The Hidden Letters of Velta B.

by Gina Ochsner

  At home I found Father silently regarding the fire in the grate. I sat beside him, placed the brick on the table beside his chair. I did not try to remind him of better times. I was remembering what Mrs. Zetsche had said nearly three years ago when that sudden fire burned the pharmacy to a crisp, that all of our suffering has been the result of our striving against the constraints of time and place and memory, none of which can be moved, changed, broken, or loosened. Time, place, memory, she had said. We need these walls in order to have something to push against, to have something that breaks us. At the time I thought her words odd—what could she know of pushing, of being broken? Now I wondered how this bit of wisdom had grown teeth, had bitten and drawn blood in the way anything true does. And throbbing behind her words was another, darker truth. We could hate people like the Zetsches, we could love them, but we could not hate them without also hating ourselves. We could not forgive them if we did not first examine ourselves.

  This is a puzzle to me: How is it that you have no memory of the history fair? It’s only been ten years, after all. You say you don’t remember Joels helping you into one of Rudy’s old church suits. You say you don’t remember your grandmother pulling a tattered coat from a trunk and her telling you, “This belonged to my father; he would want you to wear it.”

  Under a lowering sky, you and I walked down the lane toward the hall. I could not help noticing that as we passed by the cemetery your head tipped toward the stone markers as if pulled by the murmur of a dream or maybe you were hearing last-minute instructions. A soughing wind, the kind that could tear a mustache off the face of one man and plaster it onto the face of another, tore over the fields and through the lanes. With the wind came water and more water. This weather, coupled with the sad recognition that nothing else happened on Tuesday nights, induced a number of families to brave the elements. The Gepkarses, the Inkises, the Lees, the Lims, and even the widows Sosnovkis and Spassky came. And the almost sure likelihood of a spectacle lured to the hall many of the young men, some of whom I knew had been friends of Rudy’s.

  At exactly seven p.m. the parents and children arrived, every one of them drenched. The crossbar of the coatrack bowed beneath the weight of so many bloated coats refusing to drip dry. The children ran around in dizzy circles, pretending to be airplanes, horses, anything, while the adults sat on folding chairs lining the walls. Mother was in her element, lining up cups ready for the punch ladle when it was time. After a quick welcome from Miss Dzelz, we rose and sang the anthem, “God Bless Latvia.” Father did not sing, but his jaw muscles worked in time to the music and I took this as a good sign.

  The anthem finished, we resumed our seats. A quick glance around the room confirmed yet again what an odd mixture of people we were. This stretch of country represented a meeting of contradictions that had, in time, become something like reconciliation. These reconciliations were borne out daily in our small actions, in the buying of bread from the baker, Mr. Tamiroff, who was Ukrainian, but was as Latvian as a body could be; in the handing off of mail from Mrs. Arijisnikov, whose grandfather, through no fault or choice of his own, had been railed from Uzbekistan to Daugavpils and somehow ended up here. There were the Jewish families. And then there were the Zetsches; upstarts, interlopers, some people called them. Curiously absent were the Zetsches. But it was just as well; I could hear the grumbling even now coming from a man who had been let go last week.

  The lights dimmed, and slowly a wider circle of light began to assert itself. In the circle stood two microphones on their stands, and behind each microphone, one of the Indrikis twins. One twin wore a business suit and the other wore rags, his face smeared with charcoal.

  “I am Mayor Berzins of Sabile. Perhaps you remember how I protected the Gypsies when the Nazi fascists came to our town. I would not let those fascists take my poorer brothers and sisters to the trains that I knew would take them to death camps.”

  “And I am an unnamed Gypsy,” said the other twin, grinning madly. “After the Nazis had been routed by the Soviets, the Soviets tried to take Mayor Berzins away. But my poorer brothers and sisters, remembering his courage and generosity, banded together. With sticks and stones we drove back those soldiers.”

