The Hidden Letters of Velta B. (14 page)

But Uncle was working hard to fix that problem. In the two years he'd been away, he had invented a new vitality drink, certain to restore him to his right self. “Watch this,” Uncle Maris said, and he downed an entire can of the stuff right then. This inspired a coughing fit complete with red-flecked spume. Uncle collapsed onto the tall bank of pillows. Five minutes later he drifted into a troubled sleep in which he muttered nasty things about Baptists, field surgeons, and Russian cuisine.

I took heart from Uncle's dyspeptic ranting. I thought it meant Uncle's elixir was working. But Mother took one look at Uncle's pallid face and frowned. “We'd better tell Stanka about this,” Mother said. “She may want to get one last whack with a frying pan in before Uncle leaves us all for good.”

Not three minutes later Stanka burst through our kitchen door.

“Where is he?”

“The shed.”

Stanka turned on her heels and stomped back the way she came, her sandals slapping the porch steps. As I followed her through the yard, I studied the brown skin of her feet, the white rind of her cracked heels, and her substantial ankles, for it was on account of those ankles and the thick calves they supported that Uncle Maris had first fallen in love with her.

At the shed Stanka flung open the wooden door and stood there a moment, her arms crossed over her chest, her eyes adjusting to the dim light cast by the stove.

She took in the jaundiced tone of Uncle Maris's skin, his bald head. “What's the matter with you?” Stanka demanded.

Uncle Maris lit one of his fat cigarettes. “A crippling case of post-Soviet syndrome.” The piano strings hummed in agreement.

I leaned toward Stanka. “He's got cancer of the lungs.”

“Well, if you've got lung cancer, then you don't need these anymore!” Stanka plucked Uncle's cigarette from his lips and ground it under her sandals. Then she gathered all of Uncle's cigarettes—even the healthy ones—and tucked them into the waistband of her skirt. With a quick turn, she was out of the shed.

“Oh, it's bitter!” Uncle moaned, and the piano strings moaned with him. It was his way, I knew, of letting us know how much he still loved Stanka and how badly he wanted those cigarettes.

I followed Stanka out into the yard, where she ploughed a path through the laundry. And then behind the scrim of flapping linens, I spied Rudy, and beside him the most beautiful and delicate girl I'd ever seen.

“Rudy!” I cried.

Mother turned. She saw the girl with Rudy and dropped her laundry basket.

“This is m-my friend, L-Ligita. She's studying dance at the university,” Rudy stammered, as we approached. Mother squinted at Rudy while I gazed openly at Ligita, unable to fathom how Rudy managed to bring home such a beautiful girl—and an artistic one. The closest Rudy ever came to art was the time he filled in for a sick band member at a school production. And even then the director allowed him to stir the triangle only intermittently.

“Well.” Mother wiped one chapped hand against the other. Rudy glanced at the shed. “How bad is Uncle?”

Mother looked at me, then at Ligita, who was sizing up our wooden privy. “Let's all have some tea. We'll get acquainted.”

Rudy ushered Ligita into the kitchen, where Mother was boiling water. I stole covert glances at Ligita. She was utterly perfect, every part of her body in proportion to the other, every movement graceful. The bones of her face were like fine china, her cheekbones high and wide, her chin sharp, her dark eyes shrewd and intelligent—she could not be real, I thought, as I poured tea into Mother's best cups and noted the rise of Ligita's eyebrows, which were plucked to mathematical precision. And yet there she was, slurping our tea through cubes of sugar. Sitting next to Rudy. Who blinked and stammered, flabbergasted by his incredible fortune.

At last Father thumped up the back steps and opened the screen door. He stood at the threshold and pulled off his boots.

“This is Rudy's new friend,” Mother said to Father. “Ligita . . .”

“Samoylich,” she said, and I caught sight of her teeth, jagged and stained. “Samoylich—that sounds”—Mother screwed up her eyes—“Russian, or perhaps—”

“Ukrainian,” Ligita said.

“Of course!” Mother beamed.

“Ukrainians are very brilliant people.” Father gently set his boots on the top step and gave each of the tongues a solid tug to help the boots breathe. “They invented bison-grass vodka. Yes, in general, Ukrainians are very fine.”

“She's got a three-day holiday before her ballet auditions,” Rudy said.

While Rudy spoke, Ligita's gaze roamed the kitchen, looking for some cultural point of commonality. Finding none, she sighed. Even her sighs held the air of a thoroughbred.

Mother laid out supper and put a bowl of salt in the middle of the table. “For Uncle,” she said, pinching a few granules and tossing it over her shoulder. Rudy and I did the same while Ligita observed the fallen salt on the floor.

Father kept his hands folded in his lap. “I will say a prayer for Maris,” he said.

I knew Mother would rather pray to the concrete moon that changes boys into bears and returns them to their old strength than pray to God, whom she said was very unpredictable. But she respected Father. So when he started praying, Mother lowered her head for a split second. Then she went back to ladling the cabbage.

Dinner was a quiet affair. Ligita refused every dish Mother offered, as she was in training. She also wouldn't use our dry toilet, preferring instead to relieve herself in Mother's finely scrubbed porcelains at the hall.

“Well, she is, after all, very refined,” Mother said to me, as we observed Ligita skirting puddles on her return from the hall. “The smell of our shit probably offends her.”

That night, after Rudy delivered broth to Uncle that Uncle returned (“Too salty! Too thin!”), Mother, crestfallen that another meal had been refused, put a clean sheet on the couch for Ligita. It was Rudy's hope that he'd sleep on the floor beside Ligita, but Mother wouldn't hear of it. “You'll catch your death from a draft!” she exclaimed. Like most women in the east, she had a dread fear of wind and currents, and it was something we did not joke about in her presence. And so, as we had all the nights of our childhood, Rudy and I slept side by side in our separate beds and watched the moon through the window casting its pale sorrowful eye on the houses along the lane and listened to Mr. Ilmyen's donkey, Babel, protesting Uncle Maris's proximity.

In the morning we woke to the bellow of the phone:
eeeeeee-ooooooo.
It was Mr. Zetsche. In a few days he would inspect the cemetery; afterward he'd hold a town meeting in the hall. The news sent Mother and Father into a frenzy. It was autumn, Mikeli, the time when the aspens shake off their gold leaves to make a carpet for the ghosts. Your grandmother Biruta believed in ghosts. If the hall kitchen and basins weren't scrubbed to perfection, she believed her mother and father would scrape their fingernails against our windows at night. She also wanted to make a good impression on Mr. Zetsche. For his part, Father worked even harder to scrub the moss of the more remote stones and touch up the gold paint on the Orthodox crosses of the Russian stones. Rudy and I sat in the living room and watched spellbound as Ligita executed a series of stretching exercises, necessary, she said, in order to keep her limber. And limber she was: first, she raised one leg behind her, lifting it so high that it almost touched her ear. Then she lowered that leg and the other one went up. She was like a human protractor: Ligita's slim torso held stock-still over one leg, while the other leg swiveled about with unimaginable flexibility. “Wh-wh-wh-what a figure!” Rudy breathed, enchanted by the amount of daylight he could see between her legs. But the more he watched her, the more agitated he became. By noon, his stuttering rendered him completely unintelligible. “For god's sake,” Mother, back from the hall, said. “Go out and do something!” Ligita froze mid-pirouette, but Mother simply waved her on. “Not you, dear.” And so Rudy turned to his slingshot, his second love, and went foraging through the woods.

I spent the day attending to Uncle Maris. His ire inflamed by the injustice of sickness in general and by his suffering our fierce attentions in particular, everything now provoked him: the light from the lightbulb was too bright, my tread on the floor too heavy, Babel's braying from across the lane too loud. And then there was the trouble with Stanka.

“Oh, it's bitter!” Uncle Maris cried. Yes, he still loved Stanka terribly despite all that he had done to suggest otherwise. This was the one endearing trait about Uncle: he could be an ass, short and abrupt and spiteful beyond reason, but he was capable of love. What he loved, he loved to distraction. He did, in fact, love women in a constant way, forgiving them their minor faults and moments of pettiness. He loved women in general because they were nothing like the men he knew. And because Uncle Maris believed it was better to die in the embrace of a woman than to die alone, he was prepared now to do or say anything to reconcile with Stanka.

Uncle Maris rolled onto his side and gripped my wrist. “You have to help me. You have to be my legs and my lungs.” Uncle reached under the cot and withdrew his beloved fishing pole. “I'd ask Rudy to help, but your mother tells me he's so tongue-tied in love, he's practically useless.” Uncle paused to string his rod with some line. “But you, Inara—you don't have anybody yet.”

