The Hidden Letters of Velta B. (10 page)

She loved the hall for its electricity, running water, toilets, and, most of all, the double oven. This explained why she did her level best to make sure that, just as at our home, she was the only one who cooked with it. Sometimes I thought Mother cared more for that oven than she did for me. It never failed or disappointed her, continually cooking with even, reliable heat so that her
piragi
browned gently at the seams and her cakes rose and her carp cooked to perfection, bubbling in their own fat and tasting of warmer, wiser waters.

You know how your grandmother can scrub a thing to within a fraction of its life. But this oven, for all the reasons I've mentioned, she did not clean. Each subsequent meal carried the traces of every grand dish that had come before it. I suspected that while some people kept journals of their days on paper, this oven was Mother's diary, an olfactory witness to every wedding, wake, chess tournament, and society meeting that she had attended, and no sooner did Mother turn the dial than a flood of smells jogged her memory to better days.

So, on that day when we went to clean for Jutta's wedding, Mother unlocked the back door and stood for a moment on the threshold with a stillness that bordered on reverence. She was looking at the picture of her father, your great-grandfather Ferdinands, whose eyes held the look of a man who has seen every kindness, every cruelty. Between his gaze and hers, I felt I was seeing past and present moving toward a slow collision. Mother ran the cloth over Ferdinands's image then Velta's. She touched her finger to her lips and touched her finger to Grandmother Velta's lips. This was Mother's private ritual, one I knew not to ask about. I had divined, on account of the small stone next to hers in the cemetery, that Velta had lost a little one during the early years of the occupations. But the circumstances of the child's death I did not know. That was another topic we were not to ask about.

Mother turned to me, clapped her hands briskly. “Let's get busy,” she said, seizing a stiff-brush broom. Quietly, the words barely discernible, she sang the
daina
she always sang when she was tired but still had work to do.

I rose early in the morning.

Dear God rose earlier, yet

Why, God, did you get up?

What did you need so early?

I grabbed a mop and bucket. I'd cleaned this hall with Mother so many times, I knew exactly what she wanted done and how to do it. While Mother swept the carpet on the raised platform, I stacked chairs and mopped the main sitting area. And the song continued.

What would you do, dear girl, if I didn't rise early?

I open all the doors for you; I give all advice.

Mother set to work in the kitchen; I scrubbed commodes and tiles. And then I turned my attention to one of the walls, my ritual. When I was a girl, the hall was considered Soviet property, and as so often was the case in public buildings, an oversize portrait of Stalin frowning behind his oversize mustache had been hung on the wall. The day after the Soviets pulled out and your grandmother collected the key from that elderly clerk, she snatched that picture off the wall and flung it out the hall's back door, as if it were a piece of moldy cardboard. It landed face down in the mud. It stayed there for weeks: nobody wanted to be known as the person who had rescued Stalin. Still, the tyrant had left his indelible mark: having hung on the wall for so long, the picture had shielded that sixty-four square centimeters of wall from the ordinary dirt and grime that discolored everything else. That portrait had been, Mother said, a larger taint keeping at bay smaller taints. But it looked strange: this bright white square surrounded by a sea of duller white. The only real solution, Mother decided, was to hang a picture of the Bear Slayer, Lacplesis. You have always loved this picture. As he grapples with his foe, every muscle of the Bear Slayer ripples. His large hands rip at the bear's jaws. His fur-trimmed ears sit high atop his head, looking not at all strange. The only trouble with this newer picture is that it is smaller than the old one. A verge of white wall framed the smaller picture, a reminder that Bear Slayer had not always been with us.

We'd been working for some time when I noticed that Mother's singing had stopped. I pulled off the rubber gloves and found her, head thrust inside the open oven, her hands running along the inside panels. Mother withdrew her head, sat on her heels, and examined her hand. “Good Lord!” Her face blanched. “Someone's scoured the panels of the top oven! They're as spotless as the day I installed it!” Mother's shoulders sagged, and I knew that she was taking a quick inventory of her lost culinary calendar. “Well, we'll just have to come back early tomorrow,” Mother said at last, wiping her hands on her skirt.

