The Hidden Letters of Velta B.

by Gina Ochsner

  We’d been working for some time when I noticed that Mother’s singing had stopped. I pulled off the rubber gloves and found her, head thrust inside the open oven, her hands running along the inside panels. Mother withdrew her head, sat on her heels, and examined her hand. “Good Lord!” Her face blanched. “Someone’s scoured the panels of the top oven! They’re as spotless as the day I installed it!” Mother’s shoulders sagged, and I knew that she was taking a quick inventory of her lost culinary calendar. “Well, we’ll just have to come back early tomorrow,” Mother said at last, wiping her hands on her skirt.

  “Why?”

  “To mind the oven, of course!” Mother charged out the kitchen door into the rain. I trudged behind her, listening to the sound of the greasy mud wrestling with our boots and not talking as we passed the Ilmyens’ house, where each windowpane threw squares of light into their yard. Even though Mother and Mrs. Ilmyen still held Temperance League meetings together, I could not imagine that Mrs. Ilmyen would want us anywhere near the hall on the day of such a big event. And this made me unbearably sad; Jutta and I had once been like sisters, allied against the madness of a small town. We’d hidden frogs in the boots of the boys who teased us; I taught her all the dirty Latvian words and jokes Uncle had told Rudy and Rudy had taught me; we glued chessmen to the board belonging to a boy who was a cheat in math and not even a good one. And there was a time when I believed that I could be like her, able to navigate out of this town into a larger, better life. Jutta had tried to help, showing me how to balance chemistry equations, teaching me how to think two and three moves ahead on a chessboard. But where she could perceive endless possibilities within the fixed frame, I could see only how small the squares were, how short the time on the playing clock was. When we all sat for the entrance exams, I knew before the results were posted on the school doors that Jutta would go and I would stay. Her departure signaled a subtle shift; we had become two different kinds of people.

  Once home, Mother went to the kitchen where she found Father touched by drink: a row of beer bottles stood in salute on the wooden table. For a Baptist, Father knew an awful lot about beer. But he was Latvian, and inhabiting and articulating seemingly irreconcilable paradoxes came as naturally to him as breathing or praying or, in this case, drinking. That is, Father was both a Bible and bottle Baptist. And he took both jobs seriously, though when he drank, he did not wear the white gloves that he wore when he read his Bible. At this particular moment, he was aspiring to grand notions. He wanted romance, but not with just a bottle. But Mother had all the excitement she could handle in one day and personally escorted him to the toolshed where she instructed him to sleep it off.

  This, I told myself, was the reason why she had failed to notice—again—my magical eel quietly slumbering in her washtub under the table. As thick as a fifteen-kilogram sack of potatoes and twice as long, marinated or smoked, pickled or baked, he would feed twenty people, maybe more. And then I knew why the river had sent this eel to me in the first place: so that I could give it to Jutta and her family. They would eat the meat and have all of the blessing, all of the wisdom. And if by chance there was a bit left over for us, then all the better. I split the eel down the middle and took out the innards and placed the gutted fish in a stockpot. I poured vinegar into the pot, some of Mother’s special-occasion wine, and crushed coriander and fennel seed. Then I sat at the table in the dark where I cradled my head in my arms and fell almost at once into an unshakable sleep of utter exhaustion.

  And I dreamed. I heard Father singing in the yard: Then the water had overwhelmed us; the stream had gone over our soul. Then the proud waters had gone over our soul. And then another voice, both sweet and strange, strangely familiar—the Ghost Girl. You have always loved this story. The way your uncle Rudy tells it, the Ghost Girl emerges from still water, revealing herself one bit at a time: a slim torso, her breasts, her round shoulders, then her dark wings, as sharp as scythes. Half bird, half woman, her beak is as sharp as an awl. She comes for you in your dreams, and you’ll know she’s visited if you wake in the night and find puddles of water on the floor by your bed.

  In the dream she didn’t come to me; I went to the river, where she swam in the dark water. She was not surprised to see me. Dark hair, pale face, dark eyes, she seemed a darker version of me.

