The Hidden Letters of Velta B. (24 page)

“About the horses,” Father began.

“Yes—vandals, pranksters—I presume.”

“No.”

“Who then?”

Father contemplated Mr. Zetsche's shoes. “It was an accident. We thought—”

“We? Who is we?”

“Inara and I.”

“Thought what?”

“Thought it wouldn't be such a bad thing to drive such a wonderful car. Just for a bit, you see.”

Mr. Zetsche waved his hand at the crumpled vehicle. “It was a repossessed vehicle. It wasn't worth a pop. But the horses, you see, are a little more, er, problematic.”

“We will pay for all repairs,” Father said. “How much do you think we'll owe?”

A smile devoid of any warmth surfaced on Mr. Z.'s mouth; the Italy-shaped birthmark deepened to a brilliant maroon. “Hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds—as many needles on a hundred pine trees.” An indigestible sum. With that, Mr. Zetsche spun on his small heels and marched back inside his mansion.

I
USED TO MEASURE TIME
by how long it would take to wash, dry, and stack dishes. Hang laundry. There was never enough time for all the work to be done. That there is so much of it now stretching the ends of days while simultaneously Dr. N. tells me I've only a few weeks left is a strange conundrum. If your grandfather was here, I would ask him about this fluid time I'm living in and if it is how I am being prepared for the next life. Is this how, I'd like to ask, God sets eternity in our hearts and each thump from that wet engine pushes us just that much closer to the threshold?

At any rate, I've decided not to count the hours between doses. Instead, I will measure the change in light around me. Between the cracks of the jamb and door, roof and wall, light leaks in, a grainy dust swirling in viscous air, a galaxy of swimming stars. You are quite right: light is both wave and particle, I can see this now. This light pulses in my veins like electricity, febrile and alive. Insistent. I lie here and listen to you and Little Semyon working in the kitchen on the temperance newspaper. The clacking of the metal strikers sooting the paper becomes one and the same thing with the wild rye rubbing its rough stalks against the shed. The rattle of words is music to me, percussion to my rambling thought. This is how perception shifts and the ordinary becomes something hallowed and sacred.

I managed to get up and about without you today. I went to the cemetery. I wanted to watch you work. I passed Mother's stone, Father's, Uncle Maris's. My stomach wanted to head north, my bowels south, so I sat on the wall to let myself recalibrate. It was a trick of the morphine, making me believe that I had my former strength. I made it to that wall and there I stayed.

In the pine woods

My rye has been sown.

In the pine woods

Are my hollowed oak trees.

The rye blooms, the bees hum.

I am beside myself with joy

This is the
daina
I wanted to sing. Instead, spent and winded, I sat on the wall and waited. Patience is the other half of courage, Joels used to say. Or, in my case, it is the accidental product of my foolishness. I had it in mind that we would sit, you and I, on this wall and listen to dusk spool up from the ground. We'd listen to dark wicker down in gnat and needle. Instead, it was Little Semyon who came along and—thankfully—saw me here. He carried me to our house as easily as if I were a child.

“Don't ever do that again!” Jutta scolded. I laughed. Long and loud. Where did this laughter come from? It may be the effects of the painkillers, but I'd like to think that at last I am laying hold of joy, which is not the same thing as happiness—a capricious feeling as flimsy as thought itself.

Anyway, while in the cemetery, I touched up Uncle's stone. What's left of it. I thought maybe if I sat quietly enough I would hear his voice as you do. I sang:
Soul awaken, soul arise, soul push that stone away.
That his long and relatively quiet dormancy should be broken—and so noisily, so urgently—in these last few weeks has been a puzzle to me. My theory is that he's been chattering away all along, but it is only now that he's saying anything of importance.

Hell, he said, was to be abandoned to yourself, left utterly alone with your own self-awareness and memories. “Not quite what I had expected,” Uncle said. “This singularity of self. It's one thing to maintain this position while alive and amid others. Quite another thing to do so when dead, and”—here, you say, he paused significantly—“all by oneself.”

Why, you have wondered, did I name you after such a cantankerous man? David, Joels, Eriks, Oskars, these are all good, strong, and worthy names belonging to good, strong, and worthy men. And you know how a name binds together the bearers as a loop, a link from past to present. I suppose it was an act of faith, my belief in the redemptive power of language, my belief that the boy might redeem the man. It isn't correct Baptist doctrine, this idea that the action of the living can influence the soul of the dead. But the belief that names carry inherent power is.

I imagine you're right. This must have been about the time when I stopped reading Velta's letters. I should have given the letters, those I read and those yet to be decoded, to Mother. I should have done a lot of things. Instead, I hid them and told myself I was justified in doing so. We had plenty of other concerns, and those letters seemed a small thing at the time compared to my larger wrongdoing, what Mr. Zetsche termed
assault, battery, and willful violation of possessions most precious.
It took all of Father's savings to pay for the damage to Mr. Zetsche's car. Some good news: after a thorough examination, Mr. Zetsche determined that his miniature cast-iron stallions came through the fray with minimal damage. All they needed was to be reinserted into the ground. And so Mr. Z. had Father dig deep holes (“You're good at that!” Mr. Zetsche joked over the phone). Then Rudy and Father reseated the horses on their pedestals and anchored them into the wet concrete. Mr. Zetsche was so impressed that he hired Rudy on the Riviera project as a surveyor's assistant. It would be Rudy's job to shoot lines and distances with a theodolite. When the trucks came with the crushed rock and cement mix, he could then tell them how much was needed and where.

