The Hidden Letters of Velta B.

by Gina Ochsner

  Joels and I walked down the lane and through the yard to the shed. Mother had propped open the door to let it air. Father had moved the bed from their bedroom into the shed and dressed the mattress in her comforter and freshly laundered sheets. They had even stockpiled wood and kindling next to the stove, and strung a clothesline from one wall of the shed to the other. A fire sizzled and cracked inside the burzuika, casting an orange glow of shadow and light. Joels scooped me up and carried me over the threshold as if I were as light as breath. He set me on the edge of the bed. And then he spied the wheelbarrow full of the wooden parts of the piano. He surveyed the soundboard, the cast-iron plate, my clumsy attempt to secure the strings. He sank to his knees before the plate and board, as if in supplication. He ran his hands over the wooden pieces in the wheelbarrow and then again over the hammers and keys.

  “I can fix this.” Glowing reverence for the piano, for a piano needing him, warmed his words. I motioned to my dress, our bed. “Later,” I said, rising to my feet. Joels unhooked the clasp of my dress and helped me step out of it. He laid it carefully on the back of the chair. I helped him out of his suit jacket, hung it on Mother’s good wooden hanger. The same for his trousers, so the creases would hold crisp, and his dress shirt. His long dress socks. Then we stood before one another, contemplating our feet.

  “Well,” Joels said.

  “Well.” I studied the fire in the stove. “There is one bed and it is bedtime.”

  We looked at the bed. We looked at each other. “Do you have special preferences?” Joels asked.

  I coughed. “I-I don’t think so—no more than the usual person.” Now Joels blushed. “I mean for sleeping. Do you prefer the right side of the bed or the left?”

  “Whichever side is closest to the latrine,” I said, pulling back Mother’s best eiderdown. On the sheets lay a metal rake, a hoe, and a shovel: each pristine and shining. It meant good luck for our marriage, but they were very bad for sleeping on. Joels laughed, set the tools beside the fire, then we climbed into bed, Joels stretching his long large body beside mine. He hummed a few bars from a song. This is how for the first time we lay together, side by side, as man and wife. We listened to the dogs barking up and down the lane. In the comfort of darkness we spoke—quietly, of course. Layer by layer, Joels talked his way through the worries of his heart. Which is how I learned that he had entered an international coffee-flake jingle competition. He’d submitted three jingles. The winners would be announced in a few days, but Joels was in such a bundle over it that his bowels hadn’t moved in a week. Dr. Netsulis had given him some stewed figs, but that had only added to the problem.

  “Oh, Joels,” I said, stroking his arm. “I am so sorry.”

  He sighed. “The long and short of it is that my capacity for passion is utterly displaced.”

  “It’s all right,” I said. “It can wait.” I took his hand and placed it on my stomach, which was hard and tight like an early watermelon. I could feel the muscles at my hips quivering, signaling a contraction taking hold. Practice twitches, Mother called these. My body was teaching itself what to do when the time came.

  Joels lifted his hand. “Does it hurt?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “But watch this.” I rolled to my side and repositioned Joels’s hand. Just then you kicked so hard your foot threw Joels’s hand into the air.

  “Good God!” Joels exclaimed.

  I nodded my head solemnly. “I know.”

  Chapter Eight

  EVERY CREATURE CARRIES WITHIN ITSELF an internal clock, an unerring sense of when it is the precise time to do or not do something. I think this is what Solomon meant when he wrote that for every season there is a time. That stars slowly burn out and their light reaches us many years later or the fact that the seeds of certain trees cannot be released if not for a sudden and terrific heat confirms to me that we live in ordered chaos. I know it’s not fashionable to believe in God these days. This flabbergasted your grandfather, who saw in the veins of leaves and the striations of rocks evidence of a creator who loved his creation. He saw eternity strung in the stars and brilliant economy in the way, after a forest fire, the first trees to knuckle up through the scald are the same ones whose bark and sap we use to heal a burn.

  No, it wasn’t anger; it was more of a sorrow that he felt. I think there were days your grandfather actually grieved for God. Can you imagine, he asked me once, having your handiwork, the culmination of all your creative thought and dreams, dismissed as an accident or, worse, a mistake?

