The Hidden Letters of Velta B. Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2016 by Gina Ochsner

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Ochsner, Gina, date, author.

  Title: The hidden letters of Velta B. / Gina Ochsner.

  Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing, 2016.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015037466 | ISBN 9780544253216 (hardback) | ISBN 9780544703049 (trade paper) | ISBN 9780544253124 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH : Mothers and sons—Fiction. | Spiritual healing—Fiction. | Great-grandmothers—Fiction. | Family secrets—Fiction. | Letters—Fiction. | City and town life—Fiction. | Blessing and cursing—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / General.

  Classification: LCC PS3615. C 48 H 53 2016 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015037466

  Cover design by Christopher Moisan

  v1.0616

  A portion of this novel first appeared, in different form, in The New Yorker.

  The author is grateful for permission to reprint lines from Muriel Rukeyser’s “The Speed of Darkness,” from The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser. Copyright © 2006 by Muriel Rukeyser. Reprinted by permission of International Creative Management.

  The author is grateful for permission to reprint the daina on page 8, from Albert B. Lord’s essay “Theories of Oral Literature and the Latvian Dainas,” and the daina on page 65, from Lalita Muižniece’s essay “The Poetic ‘I’ in Latvian Folk Songs”; both essays appear in Linguistics and Poetics of Latvian Songs. Montreal: MQUP, 1989.

  The dainas that appear on pages 86, 164, 170, 210, 263, and 266 are from The Daina: An Anthology of Lithuanian and Latvian Folk-Songs, edited by Uriah Katzenelenbogen. Chicago: Lithuanian News Pub. Co., 1935.

  For Dace Berzins

  The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.

  —Muriel Rukeyser, “The Speed of Darkness”

  Chapter One

  YOUR FIRST DAY OF THIRD GRADE. The leaves crisped on the trees, curling orange, red, yellow. They crunched like brittle paper beneath our feet as we walked down our lane. The closer we drew to the school, the slower you moved. We spied other kids galloping toward the schoolhouse, their mothers in tow, juggling book bags, purses, and mandatory first-day gifts for the new teacher: yellow apples, embroidered handkerchiefs, chocolates. You had no book bag. I had no gifts. This was our third attempt in as many years to get through the dreaded first day. I had a pair of extra-large aviator muffs and these I slipped over your extra-large ears. As much to protect the tender cartilage as to dampen the colossal noise of the school yard.

  Outside the wooden school doors, you grabbed my sleeve, turned to me. “I know I am peculiar,” you said. “But am I too peculiar?”

  The verbal torment at the hands of schoolmates, the pain inflicted by well-intentioned neighbors. That’s what I heard in your voice. What I said, my hand on each of your narrow shoulders, “Maris, you are fearfully and wonderfully made.”

  It’s a verse from Psalms, one of my favorites. I said it because I know the power words have. I’ve read Genesis. I’ve read how God spoke every blade of grass into being with the three little words let there be. The words: all potential, all possibility. Speaking a story makes it happen, and so I told you a story, told you it was yours.

  A long time ago, so long ago no one remembers when, Bear-Slayer Boy rose out of the river’s mud. His ears, enormous. Trimmed with fur and as large as meat pies. With those ears he could hear the stirrings of field mice three countries away. His gifts of discernment were unparalleled. Bear Slayer could hear how the heartbeat changes, how the voice tightens when someone tells a lie. He could hear the sweet caroling of the songbirds and knew what the fish in the river were thinking. Smart and wise, Bear Slayer, though a boy, was also strong and courageous. Once, when he was walking in the woods, a bear ambushed him. Without hesitation Bear Slayer, using only his hands, slew that bear, ripping it apart at the jaws.

  This story is a door opening. A door closing. The words are hinges, self-oiling through the act of repeated recitation. Repetition being a form of love, I told you the story every night during those magical, swift years of your childhood. How big were those ears? you often asked, your voice small in the growing darkness. Bigger than mine? You needed to know you were not alone in your oddity, that your outsize ears were not a mistake but a marvel. I leaned over you, turning chant to parable. These words being like the interlocking teeth of a zipper, you unzipped the teeth of the story, crawled inside its dark, capacious interior and made it your own.

  Lymphoma. What a funny word! It sounds like a musical instrument, something that emits warm round tones when struck with a soft mallet. Anyway, Dr. Netsulis showed you how to administer the morphine, left several vials in a waxy white paper bag. He has changed so little through the years: the white lab coat, his snow-white hair, long beard, thick glasses, absentminded cheer. He said to me, Safe journeys and many white days! And six weeks left to live if you’re lucky.

  You asked me yesterday if cancer hurts, really hurts. Yes and yes. You say you don’t remember the time we rushed you to the clinic in Madona. You say you don’t remember telling the doctor that hornets had built a nest with knitting needles inside your ears, that our voices rattled like matches in a matchbox. What you felt in your ears I feel in my lungs, a sharp rattling. Every breath is a short, hard swipe of matches on the striking surface’s rough swath. Thank God for morphine.

