The Hidden Letters of Velta B. Read online

  Crows lived in all three chimneys and the roof drooped on one side. The third-floor windows were small half ovals, sleepy eyes watching the woods and river. But that didn’t diminish the grandeur of the porch with its two stately granite columns or the wide circular drive or what must have been at one time a magnificent water garden. Behind the manor, concentric circles of dark pond water boasted lilies and reeds. In the centermost pond, like an elegant arrow from the middle of a slimy bull’s-eye, rose a faux-marble statue of Venus minus a head and left arm, a choir of belching frogs hopping at her ankles.

  Mother didn’t want us near the manor. It was dirty, she said. And not just because of the dusty floors or grimy windows. Young couples used it from time to time for their trysts; Mother was sure of it because she’d find candles in tin cans and other evidence of common, filthy actions.

  “What’s a tryst?” I sometimes asked her, mimicking the way her mouth twisted around the word. I asked knowing that my question bothered her as much if not more than the mess the couples left behind. It was those messes, we figured, that drew Mother to the manor. Once, we followed her from a distance, careful not to snap twigs, careful to follow the path through the thicket her body had cleared. We watched as she wrested open a side door. Through the smear of dirty windows, we watched her open drawers, even pull up some wooden flooring. We watched her steam long skins of wallpaper, carefully pulling them away from the many sheets of newspaper used for binder and insulation. We could hardly believe it: Mother, violating the same home she’d so sternly wanted us to avoid. I think that’s when we both realized that this must be the old manor that had once belonged to her parents, Velta and Ferdinands. Maybe she was looking for the newspaper articles her father had written. Maybe the very poem that got him sent to the work camp was wedged in the walls of that manor house. Maybe this was why Mother, who believed in abiding by the laws of privacy, felt no compunction about peeling skin after skin of newspaper from the wall, rolling them up, and tucking them under her blouse.

  Rudy and I conducted similar investigations. We dug behind the dark ponds; we dug beside the stone walls dripping with ivy and clotted hollyhocks. One day in autumn, when the wind off the river bent the birch trees in sad sighs, we went exploring. Rudy found a box of rifle bullets. I unearthed a tin box. The rusted color of fallen pine needles and large enough to hold a thick ream of papers, or maybe a family album, it had the weighty feel of the sacred or secretive, and therefore it seemed valuable. I broke the hasp, pried off the lid. No books, no photos. Just a bundle of letters bound with butcher’s string. Under my coat I carried the bundle, somehow knowing that this might be the secret treasure Mother had been searching for. I took the tin to the cellar and sat with a candle in the darkness. Some of the letters were scratched on thick cardboard-stock paper, others on thin onionskin. Some were in German, others in Latvian. I rifled through a few of these, pausing at a recipe for caraway bread and then at this story in blue ink.

  I will stitch my dark parable.

  I sew a new skin.

  With my sharp beak,

  I will order my words by reason of darkness.

  I will step inside.

  I will sew myself up syllable by syllable.

  What if this was my story?

  The lonely hedgehog raises his pointed nose to the stars. Cold is his nose, colder still the stars. He would freeze if he stood like that for long, looking for the name of his true love spelled out among those pinpricks of light. He is a bad speller; those are the wrong stars. They don’t spell any names he recognizes and he is cold, cold. He shivers and his spines stand on end. He doesn’t know that other hedgehogs suffer as well. Loneliness, after all, is a contagious condition. All of them stand in different parts of the forest, their pointy noses aimed at the stars. One little hedgehog sniffles, cries. Another joins in. Soon the forest is all asniffle, and many tears freeze to the points of many noses.

  “Well, this is dumb,” says one hedgehog, so cold now his words fall to the ground as chips of ice. “Why should we each suffer alone? Why shouldn’t we huddle and cling? At least we’ll die together.”

