by Gina Ochsner
“This is m-my friend, L-Ligita. She’s studying dance at the university,” Rudy stammered, as we approached. Mother squinted at Rudy while I gazed openly at Ligita, unable to fathom how Rudy managed to bring home such a beautiful girl—and an artistic one. The closest Rudy ever came to art was the time he filled in for a sick band member at a school production. And even then the director allowed him to stir the triangle only intermittently.
“Well.” Mother wiped one chapped hand against the other. Rudy glanced at the shed. “How bad is Uncle?”
Mother looked at me, then at Ligita, who was sizing up our wooden privy. “Let’s all have some tea. We’ll get acquainted.”
Rudy ushered Ligita into the kitchen, where Mother was boiling water. I stole covert glances at Ligita. She was utterly perfect, every part of her body in proportion to the other, every movement graceful. The bones of her face were like fine china, her cheekbones high and wide, her chin sharp, her dark eyes shrewd and intelligent—she could not be real, I thought, as I poured tea into Mother’s best cups and noted the rise of Ligita’s eyebrows, which were plucked to mathematical precision. And yet there she was, slurping our tea through cubes of sugar. Sitting next to Rudy. Who blinked and stammered, flabbergasted by his incredible fortune.
At last Father thumped up the back steps and opened the screen door. He stood at the threshold and pulled off his boots.
“This is Rudy’s new friend,” Mother said to Father. “Ligita . . .”
“Samoylich,” she said, and I caught sight of her teeth, jagged and stained. “Samoylich—that sounds”—Mother screwed up her eyes—“Russian, or perhaps—”
“Ukrainian,” Ligita said.
“Of course!” Mother beamed.
“Ukrainians are very brilliant people.” Father gently set his boots on the top step and gave each of the tongues a solid tug to help the boots breathe. “They invented bison-grass vodka. Yes, in general, Ukrainians are very fine.”
“She’s got a three-day holiday before her ballet auditions,” Rudy said.
While Rudy spoke, Ligita’s gaze roamed the kitchen, looking for some cultural point of commonality. Finding none, she sighed. Even her sighs held the air of a thoroughbred.
Mother laid out supper and put a bowl of salt in the middle of the table. “For Uncle,” she said, pinching a few granules and tossing it over her shoulder. Rudy and I did the same while Ligita observed the fallen salt on the floor.
Father kept his hands folded in his lap. “I will say a prayer for Maris,” he said.
I knew Mother would rather pray to the concrete moon that changes boys into bears and returns them to their old strength than pray to God, whom she said was very unpredictable. But she respected Father. So when he started praying, Mother lowered her head for a split second. Then she went back to ladling the cabbage.
Dinner was a quiet affair. Ligita refused every dish Mother offered, as she was in training. She also wouldn’t use our dry toilet, preferring instead to relieve herself in Mother’s finely scrubbed porcelains at the hall.
“Well, she is, after all, very refined,” Mother said to me, as we observed Ligita skirting puddles on her return from the hall. “The smell of our shit probably offends her.”
That night, after Rudy delivered broth to Uncle that Uncle returned (“Too salty! Too thin!”), Mother, crestfallen that another meal had been refused, put a clean sheet on the couch for Ligita. It was Rudy’s hope that he’d sleep on the floor beside Ligita, but Mother wouldn’t hear of it. “You’ll catch your death from a draft!” she exclaimed. Like most women in the east, she had a dread fear of wind and currents, and it was something we did not joke about in her presence. And so, as we had all the nights of our childhood, Rudy and I slept side by side in our separate beds and watched the moon through the window casting its pale sorrowful eye on the houses along the lane and listened to Mr. Ilmyen’s donkey, Babel, protesting Uncle Maris’s proximity.
