by Gina Ochsner
Outside the hall, a far-off mechanical whine grew louder as it approached. The dogs barked and Babel brayed. Everyone in the hall fell silent, listening to the sound of Mr. Zetsche’s approach. Finally, the hall door sang on its hinges. All bodies swiveled in their chairs. Brisk footfalls echoed as Mr. Zetsche, dripping with swagger, strode to the platform. Not an easy feat when you are a mere 120 centimeters tall. In fact, he seemed impossibly smaller than before. He also had a purple birthmark that ran the length of his neck and was the exact shape of Italy, the boot of which looked as if it were kicking his Adam’s apple.
“Ladies and gentlemen.” Mr. Zetsche stood and nodded to the widows, to Mr. Ilmyen, and to Father, who was gritting his teeth, bracing for the worst. “As you all may or may not know, I am quite a successful businessman in possession of a great many, er, things. And one of my holdings is a piece of riverside property here in town that is positively choice for development. So you see”—Mr. Zetsche aimed a smile at Father—“I intend to create jobs.”
Mr. Zetsche nodded to Mr. Bishofs, who flipped the switch on the overhead projector. The small fan hummed to life and then we saw for ourselves every detail of Mr. Zetsche’s plan thrown onto the wall.
“Imagine a Latvian Riviera complete with a promenade and a band pavilion. And, of course, lodgings for the many tourists such an attraction would bring. The first step is to reshape the banks of the river whereby we’d build a retaining wall of the stoutest quality.” Mr. Zetsche’s high-pitched voice assumed the round museum quality of an artist admiring his own work.
“This is very interesting, but what does it have to do with the cemetery?” Widow Spassky asked.
Mr. Zetsche smiled. “Geological surveys indicate that the best place for development is the cemetery. So, of course, this means our first step is to move it.”
A collective gasp rose from the audience. Mr. Ilmyen wagged his head slowly from side to side. Father and Mother looked as if between them they’d swallowed a bucket of ashes. For a long moment, the only sound in the room was the hum of the projector and Stanka snapping sunflower seeds, eating as if a famine were knocking at our back door.
At last, a Gipsis said, loud enough for everyone to hear, “I think his plough has jumped the furrow.” Yes, Mr. Zetsche was quite mad. But he was well dressed and he drove a nice car and that meant something to some people.
Mother stood slowly and gripped the back of Stanka’s chair for support. It took some effort, but at last she manufactured a smile. “So, my husband here will dig new holes and move all the bodies, just like that? It all sounds conveniently foreign.” Her voice was pure acid.
Mr. Zetsche grimaced. Even he knew that this was a reference to the way that the Soviets had moved people left to right and up to down during the occupation, changing and rearranging people and borders so that even God couldn’t find some of us. No one had ever found Mr. Zingers or his Baptist wife, and we’d heard that atrocious things had been done to the Orthodox priests who’d been railed into the Soviet interior. The only evidence some of us had been here at all were our graveyards, which is why Father cared so thoroughly after each plot and stone, and also why the spiteful campaigning of the widows Sosnovskis and Spassky hurt him so.
“My dear woman,” Mr. Zetsche began. “It is not as if I have no feelings. But there are other outside considerations to, er, consider. In the end, we’ll all be better off because, while this town is undeniably beautiful, it is also quite depressed.” Mr. Zetsche glanced at Widow Sosnovskis. “That is to say, economically speaking.”
Mr. Arijisnikov jumped to his feet and appealed to the audience. “Do not be wooed by the cold heart of commerce.”
“Hear, hear!” cried Mrs. Arijisnikov.
Stanka rose slowly to her feet. She narrowed her eyes at Mr. Zetsche. “A curse falls on anyone who disturbs the dead.” Stanka’s voice shook with the weight of terrible prognostication, and among the rows of Christians, Jews, and Muslims, heads nodded in agreement.
“Old superstition,” Mr. Zetsche replied. “We can still venerate the dead. We’ll just venerate them, er, elsewhere. Because, with so many changes in our county, it’s time to consider the living now.” Mr. Zetsche’s gaze fell on Rudy. “This is a new Latvia—we must think of the future and what we can provide for our children and their children.”
And when he said this, he touched on a painful and raw economic reality of life in a small town. From the bobbing of heads and the slow wagging of others, I could discern a clean division between the old and the young, the murmurs of assent and dissent separating into a canticle sung by two choirs.
The next morning we found Father in the cemetery. He held a hoe loosely in his hand. On his face he wore the look of utter bewilderment, as if he were waiting for someone to tell him what to do. At last Mother turned to Father. “Don’t you know that there’s some people and some things you just can’t stop?” she said.
“I know it,” Father said. Then he turned away to walk among the wet stones and, I suppose, remember each of the people he had helped to bury, remember them in the cemetery where they always had wanted to be.
But within three minutes Father was back in the yard, “Inara! Biruta!” he called, waving us toward the cemetery. Mother and I ran toward the gate. Uncle Maris’s stone had tipped and a portion was broken off.
“It’s an omen,” Father said. I kept my gaze trained at the tree line, hoping for a hint of kindness from the skies. We listened to the roaring of the wind through the trees, and then I saw movement—a shudder of white.
“Look!” I pointed. “A stork.”
Mother and Father followed the bird with their eyes. Mother put her calm hand over Father’s shaky one. “A stork,” Mother said, “that’s an omen, too.” She squeezed Father’s hand. “You see the stork building that nest above our cemetery. It doesn’t know that in a week or maybe a month this”—her gaze swept the cemetery—“will all be gone. It builds anyway because that is all it knows to do. Because life is for the living.”
I’ve been thinking about all I’ve told you. I’ve said quite a bit about your great-uncle Maris, your grandfather Eriks, your grandmother Biruta. I told you about Mr. Zetsche’s plans. I’m a little shocked at how little I’ve said about your father, David. Maybe after all these years, I still don’t know how to make sense of him or where he fits in our lives. I consider this a shortcoming on my part. After all, I’ve had plenty of time to consider this. His powers of hearing weren’t exceptional as far as I can remember. And, no, I don’t know if his parents had large ears. I’m sorry I don’t have a photograph of him. All I have are his letters. I started writing to him after Jutta’s wedding. At some point into the third draft of the first letter I realized I did not have his address. Fortunately, in a small town like ours, it’s not too hard to find out where someone lives. Mrs. Arijisnikov had a photographic memory, which she helped along by scouring the contents of the trash bins each night, looking for discarded envelopes and cancelled postage stamps. This was how she not only knew the precise address of each person in our town but also the addresses of the people they corresponded with. In exchange for small gifts, she almost always shared what she knew. It took only one marinated pike and few minutes for her to locate David’s address.
“Ah! The university,” she said. “He must be so smart.”
I nodded, reaching for the scrap of paper with his address written on it. Mrs. A. curled her hand around the scrap, put her other hand on top of mine. “So”—she looked at me over the tops of her glasses—“how does your uncle know Mr. Zetsche?”
“What?”
“That big envelope. The one with extra postage. It went to Mr. Zetsche’s home in Madona.”
I shrugged. What business did I have with Uncle’s dealings? Maybe he had designed another pair of tall shoes. I had bigger things to think about. Namely, was your father thinking at all of me? This is how infatuation works. All other details of reality are irrelevant, nonexistent even. Stars might supern
ova, but I wouldn’t have noticed. I was on a mission.
The next ten months, as one season bled into the next, if I wasn’t cleaning or helping Mother with the newspaper, I wrote letters as if possessed. Mother thought I was taking a class by correspondence, an assumption I did not try to correct.
I know that I have seemed careworn, even stern at times. But remember, I was girl once. And I was in love. Being in love ushered a heightened sense of perception and perspective. The green of the moss gloving each fallen birch and oak along the river acquired a hue of such vividness and texture that it seemed to glow with an interior light, its color being sufficient unto itself. And while it is true that when girls fall in love their vision intensifies, it also narrows in scope. Did I care about Mother’s newspaper? Not a whit. The secret life of root vegetables bored me utterly. I wanted to know about the woman who penned the odd letters hidden in my room. I plied your grandmother Biruta for details. I wanted to know how Velta and Ferdinands met (at a dance, incidentally). I wanted to know about Velta’s piano. Ferdinands’s newspaper. Anything. Why, you may wonder. Why the obsession over a woman I had never met? I believe each one of us has a mystery we are compelled to solve; this mystery is our peculiar haunting. We are given few clues and often don’t recognize them as such until many years later. My particular haunting had to do with Velta. My clues were many: the manor house, the beloved and much-battered piano, the framed picture at the back of the hall, Mother’s silence. Velta’s many letters.
A ripple of fingers over the white teeth of piano keys. A child’s sharp cry of delight, the heavy jingling of coins, whistles from birds in the hedges. What if our world was built of these sounds? In a world of touchable, tangible objects, a world of solidity and weight, these sounds etch a permanent record. Yea, on the tablet of my heart. Sing me that song, the one you sang in Siberia. Sing me your dark melody.
She wrote of locusts that razed the rye field then came back four weeks later to do it again. I puzzled over her words, imagining that if I could wring some understanding from them I would know Velta, I would then know Mother. Maybe I was like that boy who climbed into the rabbi’s enchanted mirror. Perhaps, like that boy peering at his own reflection, I thought that if I attended to the visible details of Velta’s life I might cross the threshold of the ordinary here and now, and step into the mysteries of the past. I would see how one woman can inhabit another in the small gestures that flit from hand to shoulder or expressions that pull at the eyes and mouth. I would see how easily one woman becomes another.
I can tell you how afraid we were to take off our shoes and socks, to walk in the fields blanketed in lime. To churn white chalk under our feet. For fun, for sport, they said. Why don’t you dance while you’re at it? We did. They said, “Sing.” We sang. We churned the soil with our feet, the skin of our heels sliding off. Is this a kind of love, to give oneself to the ground?
I confess. I read these letters and I wanted to be Velta. I wanted the clouds of white air filling my lungs, burning me from inside out. I wanted to be the one who had made sacrifices and could later write about it so poetically. I told you I had a habit of posturing. The sad truth was that not much was happening in town. Other than facts Mother gleaned from post-office gossip (former Game Warden Lukin was in stable condition after his wife hit him about the head and face with her prosthetic leg, one of the tie-dyed T-shirts given to the Lithuanian basketball team at the Barcelona games in 1992 was currently on eBay for more than five hundred dollars, Jutta now looked like she’d swallowed a cabbage), I didn’t have much else to write to David. So I used Velta’s letters as fodder for my own. I wrote: A ripple of fingers over the piano’s white teeth, a child’s sharp cry of delight. Is this a kind of love? Posturing and petty theft. Guilty on both counts.
To my extreme delight and relief, David replied to my letters. He apologized profusely for not writing to me first. In his missives he joked about the hygienic shortcomings of his roommates, the difficulty of his many exams, a recurring problem with headaches, and how much he wished my eel hadn’t caught fire in the hall kitchen during Jutta’s wedding reception, preventing our meeting at the river that fateful night. He was so kind as to assure me—repeatedly—that even though eel was not kosher, had the ovens and their contents not gone up in flames, most certainly he would have eaten it with terrific relish because my hands had prepared it.
Heartened by this endorsement, I borrowed Father’s Bible, put on a pair of white gloves, and copied verses from the Song of Solomon, that surprisingly steamy book of the Old Testament.
By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth:
I sought him, but I found him not. I will rise now, and go about the city in the streets, and in the broad ways I will seek him whom my soul loveth.
As I copied passages from Solomon’s book, I became the Shulamite girl, separated temporarily by time and distance from the one her soul loved. And with each passage I copied, David became more and more like the lover of the Shulamite girl. Each new letter I wrote was another small test, a fleece by which I could gauge David’s true heart by his responses. If he retreated to banalities of weather or, worse, hockey, I would have my answer: he was merely being courteous to a girl with big hips and bad skin. But if he replied in kind, then I would know he liked me. After I posted a letter, my moods careened as I imagined the worst until the day I received his reply.
Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep that are even shorn, which came up from the washing; whereof every one bear twins, and none is barren among them.
P.S. You’re right about Jutta—she’s due to have a baby in a week—a boy according to the ultrasound. If all goes well, I’ll be there for the celebration.
We women up and down the lane had figured that Jutta was expecting: she’d been sighted in a bus carrying squares of soft fabrics—the kind used for making baby things. We’d also observed her circling their yard, clearly trying to hasten things along. Mrs. A. had been taking bets on the due date. Reading the news written in David’s hand is what made her baby real to me. That was the week I dredged a new path to the post office. With each trip, I slowed my pace, straining to hear the sharp and fitful cries of a newborn.
What else could I do? My entire body was possessed with a restlessness that nothing—not even hunting the spring morels—could quiet. I thought perhaps I had contracted an illness. But one morning when I was on my way back from the post office, Stanka stopped me and examined my face carefully. Then she laughed. “A donkey should piss in my eye! You’re in love—I can’t believe I didn’t see this sooner!”
“No, I’m not,” I said. For some reason I could not name, I did not want to tell Stanka about David. Not yet.
Stanka clasped my hand in hers and squeezed her eyes closed. “Yes, you are. And all these trips to the post office mean he lives out of town.” Stanka squinted. “Yes, I can see quite clearly, you are in love with a man of greatness.”
I sighed. “It’s just his ears. They are quite enormous if you have to know.”
Stanka uncurled my fingers and peered at my open palm. “Soon you will be together. You will marry—in the hall, of course—and you will have many, many children.” Stanka smiled and patted my hand.
The next day Jutta didn’t appear in the yard. I knew it could mean only one thing.
It was on an evening of lashing rain that we heard pounding on the back door. I ran to the door, hoping it was Stanka with news of the baby.
“Finally,” Rudy said, shrugging out of his coat. With him was Ligita. Apparently, they’d kissed and made up. Rudy bustled past me for the kitchen table where he pulled out our best chair. He waved Ligita to the chair, where, without a glance at me, she sat and pulled her purse—cheap imitation leather—into her lap.
Sensing another female presence in the house, Mother rushed into the kitchen. Behind her came Father.
“Rudy!” Father cried. “Such a surprise!”
“Usually you just call us on the phone when you want something,
” Mother observed.
Rudy blushed and looked at Ligita. Rudy had washed out at university, but he had managed to get into one of the best technical schools where he was now only weeks away from earning a surveyor’s license. Rudy cleared his throat. “You remember Ligita.”
Certainly we did.
Ligita seemed glued to the chair. She looked as if she’d poured herself into her clothes or perhaps the clothes had been spray painted onto her body. Yes, her jeans and sweater were just that tight, and looking at her filled to overflowing, her cup running over, looking as if abundant life had overwhelmed her, I knew she was pregnant.
“We’re marrying right away,” Rudy said.
“Why?” Father was incredulous.
Ligita folded and unfolded her hands in her lap, and stared at Mother’s dishes in the cupboards.
Rudy blushed again. “For all the usual reasons.” Rudy patted Ligita’s stomach and then it was her turn to change color.
“We’re in love, quite obviously,” Rudy said.
“Quite obviously!” Mother beamed. “Love. Marriage. Another wedding. We’ll hold it at the hall, of course.”
“Of course,” Ligita said. Her dark eyes shone like obsidian. In less than a minute she had Mother figured out entirely.
“Well, I, too, am in love.” Father passed his hand over his heart.
“Really?” Ligita ventured.
Mother tucked a strand of her dark hair behind her ear and snorted. “Don’t encourage him—please.”
