The Hidden Letters of Velta B. (12 page)

Stanka lobbed a tureen of coffee grounds at the fire. And still the flames raged. Though I could see it killed her to do it, Reka hurled an open sack of flour into the ovens. Mrs. Ilmyen scrambled to cover the trays of latkes, lest the flour contaminate them, but there was no help for it. The flour hit the flames in a big white cloud that traveled from inside the ovens and dusted every surface in the kitchen—animate and inanimate.

“My challah!” Lida shrieked, even as the flour settled in her hair and on her skin. And still the top oven flamed.

“My eel!” I cried. I wrapped a dish towel around my hand and pulled at the rack and the baking pan. I could not have held that pan more than three seconds, but it burned through that dish towel all the same. The smell of burning flesh revived Mother: she hurried me to the sink and thrust my blaring red hand under the faucet. I could not look at my hand. Instead, I looked at Mother, covered head to toe in white flour. I smelled coffee grounds in her hair and I knew she was, like me, ashamed.

Mrs. Ilmyen sat on a stool and buried her face in her hands. “Everything is ruined!” she sobbed. Through the open doorway I could see the guests whispering nervously. Mr. Ilmyen climbed atop a chair to better assess the catastrophe.

Mrs. Ilmyen took a big breath and held it. “Mrs. Kalnins . . . Biruta”—she attempted a smile—“if you'd kept the oven clean like any decent cook, none of this would ever have happened.” Mrs. Ilmyen swept her arm toward the oven, her flour-dusted sisters, the chalk-white challah, my burned hand.

Mother drew herself to her full height. “Please, do not besmirch these ovens. They are absolutely faultless in the matter.” Mother sniffed mightily. The flour had gotten into her nose. She sneezed. This, too, on Lida's challah.

At this, Mr. Ilmyen, still perched on the chair, raised his glass: “To life!” he shouted. “To life!” everyone in the hall cried. It was only a small pause in the celebration—the Ilmyens and Semyon's family would dance and forget that any of the rest of us had ever been there. I stood on tiptoe. David moved away from me in the mix of bodies. I knew I would not get another chance to talk to him about the river, and even if I had, he would not want to meet me there. Not now.

On the way home we didn't speak a word. Music poured out of the hall, now a box of sound and light shrinking behind us. In my arm the pan cooled to a leaden weight and I was never so glad to see our laundry still flapping on the line, our dingy back steps. Mother paused at the rosebush to compose herself, but I forged ahead.

Inside the kitchen I snapped on the light. Father sat at the table, white gloves on his hands, his Bible open before him. He'd been reading in the dark, which is how he read when his head hurt. With a loud
thunk,
I set the pan onto the table.

“What's that?” Father peered charred remains.

“I call it fish in a cloak. But you can call it dinner,” I said. I pulled my hand back but not before Father saw the angry welt still rising in the middle of my palm.

“You're hurt.”

I shrugged. “Not badly,” I said, but I kept my hand under the table where nobody had to see it.

Father poked at the smoldering lump with a knife. “Carp?”

“Eel.”

“I love eel,” he said, sawing at the charred mess until the meat yielded. Mother came in at last—still covered in flour and as white as a ghost. She sat across from Father, who studied her and chewed for a long moment. At last he cleared his throat. “I like what you've done with your hair. You look very dignified.”

Mother made a savage pass at her eyes with her sleeve. She managed a wobbly smile. “That's why I married you—you don't talk much, but when you do, you always say just the right thing.”

Father considered this carefully. Then he sliced another chunk of meat from the pan and put it on a plate for Mother and me. Together, the three of us, we ate that entire eel, every burned bit. And then we went to bed so that in the morning when we woke we would be wiser.

J
UTTA CAME BY THIS MORNING
. We watched the starlings being seized by a collective flinch that launched them upward in a blink, as if of one body. How do they know to do this? Is it a shift in the wind, the sound of grass bending differently? A snap of a twig or the sudden awareness of being observed? They swirled, twisted, folded in upon themselves, danced. What is this movement called? I wanted to consult your Book of Wonder, as I was almost certain you would have the answer in there. Jutta scolded me for trying to move too quickly and for not wearing warmer socks. She said, “You just sit there and let me help you.” Then she told me a story. This is the gift, the blessing of coming to one's end and having the luxury of knowing it. People shower me with stories.