Though she was not happy, probably would never be happy, Ligita took some consolation in his wages. The job paid well enough for her to buy blouses so sheer that we could read Mother's newspaper through them. Rudy gave to Mother and Father the money left over from Ligita's shopping. And how they needed it. Mother's hands had turned so red and raw that when she tried to scrub the floor or wash a dish blood wept through her skin. She could no longer keep house for her clients in the city. I don't think she minded—she wanted to spend more time with her paper. Quite a lot had been happening politically and economically. Parties were merging, new scandals were being revealed and there was lots of talk about the EU. If Latvia joined, as other countries had, Mother speculated that emigration would go through the roof, as all the good jobs were elsewhere. That was bad. On the other hand, instead of ten drunks lying about in a ditch, we'd have only two. That was good. Then there was the matter of carrots. Would the quality of imported vegetables decline or improve? As writer, editor in chief, and publisher, Mother was having a hard time keeping up. And so, as she had done for so many years, I made her rounds cleaning the hall, the school, and for the elusive genius Dr. Netsulis.

He was by far Mother's favorite client. He never patronized her, never pretended to be interested in her personal life, her temperance newspaper, or our family. Nor did he seem, she said, to expect her to display undue admiration for his many smart inventions such as the automatic venetian-blind cleaners and candlewick trimmers, both of which commanded brisk business in Sweden. It was a working relationship and Mother preferred it that way.

“But to be frank, he wore me out, that one,” Mother confided to me the night before I was to make my first visit. It seemed that furniture, on principle, didn't like him. In the days when Mother cleaned for him, she often witnessed his stumbling into chairs, tables, wardrobes, setting off a crash of dishes, an explosion of glass test tubes. The genius walk, Mother called it. Her advice: get out of the way or follow with a mop and bucket at the ready. It was also Mother's conviction that the smarter her employers, the sloppier their bathrooms and kitchens. “They can't help it,” Mother said. “Pondering all those intricate thoughts, they are utterly distracted.”

From the looks of Dr. Netsulis's manor house, a three-story stone structure set in a boggy hollow, his intricate thoughts were of a phenomenal sort. I determined right off that I would need to devote two days a week—maybe three—just to set the kitchen and mudroom in order. While I cleaned, I made rhymes of the names of ingredients. I inserted lines from
dainas,
sang songs, moved around little pieces of sound, rubbing them into Dr. Netsulis's transparent glassware. I told myself that you could hear me. As small as you were, you were listening.

On week three, as I cleaned the first-floor hallway, Dr. Netsulis burst from his lab and stumbled into my oversize mop bucket. One foot tangled in the wringer and one foot on solid ground, he stood and puzzled over my appearance. And I puzzled over his. In those days he was as thin as a rake's handle. He looked like a big wind might carry him off, which is probably why he had such heavy looking glasses—standard genius impedimenta designed to anchor his brains in place. A speckled film of dandruff, a constellation of stars, coated the lenses. And then there was the matter of his snow-white beard, as long as a goat's and thick. Somewhere behind it was a mouth. And then the mouth appeared, a small dark circle.

“You're not Biruta Kalnins,” he said at last.

“No. I'm Inara, her daughter.”

“Oh. I didn't know she had a daughter.” He took in my work clothes, my hands, my work shoes—canvas sneakers with cracked sides. A look of kindly abstraction settled over his features. He withdrew his foot from the bucket and motioned me toward his lab. The door to the lab stood ajar; the smell of cherry-flavored cigar smoke filled the hall. A quick glance beyond his shoulder revealed two long tables, shoals of test tubes and glass microscope slides, all of them dirty.

Dr. Netsulis followed my gaze. “Ordinarily—you can even ask your mother about this—I keep a clean house.” A slight twinge of shame crept into his voice. “But I'm in the thick of a new top-secret project called Joyous Bovines.”

“Bovines,” I repeated dully.

“Terrific animals, cows,” Dr. Netsulis said. “But you needn't worry yourself about them. My assistant, Joels, feeds and milks them. But if you wouldn't mind mucking out the stalls every now and again . . .” he said, bowing slightly and vanishing into his cherry-smoke-filled lab.

Dr. Netsulis was a quiet man and simple in his habits. Breakfast was always curd cheese over porridge, a meal, he said, that kept his brain from falling to distraction. He needed to keep his wits about him; he had five different dairy farms to study. It was his hypothesis that the atmosphere and general conviviality of a barn and pasture directly influenced the flavor and quality of the milk a cow produces. To this end, he made copious notes regarding the color of paint inside the barns, the type of music piping from the radio, and the quality of jokes the milkers told in the presence of the cows. And, of course, he collected a colossal number of milk samples in test tubes, all of which needed cleaning.

Spring arrived on the ground and above it simultaneously. The bark of the birches peeled and trembled with every breeze. The shedding bark looked like tissue paper upon which long and short dashes, dots and lines, had been branded. These slender gashes on the tissuelike bark were like Velta's letters, silent music composed of scars. The catkins dripped gold. The ferns steadily unfurled their green standards as if to say that there was no stopping life. The storks returned in droves to their enormous nests atop the telephone poles. Violent windstorms shook the boughs of trees, upended old birches, and lifted roofs from barns. But those nests, amazing feats of architecture built of twig and mud, held fast. As light stretched the ends of the days, the construction crews worked longer hours at the Riveria. First grading and leveling. Compacting. Then slab after slab of concrete. Footings, of course, to receive hardware that would anchor walls, the studs, and the supports. Then the framing. A strange numb exultation seized the town. We were watching our economic salvation emerge one wooden joist and beam at a time. But it was slim consolation. Once the framing went up, Mr. Z. gave Rudy the boot.