  “Inara.” She waved me toward the roiling water. “Ask me a question; I’ll answer!” I took one step in then another. I could see that she was not me at all but something else entirely. River weeds for hair, skin the color of mud. Her eyes, gaping black holes. She lunged and bit my shoulder. I woke to the sound of dogs barking and a shrill rooster clearing his throat.

  What did that dream mean? you ask me. I have no idea. Maybe the dream was a tiny confirmation that there’s something to your grandmother’s ghost story. Maybe it was the first time I felt fear. I woke with a start, my elbow knocking against the pot with the eel. A quick look inside, a poke with the fork tines. It wept vinegar, just as it should, so I washed the meat, dredged it through flour. The rest of the ingredients for the sauce—shelled walnuts, hard-boiled eggs, raisins, honey, parsley, and mint—I’d take with me and assemble at the hall. I had just turned on the oven, thinking I’d precook the eel, when Mother came into the kitchen, her hair pinned up in preparation for a full day of cooking. She pointed her nose toward the oven and squinted at the murky glass door.

  “You’re not cleaning that oven, are you?”

  “No,” I said. I knew she’d not fully recovered from her previous night’s shock. “I’m cooking something for Jutta.”

  “Oh,” Mother sighed. “Well, whatever it is, cover it and bring it with you. We’ve got to get to the hall before someone makes a mess of that kitchen.”

  The recipe? I’ve never written it down. I’ve never needed to. I can tell you that you must watch over the walnut sauce with care. Too much heat too soon will ruin it beyond remedy. The raisins, by the way, need to sit in sweet white wine overnight.

  Thick fog swelled from the river and held to the lane. We set off into the fog, Mother’s nose twitching. The distinct smell of chicken rolled through the mist. As we approached the lighted hall, we could see the silhouettes of women working in the kitchen. Mother held the door open for me and we stood on the threshold surveying the scene: Mrs. Ilmyen and the twin aunts whom Jutta had once told me about—Reka and Lida—furiously chopping almonds, dicing boiled chicken, and slicing mountains of leeks. Clearly, Mother had severely underestimated the energy of Mrs. Ilmyen and her sisters.

  Mother coughed, and after a long moment, Mrs. Ilmyen looked up. She smiled. “Oh, Mrs. Kalnins! I can’t tell you how much we appreciate your thorough cleaning.”

  Mother grimaced, her gaze taking in the stockpot simmering on the ring. “I thought we’d help out where we could—with the soups, maybe.”

  “Well.” Mrs. Ilmyen straightened a pin in her hair. “That’s generous of you, but you’ve done so much already.”

  “Nonsense! What are good neighbors for? I won’t get in the way,” Mother added, as if reading Mrs. Ilmyen’s thoughts. “I’ll just watch over the oven; it can be tricky.”

  Mrs. Ilmyen glanced at her sisters, who were still chopping but much more quietly now. Then she reset the pin in her hair. With that single gesture, she acknowledged that in all the years she lived across the road from Mother she’d weathered much worse. She’d get through this, too.

  “All right, then,” Mrs. Ilmyen said.

  Mother wiped her hands on the sides of her skirt and affixed a smile of blistering benevolence on her face. I knew that her stubborn insistence regarding the soup wasn’t merely out of spite. Mother sincerely believed that soup making was sacred work because the bad spirits of the air didn’t like it when they smelled onions and beets weeping together in the bowl. They seized you by the bones and tried to make you too tired to finish, which was why Mother sometimes needed to sit on a stool and why sometimes she started a soup and I had to finish it. Had Mother and Mrs.
Ilmyen been closer friends, Mother certainly would have reminded Mrs. Ilmyen of these things. Instead, Mother stationed herself on a stool in front of the oven and set the temperature dial.

