The Hidden Letters of Velta B.
Page 16
Rudy returned from school a week later. He moved Ligita and her small wardrobe into our living room. From a hook on the wall, she hung her ballet shoes, drooping with disappointment. As she snapped open the wardrobe doors, we heard her anger. She flung a suitcase on the floor. In its thud we heard her fear and disappointment. About living arrangements. About money. About life ambitions. From room to corridor to kitchen, a small thunder followed behind her.
Ligita fought with me, too. Quietly. As we both began our days with touchy stomachs, each morning it was a race for the privacy of the outdoor toilet where Ligita had a small plastic bucket stashed for her own use. “What’s the matter with you?” Ligita demanded after I’d been inside the privy for a good fifteen minutes with my own small bucket.
I pulled a big breath through my nose. “Bad food, I think,” I said on the exhale.
“It’s your mother’s cooking.” Ligita brushed past me for her pail and emptied her stomach. But after a few mornings of this, I knew from the way Ligita narrowed her eyes when she looked at me that she’d guessed I was pregnant and had gotten that way simply to upstage her. Since then, on principle, she wasn’t talking to me, relying on Rudy instead to deliver messages, requests, and instructions. Especially at mealtime.
“Please pass the plate of greens to your sister,” Ligita said one evening. “Folic acid is very important to the healthy brain development of the unborn.” She delivered a significant look at my stomach.
“Greens are good for everybody!” Mother said, with tepid cheer. Judging from the bewildered look on Father’s and Rudy’s faces, they didn’t know about my pregnancy.
I excused myself from the table and went to my room. Though there was a chill in the air, I opened my window and lay on my bed.
“Burying them six inches closer just to make room for more plots,” a woman’s voice lamented. “Never in my life!”
“This new cemetery is screwed up like Russia, but with German precision,” a man’s voice replied.
Later, as dusk brewed, the talk turned uglier. Every town, I knew, had its secrets: stories, fables, and lies sewn together with silence, that most formidable stitching. This history lurks, literally, beneath the surface of any town, as we were all learning. Now that Father was disinterring the graves, it was as if that stitching had been broken and he were dredging up from those plots every stain and taint associated with each family, the things we knew or suspected but dared not voice: that someone in the Gepkars family had bribed certain members of a Soviet unit dispatched to our area with Bavarian cuckoo clocks (this was why no one in their family had been deported to Siberia); that it was because Game Warden Lukin’s wife regularly offered herself to a Soviet official in Riga that Lukin was given such a choice job; that certain people had provided certain information about certain other people and now those people had disappeared. Yes, Father had his work cut out for him, and though death was his business, I knew that the overlap of the living in the territory of the dead caused him the most heartache.
Father rapped softly on my bedroom door. “I’m awake,” I said.
Father sat on the edge of my bed and stared at his hands. At last he turned his gaze on me.
“You’re angry,” I said.
Father rubbed his hands over his face. “I’m too tired to be angry. But I’m disappointed. I won’t pretend that I’m not.”
“Rudy and Ligita are having a baby.”
“This is different.”
“Why?”
“Because you are my daughter. Not somebody else’s daughter. My daughter. And there is no man to marry you.” Father ran his hands through his hair.
I couldn’t help myself then. I cried. My nose ran. I honked into Father’s handkerchief.
Father patted my back. “Don’t cry, Inara. God has big hands.”
I blinked. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“His hands are big enough to carry even this.” Father nodded at my stomach, but his voice was sad and I knew this heartache I had caused, was causing, would be one more thing he had to carry.
“Well.” Father stood slowly and pulled the window closed. “I hope it’s a girl. I hope she will be like you were: a happy child.” Then Father did something he hadn’t done in years: he pulled the cover up to my chin and kissed me on the forehead.
I tumbled into a thick, hard sleep that left no room for dreams. When I woke in the morning, spring had shaken hands with winter. Across the lane shoots of fern and crocus pushed through the mud and with them a quiet shock of blues: Anna-on-the-ice and a clutch of Siberian iris. Father called this color crucial blue because he said it meant the ground had turned from its sleep and was ready for life. I sat on the edge of the bed, my stomach calm but my heart astonished by the change a single day brings.
That week Father worked with the backhoe by night and heeled in the stones by day. By the end of the week, most of the holes had been dug and place markers set, and Father was ready to move actual remains. Very sensibly, he removed the bodies in the graves closest to the lane and worked his way back toward the river. And by the start of the next week, he’d moved most of the Christian bodies, our uncle Maris included.
Meanwhile, a Mr. Serotsin from the Daugavpils Jewish Burial Society wrote a heated letter to Mr. Zetsche. This was intercepted by Mrs. Arijisnikov, who had the good sense to steam open the letter, call Father, and notify him of its contents before sending it along to Mr. Zetsche. Did Mr. Zetsche not understand that moving a body once it had been interred was the highest offense? Had he no regard for ritual or tradition? Mr. Serotsin asked.
A few hours later the black phone bellowed. This time it was Mr. Zetsche. He had received and read the letter from Mr. Serotsin.
“Tell the Jewish Burial Society that they have my sympathies, of course.” Mr. Zetsche’s brittle voice rattled Mother’s dishes. “They wish to revere their dead, which is fine. But they want to do it on the site of my future Riviera, which is not fine. Tell them to do what they need to do, but you’ve got to move the rest of those bodies. Soon. Subgrade is going in in a few days, and after that, the concrete will arrive.”
“But, sir,” Father objected. “I am just one man working here; I have no crew left.”
“Oh, not to worry. Moving, er, things from one place to another is something Jews are especially good at. Just make sure they have plenty of rope. They’ll know what to do,” Mr. Zetsche assured Father. “But don’t let them operate the backhoe,” Mr. Zetsche added. “It’s new.”
And what of our manor house? I listened, shameful I know, at doors and windows. Mother and Father spoke in hushed words, but even so, I could hear their anger, frustration. Only once did Mother raise her voice and only once did she ever use that black phone on her own behalf; and in both instances it was to call Mr. Zetsche. She demanded to know how he had obtained the title and deed to the property. She had signed no paperwork and would have never in her right mind sold off her parents’ home. “It’s simple,” Mr. Zetsche said. “I’ve paid the back taxes. Also, I have a power of attorney on which your signature appears and just beneath it your husband’s. This is a perfectly legal and binding sale.”
“Those are our names, but not our signatures,” Mother objected.
“If you want to take this to court, I understand completely,” Mr. Zetsche droned. “But, really, my hands are tied. I’ve done nothing wrong.”
I could not escape the logical conclusion that all this was Uncle Maris’s doing. All that business with the yellow envelope, his insistence that I not ask questions. Uncle Maris had forged your grandparents’ signatures and sold the ancestral manor from under their noses. The money he’d received had funded, no doubt, any number of his exploits and possibly put your uncle Rudy through those first few years of school.
Mother slid the receiver into the holster.
“Is it gone?” Father asked.
Mother’s gaze never lifted from the wooden table. “Yes.” In that one word I heard years of hope dashed.
“Let me help dig. It’s the least I can do,” Father said.
“No.” Mr. Serotsin shook his head. “We will do it—our way.” With a nod from Mr. Serotsin, the men split into two groups, each of them carrying shovels and ropes to the farthest Jewish graves, where they began to dig. When the first group cleared a deep trench around a pine box, the second group worked the ropes through the large pulleys and snatch box that had been erected over the plot. Without heavy machinery, this was the only way to pull a casket from the ground onto the thick linen drop cloths. Then they began the slow pull over the grass.
All this Ligita and I watched from behind the gate. It reminded me of the times when Rudy and I were younger, watching the slow procession of the Jewish pallbearers carrying their heavy load. The men would take a few steps, stop, and carefully lower the coffin to let it rest for a moment. Then they’d pick it up and carry it a few paces more. And it was much the same way now: the men pulled the cloth sled several meters over the grass. Then they’d stop for a moment, as if to let the soul, tired now and perhaps disoriented, catch up with the box.
The next afternoon, a Friday, the men of the burial society—all ten of them—stood at the bus stop, the place in the road where the shoulder widened a bit. The last body had been reburied. Sabbath was only a few hours away; they were anxious for the bus to take them home. Overhead, a damp tent of clouds sagged onto the tops of distant pines, making the hour seem later than it really was. Father, with his cap in his hand, waited with the men. At last the bus rounded the corner. It grumbled toward the shoulder, jerked to a stop. The old door folded open with a hiss and one by one the men filed up the steps, the youngest first until only Mr. Serotsin stood with Father.
Father touched Mr. Serotsin’s sleeve. “You must believe me, we’re not bad people. Not really.” In his voice I heard that ancient question: Is it enough?
Mr. Serotsin looked at Father then turned his gaze to that dark sky lowering. “Every blade of grass is breathed upon and so blessed by the divine creator.” Mr. Serotsin reached for the door grip and hoisted himself onto the lowest step. “And you’ve kept the grass in the old cemetery remarkably well-groomed.” With that, Mr. Serotsin climbed the last steps and slowly found his seat near the front of the bus. The doors snapped shut and the bus rumbled down the lane, leaving as quickly as it had come.
Chapter Six
YESTERDAY, WHILE WE WERE WALKING among the stones, liquid weight gathered in my joints. You said that our bodies are two-thirds water. I think in my case the ratio is something like three-quarters. I wonder if this is how the eels feel, both buoyed up and pressed upon by water. It’s as if my body is being bent, stretched, reworked to become better suited for my next home built of a different air.
You’ve written about the secret lives of river rocks. Their yearnings for movement. Their dreams of an ocean of dry water. Their desire to sublime in fire, of being spun as light as ash so as to fly on the hot breath of a quaking mountain. Of liquefaction. Transformation. I think of your uncle Maris’s spectacular attempts at flight, both figurative and literal. The push for a different air, for weightless buoyancy. I understand the urge. All of creation, after all, trembles and groans in anticipation of change. Some of creation groans more loudly than others. You have my sympathy.
You told me about a dream Uncle had the other day. He sat astride a camel thirty hands high and as black as ink. They crossed the dark sands of the Karakum. Uncle rode four days without a drink of water. He rode so long that the camel’s fatty humps, having lost all their water, slid to its ribs and belly, where they bounced flaccidly. Even so, the camel strode across the sands without pause. Uncle was undoing the days of his life, one day per each massive stroke of the camel’s legs. He had done many wrongs, Uncle. This was going to be a long ride, he realized, as his tongue swelled inside his mouth.
“It’s a hurting thirst,” he told you. “It can’t be quenched with ordinary water.”
I find it odd that Uncle has grown so vocal of late. You theorize that he is talking his way, ever so slowly, toward something like the truth. I love this generosity in you and I hope you never lose that.
And I agree with you entirely: all of this life is preparation for the journey to come. This is not to say every creature is so keen for movement. I think of your grandfather’s work in the cemetery that summer I was pregnant. After all the bodies, Christian, Muslim, and Jewish had been relocated, it was time to move Old General. Father trenched around the oversize grave with Mr. Zetsche’s backhoe and discovered that the wooden crate containing the equine hero had rotted through and through. All that remained: wet amber-colored wood chips that crumbled to a chalklike paste at the slightest touch. The good news: Old General looked as fine as the day he’d first been laid to rest. That is, he was just okay. Father and Rudy managed to fit Old General in a harness and sling that they attached to Mr. Zetsche’s state-of-the-art winch. Five times Father put the motor in gear. Five times the sling jiggled and snapped tight, five times the winch stalled and the motor groaned. Father then looped a rope through the sling. He and Rudy and Mr. A., who enjoyed a spectacle for its own sake, all pulled and strained. Nothing. Old General didn’t budge a bit.
Every attempt Father made with the winch to dislodge Old General produced an equal and opposite force. That is, Old General wouldn’t budge.
“That’s it.” Father dropped his lead on the rope. “I’m whacked.” The men went their separate ways. Rudy and Father trudged up the back steps, defeated. I drew my shades and lay on my bed. Headaches popped and fizzed like soda water. I felt as if someone had strapped a helmet of pushpins around my head. And this pain clarified my vision; everything I saw fell into two sharp categories—colors that hurt and those that didn’t. Deep green and blue soothed. Anything lighter than pigeon gray brought a low thrumming pain. Red, orange, and fuchsia—the shades of Ligita’s nail varnish—were excruciating stabs of brightness and saturation. Only in the dim light of dusk, in that time of seeing but not seeing, did I find relief. In darkness the world turned to stone. The blue-silver light of the moon fell heavy inside our rooms, heavy on our bodies. Heavy on our eyelids. You swam, a fish no bigger than a grain of rice, navigating your world of water. I couldn’t swim. I’d swallowed the moon. I was like Mrs. Lee’s chickens that eat tiny pebbles along the lane. Without constant friction inside their gizzards, they cannot digest anything of the outer world. What they need and what they want they must crush inside themselves. This is how the world becomes knowable: in tiny broken pieces.
And then one day the stone lifted. The glaring blocks of light at the window didn’t blind me. That morning I let Mrs. Arijisnikov at the post office know that I needed a job. I knew she would put the word in her husband’s ear. Mr. Arijisnikov had a mobile knife-sharpening service and always knew who’d just been fired and why. Sure enough, before true nightfall, Father went down to the river with Mr. A. to fis
h and “take a cup of tea.” That is, they were down at the water’s edge sharing a bottle, a necessary procedure before, during, and after any transaction, business or otherwise.
That very afternoon Mother burst into my room. “Hurry,” she said, helping me into my scrub clothes. “Mr. A. got you in with the Zetsches.”
“Who?”
“Mr. Zetsche!” Mother exclaimed.
“Where?”
Mother bit her lip. “At their new manor house.” Our old manor house. She was not fully resigned to the loss of the manor, I knew this. But she’d bite her lip till it bled before she said a word about it to me. “They need a cleaner who knows what a scrub brush is made for.” Mother bent and tied my shoes. She didn’t have to do this for me, but her doing that so I wouldn’t have to produced in me a sudden rush of emotion. I kissed Mother’s cheek.
“Don’t get carried away now,” Mother said, handing me her best bucket and even her gloves.
The Zetsches seemed both ordinary and incredibly mysterious. Was it that they’d cleared a grove of birch to make way for their circular drive with the walnut-size chunks of rock and agate? Or was it the new miniature iron stallions lining their drive? Five horses, each no taller than a meter, anchored the verge of green lining the drive. Each horse had been cast in a different pose: one ran, one grazed, another looked as if he were nuzzling an invisible open hand while another reared on its hind legs with its forelegs scissoring the air. Extraordinary, I thought, trying to calculate the cost of such ornamentation. But as I made my way to the rear of the house, the place where every worker knows to go, I could not help noticing the sheer volume of bird droppings smearing the head of each horse. This struck me as exceptionally ordinary.