  Sharks expel their stomach once a month in order to clean them. Such tidy creatures! That is something, you wrote in your notebook, you very much wanted to see. The life cycle of a female octopus fascinated you, too. Once she has mated, she finds a secluded den and flattens herself in its dark recesses. She may brood thousands of eggs, and once they hatch, as small as sequins, they hang suspended in a lace of her making. All of her energy is devoted to caring for her young; she will not leave the den—not even to hunt. Once they are able to float free of the den, her final act before she dies is to exhale and send them forth on a current of her breath.

  You wrote about flecks of light buried in certain rocks. Reading your Book of Wonder, your words returned me to a time when I had a heightened sense of awareness and awe for every living thing.

  It was as if I had been blind, deaf, and dumb, and now in everything I could perceive order and design, be it found in a creature as small as the bee, whose drowse and hum I now pair with the fall of the apples and their hard turn to vinegar, or something as vast as a field of rye and the wind sighing through it shhhh-shhh-shhhh. By mid-October, the abandoned storks’ nests atop the telephone poles had sprouted thick ferns. It was now Mikeli, the time the ghosts knock on windows and doors asking for a cup of water. If you give them one, it means you will die next. If you feel a sudden thirst, you shouldn’t drink lest you drown on that water. Certainly, you should not go to the river.

  Your grandmother recorded all this in her newspaper, and I do believe that her devotion to this kind of folklore was therapeutic. But the ferocious attack of her fingers on the typewriter keys suggested to me that she’d not quite forgiven Uncle for selling the manor house. You can’t hate a dead man forever, but she did bear this loss heavily. It was a good thing the German Olympia was such a sturdy model; few others could have borne her fury.

  Meanwhile, your grandmother ran some racy advice supplied by Mrs. Lim called “Your Cabbage and Furious Fermentation.” Apparently, cabbage, when left unsupervised, yielded a robust alcohol; three squirrels and one hedgehog had died after imbibing. “Keep that stuff away from my cows,” Dr. N. said to me, as I cleaned one day. And then he added thoughtfully, “But I myself wouldn’t mind a sip. Or two.”

  My feet had grown so heavy I thought they were anchors pulling me into the ground. I couldn’t bend over without losing my balance. Dr. N. lowered the seat of his scooter so that I could duck walk it through the hallway. I attached the mop to the backseat and this is how I cleaned his floors without ever getting down on my knees. If I sidled it up to the laboratory sinks, I could wash the beakers and test tubes while sitting. “Like a lady,” I told Mother, though I had to straddle the seat, which wasn’t so ladylike.

  At Dr. N.’s manor house, Joels hovered constantly, asking, “Can I bring you anything?” His attentiveness was so sweet that sometimes I said I could use a glass of water when I didn’t need one. Joels had already collected the data from the various cows at the nearby farms so now Dr. N. worked in furious solitude. All Joels had to do was feed and muck the cows in the doctor’s barn and contemplate more jingles. He’d placed second in that coffee-flake jingle contest, to the great relief of his knotted bowels. About this same time, Chem-Do Dry Toilets announced that they were sponsoring a jingle-off for their newest line of outdoor mobile toilets: the Tuxedo Toilet. Joels immediately set about finishing repairs to Velta’s piano.

  This he was doing late one afternoon. Darkness fell in damp folds out
side the shed.

  I folded laundry inside and watched Joels. There is something beautiful about a large man doing delicate, intricate work. With such care, he secured the pinblock and hammers; with such tenderness, he tapped the keys. I loved his devotion to the small and fragile. Anyway, after some plinking, Joels leaned back on his heels. In the air his hands drew a tall box, as big as a coffin but wider.

  “Imagine if you will a completely sanitary, completely dignified, and completely private portable latrine experience. Imagine the Taj Mahal of toilets.”

  “All right,” I said, closing my eyes. “I’m imagining.”

  “Okay. Now the jingle: If you must go, then go in style. Tuxedo Toilets: a class act.”

