The Hidden Letters of Velta B.

by Gina Ochsner

  The rain continued to fall steadily, steadily. Father renewed his old silence as if to say, What good are mere words against such water, noisy and constant? Mother, too, maintained a working quiet that seemed like a refuge, a covering, a shield. Only Ligita seemed unperturbed. In the evenings, as a hazed, granular dusk intermingled with the rain, she trotted to and from the cemetery. She’d run with bundles strapped to her back, and I figured this added weight was part of her training. The Amber Girl Dash wasn’t long off. I thought she had a sporting chance; her ankles and legs had thickened considerably.

  One morning Father awoke and did not get out of bed. By that evening, the time when he’d go to the cemetery to make his quiet repairs, he still had not stirred. Mother and I went to look in on him. Two words he whispered: I’m tired.

  Over the next few days you sat at your grandfather’s bedside and told him about the pigeon races in Samarkand. You provided running commentary on a hockey match in progress three towns away. You did not relate what news you’d been hearing in the graveyard nor did you tell of the most recent spate of vandalism. Nor did you recite passages from Velta’s letters. I kept myself busy cleaning, sorting. I discovered Ferdinands’s coat, the one you wore at the history fair. It hung on the hook on the back of your door, one side of the coat hanging lower than the other. No. Not a stone in that pocket. Letters. I spread them over your bed, mismatched, disordered. I scanned a panoply of written correspondence, most of which I recognized as belonging to Velta. Such fragility, such potency.

  Then I spied Anna’s letters. No one had asked after them. It did not occur to me to consider the possibility that the Ilmyens might not want them back.

  I pushed my feet into my rubber boots and plowed a slow path through the mud to the Ilmyens’ front door. Six weeks had passed since the history fair and our families had not spoken since then. Unlike the silence within our house, this silence held the edged electricity of a deliberateness that hinted at permanence. I knocked on the door. A timid knock. A knock neither insistent nor urgent, my knuckles rapping the wood quietly as if to say, Should you mistake my summons for the sound of a woodpecker drumming on a tree, should you decide not to answer, I will understand completely. I will go home. I turned for the lane. Behind me, the door creaked open. Jutta.

  “I’ve got your family letters and, er, things.” I pushed the bundle to her chest.

  Jutta did not even blink, did not examine the bundle, merely tucked them under her arm and motioned me inside the house as if she’d been waiting there for me all along.

  As it was Saturday, the Sabbath, the shades were still drawn from the night before. A menorah anchored a long swath of lace to their dining table, the place where Jutta had tried to teach me chess (Think, Inara! Think as if life depends upon it!). Though the lace had yellowed a bit, it still bore an air of nobility. In the corner a hutch built in the Soviet style—that is, with glass doors and a mirror behind the shelves—held the family chess trophies. The top shelf, reserved for Little Semyon’s trophies, was nearly full.

  Jutta led me past her bedroom through the narrow hallway where there was another glass case full of rare books, an ancient sepia-toned photo of family, and the linen closet where instead of linens I knew they kept even rarer books. In a tiny room compassed about with deep dark oak paneling, something Mother had always wanted in our living room, lay Mr. Ilmyen. He looked like a crumpled piece of paper, like he might flake to bits and blow away if not for the green-and-gray-striped blanket holding him down.

  His chess set lay on the nightstand. Mr. Ilmyen followed my gaze to the untouched set. With an outstretched finger, he motioned me closer to the bed. “I feared my whole life I would be more clever than devout. Rather than either of these, I wish now only to be found acceptable to God my maker.” Mr. Ilmyen gripped my wrist. “I am dying. I have things I wish to discuss with your father.” He released me.

  My mouth went dry. “Of course, Mr. I. Of course,” I murmured, as Jutta led me from the room to the kitchen.

  “Is he really dying?” I had to ask her. Several times already he’d been ill, but each time he’d rallied.

  “Oh, yes.” Jutta sank into the chair next to the stove. “He’s been to the clinic and back. Dr. N. says he’s got spots on his lungs.”

  People with these complaints usually didn’t last for long. Mercury poisoning, I figured, the last toxic reminder of what Soviet occupation had done to our soil and water.