  I kept my back to them and my nose lowered over my sauce, walnuts and raisins swelling with spiced wine, and waited for the oven to heat. And I listened carefully for the little morsels women drop while working in kitchens: how many people were coming (sixty, at least); who the big eaters were (the groom’s father, who ate half a salmon at a wedding two towns away); where Semyon, the groom, and Jutta would live (in a small room Mr. Ilmyen planned to attach to their kitchen); how Mrs. Ilmyen was handling the stress (good—only one gray hair this morning and so far not a single tear shed from the bride). Through all this talk, the hands of Mrs. Ilmyen’s sisters never stopped moving. Reka and Lida were a veritable whirlwind of chopping and rolling and flouring, mixing, blanching and boiling. I marveled at their quick and steady industry: latke upon latke appearing on the trays in endless ranks and files, ropes of braided challah dough quietly rising under a towel. After three hours, the sisters decided to temporarily relinquish the kitchen to Mother and install themselves in the bathroom: Jutta needed help with hair and makeup. I caught a glimpse of Jutta. She had a towel wrapped around her head. Her dark eyes flashed. Catching sight of me, she lifted her hand, wiggled her fingers. With that one gesture, my world was made right.

  Before she left the kitchen, Mrs. Ilmyen fixed a stern gaze on Mother. “Promise me, Biruta Kalnins, you will not tamper with our food.”

  Mother adjusted the heating dial then crossed her arms over her chest. “I will only open and close the oven door—and only then to make sure nothing burns.”

  I could read utter doubt in Mrs. Ilmyen’s eyes, but the lift of her jaw indicated the resigned optimism of a woman choosing to believe. “Okay,” Mrs. Ilmyen said, clutching her purse under her arm. “Okay.” And she retreated for the bathroom.

  For the next hour Mother and I worked in silence, Mother assembling her famous piragi, small pasties she filled with meat—smoked ham and bacon and onions. It was completely unkosher, colossally unkosher, but years of cooking alongside Mother taught me to ask no questions, offer no correctives. I passed my sauce through a sieve into the belly of the eel. Then I wrapped the fish with a towel, one of Mother’s very best, and slid the entire bundle into the top oven.

  “Wait.” Mother opened the door of the upper oven and smelled the heat. “What with half this oven not what it used to be, I can’t quite judge. My nose is off.” Mother thrust her head farther into the oven. It was important, Mother had taught me, to never rush an oven heating. And you should never bake anything without first dancing the requisite twenty drops of oil on the bottom plate of the oven. How the oil beaded, she’d told me, and how it danced told you how hot it was and which dish to bake first and for how long.

  “I just don’t know,” Mother said, withdrawing her head from the oven. From her apron Mother pulled out Uncle’s old stethoscope and inserted the ear pieces into her ears. Then she reached for her backup jar of pork lard and dropped a thick white crescent from the spoon onto the racks. Another cataclysmically unkosher move. We watched the lard drip to the bottom panel. Mother held the scope near the panel and listened to the lard sizzling. It was better to use olive oil, but Mother had always maintained that anything could be substituted for something else if the situation was dire enough.

  When Mother, satisfied at last, returned the stethoscope to her apron, I slid my eel, now fish in a cloak, into the upper oven. And Mrs. Ilmyen’s somber warning? We meant well—didn’t that count for something? Mother turned her attention to the two oversize bowls of dough for Reka’s latkes and Lida’s challah. She thrust her fingers into the dough, noted how quickly the dough flaked apart. She spooned a little lard from her jar into Reka’s dough and folded it in with muscular jabs of the spoon. So much pork lard, so much unkosherness. It was too much, even for me.

  “Mother,” I gasped. “What are you doing?”

  “This is a small repair, not an alteration,” Mother said.

  “You know, some women are a strange mixture of pride and humility. Wanting help but uncertain if they should ask for it,” Mother said. “A wedding—now this is a big event, so big it overwhelms. If there’s a small thing I can do to help, then I want to do it.” Mother smiled. “It’ll be my gift to her.”

  Fortunately, it was at this time that the musicians converged at the back door: a cellist, two violinists, and an oboist, a man with a white yarmulke stapled to a red toupee. He annoyed Mother greatly by repeatedly addressing her as the mother-of-the-beautiful-bride and asking if the ensemble could be paid in advance for their services.

