The Hidden Letters of Velta B.

by Gina Ochsner

  That night I fell asleep thinking of your father. Thinking of you—my only link to him. I wondered if my dating Joels was a betrayal, and if so, was it a forgivable offense? I slid into sleep, dreaming of the woods near our house. In the manner of a dream, illogical smudges of sound and image, I found myself gathering penny bun mushrooms in a basket made of hedgehog quills. As I reached into the basket to examine my haul, instead of mushrooms, I withdrew a baby, no bigger than a beating heart. I touched its navel, a tight pink throbbing knot. “How dare you!” the baby cried in a tiny baby voice. Its amber eyes were furious. And afraid. Of me. If I unknotted the navel, I would undo his fragile body and he would disappear. The very memory of him would vanish. And then the baby bit my hand. From far away came the sounds of a woman. Not me, I told myself, not me crying, smothering my cries. Not me smothering my angry baby. Again, a womanly cry. Ligita, crying for the one she’d lost.

  Our first date ended with a handshake. Our second date ended with a proposal of marriage. It was late August, twilight, and we went to the river to stand on the little footbridge, the only good thing that had come of Mr. Zetsche’s enterprises. The railing was strong and could bear the weight of many fishermen and their poles. From this small height we could see the moving water below us. Above us, the storks sat in their enormous nests wedged in the telephone poles and oaks. They clacked their beaks and made strafing calls, what they did just before they flew to their winter grounds.

  “Not a musical sound,” Joels remarked.

  “Not pleasant, no,” I agreed.

  With massive ungainly flapping, they were off in droves, darkening the sky. A beautiful sight, birds and the sky becoming one dark thing together.

  From my pocket I withdrew a few buns. I’d put extra anise seed and butter into the dough because the fish liked it better that way. From a black pocket of still water carp broke the flat skin of water with their kisses. Other fish, trout and perch, nosed to the surface. Dark gray, calamine blue, olive with spots of yellow, a riot of color swam beneath us. As they fought over the mayflies, the blue of one fish so near the green and yellows of another, the water turned gold before our very eyes. A shifting darkness above, a shifting gold below.

  We stood there together, not speaking, not needing to. The water went flat and stars swam on the surface.

  Joels put his elbows on the railing and leaned over the water. “You know what makes the light of the stars so sharp, so raw?”

  “What?”

  “They’re lonely.”

  I looked at the stars on the water. “In the old story,” I said, “the lonely hedgehog in the forest must huddle with others of his kind in order to stay warm. In huddling, they harm one another. But if they don’t do this, they most certainly will die of cold. The huddle is worth the hurt.”

  Joels studied me for a moment. “Inara,” he said, “you are absolutely normal. I hope you don’t think this is too forward. But it seems to me that I could use a wife and you could use a husband. And”—here his gaze settled on mine—“I like you well enough to marry you.”

  There was something completely adorable in the way he worked himself toward genuine affection, and because Joels was Joels, as honest as the day, I knew whatever he said, it was exactly that—genuine. “That sounds reasonable to me,” I said at last. “If we marry, I will walk with you the whole way.” These were the very words Mother told me that Grandmother Velta had said to Grandfather Ferdinands when he asked her to marry him.

  Our nuptials became a matter for your grandmother’s “Kindly Advices” column: Received a sudden proposal of marriage? Say yes before he changes his mind. This suggestion received a record-breaking number of responses, all outlining the number of swift courtships and subsequent marriages that had ended disastrously. Of course, this necessitated a lively barrage from “Biruta Responds!” Your grandmother was the happiest I’d ever seen her.

  Women, take a firm hand with your husbands. They are like large children. Feed them then tell them what to do. Failure to do so will allow them too much free time and we all know what a danger that is!

  And then, as she so often did in her columns, she gave helpful tips on how to read an oven, how to marinate an eel, how to remove pills from a sweater. For the segment on home remedies, she relied on Stanka.

  Got gout? Soak a cabbage leaf in vodka for two days. Then drape the leaf over the gouty parts. No, really. Do it.

  Words knock like the stones of plums against my teeth. They tap against the shed. I don’t know if it’s Mother tapping at the typewriter or if it’s you and Little Semyon working in the kitchen. Is this how words travel from one place to the next, from one body to another? They won’t mean the same things those words: stone, river, salt, thirst. But they make the same sounds. I should have remembered this. Siberia, someone said, and Mr. Gepkars threw his hands up like he’d been shot. Go on, he said. Go on and laugh. Go on outside and play in the dirt. Go on, he said, go on. But his voice sounded like a shovel turning dirt.

  That was my dream, as thin as an eyelash. And tap, tap, tap I heard the typewriter. Go on, it said. Go on, bury me. I woke up on fire, flames in my feet, soil in my mouth. I felt afraid. I said, Read to me, read anything, anything at all. Go on. Go on. You read from Velta’s letters.

  Meanwhile, the sun cut itself on the jagged horizon. Night was a knock on the door. The crows tapped their beaks, winged their dark witchery over the land. Meanwhile, the woman took a hammer to a stone. She broke the stone into chunks and the chunks into smaller bits. She poured water over those bits and stirred it into a slurry. They have taken our men and our boys to quarries and mines. They will break our boys to bits. She stirred the slurry, tipped the bowl, and drank it dry.

  There you are in Joels’s blue chair watching me now. I’m no longer afraid. Are you very tired? you ask me often. Sleep and I’ll watch over you, you say. Dream, you say, and I think that’s what I’ve been doing all this time. It is harder for me to parse night from day, then from now. It’s like trying to separate water from water with a comb; there are no teeth fine enough. I sometimes wonder if it’s even you sitting in the chair. Maybe I’m dreaming you. But then I’ll see a stack of letters, musical scores, the photos, and I’ll remember. I was telling a story. No story should be left unfinished.

  My long walks down the lane to Dr. N.’s, the dig and pitch of the muck shovel in the barn, rocked you to sleep. I loved the grainy air in the barn, damp, chalky with the smell of hay and warmth. I loved the smell of Dr. N.’s tobacco, vanilla, cherry, apricot. He carried entire orchards in that pipe. As I cleaned the lab, light warmed the windows. And I found myself often looking through them, awaiting the arrival, or the return, rather, of Dr. N. and Joels. It was their habit to ride the little red scooter to nearby farms at four and five in the morning. Around nine, they’d return, their two large bodies balanced carefully on that scooter that strained beneath their combined weight. The rest of the day they ran tests of the milk samples and looked after the cows in the barn, the control group, Dr. N. called them. These cows were fed a steady diet of genetically engineered grass. Now that we were an item, Joels and I were under strict orders not to smooch in front of the cows or say anything remotely amorous or humorous. “It’s all about the ambiance,” Joels explained, in a reverential hush.

  I tried to wear the latex gloves while washing. But my hands had swollen, my fingers turned to thick sausages. So, as Mother always had, I cleaned without gloves. By autumn, I had washed so many of Dr. N.’s test tubes in bleach water that my fingers always felt slippery. One day I showed Mother my hands, blaring red at the palms, white at the tips. “Oh, they do that at first,” she said. “Eventually, you’ll lose feeling altogether at the ends.”

  Closer inspection revealed that I’d lost my fingerprints. I was like those birch trees, shedding skins and forgetting with each passing season who I was. I could understand now—just a little—why Mrs. Lee corrected anyone if they referred to her as Chinese instead of Korean and why Mrs. A
rijisnikov was quick to work the topic of Almaty, her hometown, into any conversation. Why Uncle Maris had been so bombastic about his service record. These were verbal fingerprints pressed into conversations that became a second, better skin. But who was I becoming? I could not read my skin as it was shedding daily, and daily I was being rewritten.

  At this time, Ligita and I made our wedding plans. My engagement forced theirs as it’s the height of bad manners for the younger to go ahead of the older. Jumping in puddles, they call this. Complicating matters further, Mother and Father could not afford two church weddings or even two dresses. This reality brought on waves of tears from Ligita. I believe she wanted to float in gauze down the aisle of a grand cathedral. I, too, had privately nursed such fantasies. Mother wasted no time in setting us straight.

