The Hidden Letters of Velta B. (26 page)

A series of warm-up riffs, clashing with Mengels's zippy high-hat glissandos on the piano, pulled Joels's gaze to a long black box beside the piano.

“That's your band. You should be with them,” I said.

Joels smiled gratefully then leaped onto the stage. Ludviks counted out a measure and then the Merry Afflictions launched into a number. I could not pry my gaze from Joels, who was becoming before my very eyes an entirely different man. As he forced air through his gold saxophone, coaxing a long and sad melody, he was no longer the same man who carefully recorded the demeanor of cows or the quality of their milk. And it was equally clear to me that the rest of us were undergoing a transformation as well. Whatever we carried inside of us—the dark thoughts, the grim despair—Joels had given it voice with the wails and moans of his sax. We did not have to carry these things any longer if we didn't want to. We could let the music wash it away, at least temporarily.

Perhaps this is why, when Joels slid into a wrong note, he raised his hand and brought the number to a full stop. Then he made the rounds, first to Buber on bass, “I beg your pardon”; to Mengels on the piano, “I beg your pardon”; to Vanags on trombone, “I beg your pardon”; and finally to Ludviks, who looked so frail now that he could barely hold the sticks, “I'm terribly sorry—do forgive me.” The melody thus corrected, they picked up right where they had left off.

I tried keeping time with my foot. That's when I felt movement, a quick flutter. The evidence of life—there, inside of me. I had done the biological actions necessary to make life but had done nothing to deserve it. That God in his heavens might be far more generous than I had imagined overwhelmed me, moving me to tears. Then I felt it again—another small twitch behind my navel. That twitch was you. Mother's words came to mind: every good thing starts in water. You asked me how I could so quickly, so easily, fall in love with Joels and I think I loved him because you danced when he made music.

“You were wonderful,” I said to Joels afterward, as he walked me to the bus stand. “I made some mistakes,” he said.

In the distance a rim of purple trees exhaled sweet darkness. Birds and bats scissored dark patterns into night's dropping hem. Joels hummed jazz tunes until the old bus arrived. When the doors creaked open, Joels and I shook hands. All in all, a very successful first date.

That night I fell asleep thinking of your father. Thinking of you—my only link to him. I wondered if my dating Joels was a betrayal, and if so, was it a forgivable offense? I slid into sleep, dreaming of the woods near our house. In the manner of a dream, illogical smudges of sound and image, I found myself gathering penny bun mushrooms in a basket made of hedgehog quills. As I reached into the basket to examine my haul, instead of mushrooms, I withdrew a baby, no bigger than a beating heart. I touched its navel, a tight pink throbbing knot. “How dare you!” the baby cried in a tiny baby voice. Its amber eyes were furious. And afraid. Of me. If I unknotted the navel, I would undo his fragile body and he would disappear. The very memory of him would vanish. And then the baby bit my hand. From far away came the sounds of a woman. Not me, I told myself, not me crying, smothering my cries. Not me smothering my angry baby. Again, a womanly cry. Ligita, crying for the one she'd lost.

Our first date ended with a handshake. Our second date ended with a proposal of marriage. It was late August, twilight, and we went to the river to stand on the little footbridge, the only good thing that had come of Mr. Zetsche's enterprises. The railing was strong and could bear the weight of many fishermen and their poles. From this small height we could see the moving water below us. Above us, the storks sat in their enormous nests wedged in the telephone poles and oaks. They clacked their beaks and made strafing calls, what they did just before they flew to their winter grounds.

“Not a musical sound,” Joels remarked.

“Not pleasant, no,” I agreed.

With massive ungainly flapping, they were off in droves, darkening the sky. A beautiful sight, birds and the sky becoming one dark thing together.

From my pocket I withdrew a few buns. I'd put extra anise seed and butter into the dough because the fish liked it better that way. From a black pocket of still water carp broke the flat skin of water with their kisses. Other fish, trout and perch, nosed to the surface. Dark gray, calamine blue, olive with spots of yellow, a riot of color swam beneath us. As they fought over the mayflies, the blue of one fish so near the green and yellows of another, the water turned gold before our very eyes. A shifting darkness above, a shifting gold below.