  “That’s very good,” I said. Sometimes it was necessary to refrain from saying difficult things, like the truth, for the sake of a healthy relationship. We called it “speaking through flowers.” Some people call it lying, but I prefer to think of it as compassionate avoidance.

  “Or how about this: cushy-tushy—so comfortable you’ll never want to leave.” Joels, I noticed, had his eye on his sax standing at the ready.

  “Also good.”

  Joels reached for his saxophone, dug in his hip pocket for his mouthpiece, licked his lips, and played a few measures. He sang the jingle. “Don’t have a moment, have an experience—classy assy.” Joels paused. “Well?”

  “It’s nice,” I said. “It’s very nice,” I said again. Maybe Joels had heard of creative avoidance as well; he threw himself into cleaning his spit trap as if his very life depended upon it.

  Night school. I think it’s a fabulous idea; plenty of people your age and some much older have done quite well by it. The suggested reading list has me a little perplexed. Pushkin makes sense to me, but The Sorrows of Young Werther? Is it a good idea for a young man who makes his livelihood digging graves to read such a depressing book? You assure me that it is most suitable for a moral education. After all, in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the monster has it at the top of his reading list.

  You’ve lit the burzuika and I’m glad for crackling heat that dries the jelly in my joints. I do not wish to complain, but you asked me what it felt like to die and I’m telling you. Pinches at the wrist, a buzz in the back of the brain. And the pain is a harmonic series of sensations, each piled on top of the other. On knees and knuckles, the cold creeps in. I feel it tighten over my ribs with each draw of breath. Cold is the devil’s carpet, ice his only friend. He rides the bitter winds looking for a place to land. Restlessness is his soup and bread, but all the devil really wants is sleep. This is why, if caught out in the cold, you should never let yourself succumb to the urge to close your eyes. The devil will seize your body, pull your skin over his, and sleep inside your body for a thousand years.

  It’s a kind of hell, desiring sleep and not having it. You tell me that Uncle complains of insomnia, how it burns holes through his stomach. I don’t understand why his experience should be so different from others. Mr. Dumonovsky told you that after he felt himself thrashed and threshed his mistakes, sins if you will, were milled to a fine powder and carried off on a wind. He was never so glad to see a thing go. Afterward, that same wind shouldered through what was left of him, passed through him as breath on paper, as paper on a comb, and made music of him. That this has not happened to Uncle puzzles me. He does not make music. Itches that can’t be scratched. A thirst that can’t be quenched. A story that won’t be finished. Death is a furious irritation, he told you.

  “What could be preventing his passage, his transformation?” I mused.

  You leveled your gaze on mine. “You are,” you said.

  As autumn settled in, Mr. Zetsche’s Riviera grew a good two meters taller than the tree line. Father didn’t like this new construction because of the afternoon and evening shadows the building cast over the new cemetery. Our town seemed beset in a gloom we could not name nor shake. Ligita, unable to pass the hiring screenings for any of the future Riveria jobs, spent her days wandering up and down the lane and through the woods. She wasn’t looking for mushrooms—it was too late in the season for boletes, and she’d never regained her appetite for fungi after our ill-fated hunt together. What she was after was harder to find: a stalk of corn with two ears on it. A fruit or vegetable that had grown together. Any such sign that boded well for a woman who wanted to get pregnant. And though she might wear herself out looking, I was glad that hope in second chances had pulled Ligita out of our house. This was not a problem afflicting Rudy. We rarely saw him that autumn. He drank with other men at the kafenica. He attended political meetings. He brought home newspapers and flyers bristling with nervous, angry energy. Though Mother made no mention of Rudy’s dark demeanor, there were days when I’d see her standing at the kitchen sink, a dish passing from one hand to the other. And over her face, worry settling as a shadow. We were changing in ways she could not control or even imagine. Only our traditions remained the same, or nearly the same.

  Every spring we had the Push the Swing ceremony, in summer we had Jani Day, and in winter we held a Christmas pageant in the hall. This meant that every October the Christmas pageant steering committee gathered to determine who would play the various roles. Every year Mother tried to excuse herself from the madness, citing her atheism. But she always ended up going, for fear someone might try to use the oven. This year was no exception. The only difference was that Joels went with me for moral support. Also, Miss Dzelz, on account of being the most recent hire at school, had been elected committee president.