  The two brothers shook hands, embraced, walked stiffly side by side off the stage. Their mother jumped to her feet. From where I sat, I could not see whether or not tears streamed down her face, but such is the effect of embraceable tales we can feel good about telling and even better about hearing. Best of all, we knew this story was true: a film crew had set up in Sabile a few years ago to make a documentary.

  Another child told the story of how his great-grandfather piloted an icebreaker in the Antarctic. Pure fabrication, but we all clapped our hands anyway. One child claimed a distant relative who invented the cadmium loop. The next child told of a grandmother in Balvi who had successfully hidden a Jewish woman in a slim space within a wall. The Jewish woman did not keep a diary cataloging her daily misfortunes, and there had been no tearful reconciliation years later; she’d disappeared after the Germans pulled out. Gone to Estonia was the family’s best guess. But the girl’s recitation suggested dissatisfaction. What good is a story if we don’t know how it ends?

  At last it was your and Semyon’s turn. The two of you had decided to tell the history of two families at once. Semyon, wearing a long beard made of several balls of steel wool clipped together, stood behind one mic; you stood behind the other.

  The two of you began with a daina, an old one we all knew.

  My little wolf rumbles.

  My little wolf hums.

  My little wolf has a white foot.

  If this doesn’t make it better,

  It won’t make it worse.

  A little salt in a wound, it stings, but the hurt makes us stronger. I was proud that the two of you, being only ten years old, understood this already.

  “History is a gap-toothed comb,” you said, your voice as gruff as you had imagined Grandfather Ferdinands’s voice might have sounded. “And we are the teeth in that comb. What I remember is what remains: my wife wrote me letters so that we would not forget. I had been sent to a work camp. She was left behind. She wrote of ordinary events, everyday events, of the dogs whose tails were tied together, set on fire, and turned loose in a field. Of the oxen whose legs were broken so that we could not plough.”

  Semyon stepped to the microphone and read from his notes. “In 1940 I, too, was sent to a work camp. I, too, wrote letters—to my wife, Anna. She wrote back.”

  One day a little boy was struck by an army truck. The boy’s mother flung her body over the boy while a tank rolled over the top of her. My Anna watched all this. She lit a candle for the boy and his mother. It was all anyone could do.

  I stopped smiling. Mrs. Ilmyen pulled at the stitching of her handkerchief. Mr. Ilmyen shifted slightly in his chair.

  You retrieved from your pocket a letter. It was the size and shape of those I’d hidden in the piano.

  Eight years I had been in a camp. When I returned to my home, I was a husk, a shell. Hollow. But next to my wife’s emptiness, my emptiness looked like fullness. The woman who met me on the threshold was not the same woman I’d left. She’d been pregnant with our first child. But it was not an eight-year-old child burying her face in her mother’s skirts, but a girl who must have been three maybe four years old. “Where is the other one?” I asked. “There is no other one,” she said. “Well, then whose is this?” I asked. “Ours,” she said, her voice as flat as a grid iron. “Ours.” And not another word offered by way of explanation. And so I took what I had, her letters and my letters, and for six months I read them to her. What we did in camp, making chairs with uneven legs, faulty tables that listed, stretching rubber is what this kind of shoddy work is called. That was one letter. How many days it took the Soviets to pull down the cross on top of the Lutheran church—that was another letter. Her account of the bonfire made of Bibles, yet another letter.

  Semyon cleared his throat
and read.

  In the deep woods of Bierkiniki, old grandfathers with long beards, grandmothers with tired hands, women and children, strong men, weak men, we were gathered. Who needs fairy tales to teach us that bad things happen in dark woods?

  This is what my Anna wrote in her diary.

  There were shadows flying overhead: crows. There were shadows racing over the ground: wolves. And then the wolves on two legs: men. They gave us shovels and we dug, we dug, we dug. What were we digging? A place to rest. We were digging our own private quiet. We were praying from the psalms, begging a mountain to fall down on us, to cover us.

  Semyon paused. That tiny gap between his words you quickly filled with the contents of a letter.