  “Oh! Let’s!” cried the other hedgehogs, and in short order, they all found one another and curled up in a big pile of fur and needles. To their amazement, they did not die. In fact, they grew quite warm, huddling and clinging. Some of them even managed to find their true loves whose names they could not see in the stars. And all would have been well for those hedgehogs had they clung and huddled and held stock-still. But as hedgehogs have sharp spines, the slightest tremble, the tiniest shiver provoked endless torments.

  Here the letter had been folded into halves then quarters. Velta had written this in a shaky hand.

  It is bitter, they cried, to be together, and it is bitter to be alone.

  I read another scrap of paper written in a different hand altogether.

  A girl stands beside her mother’s bed, her small hand finds her mother’s furrowed brow.

  “I just need to sleep,” the mother was always saying to the girl. “I’m just so tired.”

  “Go on,” the mother was saying. “Go on and leave me alone.”

  A stone sat on the mother’s chest. She didn’t ask for the stone, but someone put it there anyway.

  A stone grew in the daughter’s stomach. She didn’t ask for the stone, but someone put it there anyway. It pushed on her lungs; she couldn’t breathe. It pushed on her throat; she couldn’t speak. Go on, she wanted to say. Go on and crush me.

  Why had Velta written about hedgehogs, of all things? In whose hand was that second scrap written? I supposed Mother would know. So why didn’t I show her the letters? Even now, I don’t know how to answer. I imagine I liked the idea of possessing a secret; I am ashamed to admit the measure of joy I felt in withholding from Mother the tin, which I hid under my mattress. I suppose I’m telling you this because it is useful to remember that each of us is a strange, intricate combination of contradictions. This is what makes us a mystery, even to ourselves. This is what makes us capable of surprise.

  I wish you could have known your grandmother Biruta in her prime: as unpredictable as the weather and just as strong, few could resist or withstand her energy. She wasn’t a tall woman or particularly muscular. Her strength was of the compact, sinewy sort. She could walk twenty kilometers without stopping. She could peel three buckets of potatoes and then start in on a mountain of laundry; if she was tired, you’d never know.

  What she loved, she loved with a passion that outstripped proportion or measure. She loved publishing her monthly temperance newspaper, which she pounded out on an old green German Olympia typewriter. She loved presiding over the Ladies Temperance League. She launched both endeavors because your grandfather sometimes liked to go to the river to think. That is to say, he was meeting Mr. Ilmyen or Mr. Arijisnikov for a cup of tea. That is to say, they were getting as drunk as Russian sailors. This your grandfather did three nights in a row, and on the fourth night, your grandmother suffered an epiphany.

  Straightaway she began organizing the Ladies Temperance League and elected herself president. It was a lonely post, and in the first month of her presidency, she had managed to convince only two other women to join her society. Mrs. Stanka Ivaska, who had few friends in this world but would join any organization that gave out coffee with sugar, signed up right away. The other woman was Mrs. Ilmyen.

  Mother had always held a small secret admiration for Mrs. Ilmyen, who had obtained some higher education and even had the documentation to prove it. Also Mrs. Ilmyen knew how to put on makeup better than anybody else and had two pairs of nice shoes. Now that Mrs. Ilmyen had joined the Temperance League, your grandmother’s admiration grew. And when I mentioned one evening as we boiled our cabbage for dinner that the Ilmyens were chess champions, not five minutes later we were on their doorstep knocking.

  Mr. Ilmyen answered, blinking in surprise. Mother put her hands on my shoulders. “Inara, as you may well already know, isn’t so terribly
clever, but could you teach her a thing or two about chess?”

  Mr. Ilmyen’s eyes swam behind his glasses. “Anything is possible,” he said, his gaze now on the clouds. And I knew from the way he said those words that everything Jutta had taught me so far about Jewish suffering had to be true, because it was clear to me that this request of my Mother’s had just increased his suffering exponentially.

  We have been sorting through my things, reading Velta’s letters.

  You don’t use the same shovel to heel in saplings as you would to dig a grave.