In the morning we woke to the bellow of the phone: eeeeeee-ooooooo. It was Mr. Zetsche. In a few days he would inspect the cemetery; afterward he’d hold a town meeting in the hall. The news sent Mother and Father into a frenzy. It was autumn, Mikeli, the time when the aspens shake off their gold leaves to make a carpet for the ghosts. Your grandmother Biruta believed in ghosts. If the hall kitchen and basins weren’t scrubbed to perfection, she believed her mother and father would scrape their fingernails against our windows at night. She also wanted to make a good impression on Mr. Zetsche. For his part, Father worked even harder to scrub the moss of the more remote stones and touch up the gold paint on the Orthodox crosses of the Russian stones. Rudy and I sat in the living room and watched spellbound as Ligita executed a series of stretching exercises, necessary, she said, in order to keep her limber. And limber she was: first, she raised one leg behind her, lifting it so high that it almost touched her ear. Then she lowered that leg and the other one went up. She was like a human protractor: Ligita’s slim torso held stock-still over one leg, while the other leg swiveled about with unimaginable flexibility. “Wh-wh-wh-what a figure!” Rudy breathed, enchanted by the amount of daylight he could see between her legs. But the more he watched her, the more agitated he became. By noon, his stuttering rendered him completely unintelligible. “For god’s sake,” Mother, back from the hall, said. “Go out and do something!” Ligita froze mid-pirouette, but Mother simply waved her on. “Not you, dear.” And so Rudy turned to his slingshot, his second love, and went foraging through the woods.
I spent the day attending to Uncle Maris. His ire inflamed by the injustice of sickness in general and by his suffering our fierce attentions in particular, everything now provoked him: the light from the lightbulb was too bright, my tread on the floor too heavy, Babel’s braying from across the lane too loud. And then there was the trouble with Stanka.
“Oh, it’s bitter!” Uncle Maris cried. Yes, he still loved Stanka terribly despite all that he had done to suggest otherwise. This was the one endearing trait about Uncle: he could be an ass, short and abrupt and spiteful beyond reason, but he was capable of love. What he loved, he loved to distraction. He did, in fact, love women in a constant way, forgiving them their minor faults and moments of pettiness. He loved women in general because they were nothing like the men he knew. And because Uncle Maris believed it was better to die in the embrace of a woman than to die alone, he was prepared now to do or say anything to reconcile with Stanka.
Uncle Maris rolled onto his side and gripped my wrist. “You have to help me. You have to be my legs and my lungs.” Uncle reached under the cot and withdrew his beloved fishing pole. “I’d ask Rudy to help, but your mother tells me he’s so tongue-tied in love, he’s practically useless.” Uncle paused to string his rod with some line. “But you, Inara—you don’t have anybody yet.”
Uncle was right: with my bad skin and wide hips, I did not turn heads.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked.
Uncle opened his auxiliary valise. In it was a sheaf of papers that looked to be quite old, yellowed with time. With them was a bundle of letters. They looked uncannily similar to the ones I had hidden under my bed: the same jumbled assortment of all kinds of papers, all of it bound up with a leather strap.
“Where did you get those?” I touched the letters. A lopsided grin stretched from one side of Uncle’s face to the other. “Ask no questions, tell no lies.” He patted the bundle tenderly and pushed it toward me. “Go on,” he said. “Take them. They make good reading. But before you read them, I want you to mail this envelope at the post office. It’s important.”
The envelope was the kind used for legal documents, and judging by the weight of it, there were quite a few papers in there. A will, I figured.
“Thirdly, set a bait trail for Stanka.”
“Bait?”
Uncle sighed in exasperation. “And I used to think you were the smart one.” Uncle opened his second valise and withdrew a confectioner’s wax-paper bag. Inside were black Dutch buttons, the
kind that are so salty they make grown men weep. At the bottom of the bag, the confectioner’s prize: a button double the size of all the rest, as big as a horse chestnut. Uncle took this oversize button and pushed his hook through it. Then he handed me the white bag.
“It’s a full moon on the rise tonight and Stanka will be hunting the sooty milk cap. You set out a trail of buttons from her door to mine. And make sure I get my last dose of meds early; I want to be at the height of my charm when she gets here.”
As the sooty milk cap looks remarkably like a Dutch button, Uncle’s plan was a sound one. And the fact that Uncle was scheming again gave me hope that his vitality drinks were really working. Bit by bit, he was coming back to us. Just then Uncle set down the rod, turned his shoulder sharply, and started coughing. It was a terrible sound, as if everything he’d ever known and wanted was working its way loose from the bottom of his lungs.
I wrung my hands. “Do you want me to pray for you?”
“Pray?” Uncle spat into Mother’s metal basin. “As in pray to God the Father, Jesus His son?”