  More like a liquid weight than anything else, I’d say. It pulls me under and I happily let it drag me to the depths. The weight is like that of the radiologist’s bib. Remember how during that visit the technician sat you on a stack of thick dictionaries and draped the lead apron over your small body?

  The color of doom, that apron. And so heavy! It took all of your strength to keep your five-year-old body still so that he could take the pictures. More about that visit I could tell you: the immediate circuslike sensation your ears provoked among the technicians, the many questions the doctor asked as she trailed her finger along the tawny fur of your earlobes, but it’s that weight I’m thinking of. Morphine feels like a soft metal melting in my stomach, pulsing through my chest, hips, thighs, pushing all feeling toward my hands and feet, which are, incidentally, burning hot. I know I told you earlier not to fuss over me, not to bring the pans of ice water for my feet, but I think now I’ll take you up on that offer.

  You’ve come to sit beside me. A sheen of perspiration stands on your brow and above your lip. The fading light makes your ears look larger. You’ve lit the candle. Some people will think it a waste that at eighteen years of age you’ve devoted yourself to tuning pianos, studying speculative physics, and publishing poetry in the temperance newspaper. But I’ll tell you this: I couldn’t be prouder of you.

  From the open blisters on your hands, I
can see that the ground is giving you some troubles. You are digging near Uncle Maris’s grave. It is a particularly unyielding patch of the cemetery, the ground buckling, his stone lashed with many black marks and tipped to one side. The earth pushes back what it doesn’t want. The fact is, something of your namesake has always lingered with us and I don’t mean in the sentimental way that people hoard memories and imagine that a memory is the man. I mean the man was with us. Palpably, tangibly, and long after he passed. We were marked, branded.

  I understand now that you’ve known this all along. From the time you were four, your ears were as large as soup bowls. You could barely lift your head for the weight of them, for all the chatter and noise they collected. As you grew older, you kept notes. The ground spoke to you and you couldn’t help but hear the soil’s slow heave of stones. You heard the triumph of each slender blade of grass spearing up through the mud and the restless dreams of the dead. Buttons and zippers. Needles and thread, things that fasten and bind. At night, that’s what the dead dream of, you wrote. They are unhinging bone from joint, word from thought. Oh, that the needles of the trees would pierce them, would dart and pin body to soul. The unraveling, you wrote, is their greatest source of confusion. What are we without our bodies? This, you wrote, is the question that grinds at the dead like steel wool on a rusted washboard, like gravel splintering the planed pine boards of a coffin.

  You wrote that when people die they leave an empty sack they fill with words, murmurs, questions, gossip, complaints. Some empty sacks are bigger than others. Uncle Maris, you wrote, wanted a new pair of leather shoes—nice Italian ones with ornamental fobs—because the walk to heaven was longer than he had figured. He’s been gone fifteen years. And still he has so much to say. He is our haunting, present in absence. Hearing what we couldn’t, you’ve known this all along. Maybe this is why you asked me this morning whether I’d like to be buried closer to him or my grandmother Velta.

  I said, Bury me wherever the ground is softest. I think your hands were hurting; you kept your fingers curled slightly, like a man who handles a shovel all day long surely will. I said, Sit here a minute because there are things you know and things you don’t.

  Mistakes. I have made more than my fair share. When you were a child and claimed you could hear printed words vibrating on pages, or that in the buzz of the telephone wires you heard a week’s worth of gossip, I didn’t believe you. When you told me that the problem with living things is that they don’t last and the problem with dead things is that they do, I questioned your sources. “Uncle told me,” you said, and I put the aviator’s earmuffs on you and sent you to your room without supper. When you first showed me your notes, I didn’t believe a boy of your tender age could have possibly written them. I couldn’t fathom the overwhelming noise of the living and the dead, how their multitude of stories in myriad permutations assailed you.

  Other failures: shrouding events and people in silence and calling it love. I might have kept quiet, I might have died quiet. But this is the strange thing about illness. Or maybe this is the strange thing about the medication for the illness. I have lost all sense of proportion and value. Every thought, every scrap of any memory, seems as important, worthy even, as any other. All of it begs to be told. I would like to have written everything out for you, but in the same way wool is cleaned and carded before being spun into skeins, the act of writing demands a cleaning up of the facts and becomes an exercise in selection, editing. An artifice. It’s better if I simply tell you everything I can think of and let you do the sorting later, cull the extra fibers, sort the mistakes. You’ve always been able to hear a word and the many spaces around it, and discern what is vital and true. When I said this, your face softened and you smiled such a tender, sad smile. “Oh, Mama,” you said, pressing your forehead gently, gently against mine. And then you sat on the blue wooden chair. And you listened.

  Your grandfather was a cautious man in possession of a serious nature forged by sorrow and quiet fury. He had buried many people whom he loved, and those graves were written on his forehead, forearms, wrists, and hands. All he had to do was stand in front of a mirror and he could see from the lines around his eyes how long they’d been gone and where in the cemetery all the bodies were buried. In the winter of 1992, Father took your uncle Rudy, who was then sixteen, and me, fourteen, to the cemetery. At that time the cemetery sat much closer to the river than it does now. Magnificent oaks, some of them more than six hundred years old, towered over the many plots closest to the lane while the alders flushed red at their tips near the graves closest to the river. Rudy and I knew the cemetery better than we knew ourselves; we had spent many long hours wandering among the stones, pulling weeds, gathering leaves, or washing Father’s shovels and scythes. On this day, Father handed us each a shovel. Dig, he said. Go on, dig. So we dug.