  At last, the groom and his family arrived. And with them the rabbi, a tiny man in a black suit shiny at the elbows who was supported on both sides by the groomsmen. The rabbi did not walk so much as he shuffled, the weight of his beard pulling his chin to his chest. The entourage tottered to the platform where they all took their places beneath the chuppah, a shawl tied to four poles Mr. Ilmyen had erected on the platform. This canopy, bowed in the middle like a long-winded prayer, didn’t look like much to me. But back in the days when I thought I could become a Jew, Jutta explained to me that the canopy was God sheltering and protecting the bride and groom. No doubt they’d need it, I thought, so near to the river where rain and stork crap fell from the sky in a far-too-predictable manner.

  And then in a billow of white came Jutta, her dark cherrywood hair bound up with beads. Her cheeks flushed (with a little help from Mrs. I.’s flat of rouge) and her eyes as bright as May marigolds, Jutta glided past me, her gaze fixed on Semyon. She joined Semyon under the chuppah and bent over a low table where they signed a piece of paper. Then the rabbi read a bit from a musty-looking book. Melodious and odd words in a language I did not know, but they had the effect of quiet enchantment. I was standing tiptoe on the threshold of something sacred: love.

  After the reading, Semyon peered intently into Jutta’s face before lowering her veil. Happiness, I knew. He was divining in the face of his bride where his happiness lay. But even from my spot, on the threshold between the kitchen and the hall, I could see the love between them, apparent and apparently ample, and I felt that bite of ancient envy. I wanted that kind of love. Not the flimsy kind I’d read about in books, but the sturdy sort of love that would not disappoint with every change in the weather. I wanted that boy who didn’t notice my hips or my hands but looked steadily into my eyes and liked what he saw.

  A groomsman placed a glass on the platform, and Semyon smashed it under his right heel, a reminder of the fragility of human joy in this lifetime. Everyone clapped and shouted, “Mazel tov.” Mother rushed for her whisk broom and dustpan, but not before clicking her tongue, calculating the cost of such an elegant piece of glassware utterly destroyed.

  Mr. Ilmyen climbed onto a chair, a glass of wine raised in his hand. “As you know, we named Jutta after the famous chess prodigy Jutta Hempel who gave simultaneous chess tournaments on TV when she was only six years old. Just like that, Jutta, our Jutta, has always known the right move in life. And why should it be any different in love?” Mr. Ilmyen nodded at Semyon’s parents. “So a toast to the parents of the groom for having the imagination and foresight to orchestrate their first meeting. At a chess tournament, no less!”

  “A brilliant move!” Semyon’s father called out. And then he climbed onto the other chair and put an arm around Mr. Ilmyen. “You can’t have the sweet without the salt. Every fisherman knows this. Sweet water rushes headlong to the sea where it runs to salt. Both kinds of water are good; both waters nourish life. But let us not forget the inherent risks of living. Let us not forget that joy and sorrow are shadows cast by the same tree, and this tree we also call life.”

  “To life!” Mr. Ilmyen cried, and the shout went up: “To life!”

  Outside, Mrs. Lim, Mrs. Lee, and Stanka pressed their noses to the sweating panes. I went to the kitchen and let the
m in.

  “I’m sorry—” Jutta’s uncle Keres materialized behind me. “This is a private party.”

  “What’s private around here?” Stanka elbowed past him. “We’re friends of the bride.”

  Mrs. Lee said, “I taught her how to tie her right shoe.”

  “And I taught her the left,” said Mrs. Lim.

  I followed them over the threshold into the hall that had been transformed now by laughter and music and movement. Jutta and Semyon each clutched separate ends of a hankie for dear life while they were carried aloft in their chairs and twirled about. Jutta had never looked happier, and where I had just moments before felt envy, a knot between my shoulders, I now felt a simple undivided happiness for her. The music was nothing like the staunch Baptist hymns, and before I knew it, I was tapping my feet. How could I not? This music flew and skipped as if the musicians had never heard of the sturdy 4/4 signature or the open chords of the major keys. Tipping from joy to sorrow in a half measure, the music was like each one of us there in the room: intricate and sometimes discordant motifs brought together to make a song that every now and then clarified into a single melody. Where was I in this song? A half step away, near joy but not in joy. I felt myself tearing up.