The Hidden Letters of Velta B.

by Gina Ochsner

  I turned my eye to Velta’s rusted tin. At the bottom, wrapped in lace, I found a coil of her hair, a deep chestnut brown that turned copper when I held it to the light of the window. I liked touching the rough paper of her letters, I liked this act of possession. In Velta’s letters I left the known world of precarious fact for the elastic, forgiving terrain of a vividly imagined, vividly confused internal landscape. With each reading, a little more of that unknown woman came to life. She did not come willingly, this woman who wrote in fragments, in dainas and, in some cases, recipes. About herself, her thoughts, her feelings—not a word. More often she relayed old wives’ tales, kindly advice, observations regarding the world outside her window. I had to fabricate Velta from the flimsiest scraps: at night the trees, shameless gossips, tell tales. The moon is a brazen voyeur. The coarse thread from two fishing nets yields one sweater, and even then, it’s not a great sweater. Eels caught in wintertime should be dipped in icy water and hung from the rafters. On New Year’s Eve one must eat every last yellow pea on one’s plate. Failure to do so results in grief, a year of tears for each uneaten pea. Something she called number ninety-two appeared in several letters:

  Tell me, dear girl; Tell me, dear girl,

  What is heavier than a stone?

  I would not be a maid

  If I could not tell you

  What is heavier than a stone.

  At my side a youth is sitting

  Who is heavier than a stone.

  I suppose this was a courting daina, but I couldn’t help but think of old Mr. Gepkars, who adored every bit of Latvian sandstone, clay, and limestone: The rocks, children, the sturdy ancient rocks. They tell our story if only we will get on our knees to read it!

  Other bits Velta had written on backs of recipe cards.

  Bleach, bluing, and lye. In a dress made of paper and ink she wandered in the rain, bleeding a river of words between her legs. What words are there for this song? She will have to borrow a new body, a new voice to make a new song. She will sing through the water.

  I shuddered as I read this letter. I could not help thinking of the Ghost Girl, could not help making associations where maybe I should let well enough alone.

  Mrs. Zetsche—Mildi—came to see me again. She sat in the chair you are sitting in now, her feet dangling. Sometimes I forget how small she is. And old. Horizontal lines score her small troubled forehead. She looked out the window and told me about a distant relative of hers who’d been a general in the Austro-Hungarian army. He’d kept ostriches on some ancestral estate, had broken them with bit and bridle, and on St. Demetrius’s and St. George’s days he held ostrich races for the children in town. She gave me a recipe for apples in nightgowns for your next issue of the paper. She told me a story: “In the beginning the animals received their fur or hair according to the place each slept their first night. The hedgehog chose the mountaintop, and as the sun rose in the morning, he marveled at its brilliant rays. This is how he acquired his radiant coat of spines.” I agree with you, it’s a strange story to tell a woman who has lost most of her hair. Perhaps she realized it, too, as she launched straightaway into another, her gaze on the burzuika stove. She told me about her grandmother, Emilija, a woman who talked and talked. She talked about the raid on their village, how the bombs fell and flattened it, turned it to rubble. The rubble was crushed to pieces. Those pieces ground to grains of sand. The name of their town erased from every map. Punishment for having revolted against the landlords installed some hundred odd years ago. Burned flat, the town was. People shot while attempting to flee. Weren’t they the lucky ones for having escaped? “Shut up,” Mildi’s grandfather said to her grandmother. But Grandmother Emilija couldn’t shut up. She had to tell what she’d seen. She’d tell it to her schoolteacher; she’d tell it to the cashier in the market. Mildi’s grandfather punched Emilija in the mouth. “Shut up about politics or you’ll get us all killed,” he said. “Shut up before you bring a curse on our family.” Emilija’s teeth fell out soon after that. So she wrote her words down in white chalk on blue slips of paper. Letters to the spirits, she told Mildi, then still a little girl. If no one living would listen, then she’d tell the dead. Her face had a sunken look to it, like a shriveled apple. I have made mistakes, Emilija said, while rattling a glass that held her teeth.

