The Hidden Letters of Velta B.

by Gina Ochsner

  A few days before the ceremony, I found your grandfather in the cemetery. He sat in his keeper’s shed, his elbows resting on his knees, a bucket and rag at his feet.

  “Uncle’s stone—”

  “I know,” he said. “His is just one of many.”

  I reached for the bucket. “Tell me where and I’ll clean them.”

  “Dear girl.” Dear girl. Such weariness in those words. “You and Little Maris should not be near these chemicals. Go home and help your mother.”

  We left your grandfather to his work and moved toward the yellow squares of light pouring from our house. Mother had already laid out dinner: a mixture of meat and onions and shredded cabbage and carrots that she called lazy pigeon. It was lazy because Mother hadn’t rolled everything up in cabbage leaves. But she’d spiced the beef and she’d cut the cabbage and onions thin and fine.

  It didn’t feel right to eat without Father. We made small talk. Rudy relayed a city joke a surveyor from Rezekne told him: “Why do you throw a black cat into a new apartment before entering?”

  We waited for the punch line.

  “To make sure the floor will not give beneath your feet,” Rudy said.

  Ligita rolled her eyes. “That is so unfresh.” In truth, structures thrown up in haste and their quick collapse had been much discussed in the local news and touted as one more reason why people should not live in large cities.

  “Egregious corruption,” Joels concluded.

  “Nothing changes,” Mother said. “It’s like this. Crows sit like fists on the limbs of a tree. Someone shoots a gun and they all scatter. But in a few minutes other birds alight on the same limbs. That is corruption in Latvia: same tree, different birds.” Mother drained her teacup in a single swallow.

  “The mayor in Ventspils wears loud sweaters purchased with taxpayers’ money,” Ligita offered.

  “What I don’t care for is the way foreigners come in and throw up a stick or two and grab land.” Rudy looked earnestly at his food. “These people are just squatters with a little more money.”

  “If they buy it fair and square, then it’s legal,” I said.

  “Latvia is for Latvians,” Rudy said.

  I looked at Mother, expecting her to say something, but she merely looked at her empty plate. Father came in through the kitchen door. Rudy took a large spoonful of meat and chewed vigorously.

  Mother jumped from the table and brought Father some tea. She made a big deal out of bringing more tea to the table, first carrying the pot then fussing over the sugar and milk. Joels ate steadily as if this talk were water moving around him and he were a stone, implacable and unhearing.

  “About the Push the Swing ceremony,” Father addressed Rudy. “It would be nice if we wore our Jani Day shirts, I think. Your cuffs—they are clean?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the swing. It’s hung level?”

  The muscle along Rudy’s jaw tightened. “Yes.”

  “And the ropes?”

  “I checked and rechecked and rerechecked. Everything is fine.” Rudy pushed back from the table and strode out the back door.

  That night Joels and I slept on the pullout in the living room. Rudy did not come home again. Ligita spent long hours on the back step talking to girlfriends on her cell phone. Held between noise and quiet, sleep and wakefulness, I could not fully enter either world. I studied the wavering wash of light the moon cast through the sheers onto the living-room wall. Everything, I decided, was beautiful when the light is dim enough. In the darkness I heard Mother and Father’s cautious whispering.

  “What was it at the cemetery?”

  “Obscenities, same as before. And a hammer and sickle. Only this time it was with spray paint.”

  “Whose stone?”

  “Mrs. Zetsche’s uncle.”

  “Which side did he fight for?”

  “Both, I think.”

  A long pause. “What did you use?”

  “Muriatic acid.”

  “Will it come out?”

  “Well, if not, I can make it look like something else. A star maybe.”

  Another long pause.

  “Mrs. A. tells me that Mr. Zetsche is thinking of getting a dog. You know, the kind with teeth, the kind that bites.”

  The bed creaked.

  Then from Mother a protracted sigh. “Sometimes I think I do not understand a single thing about this world or anyone in it.”

