The Hidden Letters of Velta B. (35 page)

“Because of the baby who died?”

“We all thought that at first. The baby died while Ferdinands was in the camps. And we all know how grief changes a woman. Her only recourse was to write letters, write her way toward a world worth living in. For eight years she waited, wrote letters. Then Stalin died and people like my father were released—rehabilitated.”

Mother traced the outline of Velta's face. “She didn't like the dark. Every year, at some point during the winter, she'd refuse to get out of bed, would not eat, drink. And every winter a white truck came for her. Two men wearing white uniforms wrapped her up in yellow blankets, buckled her to the stretcher, and trundled her into the back end of the white truck. The whole time Mother sang songs. Strange wandering songs about walnuts and marigolds. Belted to the board, her eyes on the clouds, she'd lick her lips and say, ‘The clouds taste flat today. Not enough salt.' Every winter this happened. And then four maybe five weeks later, the white truck would come around again, and the orderlies would walk her to the front door, or maybe it would be a neighbor who'd gone to fetch her and bring her home on the bus. She'd stand on the threshold, bewildered, her hair cropped to the scalp, her eyes hollow. Each time this happened, I'd think they'd finally cured her. I'd say,
Speak to me, Mama, tell me something, anything.
”

“Something bad happened to her in winter,” I suggested.

“Yes,” Mother said. “Me. I happened in winter.”

You have always shown a keen interest in the legend of the Ghost Girl of the River. You asked quite a lot about her that spring of the history fair. I thought it a macabre obsession, but then we are a family of grave diggers. So I told you that the voice calling across the water is not a woman's, but a girl's. She rises as a mist on dark foggy nights. She cries for help. She calls people by name. She places a pair of sharp scissors beside your head while you sleep. The truth is, a little girl had been drowned in the river. They say that she is seeking revenge or reconciliation. No one knows for sure which because no one who sees her and goes to the water ever returns.

You heard her call your name. I believe that now. I believe in the conductive power of water. It's pull, pure and undeniable. How else can I understand why you went to the water's edge a few nights before the history fair, why you walked in as if it had been waiting for you all your life? I followed you to the cold water. The river, still frozen at that time, lay under a mantle of windswept ice as shiny as silver glass. A mirror. You walked as if firm ground were just a few centimeters beneath the surface. As if you believed the myth of your own life: you were the Bear Slayer and the river was your true home. And then you remembered who you were: a mere boy who does not swim. Down you went. I have always wanted to ask you what you saw when you went under. Dark water and silt? The many rocks we'd thrown with the slips of paper tied around them—our sins and confessions settled in the river's mud? What did you hear when you slid under the dark mantle? I went after you, hauling you up. As I did, you came up glistening, triumphant, and unafraid.

During those wet days, you kept detailed measurements of rainfall and rising water tables here in your Book of Wonder. So, too, in your comments in the margins. The rain never sings a song the same way twice. I think of that spring, that rain, as a second awakening, a second baptism. Can an entire town be baptized at once? Yes, I know it can because I saw it happen. It began that same spring of that history fair. In the mornings I made my rounds: first to Dr. N.'s barn. I could hear the cows lowing well before I spotted Dr. N. sitting in the loft, his head haloed in blue smoke, his pipe in his hand. Below him, the cows stood past their knees in water. Their lowing could in no way be described as cheerful, this in spite of the bright orchestral music blaring from a radio in the loft.

He'd fitted each of the cows with chartreuse-colored hip waders, but this seemed to only increase their distress. Their udders hung low and heavy. Dr. N. switched off the radio, waved his pipe in my direction. “This world is turning to water, you know.”

I stacked bales of hay to make a low dry platform and arranged a series of planks to make a ramp. It was slow going coaxing them up the ramp, but as cows are not overly clever and inclined to follow the broad rump in front of them, I managed.

“Yes,” he continued. “But I wouldn't want you to think we've been idle.”

“Who?”

“Your man, Joels, and I.”

I had a cow out of the water and relatively calm. I shoved a bucket under her udders. “I would never think that, Dr. N.,” I said, reaching with each hand for a teat.

