The Hidden Letters of Velta B.

by Gina Ochsner

  I kept Mother updated on Dr. N.’s activities. He worked every other day at the clinic, and on his days off, he had the floating barn experiment to work on, and he claimed that he was developing something called the Zambian Space Program, the particulars of which remained very fuzzy. My reports of Dr. N.’s experiments ushered Mother to an unexpected moment of revelation. She put her hands on my shoulders. “After all these years of hoping and praying that you would be a genius, I can honestly say I’m glad that you’re not.” And there was not an ounce of malice or sarcasm behind her words.

  If you weren’t out collecting corks for a school project or playing chess, I’d sit with you.

  Having recovered from the history fair and noticing the great quantity of water lying about and falling from the sky, Miss Dzelz, who never liked to let an educational opportunity go by, seized upon our strange weather patterns. She instructed you all to compare this year’s rainfall in eastern Latvia to the rainfall of the past one hundred years. You were to measure the width and height of the river daily, which already had risen to the edge of Mr. Z.’s empty Riviera shops. You were to estimate how many days would pass, if the current daily rainfall continued, before all the lower-lying homes and farms would be underwater.

  Judging from your reaction—a fervent clambering for tape measures, tin cups, and trips to Dr. N.’s—I gathered that this assignment was met with great enthusiasm by the third grade. Nothing captivates quite like imminent disaster. I thought there was something beautiful about all this water. If the rain stopped—this seemed to happen during the hour that dawn broke and the hour that dusk fell—then the water in the lower fields lay as flat and still as mirrors. And in these hundreds of mirrors, the clouds shone silver and gray. We saw and knew all that we needed and nothing more.

  Mr. Ilmyen and Father worked out a schedule for their discussions. At high noon Monday through Friday they met and aired their general and particular complaints. On the Sabbath, which started on Friday night and went through Saturday night for Mr. Ilmyen but started Saturday night and stretched through Sunday for Father, they took a rest from each other. How they needed it! When they met, and they preferred to do this in the middle of the lane, they went after matters of theology with hammer and tongs.

  “Faith is like a fish that can’t be caught,” Mr. Ilmyen said on a Wednesday. A light drizzle fell, nothing serious, and with some canvas stretched between laundry lines, we managed to keep the two patriarchs relatively dry.

  Father stretched his mouth into a grimace. “Faith is like a grave that you can never finish digging.”

  “Faith is like being on a boat on a river; it is both an individual experience, the hand at the oars, say. And communal. The boat has many seats, after all.” Mr. Ilmyen turned his gaze to the sky in deep contemplation. From upriver, we could hear Mr. Z. shooting his rifles, short sharp blasts. “There may be many seats, but not just any idiot gets to pull at the oars,” he said.

  Father narrowed his eyes at Mr. Ilmyen. “What are you saying?”

  “Jews and Baptists can’t pull at the oars together,” Mr. Ilmyen replied.

  “But they can be in the same boat,” Father insisted.

  “No.” Mr. Ilmyen shook his head, and he seemed sorry to have to say, “They can’t even float on the same river.”

  And that is how the second argument started.

  “How can you say this? Your God is my God and my God is your God.”

  “Maybe,” Mr. Ilmyen said.

  Father turned shades of violet. “I suppose we shall never fully agree. But as you desire God’s presence and I desire God’s presence, what we long for is the same.”

  “Yes.” Mr. Ilmyen winced. “But let’s not forget that as I am dying more quickly than you I am closer to the goal than you are.”

  This polemic would have gone on for hours had Ligita and I not been hanging laundry. She hung undergarments on the line closest to our house; I hung towels and sheets on the line closest to the lane. She was talking to me these days, though I attributed her chatter to sheer boredom; we had a lot of laundry to hang.

  Every successful visit to the latrine was a source of great rejoicing for Father; but there were still occasions that Father couldn’t make it there in time and I knew this was a source of great embarrassment for him.

  It hurt Mother’s hands, so bent now that she couldn’t hold a book much less turn a page, to wring and hang the bed linens. And I found I was happy to do what needed to be done, happy to be needed and necessary. I reached for a wadded sheet, whipped it into obedience, and held it up, pins in my mouth. The kitchen light had been snapped on. A box of yellow warmth spilled out, a hazy illumined patch of air hung above the yard. Strands of silver rain fell gently. I studied the hazy light, the kitchen window. That’s when I saw a dark figure behind the window. Not Mother, not Joels. Certainly not Father.

  “Who is that?” I asked Ligita. But she’d gone. Vanished.

  I lowered the sheet. There was Rudy at the table sitting in a chair as if he’d never left. I raised the sheet. If I counted to three then lowered the sheet, I’d see my folly exposed, how I was projecting my wishes onto these sheets as if they were movie screens, projecting what I wanted to see because it was what Father wanted to see.

  Three, two, one.

  I lowered the sheet. Rudy was still there. Now Ligita stood beside him, setting cup and saucer and teapot on the table. Up went the sheet. Three, two, one. Down went the sheet. Now you sat at the table, an ear inclined toward your wayward uncle.

  By the time I made it to the kitchen, Mother had helped Father from the middle of the lane to the kitchen table. They sat side by side openly studying Rudy.

  Also sitting side by side were Rudy and Ligita. They held hands, though one of his hands drifted to her belly. And they gazed at each other as if one were meat and the other salt.

  Mother had the oddest look on her face, as if she had solved a difficult problem but the solution was simply impossible to believe. Ligita’s midnight training runs were wifely missions laden with food and comfort. Judging from the way Rudy kept patting her stomach all the while gazing at her ankles, the comfort had been reciprocated.

  I suppose that’s why I didn’t notice straightaway that Rudy’s face looked different.

  His nose had been broken at least twice. It sat like a crooked S in the middle of his face.

  You could not take your eyes off of it. This might have been embarrassing, but then Rudy smiled.

  “For a while I lost my shadow. Then it found me, punched me. Twice.”

  “Your shadow?” you asked.

  “Yes. It has big hands,” Rudy said.

  “And apparently big knuckles, too,” Father observed.

  “God’s hands are made of stone,” Rudy observed.

  Now they were playing that old game: evoke a passage from the Bible. Then twist it.

  Father peered at Rudy. He was not looking at his nose but his eyes. “Are you broken?”

  “No, Father. I am crushed,” Rudy said.

  “Where have you been, son?” Mother ventured quietly.

  Rudy’s gaze lifted from Ligita’s thickened ankles to Mother’s eyes then dropped again. “Liepaja.”

  We all knew what that meant. Prison. And I understood why we’d not heard from him, why he kept his gaze lowered. He was ashamed, and I’d never seen him like this before.

  Mother drifted to the window and opened it. “What did you do?” Mother’s voice floated, spectral and thin.

  “Some things and then some other things.”

  “Well, if you stay, you have to work,” Father said.

  Rudy’s gaze still had not risen from the province of Ligita’s ankles. “What shall I do?

  Father pointed to the pile of testicles still on the TV tray. “Find the rest of the horses.”

  And this Rudy did with alarming speed. Because he’d been to prison and back, a fact that we suspected elevated him astronomically in the questionable opinion of his former mat
es, his word was now law. Not two nights passed and we heard a commotion in our yard. In the morning we discovered the stallions, glistening slick with rain and caught in midprance behind the shed.

  We didn’t know which of his friends had taken the horses. (No names! If you love us, son, then don’t say a single name, Mother cautioned.) And it really didn’t matter. The fact was we had all five of them back.

  What to do next seemed clear. Joels and Rudy and Dr. N. conducted many debates regarding the special difficulties joining cast iron to cast iron presented, the merits of gas welding over electrode and rod. Finally, they settled on a plan. Dr N. had a friend who could be sweet-talked into lending a machine and various electrodes. Many more hours passed, many more arguments, before the men reemerged from the yard: Rudy and Joels in thick work clothes, Dr. N. in his scrubs. The stallions were once again whole and wholly in possession of all their parts.

  Mother and I examined their work. It wasn’t perfect, their welding, but it would do.

  Rudy looked at Father. “So now what?”

  “We return them,” Father said.