  If it had so happened that a woman such as the neighbor woman had been brutalized, then we might tear our hair out in anger, might slit our wrists in shame. As it is, my dear, the birds still sing, and to my ear, the plainer-plumaged wrens sing the sweeter songs.

  Mother on one side of me, Father and Joels to my other side. Together we drew our breaths, held, held our air inside of us. These words falling from your lips did not belong to young boys in the third grade, boys who had merely gathered anecdotal family stories and supplied the unknowns with pure imagination. What we heard were the voices of those men: two anguished husbands attempting to piece together all that had happened to their women in the years they’d been at labor camp. I was hearing the difficult passages of Velta’s words that she’d fashioned into dark notes, shapes of small birds never meant to fly, the words on a musical score I’d been too lazy or unwilling to decode.

  And the attack on the neighbor woman. Three soldiers ripped her clothes from her body, bent her over an open windowsill. Afterward, they left her for dead.

  “My Velta wrote how for several days, unmoored by the attack, the woman, wandered up and down the lane. So unhinged the woman was, she did not know to feel shame, did not know she was naked, bleeding. In her letter, Velta asked me, How will she live among neighbors and those soldiers? How will she carry on as if nothing has happened? She will have to throw it all down a well so deep inside of her that these things, the words used to talk about them, will become irretrievable. They will fall and will always be falling because there is no bottom to this well.

  “And then I understood, the woman my Velta kept mentioning in the letters, the silly neighbor woman who had gone insane—she was describing herself.”

  As if touched by electricity, I jolted in my chair. I craned my neck toward the image of Velta on the wall. No wonder her words had been so few and the ones we did have so strange. How else can a woman tell the untellable tale to her husband, knowing that every word will break his heart?

  I held my gaze on Velta, aware that around me others were doing the same: Mother, Father, the Tamiroffs, the Arijisnikovs, the Indrikises, the widows Spassky and Sosnovkis, and the Gepkars and Inkis families turned and cast furtive glances at that picture of Grandmother Velta. And as they did, a strange alchemy happened. They were superimposing the figures of their own aunts and grandmothers, sisters and mothers. It was not Velta in that photo now, but every woman in the village.

  And still you pressed on with those letters.

  Naked, that silly neighbor woman went to that heap of burned Bibles. She found scraps of paper, scraps of leather. She fashioned a garment of paper, leather, ash. The rain fell. Ink and ash coursed down her back, her arms, her legs—a prophetess, a holy fool, a stained woman, branded in the ink and all the words we’d been taught to hold dear.

  Father’s face had blanched as white as a turnip. As if hearing fact and atrocity carried in the mouths of these two ten-year-old boys had conveyed him to his own boyhood, a time of metal shovels, hard yellow dirt, coal dust, winter’s dark fist.

  Semyon’s voice lifted, carried by a chanting cadence: “With what words do we describe the three-day torture of a twelve-year-old gypsy girl. Later, her mother found her body, a bullet in the forehead, and she called it a mercy.”

  You folded the letters, tucked them into your oversize trousers. “Which suffering in particular afflicted my Velta that she could not even after all these years speak of it?”

  “Was it the Jews rounded up, locked in a barn, and burned to death? Or the Jews silenced in the forest of Sisenu?” The spotlight on Semyon’s glasses turned them into mirrors reflecting a searing light that made us wince.

  Through all of this, a low groaning, something like the plaintive lowing of Dr. Netsulis’s cows, emanated from the back rows and rolled forward. Stanka wrapped her arms around her sides as if holding her innards in place. Mrs. Ilmyen’s mouth wrenched to one side of her face as if it were a seam sewn on crookedly. Miss Dzelz held her head in her hands and muttered, “No, no, no, not at all what I intended.”

  Yes, we knew, had known, or at least had guessed that these things had happened. The people responsible, people we all knew, were buried in the cemetery. But that didn’t diminish the shock of hearing with stinging clarity everything we could not bear to speak. For as soon as one boy uttered a disturbing question, the next, fighting for supremacy, supplied another unanswerable query.