Her story came from her father. As a boy in Minsk, he'd been schooled, as so many Jewish boys were, at a heder. The rabbi kept in his study a wide mirror, as tall as the man himself and framed in dark cherrywood and mounted on a wooden stand. In those days every boy had a chore in the school; some cleaned the floors, some the wooden stairs leading up to the rooftop where they held evening prayers. Others cleaned the tables and chalkboards. This boy's job was to run a dry rag over the spines of all the books in the rabbi's study. The rabbi enjoyed smoking a pipe every now and again in the study, and as we both know, smoke will settle. One day the boy noticed that the mirror was covered in dust. The rabbi was a great and devout teacher, the kind of man who would have wiped the sweat off of God's brow if there had been a cloth large enough. And because it bothered this little boy that a man so holy should have such a dirty mirror, he ran that cloth over the mirror's surface. As he did, the boy contemplated his own reflection in the smudged glass. Maybe he was remembering the rabbi's teachings from earlier that morning: a divine spark resides in each of us. We are made in the Maker's image. And the boy, forgetting the dangers of a mirror and perhaps thinking that if he gazed into the glass long enough he'd catch a glimpse of that image, leaned in.

The silver hummed, softened. The mirror turned liquid, the wet metal folding and pooling in on itself. The lull and lure of both his changing reflection and the changing mirror pulled at him. As a swimmer parts the water with his hands, he opened a passage in the glass and aluminum, and climbed through the mirror and vanished. How could anyone know this? Because one of his shoes had been caught in the mirror as the liquid silver closed behind him. A warning against the dangers of vanity? The tacit endorsement of escapism? “No,” Jutta said. It was a reminder that a flimsy, whisper-thin membrane separates us from this world and others.

We stand at all times on the threshold of mystery. I tell it to you now to remind you the reason for stories in the first place. It is a way to pluck the loose stitching of a garment so capacious one cannot tell where the top is, where the bottom is. In this way our words take full sail and lift us to another time and place.

Because he dug so many graves, people often asked your grandfather if there was a good way to die. He'd say in the bosom of our Lord. And because he was a man of the earth and a man of the book, they asked him to hold his hands over them and pray. Not so much a prayer of healing because when people sent for your grandfather they knew they were beyond healing. More often, they wanted to make amends, to recount their wrongs, as if Father were an ordained priest and could offer absolution. This is how we learned about Mr. Sosnovskis's many trysts. We learned, too, that Mr. Spassky had once cheated his way to a chess win.

Though these deathbed confessions made your grandfather uncomfortable, he did not dissuade the dying from telling their stories. Their urgent need to confess, he believed, was both natural and necessary and a need, he said, we carry to the grave and beyond. “Just as the body decomposes, the soul likewise must uncompose,” Father explained to anyone who wanted to hear and sometimes even to those who didn't. The soul's work, he believed, was to both tell and untell the wrongs of the body. He called it taking a moral inventory, an accounting that included an exhaustive examination of one's attitudes, will, imagination. Jealousy, selfishness, misplaced ambition, the brilliant and false illusions of oneself so carefully groomed over a lifetime, every failure of large and small compassion—all these had to be acknowledged, exposed. That is why, Father said, some people flop about so much in the first weeks after they die. “Dismantling the tyranny of self—it's quite exhausting work,” Father explained. “And noisy.”

From your notes I detect it was this noise that in your teenage years pulled you to the cemetery. You wrote that Lida Kaulfeds, the brilliant dancer, had in her home life-size bronze sculptures of herself in various poses. In both her youth and elder days she had many lovers. Of each she demanded bouquets of carnations, roses if they could get them, and obsessive, slavish homage. You wrote that with some remorse and bewilderment she confessed she could not remember any of her admirers' names.