“I've fastened and yoked planks all around the barn. Sort of like a wooden collar. As the water rises, the planks will rise, too.” Dr. N. regarded me from beneath his bushy eyebrows. “We're fashioning rubber pontoons to buoy everything. It would be nice if we could fill them with helium.”

The last cow milked, the pails lined up in the loft, I left Dr. N. muttering genius-invention thoughts: How to coax the floatation suits onto the cows? Slick their legs with vegetable oil or sticks of butter?

I headed for the Zetsche manor stuck in that dark hollow of wood. They had a hard enough time managing their water garden. They certainly would not know what to do with all this rain. As I passed the ministallions, they seemed less triumphant. Water licked at their hooves. Crows sat on their heads and made low knocking noises in the backs of their throats. They were laughing.

Mrs. Zetsche met me in the corridor, waved me toward her grand dining-room table. We passed Mr. Z.'s study, where financial journals and newspapers had been scattered over his desk. It looked as if he'd taken a stack of those journals and thrown them against the wall. Mrs. Z. reached beneath her chair and produced a brick wrapped in a green sheet of paper. I recognized the slogan blazing across the paper:
PATRIOTIC LATVIANS FOR AN ALL-LATVIAN LATVIA.

“Please ignore it, Mrs. Zetsche. It's probably some dumb kid trying to scare you,” I said.

“One hundred and twenty years our family has owned property in this region, and we're still treated like foreigners.” Mrs. Zetsche touched the brick. “It isn't as if my father wasn't killed in the war. It wasn't as if he, too, was put in prison, beaten.” Her gaze lifted to mine.

In her eyes was the look of pain, of a woman wounded. I had to look away. She did not really belong here; she and her husband never would. And she was beginning to understand this.

“Do you know why we moved back?”

“No, Mrs. Z.”

“Because Latvia was the homeland, a return to a promise. We reclaimed the family inheritance, the ancestral lands. We weren't making it in Bonn.”

Shotgun blasts from the trees punctuated her words.

“We wanted to have children. It took all the money we had to emigrate and pay the lawyers. Everything we had went into investigating whether or not our claims were legitimate. I would have had sons and daughters, many of them by now, and look at us!”

More blasts from the forest.

“I'm sorry, Mrs. Z.”

Her little red mouth twisted. “You know, Inara. You're almost like a daughter to me, a distant and strange daughter. I believe that you are sorry for me. Why does that make me feel worse, not better?”

At home I found Father silently regarding the fire in the grate. I sat beside him, placed the brick on the table beside his chair. I did not try to remind him of better times. I was remembering what Mrs. Zetsche had said nearly three years ago when that sudden fire burned the pharmacy to a crisp, that all of our suffering has been the result of our striving against the constraints of time and place and memory, none of which can be moved, changed, broken, or loosened.
Time, place, memory,
she had said.
We need these walls in order to have something to push against, to have something that breaks us.
At the time I thought her words odd—what could she know of pushing, of being broken? Now I wondered how this bit of wisdom had grown teeth, had bitten and drawn blood in the way anything true does. And throbbing behind her words was another, darker truth. We could hate people like the Zetsches, we could love them, but we could not hate them without also hating ourselves. We could not forgive them if we did not first examine ourselves.

This is a puzzle to me: How is it that you have no memory of the history fair? It's only been ten years, after all. You say you don't remember Joels helping you into one of Rudy's old church suits. You say you don't remember your grandmother pulling a tattered coat from a trunk and her telling you, “This belonged to my father; he would want you to wear it.”

Under a lowering sky, you and I walked down the lane toward the hall. I could not help noticing that as we passed by the cemetery your head tipped toward the stone markers as if pulled by the murmur of a dream or maybe you were hearing last-minute instructions. A soughing wind, the kind that could tear a mustache off the face of one man and plaster it onto the face of another, tore over the fields and through the lanes. With the wind came water and more water. This weather, coupled with the sad recognition that nothing else happened on Tuesday nights, induced a number of families to brave the elements. The Gepkarses, the Inkises, the Lees, the Lims, and even the widows Sosnovkis and Spassky came. And the almost sure likelihood of a spectacle lured to the hall many of the young men, some of whom I knew had been friends of Rudy's.