“Why?”

“To mind the oven, of course!” Mother charged out the kitchen door into the rain. I trudged behind her, listening to the sound of the greasy mud wrestling with our boots and not talking as we passed the Ilmyens' house, where each windowpane threw squares of light into their yard. Even though Mother and Mrs. Ilmyen still held Temperance League meetings together, I could not imagine that Mrs. Ilmyen would want us anywhere near the hall on the day of such a big event. And this made me unbearably sad; Jutta and I had once been like sisters, allied against the madness of a small town. We'd hidden frogs in the boots of the boys who teased us; I taught her all the dirty Latvian words and jokes Uncle had told Rudy and Rudy had taught me; we glued chessmen to the board belonging to a boy who was a cheat in math and not even a good one. And there was a time when I believed that I could be like her, able to navigate out of this town into a larger, better life. Jutta had tried to help, showing me how to balance chemistry equations, teaching me how to think two and three moves ahead on a chessboard. But where she could perceive endless possibilities within the fixed frame, I could see only how small the squares were, how short the time on the playing clock was. When we all sat for the entrance exams, I knew before the results were posted on the school doors that Jutta would go and I would stay. Her departure signaled a subtle shift; we had become two different kinds of people.

Once home, Mother went to the kitchen where she found Father touched by drink: a row of beer bottles stood in salute on the wooden table. For a Baptist, Father knew an awful lot about beer. But he was Latvian, and inhabiting and articulating seemingly irreconcilable paradoxes came as naturally to him as breathing or praying or, in this case, drinking. That is, Father was both a Bible and bottle Baptist. And he took both jobs seriously, though when he drank, he did not wear the white gloves that he wore when he read his Bible. At this particular moment, he was aspiring to grand notions. He wanted romance, but not with just a bottle. But Mother had all the excitement she could handle in one day and personally escorted him to the toolshed where she instructed him to sleep it off.

This, I told myself, was the reason why she had failed to notice—again—my magical eel quietly slumbering in her washtub under the table. As thick as a fifteen-kilogram sack of potatoes and twice as long, marinated or smoked, pickled or baked, he would feed twenty people, maybe more. And then I knew why the river had sent this eel to me in the first place: so that I could give it to Jutta and her family. They would eat the meat and have all of the blessing, all of the wisdom. And if by chance there was a bit left over for us, then all the better. I split the eel down the middle and took out the innards and placed the gutted fish in a stockpot. I poured vinegar into the pot, some of Mother's special-occasion wine, and crushed coriander and fennel seed. Then I sat at the table in the dark where I cradled my head in my arms and fell almost at once into an unshakable sleep of utter exhaustion.

And I dreamed. I heard Father singing in the yard:
Then the water had overwhelmed us; the stream had gone over our soul. Then the proud waters had gone over our soul.
And then another voice, both sweet and strange, strangely familiar—the Ghost Girl. You have always loved this story. The way your uncle Rudy tells it, the Ghost Girl emerges from still water, revealing herself one bit at a time: a slim torso, her breasts, her round shoulders, then her dark wings, as sharp as scythes. Half bird, half woman, her beak is as sharp as an awl. She comes for you in your dreams, and you'll know she's visited if you wake in the night and find puddles of water on the floor by your bed.

In the dream she didn't come to me; I went to the river, where she swam in the dark water. She was not surprised to see me. Dark hair, pale face, dark eyes, she seemed a darker version of me.

“Inara.” She waved me toward the roiling water. “Ask me a question; I'll answer!” I took one step in then another. I could see that she was not me at all but something else entirely. River weeds for hair, skin the color of mud. Her eyes, gaping black holes. She lunged and bit my shoulder. I woke to the sound of dogs barking and a shrill rooster clearing his throat.

What did that dream mean?
you ask me. I have no idea. Maybe the dream was a tiny confirmation that there's something to your grandmother's ghost story. Maybe it was the first time I felt fear. I woke with a start, my elbow knocking against the pot with the eel. A quick look inside, a poke with the fork tines. It wept vinegar, just as it should, so I washed the meat, dredged it through flour. The rest of the ingredients for the sauce—shelled walnuts, hard-boiled eggs, raisins, honey, parsley, and mint—I'd take with me and assemble at the hall. I had just turned on the oven, thinking I'd precook the eel, when Mother came into the kitchen, her hair pinned up in preparation for a full day of cooking. She pointed her nose toward the oven and squinted at the murky glass door.