We stood there together, not speaking, not needing to. The water went flat and stars swam on the surface.

Joels put his elbows on the railing and leaned over the water. “You know what makes the light of the stars so sharp, so raw?”

“What?”

“They're lonely.”

I looked at the stars on the water. “In the old story,” I said, “the lonely hedgehog in the forest must huddle with others of his kind in order to stay warm. In huddling, they harm one another. But if they don't do this, they most certainly will die of cold. The huddle is worth the hurt.”

Joels studied me for a moment. “Inara,” he said, “you are absolutely normal. I hope you don't think this is too forward. But it seems to me that I could use a wife and you could use a husband. And”—here his gaze settled on mine—“I like you well enough to marry you.”

There was something completely adorable in the way he worked himself toward genuine affection, and because Joels was Joels, as honest as the day, I knew whatever he said, it was exactly that—genuine. “That sounds reasonable to me,” I said at last. “If we marry, I will walk with you the whole way.” These were the very words Mother told me that Grandmother Velta had said to Grandfather Ferdinands when he asked her to marry him.

Our nuptials became a matter for your grandmother's “Kindly Advices” column:
Received a sudden proposal of marriage? Say yes before he changes his mind.
This suggestion received a record-breaking number of responses, all outlining the number of swift courtships and subsequent marriages that had ended disastrously. Of course, this necessitated a lively barrage from “Biruta Responds!” Your grandmother was the happiest I'd ever seen her.

Women, take a firm hand with your husbands. They are like large children. Feed them then tell them what to do. Failure to do so will allow them too much free time and we all know what a danger that is!

And then, as she so often did in her columns, she gave helpful tips on how to read an oven, how to marinate an eel, how to remove pills from a sweater. For the segment on home remedies, she relied on Stanka.

Got gout? Soak a cabbage leaf in vodka for two days. Then drape the leaf over the gouty parts. No, really. Do it.

Words knock like the stones of plums against my teeth. They tap against the shed. I don't know if it's Mother tapping at the typewriter or if it's you and Little Semyon working in the kitchen. Is this how words travel from one place to the next, from one body to another? They won't mean the same things those words:
stone, river, salt, thirst.
But they make the same sounds. I should have remembered this.
Siberia,
someone said, and Mr. Gepkars threw his hands up like he'd been shot.
Go on,
he said.
Go on and laugh.
Go on outside and play in the dirt. Go on,
he said,
go on.
But his voice sounded like a shovel turning dirt.

That was my dream, as thin as an eyelash. And
tap, tap, tap
I heard the typewriter.
Go on,
it said.
Go on, bury me.
I woke up on fire, flames in my feet, soil in my mouth. I felt afraid. I said,
Read to me, read anything, anything at all.
Go on. Go on.
You read from Velta's letters.

Meanwhile, the sun cut itself on the jagged horizon. Night was a knock on the door. The crows tapped their beaks, winged their dark witchery over the land. Meanwhile, the woman took a hammer to a stone. She broke the stone into chunks and the chunks into smaller bits. She poured water over those bits and stirred it into a slurry. They have taken our men and our boys to quarries and mines. They will break our boys to bits. She stirred the slurry, tipped the bowl, and drank it dry.

There you are in Joels's blue chair watching me now. I'm no longer afraid.
Are you very tired?
you ask me often.
Sleep and I'll watch over you,
you say.
Dream,
you say, and I think that's what I've been doing all this time. It is harder for me to parse night from day, then from now. It's like trying to separate water from water with a comb; there are no teeth fine enough. I sometimes wonder if it's even you sitting in the chair. Maybe I'm dreaming you. But then I'll see a stack of letters, musical scores, the photos, and I'll remember. I was telling a story. No story should be left unfinished.