  You don’t use the same needle to sew a sweater as you would a shroud.

  Odd advice, I agree, but it might make for good reading in your temperance newspaper.

  And now this: your Book of Wonder. You opened the thick clothbound cover and out of a cloud of dust rose a moth, its wings transparent yellow, fluttering up, up. I took it as a sign that this book of unraveling thread and flaking binder’s glue still held life, sudden flight, and subtle possibility. That you can’t remember writing in it baffles me. Have you really forgotten so many of your hard-earned discoveries?

  Iron in our blood, carbon in our bones, we are built, you wrote, of the same stuff of stars. The moon is slipping off its leash, about four centimeters per year, because, you wrote, even the moon needs to wander. In your careful cursive, you wrote of the dead, their musings, their confusion. Mr. Bumbers, who used to sell apples at bus stands all along the A2, told you that his body was withering, shriveling like the rinds of spoiling fruit. Herta Ozolins, a seamstress who specialized in alterations, said that when she died a fountain of water rushed through her every fiber as if her body were a loose garment and she were in a gigantic whirlpool washing machine, something she’d never owned while living. Mr. Dumonovsky, a kind man who had worked in the bread cooperative during the Soviet times, said he woke up on a stone floor. He heard thunder. His body trembled, as if shaken by an enormous tumbler. Lida Kaulfeds, who in her golden youth had been a principal dancer and had loved cigarettes, described a furnace of terrific heat. Her bones dried up inside her body. Her body turned to paper, then ash. Then she flaked to bits.

  A way to quiet the noise, a way to carve order out of the jangling and jostling of so many books and school worksheets full of facts. A way to escape. That’s what the book was for. You made it through the first week of the third grade; we had high hopes for the second until Miss Dzelz, the third-grade teacher, sent you home one bright September day with a piece of butcher paper. On that paper you were to draw a stout oak tree with branches blooming ovals for each set of great-grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, parents, and siblings. You studied that tree and the empty ovals, and asked, “Whose name should I write in the oval for ‘father’—David or Joels? There’s not room enough for both,” you said, “and I don’t want to leave it empty.” There it was, your dilemma served up as neat as geometry: one boy, two fathers. One man absent, one present.

  In the middle of the tree’s green canopy you drew a self-portrait in colored chalks. Your head the size of a plum, your ears as large as tubas into which a spiral of sound, circles upon circles, funneled. And in circles swam eels, dark notes of dark dainas, the caviling of owls, your grandmother’s latest advice: wear those earmuffs! For the ordinary and acceptable noise, you selected soothing blue and green chalks. But the words of your classmates: Freak! Monster! These you drew as jagged electric-white thunderbolts piercing the circles, puncturing your inner ear. And the little raisin eyes you’d drawn for yourself were so sad, so unbearably small and sad that I understood in a blink what must be done.

  I consulted with Miss Dzelz, and it was decided that with the exception of special school events you’d stay home. You’d write in that book anything and everything that caught your fancy. We were glad to have you. Everything you needed to know Grandfather, Grandmother, Uncle Rudy, Stanka, Joels, Dr. N., or I could teach you. All of us working in concert, we compiled a curriculum like no other on the planet. We started with ears, of course.

  Crickets keep theirs at the backs of their knees. Whales keep theirs on their broad lips; sound waves travel from lip through a stringlike nerve to the brain. You learned that individual hairs on the body of a spider function as individual ears, each tremble of a hair registering and responding to a whole spectrum of sound.

  You recorded how loud a second was, how much it weighed on the stretched parchment of your thin tympanic membrane. The hearing of certain flowers, the hibiscus and clematis in particular, is exceptional as they are all auricle, all ear. The ears are the only part of the human body that never stops growing.

