The Hidden Letters of Velta B.

by Gina Ochsner

  This generosity did not go unnoticed. Mrs. Zetsche stood beside Stanka for long stretches of time during those weeks as slab by slab, beam by beam, a new mansion emerged. It did not escape our notice when, from time to time, Mrs. Zetsche wiped at her eyes—genuine tears. Stanka often stood next to Mrs. Z., offering her dark sunflower seeds and spare tissues. How many generous people live in this town? Mrs. Z. was asking herself this, I imagined. I knew the answer: like the little stones at the river’s edge, too many to count.

  The river moved differently, slower in places where it had once been swift, surging over rocks where once had been still pockets for sleeping eels. We couldn’t catch them to save our lives that next year. “Water has its own will,” you said one day, as you twirled a fuzzy gun-barrel cleaner into first one ear canal then the other. The barrel cleaner a gift from Mr. Zetsche. “That’s why it is a sin against nature to try to contain it or control it.”

  And like the river, you had changed. In the three years following the flood, you grew taller than Rudy and we had to stop calling you Little Maris. You became simply Maris. The muscles in your back and neck thickened, as did the downy fuzz on your ears. Thinking you were the Bear Slayer incarnate, a PR firm lobbied hard to make you the national hockey team’s mascot. You were even profiled in a magazine that heralded you as the next presidential hopeful. Joels and I discussed the situation; we’d endured other legends that could not be stifled. We’d saddle this rumor—and many more—and ride it.

  You tell me that it was during this time your powers of hearing changed. That broad pallet of sound that had for so many years kept you awake at night narrowed considerably. Regarding certain sounds, you were almost deaf; you could not hear the political goings-on in Riga and did not care to. When Mr. Z. enquired about the economic outlook and the news of Hong Kong markets, you reported an unusual trending toward Arthurian reenactments in Canada and shifts in the polar ice whose groaning and cracks sometimes kept you up at night. Quieter noise, too, interrupted your sleep.

  You could hear different bodies of water, could hear what color their beds were, how fast they moved over their beds; you heard the fish dreaming in the rivers: the Daugava, the Neva, and even the Amazon. But it was the Aiviekste you listened to most. In autumn, the height of eel season, we could not manage to hook a single one. It was the eels, you declared, pounding the side of your head with your open palm. They were in distress, you said, prevented from making free passage in the river by a heavy solid object. Upon further investigation, we learned what that solid object was: the steel plate of Velta’s piano. Wedged in a tight bottleneck of the river, it took all of the men working and a hydraulic winch whining and ratcheting to pull it out. And this, too, worked a shift inside the way some of us thought about eels. They were not so different from us in their desires. All they wanted was to live their lives unobstructed and unobserved. It seemed wrong to catch and eat them somehow.

  I can see texture in the air, weight to the light. I can measure the strength of a shadow by its crisp edges. I’ll never hear as well as you do, but I can discern a sweetness to breath and cricket song and the yelps and rumbles of dogs down the lane, noises that used to annoy me. And Uncle. His voice is a faint rasp, but I can distinguish it from that of the cicada and the cricket. It’s an incessant rattling, the sound of vitamins shaken in a bottle. And I understand he has things to tell me. A score to settle.

  “A mirror is not, I repeat, not a miracle.” Uncle’s voice is a scratch at the window. I understand now that I have prevented his passage; I have been his haunting.

  I have worn the white gloves and scoured Oskars’s Bible forward and back. I am no theologian, only a shabby practitioner of faith. But I have to believe the answer is yes. I am in need of forgiveness. It has taken me some time to realize it, but my anger toward Uncle has pinned him to me, and for this, I need his forgiveness and he is in need of mine. Our mutual ire has kept us bound together. About burying him with the Bible, I will confess—just between you and me—that I am guilty but unrepentant. Though it became his condemnation, a curse, it is also his blessing. He has been steadily wounded on account of those psalms boring holes in his hips. But, you’ve written in your Book of Wonder, isn’t a blessing a thrash in the wound, isn’t this the pain of redemption, isn’t this how we are gloriously healed?

  Time moves in one direction, our bodies catalog its passing. After the flood, you recorded every change in the river’s movements, every shift of mud, snag, deepening pocket of dark water. It took two years, but your uncle Rudy learned to operate a backhoe with one leg. Your auntie Ligita achieved the fame she so desired; working as a hand model, she often rode the bus to Riga for photo shoots.

