The Hidden Letters of Velta B.

by Gina Ochsner

  We had guessed as much from your many visits to the clinic. One doctor in Balvi showed us X-rays. We saw those large hammers and anvils inside your enormous ears.

  “He’s living in a sound chamber; everything is amplified,” the doctor explained. “And as sound is a form of touch, certain vowels in words, certain tones, will cause a faster vibration and pain him more than other sounds.” The doctor sent us home with those blaze-orange industrial-strength ear protectors that you conveniently left on the bus.

  If the wind blew from the east, you could hear the bells pealing in St. Petersburg. You claimed that the monks at Saint Alexander Nevsky Lavra ushered morning in with songs that started bright but stanza by stanza bent to unbearable sadness. That’s when the monks jumped, you said, as jumping was the only way to outstrip sorrow. You wrote this all down, how you could hear the gradations of sound on the chromatic scale, half tones, quarter tones that only the monks have mastered. You’ve assured me that you don’t recall having placed your ear to the mud at the river’s edge to hear the water’s quiet susurration, but you recorded with what patience water reshapes shoal and shore. How patient? One particle of sand, one bit of stone at a time.

  You have suffered on account of your ears. I am sorry your date walked out on you. That’s a city girl for you. I will say that your choice of online dating services—Desperate.com—doesn’t inspire confidence. At any rate, you did not ask for your ears and I fear they have been a burden, your affliction.

  It may be slim consolation, but I assure you we all suffer in some way or another. When I was young, I was afflicted by a ferocious need to prove, if only to myself, that I was a clever girl. I don’t know what Rudy’s particular affliction was. I think it may have been an overwhelming desire to know love in the physical sense: he had not been popular with the girls at school and this even with a Fu Manchu mustache. What was your grandfather’s particular affliction? His younger brother, Maris. Agony—your grandfather slept it, wept it, ate it, and drank it on account of Uncle. This is a kind of love: to be tormented on behalf of another, to grieve for one whom he thinks may be lost. I don’t know if this is a healthy love, but it is a love all the same.

  We could say the problem was one of personalities. They were utterly different, your grandfather Eriks and uncle Maris. Your grandfather was a man of the earth, a man who felt keenly, especially as he stood knee-deep in an open grave, gravity and the weight of time pushing on the bones. “The world is all stone,” he’d sometimes say, when he’d come home after a long day of digging. I suppose this is why over the years he had become a quiet man. What does one say in the presence of so much weight? And I suppose this is why Uncle Maris was so noisy. Uncle filled your grandfather’s quiet with sound. One man’s steady drive into the earth the other countered with erratic, brilliant flight. Mother was less generous in her assessment of Uncle. She said he was like the hedgehog, a difficult animal to love as it is a proud creature, slow to listen and quick to make a point. Even if Uncle had not made the scene at the hall, Mother’s dissenting vote was almost automatic in nature, as Mother and Father rarely agreed on anything.

  Maybe you recall the time you asked them where you would go when you died. “Into the ground,” Mother said. “Heaven,” Father said. Father believed that the invisible things—truth, time, love, regret, memory—manifested themselves visibly if one knew how to look, really look. Invisible faith takes palpable imagination, but it is apprehended in the smallest of actions. A man stopping to help another to lift a load—that was love. Knees hitting the floor in a prayer of thanksgiving or desperation—that was faith. Faith, Mother believed, was a neurological aberration that occurred in the temporal lobe of the brain. And to acknowledge or name an emotion such as love was to commit the crime of trivialization and sentimentality. Wind, the cruel intelligence of crows. The river. That’s what she believed in. The impossibility of fully removing the bright and sure stains of beet juice from linen. She preferred the tangible world of things seen: light, water, salt, stalks of rye, what could be grasped between her hands and understood by the body.