  We heard the Merry Afflictions before we saw them. From Joels’s sax came a few mournful howls and some flatulence from Vanags’s trombone. Ludviks stirred his sticks in anxious rasping noises over the drums. It was a perfect day. The promise of free beer had catapulted everyone into high spirits.

  From behind the oak, Rudy and Mr. Lee steadied the seat of the swing. With the help of a stepladder, the Zetsches mounted the swing, their feet on the seat and their hands at the ropes. Rudy and Mr. Gipsis gave a cautious push. And then another. And then another. Higher and higher the Zetsches arced through the air; harder and harder Rudy pushed. The Zetsches, as stiff as human metronomes marking out a soundless tune. Mr. Zetsche wore a grin, but an expression of pure terror had seized Mrs. Zetsche’s face. The swing had acquired a list, and one end drooped a little lower than the other. Mrs. Z. was turning colors.

  A few of the men coughed. “It is enough,” Father whispered to Rudy, for clearly Mrs. Zetsche was in trouble. But it is considered very bad luck, or at least bad form, to interfere with the swing once it’s in motion. And so we all stood and watched.

  “You’re doing marvelously!” Miss Dzelz called. That is when Mrs. Zetsche turned her stomach inside out.

  But as long as beer is on hand, such occurrences are only minor hiccups in the general festivities. The only remedy is to drink more beer as quickly as possible. Mother and I helped Mrs. Z. from the swing while Mr. Z. signaled for the beer and the Merry Afflictions struck a resplendent tune. The conversation jittered along like an epileptic on a high wire bouncing from talk of the economy, which was by all accounts in the crapper, to the beer, which was just okay, to talk of the EU (“We must join! We must progress with the times and merge with the larger European community!”) back to the beer, which was running low, to talk of whether a woman could really be a president (Mother chimed in loudly that women make fine presidents) to talk of the ceramics factory that had shut down to talk of latent Russian aggression (Widow Sosnovskis kept her eyes averted from Widow Spassky, however). Back to the beer, which was definitely not okay because it was now gone. The crowd quickly thinned. To make matters worse, Mrs. Zetsche passed around marzipan that sunk like a chunk of lead in the stomach.

  “Not enough almond,” Mother said, and turned for home. As did everyone else. The Merry Afflictions packed up their instruments; Vanags brought around his gray Pobeda. Joels remained on the green. We stood side by side, Joels cradling his sax tenderly to his chest, I cradled you. Small yellow pieces of paper littered the green and the wind kicked them toward the river.

  Mr. Zetsche stood beneath the oak tree, his hand on one of the ropes of the swing. The seat of the swing listed steeply to one side. He was looking up at the oak at the place where the ropes looped over the branch. One rope was frayed, much more so than the other. In fact, it looked as if the slightest bit of friction and weight would cause it to snap. Mr. Zetsche was talking, but I could not see to whom he was speaking. His gaze was trained on the space between the two banks of the river narrowing fast into darkness.

  “I’m not as happy as I look. You know, I have my troubles, too.” In Mr. Zetsche’s hand was one of those yellow flyers. “I’m a man of principle. I did what I said I would do. I brought jobs to the town. The thing is, I’m not a land-grabber. The thing is, I love this land. My grandfather did, too, before the war. Before all of . . . that.”

  Now Mr. Zetsche turned and looked at us. He had known we were there all along. “And we paid fair and square for the manor property. So why do things like this happen? Why so many broken windows. I don’
t mind so much, but it’s not fair to my Mildi.”

  Joels approached the swing. A few saws with his pocket knife and it tumbled down.

  Mr. Zetsche handed the yellow paper to me. LATVIA FOR LATVIANS, the slogan made popular years ago by a fatherland political party. I felt that old weight, dread, growing inside me. I think about that moment on the green with the broken ropes as the first time I recognized my own naïve complacency, complicity. I realized that whatever our intentions, collective or individual, we would find ways to punish the Zetsches.