  This we knew. For the first few years of your life, we measured and recorded the growth of your ears—Dr. Netsulis in his lab journal, and your grandmother Biruta in her temperance newspaper. Big, she wrote one month. Bigger, the next. When the fuzz turned to bona fide fur, your grandmother stopped her candid reportage. Her pride in you: unbounded. You were myth made flesh. But common sense had finally caught up with her, as had some none-too-gentle teasing at the Elvi Market and at the swings in the school yard. That teasing provoked a response in her trademark “Kindly Advices” column: if you can’t be polite, then, at the very least, be vague.

  And words! How you loved collecting them.

  GNARL

  growl; snarl

  GNAT

  small winged insect

  KNIT

  to form into knots; to tie together as a cord

  KNOT

  an interlacement of parts; something not easily solved; an intricacy, difficulty

  KNURL

  lump or a knob; a series of small ridges

  You found these words in your grandmother’s English dictionary, her gift to you on your ninth birthday. You chewed over that word knot for weeks. An intertwining or conjunction, you wrote, a knot is a complication. A knot’s strength is a result of the snarled strands. If you try to untangle them, the knot loses its integrity. This bit you had underlined with a red pen. The letters g and k in those words intrigued you. Their presence, though unarticulated, is vital; without those silent consonants, the words might mean something else entirely. You wrote that people are like this, too. Some are loud, some silent, all of them necessary to understand the whole.

  Loud. Your great-uncle was impossibly loud, or what your grandmother called colorful, flamboyant, lively. In the main, it was his mouth people noticed. He liked to use it. His mouth had gotten him beaten within centimeters of his life, and these beatings had happened in a regular and steady way. He seemed to enjoy the special attention, sometimes asking for more with his lopsided, gap-toothed grin. “What is the matter with you!” Father would ask when Uncle showed up on our doorstep at strange hours, a rag pressed to his mouth or a bandage wound about his head. I think the matter had to do with his left leg, which he lost somewhere in the jagged mountains of Afghanistan. It was the custom of the Soviet regime to dispatch the people least interested in Soviet affairs—particularly Latvians, Estonians, and Lithuanians—to fight the government’s ugliest wars. Anyway, Uncle could not forgive the Soviet army for sending him to such a godforsaken place. He couldn’t forgive the field surgeon for taking his leg. He couldn’t forgive himself for relying on those crutches. Your uncle Rudy and I learned never to ask about his time in the army.

  We loved it when Uncle Maris came to visit. All he had to do was smile just wide enough for the gap between his front teeth to show, and Mother could not say no to him. Uncle Maris could put his foot up on the table, smoke indoors, and shave at the kitchen sink if he wanted, because when he smiled, the whole world smiled. This was because he’d gained a certain amount of notoriety as a political protester after he lost his leg in Afghanistan. According to Mother, he had the habit of exhibiting a little too much zeal—even for the protest organizers. But he had a good heart. And, Mother liked to remind us, he was one of the very best vitamin salesmen in all of eastern Latvia. How Uncle Maris became so smart and industrious, she didn’t know, except that a hard
life, Mother sometimes said, looking at her blaring red hands, had a way of enlightening even the dumbest people. In that winter of 1993, I pondered this quite a lot as I helped your grandfather dig in the cemetery, the way ordinary work provides extraordinary knowledge, and if not that, then a simple, unadorned wisdom.

  One night the same winter the Zetsches came to town, we heard a pounding on our front door.

  “Maris!” Father and Mother cried, their voices climbing the octaves as they opened the door. Rudy and I stood dumbfounded at the sight of Uncle: crutches wedged under his armpits, and leaning against his shin like a pair of faithful dogs, two small suitcases.

  “Don’t just stand there like cough drops,” Mother yelled at us, and Uncle Maris tipped a shoulder in our direction and beamed.

  “Inara! Look at you—a woman already! And Rudy! Such a man!” Uncle was referring to Rudy’s mustache, which had taken him a full year to grow. Rudy, his face flushed bright red, grabbed Uncle Maris’s suitcases and hurried inside.