Mr. Ozolins had fathered a child with one of his employees. He would not recognize the child, had insisted he wasn't the father. His failure to love what he'd been given gnawed at his bones, turned his teeth to chalk.

Mr. Bumbers admitted that he'd made all his money, which wasn't much but enough to put his daughter through school, by selling distressed fruit at top price. Spray paint and fructose injections figured prominently in his small frauds. The worst thing, he said, was that he believed the lies he told himself: his small deceptions were no more egregious than those of his competitors. And yet he could not deny his deep sense of shame or the need to confess.

The dead are not alone in their deep need to rectify accounts. But my reasons for telling you our family stories are not so much for confessional purposes as they are for corrective ones. You know how I love your uncle Rudy to the marrow of my bones, but he is an inveterate talebearer. What more clever means of misdirection than a story, these beautifully extravagant lies? He would have you believing that great-uncle Maris's around-the-world-in-eighty-minutes experiment involving a bathtub, tanks of hydrogen, and a town full of stolen bedsheets was a smashing success. Let me be clear: it was not. Your namesake only managed to clear the tops of the birches before all the women, recognizing their pilfered laundry floating away from them, lobbed stones and brought Uncle literally to his knees. Ditto for Uncle's hope-of-our-nation Olympic campaign. Alpine yodeling is not and has never been an Olympic event.

I do not wish to be contentious, but I do believe it's wrong to knowingly tell a lie. I should have told my version of the family stories to you sooner and more often. I should have remembered that we find ourselves and locate the meaning of our lives in the stories we tell. We are setting a string of buoys, lights in a deep water of darkness. It's an attempt to find a way closer to the raw and aching truth of ourselves and it takes a lifetime of telling to travel there. Agony to articulate, agony to hear. But what sweet relief to be released through our words.

I believe you know this agony and release well. The yearning to find the words for the inexplicable, the inchoate—that has been your torment. Your Book of Wonder, this playground of ideas capriciously arranged, that was your release. They have been a great comfort to me, these notes. That you've taken to writing in it again, that you allow me to read your thoughts, pleases me beyond measure. You've written that time is a series of looped threads. Of this I am living proof; I am here in the present, but many of the ruminations of my internal landscape are tied to the events of the past as if there were two of me, the one talking to you as you sit in the blue chair and the other a twenty-one-year-old girl pulled by longings that elude my attempt to clothe them in words. What ties these two girls together? You.

You've asked what kind of a person I was that summer I met your father. Awkward comes to mind. I was not and would never be a beautiful woman, and I was just vain enough to know it and care. I had not heard from David, wondered if I ever would. Not knowing brewed a restlessness in me I had never before felt. No, not butterflies. Having butterflies suggests beauty, a gracefulness to my agitation. All I had was a desperate sense that I was inadequate. If I possessed some skill, some talent, some secret knowledge, I told myself, I could make up for my many shortcomings.

I turned my eye to Velta's rusted tin. At the bottom, wrapped in lace, I found a coil of her hair, a deep chestnut brown that turned copper when I held it to the light of the window. I liked touching the rough paper of her letters, I liked this act of possession. In Velta's letters I left the known world of precarious fact for the elastic, forgiving terrain of a vividly imagined, vividly confused internal landscape. With each reading, a little more of that unknown woman came to life. She did not come willingly, this woman who wrote in fragments, in
dainas
and, in some cases, recipes. About herself, her thoughts, her feelings—not a word. More often she relayed old wives' tales, kindly advice, observations regarding the world outside her window. I had to fabricate Velta from the flimsiest scraps: at night the trees, shameless gossips, tell tales. The moon is a brazen voyeur. The coarse thread from two fishing nets yields one sweater, and even then, it's not a great sweater. Eels caught in wintertime should be dipped in icy water and hung from the rafters. On New Year's Eve one must eat every last yellow pea on one's plate. Failure to do so results in grief, a year
of tears for each uneaten pea. Something she called number ninety-two appeared in several letters: