it was time our language replace that foreign one that had been crowded down our throats. And I could tell by the shine in Rudy’s eyes that he was memorizing Maris’s every word and gesture. I could see that he believed, as Uncle did, that ethnic and political intricacies could be tied as neatly as a pair of shoelaces, and in this way, the problems of our lives could be tidily solved.

  Uncle Maris stayed on with us for a week, and then a week became two weeks. He slept on the couch, with his suitcases containing his many bottles of vitamins stacked beside him. Each morning, he got up just as Mother left for work. He dressed in the dark, carefully pinning to his lapel a red plastic carnation that was a call, he said, for unity and a reminder of how much blood had already been spilled for the cause. Then with his suitcases full of smart-looking vitamin bottles clutched against the crutch grip, he walked to the bus stand. He didn’t return until late at night, long after Father had locked up the cemetery. It was his strategy, he explained to Rudy, to sell to the towns farthest away then work his way back toward our town, as if he were pulling the drawstring of a net tight. He was good at it, too, often selling an entire suitcase of vitamins in a single day. And he was tireless. In the evening he stayed up late with Rudy and Father discussing politics, the future of Latvia, or plans for a new invention.

  Whatever one might say of your namesake, he could never be accused of being idle. Uncle Maris liked to improve and modify inventions already patented and trademarked. He claimed to have made a defibrillator, but his attempts to reconstruct it went disastrously awry and for three whole minutes Uncle left us to visit the angels. He came back inspired to do more, he said. Some of his inventions were smashing successes.

  Uncle did a brisk business with his sloth-prevention bracelets. The device fit comfortably snug around ankles or wrists and delivered small “completely safe” electric shocks if a body remained inert for long periods of time. Middle-aged women with unemployed grown children snapped them up even after it became known that some of the completely safe shocks weren’t as safe as Uncle had claimed.

  Uncle also developed an energy elixir he called Vitality, the ingredients of which were so secret that even he couldn’t quite remember what they were. An
yway, I think the real reason Uncle came to visit us was because he needed money. Inventing amazing things requires amazing materials, he explained to your grandfather one evening. Your grandfather could never say no to Maris. The money Uncle used to buy springs and leather and a cobbler’s last. He was fashioning elevated shoes. He’d been commissioned, he said, by that funny little German man.

  “Who?” Father asked.

  “What?” Mother asked.

  “Is there an echo?” Uncle looked at the ceiling.

  Chastised, Mother and Father fell silent.

  “That man,” Uncle continued. “The one who’s buying up a bunch of property. He’s short and he wants tall shoes.”

  You have always loved chess. When you were three, your stepfather fashioned chessmen out of white oak. He planed a board, squared and stained it. You would play for hours. I think you understood that chess is a game of strategy, of ordered movement, logical thought. A quiet game, it soothed you. So much so, you often didn’t need to wear your aviator’s earmuffs. What does the game mean? you once asked your grandfather. Oh, it’s about love, he said, without lifting his gaze from Oskars’s Bible. The king from one side wants to marry the queen from the other, but first he must negotiate with the other king. No, no, your grandmother said. It’s about power and politics. The one kingdom wants to seize everything belonging to the other kingdom. Those squares are parcels of land. That’s why both sides fight until there are no chessmen left.

  It was that same winter of ’93 when both Uncle Maris and the Zetsches came to town that I was trying to learn the game. To me, that board looked like a quilt of white patches of farmland knuckling up through dark patches of water. A secret treasure might be buried beneath any one of the white squares, and certain death lurked in the black ones. I would not move a knight onto a black square and I usually castled my king, hedging him in as soon as I could. You can imagine what a horrible player I was. But my lack of skill worked to my personal advantage. In less than a week, the regional open chess tournament was to be held in the hall and I could spend more time with Jutta.

  Everyone was talking about it—even people who didn’t care for chess—for nothing quite this important had taken place at the hall in a long time. Every afternoon Jutta showed me opening moves: the gambits, the King’s and Queen’s Indian, the Nimzo-Indian, and explained to me again and again the importance of controlling the two key middle squares. Then we practiced closing moves—Greco’s Mate, the Smothered Mate, Blackburne’s Mate, Anastasia’s Mate—until Jutta was satisfied I could hold my own with the other beginners and maybe even a few of the intermediate players. Each afternoon we did this while Mrs. Ilmyen studied Latvian grammar texts on account of the language law. Mrs. Ilmyen already had her nursing credential. She worked both at a clinic in Balvi and the one here in town, but she said she needed to prove her fluency in Latvian if she wanted to get a promotion. If any of this was bothering Jutta, she did not show it—that’s how good at suffering she was, concentrating all her attention on those black-and-white chess pieces. Each piece, she said, was like a letter of the Hebrew alphabet, each combination of moves and pieces spelled different phrases, the words to different outcomes. But the more I looked at the board, the fuzzier it became, squares and pieces swimming before my eyes. One day, just a week before the big tournament when I thought I’d never have a genius moment in my life and that this was my particular suffering, I discovered I’d trapped Jutta quite suddenly in a Smothered Mate. She was so kind as to allow me to believe I had orchestrated this all by myself. “Well, well.” Mr. Ilmyen beamed behind his glasses when he saw the board, and later he patted me on the shoulder as I squeezed past him through their front door.

  One night Uncle sat with your grandfather on the divan, a half-empty bottle wedged in the cushion between them. They were watching a low-budget Russian shock-news program. Filmed from the passenger’s seat of a careening news-station car, the show captured the day’s most cataclysmic or grisly events, most of which were car accidents involving hapless pedestrians knocked clean out of their shoes.