  It was just the sort of covert mission Rudy lived for. Father assumed a supervisory role while Joels, Dr. N., and the Merry Afflictions lent their expertise. Dr. N. fashioned a sled out of metal flashing and fabricated a harness and hitch to join the sled to Vanags’s stout Pobeda. It was a good omen, the Pobeda, as it meant “victory.”

  Around three that morning, when the air was as thick and dark as soot, Vanags and Buber brought around the dull gray Pobeda. It took some heavy lifting, some strong bungee cords, before one of the horses was secured to the roof. This gave Vanags some grief. He loved his car like a man loves a beautiful, demanding woman. Seeing how the roof bowed visibly hurt Vanags. But because it was for Rudy and for a fairly good cause, Vanags slid behind the wheel for the slow haul.

  We watched the dark slurry of fog incrementally swallow the slowly retreating vehicle. Vanags had to drive this way on account of the many potholes. But this was what made the Pobeda so great: with its high axles, it could negotiate uneven terrain at a glacial pace. Even so, long after we lost sight of the car, we could hear it. The Pobeda was in no way a quiet machine. It spluttered and chortled and wheezed, and this was what made it not so great. This was also why Dr. N. had to build a sled and hitch, and why the noisy car could not be driven directly to the Zetsches’ circular drive. The plan: maintain a stealthy crawl in the Pobeda to the edge of the Zetsche property, unload a stallion from the car to the sled, then harness themselves to Dr. N.’s sled and drag the horses to their proper pedestals. All this to avoid waking the Zetsches. “What good is charity, after all,” Father reminded everyone, “if you announce it for the whole world to hear?”

  You stood with Mother, Ligita, Father, and me, and you watched and listened from the side of the lane: first one horse was carried off, and then the next, and then the next. What we couldn’t see you narrated for us: the dismount of the stallion from the roof of the car to the sled, the pull of the sled, the strain on the harness, the triumphant moment when the first, the second, and then the third stallions were placed in their proper spots.

  Owing to the great quantity of water standing about in the fields and on the Zetsches’ drive, it was tricky convincing the fourth horse to stay upright. It had been sculpted to look as if it were in perpetual flight as none of its hooves actually touched the ground; a stout pole, one end affixed to its belly and the other to a small pedestal set in concrete, held it in place.

  And, you told us, they finally arrived with the fifth horse. By this time, the sky had lightened to a slate gray.

  We exhaled a collective sigh.

  Then, from the direction of the Zetsche property, we all heard a loud blast. It was a sound we knew well: Mr. Zetsche firing his rifle.

  You bolted from your seat. “Uncle!” you cried, as you ran out the door.

  We heard them before we saw them: Rudy shouting epithets at the top of his lungs, “Bastard! Bastard!” and then Joels and Big Semyon carrying Rudy through the drizzle. Rudy’s face was a whitish gray like birch bark. Dr. N. hurried behind, his black medical bag in one hand, a bottle of vodka in the other.

  They carried Rudy to the kitchen table and laid him on it. Mother set a pot on the stove to boil. She put her palms on the stove’s frame and leaned heavily against it. She couldn’t bring herself to look at Rudy, to look at all that blood. Better to keep busy; that was the rule she lived by. And it was a rule I lived by, too. I could not carry his pain; I could not do a thing to bring comfort. But I could locate clean linens, salt, gauze. It was Ligita who patted his hand, whispered tender encouragement while Joels and Big Semyon held him down.

  “Drink this,” Dr. N. instructed, as Ligita propped Rudy’s head up. “It will help with the pain.”

  It was unusual for this kind of procedure to be done in a home, but as Dr. N. explained, it was either here in the kitchen or at the clinic. As the tools and procedures would be precisely the same, there was really no point in moving Rudy if it wasn’t absolutely necessary. And, of course, if he went to the clinic, there’d be paperwork, questions, and a hefty bill.

  It took one bottle of vodka for Rudy and one for his leg, but finally Dr. N. dug out the bullet. Rudy gritted his teeth and kept his gaze locked on Ligita through all the sterilizing, digging, and bandaging. “You have beautiful ankles,” he murmured at one point, though I noticed his gaze had traveled considerably higher to her bosom.

