The Hidden Letters of Velta B. (20 page)

I shrugged. “I don't know.”

Mr. Ilmyen tipped his head, considering the possibilities. “Oh, Inaraleh, you have always been like another daughter to me.” Mr. Ilmyen wrapped his coat around me and I buried my face in his shirt. I cried, quietly at first, and then, because Mr. Ilmyen was so kind as to let me continue, even patting my back, I wailed and bawled until I had cried myself into quiet exhaustion and stained his shirt with my inky tears.

You know your grandmother was a wise woman. She could look at people and see who they were at their core. A single squint and she'd divine your very essence. Though I often thought that she was too busy banishing every offending particle of dirt to see me, this was a failure of my imagination. The fact was her vision was never as sharp as it was that night I came back from the river. I found her kneeling in front of the oven, the earpieces of Uncle Maris's stethoscope in her ears and the scope held to the back panel. She caught my reflection in the oven's back panel. She maneuvered her head and shoulders slowly out of the oven and sat on her heels. “Every time you come back from the river, you are sopping wet and wearing somebody else's coat. What were you doing out there?”

I bit my lip. “Fishing,” I said.

Now Mother looked me over carefully. “What did you catch?”

I looked at my hands. The grass ring David had made for me was gone, lost in the river no doubt.

“Nothing.”

Mother frowned. “Let me make you some tea.” She wiped her hands against her thighs and dragged the kettle over to the stove. “With honey.”

I sank into a chair. Mother wet a tea towel under the faucet. “And let me clean your face. Maybe I should have said this more often.” Now Mother cupped my chin in her chapped hands. “Maybe you don't know. You are so beautiful—in every way. You don't need this paint.” Mother scrubbed at my face with the towel. “Besides, in my day only trashy girls wore makeup.” As she withdrew her hands, one of her fingernails raked my cheek.

That night, as I studied my reflection in the darkened windowpane, I detected a tiny smear of blood on my face. I left it there. I lulled myself to sleep, and as I did, old words from an old song wove themselves into the loose fabric of night, a crow's calling in the distance.

Strange news flies up and down,

Strange news is a-gathering.

My true love has left town.

My true love they are a-burying.

The crow flew darkness into my sleep, where I dreamed my loves and I dreamed my fears. The Ghost Girl of the river called my name:
Inara! Inara!
I walked the river, took that old forbidden path to the manor. My feet sank to the ankles in a bog. The bones in my heels disintegrated, and with every step I took, my feet sank deeper into the mud until I went under, swallowed whole by the dark mire. I held my breath and I grew scales—beautiful periwinkle-blue scales, but no one could see them in the dark.
Inara!
David called to me.
Come find me!
I realized that I had never lost David—all this time David had been waiting patiently for me deep beneath the mud. But I could not swim to him: my arms had not yet changed to fins and I had not yet learned to breathe through my skin.

I found Stanka two kilometers downriver. Though she advertised her dream interpretation services in Mother's temperance newspaper, we all knew her claims were dubious. Still, I reminded myself that even a broken weather vane tilts in the right direction once in a while. She was hunkered over the riverside underbrush. In autumn she liked to look here for choice sooty milk caps, a mushroom good for marinating with onions. In spring she came to read the mud for signs of her family, as this was once a place they used to pass through on their way to the towns where they liked to buy and sell horses. But every spring it was the same story: the only tracks were those made by Mr. Ilmyen or me in our separate bids to catch fish.

“I just had a strange dream,” I said. “I was wondering if you could interpret it for me.”

Stanka merely grunted.

“David appeared in the dream,” I pressed on. “He was supposed to meet me yesterday and didn't. What do you suppose it means?”

Stanka straightened. “It means you should wake up.” Then she scurried off.

I turned upriver. As I passed the school, the windows of Mr. Bishofs's classroom had been thrown open and the voices of his second- and third-year students conjugating German verbs at the top of their lungs rolled over the back of the fog. Mr. Bishofs believed in fresh air, though Miss Druviete, who taught in the room opposite, had a terrible dread of drafts. The two teachers spent most of their short lunch breaks opening and closing windows. They would probably get married.