  “Was it the drowning in the slough of the Gypsy family whose name no one will utter?”

  “Who wants to know that their grandparents participated in a massacre?”

  Oblivious to our groaning, slowly growing in volume, Semyon carried on, his body swaying side to side: “Afterward, we could not speak of these things. Not openly. Why trouble our children with a history that makes them regret living?”

  “Who wants to know of a good woman driven by such madness that she drowned her own three-year-old daughter? She called it a baptism for her baby. Who wants to know of the many rapes and the other daughter she didn’t want, a product of such a rape. My Velta wrote this and—”

  Father jumped to his feet. “For the love of God, dear boy, stop!”

  As if of one mind, one body, both Father and Mr. Ilmyen rushed to the podium, each of them tucking each of you under an arm, shuffling both of you off the stage and out the side door.

  We trudged home in the rain: Mother and Father in front, Ligita and Stanka behind them, Joels, you, and I bringing up the rear. Father had lapsed into his familiar silence. Joels hummed the coffee-flake jingle; only it sounded more like a dirge. Ligita, as if physically trying to shake off all that she’d heard, lifted her skirt and dashed over the uneven road for home.

  I studied Father, his stooped back and pained walk. Mother matched her gait to his, the two of them side by side, carrying this evening between them. You slipped your hand in mine. I squeezed it tightly. Who needs words when we have hands? I wanted you to know that what you had shared—all of it true—could not be helped. Nor were you to be blamed for speaking it aloud. Not your fault that it was difficult to hear.

  “That,” Mother said to no one in particular, “is why those history texts haven’t been updated.”

  Is there a body beneath that stone? No. Having moved the bodies from the old cemetery to the new, I think your grandfather was the first to figure it out. It’s true, Velta drowned her girl the winter after the child was born. A few years later she tried to drown your grandmother. She would have done it, too, had not a neighbor been ice fishing upriver. He watched her chop a hole, saw the ax sink helve-deep in the ice. Heard the little girl crying. He must have known what Velta was about to do, and he carried your grandmother Biruta to the clinic where someone called for the white truck. At least that’s how your great-grandmother remembers it. You’ve read both sets of her letters, you’ve decoded all her words. You know what I’m saying is true. Your uncle Rudy would like to burn the letters. I can’t quite bring myself to do it. We’ve agreed to let you make the decision.

  Chapter Eleven

  SO RIGHT YOU ARE: God gave us two ears, one mouth. The better to listen. So I’ll tell you since you’ve worn me down. The eel recipe.

  First, wash him in water and salt then pull off his skin below his vent or nave
l but not much farther; take the guts as cleanly as you can but don’t wash him. Scotch the belly three times with the knife. Then stuff into the belly sweet herbs, nutmeg (grated), butter, and salt. Cut off the head. Pull the skin back onto his body and knot the end. Wrap and roast the eel in a pit or over open coals. Or place him in a pan with butter and water. By the way, you can do all these things and more to lampreys and congers. Kosher? Heavens, no.

  I was thinking about visions today. They rarely visit when you want them to. I wanted to sleep, felt myself slipping under, but the sound of wind and wings churning the air outside the window kept tugging at me. A crow flew through the open window. It hovered over the bed. I said, Well, go on then. Do what it is you’ve come to do. So close it hovered, I could see myself reflected in its gimlet eye. Then it darted, pierced my heart with its needle-sharp beak. I bled ink, black and thick, onto the white sheets. The pelican in the wilderness nourishes her own with a freshet of blood. What shall I bleed? What will best nourish? A song, a song from the stone of my heart.

  I am the beginner of the song.

  I stand in the middle.

  If I wasn’t the beginner of the song,

  I wouldn’t stand in the middle.

  This is what I’d like you to sing for me when it is my time.

  Because people don’t have too much patience for those who hear or see things of this world or the next clearly, I kept you close by during those weeks following the history fair. Mother canceled the weekly Ladies Temperance League meeting; there was no combating such forceful, determined consumption—and this with the kafenica at half hours.