  You have been such a good cousin to their Little Biruta. She tugs on your ears and you never lose your patience. They named her after your grandmother, and I think nothing could have brought her more joy: hearing the sound of small feet pattering up and down the hallway.

  Though Little Biruta was far too young at the time to really understand, your grandmother told her the importance of the potato and the correct way to shred beets. That’s how I knew your grandmother was ill: she was releasing the family recipes.

  She said she was tired, that’s all, but a call to Dr. N., some tests at the clinic, and we had our answer: she’d been suffering a series of small to large heart attacks. “But didn’t you feel them?” I asked incredulously. “How could you not know?” And she smiled, as she did so often in those last days, a tired, helpless smile. “I thought I’d swallowed a stone. Ha.”

  Mrs. Ilmyen brought over her prized pair of heels and insisted your grandmother at least try them on. Never in her life had she been fussed over. Never once in her life had she allowed it. And now our clumsy excess of attention—Rudy carrying in a tea tray!—only alerted her to the gravity of her situation. “I really am dying,” she said to me. “Yes,” I said.

  One evening in July when the light through the window painted her bedroom walls in swaths of lilac, Mother lay in bed. I sat with her, my rough, cracked hands on hers. “I’m afraid,” she murmured. “I know I shouldn’t be. Every good thing is on the other side. Why am I so afraid of the good things?”

  I did not know how to answer her then. I’m not sure I will ever know the answer to that question. I sang for her instead, my voice reedy and thin and unsure.

  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.

  I hummed the song to Mother, the beginner of my song, the one who stands in the middle.

  Mother put a hand on my hand. “Something is changing inside of me. Before all this, I could not see God anywhere. Now I see God everywhere I look.” Her gaze had drifted to a corner of pooling shadow.

  I squinted, wanting to see what she could divine in that burgeoning darkness.

  She died that night. We lit a candle, kept it at the bedside. You guarded the flame while Rudy and Joels brought in the coffin, lifted Mother’s small body, and tenderly set her inside. For the wake, we made rasols, this time using ham, onion, and potatoes. All the while, I heard Mother’s voice. Don’t even think of serving it without crushed dill! Stanka gave us a down pillow, a traditional Roma gift at funerals. If we were Roma, we’d have ended up with twenty-seven pillows. Why twenty-seven and not twenty-eight or twenty-six Stanka could not say. But the down was genuine—she plucked the geese herself.

  I know you remember the walk to the cemetery. How we picked up the coffin, walked a little way, set it down. This is how we carry burdens together. We shift the weight; we allow the hands to breathe; we change positions. Together we stoop, grab the straps, lift, and shuffle forward.

  At the cemetery we walked to the hole in the ground beside Father. You and Little Semyon and Rudy and Joels lowered the coffin with ropes. Then Rudy and Joels shoveled the dirt into the hole, heaping the dirt into a mound. We piled high the oak
boughs, the red roses. We piled high the dainas: I will open a casket of songs and engender joy.

  Spring’s green witchery has returned. Yellow light climbs the wall. Sets the green on the birch shivering. The light through the leaves casts a fine gold on the floor. I hear humming. The bees have returned. The bees have made a nest inside my head. How they work, tirelessly reeving a home within my loosely woven thoughts. They dart like needles, knitting light and sound. Stanka tells me that God needs no light in heaven, no sun, no lamp, for the bees hum light and clover all about heaven. We shall drip with honey. She says this as she sits beside me, her long knitting needles clicking and clacking.

  I am of two minds about the noise of knitting. On the one side, I like the sound of rhythmic ticking. On the other side, I can’t help but hear the tick and sweep of a hand over a clock’s face. Each tick says, Now. I’m hearing my last breaths being counted.

  I was thinking this and wishing you were in the blue chair. I wanted you to remind me that asteroids are built of the leftover scraps of planets or to recount for me the patience and humility with which for thirty years an Arab astronomer, your hero, observed the tranquil wanderings of a distant star. Or to tell me the theory that globular clusters of stars contain at their centers black holes. Knots and lace. I wanted to hear something, anything, when Stanka nodded to the corner of the room. The long mirror set in the leather ox harness stood there, returning to us our astonished images. Who had put it there? I can’t even imagine. A puddle of darkness gathered beneath the mirror. The glass turned to liquid and hummed. Did Stanka see a long white hand beckoning me? Did she see what I saw: a claw wanting to catch me by what’s left of my hair and pull me through? I don’t know. But she leaped up from the chair and lunged with her needles for the glass. She skewered that mirror and it shattered in a delicate tinkling of glass. As those pieces fell to the floor, they caught the last light and multiplied it exponentially. I sat on the edge of the bed, bathed in light.