  “You may wonder,” Mildi said, leaning toward me, her amber eyes glittering like sequins, “why I’m saying these things.”

  Behind her words I heard the rattle of teeth in a jar. “No,” I said. I didn’t wonder one tiny little bit.

  Incidentally, Mildi brought gifts. That long silver platter. Not silver plate. Silver through and through. She is haunted by guilt. How to repay your grandfather for the torment they caused him. It’s another mystery, an unanswerable question. I assured her again and again that Eriks was not the kind of man to hold grudges. “Why?” she asked, blinking in wonder. I told her what I’ve told you all along, love keeps no records of wrongs. Love steps into the river, wades in to the knees, thighs, and hips, lets the river carry everything where it will.

  She had her help bring that oval mirror set inside a leather ox harness. It’s enormous, that mirror. A visual picture of vanity ringed by brutish servility. It would be best to cover it with a sheet.

  When you were six, I led you to the cemetery where your grandfather was working. He wanted to show you the patience it took to dig a grave, and he wanted to show you how to prepare your heart for the future. He told you that someday he would go away. He was getting older, and he explained to you that he’d have to leave you because where he was going he had to go alone. It was the first of many riddles. “Nobody stays in the same place forever; nothing stays the same,” your grandfather said. “Rocks do,” you said. But you furrowed your brow and added, “But water can move rocks.”

  “Yes,” your grandfather said. “Water can move anything if there’s enough of it.”

  “And time,” you said to him, “rearranges people and things, too. But time is heavier than water.”

  Grandfather stopped digging then because I suppose he realized he was in the presence of a poet and philosopher. I’m telling you this because you say you can’t recall much of your childhood. I find it odd that you could hear so much and so well but remember so little. Odd and a little sad. I suppose, being saturated by so much sound, your brain simply had no space left. But you were such an interesting child. You deserve to know that.

  While you were out, Dr. Netsulis brought more medication. He clambered into the shed, catching his shin on the piano’s sharp edge. The grandfather I never had, he dispenses small bits of wisdom. “Stop scratching!” he said. I’d been raking my jagged fingernails along my shins. This is the problem with our bodies. They flake and peel. Bright bruises, an astonishing bloom of color dots my arms, legs. A map of my undoing—how can I resist reading it?

  Jutta stopped in to change the linens. We watched the light climb the wall. We listened to the clock’s steady ticking. She brought some thread and a needle. She is sewing my shroud. Before a child is born, she told me, it possesses all knowledge. All wisdom. But at the very moment a child enters the world, an angel of the Lord touches it on the forehead and all knowledge and wisdom vanishes. We spend our whole lives dimly aware that we once grasped the deepest mysteries of the universe and that we are wholly unable to remember any of it. But at the moment of our death, that same angel touches our foreheads once again and we remember. The veil is lifted and we pass through to the other side of understanding.

  Jutta lifted the fabric to measure it. Stretched long and thin, it shivered over my body. Breath rising, breath falling. It will breathe for me, I thought. And in that last moment, wisdom will pull me by the wrists through the veil.

  Why this harping about wisdom? I suppose I’m taking stock of what I have lacked and what I hope to gain. Perhaps my trouble was that I did not fundamentally know myself and what I did know I didn’t like. I had a fabulous imagination, but a completely ordinary intelle
ct and a downright disappointing body. But I was a good mushroom hunter. At nineteen years of age I could find almost every kind. I knew that if you found the red-freckled saffron milk cap it meant you’d fall in love soon. The sulfur-yellow chicken of the woods, which loved to crawl up the bark of the yew, meant good luck. But the jack-o’-lantern, whose orange gills glowed in the dark, meant death if you ate it. It was the same way for the toad-brown panther cap. Its looks weren’t nearly as exciting as the lantern’s, but it was just as deadly. By far the most elusive fungus was the cornflower bolete. A homely looking mushroom with its straw-yellow pores, it holds healing properties in its chambered flesh. If you cut it with a knife, it turned a cerulean blue.