My long walks down the lane to Dr. N.'s, the dig and pitch of the muck shovel in the barn, rocked you to sleep. I loved the grainy air in the barn, damp, chalky with the smell of hay and warmth. I loved the smell of Dr. N.'s tobacco, vanilla, cherry, apricot. He carried entire orchards in that pipe. As I cleaned the lab, light warmed the windows. And I found myself often looking through them, awaiting the arrival, or the return, rather, of Dr. N. and Joels. It was their habit to ride the little red scooter to nearby farms at four and five in the morning. Around nine, they'd return, their two large bodies balanced carefully on that scooter that strained beneath their combined weight. The rest of the day they ran tests of the milk samples and looked after the cows in the barn, the control group, Dr. N. called them. These cows were fed a steady diet of genetically engineered grass. Now that we were an item, Joels and I were under strict orders not to smooch in front of the cows or say anything remotely amorous or humorous. “It's all about the ambiance,” Joels explained, in a reverential hush.

I tried to wear the latex gloves while washing. But my hands had swollen, my fingers turned to thick sausages. So, as Mother always had, I cleaned without gloves. By autumn, I had washed so many of Dr. N.'s test tubes in bleach water that my fingers always felt slippery. One day I showed Mother my hands, blaring red at the palms, white at the tips. “Oh, they do that at first,” she said. “Eventually, you'll lose feeling altogether at the ends.”

Closer inspection revealed that I'd lost my fingerprints. I was like those birch trees, shedding skins and forgetting with each passing season who I was. I could understand now—just a little—why Mrs. Lee corrected anyone if they referred to her as Chinese instead of Korean and why Mrs. Arijisnikov was quick to work the topic of Almaty, her hometown, into any conversation. Why Uncle Maris had been so bombastic about his service record. These were verbal fingerprints pressed into conversations that became a second, better skin. But who was I becoming? I could not read my skin as it was shedding daily, and daily I was being rewritten.

At this time, Ligita and I made our wedding plans. My engagement forced theirs as it's the height of bad manners for the younger to go ahead of the older. Jumping in puddles, they call this. Complicating matters further, Mother and Father could not afford two church weddings or even two dresses. This reality brought on waves of tears from Ligita. I believe she wanted to float in gauze down the aisle of a grand cathedral. I, too, had privately nursed such fantasies. Mother wasted no time in setting us straight.

“In my day girls rode the bus to the city and registered with the civil clerk. We dressed as smartly as we could and had our picture taken. All in all, it was very nice. I think you two girls could do the same. Afterward, we could have a reception at the hall—if we do it on a Saturday.”

Sensibly, we both agreed. The date set, Mother and Father felt it high time they meet the groom. The next evening Joels arrived with a bouquet of marigolds for Mother.

“Inara says you are Estonian?” Mother ventured, as she set out the tea things.

“Yes.” Joels's gaze remained on the tabletop.

Mother sighed. “A very clean country.”

“And how do you feel about cemeteries?”

“I adore them,” Joels said.

“And are you a drinking man, then?” Mother scrutinized Joels's face for signs of liver strain.

Joels coughed. “Only to fortify my intestines and give the bowels something to think about.”

A thorough silence descended. Once bowels are mentioned, it's hard knowing in which direction to steer.

“Inara is pregnant, you know,” Mother said at last.

“Oh, yes.” Joels found my hand under the table and gave it a squeeze. “She is great with child and I am ready to support a family.”

“Well, this has been a very good talk,” Father said.

“I always did like Estonians.” Mother turned to Joels. “I've known several who could be quite sensible and generous—when the occasion called for it.”

In three weeks time, as we had planned, Ligita and Rudy married first, and on their heels Joels and I registered with the clerk. Each of us paid the registry fee and acted as witnesses for the other. “So happy,” the fuzzy-haired clerk murmured. “I'm sure you'll all be so happy.” A tepid smile said she doubted it. We rode the bus back to town.

Anxious to make their appearance at the hall, Rudy and Ligita went on ahead while Joels and I walked toward Mr. Zetsche's new footbridge. This was something newlyweds did—walk by water. Some newlyweds wrote their sins on stones and threw them into the water. Others scratched their names on padlocks and hung them from the rails of bridges. Joels and I stood shoulder to shoulder and watched the pass of clouds on the skin of the river. After a while, Joels withdrew a padlock from his pocket and snapped the lock around Mr. Zetsche's new railing. He had had our initials engraved on the lock. “Here.” Joels pressed the key into my hand. “You do the honors.”