The Hidden Letters of Velta B. (27 page)

I held the key in my hand. “I will walk with you all the way,” I said.

This is what Velta had said to Ferdinands once she finally decided to marry him. And then I threw the key as far as I could downriver.

By the time we reached the hall, the wedding celebration was in full swing.

“Here they are, the lovebirds!” Mr. Arijisnikov called out, and the men made good-natured jokes in poor taste until Mrs. Arijisnikov flung open the door and herded us all in.

When they saw us, the Merry Afflictions struck a chord and everyone clapped. “It's time for a toast,” Mr. Lim cried, and cups of black balsam made the rounds.

“May happiness brood over them.” Mr. Ilmyen raised a glass. “May the tears soon cease to flow,” Mr. Gipsis said.

Father and Rudy and Joels lifted their glasses and the band launched into “Many White Days,” a song mandatory at Latvian weddings. Joels guided me across the floor through the entire song and halfway through Charlie Parker's “Bird of Paradise,” the whole time counting the beats under his breath. As happy as we both were, I knew he would be happier if he was playing his saxophone. I touched his elbow. “Just play,” I said. “I need to sit down anyway.”

Joels smiled at me gratefully. “You are better than normal,” he said, planting a kiss on my forehead.

Oak boughs hung from the beams, and Mother had made swags of birch and pine for the sills. Every table had a candle, which I knew had Mother in a high state of alarm, but for our sake, she'd stretched herself. She stood at a long table, beaming from behind a platter of
rasols,
a potato salad Mother wouldn't dream of serving without herring and pickles, beets and sour cream. She handed a plateful to Mrs. Gipsis. Mother liked Joels; when she said his name, she lifted her chin slightly. And she was happy to see so many people in the hall. The beautiful thing about weddings is that songs flow freely, as does the beer. Everyone attends even if they find the bride or groom utterly loathsome.

Father, too, was happily conversing with Mr. Baltmanis about the theological implications of certain vegetables in the Bible. “Sadly, there is nothing written in the entire Bible about potatoes.”

“What a shame,” Father concurred. “The hidden part of the slumbering vegetable is the most fascinating. It's the unseen that holds greater value than the seen.”

I thought of you turning silently in my womb.

“Inara!” Jutta squeezed my shoulder. “I think marriage agrees with you. You are positively glowing. And your groom up there—what a man!”

I blushed. “Yes, well. He's a—”

“Very hard worker. I know, I know.” Jutta patted my hand. “All work and no play, well, you know what they say about that, too.” Jutta winked and waltzed back to her family. No wonder she and Big Semyon kept the shades drawn.

“Ahem.” Dr. Netsulis stood before me and bowed. “I am an old man with few pleasures.” He extended his hand.

I rose and put my hands on Dr. N.'s shoulder while he searched for my waist. We laughed. And then we danced. If anyone, Stanka said, could have read my future and told me that everything that had happened, both good and bad, would have led me to this man who made the music my feet now danced to, I would never have believed it. I would have never guessed that happiness could find me twice in one lifetime when so many people never find it even once.

Dr. Netsulis danced me closer to the back of the hall where Mrs. Gipsis had cornered Ligita.

“And where is your father, dear?” Mrs. Gipsis shouted. Having taught the sixth-grade class for so many years, her hearing was not the best and she refused to wear any helps for it.

For her part, Ligita, being half Ukrainian, was plagued with the western Slavic intonation that prevented most people from understanding her, especially when she mumbled. But Mrs. G. furrowed her brow and persisted: “Speak up, dear. The music is so loud.”

“He is in Liepaja!” Ligita's voice climbed to a volume that turned a few heads.

Befuddlement seized every muscle in Mrs. G.'s face. “But why is he there when you are here?”

“He is in PRISON!” Ligita shouted. “He stole a gun and shot a man in the head.” The music stopped for only a measure, and then Vanags launched into a lively reel. Mrs. G. patted Ligita's shoulder and brought her a tissue. Poor Ligita. There is nothing like living in a small town to reveal your nakedness again and again. But there were benefits to this kind of life. Yes, now everyone knew where her father was. And we sympathized. Because in every household there was a missing father or uncle. A grandparent sent to Siberia. An alcoholic. A wife beater. Knowing these things, the hard things, we could come together and pretend that those things didn't mark us forever.

I watched Joels. Did he wonder what others were thinking about him, of our marriage, of this baby I carried who was not his? Was he thinking about his family—Aunt Tufla? Or was it Tevya?—the one who had raised him and had chosen not to be here? Was he remembering her stingy love? Feeling it an injustice that she should be saddled with her dead sister's child, she clothed and fed young Joels grudgingly. Every day at five in the afternoon, regardless of the season, she sent him to the mudroom where he had a cot. She forbade him to rise until seven the next morning. You asked him once how he had committed so many musical scores to memory, and he told you he had lots of time on his hands to do so. But he didn't tell you how he did it. While his aunt wrote her scholarly papers for the academic journals, he sat on the edge of his cot and imagined measure after measure of music unspooling over the gray walls of the mudroom. The rufous-sided towhee trilled in soprano. The frogs belched baritone. Crickets were his violin section. The oboelike calls of the owls became his wind section. The wind roared like kettledrums and the rain
tap, tap, tapped
percussion on the windows and roof. In a few years' time, he had composed entire symphonies, score upon score of joy and sorrow. And now all the pain and hurt and harm he carried came out of the sax, his instrument of joy and sorrow.

That was him telling his story. And he was doing it for us, people he did not know. But that was the beauty and power of music. It undressed us all and made us honest in ways that nothing else could.