Uncle was right: with my bad skin and wide hips, I did not turn heads.

“What do you want me to do?” I asked.

Uncle opened his auxiliary valise. In it was a sheaf of papers that looked to be quite old, yellowed with time. With them was a bundle of letters. They looked uncannily similar to the ones I had hidden under my bed: the same jumbled assortment of all kinds of papers, all of it bound up with a leather strap.

“Where did you get those?” I touched the letters. A lopsided grin stretched from one side of Uncle's face to the other. “Ask no questions, tell no lies.” He patted the bundle tenderly and pushed it toward me. “Go on,” he said. “Take them. They make good reading. But before you read them, I want you to mail this envelope at the post office. It's important.”

The envelope was the kind used for legal documents, and judging by the weight of it, there were quite a few papers in there. A will, I figured.

“Thirdly, set a bait trail for Stanka.”

“Bait?”

Uncle sighed in exasperation. “And I used to think you were the smart one.” Uncle opened his second valise and withdrew a confectioner's wax-paper bag. Inside were black Dutch buttons, the kind that are so salty they make grown men weep. At the bottom of the bag, the confectioner's prize: a button double the size of all the rest, as big as a horse chestnut. Uncle took this oversize button and pushed his hook through it. Then he handed me the white bag.

“It's a full moon on the rise tonight and Stanka will be hunting the sooty milk cap. You set out a trail of buttons from her door to mine. And make sure I get my last dose of meds early; I want to be at the height of my charm when she gets here.”

As the sooty milk cap looks remarkably like a Dutch button, Uncle's plan was a sound one. And the fact that Uncle was scheming again gave me hope that his vitality drinks were really working. Bit by bit, he was coming back to us. Just then Uncle set down the rod, turned his shoulder sharply, and started coughing. It was a terrible sound, as if everything he'd ever known and wanted was working its way loose from the bottom of his lungs.

I wrung my hands. “Do you want me to pray for you?”

“Pray?” Uncle spat into Mother's metal basin. “As in pray to God the Father, Jesus His son?”

I nodded.

“God the Father—He's an entrepreneur, a negotiator. I can deal with him. But Christ”—a blue blood vessel rose to the surface of Uncle's forehead—“He's a tyrant. Crawling up on that cross to die, knowing full well he'd come back from the dead. All this just to inflict himself on everyone.” The piano strings buzzed and Uncle's nostrils flared with his old familiar rage. “Well, two can play that game. I'm going to kick this thing in the teeth! Watch me now!” He was like a wild animal, cagey and unpredictable. Uncle Maris drove his crutch into the sod and pitched to the floor.

“Oh,” Uncle moaned. “It's bitter.”

I helped him back onto the cot. I opened a vitality drink for Uncle, but he only grimaced.

Uncle withdrew a small pouch from his hip pocket and shook out a small mound of tobacco. “What I want is rolling paper.”

We did not have rolling paper. I knew what I had to do. I ran to my room and retrieved my Bible. It had soft calfskin covers and gold edged the onionskin pages. Father had written:
sword and shield, my strong buckler is you, Lord, oh Lord.

Father had given it to me on the same day Gorbachev had allowed Bibles back into Latvia. I was only ten at the time, too young, he said, to go with him to Daugavpils to see the heavy-cargo Ural transports roll into the middle of the old town square. There was some concern that this was a trick, that the transports would be stuffed stem to stern with soldiers and a riot would ensue. Father went anyway. The cargo trucks arrived. No soldiers. Just boxes and boxes of Bibles. Within four minutes the boxes were emptied. He told me this, tears streaming down his face, as he gave me that white calfskin-bound book. I loved this book. I loved my uncle. And right now he needed it more than I did. And so I returned to the shed, my Bible trembling in my hand as if it sensed its fate.

I handed the Bible to Uncle.

“Well, it's not rolling paper, but it'll do.”

Such sacrilege, it pained me. I bit my lip. “Just promise you'll read each page before you light it up.” I left Uncle. I took the large envelope to Mrs. A. at the post office. And then I set the trail of licorice. I did not know if nicotine withdrawal or pain relievers had driven Uncle into a temporary heresy or if I was at last seeing Uncle stripped down to his truest form: a man who really did not hate people so much as he hated the God who made people, the God of resurrection who promised life in those New Testament books and had left him on this cot in this shed to cough himself to death.