by Gina Ochsner
In handwriting belonging to neither Velta nor Ferdinands was something like a daina.
One girl sings in the river.
One girl sings from the stone.
Both sing the same song.
Could they be daughters of the same mother?
When the swifts dove from the lower limbs of the birch and burst from the eaves, signaling evening’s approach, I put away the cleaning things, tucked that music inside my coat, and headed homeward. The house was dark except for a sliver of light from the back room. I heard Mother speaking. “This happens sometimes. A little bleeding is normal.” I pushed open the door and saw Mother leaning over Ligita and dabbing at her brow with a wet cloth. Ligita lay on the bed, her face chalk white and her hair stuck to the sides of her face. A small dark blot of red stained her bedsheets. When Mother saw me, she drew Ligita close. I pulled the sheets off the bed, set pots of water to boil in the kitchen.
Sometime in the night, Ligita shrieked. A solid wall of sound that pushed every other noise out of the house. The house went utterly still, as if it were holding its breath. “Inara!” Mother shouted. “Come quickly!”
I grabbed some clean towels and rolled Ligita toward the wall. More blood and this time something else: a baby smaller than two pats of butter. Mother touched the baby once with the tip of her finger then wrapped it in a towel. I put the bundle under my shirt, holding Ligita’s baby to my chest where my heart pounded. I thought maybe my heart would be warm enough and strong enough to beat for this baby, too. Rudy and Father met me on the back steps. I gave the bundle to Rudy and we made the short trek to the cemetery.
Sometimes I forgot how intuitive Father was, how much he understood without saying a word. Already he had dug a hole, small and deep, not far from where our uncle Maris lay. Already he had found a small wooden box, the same shape and size as a cake box. Rudy held the lid and I placed the small bundle inside.
“Shall we sing for this little one?” Father asked.
Rudy’s gaze was glued to the box. “No,” he said, and turned for home.
After your auntie’s little one passed, darkness set up residence inside your uncle Rudy. He did not speak often, and when he did, it was to complain or make a sarcastic comment. He brought home a TV and watched it for hours on end. Sometimes he’d go out at night and not return for days. Your auntie would have drowned in her own tears if not for your grandmother. While I worked at the Zetsches’, your grandmother looked after Ligita. By look after I mean to say she put her to work. It was the best way to manage grief: putting up vegetables, laundering sheets and towels, digging a new root cellar. This is how Ligita learned the dainas her own mother hadn’t taught her: your grandmother at her elbow reciting the words, keeping time with her fist as she beat dough for bread.
For the next five weeks I kept on at the Zetsches’, scrubbing the heads of the small stallions until they gleamed. One day Father came by to visit me. Mr. Zetsche’s spare car, another Mercedes—this one soot gray—was parked on the drive. I could read in Father’s eyes how badly he wanted to drive this auxiliary Mercedes with the faux-leather bonnet, clean now from the grille to the side vents to the spoiler, the interior fumigated with an ozone box and each tiny slat of the air vents in the dash swabbed with cotton-tipped swabs, every surface loved by a golden chamois. But Father had his dignity. Father touched the chrome molding tentatively. He thought for a moment then opened the driver’s-side door. “I just want to sit inside. For a minute. Or two.” He slid into the leather seat, inhaled deeply. He ran a fingertip along the dash and then recoiled as if he’d received a shock. The gold key dangled from the ignition. Powerless against such temptation, Father turned the key. The ignition fired, the engine hummed—a smooth liquid sound of a well-oiled machine.
Father turned a knob at the end of the shifter and the windshield wipers swished up and down. Up and down. Then he turned on the radio and a Wagnerian opera commenced. It was a sledgehammer of sound disguised as orchestral music. Father twisted the knob gently and found Sibelius on another station.
“Sit with me,” Father said. I opened the passenger’s door and slid in beside Father. We inhaled the rich leather scent of good breeding. We watched the precise synchronization of the windshield wipers. Father’s hand trembled at the shifter then fell to his lap. He shook his head. “I can’t—it wouldn’t be right.” He opened the door and climbed out, leaving the keys in the ignition, the engine running.
I sat in the car alone and listened to the plaintive strains of violins and the swishing of the wipers. I studied Father’s stooped form. I thought about him, about Mother. I thought about the things each one of us had wished we had done in our short lives. And then I thought of our many compromises. We settle too quickly, our gazes falling lower and lower, until we forget our small dreams and then, worse, we forget how to dream at all.
It shouldn’t be this way, I decided, as I slid over the shifter into the driver’s seat. I ran my hands over the cherrywood steering wheel; I would do what Father told himself he couldn’t. It was the least I could do. I switched the radio back to the furious Valkyries. Transmission in gear, I pressed the pedal.
The car shot down the drive into the first miniature stallion. Clank, then a loud lug, lug, a shrieking whine as cast-iron hind legs tore at the undercarriage. Then clunk-clunk as the back tires rolled free of the fallen beast. Clank, lug, lug, screee, clunk-clunk as I plowed rank-and-file over every horse. Finally, the drive shaft of the Mercedes high centered on the raised front legs of the last stallion.
Father opened the driver’s-side door. “Inara!” he gasped, pulling me from the seat. We stood and surveyed the carnage. Steam hissed from beneath the crumpled hood. Father rocked on his feet. He doubled over. He roared with laughter.
“Oh, Inara.” Father clutched his sides. “If only your uncle Maris could have seen this!” Father rested his hands on his knees and waited for his breath to return.
I handed Father the keys. And then I went to Mrs. Zetsche’s linen closet and found her oldest sheets, one for each of Mr. Zetsche’s black stallions.
“I’ll be fired,” I said.
“Oh.” Father rubbed his chin. “Most certainly.”
“I should look for another job.”
Father put a hand on each of my shoulders.
“Time for that later. I’ll help you lock up. Then you can come home. We miss you at the dinner table.”
A few days later, the Zetsches returned from their continental vacation. The battered Mercedes we had pushed into their garage. The fallen horses lay shrouded in Mrs. Zetsche’s sheets. When popping gravel announced the Zetsches’ arrival, your grandfather and I stood on the drive like soldiers awaiting inspection. Slowly they passed the draped figures until they reached the garage. Mr. Zetsche climbed out of the car and stood for a moment studying the battered and broken Mercedes. Then he walked to the drive where he stood before each toppled sculpture, lifting the sheet quickly then letting it fall. All this time, Mrs. Zetsche, in shock, sat trembling in the car, murmuring, “Oh dear, oh dear.”
“About the horses,” Father began.
“Yes—vandals, pranksters—I presume.”
“No.”
“Who then?”
Father contemplated Mr. Zetsche’s shoes. “It was an accident. We thought—”
“We? Who is we?”
“Inara and I.”
“Thought what?”
“Thought it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to drive such a wonderful car. Just for a bit, you see.”
Mr. Zetsche waved his hand at the crumpled vehicle. “It was a repossessed vehicle. It wasn’t worth a pop. But the horses, you see, are a little more, er, problematic.”
“We will pay for all repairs,” Father said. “How much do you think we’ll owe?”
A smile devoid of any warmth surfaced on Mr. Z.’s mouth; the Italy-shaped birthmark deepened to a brilliant maroon. “Hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds—as many needles on a hundred pine trees.” An i
ndigestible sum. With that, Mr. Zetsche spun on his small heels and marched back inside his mansion.
Chapter Seven
I USED TO MEASURE TIME by how long it would take to wash, dry, and stack dishes. Hang laundry. There was never enough time for all the work to be done. That there is so much of it now stretching the ends of days while simultaneously Dr. N. tells me I’ve only a few weeks left is a strange conundrum. If your grandfather was here, I would ask him about this fluid time I’m living in and if it is how I am being prepared for the next life. Is this how, I’d like to ask, God sets eternity in our hearts and each thump from that wet engine pushes us just that much closer to the threshold?
At any rate, I’ve decided not to count the hours between doses. Instead, I will measure the change in light around me. Between the cracks of the jamb and door, roof and wall, light leaks in, a grainy dust swirling in viscous air, a galaxy of swimming stars. You are quite right: light is both wave and particle, I can see this now. This light pulses in my veins like electricity, febrile and alive. Insistent. I lie here and listen to you and Little Semyon working in the kitchen on the temperance newspaper. The clacking of the metal strikers sooting the paper becomes one and the same thing with the wild rye rubbing its rough stalks against the shed. The rattle of words is music to me, percussion to my rambling thought. This is how perception shifts and the ordinary becomes something hallowed and sacred.
I managed to get up and about without you today. I went to the cemetery. I wanted to watch you work. I passed Mother’s stone, Father’s, Uncle Maris’s. My stomach wanted to head north, my bowels south, so I sat on the wall to let myself recalibrate. It was a trick of the morphine, making me believe that I had my former strength. I made it to that wall and there I stayed.
In the pine woods
My rye has been sown.
In the pine woods
Are my hollowed oak trees.
The rye blooms, the bees hum.
I am beside myself with joy
This is the daina I wanted to sing. Instead, spent and winded, I sat on the wall and waited. Patience is the other half of courage, Joels used to say. Or, in my case, it is the accidental product of my foolishness. I had it in mind that we would sit, you and I, on this wall and listen to dusk spool up from the ground. We’d listen to dark wicker down in gnat and needle. Instead, it was Little Semyon who came along and—thankfully—saw me here. He carried me to our house as easily as if I were a child.
“Don’t ever do that again!” Jutta scolded. I laughed. Long and loud. Where did this laughter come from? It may be the effects of the painkillers, but I’d like to think that at last I am laying hold of joy, which is not the same thing as happiness—a capricious feeling as flimsy as thought itself.
Anyway, while in the cemetery, I touched up Uncle’s stone. What’s left of it. I thought maybe if I sat quietly enough I would hear his voice as you do. I sang: Soul awaken, soul arise, soul push that stone away. That his long and relatively quiet dormancy should be broken—and so noisily, so urgently—in these last few weeks has been a puzzle to me. My theory is that he’s been chattering away all along, but it is only now that he’s saying anything of importance.
Hell, he said, was to be abandoned to yourself, left utterly alone with your own self-awareness and memories. “Not quite what I had expected,” Uncle said. “This singularity of self. It’s one thing to maintain this position while alive and amid others. Quite another thing to do so when dead, and”—here, you say, he paused significantly—“all by oneself.”
Why, you have wondered, did I name you after such a cantankerous man? David, Joels, Eriks, Oskars, these are all good, strong, and worthy names belonging to good, strong, and worthy men. And you know how a name binds together the bearers as a loop, a link from past to present. I suppose it was an act of faith, my belief in the redemptive power of language, my belief that the boy might redeem the man. It isn’t correct Baptist doctrine, this idea that the action of the living can influence the soul of the dead. But the belief that names carry inherent power is.
I imagine you’re right. This must have been about the time when I stopped reading Velta’s letters. I should have given the letters, those I read and those yet to be decoded, to Mother. I should have done a lot of things. Instead, I hid them and told myself I was justified in doing so. We had plenty of other concerns, and those letters seemed a small thing at the time compared to my larger wrongdoing, what Mr. Zetsche termed assault, battery, and willful violation of possessions most precious. It took all of Father’s savings to pay for the damage to Mr. Zetsche’s car. Some good news: after a thorough examination, Mr. Zetsche determined that his miniature cast-iron stallions came through the fray with minimal damage. All they needed was to be reinserted into the ground. And so Mr. Z. had Father dig deep holes (“You’re good at that!” Mr. Zetsche joked over the phone). Then Rudy and Father reseated the horses on their pedestals and anchored them into the wet concrete. Mr. Zetsche was so impressed that he hired Rudy on the Riviera project as a surveyor’s assistant. It would be Rudy’s job to shoot lines and distances with a theodolite. When the trucks came with the crushed rock and cement mix, he could then tell them how much was needed and where.
Though she was not happy, probably would never be happy, Ligita took some consolation in his wages. The job paid well enough for her to buy blouses so sheer that we could read Mother’s newspaper through them. Rudy gave to Mother and Father the money left over from Ligita’s shopping. And how they needed it. Mother’s hands had turned so red and raw that when she tried to scrub the floor or wash a dish blood wept through her skin. She could no longer keep house for her clients in the city. I don’t think she minded—she wanted to spend more time with her paper. Quite a lot had been happening politically and economically. Parties were merging, new scandals were being revealed and there was lots of talk about the EU. If Latvia joined, as other countries had, Mother speculated that emigration would go through the roof, as all the good jobs were elsewhere. That was bad. On the other hand, instead of ten drunks lying about in a ditch, we’d have only two. That was good. Then there was the matter of carrots. Would the quality of imported vegetables decline or improve? As writer, editor in chief, and publisher, Mother was having a hard time keeping up. And so, as she had done for so many years, I made her rounds cleaning the hall, the school, and for the elusive genius Dr. Netsulis.
He was by far Mother’s favorite client. He never patronized her, never pretended to be interested in her personal life, her temperance newspaper, or our family. Nor did he seem, she said, to expect her to display undue admiration for his many smart inventions such as the automatic venetian-blind cleaners and candlewick trimmers, both of which commanded brisk business in Sweden. It was a working relationship and Mother preferred it that way.
“But to be frank, he wore me out, that one,” Mother confided to me the night before I was to make my first visit. It seemed that furniture, on principle, didn’t like him. In the days when Mother cleaned for him, she often witnessed his stumbling into chairs, tables, wardrobes, setting off a crash of dishes, an explosion of glass test tubes. The genius walk, Mother called it. Her advice: get out of the way or follow with a mop and bucket at the ready. It was also Mother’s conviction that the smarter her employers, the sloppier their bathrooms and kitchens. “They can’t help it,” Mother said. “Pondering all those intricate thoughts, they are utterly distracted.”
From the looks of Dr. Netsulis’s manor house, a three-story stone structure set in a boggy hollow, his intricate thoughts were of a phenomenal sort. I determined right off that I would need to devote two days a week—maybe three—just to set the kitchen and mudroom in order. While I cleaned, I made rhymes of the names of ingredients. I inserted lines from dainas, sang songs, moved around little pieces of sound, rubbing them into Dr. Netsulis’s transparent glassware. I told myself that you could hear me. As small as you were, you were listening.
On week three, as I cleaned the first-floor hallway,
Dr. Netsulis burst from his lab and stumbled into my oversize mop bucket. One foot tangled in the wringer and one foot on solid ground, he stood and puzzled over my appearance. And I puzzled over his. In those days he was as thin as a rake’s handle. He looked like a big wind might carry him off, which is probably why he had such heavy looking glasses—standard genius impedimenta designed to anchor his brains in place. A speckled film of dandruff, a constellation of stars, coated the lenses. And then there was the matter of his snow-white beard, as long as a goat’s and thick. Somewhere behind it was a mouth. And then the mouth appeared, a small dark circle.
“You’re not Biruta Kalnins,” he said at last.
“No. I’m Inara, her daughter.”
“Oh. I didn’t know she had a daughter.” He took in my work clothes, my hands, my work shoes—canvas sneakers with cracked sides. A look of kindly abstraction settled over his features. He withdrew his foot from the bucket and motioned me toward his lab. The door to the lab stood ajar; the smell of cherry-flavored cigar smoke filled the hall. A quick glance beyond his shoulder revealed two long tables, shoals of test tubes and glass microscope slides, all of them dirty.
Dr. Netsulis followed my gaze. “Ordinarily—you can even ask your mother about this—I keep a clean house.” A slight twinge of shame crept into his voice. “But I’m in the thick of a new top-secret project called Joyous Bovines.”
