The Hidden Letters of Velta B.

by Gina Ochsner

  Mr. Ilmyen squinted at Uncle. “How many respondents exactly?”

  “Four.”

  Now Mr. Ilmyen’s gaze lifted over the top of Uncle’s head and settled on where we stood, shrinking in our doorway. “Good night, sir,” Mr. Ilmyen said quietly, shutting the door.

  Uncle Maris whirled on his crutches. We all jumped from the threshold and became inordinately busy scrubbing dishes or pretending to study. Later that night, no amount of industry or imagination could block the sounds of Uncle Maris swearing at the TV. And his talk was so raw, so open, it was like gazing upon someone in their nakedness. And though I couldn’t make out everything he said, the sentiment behind those words, what I recognized as hatred, was like dark water drawn from a deep cold well.

  The night of the big match a lashing rain battered the town. Rain was all about us, routing deep grooves into the roof. We were all jumpy but for different reasons. Mother fussed and fumed in the kitchen preparing a tray of pirags and pickled mushrooms—her very best sooty caps—for the big chess tournament. She was in a hurry to set out the crates that doubled as small chess tables and move the piano to the middle of the platform, which was necessary to maintain the fragile equilibrium between two fractious groups of Baptists. They had, at one point in time, been a unified band of worshippers, but an argument arose over the correct placement of Velta’s piano: the left side of the platform or the right? No amount of reasoning, exhortation, or recitation of scripture from leaders representing either side could breach the schism. Now each group so thoroughly believed the other to be in heresy, they refused to speak to one another. This behavior was not so odd. A lot of people in our town were not on speaking terms. The Arijisnikov and Aliyev families, Uzbeks, would not acknowledge the Lee or Lim families, Koreans, who, like the Uzbeks, had come from Tashkent. Or maybe it was Bukhara. The Egers family, all nineteen of them, maintained a robust hatred for Gypsies on account of a horse that had been stolen from a distant relative sometime in the 1800s. This kind of hatred had a special name: principa pec, on principle, and it meant that if you felt you had been offended or aggrieved you had a right to your grudge for as long as you liked.

  After his standoff with Mr. Ilmyen, Uncle Maris hadn’t moved from the couch where he drank steadily and watched the TV with Father. Father, visibly nostalgic for spectacular and frequent deaths, kept looking at the phone. “Nobody’s died in weeks,” he lamented. “I’m a wreck.” But as soon as Mother let herself out the back door, Father grabbed a bucket and flashlight, and went into the yard. Rudy followed him, wasting no time in churning up Mother’s cabbage rows for worms. At the hall, Mother stationed herself in the foyer behind a long table of pastries and the contribution dish for the Ladies Temperance League. Nearly everyone in town had turned out for the tournament: our teachers from school, all the neighbors, and the fathers and mothers of all the student chess players. In spite of Jutta’s fine coaching, I was still in the beginner group. And so I threaded through the crush to the front of the hall where the other beginners—six- and seven-year-olds mostly—fidgeted behind the cloth-covered crates with the chessboards.

  I didn’t last long. One of the Russian girls in the class ahead of me got me flustered with an Alekhine’s Defense and finished me off quickly. The winners then paired with the intermediates, and thirty minutes later, the victors of that round—one of whom was Jutta—battled it out for a turn with the local master: Mr. Ilmyen. By the time Jutta beat her opponent—Mr. Gipsis, the fourth-grade teacher—everyone had finished eating and were settled in the chairs, packed like herrings in a barrel.

  Mr. Ilmyen shuffled up the steps and took his seat behind the table. Jutta followed Mr. Ilmyen and took the opposite seat. Mr. Ilmyen nodded to Mrs. Ilmyen standing in the back, and the overhead projector hummed and threw the image of a gigantic chessboard against the back wall. With each move Mr. Ilmyen and Jutta made, Mrs. Ilmyen moved disks over the glass so we could watch on the wall.

  “Ooh!” the crowd murmured when Jutta moved her Queen’s knight deep into her father’s rank of pawns.

  “Aaah!” came the sage reply when Mr. Ilmyen moved his King’s pawn forward. For twenty minutes this went on. And just when it looked like Jutta would pin her father in an Anastasia’s Mate, Mr. Ilmyen blocked with a rook. They were at a momentary impasse: any move either one of them might make would result in the sacrifice of an essential piece. The audience held its collective breath in appreciation of this most delicate position.

