The Hidden Letters of Velta B.

by Gina Ochsner

  I’m not crazy; at least I don’t think I am. But I will admit there have been times when I’m not sure which girl I am: the one in love with the man by the river or the one lying in bed talking to the man in the blue chair. Which story will this girl remember? In the days after I met David, my moods swung wildly between elation and despair. I thought often of the Ghost Girl. They say she crawls on her knees and knuckles through the river grass. She can assume many shapes. As you sleep, she broods over you with her dark wings. You know she’s been near if you wake with a sudden thirst and find water in the foot of your shoes. I knew of a farmer who found dark feathers as long as a scythe beside his pillow. He drowned his beloved dog to make her go away. I clung to those stories, to Velta’s letters, for their lurid strangeness, for their vivid detail, for a world made known by small solid things: forks and dance shoes, clover and eels. Only the act of reading and writing letters tethered me to a sense of time and place. I recounted for David how hundreds of storks—black and white—returned to their nests the day after he left or built new ones high in the riverside oaks and lindens and in the crotches of telephone poles.

  Father returned to work at the cemetery. Mr. Zetsche assembled a crew from Jekobpils to move the contents of the cemetery, and now he needed Father to write the names of the dead on a blueprint of the new cemetery to make sure everyone arrived in their proper place. “It’s very simple,” Mr. Zetsche assured Father one night over the black telephone. “The two land parcels are mirror images of each other. The only difference is that the old cemetery falls to one side of the lane and faces the river and the new cemetery rests on the other side of the lane and faces, er, other things.”

  Whereas the old cemetery featured stately black alders and ash that yielded gradually to a birch at the river’s edge, anemic birches that year after year neither flourished nor withered marked the four corners of the property that was to be the new cemetery. A lone oak anchored the center. This parcel of land sat on higher ground than the old cemetery, a fact Mr. Zetsche was quick to point out. “You’ll thank me later,” he said again and again.

  Everyone else realized in no time how unalike the two parcels were. Those who determined that their family plots occupied the choicest spots—the ones nearer the lonely oak and the memorial for Old General, the most famous horse in Latvia—privately rejoiced. Those who guessed that their plots would be too near the plot designated for our uncle Maris uprooted Father’s string lines or switched markers. In short order, chaos reigned, and every morning Father tramped through the new cemetery and pulled out Mr. Zetsche’s map, looking at it this way and that. Then he’d shake his head and reset the string lines, knowing that by nightfall they’d all be moved again.

  Adding to Father’s worries was the fact that three of Mr. Zetsche’s crew, Jews from Daugavpils, quit and notified the Jewish Burial Society of Mr. Zetsche’s indelicate plans. Mr. Zetsche had no choice but to promote Father to project supervisor, foreman, and community liaison. Though this meant that Father would do the digging as usual, now he also had to endure the evening visits from the widows Spassky and Sosnovskis, who were now best friends. They brought rum cookies and birch juice, and begged Father to place their husbands in plots befitting their position of honor in the chess world. They provided Father with a new plan for the cemetery, which looked uncannily similar to that of a chessboard. Naturally, their husbands were to occupy the king positions.

  I wrote about all this to David; my frenetic writing was my way of shortening the days between our agreed-upon meeting, a way to dampen my worry that David had not replied to my letters. When the appointed time for our meeting came, I pulled on Rudy’s fishing boots, and despite Father’s strong sentiments regarding cosmetics, I applied to my face a generous coating. Then I went to the river. For the first three hours at the river, I fished. I caught a woman’s umbrella, which offered no help whatsoever when the clouds lowered and rain fell sideways and pounded the river like a thousand tiny fists. I stood on the soggy bank watching the water rise over the tops of Rudy’s boots. I stepped forward, felt the water at my shins, then my knees. I told myself I would wait for David for as long as it took. The rain quit and the light folded quietly bolt by bolt until the sky bled rose, bled lavender, then a deep blue. A horrible thought seized me: a good-looking and smart man like he was might have found someone else. I could not help myself. I sobbed big body-wracking sobs so powerful and grand that I was surprised by my own sorrow.

  I rose up to open to my beloved; and my hands dropped with myrrh, and my fingers with sweet smelling myrrh, upon the handles of the lock. I opened to my beloved, but my beloved had withdrawn himself and was gone . . . I called him, but he gave me no answer.

  I stepped forward. Water pulled at my hips. I had that sensation of being utterly split. Of there being two of me present at the same time: one in the water, bawling as if there were no tomorrow, the other one wondering, How much farther can I wade and still haul myself to shore? How strong am I really? I thought about my childish desire for water, weightlessness. I took another step and my breath came in sharp pulls. The cold forced a shift in my vision, and I saw myself from outside my own body. I saw how I looked as viewed through a camera placed at a distance then through the lens close up. I was a fat Ophelia, as sloppy as an unspun sonnet; my hair—a tangle of wet ropes—clung to my neck and face.

  I imagined David observing from the trees, somber and sad that he’d driven me to this. And then I took another step. I was in up to my chest. The water was so much colder and harder to push against than I had realized. I could neither fight the current nor find my footing; the boots had filled with water and each step pulled me farther out into the middle of the river. If I opened my mouth to call for help, the water would rush in. And who, on a night like this one, would hear me? And for the first time in my life, I doubted this river. For the first time in my life, I was afraid of this water.

  “Inara!” An orange float bobbed past; I grabbed for it. The line pulled me and I kicked for the shallows, where I imagined I’d see David. I sank to my knees and panted like a carp.

  I looked up. Not David, but Mr. Ilmyen, his sides heaving. He wiped at his face with a handkerchief. I crawled onto the soggy bank, and he pulled off my boots, dumped the water from them. “You know this river as well as anyone.” Mr. Ilmyen tossed one boot at my feet then the other. “You are a good girl and a good swimmer. But you are not a fish. What were you thinking?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  Mr. Ilmyen tipped his head, considering the possibilities. “Oh, Inaraleh, you have always been like another daughter to me.” Mr. Ilmyen wrapped his coat around me and I buried my face in his shirt. I cried, quietly at first, and then, because Mr. Ilmyen was so kind as to let me continue, even patting my back, I wailed and bawled until I had cried myself into quiet exhaustion and stained his shirt with my inky tears.

  You know your grandmother was a wise woman. She could look at people and see who they were at their core. A single squint and she’d divine your very essence. Though I often thought that she was too busy banishing every offending particle of dirt to see me, this was a failure of my imagination. The fact was her vision was never as sharp as it was that night I came back from the river. I found her kneeling in front of the oven, the earpieces of Uncle Maris’s stethoscope in her ears and the scope held to the back panel. She caught my reflection in the oven’s back panel. She maneuvered her head and shoulders slowly out of the oven and sat on her heels. “Every time you come back from the river, you are sopping wet and wearing somebody else’s coat. What were you doing out there?”

  I bit my lip. “Fishing,” I said.

  Now Mother looked me over carefully. “What did you catch?”

  I looked at my hands. The grass ring David had made for me was gone, lost in the river no doubt.

  “Nothing.”

  Mother frowned. “Let me make you some tea.” She wiped her hands against her thighs and dragged the kettle over to the
stove. “With honey.”

  I sank into a chair. Mother wet a tea towel under the faucet. “And let me clean your face. Maybe I should have said this more often.” Now Mother cupped my chin in her chapped hands. “Maybe you don’t know. You are so beautiful—in every way. You don’t need this paint.” Mother scrubbed at my face with the towel. “Besides, in my day only trashy girls wore makeup.” As she withdrew her hands, one of her fingernails raked my cheek.

  That night, as I studied my reflection in the darkened windowpane, I detected a tiny smear of blood on my face. I left it there. I lulled myself to sleep, and as I did, old words from an old song wove themselves into the loose fabric of night, a crow’s calling in the distance.

  Strange news flies up and down,

  Strange news is a-gathering.

  My true love has left town.

  My true love they are a-burying.

  The crow flew darkness into my sleep, where I dreamed my loves and I dreamed my fears. The Ghost Girl of the river called my name: Inara! Inara! I walked the river, took that old forbidden path to the manor. My feet sank to the ankles in a bog. The bones in my heels disintegrated, and with every step I took, my feet sank deeper into the mud until I went under, swallowed whole by the dark mire. I held my breath and I grew scales—beautiful periwinkle-blue scales, but no one could see them in the dark. Inara! David called to me. Come find me! I realized that I had never lost David—all this time David had been waiting patiently for me deep beneath the mud. But I could not swim to him: my arms had not yet changed to fins and I had not yet learned to breathe through my skin.

  I found Stanka two kilometers downriver. Though she advertised her dream interpretation services in Mother’s temperance newspaper, we all knew her claims were dubious. Still, I reminded myself that even a broken weather vane tilts in the right direction once in a while. She was hunkered over the riverside underbrush. In autumn she liked to look here for choice sooty milk caps, a mushroom good for marinating with onions. In spring she came to read the mud for signs of her family, as this was once a place they used to pass through on their way to the towns where they liked to buy and sell horses. But every spring it was the same story: the only tracks were those made by Mr. Ilmyen or me in our separate bids to catch fish.

  “I just had a strange dream,” I said. “I was wondering if you could interpret it for me.”

  Stanka merely grunted.

  “David appeared in the dream,” I pressed on. “He was supposed to meet me yesterday and didn’t. What do you suppose it means?”

  Stanka straightened. “It means you should wake up.” Then she scurried off.

  I turned upriver. As I passed the school, the windows of Mr. Bishofs’s classroom had been thrown open and the voices of his second- and third-year students conjugating German verbs at the top of their lungs rolled over the back of the fog. Mr. Bishofs believed in fresh air, though Miss Druviete, who taught in the room opposite, had a terrible dread of drafts. The two teachers spent most of their short lunch breaks opening and closing windows. They would probably get married.

  The Ilmyens also believed in the power of fresh air. As I climbed their front step, Little Semyon’s wails ripped the air into shreds, though Mrs. Ilmyen was doing her level best to sing her new grandson quiet with a lullaby I knew well: aija zuzu, laca berni and then another, something simpler and ancient and much sadder: bai, bai, bai. When I knocked, Mr. Ilmyen answered the door.

  “I’m looking for David. He wasn’t here yesterday and he promised he would be.”

  Mr. Ilmyen pulled the door closed behind him. “I know, Inara, I know.”

  “Why hasn’t he come?” Dread, thick and full, spread across the floor of my stomach, rose in my throat.

  Mr. Ilmyen gathered me into his arms. “He wanted to, Inara. He very much wanted to.”

  “But where is he now? Tell me.”

  “I am so very sorry; I thought someone had already told you,” Mr. Ilmyen said. Then he raised his gaze to the clouds. And that’s how I knew David was never coming back. Those headaches had not been about poor vision. He’d been ill all along and now he was dead.

  Mother met me on our back porch. “I’m sorry about your friend,” she said.

  “You knew?”

  Mother withdrew two letters from her apron—both letters in my handwriting, both returned to sender unopened. “I had guessed,” Mother said. “Mrs. A. delivered a black letter to the Ilmyens. I put two and two together. Also, Mrs. A. had steamed open the letter.”

  For the next three days I did nothing but wander up and down the lane in a daze. “You’ll find somebody else,” Ligita offered, by way of consolation. From time to time Father patted my head. Mother, too, only her hand held a scrub brush. For me, work, she was saying. It was the only way she knew how to purge herself of tragedy. Stanka brought me black licorice wheels. On the fifth day, after I’d exhausted her supply, Stanka sat with me at our kitchen table. The dishes were drying in the racks by the sink. I put my sorrow to good work and scrubbed the floor, but still I could not stop crying.

  “Inara,” Stanka sighed. “You can’t fart wider than your ass.”

  I wiped at my eyes. “What?”

  “There are limits. To everything.” Stanka slid her feet into her sandals and left the kitchen, a trail of sunflower hulls dropping in her wake.

  I walked through the woods. I thought this is what Velta would have done. She would have turned her sorrows under her feet, trod them like a stone, and kept on walking. So I walked through the scrub alder and birch to her manor house. I wasn’t happy and I knew I wouldn’t be for a long time. But I thought the sight of a familiar place, a place I had shared with David, would somehow bring comfort. I skirted the dark ponds, thinking I’d peer into a dark window and see the other me, a girl in a white dress with rush lights in her hand and man who loved her sitting in darkness. Instead, I saw a long flat piece of thin wood. On it seven crows had been nailed spread-eagle. They’d been left to rot. Feather, beak, and bone. That’s all that was left of them. A message, a warning to other crows, as death is the only thing a crow respects. But who would want to send this message here?

  “Hey!”

  I whirled on my feet. A man in overalls shook his fist at me. In his other hand he held a bucket with a trowel and brush. “This is Zetsche property. You’re trespassing.”

  That evening I tasted the salt on my skin as I tumbled into a fitful night of watery dreaming. Bloated with sorrow, my body was a buoyant sea, rising and ebbing. Three times in the night I had to go outside and use the toilet. In the morning the air smelled metallic and wet, like rusty keys or old wire fencing. The Arijisnikov dog, a herder with long teeth that was best avoided, took a sudden interest in the smell of my skin at the back of my knees. No matter what I drank—tea, coffee, juice—my mouth tasted bitter, like a new filling in a bad tooth. And I couldn’t eat.

  Always, I’d had a healthy appetite, but now the smell of Mother’s cooking lard and the sound of her pans rattling on the stove top turned my stomach. Four mornings in a row I did not sit with Rudy and Ligita at the table for breakfast. On the fifth morning Mother followed me outside to the toilet where I threw up, as faithful as the hands of the clock are to the hours.

  “You’re pregnant,” Mother said.

  I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. “Yes.”

  “Stupid!” Mother slapped me across the face. “Stupid girl!” Mother stormed back to the house.

  I want you to understand that I have always considered you the greatest gift ever given to me. You are living proof of the love that transcends the limits of a single human body, of time and space. They say that because God is omnipresent God loves us in the past, in our present, and in our future. I believe this not because I know so much about God, but because the moment I realized I was pregnant, I loved you. I loved the idea of you, the fact of your existence. I knew I would love you in the present and I loved imagining your future. Maternal affection pounded inside my heart, pushing o
n the seams and bursting forth like rushing water during a sudden spring melt. Such a surprise to me to learn that while I thought I had been so large hearted in my love for your father it was nothing compared to what I felt for you.

  You should know your grandmother Biruta loved the same way: beyond measure and without limitation. You must also understand that her not speaking to me for the next thirteen days (on principle, I knew) was because she had been raised in a traditional household. Hers was the traditional response. It would have been different if I had been a man, if I’d been Rudy. A boy who gets a girl pregnant is fulfilling a natural function, and as long as he marries, the whole world nods and winks. A girl who gets pregnant is a tramp, a source of shame to everyone who knows her. And whereas I had felt little shame before, and it surprised me that I could waltz around such a large emotion unscathed, I did feel the sure and hard knowledge that I’d disappointed Mother in ways she’d never imagined I could.

  One morning Mother followed me into the latrine again. This time she held my hair while I threw up. Then she wiped my face with a handkerchief. I knew that by these gestures she’d forgiven me.

  “Does Father know?” I asked.

  Mother tucked her handkerchief into her dress pocket. “Not yet.”

  “I have to tell him,” I said.

  Mother laid her rough hand on the back of my neck. Though her hands were not smooth—never smooth—they were cold and the pressure of her hands immediately calmed the nausea. “I’ll tell him,” Mother said at last. “Later.”

  I followed Mother inside the house and washed my face at the sink. Through the window I watched Father digging in the new cemetery. Even from my place behind the window I saw how hard it was for him to dig, how heavy the rain-soaked earth had become. And I could see, too, that Father was not as strong as he used to be.