“You're not cleaning that oven, are you?”

“No,” I said. I knew she'd not fully recovered from her previous night's shock. “I'm cooking something for Jutta.”

“Oh,” Mother sighed. “Well, whatever it is, cover it and bring it with you. We've got to get to the hall before someone makes a mess of that kitchen.”

The recipe? I've never written it down. I've never needed to. I can tell you that you must watch over the walnut sauce with care. Too much heat too soon will ruin it beyond remedy. The raisins, by the way, need to sit in sweet white wine overnight.

Thick fog swelled from the river and held to the lane. We set off into the fog, Mother's nose twitching. The distinct smell of chicken rolled through the mist. As we approached the lighted hall, we could see the silhouettes of women working in the kitchen. Mother held the door open for me and we stood on the threshold surveying the scene: Mrs. Ilmyen and the twin aunts whom Jutta had once told me about—Reka and Lida—furiously chopping almonds, dicing boiled chicken, and slicing mountains of leeks. Clearly, Mother had severely underestimated the energy of Mrs. Ilmyen and her sisters.

Mother coughed, and after a long moment, Mrs. Ilmyen looked up. She smiled. “Oh, Mrs. Kalnins! I can't tell you how much we appreciate your thorough cleaning.”

Mother grimaced, her gaze taking in the stockpot simmering on the ring. “I thought we'd help out where we could—with the soups, maybe.”

“Well.” Mrs. Ilmyen straightened a pin in her hair. “That's generous of you, but you've done so much already.”

“Nonsense! What are good neighbors for? I won't get in the way,” Mother added, as if reading Mrs. Ilmyen's thoughts. “I'll just watch over the oven; it can be tricky.”

Mrs. Ilmyen glanced at her sisters, who were still chopping but much more quietly now. Then she reset the pin in her hair. With that single gesture, she acknowledged that in all the years she lived across the road from Mother she'd weathered much worse. She'd get through this, too.

“All right, then,” Mrs. Ilmyen said.

Mother wiped her hands on the sides of her skirt and affixed a smile of blistering benevolence on her face. I knew that her stubborn insistence regarding the soup wasn't merely out of spite. Mother sincerely believed that soup making was sacred work because the bad spirits of the air didn't like it when they smelled onions and beets weeping together in the bowl. They seized you by the bones and tried to make you too tired to finish, which was why Mother sometimes needed to sit on a stool and why sometimes she started a soup and I had to finish it. Had Mother and Mrs. Ilmyen been closer friends, Mother certainly would have reminded Mrs. Ilmyen of these things. Instead, Mother stationed herself on a stool in front of the oven and set the temperature dial.

I kept my back to them and my nose lowered over my sauce, walnuts and raisins swelling with spiced wine, and waited for the oven to heat. And I listened carefully for the little morsels women drop while working in kitchens: how many people were coming (sixty, at least); who the big eaters were (the groom's father, who ate half a salmon at a wedding two towns away); where Semyon, the groom, and Jutta would live (in a small room Mr. Ilmyen planned to attach to their kitchen); how Mrs. Ilmyen was handling the stress (good—only one gray hair this morning and so far not a single tear shed from the bride). Through all this talk, the hands of Mrs. Ilmyen's sisters never stopped moving. Reka and Lida were a veritable whirlwind of chopping and rolling and flouring, mixing, blanching and boiling. I marveled at their quick and steady industry: latke upon latke appearing on the trays in endless ranks and files, ropes of braided challah dough quietly rising under a towel. After three hours, the sisters decided to temporarily relinquish the kitchen to Mother and install themselves in the bathroom: Jutta needed help with hair and makeup. I caught a glimpse of Jutta. She had a towel wrapped around her head. Her dark eyes flashed. Catching sight of me, she lifted her hand, wiggled her fingers. With that one gesture, my world was made right.