The Hidden Letters of Velta B.

by Gina Ochsner

  Mother glanced at the note. “You are not the son I raised.”

  “I am exactly the son you raised. Aren’t you the one who said that all the wrong people benefit from the hard work of Latvians? I’m just settling the score.”

  Mother’s face turned ashen. “Get out of here.” Her voice trembled.

  For five very long seconds Rudy stood still. And then, as if he’d been touched with an electrical current, he sprang backward and ran down the lane. We did not even hear his boots crunching on the gravel.

  Chapter Ten

  WHAT IF THE WORLD WERE MADE OF STORY? What if a bedrock of words girded the ground beneath our feet? What if the sky were a brattice of sound, hum, and hymn holding us in an invisible embrace? What do I think of this, a poem for the newspaper?

  I don’t know if your grandmother ever received hate mail. Certainly there were heated exchanges, particularly regarding politics or recipes involving carrots. She was not a fan of them, as you may or may not recall. She usually got the last word in with her “Kindly Advices” column. If you can’t say anything nice, then shut up already! Did people appreciate her labors with the newspaper? Probably not. Her pearls, as Father would say, had been scattered before swine. But I believe she would have been delighted to see how you are reviving her old column and writing something new: “Mishaps with Camels in Kyrgyzstan!”

  And the old pictures. The one you showed me this morning was her favorite, bar none. The legendary Baltic Chain. She wrote an article about what it was like standing along the roadway outside of Riga amid a long line of people holding hands. Where the gap between them yawned too wide, they held a sash. In this way, the chain remained unbroken. Mother wrote of the day she and Mrs. Ilmyen rode the bus to Balvi and another bus to Riga and then finally another to a town just south of Riga. She wrote what it felt like to join hands with people she’d never met: a truck driver from Daugavpils on her one side and an Old Believer in her long skirts and snug snoodlike head scarf on her other side. Mrs. Arijisnikov, standing a few paces down the chain, had likewise linked hands with people she’d never met. All along the A2 more than one million people joined together and sang. This is how Balts lodge a protest, your grandmother explained to me. We don’t throw bricks. We don’t lob grenades. We come together and we make a chain with our hands and our words and our songs. We say to our oppressors: you cannot pull us apart. We come together and we sing.

  You have always loved the story of little Samuel. No other boy in the Bible had ears like he did. Speak, Lord, your servant is listening. He’d been promised to Eli the prophet, to serve the older man and be mentored in the ways of the temple. Didn’t Eli have other sons, other protégés? Surely he did. But they were as lazy as fallen chestnuts.

  Eli was an old man and he spent a good portion of his time listening to God with his eyes closed. This he was doing when God spoke to little Samuel. Samuel! Samuel! And the boy, thinking Eli had called him, runs to the old man’s room and says, Here I am.

  Go back to sleep, Eli says. I didn’t call you.

  This happens again: Samuel! And the boy goes to Eli. Go away, Eli says. I didn’t call you, and even in the spare King James text, you can sense the ire in the aged prophet’s voice. Maybe he thought the boy was playing tricks on him, depriving an old man of one of his few pleasures in life. The third time Samuel hears his name called and wakes his master, Eli finally understands. If this boy could hear so clearly and well at that young age, then he was beyond the need for mentorship. I have been thinking about how the young outstrip and surpass the old. If the old have mentored well, it’s natural and right that this should happen. I’m no prophet, no saint. I have made mistakes. But I am singing the old songs, telling the stories. I am weaving a cloak of knots small and large. I am holding the sash.

  You stand in the middle of this song, hearing what I can’t. “I have made mistakes,” Uncle told you. When the devil whistled, he jumped. And now he feels some guilt. And unease. A foot in search of a shoe. A cup looking for water. So thirsty, Uncle is, he could spit nails. At least that’s what he’s been telling you. This unrest, you say, is our fault: Father’s sorrow, Mother’s irritation, my anger, Rudy’s adulation, all kept Uncle hemmed in the mud none too comfortably. “I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint. My heart is like wax . . . I may tell all my bones.” This, you say, is his enduring lament.

