The Hidden Letters of Velta B.

by Gina Ochsner

  Though it was Mother’s habit to pour water over Father’s words so they wouldn’t have a chance to firm up, Father merely winked at her. “Oh, yes, and they are beauties, each and every one possessing speed and balance and perfect symmetry.” For years Father had maintained a theoretical love affair with German-made automobiles. Whenever that slick magazine arrived at the end of each month, Father immediately retired to the latrine, where he gazed with sustained admiration at the many shiny pictures, the only luxury that Father allowed himself.

  Father sighed, a sound of vast longing that conveyed decades of wistful desire.

  “Someday I will have one of these lovely ladies for my own.”

  “What would you do with such a car?” Mother asked.

  Father looked at Mother as if she’d grown a third eye. “Why, drive it, of course.”

  Mother and Father wasted no time in setting up Rudy and Ligita in the living room. I repaired to the shed, where I felt I could pursue my literary endeavors without interruption. But that very first night, Rudy and Ligita rattled the wooden door and let themselves in without knocking.

  “I didn’t want to mention it, not in front of Mother and Father; they’re upset enough as it is. But there was a fellow on the bus asking after you.”

  “He had absolutely enormous ears,” Ligita piped up, and it seemed to me she was smirking a bit.

  “Anyway, this fellow wanted me to give you this.” Rudy handed me an envelope. I waited for them to leave then tore open the letter.

  For, lo, the winter is past; the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.

  P.S. Dusk is the best time to hunt for the magic fern that blooms. And the river is the best place—no?

  I glanced at my reflection in the window. Not cute. I whisked a tube of lipstick over my lips, pinched my cheeks for color, and pulled on David’s fishing coat. As luck would have it, Mother was busy showing Ligita the inside of her oven. I hurried through the cemetery. The rain had quit, and the earliest of the spring birds flitted and darted from the understory of the trees. The last light, fallen now behind the lowest layer of clouds, cast a horizontal beam that illuminated every drop of water studding silver and gold the buds of every twig of every branch of every tree. Suddenly, I was that Shulamite girl in a garden of diamonds.

  “Inara—over here!” David emerged from the brush. His gaze swept the open collar of his fishing coat and the neckline of my dress underneath it. “You look wonderful.”

  Behind his words, I heard Solomon’s script scrolling like a ticker tape. Dramatic, sure. And crazy. For me to fall in love not really knowing what love is but sure that I was consumed by it and that this must be a good thing. But it was easy to do as the clouds had folded down for dusk and twilight blurred sharp edges, forgiving any blemish. It was easy to allow myself to feel, to be carried away by feelings larger than any I had ever encountered before. David linked his arm in mine and we walked by the water. Eventually, our steps led us through the cribbed aspen to the manor house. It was the only tangible evidence that our family had once owned something fine, and I wanted him to see the crumbling stone statue of Venus rising from the dark pond and how the loss of her left arm and head only added to her noble bearing. I wanted him to hear the strains of waltzes spilling through open doorways. I wanted him to imagine, as I did, that we might someday live here together.

  We walked over the flagstone, which at one time, judging from the grout of weeds between each stone, had been pieced and fitted to such precision that a woman in rustling silk could walk without soiling her dress or feet. The mullioned windows of leaded glass and the intricate loops and curls of the decorative wood latticework wrapping the entire upper story of the structure suggested an elegance belonging to a forgotten era. And now, at sunset, when the last stabs of light lanced through the birch and oak, those windows turned to mirrors, casting light all about, honey thick and viscous. I wanted to drink that light, bathe in it.

  We approached the back of the house where the side door hung crookedly on its hinges. We did not light a lamp. We did not need to: by this time the clouds had thinned and the moon, round and full, threw rectangles of silver light over the stone floor. I unrolled his coat and spread it over the floor.