  I loved hunting the mushrooms, fair or foul. I cherished every gill, wart, and wrinkle, inhaled with affection the fusty reek of damp and mossy places beneath the alder, pine, and birch. It was the dank smell of the earth turning leaves and needles to rich soil, a beautiful rotting boletic smell that meant mushrooms. But I did not always hunt well. My mind was on David, replaying the image of his climbing up the black steps of the old bus. We had not managed that first kiss by the river. This was the best we could do: I stood on the gravel at the side of the road and David, sensing my gaze fastened to his back, turned and lifted his hand in a wave. I imagined Velta on a similar road watching Ferdinands, a prisoner, loaded onto an old Soviet truck juddering on its chassis. Did they wave? Did she say, as she did in her many letters, I kiss you with a thousand kisses? Did she stand and watch, as I did, the bus retreat into the distance, a veil of dust rising up in waves behind it?

  In those days I found myself scouring my memory for every detail of his face, the angle of his cheekbones, wide jaw, those enormous ears, his blue-silver eyes. I kept his coat under my bed, and every now and then I’d pull it out and sniff the collar and cuffs. I looked to the woods for a sign. If I found a milk cap or a chanterelle, then I’d see David again. If I found the dog mushrooms, those gray fungi that are no bigger than a little finger and utterly worthless in a culinary sense, then I divined bad luck was on the way. Imagine my delight when one day I managed to fill my trug with the prized cornflower bolete. But as I laid the mushrooms on a sheet over the kitchen table and gently pinched the stalks, they bled crimson from the gills. When Father saw the mushrooms, and then saw my hands, he went white and had to sit down.

  “Mushrooms like these mean someone in the family will die soon,” Father said.

  “Oh, that’s an old superstition,” Mother said, dragging the kettle over the ring. No sooner were the words out of her mouth than the black phone bellowed deep and low.

  Father jumped from the chair. “Yes.” Father said, holding the phone to his ear. “I understand completely.” Father slid the phone gently into the cradle.

  “What is it?” Mother asked.

  “It’s the hospital in Daugavpils. They want us to come for Maris. He is too ill for treatment.”

  I realize that most of what I’ve mentioned about your namesake isn’t terribly flattering. Perhaps I needn’t have mentioned the twenty-kilometer-long underground rubber tubing that stretched from a vodka still in Estonia to his yard or the slightly toxic peppermint bark he made and donated to a children’s home or the lasting gastric impression it made. I will say that Mother had a hard time forgiving Uncle for taking her beloved Olympia typewriter. But Uncle Maris’s footing the bill for Rudy’s education went a long way toward fostering something like forbearance. And when family is in some kind of trouble, you overlook past grievances. This is why, after that phone call, your grandfather wasted no time in collecting Uncle from Daugavpils and installing him in the shed.

  Though it seemed unkind to closet Uncle amid shovels and rakes, it was the best place for him: he could be as offensive as he liked and there was little chance any of the neighbors would hear or smell him. Mother lit the old Soviet-style burzuika stove and propped two pillows behind Uncle’s head.

  Uncle smiled and it was then I saw that he’d lost some teeth. “A gift. For you, Biruta.” Uncle nodded to one of his suitcases.

  Mother opened it and found her green Olympia typewriter nestled in some papers. “The keys for the letters K and O and S are missing,” Mother observed.

  Uncle thumped his chest with a fist, and said, “Inconsequential.” And then a fit of coughing seized him.

  Mother and Father backed out of the shed. I stayed in the shed.

  “What’s wrong with you?” I asked Uncle, pulling a blanket up to his chest. My voice set the piano strings buzzing. He had always been larger than life: bombastic and unflappable. Now his face was ashen. Except for a few defiant gray wisps, his head was bald, his body stove in. He was as mortal and small and defeated as the rest of us.

  “Inconsequential,” he said, and snapped his fingers. I brought him his other valise, which yawned open on its rusty hinges. Inside were the last of his vitamins and something new: rows and rows of cigarettes, some short and squat and packed with loose tobacco and some long and elegant but a little hollow looking.

  Uncle retrieved one of the shorter cigarettes and lit it.