  “That’s from Psalm 22,” I said, my heart leaping. Uncle was reading the Bible—at last. “Yes,” you replied. “And it’s boring holes through Uncle’s hip bones.” The ink branded his skin, etched indelible marks upon the tablet of his heart. Yes, I’ve made mistakes. I realize now that I am his haunting, and all this time I thought he was mine.

  In those days after Mr. Zetsche gave him the boot, your grandfather took you at night to walk in the dark among the stones of the cemetery. So much of his life your grandfather had spent in that place, fretting over every stone, marker, and icon. He couldn’t fully abandon them to the hands of the new caretaker, a Slovenian, who wisely made himself scarce in town. At dusk you’d go, leaping over the back gate, where I imagined you and your grandfather soundlessly wading through tall grass. I wondered if these long walks among the quiet world of the dead weren’t his way of firming the seams between the life he’d made for himself and the one that had been given to him. Red clover, vetch, and the bee, did they carry him back in scent and sound to some early memory, a time before words? I wondered if this was why, even before he abandoned his voice, he didn’t talk when he worked in the cemetery. As he cared for the plots containing people, some of whose families had left and likely would never return, was he thinking of his own mother and father still in Siberia, buried in the yellow dirt by his young boy’s hands? Was this why he had always cared for the cemetery and everything in it with a tenderness that defied reason (yes, tenderness is the only word I can supply when I conjure the image of Father kneeling before those stones, touching up the paint or scrubbing with a small brush at dirt and mud).

  Whatever the reason, it was a good thing your grandfather did this. It had rained so much in the prior few months that water stood on the ground. Some of the stones had fallen over. Mr. Z.’s new hire did a fair job of keeping the leaves raked into piles, but it was Father who cleaned the moss off the stones, Father who made repairs in the middle of the night, Father who scrubbed off the graffiti someone had painted on the stone belonging to one of Mrs. Zetsche’s distant relatives. This is what love looks like: caring for others even when your care is unwanted.

  By this time, you were ten and would have been in the fourth grade. You had not grown into your ears and had accepted the fact that you never would. But neither would you wear those aviator’s ear protectors. You said they made the world as blank as bleach, as tasteless as a bus window. You preferred instead to grow your hair long and wear a woolen cap. You almost looked like the other boys. But you have never walked like other people. This is not to say that you aren’t coordinated or graceful. But whereas some people—your aunt Ligita, say—walk with their hips propelling the body forward or other people—such as your grandmother sniffing the changes in heat from her oven—walk as if led by the nose, you have always been pulled by your ears. It was as if sound were a living thing pulling you by the right ear this way and then by the left ear that way. You could not ignore these tugs of sound even if you tried.

  After some of those late-night walks through the cemetery, you would return home, your hair on one side of your head wet from where you’d placed it against the stones. “I don’t think Mrs. Ecis really died of indigestion,” you might say. Or “The grass is brown at Mr. Berzin’s grave because he’s angry that his daughter doesn’t visit often.” Though Father was still not talking, he would exchange a significant glance with Mother, as would Joels and I. Later, as you drifted off to sleep, listening, I suppose, to the scratching of the stars etching their distant traceries in the darkness, we’d scribble on slips of paper our diagnosis: his powers of he
aring weren’t really that keen. These were the lively musings of a ten-year-old’s imagination asserting itself, testing its limits via exaggeration. My easy dismissal, I realize, is a failure on my part. Why was I unable to allow in you possibilities that outstrip my own imagination?

  How I wished in those days that I could dampen the noise around you. We choose which chords we strike first in any conversation, in our lives, in our loves. And because the words that follow are a natural progression of that first fateful chord, I wanted my words to be gentle. A strange unrest had enveloped our little town, and over the last few years, it had grown more robust. Even Stanka’s dog was not immune: every day he nipped at Mr. Arijisnikov’s ankles as he went to and from the river. Sometimes Mr. A. complained. When he did, Stanka merely shrugged. “Oh, that’s just his way of showing affection. If he had any real rancor, he’d have drawn blood.”