  And then from the foyer came Mother’s voice, high and shrill: “For god’s sake, go home, you drunken moron!” In burst Uncle Maris, his face beet-root red, his breath ragged, and the plastic carnation heaving up and down as if it had a heart of its own. In his hand he held the yellow petition, which he raised above his head.

  “You don’t belong here, you know,” Uncle Maris shouted at Mr. Ilmyen. A collective gasp rose from the crowd; it’s one thing to think such things, quite another to shout it in public in front of God and everybody.

  “My dear fellow.” Mr. Ilmyen picked up a pawn and held it suspended in air. “This is our home. Where else should we go?”

  “Who the hell cares? You are the expert in suffering. Why don’t you just go and die. That’s what you Jews do best!” Uncle Maris raised his crutch as if it were a javelin, and then he hurled it. The crutch flew through the air and landed—impossibly—with a resounding twang in the strings of the open piano. For three horrifying seconds, the room was absolutely silent as we sat frozen in stunned mortification, contemplating the disaster: the piano, the crutch, those words, Uncle Maris, and Mr. Ilmyen.

  At last Mr. Ilmyen stood, brushed the front of his trousers. “And now, ladies and gentlemen, I bid you goodnight,” he said in Latvian. It was so sad and sweet—something people said only in the movies, and then only when they were going away for a very long time. Mr. Ilmyen put his hand on Jutta’s shoulder, and they crossed the stage to where Mrs. Ilmyen held open the small side door. The spell broken, Uncle Maris, minus one crutch, stumped to the foyer and out the front door.

  Everyone spluttered and brayed all at once: “He must be crazy!”

  “Even so, he has a good point.”

  “Such an arm!”

  “Horrible aim!”

  I slipped out the back, determined to find Mr. Ilmyen or Jutta. But only Uncle Maris was there.

  “Help me a minute,” Uncle Maris said, leaning his weight into me.

  More clouds had rolled in from the east and the sky cracked in two. As we started walking, light shot out in arcs and rain pounded the road.

  “You probably think I’m a terrible man for saying those things,” Uncle Maris said.

  I shook my head, but I wasn’t really sure. My eyes were filled with water, and now the rain fell with such force that my skirt stuck to my legs and the road dissolved beneath our feet into narrow violent streams of muddied water. With each step, my shoes filled with mud and I just wanted to get home. But Uncle Maris’s crutch sank deeper into the mud of the road and it seemed like we would never make it.

  “You’re ashamed of me. You wish I never came here,” he continued.

  “No,” I lied, bearing up under his weight. I could see our house in the distance and I tried to pick up the pace.

  “You want to know how I lost my leg?”

  “Not really,” I said.

  “I threw myself over a mine,” Uncle Maris continued, undeterred. “I saved the man standing beside me, a Russian, incidentally. Now tell me I’m a terrible man.”

  “You’re not terrible,” I said, in a voice that I did not recognize as belonging to me.

  Uncle Maris leaned close. “I always liked you. Rudy, he’s okay, but you’re the smart one. Anyone can see you understand the way things are.” Uncle Maris lurched, and for a horrifying second, I thought he would kiss me. And then he righted himself with the crutch, doubled over, and retched a colossal amount of vomit onto my shoes. “I beg your pardon most sincerely,” he said, wiping his mouth with hi
s sleeve.

  I shrugged out of his grip and left him at the edge of our yard, where he retched behind Mother’s rosebush. The light was on in the kitchen, and as I came in through the back door, Father and Rudy were at the sink. They’d caught a long dark silver eel, a fully mature adult who’d been reckless, who’d made the mistake of biting our lowly lobworms soaked in pilchard oil. Rudy held the eel on its back. Then with a small kitchen knife, he cut out its angry eyes.

  “Where did you catch that?” I asked, astonished at its size.

  Rudy grinned. “Where do you think?”

  I realized they had fished from Mr. Ilmyen’s spot while he had been at the hall playing chess. Mother came through the back door then, and in the open frame of sky and darkness, I saw Uncle Maris, still in the yard. His mouth was moving and the sounds kept issuing forth, a burbling colorless stream of rage.

  “He goes. Tomorrow,” Mother said. Father tried hard to hide his embarrassment by scrutinizing the eyeless eel. Then Mother turned, looked at my feet, and sniffed mightily. “Get your other shoes and coat on. We’re going to the Ilmyens’.”

  When we reached their house, Mother stood on the step and wrung her hands. We could hear dogs howling in the hills, barking through the dark with their low, dull voices. Finally, she knocked on the door and a few seconds later Mr. Ilmyen appeared. Mother touched the white temperance pin on her coat. “Mr. Ilmyen, you must forgive my brother-in-law. He’s an idiot, and besides, he drinks too much. And when he drinks, he talks, and when he talks, unfortunately he says stupid things.”

  Mr. Ilmyen stared at us and then his gaze lifted to a point above our head. And then Mrs. Ilmyen’s voice floated out from somewhere deep in the kitchen: “Go away. Please.” So simple a request, so complete. And in her voice I heard the weariness of generations of suffering and abuse at the hands of friends and neighbors. We turned and trudged back to our kitchen, the whole way my heart sitting heavy in my chest, the blood in it tired and unmoving. I would not pretend that I understood the vast and irreparable damage that had occurred in the course of one short evening. But I had lost Jutta, my only real friend. That much I understood. I thought at last I was feeling some of that suffering Jutta had tried so hard to teach me about. And then I realized what an idiot I was—to lay claim to any fraction of suffering when our family had so publicly reminded them of theirs.

  Later, Mother sat on the edge of my bed, the springs creaking under her weight. I did not want to be a genius and did not want her wishing me to be one. Though it was dark inside the room, a break in the clouds revealed a slip of moonlight that transformed the window into a box of silver. I could see then that Mother was looking at her hands. “Don’t cry, Inara. Nothing lasts forever,” she said. “Not love, not hate. Not joy or pain.” Mother leaned close, her breath on my hair. She laid her chapped hand on my forehead. And then she kissed me on the cheek. It was the first time she had kissed me in years.

  By the time we woke the next morning, liquid light healed over in the west to a dark welt that meant more rain. Uncle Maris had gone. No one seemed surprised: vanishing is what he did best. Also, he’d taken Mother’s typewriter. According to the typed note he left next to the sink, he felt like a fox caught unawares by winter and forced to eat his own turds. He would return only when we had all come to our senses, and maybe not even then. In a postscript addressed to me, he’d written: If you can’t behave disgracefully, then what’s the point of living? Another note, this one left for your grandmother: I’m feeling a nudge for patriotism. Riga calls. Don’t worry about the typewriter. It’s all for the greater good.

  When your grandmother found that second note, she sat at the table, buried her head in her arms, and wept. She would have continued to do so had the oven timer not sung out. “Oh, shit. The Baptists!” Mother grabbed her coat and I followed her out the back door and down the road. As we approached the Ilmyen home, Mother kept charging ahead, but I let my feet slow a little. The shades were still drawn. Light behind the windows turned the shades to paper lanterns. Dark shapes moved behind the lighted scrim. I thought that if I stood still and stared hard enough I could watch the quiet goings-on inside the Ilmyen household as if I were watching a movie. But the longer I watched, the more my eyes burned and I realized that their world was a book written in another language and therefore closed to me.

  We had forty minutes before the left-side Baptists were due. Inside the hall, the previous evening’s disaster remained untouched: there were chairs overturned on their backs, chessmen scattered over the floor, and plates of half-eaten pastry and plastic cups of stale coffee studded the windowsills. Uncle Maris’s crutch was still wedged in the strings of Grandmother Velta’s piano. Mother dragged a trash bin from the foyer, and I climbed onto the platform. I leaned my shoulder into the piano’s wood and pushed with all my might. And that was my mistake: the piano sailed over the lip of the platform. The resounding crash sent the crows screeching and the dogs barking in the lane. Then complete and absolute silence. Hands on her hips, Mother surveyed the destruction: the collapsed wood, the hammers sheared from the pinblock, strings snapped, the solid soundboard thicker and heavier than any tombstone half sunk in the wooden floor. At last she turned to me, her eyes shiny with unshed tears. “I’ve never cared for stringed instruments if you want to know the truth.”