  “Those long ones, they’re nicotine free. For all those health freaks who really think this life is worth prolonging.”

  “Are they any good?” I asked. Stanka had taught me to smoke her Bulgarian cigarettes, and I just couldn’t imagine cigarettes that didn’t taste like a newly paved road.

  “Doesn’t matter. Do they appeal to a hidden need in the consumer? That is the better question.” Uncle Maris exhaled a halo of smoke. Then he snapped his valise closed, and with a quick wave of his fingers, he dismissed me from his shed.

  Death is a slow advance on the joints. It’s a cough that won’t go away. It’s a stone that can’t be swallowed. It’s the weight that draws us into the ground, folding our chests to our knees. Having grown up in the Vorkuta mining camp, your grandfather Eriks knew death so well he could smell it a month away. He heard it in the tight chafing sound of his brother’s voice, the rattling in his lungs, and that is how your grandfather knew, and I did, too, how very ill, as good as gone, Maris really was.

  All that evening we fluttered to and from the toolshed. With blankets. With broth. With birch-bark tea and pain medications. With newspapers and lozenges. Each time I opened the shed door, I reminded myself to lower my gaze. The loss of all his dark hair and this harrowing cough were strange enough. But Uncle had changed in other ways, too. He’d been in the shed a full three hours and hadn’t once spluttered about the Jews or the smelly Russians or the Ukrainians with his trademark vitriol. I thought perhaps in the time he’d been away from us that he had learned to love people more or hate them a little less. But when I brought him his last dose of pain medication for the evening and asked him about this, Uncle corrected me. “No, I still hate everyone. I just don’t have the same energy to let them all know about it the way I used to.”

  But Uncle was working hard to fix that problem. In the two years he’d been away, he had invented a new vitality drink, certain to restore him to his right self. “Watch this,” Uncle Maris said, and he downed an entire can of the stuff right then. This inspired a coughing fit complete with red-flecked spume. Uncle collapsed onto the tall bank of pillows. Five minutes later he drifted into a troubled sleep in which he muttered nasty things about Baptists, field surgeons, and Russian cuisine.

  I took heart from Uncle’s dyspeptic ranting. I thought it meant Uncle’s elixir was working. But Mother took one look at Uncle’s pallid face and frowned. “We’d better tell Stanka about this,” Mother said. “She may want to get one last whack with a frying pan in before Uncle leaves us all for good.”

  Not three minutes later Stanka burst through our kitchen door.

  “Where is he?”

  “The shed.”

  Stanka turned on her heels and stomped back the way she came, her sandals slapping the porch steps. As I followed her through the yard, I studied the brown skin of her feet, the white rind of her cracked heels, and her su
bstantial ankles, for it was on account of those ankles and the thick calves they supported that Uncle Maris had first fallen in love with her.

  At the shed Stanka flung open the wooden door and stood there a moment, her arms crossed over her chest, her eyes adjusting to the dim light cast by the stove.

  She took in the jaundiced tone of Uncle Maris’s skin, his bald head. “What’s the matter with you?” Stanka demanded.

  Uncle Maris lit one of his fat cigarettes. “A crippling case of post-Soviet syndrome.” The piano strings hummed in agreement.

  I leaned toward Stanka. “He’s got cancer of the lungs.”

  “Well, if you’ve got lung cancer, then you don’t need these anymore!” Stanka plucked Uncle’s cigarette from his lips and ground it under her sandals. Then she gathered all of Uncle’s cigarettes—even the healthy ones—and tucked them into the waistband of her skirt. With a quick turn, she was out of the shed.

  “Oh, it’s bitter!” Uncle moaned, and the piano strings moaned with him. It was his way, I knew, of letting us know how much he still loved Stanka and how badly he wanted those cigarettes.

  I followed Stanka out into the yard, where she ploughed a path through the laundry. And then behind the scrim of flapping linens, I spied Rudy, and beside him the most beautiful and delicate girl I’d ever seen.

  “Rudy!” I cried.

  Mother turned. She saw the girl with Rudy and dropped her laundry basket.