  We could attribute some of the despair to the two sugar refineries that closed down and the textile manufacturer in Rezekne that shut its doors. There were even rumors that the kafenica, the place where some of Rudy’s friends sat at tables drinking tea and other things, might whittle back its hours. It was a rumor that kindled even more grumbling and speculation—the shops at the Riviera were failing. I blamed the cold and the unending rain. In the older homes of the elderly pensioners, winter hit hard. Two old women, unable to pay for heat, had frozen to death. Stanka had taken to stuffing Mother’s back issues of the Ladies Temperance League newspaper into the spaces between her roof and siding. Others who had lost their electricity now relied on their ancient carbide lamps. But if I’d walk past the kafenica, I’d hear blame cast in other directions: at the corruption of certain government officials and agencies, at inadequate leadership, at foreigners who, on account of our joining the European Union, were free to roam in and out of Latvia and, in some cases, even buy land. To hear people talk, foreign investors were either shameless speculators or our financial saviors.

  I didn’t know what to think. All I knew was that for all our hard work—our clean-as-a-whistle school, the brilliance of Dr. Netsulis, our root cellar full of Skak and temperance newspapers—we were still trying to figure out how to stretch our pickled eel and potatoes through the winter. With the exception of Mr. Ilmyen, who translated important official documents, the income of most people in town had not grown but withered. Mr. Zetsche’s market had fewer and fewer items on the shelves, but prices had steadily climbed, and last week he’d sacked another employee, a man with whom Rudy had gone to school. Mother pounded on her typewriter, the hammer striking the ribbon with such force the entire typewriter trembled.

  Trouble with taxes? Simply don’t pay them. Nobody else does.

  Feeling depressed? Join the club! The latest World Health Report ranks Latvia in third place for the highest number of suicides.

  Amid all of this noise, some of it loud and strident, some of it cloaked in sighs, as if assigning actual words to our troubles was too much of a strain, I wanted quiet.

  The posters of political candidates whose mouths had been scratched out with a key or a coin or, in one instance, had thumbtacks pressed into the place where the eyes had been: that was caricature, petty vandalism, nothing a boy should pay any attention to. I pulled down those posters. The hateful slogans written in chalk on the playground—I dumped tubs of wash water on them. Love, I figured. This was love and therefore what a good mother does: she absorbs all that seems unbalanced, disturbed. As a mother trims tough crusts of old bread, serving up only what she thinks her children can chew, I would whittle the discordance of a swiftly tilting world into smaller sounds, words, and nonwords that would fall to a quiet hum we might ignore.

  In one activity you found solace. Chess. Once a week, to combat the general toxicity about town, Mother held a temperance meeting. Stanka and Mrs. Ilmyen, founding members, came faithfully, as did Miss Dzelz and Jutta. Jutta always brought Little Semyon, who wasn’t so little anymore, and I brought you. The two of you had fallen into one of those effortless friendships that come quickly for children who sense in one another the spirit of a fellow sufferer. You were both quiet boys, and because of this, neither of you had many friends. The other boys mocked Semyon on account of his bookishness, his unfamiliarity with sports—the things other boys judge one another by. But when you two met on Tuesday evenings, the world around you ceased to exist. The chessboard out, the chessmen arranged rank and file, you’d engage in soundless, intense warfare. Sometimes you and Semyon would call the white chessmen Latvians and the blacks Soviets. Sometimes the whites were Germans and the blacks were Soviets. And then there were times when the whites represented all underdogs everywhere and the blacks were the classmates who had mercilessly teased you.

  It was at one of these temperance meetings, which, I will admit, had degenerated into something more like a gossip fest, that Miss Dzelz had something like an epiphany. We were airing our complaints. Mrs. Ilmyen didn’t like the looks of the young men gathered at the kafenica. Their drinking struck her as dogged and desperate, as if they were making up for lost time. Mother agreed: the consumptions of spirits in our town had escalated while displays of community service had fallen in decline. That is to say, contributions to her newspaper had dwindled. Stanka was in a sour mood because Mrs. Lim had beaten her to a choice morel patch and picked it clean.