  When the potatoes were done, I laid out the table as Mother called the men to dinner.

  “You’re not getting drunk, are you?” She grinned ferociously at Uncle Maris, but her slate-gray eyes were as hard as flint.

  “Oh, Biruta. Calm down.” Uncle laughed. “Drunks are people, too, you know. Young men get drunk because they don’t know who they are; old men get drunk because they do.” In each hand Uncle held a bottle of vitamins. As he spoke, he shook the bottles, underscoring each word with a percussive rattle.

  “I beat Jutta Ilmyen today in chess,” I whispered to Mother, my clumsy attempt to steer the conversation to safer topics.

  “Oh, Inara!” Mother said, her eyes shiny.

  Uncle Maris tapped his fork on his plate. “So tell me—who are these Ilmyens?”

  “Nobody,” Rudy said.

  “Neighbors,” I said.

  “But not Latvian?”

  “Well . . . ,” Father hedged.

  “So why do you go over there so much?” Uncle Maris asked me.

  I rolled my eyes heavenward and sighed. “They’re God’s chosen people, which is to say they are special, which is to say they are expert in the art of suffering. They are also very smart.”

  “Well, if they’re so special and smart, why do Mr. Ilmyen’s elbows show through his sleeves?” Rudy piped up.

  Uncle Maris smiled widely. “Well, scratch a Russian,” he said. It was an old saying, so old I couldn’t remember how the rest of it went, but the gist was that lurking beneath the thin varnish of any ethnic Russian or Russian speaker could be things far worse than mere Russianness. What things those were I did not know. No person could possibly be Latvian enough for Uncle.

  “They’re not Russian,” I said at last. “They are Jews who speak Russian.”

  “Terrific. Jewish communists—my favorite kind of people,” Uncle Maris said. “Inflicting their troubles and woe on everyone else. And the way they go on about it—as if they were the only ones who suffered.” Uncle Maris looked at his empty trouser leg.

  “Oh, they’re all right,” Mother said. Later, as we washed the dishes, she made a lot of noise with them, washing and rewashing, as if those plates and cups were unruly children who could be subdued only by vigorous dunkings and scrubbings.

  It was early April. Light leaked from the sky a bit longer each day, bringing the birds back to us one by one. I could detect the hard elemental smell of mud thawing. The soil was breathing again, and in early mornings when the vapor hung over the fields, Rudy and I collected worms for midnight eel-fishing expeditions. On the Aiviekste, April is a good month for fishing as the sky never quits weeping, and the eels seem to prefer things that way. We wanted to pickle or smoke as many of them as possible. Uncle Maris loved them, and we hoped that with enough eels on hand, he might regain his old sense of humor that had been evaporating day by day since he arrived.

  Mother was on edge, too: she frowned at Maris more and sniffed in his direction, measuring from his body odors how much he’d drunk that day. We figured that either the number of signatures on his petition wasn’t to his liking or his vitamin sales were low because one day Maris announced that he’d combed the countryside long enough and that it was time to sell his wares in our town. On a Monday, Uncle Maris took Rudy with him—for moral support, he said. They rode the bus to the outlying homes beyond the school, calling at the Latvian houses, which—he told Rudy and Rudy told me—were easy to spot because Latvians build their homes as if they were planning to stay, while Ukrainians, Jews, and Gypsies cobbled their homes together with whatever they could find because they were too cheap to bother with appearances. Uncle Maris wasn’t holding out much hope for big sales in our town full of foreigners (“So tight, they squeak when they fart!”), but for some reason he felt obligated to try anyway, carefully pinning that red plastic carnation to his lapel and checking and double-checking his yellowed petition of signatures.
With Rudy in tow, Uncle Maris stumped along the back roads only to find himself turned away from every household—and this before even having a chance to brandish his well-polished arguments about the citizenship laws. By Friday, the day before the big tournament, he’d worked his way to the far end of our road and decided to pay a visit to the Ilmyens.

  “At least remove that carnation,” Father advised. “It has lost a bit of color and has acquired a strange odor.”

  Uncle Maris simply smiled. He folded the yellow petition and slid it carefully into his breast pocket then crutched himself double-time across the lane.

  We all gathered in our customary places at the open door and watched. As it was Friday evening, the window shades of the Ilmyen home were drawn. Even so, Mr. Ilmyen had the door open before Uncle Maris made it to their front step.

  “Good evening, sir.” Uncle Maris bowed with a flourish. “I’m Inara’s uncle, Maris Kalnins.”

  “I know who you are,” Mr. Ilmyen replied, in flawless Latvian. He pushed his glasses higher onto his nose.

  “Then perhaps you’d be interested in the betterment of your body. Vitamins are essential, you know, to good health.”

  “We don’t buy or sell on the Sabbath,” Mr. Ilmyen said, politely but firmly.

  “Well, then, perhaps you’d be interested in promoting the betterment of Latvian culture.”

  Uncle Maris withdrew and unfolded the yellow petition. “Latvian language—and indeed the Latvian way of life—must be kept sacred by those who claim to be Latvian. In short, my dear fellow, you should sign this petition to attest to your loyalty to the Latvian nation. You are a citizen?”

  “I am a potential citizen,” Mr. Ilmyen replied.

  “But you speak Russian primarily?”

  “Among other things,” Mr. Ilmyen said, adjusting his glasses.

  Uncle Maris drew himself to his full height. “But language, my good fellow, is identity. You might find it interesting to know that in a recent survey 100 percent of respondents polled agreed with me.”