Around midnight people began making their way home. Dr. Netsulis blew everyone a kiss then climbed onto his scooter and spluttered into the darkness. The Merry Afflictions packed up their instruments with the care one bundles the most fragile of children. Vanags brought around his ubersturdy Pobeda. The instruments they stowed first, the string bass in the front passenger's seat where the safety strap was still in good working order. Ludviks, Mengels, and Buber climbed into the back, folding their legs to their chests. And then they sped off at breakneck speeds for the nearest bar.

Joels and I walked down the lane and through the yard to the shed. Mother had propped open the door to let it air. Father had moved the bed from their bedroom into the shed and dressed the mattress in her comforter and freshly laundered sheets. They had even stockpiled wood and kindling next to the stove, and strung a clothesline from one wall of the shed to the other. A fire sizzled and cracked inside the burzuika, casting an orange glow of shadow and light. Joels scooped me up and carried me over the threshold as if I were as light as breath. He set me on the edge of the bed. And then he spied the wheelbarrow full of the wooden parts of the piano. He surveyed the soundboard, the cast-iron plate, my clumsy attempt to secure the strings. He sank to his knees before the plate and board, as if in supplication. He ran his hands over the wooden pieces in the wheelbarrow and then again over the hammers and keys.

“I can fix this.” Glowing reverence for the piano, for a piano needing him, warmed his words. I motioned to my dress, our bed. “Later,” I said, rising to my feet. Joels unhooked the clasp of my dress and helped me step out of it. He laid it carefully on the back of the chair. I helped him out of his suit jacket, hung it on Mother's good wooden hanger. The same for his trousers, so the creases would hold crisp, and his dress shirt. His long dress socks. Then we stood before one another, contemplating our feet.

“Well,” Joels said.

“Well.” I studied the fire in the stove. “There is one bed and it is bedtime.”

We looked at the bed. We looked at each other. “Do you have special preferences?” Joels asked.

I coughed. “I-I don't think so—no more than the usual person.” Now Joels blushed. “I mean for sleeping. Do you prefer the right side of the bed or the left?”

“Whichever side is closest to the latrine,” I said, pulling back Mother's best eiderdown. On the sheets lay a metal rake, a hoe, and a shovel: each pristine and shining. It meant good luck for our marriage, but they were very bad for sleeping on. Joels laughed, set the tools beside the fire, then we climbed into bed, Joels stretching his long large body beside mine. He hummed a few bars from a song. This is how for the first time we lay together, side by side, as man and wife. We listened to the dogs barking up and down the lane. In the comfort of darkness we spoke—quietly, of course. Layer by layer, Joels talked his way through the worries of his heart. Which is how I learned that he had entered an international coffee-flake jingle competition. He'd submitted three jingles. The winners would be announced in a few days, but Joels was in such a bundle over it that his bowels hadn't moved in a week. Dr. Netsulis had given him some stewed figs, but that had only added to the problem.

“Oh, Joels,” I said, stroking his arm. “I am so sorry.”

He sighed. “The long and short of it is that my capacity for passion is utterly displaced.”

“It's all right,” I said. “It can wait.” I took his hand and placed it on my stomach, which was hard and tight like an early watermelon. I could feel the muscles at my hips quivering, signaling a contraction taking hold. Practice twitches, Mother called these. My body was teaching itself what to do when the time came.

Joels lifted his hand. “Does it hurt?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “But watch this.” I rolled to my side and repositioned Joels's hand. Just then you kicked so hard your foot threw Joels's hand into the air.

“Good God!” Joels exclaimed.

I nodded my head solemnly. “I know.”

E
VERY CREATURE CARRIES WITHIN ITSELF
an internal clock, an unerring sense of when it is the precise time to do or not do something. I think this is what Solomon meant when he wrote that for every season there is a time. That stars slowly burn out and their light reaches us many years later or the fact that the seeds of certain trees cannot be released if not for a sudden and terrific heat confirms to me that we live in ordered chaos. I know it's not fashionable to believe in God these days. This flabbergasted your grandfather, who saw in the veins of leaves and the striations of rocks evidence of a creator who loved his creation. He saw eternity strung in the stars and brilliant economy in the way, after a forest fire, the first trees to knuckle up through the scald are the same ones whose bark and sap we use to heal a burn.

No, it wasn't anger; it was more of a sorrow that he felt. I think there were days your grandfather actually grieved for God.
Can you imagine,
he asked me once,
having your handiwork, the culmination of all your creative thought and dreams, dismissed as an accident or, worse, a mistake?

Sharks expel their stomach once a month in order to clean them. Such tidy creatures! That is something, you wrote in your notebook, you very much wanted to see. The life cycle of a female octopus fascinated you, too. Once she has mated, she finds a secluded den and flattens herself in its dark recesses. She may brood thousands of eggs, and once they hatch, as small as sequins, they hang suspended in a lace of her making. All of her energy is devoted to caring for her young; she will not leave the den—not even to hunt. Once they are able to float free of the den, her final act before she dies is to exhale and send them forth on a current of her breath.

You wrote about flecks of light buried in certain rocks. Reading your Book of Wonder, your words returned me to a time when I had a heightened sense of awareness and awe for every living thing.

It was as if I had been blind, deaf, and dumb, and now in everything I could perceive order and design, be it found in a creature as small as the bee, whose drowse and hum I now pair with the fall of the apples and their hard turn to vinegar, or something as vast as a field of rye and the wind sighing through it
shhhh-shhh-shhhh.
By mid-October, the abandoned storks' nests atop the telephone poles had sprouted thick ferns. It was now Mikeli, the time the ghosts knock on windows and doors asking for a cup of water. If you give them one, it means you will die next. If you feel a sudden thirst, you shouldn't drink lest you drown on that water. Certainly, you should not go to the river.