I nodded.
“God the Father—He’s an entrepreneur, a negotiator. I can deal with him. But Christ”—a blue blood vessel rose to the surface of Uncle’s forehead—“He’s a tyrant. Crawling up on that cross to die, knowing full well he’d come back from the dead. All this just to inflict himself on everyone.” The piano strings buzzed and Uncle’s nostrils flared with his old familiar rage. “Well, two can play that game. I’m going to kick this thing in the teeth! Watch me now!” He was like a wild animal, cagey and unpredictable. Uncle Maris drove his crutch into the sod and pitched to the floor.
“Oh,” Uncle moaned. “It’s bitter.”
I helped him back onto the cot. I opened a vitality drink for Uncle, but he only grimaced.
Uncle withdrew a small pouch from his hip pocket and shook out a small mound of tobacco. “What I want is rolling paper.”
We did not have rolling paper. I knew what I had to do. I ran to my room and retrieved my Bible. It had soft calfskin covers and gold edged the onionskin pages. Father had written: sword and shield, my strong buckler is you, Lord, oh Lord.
Father had given it to me on the same day Gorbachev had allowed Bibles back into Latvia. I was only ten at the time, too young, he said, to go with him to Daugavpils to see the heavy-cargo Ural transports roll into the middle of the old town square. There was some concern that this was a trick, that the transports would be stuffed stem to stern with soldiers and a riot would ensue. Father went anyway. The cargo trucks arrived. No soldiers. Just boxes and boxes of Bibles. Within four minutes the boxes were emptied. He told me this, tears streaming down his face, as he gave me that white calfskin-bound book. I loved this book. I loved my uncle. And right now he needed it more than I did. And so I returned to the shed, my Bible trembling in my hand as if it sensed its fate.
I handed the Bible to Uncle.
“Well, it’s not rolling paper, but it’ll do.”
Such sacrilege, it pained me. I bit my lip. “Just promise you’ll read each page before you light it up.” I left Uncle. I took the large envelope to Mrs. A. at the post office. And then I set the trail of licorice. I did not know if nicotine withdrawal or pain relievers had driven Uncle into a temporary heresy or if I was at last seeing Uncle stripped down to his truest form: a man who really did not hate people so much as he hated the God who made people, the God of resurrection who promised life in those New Testament books and had left him on this cot in this shed to cough himself to death.
Back inside the living room, Rudy had his hands full. Ligita had stretched and danced solo all day long and now she needed a mule, she told Rudy. “Imagine that I am a bird of paradise and you are the strong stalk of support,” she said, turning on her toes, unfurling her body.
“Now lift!” she commanded.
Rudy grabbed her by the waist and flung her over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. He twirled in a wide ungainly circle.
Father smiled at the fireplace; Mother bit her lip.
“Clumsy!” Ligita shrieked. “Put me down!” Which Rudy did as gently as possible, but with Ligita flailing about, it wasn’t as smooth a landing as she might have hoped for.
Fuming, Ligita raked at her hair until she had restored her bun and composure. She turned to Rudy.
“You will never be a good dance partner.” Ligita spoke each word carefully as if each one carried a mysterious weight that needed time to sink in. “You’re not even a good mule.”
“It’s true—I don’t lift well,” Rudy said, his gaze on his feet. “Can you do anything well?” Ligita asked.
Because Father had taught him to be a gentleman, Rudy only ducked his head. But as he slid his slingshot into his pants pocket and passed by me for the kitchen door, I detected something desperate in the hunch of his shoulders.
You asked once what kind of a person Rudy was when he was younger and what kind of person I was. I said he was the kind of person who would walk a thousand kilometers to rescue someone who needed saving. He would defend the defenseless and love the loveless.
He’d do this without apology. His only flaw, in my opinion, was that he’d do these things indiscriminately, wasting the best of himself on people unworthy of it.
I did not love others as deeply or openly as your uncle Rudy. I suppose it is a shortcoming on my part because I know very well, and you do, too, that the Bible entreats us to love our neighbors as ourselves. But I had a hard time answering the question, Who is my neighbor? The Ilmyens, of course, and I did love them. Stanka I loved. But this girl, this woman, whose every word seemed intended to harm, I could not love. And I felt shame and guilt stirring inside of me. If Rudy saw fit to love her, why couldn’t I?
By dinnertime, Mother stood over the stove, cursing a pot of uncooperative sorrel soup. Ligita sighed with the distracted air of one who was profoundly bored. Of one who was wishing a comet would drop on our roof if only for the novelty of a spectacle. And then, just as Mother set out the sorrel, Rudy returned. In his hands a rabbit swung by its heels. Spots of blood dotted its snout and gummed the whiskers.
Ligita gasped. But Rudy, undeterred, presented his gift to Ligita, it being his conviction that women long to be showered with the fruits of nature, dead or alive.
“That’s very nice, son,” Mother said, with a wink in Ligita’s direction.
“Please tell me that there’s something else people do here for fun.” Ligita sighed. I saw the liquid shift in Rudy’s eyes as he hung the rabbit over the salting board.
Then I looked at Ligita. In her I saw every beautiful girl who breaks every good boy’s heart. And I got an idea.
“We go mushrooming,” I said.
“Really!” A cardiac glow bloomed over Ligita’s pale face. Outside, the harvest moon loomed large and bright. In the air I could smell the ground cooling, the snap of seasons changing. A perfect night for mushrooming. As we passed the shed and wandered toward the river, I stepped over the licorice trail for Stanka. And I talked. I explained to Ligita what I knew of the invisible properties of mushrooms, namely the kinds you should feed the cows if you want them to come into season, which ones to fry with onions, which kept well in a freezer. I told her what your grandfather and grandmother had taught me. In short, I was testing her to see if she’d listen. Was she worthy of such knowledge?
As I talked, Ligita raced toward a stand of birch. “Ha!” she cried, triumphant. She’d spotted some fringed parasol, which were nice to look at but bad for the bowels.
“No. Not those.” I cautioned. And when she spotted the oyster mushroom, its dark tongues bracketing the bark of a tree, I said the same thing: no. Ditto for the liberty cap, which was slightly hallucinogenic. On this went, and as we approached a copse of birches, I could tell Ligita was getting frustrated. And I was glad. I wanted to wear her out. I wanted her to see that, like her, we were artists—talented and smart in our own fashion.
Ligita dashed toward the trees. “Chanter
elles!” she cried, filling the trug. This time she wasn’t far off. What she’d found was a nice troop of false chanterelles, which were known to cause acute nausea. In the dim light, hers was an easy mistake to make.
“I wouldn’t eat those,” I said.
“I know what you’re all doing to me. Making sport of me at every turn. But I’ve been to university. I know reverse psychology when I hear it.” Ligita shoved the entire mushroom into her mouth and chewed furiously. It occurred to me that not only was she angry, but having skipped so many meals, she was also probably very hungry. And she was right; I did want her to eat that mushroom.
Throwing caution to the wind, Ligita ate another. And another. And then I realized what I was allowing to happen. I took a few steps and dropped to my knees. There under a birch was a fine fruiting of bay bolete—one of Father’s favorites, as it carried an air of nobility. Also, their fleshy stalks and caps were good absorbers of stomach acids. “Here.” I handed Ligita a bolete. “Try this one instead.”
Ligita stopped eating for a moment and contemplated the mushroom in my hand. “I need to use a bathroom,” she said.
I looked around the woods and shrugged. “Just squat behind a log.”
“It’s a very unattractive position, squatting,” Ligita said, but her voice had lost its starch and she weaved on her feet. I hooked my arm around Ligita’s tiny rib cage and steered her back toward our yard.
“Stanka! My love, is that you?” Uncle Maris called, as we passed the shed. Babel trumpeted and Ligita moaned. She lurched for the back steps, draping herself over the bottommost one.
“I need a bowl,” she said, and fished from her sleeve a bit of perforated fabric: a very fine lace handkerchief. As she did, I spied a purple line that ran from the inside of her wrist to midforearm. A scar thick and deep. Perhaps her life wasn’t as enchanted as I had assumed.
I dashed into the kitchen and returned with Mother’s orange polka-dotted mixing bowl. And not a moment too soon. One look at the bowl’s busy pattern and Ligita began retching. When they heard the powerful heaves of a stomach turning itself inside out, Mother, Father, and Rudy rushed to the steps.