The Ilmyens also believed in the power of fresh air. As I climbed their front step, Little Semyon's wails ripped the air into shreds, though Mrs. Ilmyen was doing her level best to sing her new grandson quiet with a lullaby I knew well:
aija zuzu, laca berni
and then another, something simpler and ancient and much sadder:
bai, bai, bai.
When I knocked, Mr. Ilmyen answered the door.

“I'm looking for David. He wasn't here yesterday and he promised he would be.”

Mr. Ilmyen pulled the door closed behind him. “I know, Inara, I know.”

“Why hasn't he come?” Dread, thick and full, spread across the floor of my stomach, rose in my throat.

Mr. Ilmyen gathered me into his arms. “He wanted to, Inara. He very much wanted to.”

“But where is he now? Tell me.”

“I am so very sorry; I thought someone had already told you,” Mr. Ilmyen said. Then he raised his gaze to the clouds. And that's how I knew David was never coming back. Those headaches had not been about poor vision. He'd been ill all along and now he was dead.

Mother met me on our back porch. “I'm sorry about your friend,” she said.

“You knew?”

Mother withdrew two letters from her apron—both letters in my handwriting, both returned to sender unopened. “I had guessed,” Mother said. “Mrs. A. delivered a black letter to the Ilmyens. I put two and two together. Also, Mrs. A. had steamed open the letter.”

For the next three days I did nothing but wander up and down the lane in a daze. “You'll find somebody else,” Ligita offered, by way of consolation. From time to time Father patted my head. Mother, too, only her hand held a scrub brush.
For me, work,
she was saying. It was the only way she knew how to purge herself of tragedy. Stanka brought me black licorice wheels. On the fifth day, after I'd exhausted her supply, Stanka sat with me at our kitchen table. The dishes were drying in the racks by the sink. I put my sorrow to good work and scrubbed the floor, but still I could not stop crying.

“Inara,” Stanka sighed. “You can't fart wider than your ass.”

I wiped at my eyes. “What?”

“There are limits. To everything.” Stanka slid her feet into her sandals and left the kitchen, a trail of sunflower hulls dropping in her wake.

I walked through the woods. I thought this is what Velta would have done. She would have turned her sorrows under her feet, trod them like a stone, and kept on walking. So I walked through the scrub alder and birch to her manor house. I wasn't happy and I knew I wouldn't be for a long time. But I thought the sight of a familiar place, a place I had shared with David, would somehow bring comfort. I skirted the dark ponds, thinking I'd peer into a dark window and see the other me, a girl in a white dress with rush lights in her hand and man who loved her sitting in darkness. Instead, I saw a long flat piece of thin wood. On it seven crows had been nailed spread-eagle. They'd been left to rot. Feather, beak, and bone. That's all that was left of them. A message, a warning to other crows, as death is the only thing a crow respects. But who would want to send this message here?

“Hey!”

I whirled on my feet. A man in overalls shook his fist at me. In his other hand he held a bucket with a trowel and brush. “This is Zetsche property. You're trespassing.”

That evening I tasted the salt on my skin as I tumbled into a fitful night of watery dreaming. Bloated with sorrow, my body was a buoyant sea, rising and ebbing. Three times in the night I had to go outside and use the toilet. In the morning the air smelled metallic and wet, like rusty keys or old wire fencing. The Arijisnikov dog, a herder with long teeth that was best avoided, took a sudden interest in the smell of my skin at the back of my knees. No matter what I drank—tea, coffee, juice—my mouth tasted bitter, like a new filling in a bad tooth. And I couldn't eat.

Always, I'd had a healthy appetite, but now the smell of Mother's cooking lard and the sound of her pans rattling on the stove top turned my stomach. Four mornings in a row I did not sit with Rudy and Ligita at the table for breakfast. On the fifth morning Mother followed me outside to the toilet where I threw up, as faithful as the hands of the clock are to the hours.

“You're pregnant,” Mother said.

I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. “Yes.”

“Stupid!” Mother slapped me across the face. “Stupid girl!” Mother stormed back to the house.

I want you to understand that I have always considered you the greatest gift ever given to me. You are living proof of the love that transcends the limits of a single human body, of time and space. They say that because God is omnipresent God loves us in the past, in our present, and in our future. I believe this not because I know so much about God, but because the moment I realized I was pregnant, I loved you. I loved the idea of you, the fact of your existence. I knew I would love you in the present and I loved imagining your future. Maternal affection pounded inside my heart, pushing on the seams and bursting forth like rushing water during a sudden spring melt. Such a surprise to me to learn that while I thought I had been so large hearted in my love for your father it was nothing compared to what I felt for you.