  “In my day girls rode the bus to the city and registered with the civil clerk. We dressed as smartly as we could and had our picture taken. All in all, it was very nice. I think you two girls could do the same. Afterward, we could have a reception at the hall—if we do it on a Saturday.”

  Sensibly, we both agreed. The date set, Mother and Father felt it high time they meet the groom. The next evening Joels arrived with a bouquet of marigolds for Mother.

  “Inara says you are Estonian?” Mother ventured, as she set out the tea things.

  “Yes.” Joels’s gaze remained on the tabletop.

  Mother sighed. “A very clean country.”

  “And how do you feel about cemeteries?”

  “I adore them,” Joels said.

  “And are you a drinking man, then?” Mother scrutinized Joels’s face for signs of liver strain.

  Joels coughed. “Only to fortify my intestines and give the bowels something to think about.”

  A thorough silence descended. Once bowels are mentioned, it’s hard knowing in which direction to steer.

  “Inara is pregnant, you know,” Mother said at last.

  “Oh, yes.” Joels found my hand under the table and gave it a squeeze. “She is great with child and I am ready to support a family.”

  “Well, this has been a very good talk,” Father said.

  “I always did like Estonians.” Mother turned to Joels. “I’ve known several who could be quite sensible and generous—when the occasion called for it.”

  In three weeks time, as we had planned, Ligita and Rudy married first, and on their heels Joels and I registered with the clerk. Each of us paid the registry fee and acted as witnesses for the other. “So happy,” the fuzzy-haired clerk murmured. “I’m sure you’ll all be so happy.” A tepid smile said she doubted it. We rode the bus back to town.

  Anxious to make their appearance at the hall, Rudy and Ligita went on ahead while Joels and I walked toward Mr. Zetsche’s new footbridge. This was something newlyweds did—walk by water. Some newlyweds wrote their sins on stones and threw them into the water. Others scratched their names on padlocks and hung them from the rails of bridges. Joels and I stood shoulder to shoulder and watched the pass of clouds on the skin of the river. After a while, Joels withdrew a padlock from his pocket and snapped the lock around Mr. Zetsche’s new railing. He had had our initials engraved on the lock. “Here.” Joels pressed the key into my hand. “You do the honors.”

  I held the key in my hand. “I will walk with you all the way,” I said.

  This is what Velta had said to Ferdinands once she finally decided to marry him. And then I threw the key as far as I could downriver.

  By the time we reached the hall, the wedding celebration was in full swing.

  “Here they are, the lovebirds!” Mr. Arijisnikov called out, and the men made good-natured jokes in poor taste until Mrs. Arijisnikov flung open the door and herded us all in.

  When they saw us, the Merry Afflictions struck a chord and everyone clapped. “It’s time for a toast,” Mr. Lim cried, and cups of black balsam made the rounds.

  “May happiness brood over them.” Mr. Ilmyen raised a glass. “May the tears soon cease to flow,” Mr. Gipsis said.

  Father and Rudy and Joels lifted their glasses and the band launched into “Many White Days,” a song mandatory at Latvian weddings. Joels guided me across the floor through the entire song and halfway through Charlie Parker’s “Bird of Paradise,” the whole time counting the beats under his breath. As happy as we both were, I knew he would be happier if he was playing his saxophone. I touched his elbow. “Just play,” I said. “I need to sit down anyway.”

  Joels smiled at me gratefully. “You are better than normal,” he said, planting a kiss on my forehead.

  Oak boughs hung from the beams, and Mother had made swags of birch and pine for the sills. Every table had a candle, which I knew had Mother in a high state of alarm, but for our sake, she’d stretched herself. She stood at a long table, beaming from behind a platter of rasols, a potato salad Mother wouldn’t dream of serving without herring and pickles, beets and sour cream. She handed a plateful to Mrs. Gipsis. Mother liked Joels; when she said his name, she lifted her chin slightly. And she was happy to see so many people in the hall. The beautiful thing about weddings is that songs flow freely, as does the beer. Everyone attends even if they find the bride or groom utterly loathsome.

  Father, too, was happily conversing with Mr. Baltmanis about the theological implications of certain vegetables in the Bible. “Sadly, there is nothing written in the entire Bible about potatoes.”

  “What a shame,” Father concurred. “The hidden part of the slumbering vegetable is the most fascinating. It’s the unseen that holds greater value than the seen.”

  I thought of you turning silently in my womb.

  “Inara!” Jutta squeezed my shoulder. “I think marriage agrees with you. You are positively glowing. And your groom up there—what a man!”

  I blushed. “Yes, well. He’s a—”

  “Very hard worker. I know, I know.” Jutta patted my hand. “All work and no play, well, you know what they say about that, too.” Jutta winked and waltzed back to her family. No wonder she and Big Semyon kept the shades drawn.

  “Ahem.” Dr. Netsulis stood before me and bowed. “I am an old man with few pleasures.” He extended his hand.

  I rose and put my hands on Dr. N.’s shoulder while he searched for my waist. We laughed. And then we danced. If anyone, Stanka said, could have read my future and told me that everything that had happened, both good and bad, would have led me to this man who made the music my feet now danced to, I would never have believed it. I would have never guessed that happiness could find me twice in one lifetime when so many people never find it even once.

  Dr. Netsulis danced me closer to the back of the hall where Mrs. Gipsis had cornered Ligita.

  “And where is your father, dear?” Mrs. Gipsis shouted. Having taught the sixth-grade class for so many years, her hearing was not the best and she refused to wear any helps for it.

  For her part, Ligita, being half Ukrainian, was plagued with the western Slavic intonation that prevented most people from understanding her, especially when she mumbled. But Mrs. G. furrowed her brow and persisted: “Speak up, dear. The music is so loud.”

  “He is in Liepaja!” Ligita’s voice climbed to a volume that turned a few heads.

  Befuddlement seized every muscle in Mrs. G.’s face. “But why is he there when you are here?”

  “He is in PRISON!” Ligita shouted. “He stole a gun and shot a man in the head.” The music stopped for only a measure, and then Vanags launched into a lively reel. Mrs. G. patted Ligita’s shoulder and brought her a tissue. Poor Ligita. There is nothing like living in a small town to reveal your nakedness again and again. But there were benefits to this kind of life. Yes, now everyone knew where her father was. And we sympathized. Because in every household there was a missing father or uncle. A grandparent sent to Siberia. An alcoholic. A wife beater. Knowing these things, the hard things, we could come together and pretend that those things didn’t mark us forever.

  I watched Joels. Did he wonder what others
were thinking about him, of our marriage, of this baby I carried who was not his? Was he thinking about his family—Aunt Tufla? Or was it Tevya?—the one who had raised him and had chosen not to be here? Was he remembering her stingy love? Feeling it an injustice that she should be saddled with her dead sister’s child, she clothed and fed young Joels grudgingly. Every day at five in the afternoon, regardless of the season, she sent him to the mudroom where he had a cot. She forbade him to rise until seven the next morning. You asked him once how he had committed so many musical scores to memory, and he told you he had lots of time on his hands to do so. But he didn’t tell you how he did it. While his aunt wrote her scholarly papers for the academic journals, he sat on the edge of his cot and imagined measure after measure of music unspooling over the gray walls of the mudroom. The rufous-sided towhee trilled in soprano. The frogs belched baritone. Crickets were his violin section. The oboelike calls of the owls became his wind section. The wind roared like kettledrums and the rain tap, tap, tapped percussion on the windows and roof. In a few years’ time, he had composed entire symphonies, score upon score of joy and sorrow. And now all the pain and hurt and harm he carried came out of the sax, his instrument of joy and sorrow.

  That was him telling his story. And he was doing it for us, people he did not know. But that was the beauty and power of music. It undressed us all and made us honest in ways that nothing else could.

  Around midnight people began making their way home. Dr. Netsulis blew everyone a kiss then climbed onto his scooter and spluttered into the darkness. The Merry Afflictions packed up their instruments with the care one bundles the most fragile of children. Vanags brought around his ubersturdy Pobeda. The instruments they stowed first, the string bass in the front passenger’s seat where the safety strap was still in good working order. Ludviks, Mengels, and Buber climbed into the back, folding their legs to their chests. And then they sped off at breakneck speeds for the nearest bar.