  An energetic woman, she seemed perfect for the job. She was a ferocious stick walker, an exuberant style of walking that looked a lot like cross-country skiing minus the skis and the snow. On weekends Joels and I had observed her stabbing the new concrete pavement of Mr. Zetsche’s waterside promenade with her poles. Where and how she found such energy I did not know. She was at least twice my age: a spinster who made no secret that she was on the lookout for a husband. Each month she dyed her hair in an unprecedented shade of magenta we only knew to call Dzelz Red.

  In years past, the steering committee meetings earned a reputation for boisterousness. This was because the widows Sosnovskis, Rezniks, and Spassky, not wishing to succumb to the sins of sloth or spiritual boredom, insisted each year on participating. This they did with their whole hearts. And everything else, too. They could argue the seventy-two angles of a circle, which is why Mother was so vital to these meetings. She brewed the tea that kept everyone going, usually three tureens but sometimes four.

  Miss Dzelz called the meeting to order. Of course, Widow Spassky lodged her protests immediately. Being Orthodox Russian, she wanted to celebrate Christmas a solid thirteen days later than everyone else—just to be difficult. Back and forth the argument swung: Was Jesus an Orthodox Russian Jesus or a Baptist Jesus or a Lutheran Jesus?

  Finally Mother arbitrated. “We’ll hold the program on January 1. At noon. Exactly halfway between the two dates in question. All in favor say aye.”

  The room fell silent. It was a near-blasphemous proposition, but it also smacked of good old-fashioned pragmatism.

  “Aye” came the response. I could hear only one quiet nay, and this from Mrs. Friemane, a forlorn nihilist who nonetheless lent her talents as resident costume designer year after year.

  “Now, then.” Miss Dzelz consulted her clipboard. “The cast. Mr. Gipsis’s class will be the sheep. Mrs. Gepkars’s class will be the multitude of angels. The three oldest boys from Mrs. Inese’s class will be the shepherds tending their flocks by night.” Miss Dzelz paused and smiled at me. “Mary will be played this year by Inara Kalnins, er, Henriksen. For obvious reasons, she seemed the natural choice.” At this, the widows exchanged significant glances. “And then, naturally, the part of Joseph has fallen to Inara’s husband, Joels.”

  Joels shifted in his chair. “Actually, Miss Dzelz, I must respectfully decline. I am uncalibrated in my feelings about Jesus.”

  “But I’ve written into th
e script several potent thinking poses for you.”

  Joels took a big breath, held it, then let it out slowly and steadily as if he were playing an imaginary solo on his saxophone. “I would consider playing the saxophone—from a distance. I would even consider building the set. But I cannot participate in a Christmas program.”

  “Why not?” Miss Dzelz asked.

  “The truth is, I’m Jewish.”

  Miss Dzelz frowned. “Is it Jesus the man who’s troubling you or Jesus the baby?”

  “Jesus the man.”

  “Oh, that’s fine then.” Relief flooded her voice. “We’re not the least bit concerned about the man and we’re certainly not interested in any of his messianic claims. We’re focusing only on Jesus the baby. And the sheep. And the cows. By the way—does anyone know where I can find a few cows?” Miss Dzelz looked wildly around the room.

  Mother rolled her eyes toward the ceiling.

  Joels touched my elbow. “I didn’t actually agree, did I?”

  “You did, actually. At these meetings, silence is consent.”

  I patted his knee and Joels excused himself for home. A good thing, too, as no one was finished arguing yet. The solo part had yet to be determined, and this was the point at which good manners strained, friends and neighbors sometimes coming to verbal fisticuffs.

  “Little Ksinia should have the solo,” Widow Rezniks said.

  “She had it last year,” Mrs. Lee said.

  “And a fine job she did, too,” Widow Spassky piped up.

  “Let little Aija sing. Ksinia sang last year,” Mrs. Lim said.

  “And a fine job she did, too,” Widow Spassky insisted.