You should know your grandmother Biruta loved the same way: beyond measure and without limitation. You must also understand that her not speaking to me for the next thirteen days (on principle, I knew) was because she had been raised in a traditional household. Hers was the traditional response. It would have been different if I had been a man, if I'd been Rudy. A boy who gets a girl pregnant is fulfilling a natural function, and as long as he marries, the whole world nods and winks. A girl who gets pregnant is a tramp, a source of shame to everyone who knows her. And whereas I had felt little shame before, and it surprised me that I could waltz around such a large emotion unscathed, I did feel the sure and hard knowledge that I'd disappointed Mother in ways she'd never imagined I could.

One morning Mother followed me into the latrine again. This time she held my hair while I threw up. Then she wiped my face with a handkerchief. I knew that by these gestures she'd forgiven me.

“Does Father know?” I asked.

Mother tucked her handkerchief into her dress pocket. “Not yet.”

“I have to tell him,” I said.

Mother laid her rough hand on the back of my neck. Though her hands were not smooth—never smooth—they were cold and the pressure of her hands immediately calmed the nausea. “I'll tell him,” Mother said at last. “Later.”

I followed Mother inside the house and washed my face at the sink. Through the window I watched Father digging in the new cemetery. Even from my place behind the window I saw how hard it was for him to dig, how heavy the rain-soaked earth had become. And I could see, too, that Father was not as strong as he used to be.

Rudy returned from school a week later. He moved Ligita and her small wardrobe into our living room. From a hook on the wall, she hung her ballet shoes, drooping with disappointment. As she snapped open the wardrobe doors, we heard her anger. She flung a suitcase on the floor. In its thud we heard her fear and disappointment. About living arrangements. About money. About life ambitions. From room to corridor to kitchen, a small thunder followed behind her.

Ligita fought with me, too. Quietly. As we both began our days with touchy stomachs, each morning it was a race for the privacy of the outdoor toilet where Ligita had a small plastic bucket stashed for her own use. “What's the matter with you?” Ligita demanded after I'd been inside the privy for a good fifteen minutes with my own small bucket.

I pulled a big breath through my nose. “Bad food, I think,” I said on the exhale.

“It's your mother's cooking.” Ligita brushed past me for her pail and emptied her stomach. But after a few mornings of this, I knew from the way Ligita narrowed her eyes when she looked at me that she'd guessed I was pregnant and had gotten that way simply to upstage her. Since then, on principle, she wasn't talking to me, relying on Rudy instead to deliver messages, requests, and instructions. Especially at mealtime.

“Please pass the plate of greens to your sister,” Ligita said one evening. “Folic acid is very important to the healthy brain development of the unborn.” She delivered a significant look at my stomach.

“Greens are good for everybody!” Mother said, with tepid cheer. Judging from the bewildered look on Father's and Rudy's faces, they didn't know about my pregnancy.

I excused myself from the table and went to my room. Though there was a chill in the air, I opened my window and lay on my bed.

“Burying them six inches closer just to make room for more plots,” a woman's voice lamented. “Never in my life!”

“This new cemetery is screwed up like Russia, but with German precision,” a man's voice replied.

Later, as dusk brewed, the talk turned uglier. Every town, I knew, had its secrets: stories, fables, and lies sewn together with silence, that most formidable stitching. This history lurks, literally, beneath the surface of any town, as we were all learning. Now that Father was disinterring the graves, it was as if that stitching had been broken and he were dredging up from those plots every stain and taint associated with each family, the things we knew or suspected but dared not voice: that someone in the Gepkars family had bribed certain members of a Soviet unit dispatched to our area with Bavarian cuckoo clocks (this was why no one in their family had been deported to Siberia); that it was because Game Warden Lukin's wife regularly offered herself to a Soviet official in Riga that Lukin was given such a choice job; that certain people had provided certain information about certain other people and now those people had disappeared. Yes, Father had his work cut out for him, and though death was his business, I knew that the overlap of the living in the territory of the dead caused him the most heartache.