  In the following weeks, the ground thawed, releasing a steam in the morning that convinced me that soil sleeps, wakes, and breathes just as we do. With each exhalation, the last dreams of winter rolled over the dark ground in white rasps that were sublimed to light. This was how winter left our lane, leaving the gate open for Lent. Father gave the Easter messages at the hall for the two groups of Baptists. As he spoke of the reviving power of water, we looked out the windows of the hall and watched a world of possibility slowly emerging: runnels of rainwater coursed through the lane that guttered alongside the hall. In the fields powerful rills laid bare the soil in dark gashes. It was the season of surprising changes and none of us were exempt. Joels, who had been beating himself up all winter working on new jingles, finally received some good news: a fledgling vodka manufacturer in Kaliningrad purchased three of his product names and tunes. The first name, Eternal Fire, struck me as a little dyspeptic. The bottlers hoped the second, Rear Naked Choke, would entice fans of mixed martial arts—a growing target market, they assured Joels. Lastly, there was Skak, or “at a full gallop” for the Russians who fancied themselves very bold. Factually speaking, it was all the same vodka bottled by the same manufacturer. Although they hadn’t yet sent payment, they had sent twenty cases of their product. The timing of this delivery was, in my opinion, divinely inspired. No! It was serendipity! Mother insisted later when she recounted the story to Father: she just happened to be in the yard hanging laundry when the man in the delivery van tooted his horn. Not two minutes later, she had the cases safely stowed in the root cellar, the place Mother put things she did not want anyone to know about. She had, after all, her reputation as president of the Ladies Temperance League to think of. But it was clear in the manner of her recitations how very proud she was of Joels.

  Dr. Netsulis, never one to sit about idly, also had been hard at work all winter boiling different currencies in various solutions: euros, lats, rubles, pounds, and dollars. As it turned out, the Swedish kroner was the most stable currency in nonbuoyant and turbulent environments. This, he maintained, explained the urgent longing so many young people had for the Scandinavian countries. As if to confirm these findings, no sooner had I cleaned all the grimy test tubes (the American dollar has a tenacious ink that clings to glass like no other) than Dr. Netsulis cut my hours. “They were glorious, these last experiments, but now”—he hung his head ruefully and the two ends of his mustache drooped into his white beard—“my funding is kaput. I can afford you only one day a week—to look after the stalls.”

  I will confess that during those early three years of your life I moved and lived as if I swam in thick, viscous water, my thoughts and perceptions sheathed in a fog. Sleep deprivation does that to a woman. You told me once that sound never vanishes, is never lost. Once created, a sound wave travels infinitely. I believe this to be true. I have witnessed how sound returns, called back by a scent, a wrinkle in the clouds, a thought. Mother used to tell me that our words are like arrows. Once spent, they fly from us and we can’t call them back. This is true and not true, given the way a word, just one, hovers at the edge of memory, treads at the threshold of waking and sleeping. Which word? Work.

  Mrs. Ilmyen put in a word for me at the clinic, and three times a week I cleaned the front office and surgery. In the evenings I cleaned at the school. Mother tended to you.

  I wanted to help, but Mother wouldn’t hear of it. “You and Joels work; I don’t. I might as well make myself useful with the boy.”

  I understood the ethic to which Mother subscribed: we find ourselves in work; work makes us who we are. This had to be why she set about caring for you during those early years, more thoroughly, in certain ways, than she had for Rudy and me. Though you weighed more than two stones, she carried you in her arms. She shielded you from every draft, real or imagined, by wrapping you in blankets and shawls. And she told you things she’d never told me: rye blossoms for two weeks, ripens for two weeks, and dries for two weeks. Then, and only then, is it time to harvest. After the harvest, the cutters and gatherers always leave a little bread in the sheaves for the fields. “How do you know so much about rye?” I asked her. Great-grandmother Velta’s farm, I knew, had been seized and collectivized when Mother was a girl. She could not have possibly grown up in the fields. But Mother simply shrugged and kept singing.

  I’d never known Mother to sing so much as when she held you.

  God grant satiety!

