The Hidden Letters of Velta B. (11 page)

Before she left the kitchen, Mrs. Ilmyen fixed a stern gaze on Mother. “Promise me, Biruta Kalnins, you will not tamper with our food.”

Mother adjusted the heating dial then crossed her arms over her chest. “I will only open and close the oven door—and only then to make sure nothing burns.”

I could read utter doubt in Mrs. Ilmyen's eyes, but the lift of her jaw indicated the resigned optimism of a woman choosing to believe. “Okay,” Mrs. Ilmyen said, clutching her purse under her arm. “Okay.” And she retreated for the bathroom.

For the next hour Mother and I worked in silence, Mother assembling her famous
piragi,
small pasties she filled with meat—smoked ham and bacon and onions. It was completely unkosher, colossally unkosher, but years of cooking alongside Mother taught me to ask no questions, offer no correctives. I passed my sauce through a sieve into the belly of the eel. Then I wrapped the fish with a towel, one of Mother's very best, and slid the entire bundle into the top oven.

“Wait.” Mother opened the door of the upper oven and smelled the heat. “What with half this oven not what it used to be, I can't quite judge. My nose is off.” Mother thrust her head farther into the oven. It was important, Mother had taught me, to never rush an oven heating. And you should never bake anything without first dancing the requisite twenty drops of oil on the bottom plate of the oven. How the oil beaded, she'd told me, and how it danced told you how hot it was and which dish to bake first and for how long.

“I just don't know,” Mother said, withdrawing her head from the oven. From her apron Mother pulled out Uncle's old stethoscope and inserted the ear pieces into her ears. Then she reached for her backup jar of pork lard and dropped a thick white crescent from the spoon onto the racks. Another cataclysmically unkosher move. We watched the lard drip to the bottom panel. Mother held the scope near the panel and listened to the lard sizzling. It was better to use olive oil, but Mother had always maintained that anything could be substituted for something else if the situation was dire enough.

When Mother, satisfied at last, returned the stethoscope to her apron, I slid my eel, now fish in a cloak, into the upper oven. And Mrs. Ilmyen's somber warning? We meant well—didn't that count for something? Mother turned her attention to the two oversize bowls of dough for Reka's latkes and Lida's challah. She thrust her fingers into the dough, noted how quickly the dough flaked apart. She spooned a little lard from her jar into Reka's dough and folded it in with muscular jabs of the spoon. So much pork lard, so much unkosherness. It was too much, even for me.

“Mother,” I gasped. “What are you doing?”

“This is a small repair, not an alteration,” Mother said.

“You know, some women are a strange mixture of pride and humility. Wanting help but uncertain if they should ask for it,” Mother said. “A wedding—now this is a big event, so big it overwhelms. If there's a small thing I can do to help, then I want to do it.” Mother smiled. “It'll be my gift to her.”

Fortunately, it was at this time that the musicians converged at the back door: a cellist, two violinists, and an oboist, a man with a white yarmulke stapled to a red toupee. He annoyed Mother greatly by repeatedly addressing her as the mother-of-the-beautiful-bride and asking if the ensemble could be paid in advance for their services.

At last, the groom and his family arrived. And with them the rabbi, a tiny man in a black suit shiny at the elbows who was supported on both sides by the groomsmen. The rabbi did not walk so much as he shuffled, the weight of his beard pulling his chin to his chest. The entourage tottered to the platform where they all took their places beneath the chuppah, a shawl tied to four poles Mr. Ilmyen had erected on the platform. This canopy, bowed in the middle like a long-winded prayer, didn't look like much to me. But back in the days when I thought I could become a Jew, Jutta explained to me that the canopy was God sheltering and protecting the bride and groom. No doubt they'd need it, I thought, so near to the river where rain and stork crap fell from the sky in a far-too-predictable manner.

And then in a billow of white came Jutta, her dark cherrywood hair bound up with beads. Her cheeks flushed (with a little help from Mrs. I.'s flat of rouge) and her eyes as bright as May marigolds, Jutta glided past me, her gaze fixed on Semyon. She joined Semyon under the chuppah and bent over a low table where they signed a piece of paper. Then the rabbi read a bit from a musty-looking book. Melodious and odd words in a language I did not know, but they had the effect of quiet enchantment. I was standing tiptoe on the threshold of something sacred: love.

After the reading, Semyon peered intently into Jutta's face before lowering her veil. Happiness, I knew. He was divining in the face of his bride where his happiness lay. But even from my spot, on the threshold between the kitchen and the hall, I could see the love between them, apparent and apparently ample, and I felt that bite of ancient envy. I wanted that kind of love. Not the flimsy kind I'd read about in books, but the sturdy sort of love that would not disappoint with every change in the weather. I wanted that boy who didn't notice my hips or my hands but looked steadily into my eyes and liked what he saw.

A groomsman placed a glass on the platform, and Semyon smashed it under his right heel, a reminder of the fragility of human joy in this lifetime. Everyone clapped and shouted, “Mazel tov.” Mother rushed for her whisk broom and dustpan, but not before clicking her tongue, calculating the cost of such an elegant piece of glassware utterly destroyed.

Mr. Ilmyen climbed onto a chair, a glass of wine raised in his hand. “As you know, we named Jutta after the famous chess prodigy Jutta Hempel who gave simultaneous chess tournaments on TV when she was only six years old. Just like that, Jutta, our Jutta, has always known the right move in life. And why should it be any different in love?” Mr. Ilmyen nodded at Semyon's parents. “So a toast to the parents of the groom for having the imagination and foresight to orchestrate their first meeting. At a chess tournament, no less!”

“A brilliant move!” Semyon's father called out. And then he climbed onto the other chair and put an arm around Mr. Ilmyen. “You can't have the sweet without the salt. Every fisherman knows this. Sweet water rushes headlong to the sea where it runs to salt. Both kinds of water are good; both waters nourish life. But let us not forget the inherent risks of living. Let us not forget that joy and sorrow are shadows cast by the same tree, and this tree we also call life.”

“To life!” Mr. Ilmyen cried, and the shout went up: “To life!”

Outside, Mrs. Lim, Mrs. Lee, and Stanka pressed their noses to the sweating panes. I went to the kitchen and let them in.

“I'm sorry—” Jutta's uncle Keres materialized behind me. “This is a private party.”

“What's private around here?” Stanka elbowed past him. “We're friends of the bride.”

Mrs. Lee said, “I taught her how to tie her right shoe.”

“And I taught her the left,” said Mrs. Lim.

I followed them over the threshold into the hall that had been transformed now by laughter and music and movement. Jutta and Semyon each clutched separate ends of a hankie for dear life while they were carried aloft in their chairs and twirled about. Jutta had never looked happier, and where I had just moments before felt envy, a knot between my shoulders, I now felt a simple undivided happiness for her. The music was nothing like the staunch Baptist hymns, and before I knew it, I was tapping my feet. How could I not? This music flew and skipped as if the musicians had never heard of the sturdy 4/4 signature or the open chords of the major keys. Tipping from joy to sorrow in a half measure, the music was like each one of us there in the room: intricate and sometimes discordant motifs brought together to make a song that every now and then clarified into a single melody. Where was I in this song? A half step away, near joy but not in joy. I felt myself tearing up.

Stanka nudged me with her elbow. “Don't be sad. Her life isn't gonna be all fun and games, chess or otherwise.”

I smiled. Stanka always knew when I needed cheering up.

“A girl like that! All books and big vocabulary. I'll bet she doesn't even know how to take out her own eyes.” It was the Romani expression for orgasm. Clearly, Stanka didn't think Jutta, as smart as she was, would know how to satisfy in the bedroom, let alone experience the ecstatic state for herself.

“Psst! Inara!” Mother called from the kitchen. “Stop lounging around like a cough drop.” She pointed to her trays of
piragi
cooling on the sideboard. “Carry these out.”

“What about all Reka's latkes?”

“Oh—she's busy dancing. Let's put our food out first.” This I did, but I couldn't help but notice that only Stanka and Mrs. Lee touched Mother's meat pies. Not a single guest even approached the table.

During a break between numbers, Mrs. Ilmyen took Mother aside by the elbow. “About your hors d'oeuvres, Mrs. Kalnins; we cannot eat them.”

“What?” Mother blinked. “What's wrong with them?”

“It's not part of our tradition.”

“What tradition?”

“Traditionally, Jews do not eat pork. Your
piragi
are loaded with pork and are, therefore, forbidden to us.” Mrs. Ilmyen spoke with the same overly patient tones she used when I'd visit Jutta and ask impossible questions.

“Can't the rabbi just bless it?” Mother asked. She was not a stupid woman, and I believe she genuinely did not mean to offend the Ilmyens. She simply couldn't see how something so elemental to Latvian cuisine could be at fault, and she hated to see this measure of our generosity go to waste.

“No,” Mrs. Ilmyen said. The weight in her voice pulled her words to a place beyond any suggestion of emotion—to the physical state of pure exhaustion: Solomina Ilmyen was not angry; Mother had simply worn her out.

Crestfallen, Mother returned to the kitchen where a great clanging of pots and lids commenced. The musicians started another song, but not before Jutta caught my eye and raised her hankie. Jutta knew me and she knew my mother. No one had to tell Jutta what was going on, but she was so happy she didn't care. Instead, she wound her way through the moving bodies until she stood before me.

“Inara.” Jutta clasped my hand in hers. “It's time for the gladdening of the bride.” Stanka coughed and rolled her eyes.

“I don't dance,” I said.

“Nonsense. Everybody dances at a wedding. It's easy—just follow the person next to you.”

I looked at Jutta, so happy now and determined to share her happiness with me. And I wanted to feel it, too—real happiness. I had a few doses of sorrow, and for one hour I wanted to trade them for joy. Which is why I allowed myself to be pulled into the current of bodies, turning in a ring first clockwise then counterclockwise. And I was surprised to feel how light my feet could move.

And that's when I saw, above the weaving ring of women, a pair of ears, ears of such grand proportion that they were irrefutably the same set that belonged to David. The circles of bodies rotated, and when he and I were opposite each other, he clutched my hands and pulled me out of the circle. David had blue eyes to the bottom of a river and back. So blue, it was as if they'd taken a clear summer sky and wrung the color out of it.

“Why, it's the girl from the river—I almost didn't recognize you in those dry clothes!” David stepped back and examined my appearance.

I couldn't help noticing that his gaze seemed stuck at my hips.

“What are you looking at?”

“You have, er, elbows of enormous construction.”

My cheeks burned.

“I was thinking the same thing about your ears. They're really quite marvelous.”

This time it was David's turn to blush. “Each year I think I'll grow into them, but every year they seem to get bigger.”

I looked at my hips. “I know the feeling.”

David laughed. And that's when I knew I was looking at the boy I would marry. David pulled me closer and maneuvered us away from the too-enthusiastic oboist.

“So, Inara, do you have a last name?”

“It's Kalnins.”

David stopped midstep then caught up. “Kalnins? As in the Kalnins who narrowly escaped indictment for trademark fraud?”

“Yes, the same.”

“As in the Kalnins who salted the birch trees belonging to that Alpine yodeler until all the trees died?”

I nodded. “Yes.”

“And claimed to have invented the cadmium loop as well as the world's first environmentally friendly antigravity jump boots?”

“Okay. So okay—you've heard of my uncle.”

“It's just that your uncle is legendary. His
We Are So Smart
science programs are still aired—usually around three in the morning.”

My face burned. I recalled that moment when Uncle hurled his crutch at Jutta's father and the horrible things Uncle said.

“Hey—I'm only teasing.” David touched my chin with his index finger. “Let's just dance.”

“I think you should know that I sleep with your coat under my pillow. I suppose I should give it back to you.”

“How about at the river—for old times' sake?”

To tell someone of the opposite sex that you want to meet at the river is to say you want to kiss that person. But as David was from a big city, he might not know this, and I was only too happy to educate him on the matter. Later. “Okay,” I said. “What time?”

Before he could answer, a scream pierced the air. The orchestra fell silent. I pointed my nose toward the kitchen, toward the source of the noise and the unmistakable smell of smoke.

Mrs. Ilmyen and her sisters raced to the kitchen, where I found Mother standing stock-still in front of the open oven doors. Dark clouds of smoke billowed and purled up the walls and across the ceiling. Apparently, we'd used too much lard, so much so that it had dripped from the back of the top oven into the bottom. Fire blazed from both ovens, top and bottom. Now it was every cook for herself.