  Seeing as how I have little time left, Stanka came by again while you were working. She is in fits and torments. Her roadside business, Fortunes While You Wait, is being taxed. Her solution: send a curse through the post in the form of a long strip of flypaper covered in coarse black pepper. It will ensure at least three weeks of colossally bad luck and robust rounds of sneezing for the recipient. She drank all the milk, by the way. I am glad the two of you have always been such good friends. You once asked me when you were small why her skin was so dark—was it because she smokes Bulgarian cigarettes? You might have been six or seven at the time. “No,” I said. “She’s dark because she’s a Gypsy.” This explained her fondness for milk, which she drank, Stanka once told me, so that at least her insides would be white. Even so, she was a cursed woman because she had “gone behind the hedge” and married a gadjo, a non-Gypsy, which is the most disgraceful thing a Gypsy woman can do. This is why the day after she married Mr. Pauls Ivaska, Stanka’s family, who all lived in Sabile, held a funeral for her and burned all of her belongings and all their photos containing her image. That wouldn’t have been so bad, but then a month later Mr. Ivaska went to Riga to play his French horn and forgot to return. Out of sheer loneliness, Stanka then lit the lamp for Uncle Maris.

  I thought Stanka had a sporting chance, as she understood men who wandered, but your grandmother held slimmer odds. About Stanka she’d heard Uncle mutter: “Is she just dirty or permanently tanned?” The sad fact was that Uncle Maris had over his years cultivated a deep suspicion of anything or anybody who’d come from the east, which he said was the source of all our trouble. But we’ve all seen how a very small amount of water can wear down stone. Stanka predicted a streak of winning lottery numbers and Uncle couldn’t resist her charms. Stanka also has thick calves and this is something in a woman Uncle admired. They paid their fee and married at the courthouse and I suppose they were happy, though sometimes it was hard to tell. Uncle sustained two concussions in the first year of marriage. Assault and battery, Uncle called it. Tough love, Stanka called it.

  Anyway, Stanka combed my hair, what is left of it, gently, gently. The comb is sturdy, made of white oak. You needn’t return it. She left it so you would put it in my coffin. When we buried your namesake, she put a mirror in his right hand and a packet of cigarettes in his left one. A mirror is a window into the next world, and the dead hold it up like a compass to better steer by. The cigarettes? There’s nothing worse than the jitters, she said. Even the dead get them. And she told me about Gypsy heaven. The clouds are made of light bread and the houses are made of cheese. No one ever goes hungry, no one cries. The little orange foxes, the chanterelles that smell so much like apricots, fruit endlessly. No one wears white in heaven because white is the color of mourning. The songs are like wheels well soldered, well fit. They turn smoothly and without effort, and this is how it is that in Gypsy heaven the singing never ends.

  Why am I telling you in such detail about what might seem like irrelevant conversations that happened before you were born? The short answer: it’s a way to keep our loved ones alive, if only in our embroidered fictions. And why am I narrating the stories of people you knew well and even about events you witnessed? A story is a garment made of many threads, sewn by many needles. Our story is a cloak thicker and more knotted than we suppose. Like a tapestry, I said the other day. You said, No, it’s more like lace. We hold lace up and marvel at the beauty of the light shining through it. But that beauty is only possible because of the knots anchoring the empty space. Our story is like that, you said, made as much of silence and emptiness as it is of the knots, those anchors of known fact, people. Who are the knots holding us in place? I could say that it was the Zetsches who ordered shape out of our emptiness. Or I could say it was Uncle.

  For three years after that fateful chess tournament, we didn’t hear much from him. A tattered and road-weary postcard from T
ajikistan. (The watermelons! Wow!) A cable from Murmansk. (Cold, cold.) Once in a blue moon Uncle Maris called and the black phone swelled with his elaborate, overwrought, and altogether pitiful explanations for his behavior that we could only consider as obligatory fictions. For all his charm and brains, Mother explained to me once, our uncle Maris was the kind of man who could never perceive his own bodily stink, only the stink of others. And so she hung up on him whenever he called.