At exactly seven p.m. the parents and children arrived, every one of them drenched. The crossbar of the coatrack bowed beneath the weight of so many bloated coats refusing to drip dry. The children ran around in dizzy circles, pretending to be airplanes, horses, anything, while the adults sat on folding chairs lining the walls. Mother was in her element, lining up cups ready for the punch ladle when it was time. After a quick welcome from Miss Dzelz, we rose and sang the anthem, “God Bless Latvia.” Father did not sing, but his jaw muscles worked in time to the music and I took this as a good sign.

The anthem finished, we resumed our seats. A quick glance around the room confirmed yet again what an odd mixture of people we were. This stretch of country represented a meeting of contradictions that had, in time, become something like reconciliation. These reconciliations were borne out daily in our small actions, in the buying of bread from the baker, Mr. Tamiroff, who was Ukrainian, but was as Latvian as a body could be; in the handing off of mail from Mrs. Arijisnikov, whose grandfather, through no fault or choice of his own, had been railed from Uzbekistan to Daugavpils and somehow ended up here. There were the Jewish families. And then there were the Zetsches; upstarts, interlopers, some people called them. Curiously absent were the Zetsches. But it was just as well; I could hear the grumbling even now coming from a man who had been let go last week.

The lights dimmed, and slowly a wider circle of light began to assert itself. In the circle stood two microphones on their stands, and behind each microphone, one of the Indrikis twins. One twin wore a business suit and the other wore rags, his face smeared with charcoal.

“I am Mayor Berzins of Sabile. Perhaps you remember how I protected the Gypsies when the Nazi fascists came to our town. I would not let those fascists take my poorer brothers and sisters to the trains that I knew would take them to death camps.”

“And I am an unnamed Gypsy,” said the other twin, grinning madly. “After the Nazis had been routed by the Soviets, the Soviets tried to take Mayor Berzins away. But my poorer brothers and sisters, remembering his courage and generosity, banded together. With sticks and stones we drove back those soldiers.”

The two brothers shook hands, embraced, walked stiffly side by side off the stage. Their mother jumped to her feet. From where I sat, I could not see whether or not tears streamed down her face, but such is the effect of embraceable tales we can feel good about telling and even better about hearing. Best of all, we knew this story was true: a film crew had set up in Sabile a few years ago to make a documentary.

Another child told the story of how his great-grandfather piloted an icebreaker in the Antarctic. Pure fabrication, but we all clapped our hands anyway. One child claimed a distant relative who invented the cadmium loop. The next child told of a grandmother in Balvi who had successfully hidden a Jewish woman in a slim space within a wall. The Jewish woman did not keep a diary cataloging her daily misfortunes, and there had been no tearful reconciliation years later; she'd disappeared after the Germans pulled out. Gone to Estonia was the family's best guess. But the girl's recitation suggested dissatisfaction. What good is a story if we don't know how it ends?

At last it was your and Semyon's turn. The two of you had decided to tell the history of two families at once. Semyon, wearing a long beard made of several balls of steel wool clipped together, stood behind one mic; you stood behind the other.

The two of you began with a
daina,
an old one we all knew.

My little wolf rumbles.

My little wolf hums.

My little wolf has a white foot.

If this doesn't make it better,

It won't make it worse.

A little salt in a wound, it stings, but the hurt makes us stronger. I was proud that the two of you, being only ten years old, understood this already.

“History is a gap-toothed comb,” you said, your voice as gruff as you had imagined Grandfather Ferdinands's voice might have sounded. “And we are the teeth in that comb. What I remember is what remains: my wife wrote me letters so that we would not forget. I had been sent to a work camp. She was left behind. She wrote of ordinary events, everyday events, of the dogs whose tails were tied together, set on fire, and turned loose in a field. Of the oxen whose legs were broken so that we could not plough.”