The Hidden Letters of Velta B. (19 page)

With a flashlight wired to his cap, Father spent long hours drawing maps of the old cemetery and the new cemetery. Mother worked longer hours, stockpiling for that grandchild she hadn't planned on. And the weariness of a lifetime of hard work was beginning to show on her. Late at night when we washed dishes, she'd startle at the sight of her own reflection in the window as if, in the small signs of aging, she'd become a stranger to herself. Mother was not a vain woman, but she'd been proud of her hair, which all through the days of her youth had been as dark and shiny as wet stone. Over the last couple of years, she had acquired some silver hair on the crown of her head, and it seemed to me that these hairs were a growing record of the major stress-producing events in her life: the fall of the Soviet Union, the first democratic election, the hyperinflation that took nearly everyone's savings, Uncle Maris's boisterous decline and eventual death, and now this: the news of a grandchild, which announced itself as a bright silver streak at her temple. But I couldn't work for anything. All I could think about was David. Was he thinking about me? How were his tests coming along? Was he leveled by those headaches and, dear Lord, I wondered, could I be the cause of those headaches? After I broke the third plate in one night, Mother tossed her rag into the sink. “What in the world is the matter with you?” She touched my forehead.

I bit my lip. “I'm in love,” I said.

Though the light in the kitchen was dim, Mother shielded her eyes with her hand and squinted at me fiercely. “You have too much common sense to fall in love. Love is for girls who can't manage anything else.” Mother folded her arms across her chest.

I studied the tops of my hands. Her comment was a compliment and an insult at the same time: I hadn't had the brains for university, but at least I wasn't so foolish as to hitch my hopes on any passing boy. I twisted the grass ring between my finger.

Mother frowned. “Just how well do you know this boy anyway?”

“Well enough to know we're in love.”

“And just who are his parents?”

“You saw them yourself—at Jutta's wedding. They are very fine people,” I said.

“Oh.” Mother's face went tight. “Relatives of the Ilmyens'?”

“Yes.”

Mother threw open the window and thrust her head over the sill. “For God's sake,” she called over her shoulder. “Don't tell your father about this; he has enough worries already.”

“Tell me what?” Father called from the shed.

“Inara's in love—with a Jew,” Mother shouted.

Father sprinted across the yard. He stood on the porch for a moment, catching his breath. Then he opened the back door and sat at the kitchen table. Though I could hear his heart thumping erratically in his chest, his voice was steady and calm. “We like Jews. The Ilmyens, as you know, are, for the most part, magnificent people. So then you also know that we absolutely believe in being neighborly to Jews in general.”

“But that doesn't mean you have to go around marrying them!” Mother said, reaching for a scrub brush.

“Why not?” I asked.

Mother fell to her knees and scrubbed the floor with the vigor of a woman possessed. “Because,” she said at last, “they aren't real Latvians. Not Latvian Latvian. They are more of a European variety of Latvian, which is to say they have acquired that weedy continental look of people on the move. They also possess a harrowingly Hebraic sigh that discourages frank and open relationships.”

I looked at Father. He lowered his gaze to the scored tabletop. There was no use arguing or attempting to adjust this opinion of Mother's. She was not a mean-spirited woman, but she had always appreciated the certainties of classification; it was her way of keeping tabs on what seemed to her an increasingly unruly and disheveled world. “Besides,” Mother continued, resting a moment on her heels. “People who don't believe the same way can't be happy together. Trust me.”

Father winced. But Mother continued. “We aren't trying to ruin things. Really. We're only trying to help.” Mother glanced at the living room, where Rudy and Ligita's voices rode the rise and run of a swelling argument. “Anyway, don't think for a minute you're marrying anytime soon,” Mother whispered. “You'll not upstage Rudy and have him jumping in puddles.”

I fingered David's grass ring. Time. Everything yields in time, I told myself. The time it takes for water to wear down stone. Eventually, even the sharp edges of Mother's unassailable logic would blunt to nubs. Mother was right—I could wait. And while I waited, she would see how unhappy I was, and then some unknowable part of her heart would soften.

D
USK FELL ONE GRAIN AT A TIME
. I heard Mother singing out in the yard, a work song we all knew by heart:

Trouble, my big trouble,

I put it under a rock

and kept on singing.

I know she's been gone for some time. But I heard her voice as clear and pure as cold water, and I hoisted myself up out of bed fully expecting to see her washing her coal-black hair in that old metal tub we keep next to the shed. I saw instead pigeons, light gray smears fluttering at the eaves of the Ilmyens' house. High above the red tin roof, the geese, those dark knots, pulled a peasant's twilight in their wake. Enchanted by the lull of this quiet spectacle, I floated adrift in a dream, extravagant, strange, and dark. Mother rose up from the river.
Inara, come and drink this water that is so cool and sweet,
she said.
I'm not thirsty,
I said.
Come to the river where you can wash and I will baptize you,
she said.
You don't believe in such things, Mother.
I said. Her arm stretched long over the tall cow parsley, stretched long over the grass. Her strong arm hooked around my body and drew me to the water, pulled me under, held me down. No amount of thrashing from my arms and legs could free me. I struggled. I called out.

I woke with a shout, my legs tangled in the blankets, my sheets drenched in sweat. I lay there bathed in quiet, bathed in gray light, my baptism. A puddle of river water beside my bed. You said, “Rest now, rest now.” But I heard “Go on and dig.” And I thought,
Go on and bury me.