  During that time, both Rudy and I graduated from gymnasium by the skin of our teeth. Mother’s deepest fears were confirmed: she had not raised geniuses. That next autumn, several of my classmates, Jutta among them, rode the bus each morning to university. There she would pursue a brilliant life, I was sure, just as I was sure that my life was headed for all things dull and dreary. Had the Soviet Union not fallen, it is possible that Rudy and I would have gone to university. Higher education in those times was free, or nearly free. But after the fall, people like us who earned low marks did not go to university. People like us learned trades or worked in factories—if we were lucky. But as we were not lucky, we made ourselves as useful as possible in the cemetery. And then one evening the black phone on the wall bellowed: eeeeeee-oooooooh!

  It was Uncle. On principle, Mother hung up on him. He promptly rang back and this time Father answered. He’d called to tell us that Rudy would go to university in Daugavpils. Maris had made all the arrangements. “It’s the least I can do.” His voice boomed through the black receiver. The next morning Rudy rode the bus to Daugavpils and that left me with Mother and Father. Mother applied herself to her newspaper. The frenzied activity in the real estate market she likened to piranhas let loose in a tank of meat. This newly liberated Latvia meant that Latvians, if they could produce the correct paperwork, could reclaim family properties that had been seized during the occupations. Curiously, a spate of fires ravaged the filing cabinets of many regional courthouses. In the absence of essential records, extremely well-forged titles and deeds sprouted up like mushrooms after a fine August rain. I suppose this was why Mr. Ilmyen, who clerked in a legal office in Daugavpils, always looked so tired in the evening. It was all very suspicious and all meticulously reported in Mother’s temperance newspaper.

  Father thought Mother’s interest in the property deeds and sales transactions unhealthy. “At least we still own the manor—and we can prove it,” she’d mutter, her fingers stiff and aching, her eyes bleary. And I think Father felt obligated to offer a mild corrective. “Nobody really owns the land,” he’d say, a gentle acknowledgment that our family had not been able to come up with the back taxes for the manor; it both did and did not belong to us. We are caretakers, he’d remind us, stewards, and all that we see God has temporarily placed into our hands. There was no mistaking the emphasis he placed on that word temporarily. “If we steward well, that is to say, if we trod gently over this land, then there will be no sign of us afterward. Except, of course, a gravestone or something like that,” he hastened to add.

  At this time, stewardship was heavy on our minds. Even Mother, a thrifty woman who knew how to stretch a single chicken through an entire month, remarked more than once that winter had sharp teeth. A sack of our potatoes had gone bad in our cellar, and what luck we’d had with the mushrooming had run out. Though Mother took an extra cleaning job in Rezekne, spending even longer hours on her hands and knees, and Father dug fresh holes like a madman to accommodate another rash of suicides, we still felt the pinch. Though a series of new hypermarkets opened in Riga and we’d heard rumors of sudden wealth in big cities, such news felt like distant sparking fire: we might see the light but we did not feel its heat. I understood that it was my job to catch as many perch, pike, and trout as I could and preserve them any way I knew how.

  I was eighteen. Not an expert angler but not the worst, either. I fished in midafternoon as the light thinned and cold crimped the horizon. By four, four thirty at the latest, full darkness and frost fell. Under this cover of cold, I shamelessly trolled the spots I knew belonged to Mr. A., Stanka, Mr. Lee, and Mr. Lim. I measured the hours by the number of bites on the line, and by my count, I did pretty well, often hooking pike, a greedy fish easily fooled by the flimsiest of bait.

  Toward the end of March and into April, the light in the afternoons returned, weak and pale. Rain and more rain. Torrential rains, falling in biblical proportions, and the river rose steadily, covering the rocky shoals, reshaping glides, and flooding the marshy banks. Perfect fishing conditions to land an eel. But try as I might, I couldn’t hook a single one. I decided to become more eel-like: sluggish and dull by day, quick and clever by night. I holed up in my room, Velta’s letters spread around me. I felt only a little guilty about my theft. My attention to and my love for these letters exonerated me. After all, we forgive, even applaud, archaeologists for their discovery of fragile artifacts, provided those discoveries find their way home. And as this was a family affair, I told myself I was doing no real harm.

  Water is life. In mud, a drier form of water, lives every dark dream, good and bad. The Black Snake lives in this mud. And so does Ghost Girl. She swims close to the riverbank. Mud flows through her veins. With her eyes flashing as blue as flaming sulfur, she looks for children as only children can see her. And being a child, she longs to play. She calls to children to come and swim with her, to come and see her watery world, to slide among the eels and the slippery rocks. She knows every child by name, and when she calls your name, she does so with a voice as strong and persuasive as a dream.

  If Mother noticed my furtive habits, she did not let on. More pressing concerns held her attention. In April, Widow Sosnovskis ran out of her antidepressants, went to the little Elvi Market, bought out the entire stock of hair dye, all three bottles, and colored her hair lavender. Three of Mr. Arijisnikov’s goats went barking mad. The Zetsches had purchased more riverside property. Her fingers plunging over the stiff typewriter keys, Mother turned these strange stories into clacking syncopation, a matter of public record the rest of us could read. In addition, the low swollen skies had driven the men to drink and attendance at Mother’s Temperance League to swell. Mother couldn’t help feeling that all of her efforts were paying off at last: the women in town were finally taking the matter of drinking, and to some extent her newspaper, seriously. But her sense of satisfaction was short-lived as that spring Father more regularly climbed the cork. I should remind you that, for the most part, your grandfather Eriks maintained a sober outlook. But sometimes the rain got on his nerves, particularly when it threatened the cemetery. That spring huge swaths of topsoil—some mere meters from the most famous horse in Latvia—washed into the river. This horse, decorated twice for acts of valor during the Great War, in which it had served under Janis Kalnins (no relation to us), was something of a town mascot. It had been embalmed and for several years had been kept on display in a special mausoleum. At some point, the preservative fluids failed and Father built a supersize coffin. He then dug a supersize grave with a nice view of the river, as befits a war hero. But given the rising water table, he was now doubting his wisdom.

  Adding to his worries was the driving rain that scoured the gold paint from the stones belonging to two of the best chess players in town: Mr. Spassky—very distantly related to the great Russian chess master—and Mr. Sosnovskis. Before they died, both men requested that Father include a complete record of their wins and losses on their stones, and Father happily complied, painting 273-1-17 on Spassky’s stone and 273-1-17 on Sosnovskis’s stone. This would have been of no account if not for the fact that Spassky and Sosnovskis hated each other so completely that their hatred infected their widows, who seemed, on principle, determined to carry on the sentiments of their husbands. Made of knitting needles and thistles, the widows Spassky and Sosnovskis spent most of their time lancing and barbing each other. They only stopped every now and then to needle Father, accusing him of laziness or fecklessness. With the patience of a saint, Father bore their withering scowls and assured them t
hat he was doing his best to give their husbands’ gravestones the care befitting chess geniuses. I knew that he was: in those rare breaks between showers, he sunk to his knees in front of those stones and blasted hot air from a battery-operated hair dryer—the last of Uncle’s inventions.

  In those days, if I wasn’t fishing, then I was I tucked in the shed poring over Velta’s letters. To my surprise, she wrote, obsessively so, of old myths. Wolves. Water. Girls turned into crows. Of their own volition, these girls flew home to their mothers, their black feathers as shiny as an oil slick and their beaks pointy. With their beaks as sharp as awls, they punctured the sky and let the darkness and wind tumble in. Why, girl, their mothers would ask, why would you do this? And down to the girl they cackled and said, We’ve been to see the Devil and the darkness is his cloak and the wind is his meat. We will never be cold or hungry again. We will want for nothing.

  Sometimes I found a fragment of a letter from my grandfather Ferdinands.

  We work fourteen hours in the cold. Frozen soot hovers in the air like a shroud. Mining crushes a man in body and spirit. Three men crossed the white line, the warning mark. They crossed the low stone wall, and the sirens wailed. They crossed the red line, and the guards let the dogs loose. The men flung themselves into the barbed wire. “Go on!” they shouted. “Shoot us. We’re begging you.”