  “It’s not perfect,” Dr. N. said to Mother, as he washed his hands in the sink. “It would have been better to do this at the clinic, but it will do.”

  Mother didn’t say a word, only leaned against her stove, which clattered and trembled.

  Infection set in within nightfall. Rank and putrid, the odor of decay filled the room where Rudy lay. And just as Uncle Maris’s leg had turned as black as oxblood so did Rudy’s in five days. It was clear, even to him, what had to happen next. “Just do it quickly and cleanly,” he said to Mother.

  We could not risk the chance of yet another infection. This time Dr. N. insisted on moving Rudy to his lab. As he had before, Vanags lent the use of his car. As Joels and Vanags loaded him in, Rudy could not have been any paler. His hands trembled; his whole body shook. I know that Father wanted to be with his son, but he could not get out of bed. The events of the last five days had beaten him down, and you agreed to stay behind with Father.

  “Blood is just so loud,” you said.

  “Wear your earmuffs,” I told you, and without another word, you complied.

  Mother, Ligita, and I followed the Pobeda. The sky, that storehouse of water upon water, opened up its floodgates. Rain beat us into the mud. Vanags drove slowly over the lanes so as not to jostle Rudy.

  We arrived at Dr. N.’s, and the men carried Rudy inside. Joels would give his blood, and Vanags would lend some of his. We women waited in the corridor. We cleaned windows. We sorted Dr. N.’s laundry. We watched the sky. On her hands and knees, Mother pushed the mud down Dr. N.’s back steps. The water was rising quietly and steadily as the rain fell in an unbroken shower of gray and silver. Needles sewing our world to water. Dr. N. had located morphine and this was a great mercy. No one should have to hear the sound of their own bones being sawn in half. This was why Mother hummed loudly and constantly as she cleaned. A mother shouldn’t hear the bones of her son being sawn in half. Nor a wife. Ligita joined in, her humming a rattling buzz in the back of her throat.

  When it was over, Rudy lay still. He did not move, did not wake as Vanags and Joels carried him to the car. During the slow drive home through the drizzle, we thought we heard groaning, but Mother kept a tune steady. Through it all, the rain never stopped.

  Time slows, stops, moves backward when sickness takes over a family, a room, a body. Rudy babbled. Some of the information was useful. At last we learned which of his friends had thrown that brick at the Zetsches’ mansion. Other information, less so. The anecdotal accounts of his days at uni
versity, the forays into the forest, how many times and with which girls, who needs to know? And then about prison. This is what put Mother’s head in the oven.

  “It’s enough, son,” Father said, passing a palm over his forehead. “Rest.”

  Father prayed for Rudy; I prayed for Rudy. For two days Dr. N. did not report to the clinic. Instead, he paced in our kitchen, drinking most of the vodka.

  Mother wanted to sing. I could see it in her eyes: a silent search for the right words. But what tune do you carry, what song is there, for times like these? We waited, not moving, not talking for a day, then another day. And on the third day we knew: infection. Again. And this I believe is what undid Father. For his own sake, he had run head-on toward death, but death wouldn’t take him. Death wanted his son. But Father wouldn’t have it. And so he wrestled hour after hour for the life of his son. Father took that infection inside his own blood and fought with it. Rudy’s skin burned hot; Father’s skin burned hotter. Rudy soaked three sheets; Father soaked four. Rudy kept a steady murmur of strange songs; Father recited passages from First Corinthians. Love bears no record of wrongs. In its weary bones love carries those wrongs, hoists them upon stooped shoulders, and bears them away. Because love can and wants to do it.

  On the fifth day heavy silence filled our house. Rudy and Father were sleeping hard. Fighting death had worn Father down; his skin turned white and his face bore long creases deeper than any of those furrows men get from working outside in all kinds of weather.

  Toward evening came a knock at the door. Mother went to the door and opened it slowly.

  Mr. Zetsche stood on our porch, his felt hat in hand.

  Mother remained on the threshold. She did not greet him, did not invite him inside.

  “I came by to say how sorry I am. I only meant to frighten, you see, because we’ve had so much trouble at our place. And I just thought . . .”

  “Yes.” Mother’s voice was as dull as a worn pan.