  “Jutta, if there’s anything I can do, anything at all . . .” My words hung in the air, and I waited the obligatory three seconds during which I fully expected and hoped that capable Jutta, who did not need help during childbirth or at any other time in her life, would say, Oh, no. It’s fine.

  Instead, she touched the cuff of my sweater. “I wonder, I know this is an imposition, but our regular girl has left unexpectedly.” Color crept up her neck and face. “You know we don’t work on the Sabbath.” She motioned to the dirty dishes stacked beside the sink and a tub of soiled clothing. Mr. Ilmyen’s, I surmised. And then I understood that this is how reparations are made: in the small things like doing dishes, changing linens. She needed someone to clean and care for her father, who needed these things on the holy Sabbath as much as he needed them on the ordinary days. I understood that had I not knocked on their door first she would never have asked me. But because it was Jutta, who was the sister I always wanted and couldn’t have, I said yes.

  I rolled up my sleeves, filled the pots with water for boiling. Jutta vanished down the corridor, her voice floating behind her.

  Driver ho! Driver ho!

  Let the sled skim gently.

  If it skims gently,

  My sleep is light.

  I peered behind the lowered shade and watched the rain fall in silver pins and needles. I listened to the musical sound of water falling in the eaves, and for a few minutes, I was fifteen again. I plunged my hands in the scalding water, glad that I was here, glad that I could do this.

  As I finished at the Ilmyens’, darkness began to fall. The sun made a brief, fading appearance before submerging into the clouds. For twenty glorious minutes every frond of every fern, every blade of grass, every bud on every tree glistened wet and silver. The puddles in the lane were not water but platen mercury reflecting light. Aluminum foil wrinkled and glinted at the skyline. Joels had made a fire in our shed. That evening it seemed to me that he and I—shut up as tightly as a drum inside our shed, closing our ears to the water outside and the trouble all around—had all we needed: each other.

  Our world was not all right nor were most things in it. But in the midst of what felt like bewildering change I could not correct or control, I felt a strange calm. Still, my thoughts would kick up like dry leaves stirred by a wind. Hadn’t Velta felt like this before her Ferdinands was taken away? Doesn’t every wife and mother imagine and expect that her husband will live long, that her children will remain healthy? Isn’t it a shock to every one of these women when their men age before their eyes? “It’s like this,” Mother had tried to explain to me only a few days ago. “A man’s body fails faster than a woman’s. They work so hard, and when they start the journey toward the door, they go quickly.” I knew that was what Father was hoping for: a quick passage.

  I pressed my body next to Joels. His skin smelled of sawdust, both dusky and sweet. He was asleep, lost in the deep slumber of a man who works outdoors. As I so often did these days, I put my ear to his chest to listen to that wet engine working in the dark. How deceptive a man’s body is: working and working and then, without a noise, quitting.

  “Please don’t get tired,” I whispered. “Please, please, please don’t leave me.”

  In the darkness, Joels’s hand found mine. He squeezed my hand hard. “I won’t. I promise.”

  In the morning I found Father propped up in bed, a blanket tucked around his waist and an open book on the blanket. It was a collection of sermons.

  “Mr. Ilmyen is sick,” I said.

  The
news immediately loosened his tongue. “The nerve!” Father said. “I am dying. I had the idea first.”

  “He’d like to see you. He has things to discuss.”

  Father danced his fingers over the edge of his blanket. The lining had worked loose where he’d worried the stitching with his restless fingers. He seemed to be tapping out his answer on the edge of the blanket. “All right,” he said at last. “I also have things to discuss.”

  And so the next day in a half-hour halt between rain, Joels carried Father outside. Big Semyon carried out Mr. Ilmyen. They met in the middle of the lane, each man supported by their sons-in-law.

  First, they exchanged symptoms.

  “Spiders have set up a lace factory inside my eyes,” Father said. “Everywhere I look, I see cobwebs and clouds.”

  “I have swallowed sandpaper,” Mr. Ilmyen rasped. “Every breath is a hundred nicks with a hundred nails.”