I'm not crazy; at least I don't think I am. But I will admit there have been times when I'm not sure which girl I am: the one in love with the man by the river or the one lying in bed talking to the man in the blue chair. Which story will this girl remember? In the days after I met David, my moods swung wildly between elation and despair. I thought often of the Ghost Girl. They say she crawls on her knees and knuckles through the river grass. She can assume many shapes. As you sleep, she broods over you with her dark wings. You know she's been near if you wake with a sudden thirst and find water in the foot of your shoes. I knew of a farmer who found dark feathers as long as a scythe beside his pillow. He drowned his beloved dog to make her go away. I clung to those stories, to Velta's letters, for their lurid strangeness, for their vivid detail, for a world made known by small solid things: forks and dance shoes, clover and eels. Only the act of reading and writing letters tethered me to a sense of time and place. I recounted for David how hundreds of storks—black and white—returned to their nests the day after he left or built new ones high in the riverside oaks and lindens and in the crotches of telephone poles.

Father returned to work at the cemetery. Mr. Zetsche assembled a crew from Jekobpils to move the contents of the cemetery, and now he needed Father to write the names of the dead on a blueprint of the new cemetery to make sure everyone arrived in their proper place. “It's very simple,” Mr. Zetsche assured Father one night over the black telephone. “The two land parcels are mirror images of each other. The only difference is that the old cemetery falls to one side of the lane and faces the river and the new cemetery rests on the other side of the lane and faces, er, other things.”

Whereas the old cemetery featured stately black alders and ash that yielded gradually to a birch at the river's edge, anemic birches that year after year neither flourished nor withered marked the four corners of the property that was to be the new cemetery. A lone oak anchored the center. This parcel of land sat on higher ground than the old cemetery, a fact Mr. Zetsche was quick to point out. “You'll thank me later,” he said again and again.

Everyone else realized in no time how unalike the two parcels were. Those who determined that their family plots occupied the choicest spots—the ones nearer the lonely oak and the memorial for Old General, the most famous horse in Latvia—privately rejoiced. Those who guessed that their plots would be too near the plot designated for our uncle Maris uprooted Father's string lines or switched markers. In short order, chaos reigned, and every morning Father tramped through the new cemetery and pulled out Mr. Zetsche's map, looking at it this way and that. Then he'd shake his head and reset the string lines, knowing that by nightfall they'd all be moved again.

Adding to Father's worries was the fact that three of Mr. Zetsche's crew, Jews from Daugavpils, quit and notified the Jewish Burial Society of Mr. Zetsche's indelicate plans. Mr. Zetsche had no choice but to promote Father to project supervisor, foreman, and community liaison. Though this meant that Father would do the digging as usual, now he also had to endure the evening visits from the widows Spassky and Sosnovskis, who were now best friends. They brought rum cookies and birch juice, and begged Father to place their husbands in plots befitting their position of honor in the chess world. They provided Father with a new plan for the cemetery, which looked uncannily similar to that of a chessboard. Naturally, their husbands were to occupy the king positions.

I wrote about all this to David; my frenetic writing was my way of shortening the days between our agreed-upon meeting, a way to dampen my worry that David had not replied to my letters. When the appointed time for our meeting came, I pulled on Rudy's fishing boots, and despite Father's strong sentiments regarding cosmetics, I applied to my face a generous coating. Then I went to the river. For the first three hours at the river, I fished. I caught a woman's umbrella, which offered no help whatsoever when the clouds lowered and rain fell sideways and pounded the river like a thousand tiny fists. I stood on the soggy bank watching the water rise over the tops of Rudy's boots. I stepped forward, felt the water at my shins, then my knees. I told myself I would wait for David for as long as it took. The rain quit and the light folded quietly bolt by bolt until the sky bled rose, bled lavender, then a deep blue. A horrible thought seized me: a good-looking and smart man like he was might have found someone else. I could not help myself. I sobbed big body-wracking sobs so powerful and grand that I was surprised by my own sorrow.

I rose up to open to my beloved; and my hands dropped with myrrh, and my fingers with sweet smelling myrrh, upon the handles of the lock. I opened to my beloved, but my beloved had withdrawn himself and was gone . . . I called him, but he gave me no answer.

I stepped forward. Water pulled at my hips. I had that sensation of being utterly split. Of there being two of me present at the same time: one in the water, bawling as if there were no tomorrow, the other one wondering,
How much farther can I wade and still haul myself to shore? How strong am I really?
I thought about my childish desire for water, weightlessness. I took another step and my breath came in sharp pulls. The cold forced a shift in my vision, and I saw myself from outside my own body. I saw how I looked as viewed through a camera placed at a distance then through the lens close up. I was a fat Ophelia, as sloppy as an unspun sonnet; my hair—a tangle of wet ropes—clung to my neck and face.

I imagined David observing from the trees, somber and sad that he'd driven me to this. And then I took another step. I was in up to my chest. The water was so much colder and harder to push against than I had realized. I could neither fight the current nor find my footing; the boots had filled with water and each step pulled me farther out into the middle of the river. If I opened my mouth to call for help, the water would rush in. And who, on a night like this one, would hear me? And for the first time in my life, I doubted this river. For the first time in my life, I was afraid of this water.

“Inara!” An orange float bobbed past; I grabbed for it. The line pulled me and I kicked for the shallows, where I imagined I'd see David. I sank to my knees and panted like a carp.

I looked up. Not David, but Mr. Ilmyen, his sides heaving. He wiped at his face with a handkerchief. I crawled onto the soggy bank, and he pulled off my boots, dumped the water from them. “You know this river as well as anyone.” Mr. Ilmyen tossed one boot at my feet then the other. “You are a good girl and a good swimmer. But you are not a fish. What were you thinking?”