The Hidden Letters of Velta B.

by Gina Ochsner

  I can tell you something I remember of your younger days. You announced to Joels and me that you wanted to start a mining company. Your grandmother asked, “What will you mine? Silver or gold?” And you looked at her as if you felt sorry for her lack of imagination. “Stars,” you said. “I will harvest stars.”

  And so you did. You dug and dug. One meter, two meters, three meters deep. Was it a week after you started digging or two when you burst into our shed? You had a rock in your hand and you’d broken it with a hammer. Mica or quartz, I didn’t know. But the dark rock glittered. “Stars,” you said. A galaxy of stars in the heart of that rock. That God could create hidden universes of light and bury them—because He could—astounded you.

  Stanka visited again today. This time she brought compounds of gentian, a virulent purple tincture that she claimed would help my acute nausea and “hectic” red cheeks. She surrendered her prize black licorice to help the constipation and procured banana extract in the event of galloping bowels. She concocted an orange-peel poultice for the falling of the womb, which struck me as wholly irrelevant. She also brought a book of homeopathic remedies and anecdotal instructions. I thank you for reading to me from the wrinkled leather book, “There is no class of person whose system, owing to its peculiar structure, is more liable to derangement than a woman’s.”

  I don’t know where she found the book, but I imagine it will make for lively conversation in your column.

  I told you that the light through the window spins lace on the walls. You were kind enough to pretend that I hadn’t already said that once or twice before. Everything in this universe, be it as fine as lace or as fragile as memory is spun of absence and presence, darkness and light. Dark matter. It’s all you and Dr. N. have been talking about lately, this mass everywhere present, nowhere seen. Mass that neither emits nor absorbs light. Mass that exerts its own gravitational pull. I imagine galaxies of lace, the visible planets and stars and meteorites spinning tight knots in the darkness.

  What lace corsets and binds the depths of the earth to the vault of heaven? You laugh at my questions and I laugh with you. Go on I am saying with my laughter. Impossible questions are meant to further the mystery of existence, not solve them. A saint, an important one, I think, said that. I believe it.

  For a time you stopped writing in your book. You said it was childish. I said, No, it’s childlike. The reverence and appreciation—wonder—that you expressed for the act of living and for every living creature held a childlike purity that astonishes me. Evidence of your infinite curiosity, these notes. “Every part of a bumblebee is covered in hair,” you wrote. “Every three days a person has a new stomach lining. The hummingbird is the only bird that can fly backward. It can even turn somersaults in air.” Your education in those early years was glorious, strange, and quixotic. Whichever way the wind listed, that’s what you pursued. “The horn of a rhinoceros,” you wrote, “was not made of bone but of dark coarse hair, compacted and condensed.” That something soft could become so hard was a mystery you pondered for many days. “Where do you find all these facts?” I once asked, and you smiled the way a child does when he knows more than he will say.

  You wrote of the planets etching their elliptical traceries around the sun. You wondered at the sound of light and if the gnawing, grinding noise you dimly detected was the sound of the universe’s growing pains. As you grew older, your notes turned more philosophical. Your fascination with sound, gravity, and light all culminated in a series of conjectures helped along, I suppose, by your many talks with Dr. Netsulis. The problem, you’ve written, is that our universe is expanding faster now than ever before. It has outstripped the relatively weak grasp of gravity. Our world is one tiny buoy among billions of buoys in a vast and ever-widening sea. Our universe resists reduction.

  I would love to assure Mrs. Zetsche, who visits me almost every morning, that the slow-moving fire burning inside of me is God. Embers in my lungs, I fan flames with each breath. What water is wet enough to put it out? She cannot answer my question. So we read together your “Kindly Advices.”

  It’s a sin to tear paper.

  It’s a crime to trample bread.

  Salt is more precious than tears, and a spent word can never be recalled.

  I told her stories from your childhood. That triumphant discovery of yours: the galaxies caught midwhirl in dark stone. Aren’t those bright bits of memory? Reflective surfaces that remind us: we are here, we exist, this is what we know.

  She wanted children of her own, and I thought this was a small thing I could do, share the strange and miraculous observations you made as a child. She didn’t attend the history fair. She and Mr. Z. were on a horse-riding and shooting holiday somewhere. I remembered that. So I told her of your research methodology and your selection process. How you pulled out that family tree and scowled at all the ovals. You were to choose a departed family member and tell or reenact scenes from his or her life. It is perverse of me, I suppose, but I had hoped for the history fair you would pick Uncle Maris. I thought that if people had the opportunity to learn how generous, funny, and energetic he had been, they might recalibrate their opinions. He even had a sensitive side. Once I asked him if he remembered Siberia. He was quite sick by this time, his face waxy pale and always a standing sheen of perspiration on his forehead. He lay on the cot in the shed. It was dim, the burzuika casting a dull orange glow. His eyes filled with tears, and he made no attempt to stop them as they streamed from cheek to chin to chest. And then he did the most incredible thing: he answered my question.

  “Singing. I remember the beautiful songs, sung quietly, as quiet as slow water in deep, dark night.” He looked at me. “If not for the rocks, a river would have no song,” he said, and I will never forget that.

  I told Mrs. Z. how you sat at your chessboard and moved the white king, the black king, moved the pawns this way and that as if such a decision could be worked out only with the chessmen. You plunked odd tunes in minor keys on the piano in the shed. Then you spent a long evening among the family tombstones laying your ear against each one. Finally, you decided; you’d be Grandfather Ferdinands. You made many visits to the cemetery that spring. Sometimes with your grandfather. More often alone. You said to me that you were researching for the pageant. Also, you were collecting an outrageous number of corks. Another project for Miss Dzelz. I did not argue. We’d all agreed to allow you to pursue your own interests when it came to your education. You told me one afternoon that you didn’t think there was a body beneath that smaller stone that rested beside Velta’s marker. I said, Of course there is. A mother always wants to lie beside her children. You gave me a look that said you knew better, and I felt a chill like a rush of cold air brush past my arm.

  I told Mrs. Z. how you pestered Mother day and night about the details of her childhood. If Mother furrowed her brow, then you asked about Velta, questioning Mother with a tenacity I had to admire. Of course, when we were your age, Rudy and I had made our attempts, wondering aloud what happened to the two sets of grandparents we had never known. Who were these absent people whose presence became palpable beneath Mother’s loving pass of the polishing rag? Why was Velta’s mouth pressed into a flat line? Was she biting her tongue, keeping back a world of mystery or was she merely angry?

  “What was she like, really?” you asked Mother one afternoon. The fair was less than a week away. Mother had opened the windows, and an unseasonably warm breeze blew through the rooms. “What color was her hair? Did she dance? What was her favorite song? Was she as good at catching fish as you are?” Judging from the cadence of your queries, hurried and breathless, it must have occurred to Mother that the storehouse of your questions had no end.

  She regarded you for a moment then plucked at your sleeve. Together you walked down the corridor to Mother and Father’s room. From her open bedroom, I heard your high-pitched murmuring, your voice pure and open in the way children’s voices are when they have no idea what they are asking. Mother’s voice,
uncharacteristically accommodating, rumbled quietly as she answered your every query. Maybe it has to be this way, I thought, creeping on tiptoe down the hallway. Maybe stories skip a generation. She could tell you the hard things she couldn’t tell me. Jealousy pinched at my heels as I walked carefully, holding my weight on my toes.

  “This is Velta,” Mother said.

  I could not see in the room, but I could sense your deep scrutiny of Velta’s image behind the glass, her white wedding gown with ribbons, that Jani Day wreath on her head.

  “She’s wearing a tree on her head.”

  Mother laughed. It was a liquid sound that filled the room; a sound I’d not heard in months and months. “She’s only nineteen in this photo. You can’t see her hands, but I wish you could. She had long graceful fingers and she played the piano. Music poured out of her every fiber. She was hardworking, too.” Mother tapped the frame with her finger. “She spun wool into long skeins even when it wasn’t fashionable to spin anymore.”

  I didn’t need to look through the crack in the door—I knew this photo. Beneath that oak-leaved wreath, Velta’s hair is plaited into long ropes and wound around her head. I imagined that her hair, the leaves, and those skeins she wove were one and the same thing, all of it held together, pinned by the dark notes of music.

  “It wasn’t long after this photo was taken that the trouble started. Soviets first, then the Germans, and then the Soviets again.” A scuffling of a wooden object being dragged over wood—Mother was reaching for the other photo. I knew this one, too: a picture of Grandmother Velta taken a year after Ferdinands returned from the camp. She did not even remotely resemble the girl in the first photograph. She had the frizzled hair that told of malnutrition. Her face had turned flat and angular. She was bodily present for the making of that picture, but her spirit had flown away.

  “You look like her,” you said. I hoped, so hoped, it was the picture of the young Velta you meant.

  Your feet padded softly over the floor. I pressed myself flat against the wall, watched you turn for the kitchen, and sighed, relieved that you did not see me hiding.

  “You can come in now, Inara,” Mother said. She stood at the dresser, peering at Velta’s image. “A quiet woman. A quiet woman,” Mother said. “Quiet in the shape of a woman. It is a kind of sleeping, that quiet. Like a blanket, the soundlessness. Like snow, that quiet. It could be snowing inside that woman. For years and years, she gathered breath, held it, held it, until it turned cold and white inside her. She lived in a quiet so complete that after a while I suspect she forgot the reason for her silence.”

  “Because of the baby who died?”

  “We all thought that at first. The baby died while Ferdinands was in the camps. And we all know how grief changes a woman. Her only recourse was to write letters, write her way toward a world worth living in. For eight years she waited, wrote letters. Then Stalin died and people like my father were released—rehabilitated.”

  Mother traced the outline of Velta’s face. “She didn’t like the dark. Every year, at some point during the winter, she’d refuse to get out of bed, would not eat, drink. And every winter a white truck came for her. Two men wearing white uniforms wrapped her up in yellow blankets, buckled her to the stretcher, and trundled her into the back end of the white truck. The whole time Mother sang songs. Strange wandering songs about walnuts and marigolds. Belted to the board, her eyes on the clouds, she’d lick her lips and say, ‘The clouds taste flat today. Not enough salt.’ Every winter this happened. And then four maybe five weeks later, the white truck would come around again, and the orderlies would walk her to the front door, or maybe it would be a neighbor who’d gone to fetch her and bring her home on the bus. She’d stand on the threshold, bewildered, her hair cropped to the scalp, her eyes hollow. Each time this happened, I’d think they’d finally cured her. I’d say, Speak to me, Mama, tell me something, anything.”

  “Something bad happened to her in winter,” I suggested.

  “Yes,” Mother said. “Me. I happened in winter.”

  You have always shown a keen interest in the legend of the Ghost Girl of the River. You asked quite a lot about her that spring of the history fair. I thought it a macabre obsession, but then we are a family of grave diggers. So I told you that the voice calling across the water is not a woman’s, but a girl’s. She rises as a mist on dark foggy nights. She cries for help. She calls people by name. She places a pair of sharp scissors beside your head while you sleep. The truth is, a little girl had been drowned in the river. They say that she is seeking revenge or reconciliation. No one knows for sure which because no one who sees her and goes to the water ever returns.

  You heard her call your name. I believe that now. I believe in the conductive power of water. It’s pull, pure and undeniable. How else can I understand why you went to the water’s edge a few nights before the history fair, why you walked in as if it had been waiting for you all your life? I followed you to the cold water. The river, still frozen at that time, lay under a mantle of windswept ice as shiny as silver glass. A mirror. You walked as if firm ground were just a few centimeters beneath the surface. As if you believed the myth of your own life: you were the Bear Slayer and the river was your true home. And then you remembered who you were: a mere boy who does not swim. Down you went. I have always wanted to ask you what you saw when you went under. Dark water and silt? The many rocks we’d thrown with the slips of paper tied around them—our sins and confessions settled in the river’s mud? What did you hear when you slid under the dark mantle? I went after you, hauling you up. As I did, you came up glistening, triumphant, and unafraid.

  During those wet days, you kept detailed measurements of rainfall and rising water tables here in your Book of Wonder. So, too, in your comments in the margins. The rain never sings a song the same way twice. I think of that spring, that rain, as a second awakening, a second baptism. Can an entire town be baptized at once? Yes, I know it can because I saw it happen. It began that same spring of that history fair. In the mornings I made my rounds: first to Dr. N.’s barn. I could hear the cows lowing well before I spotted Dr. N. sitting in the loft, his head haloed in blue smoke, his pipe in his hand. Below him, the cows stood past their knees in water. Their lowing could in no way be described as cheerful, this in spite of the bright orchestral music blaring from a radio in the loft.

  He’d fitted each of the cows with chartreuse-colored hip waders, but this seemed to only increase their distress. Their udders hung low and heavy. Dr. N. switched off the radio, waved his pipe in my direction. “This world is turning to water, you know.”

  I stacked bales of hay to make a low dry platform and arranged a series of planks to make a ramp. It was slow going coaxing them up the ramp, but as cows are not overly clever and inclined to follow the broad rump in front of them, I managed.

  “Yes,” he continued. “But I wouldn’t want you to think we’ve been idle.”

  “Who?”

  “Your man, Joels, and I.”

  I had a cow out of the water and relatively calm. I shoved a bucket under her udders. “I would never think that, Dr. N.,” I said, reaching with each hand for a teat.

  “I’ve fastened and yoked planks all around the barn. Sort of like a wooden collar. As the water rises, the planks will rise, too.” Dr. N. regarded me from beneath his bushy eyebrows. “We’re fashioning rubber pontoons to buoy everything. It would be nice if we could fill them with helium.”

  The last cow milked, the pails lined up in the loft, I left Dr. N. muttering genius-invention thoughts: How to coax the floatation suits onto the cows? Slick their legs with vegetable oil or sticks of butter?

  I headed for the Zetsche manor stuck in that dark hollow of wood. They had a hard enough time managing their water garden. They certainly would not know what to do with all this rain. As I passed the ministallions, they seemed less triumphant. Water licked at their hooves. Crows sat on their heads and made low knocking noises in the backs of their throats. They were
laughing.

  Mrs. Zetsche met me in the corridor, waved me toward her grand dining-room table. We passed Mr. Z.’s study, where financial journals and newspapers had been scattered over his desk. It looked as if he’d taken a stack of those journals and thrown them against the wall. Mrs. Z. reached beneath her chair and produced a brick wrapped in a green sheet of paper. I recognized the slogan blazing across the paper: PATRIOTIC LATVIANS FOR AN ALL-LATVIAN LATVIA.

  “Please ignore it, Mrs. Zetsche. It’s probably some dumb kid trying to scare you,” I said.

  “One hundred and twenty years our family has owned property in this region, and we’re still treated like foreigners.” Mrs. Zetsche touched the brick. “It isn’t as if my father wasn’t killed in the war. It wasn’t as if he, too, was put in prison, beaten.” Her gaze lifted to mine.

  In her eyes was the look of pain, of a woman wounded. I had to look away. She did not really belong here; she and her husband never would. And she was beginning to understand this.

  “Do you know why we moved back?”

  “No, Mrs. Z.”

  “Because Latvia was the homeland, a return to a promise. We reclaimed the family inheritance, the ancestral lands. We weren’t making it in Bonn.”

  Shotgun blasts from the trees punctuated her words.

  “We wanted to have children. It took all the money we had to emigrate and pay the lawyers. Everything we had went into investigating whether or not our claims were legitimate. I would have had sons and daughters, many of them by now, and look at us!”

  More blasts from the forest.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Z.”

  Her little red mouth twisted. “You know, Inara. You’re almost like a daughter to me, a distant and strange daughter. I believe that you are sorry for me. Why does that make me feel worse, not better?”