  While we worked, Father talked about things we’d never heard of, things he’d not been allowed to discuss. The president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, lifted the ban on silence in 1988, but it wasn’t until a few more years had passed that many Latvians, Father included, took the ban lifting seriously. This is how we learned from Father that Oskars, his father, had been a camp grave digger. He and Solveiga, a grandmother I never knew, and Father, then a little boy, and some sixty thousand others were deported to gulag work camps in Siberia. Vorkutlag, a mining camp. That’s where Oskars, Solveiga, and little Eriks ended up, in the Pechora River Basin somewhere above the Arctic Circle.

  How it happened was like this. In 1947, a sweep was made in eastern Latvia. Any excuse, however flimsy, was used to arrest people. One man, for example, made the mistake of wearing an “anti-Soviet smile” and was sent to Magadan, a place few survived. It just so happened that a small contingent of Soviet soldiers searched Oskars’s barn and found a Bible. And that was enough. They started a small fire in the brush and would have burned it if not for a certain captain, a Tatar from the Urals.

  The captain noted the gilt-edged pages, the mark of a holy book. “Where did you get this?” he asked, his eyes scanning over the words on the onion-thin pages. And your grandfather explained: “My mother gave it to me.”

  With his free hand, the captain reached under the collar of his uniform and withdrew a small medal icon. Michael slaying the dragon, I believe, or maybe Saint George. I suppose this captain could have gotten into quite some trouble had his superiors known about that icon. But I have since learned that it wasn’t uncommon for Soviet soldiers—generals, even—to wear them, discreetly, of course. The captain kissed the medal right there in front of Oskars. “My mother gave me this,” he said, slipping the icon beneath his shirt. The captain nodded to Oskars’s shovel, nodded to a patch of mud beyond the barn. Then he bent over his boot and took a very long time to retie the laces. This is how Oskars was allowed to bury that Bible before he was taken away. But this captain still had to send Oskars, Solveiga, and little Eriks to the work camp; he apologized that he couldn’t spare them that injustice. A quota had to be filled, and it was the way of the Soviet regime to relocate people as a means of breaking their spirits. The captain made no mention of the Bible in his report and even allowed Solveiga an extra five minutes to gather a few blankets and kitchen utensils for their long journey. I offer this story to remind you that in every period of time, in every place, you can find incredible cruelty but also unexpected kindness.

  Your grandfather Eriks felt there is a sacred connection between life and death. A single breath separates the two, and you cannot understand life without experiencing death. Given the task of digging graves for the prisoners, Oskars saw plenty of death at the Vorkuta mines. In those days it was customary to be buried in the nude. They called it “going into the ground Soviet-style.” Prisoners did not have the luxury of proper burials with a nice coffin and nice words said at their interment. Sometimes the guards made a point of dragging bodies facedown through the ice or mud. It broke Oskars’s heart. Working under the cover of darkness, he dressed the bodies i
n worn-out work clothing and mumbled passages from Psalms over them even though it was forbidden and could have added time to his sentence. In a twelve-hour workday, Oskars maintained a steady harmony between hand and mouth. As he dug, he recited Psalm 1 through Psalm 150. And then he’d start over again. When he’d tire of the psalms, he’d sing a daina.

  Why, O sun, did you tarry,

  Why did you not rise earlier?

  I was delayed behind the hills,

  Warming little orphans.

  I warmed their feet, I dried their tears.

  This was the daina he and Eriks sang when they buried Solveiga. She died in that camp giving birth to our uncle Maris. At any rate, after Oskars had served his “tenner,” a standard Soviet sentence, the camp administrators released Oskars, Eriks, and Maris. They sent them on their way with thirty rubles and a wolf card, a small paper glued to their travel papers that marked them as former prisoners.

  Having a wolf card meant few jobs and no privileges, no rights. Many of Oskars’s friends and neighbors, fearing the taint of associating with a former camp prisoner and a practicing Baptist to boot, would not acknowledge him. There was some suspicion at the time that Baptists, also called Shtuntists, were in actual fact German spies. Of course, that wasn’t true, but the Baptist faith was viewed by Orthodox Russians and Lutheran Latvians as a dangerous import. And so Oskars became the town grave digger and coffin maker—the only jobs he could get. Working beside him were Eriks and Maris.

  Eventually, Oskars’s heart seized; he loved butter and, Father said, digging graves had broken his spirit. The brothers built a coffin, measuring boards and joining them without any nails. They dug a hole. All these things your grandfather Eriks told us that winter in 1992. It was our inheritance, he said, to know the truth and be set free by it. But lest we get big ideas and forget our place, he gave us each an ash-handled shovel. From that day forward, if we weren’t in school, we were in the cemetery. Even at that time, Rudy could dig quickly and well.