  When you were quite young, you asked about your father, the circumstances of your birth. You asked where he was. You asked me why I did not love him enough to marry him, and that was the question that convinced me, matters of tact and dignity aside, that I should tell you everything. You are my son, blood of my blood. You are David’s son, blood of his blood. And so I will tell you he had eyes as blue as a cloudless sky in August. In certain light they looked purple, in other light, silver. No one before had noticed me in the way a girl wants to be noticed. I loved him in the frenetic, anxious, giddy, soul-consuming way a girl does when she falls in love for the first time. I stumbled headlong and clumsily through a tumultuous array of emotion. Time moved in two speeds at once: dizzyingly fast as darkness fell around us, and at the same time as slowly as an old camera, the kind with a shutter snapping one frame after another: a look, a breath, a gesture.

  I know you understand. You’ve written that we inhabit mysteries we don’t have words to express. To read your explanation of the latticed nature of the universe makes perfect sense to me. I have witnessed the way needle ice grows slowly, knitting itself into sheets so solid they can support the weight of an army of elephants. I have rooted for mushrooms, have seen the thin white tendrils of the mycelium, that network of roots that binds one fruit of a mushroom to another that might fruit ten kilometers away. I know that the strength of lace rests in the knots that anchor the empty holes. That we are built of more space than solid substance seems in perfect accord with the larger architecture of our visible and invisible world. All fundamental forces of nature, all particles, you wrote, can be thought of as vibrations of tiny strings. A network of thread corseting the heavens, binding the deep. Strings finer than the finest hair, so fine no needle can work it. This intricate warp and weft of thread, this quiet industry, weaves itself on a vast loom that never stops growing.

  And so there we were, sitting beside each other. I had waited ten months to see David, but nervousness seized me and I could hardly breathe, let alone speak. And whatever ailed me seemed to afflict David, only it turned him strangely chatty. He told a joke about three retired Estonian race-car drivers. Jokes about the famed unflappable calm of Estonians is a sure icebreaker in almost any social setting. When David launched into an anecdote about a rabbi, a priest, and a mullah, I put a finger on his lips. “You didn’t come all this way to tell jokes.”

  “No.” David squeezed my hand.

  I looked at David, at his gray-blue eyes, and I saw the eyes of the famous lover, one who is beautiful in his coming and going, one who found beauty in an unlikely candidate, the dark Shulamite girl, misunderstood, shunned. So when I looked at my beloved, I could say, as the Shulamite girl did, that his head was as fine as gold, his locks as bushy and black as a raven. His eyes were the eyes of doves by the rivers of waters, washed in the milk and fitly set. His cheeks were like a bed of spices, as sweet as flowers. When I looked at David bending toward me, he was more than David the person, he was David of those passionate letters. David cradled my head under his arm and his lips were lilies dropping sweet petals. Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine.

  When I looked in his eyes, they replied in that same language, a language beyond words.

  Then I kissed him. And with that kiss, I was transported, divided. There were two of me. One kissing David and the other one hovering close by, watching. It was as if my life were a movie and I were both actress and audience. When he pushed my dress above my hips, I kissed him. And when he pulled my dress over my head, I kissed him because there was nothing dirty or shameful in any of it. I loved him and he loved me, and in this moment, we were f
inding the unsaid part neither of us knew how to say. As surface slid against surface, our soft geometries, we made a soundless language between us that only we two could speak, a language beyond words. And I suppose, as the audience part of me watched myself, that I was putting some distance between the act of love and the feelings of love. Because the truth was, the act wasn’t living up to my romantic imaginings. In fact, there was a moment of actual pain. Sharp pressure, wetness down below, wetness above. A tear rolled down the side of my face.

  “Are you okay?” David studied my face, the part of me beneath him on the coat. “Did I hurt you?” And I smiled, both versions of me did, because not for the world would I tell him that he had. After all, what’s a little blood between people who love each other? We pulled on our clothes; it was cold after all. I rolled up the coat, a spot of blood on it now, and both versions of me were glad for the incumbent darkness.

  Afterward, we walked back to the river.

  David pulled at a tuft of tall grass and worked it between his fingers. “What happened between us just now is the most sacred thing that can happen between a man and a woman.”