  “Inside my legs a sharp-toothed thresher is biting me with its many teeth.” Father replied.

  I recognized the banter. It was an old game: find a verse of scripture and alter it slightly. It was a game Father loved because he had committed so much of the Bible to memory; it was an easy matter to evoke a verse and distort it for his own purposes.

  “My chest is a slab of stone. It pins me to the bed; it crushes me.”

  “Worms burrow in my teeth.”

  At last, exhausted by metaphor, Mr. Ilmyen cleared his throat. “I have a confession,” he said. “It has taken me seven years to recognize the hatred inside of me. Seven years to forgive those whom I hated, and seven more to ask those whom I hated to forgive me.”

  “What do you mean?” Father asked.

  “For seven years I kicked your brother’s stone.”

  A long look of understanding filled Father’s eyes. Then he smiled. “I have always wondered where those scuff marks came from.”

  Mr. Ilmyen clutched Father’s hand. “Forgive me.”

  “Brother, only if you will forgive me first. For many years I rubbed banana peels on your box of fishing tackle. I have emptied potassium pellets near your most treasured fishing spot.”

  Mr. Ilmyen’s bushy gray eyebrows lifted. “Of course. That explains everything.”

  “Forgive me,” Father implored.

  “No, you forgive me first and then I shall forgive you.”

  “I shall not. It is clear that I am fading fast.”

  “Yes. But as I am fading faster, you must forgive me first.”

  This first argument provoked a robust spate of coughing, the signal that they needed Joels and Big Semyon to haul them to their respective beds.

  It was cause for relief, this banter. I decided that their energy, their need to argue, meant they were on the mend. Mother was quick to set me straight later as we stood side by side at the sink. We were making soup. In dusk’s bend of light Mother’s hair looked much grayer than usual. Mother reached for a potato and scrubbed it vigorously with steel wool. She did her best philosophical thinking when she was working, though sometimes this had dire effects on the root vegetables.

  “Life,” she said, pausing to rub the tendons in her hand, “is a series of entrances and exits. It’s just a door that opens and closes. And we are the hinges bearing the weight.”

  How strange this weight, I thought later as I lay in bed listening to the dogs bark. How quickly the burden shifts from the hard tasks of living to those of dying. As Joels and I drifted into sleep, our separate dark waters, I felt the weight pushing on me. People talk about burdens, about bearing them up for one another, and I used to think of small packages wrapped in butcher paper or bundles slung over the shoulder. But I felt it now, the weight. And it wasn’t an object so well defined that it could be hoisted in the arms and handed off. The weight—I knew we all felt it as tangibly as we did sacks of concrete—was worry. And the only way any one of us knows how to carry it is to throw ourselves headlong into a series of tasks: washing, cooking, cleaning, tending, mending. And I was not alone in these tasks, this strategy of coping. Across the lane I knew that Jutta and Mrs. Ilmyen were working just as hard, and even Ligita, who surprised me by doing this, maintained a steady haul of laundry at our house. Which is, I suppose, why we were so shocked when Mrs. Zetsche walked down our lane bright and early one morning. The sight of her in the lane was so odd, like seeing a flamingo in Siberia; that she even knew where we lived was something of a surprise, too. She was dripping wet, and from our vantage point, it was hard to tell if the water rolling off her face was rain or tears.

  Joels hopped to the front porch and held open the door. It was all the permission she needed. She hadn’t crossed the threshold before she told us the news: Mr. Zetsche’s cast-iron horses had gone missing.

  “I am begging you, Inara. You are the only one who understands. My Mr. Z. is not right in the head without the horses. We must get them back.” As if to punctuate her plea, we heard the rapid cracks from the trees across the river. It was Mr. Zetsche firing his rifle.

  Mother ushered Mrs. Zetsche toward Father’s good chair, and Mrs. Zetsche sank deep into the cushion.

  From her purse she withdrew a small bundle wrapped in several blue handkerchiefs. With tiny trembling fingers, she unwound the cloth and handed to Mother its shiny metallic contents.

  Mother furrowed her brow. “Are these . . .”