  What is it I dream of during my fevered sleeps? White gloves, the hall oven, Mother’s dark hair, Uncle’s lopsided smile. I do think of David from time to time. Sleep ushers unbidden, extravagant, expansive memories. In sleep I am a different woman, as light as air, buoyed up by better, wiser water. Crazy talk, I know, but I have committed myself to telling the truth, odd as it may be. So I’ll tell you. In my dream a crow perched in my open hand. Speak, I said, your servant is listening. As sharp as a quill, as quick as thought, it pierced my heart. I heard my name called across water. I cannot stop what will happen next. Death is a baptism in a river that rushes swift and cool. I have one foot in the river and one in the mud. I have no regrets. I am not afraid.

  I do miss them all terribly. Father, Mother, Joels. Joels went quickly, and for his sake and yours, I was glad. You’re right. Life isn’t fair, but it is just. We will all die, some of us sooner than others, and no one knows that better than our family. I’ll never forget how, as we dug Joels’s grave, you muttered, I never want to dig another grave again. And here you are, in the chair, your palms cracked, fingers curling. On account of my grave. You could be bitter. Hate God. Hate this life. But you’ve always maintained a capacious vision, a vigilant belief in all possible possibility, an unashamed pursuit of wonder, which in itself is a rare kind of grace.

  You are reading from your Book of Wonder: tar water and brake dust will seal out the dead. If you stand in a river, you will never feel the same water touch you twice. A story is never told exactly the same way. Though the words are knots anchoring and calling forth shape from emptiness, no two shapes evoked are precisely alike. The words work on us differently each time we hear them. I suppose this is why we sing the dainas and say the psalms. As familiar as they are, they will never grow old. We stand in those familiar waters and feel ourselves transformed anew.

  This is the power of word worked through the body. This is why we must tell our stories, sing our songs. This is how we forgive and are forgiven. Is this enough? you ask me often. Of what use are our lives, our stories? What use to tell them in a world going deaf? Well, I’ve always believed you are a prophet. So shout. Tell the untellable tale. You stand in the middle, singer and song. You hold the sash binding us together, binding up our wounds.

  So much more I wanted to tell you. All the aches our flesh is heir to. Don’t be afraid of sorrow. It is the making of many. I want to tell you why we eat crunchy yellow peas in a bowl on New Year’s or count fish scales. Why some people throw old shoes and broken things out a window. Why we jump fire on Jani Day.

  You have asked for advice and this is it. Let us weave our dark parables; let us bury them deeply and firmly, pushing them down to an unshakable foundation, a bedrock of truth. Let us build upon that. Let us tell our stories and sing our songs. Let us baptize our world in words.

  Acknowledgments

  Deepest gratitude to my parents who told me all their stories and encouraged me to tell mine. I thank my husband and children for their unswerving faith in me. I thank Julie Barer for guiding the ship to shore and Jenna Johnson and Pilar Garcia-Brown for their keen vision and kind hearts.

  Many thanks to the many friends and readers who gave countless hours reading the manuscript in all its incarnations. Specifically, I wish to thank William Boggess, Don Comfort, Adrianne Harun, Colleen Jefferey, David Mehler, Bernie Meyer, Lynn Otto, Melissa Pritchard, Geronimo Tagatac, Colette Tennant, the members of the Chrysostom Society, and colleagues at Corban University and Seattle Pacific University’s Low Residency MFA program.

  For their help with research, I wish to thank the good folks at the YWAM base in Talsi, Al and Carolyn Akimoff, Judite Dzelzs, Ilga, Lev, Inara, Kristina and Ivo, and Peter and Emma Samoylich. For their guidance and aid in research, I wish to thank everyone with Bridge Builders International, specifically Charles and Nancy Kelley, Inete Zale, Katie and Dan Roth, Dustin and Kristine Peterson, and Paula Hewitt. Special thanks to Ilze Gulens, Juris Kronbergs, and Knuts Skujenieks for their help.

  Research for this novel was made possible through the generous assistance of the Howard Foundation and Oregon Literary Arts, Inc.

  About the Author

  GINA OCHSNER is the author of The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight, a novel long-listed for the Orange Prize, and two story collections. Her honors include the Flannery O’Connor Award, the William Faulkner Prize, the Oregon Book Award, Guggenheim and NEA grants, and the Raymond Carver Prize. She lives in Keizer, Oregon.

  Visit her website: www.ginaochsner.com