  “Oh, I know it,” I said. It was so sacred and special that I don’t think I’d ever heard Mother talk about it outside our house, or inside of it, either.

  “So, in way we’re married now, you and I.” David knotted some grass into a loop, slipped it as a ring around my finger. “This is a solemn seal between us.”

  I rubbed at the grass ring with my thumb. It was beautiful because David had made it, but it wouldn’t last a day in the kitchen.

  David squeezed my hand. “I have to go back to Riga tomorrow and I won’t return for at least two weeks.”

  “Why?”

  “I have to take some tests.”

  “Oh—more exams.”

  “No.” David reached for my other hand. “Different kinds of tests. For those headaches. I probably just need new glasses or something. I’ll be back before you know it.”

  “When?”

  David smiled, tapped the faces of both his watches. “Two weeks to the day. I promise. I’ll be here.” David planted a kiss on my forehead, one on each cheek, and another on my lips. “ ‘Many waters cannot quench love; neither can the floods drown it.’ ”

  I smiled. “That’s chapter eight, verse seven.”

  “Don’t forget it.”

  Through the cemetery I scurried. I had cleared the toolshed when the latrine door flung open.

  “Inara!” Father bellowed. “Where have you been?”

  “At the river.” I clutched David’s coat tightly to my chest.

  Father shined his flashlight on my high heels. “Quite obviously you weren’t fishing.”

  “No. I was reading.”

  Father shined the light into my eyes. “Reading?”

  I squinted into the light. “The Song of Solomon.”

  “Oh—the Bible—that I’m glad to hear. But if you are going to study God’s Holy Word, promise me that next time you will cover your elbows. Please don’t ever let me see you dressing like a Russian again.” The light panned my face and neck. “And wipe that mess off your face. It’s trashy.” Father pulled shut the toolshed door.

  My eyes stung. Never had your grandfather spoken to me like this. And then I felt ashamed. His eyes had measured me and found me wanting, and now I could not get to my room and wipe the makeup off my face fast enough.

  The week after I met your father at the river, we were nervous wrecks, each of us for our different reasons. Ligita listened to a German radio station in the dark and commented on her frayed nerves, which was why she couldn’t help in the kitchen or hang laundry. But she was tireless in her arguments with Rudy, possessing the stamina of a champion interlocutor who knew how to grind out an infinitesimal advantage and convert it to palpable gain. That is, she talked and talked and talked, her tongue the grindstone by which she wore Rudy down into numb submission.

  With a flashlight wired to his cap, Father spent long hours drawing maps of the old cemetery and the new cemetery. Mother worked longer hours, stockpiling for that grandchild she hadn’t planned on. And the weariness of a lifetime of hard work was beginning to show on her. Late at night when we washed dishes, she’d startle at the sight of her own reflection in the window as if, in the small signs of aging, she’d become a stranger to herself. Mother was not a vain woman, but she’d been proud of her hair, which all through the days of her youth had been as dark and shiny as wet stone. Over the last couple of years, she had acquired some silver hair on the crown of her head, and it seemed to me that these hairs were a growing record of the major stress-producing events in her life: the fall of the Soviet Union, the first democratic election, the hyperinflation that took nearly everyone’s savings, Uncle Maris’s boisterous decline and eventual death, and now this: the news of a grandchild, which announced itself as a bright silver streak at her temple. But I couldn’t work for anything. All I could think about was David. Was he thinking about me? How were his tests coming along? Was he leveled by those headaches and, dear Lord, I wondered, could I be the cause of those headaches? After I broke the third plate in one night, Mother tossed her rag into the sink. “What in the world is the matter with you?” She touched my forehead.

  I bit my lip. “I’m in love,” I said.

  Though the light in the kitchen was dim, Mother shielded her eyes with her hand and squinted at me fiercely. “You have too much common sense to fall in love. Love is for girls who can’t manage anything else.” Mother folded her arms across her chest.