  From her enormous purple faux-alligator-skin purse, Miss Dzelz retrieved a history book. The history book. The only history book anyone had ever used or seen in use at Elementary School Number Two. Yes, the very same one your uncle and I had chucked out the classroom window all those years ago. We were haunted by this book, it seemed. But no one was more haunted than Miss Dzelz, who actually read its pages. What fits and torments they gave her! She swayed side to side on her chair, a human pendulum of woe. “This book,” she said, her voice shaking. “This book contains inaccuracies of such grand proportions that I fear, yes, fear, for our children. Our history and our traditions are the ties that bind, and I fear we are in grave danger of losing our grasp.”

  Some people believe the maintenance of cultural memory is a moral obligation. But to grasp hold of a memory, collective or otherwise, is to walk through a fire barefoot. Perhaps this is why Stanka winced. “The problem with any talk of the past is that it’s all so muddled. Fact stands on one bank of a river and memory stands on the other. History is the mud in between.”

  Mother passed around cups of dark tea. Her face, normally fixed into an expression of firm determination to conquer whatever task was at hand, now held a look of uncertainty.

  “It’s worse than that,” Mrs. Ilmyen said. “Talking about history is like tapping each of your teeth until you find the one that hurts. Just when you thought you’d subdued the offending member, it reasserts itself in bites and pinches. And we all know how it can bite different people at different times.”

  Ligita made a face and rolled her eyes. The future concerned her most of all. In particular, she’d heard of the high-heel dash held for girls who loved and lived by their cosmetics. The winner of the sprint would be named this year’s Amber Girl and given a truckload of cosmetics and a photo shoot in Russia. Maybe even Bulgaria. It was no secret to any of us that late at night Ligita practiced a tottering trot over the broken sidewalks to improve her ankle strength.

  Miss Dzelz would not be swayed. “Of course, you are right. Of course. But as everyone wants to write our history for us, it seems we ought to join in, if only for the sake of steering the conversation closer toward the truth, and if not that, then mere accuracy of fact. For example”—now Miss Dzelz held up the old orange textbook that had been in her lap—“there’s simply no Latvia in these history texts, none of our rich culture, our many contributions to sciences, our keen intellect, our music, and our dancing. Our dainas. Nothing!” Miss Dzelz was almost shouting.

  I understood her frustration. Written in the clumsy self-congratulatory language of Soviet-era rhetoric, the text focused on military achievements and economic develop
ment. About Latvia the book had little to say except that Latvia was a leader in the production of televisions and that Riga was an important commercial port. About the near genocide of Latvians and the forced deportations—15,000 in 1941; 60,000 in 1945; and another 33,000 in 1949—the book said nothing. Nor were there any mentions of the Baptists who were shot by the Soviets or any discussion of the many crosses of the Orthodox churches that were pulled down and drowned in the sloughs and marshes. Such events, if they were ever addressed, were mentioned obliquely, speciously referred to as “ethnic engineering” or the “isolation of hostile elements.”

  Miss Dzelz’s voice dropped to a whisper. “There’s no mention of 1940.”

  “What happened in 1940?” Ligita piped up.

  Mother’s jaw tightened. She was grinding her teeth.

  Miss Dzelz ran her finger over an open page and began reading: “In the summer of 1940 Latvia was received by the USSR. The Soviet Union was not a democracy, but it was an example of a good and just society and a reference point for millions of people throughout the world.”

  “‘Received’?” Stanka looked at Miss Zifte, Mrs. Ilmyen, Mother. “Did we ever ask to join?”

  It was this question that was like an arrow piercing the mark true. We put it to a vote and agreed unanimously. Our children would weave with words a better and truer version of our own history; we would hold a history fair.

  I’m sorry I’m not more help to you with the “Kindly Advices” column. How to stretch a single chicken through a whole winter—that I can tell you. Jokes about Estonians, clean and dirty, I have in abundance. And you are right: removing unwanted body hair with sandpaper or other such abrasives is always a bad idea.