  “The testicles, yes,” said Mrs. Zetsche. “We’ve received a ransom note. The kidnappers will castrate one stallion for every week we don’t meet their demands: five hundred lats per stallion.”

  Mother pulled her upper lip tight over her front teeth. She was trying hard not to smile. And yet I could only imagine what turmoil Mr. Zetsche was suffering. The cast-iron stallions were his strong, immutable progeny. And now they were in harm’s way.

  Mrs. Zetsche buried her tiny face in her tiny hands, and small muffled noises commenced.

  Mother patted Mrs. Zetsche’s shoulder ever so gently. I rewrapped the cast-iron testes in the handkerchiefs.

  “The thing is, we’ve lost our tenants at the Riviera. We’ve lost most of our savings in the stock exchange. We can’t meet these demands; we simply haven’t got that kind of money.”

  Mother and I exchanged glances. That there could be a limit to the Zetsche wealth had never once crossed either of our minds. Why do people hate us so? Her words reverberated in my ears as I watched her weeping beyond consolation, as surely as she had lost a child or, in this case, five children.

  “There, now,” Mother murmured. “It’s never quite as bad as it seems. This can be fixed,” Mother said, even as the look on her face said, There’s no fixing this. No way.

  Mrs. Zetsche stopped in midsob, wiped her nose with a tissue. “In that case”—Mrs. Zetsche had her hand on her purse, which yawned wide open—“I’ll leave these with you.” She removed another pair of testicles and, clunk, dropped them onto the TV tray.

  You say you don’t remember your grandmother scolding you. This doesn’t surprise me. She rarely had occasion to do so. But the moment Mrs. Z. left, she cornered you in the kitchen.

  “Where are those damn horses?” Her fingers, pincerlike, gripped your elbow.

  You squirmed; she pinched harder. I didn’t stop her.

  “It’s our jobs on the line, you know. You tell what you know and we might all get to keep working.”

  You looked sufficiently worried; your ears turned vermilion. “They’re somewhere in a barn in Balvi. That’s all I know.” You would not meet her gaze.

  Mother released her grasp on your elbow and folded her arms across her chest. “Balvi. That’s not so far away.” And I could see her making plans, figuring whom she could conscript into a recovery mission. And if I was honest, I would have to admit that I was glad Mrs. Z. had come to us first. She needed us. Another plus: seeing someone else, namely her, reduced to tears was something like a comfort. Don’t the problems belonging to others seem more convivial, more interesting, and possibly more soluble?

  That
year your grandfather took ill, my rounds became increasingly strange. My first stop: the Zetsche manor house. With a wag of her petite head, Mrs. Z. would greet me. If she held a hankie to her eyes, it meant another stallion had undergone the knife. By this time, she was trusting me with her keys again and she preferred that I clean their many porcelains in their many bathrooms. Ligita, she thought, wasn’t scrubbing as well as she ought to. But I divined that Mrs. Zetsche really wanted a captive audience, someone who could radiate sympathy and work at the same time. I did this knowing that Mrs. Z. might not be paying me as much as she paid Ligita and, in fact, might not pay me at all.

  Then I’d stop by and see Dr. N., who spent most of his time these days in his barn. He’d encircled the barn with wooden planks. Stanka said his place looked like a gigantic wagon wheel, the planks being both spokes and rim, and the barn anchoring it all in the center.

  Inside the barn, a deluge of orchestral, choral, and jazz music fell from rafter speakers to the cows, though Dr. N. and his cows seemed visibly confounded.

  “They resist my every effort at cheer,” he sometimes complained.

  He’d outfitted them in rubber boots, and I thought this had something to do with their lachrymose demeanor. Dr. N.’s funding had been pulled, but that didn’t slow him down a bit: the test tubes boiled and burbled, and I had plenty of work inside his manor house and outside. From Miss Dzelz and others, he’d accrued at least fifty barrels of corks and claimed that he was putting them to good use—he’d made buoys out of them and affixed them to the sides of the barn. It was quite possible that his barn could actually float—one end seemed to bob upward ever so slightly from time to time as if it were slowly warming up to the idea.