  I studied the tops of my hands. Her comment was a compliment and an insult at the same time: I hadn’t had the brains for university, but at least I wasn’t so foolish as to hitch my hopes on any passing boy. I twisted the grass ring between my finger.

  Mother frowned. “Just how well do you know this boy anyway?”

  “Well enough to know we’re in love.”

  “And just who are his parents?”

  “You saw them yourself—at Jutta’s wedding. They are very fine people,” I said.

  “Oh.” Mother’s face went tight. “Relatives of the Ilmyens’?”

  “Yes.”

  Mother threw open the window and thrust her head over the sill. “For God’s sake,” she called over her shoulder. “Don’t tell your father about this; he has enough worries already.”

  “Tell me what?” Father called from the shed.

  “Inara’s in love—with a Jew,” Mother shouted.

  Father sprinted across the yard. He stood on the porch for a moment, catching his breath. Then he opened the back door and sat at the kitchen table. Though I could hear his heart thumping erratically in his chest, his voice was steady and calm. “We like Jews. The Ilmyens, as you know, are, for the most part, magnificent people. So then you also know that we absolutely believe in being neighborly to Jews in general.”

  “But that doesn’t mean you have to go around marrying them!” Mother said, reaching for a scrub brush.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  Mother fell to her knees and scrubbed the floor with the vigor of a woman possessed. “Because,” she said at last, “they aren’t real Latvians. Not Latvian Latvian. They are more of a European variety of Latvian, which is to say they have acquired that weedy continental look of people on the move. They also possess a harrowingly Hebraic sigh that discourages frank and open relationships.”

  I looked at Father. He lowered his gaze to the scored tabletop. There was no use arguing or attempting to adjust this opinion of Mother’s. She was not a mean-spirited woman, but she had always appreciated the certainties of classification; it was her way of keeping tabs on what seemed to her an increasingly unruly and disheveled world. “Besides,” Mother continued, resting a moment on her heels. “People who don’t believe the same way can’t be happy together. Trust me.”

  Father winced. But Mother continued. “We aren’t trying to ruin things. Really. We’re only trying to help.” Mother glanced at the livi
ng room, where Rudy and Ligita’s voices rode the rise and run of a swelling argument. “Anyway, don’t think for a minute you’re marrying anytime soon,” Mother whispered. “You’ll not upstage Rudy and have him jumping in puddles.”

  I fingered David’s grass ring. Time. Everything yields in time, I told myself. The time it takes for water to wear down stone. Eventually, even the sharp edges of Mother’s unassailable logic would blunt to nubs. Mother was right—I could wait. And while I waited, she would see how unhappy I was, and then some unknowable part of her heart would soften.

  Chapter Five

  DUSK FELL ONE GRAIN AT A TIME. I heard Mother singing out in the yard, a work song we all knew by heart:

  Trouble, my big trouble,

  I put it under a rock

  and kept on singing.

  I know she’s been gone for some time. But I heard her voice as clear and pure as cold water, and I hoisted myself up out of bed fully expecting to see her washing her coal-black hair in that old metal tub we keep next to the shed. I saw instead pigeons, light gray smears fluttering at the eaves of the Ilmyens’ house. High above the red tin roof, the geese, those dark knots, pulled a peasant’s twilight in their wake. Enchanted by the lull of this quiet spectacle, I floated adrift in a dream, extravagant, strange, and dark. Mother rose up from the river. Inara, come and drink this water that is so cool and sweet, she said. I’m not thirsty, I said. Come to the river where you can wash and I will baptize you, she said. You don’t believe in such things, Mother. I said. Her arm stretched long over the tall cow parsley, stretched long over the grass. Her strong arm hooked around my body and drew me to the water, pulled me under, held me down. No amount of thrashing from my arms and legs could free me. I struggled. I called out.

  I woke with a shout, my legs tangled in the blankets, my sheets drenched in sweat. I lay there bathed in quiet, bathed in gray light, my baptism. A puddle of river water beside my bed. You said, “Rest now, rest now.” But I heard “Go on and dig.” And I thought, Go on and bury me.