  Without another word, we left the hall and headed home. As our feet churned the mud, I thought of Uncle Maris and how he’d split in my mind into two separate people, the Uncle Maris of my childhood whom I would always love, and the Uncle Maris whom I never wanted to see again. He had changed these last months, and I realized there was no stopping that or helping him. We each of us had to keep taking our steps where they would lead. It was a scientific principle: momentum, and it meant to me that some things—like love, like hate—once in motion couldn’t be stopped. Even the piano had not been exempt. But that was the way of life, Father liked to say as we stood on our threshold watching the sad funerary processions. Forward life rolled and only death slowed it down. And even that, Father said, was only a temporary hitch. Even now the rain was falling as steadily as ever and the roads were rising and bleeding to the river as they always did this time of year.

  And what of that mangled piano? By bits and pieces: keyboard, pinblock, hammers, and strings, Father gathered it into a wheelbarrow and stored it in his toolshed. The cast-iron plate, the largest and by far the heaviest part of the piano, we carried: Mother and Rudy on one end, Father and I on the other. We picked it up, walked a few paces, set it down, picked it up, walked a few paces, set it down. Though none of us said it, I know we were all thinking how very much like a Jewish procession we looked, how very likely our neighbors were standing behind windows and watching us as we had watched so many others.

  We laid the iron plate and soundboard to rest inside Father’s toolshed, which was where he stored anything that was broken. Set on end and leaning against the far wall of the shed, the iron plate with the strings, which somehow had not broken (“What a miracle!” Mother intoned again and again), looked like a loom. Every sound, every utterance, set the strings buzzing.

  Though Mother claimed she did not care for stringed instruments, she made a phenomenal number of visits to the shed. Father would follow her, assuring her that with the right glue and patience he would have Grandmother Velta’s piano trilling tunes that would make angels weep.

  Chapter Two

  YOU’VE BROUGHT THE PAIN MEDICATION. You’ve brought more ice. And newspapers. Your grandmother would have turned cartwheels to hear this latest: Madame President Vaira Vika-Freibergs opened a recent book-fair address with a daina.

  I was born singing,

  I have lived singing,

  and when I die,

  I will fly to heaven singing.

  Because the president had been raised in Canada and because your uncle Rudy had just had a fight with your grandmother, Rudy, on principle, didn’t vote for Mrs. Vika-Freibergs. But just about every other voter in the
country did. I think her holding a PhD in ethnography and having so many dainas committed to memory went a long way with a lot of people.

  I thank you also for reading to me from the Gospel of Luke. I’ve always liked it for the miracle accounts: Jesus feeding the five thousand, the healing of the demoniac who made his home in graveyards. What did that man eat while he lived among tombstones? Let’s not dwell overlong on that.

  You told me once that Jesus was your favorite superhero. You asked me once, too, if I thought Jesus had big ears. I said yes because He hears our every prayer, but honestly, there is no exact record of what his ears looked like. He definitely liked ears—that much I know. Twenty times, by my count, Jesus said let those who have ears to hear. You remember, of course, his arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane. A crowd had gathered. One of Jesus’s followers, and I believe it was Peter because he was such a hothead—though your grandfather assures me that the scriptures do not support this—withdrew his sword and hacked off an ear belonging to a young servant of the high priest. Jesus wasted no time attaching the severed ear to the side of the boy’s head. A miracle, and on his way to his own crucifixion. I’ve often wondered how this action changed that boy’s life; if the restoration of a small flap of cartilage on the side of his head did something to his heart.

  I thank you, too, for reading from your Book of Wonder.

  There’s no covering that protects the body of any living thing that excels the scales of a fish, you wrote. Both armor and oil jacket, the plated scales are tough enough to resist bruising, resist the radiation of heat, and keep the fish’s skin dry. Having no seams to the body, no seams to the scales, a fish can withstand any amount of water pressure without breach or penetration. This is why a fish can swim at depths no human, no submersible, can reach. Even more amazing, you wrote, is that dark stripe that runs along a fish’s side from gill to tail, the lateral line, which registers low-frequency vibrations. A tactile and aural organ, this line senses movement, and like radar, it indicates to the fish how near or far away other objects are and whether those objects are in motion or stationary. Sound, you concluded, was a form of touch.