  Bear’s strength,

  Midge’s gut,

  The ease of hops!

  Be as strong as a bear, every mother’s wish. Be satiated with as little as what satisfies the midge, and as you walk the long road, may your step be as light as hops.

  I am unraveling one hair at a time. I have a hank of wispy thin hair at the base of my skull, all that has and will ever return. Not silver, not white. It’s the same tarnished color Mrs. Zetsche’s silver acquired when it needed polishing. Ligita and Jutta came to sit with me. Ligita unearthed an old can of Uncle’s vitality drink. Uncle was quite right when he said it tasted like shit. Jutta combed those brittle wisps that break at the slightest touch. At any rate, she asked me how I would describe the difference between mortal and immortal. Fragile, I said, and we both laughed. I am not a theologian or a philosopher, my faith is of a diaphanous sort: semirigid, light but strong. I know what I believe; my experience bears witness. I said, that being immortal, we recognize we are mere sojourners here; this is not our true homeland. Being mortal, we cannot bear to leave. Which makes Uncle’s present situation all the more strange. Human fortitude, divine caprice, the injustice of a causality. He burns with indignation all while spouting psalmic phrases amid his habitation of stones. He is bored. Fifteen years dead and as stuck as ever. If Uncle had been a Jew, Jutta said, his stay in hell would have been no longer than twelve months. This is the problem with Christian hell, she said, there are no firm boundaries in time and space. And purgatory, too, Ligita added. This is why, Ligita explained, Catholics can be at all times and in all places utterly miserable.

  Anyway, I’ve been thinking about those early years when you were just learning to speak. I wish now I’d written down more of what you said. It would fill your Book of Wonder. We suspected that it was on account of your ears that your speech was so delayed. But when you did talk, right around your fifth birthday, you tugged on Father’s pant leg, and said, Night is when God puts his hands around the sun.

  Father spun in circle, amazed. “The boy is a poet!”

  The sky, you said, was nothing more than a thinning lampshade stretched to paper; God was light moving behind it. Darkness was light standing still.

  Transported beyond joy, Father carried you to church every Sunday, believing that you possessed a prophet’s clear ear for divine messages. “He could preach someday,” Father proclaimed, in a manner that suggested it was certainty. And the pride on Father’s face was the kind reserved for a most favored son.

  By this time, I couldn’t wear you on my back any longer. When I hung laundry, I kept you tethered to me. With that sash. Not a leash, a sash. Let me be clear.

  I am grateful that you and your uncle Rudy have always been close. He taught you how to catch eels. He taught you how to smell the edges in the wind and adjust your line accordingly. He loved you as if you were his, and I tell you this lest you think for a moment that my love for him wavered. He was, in those years of your youth, a haunted soul. In the evenings when Rudy should have been working
at Rimi, he’d be elsewhere. At the kafenica, I figured, where the manager allowed Rudy and his friends to run tabs while they talked radical politics. They had plenty to discuss—at last count twenty-three political parties had put forth a presidential candidate. One of them was a woman, which pleased your grandmother to no end. But Rudy’s absences provoked more complaints from Ligita, who updated us on his lack of motivation at the evening meals. Her biggest complaint: he hadn’t achieved success—that most mighty word in Latvia. Her disappointment settled over the table like a transparent veil: through these nightly narratives of dissatisfaction, we could readily glimpse a virtual widow destined for even larger heartbreaks.

  What none of us could bring ourselves to discuss was Rudy’s drinking, which had a dogged, determined quality about it. He never drank in the house, but in the yard I found bottles of Skak-Eternal-Fire-Rear-Naked-Choke clumsily stashed behind the woodpile. This was an added disappointment to us all; he wasn’t even bothering to conceal his drinking in an artful, convincing manner. For a while, I attributed the change in his demeanor to a special form of male grief. If he stayed out all hours of the day and night, if he had sudden bursts of anger, long stretches of silence, if he smelled of mud and vodka, who could blame him. It hadn’t been that long since he’d put that cake-boxsize coffin into the ground.