The Hidden Letters of Velta B. (6 page)

“Neighbors,” I said.

“But not Latvian?”

“Well . . . ,” Father hedged.

“So why do you go over there so much?” Uncle Maris asked me.

I rolled my eyes heavenward and sighed. “They're God's chosen people, which is to say they are special, which is to say they are expert in the art of suffering. They are also very smart.”

“Well, if they're so special and smart, why do Mr. Ilmyen's elbows show through his sleeves?” Rudy piped up.

Uncle Maris smiled widely. “Well, scratch a Russian,” he said. It was an old saying, so old I couldn't remember how the rest of it went, but the gist was that lurking beneath the thin varnish of any ethnic Russian or Russian speaker could be things far worse than mere Russianness. What things those were I did not know. No person could possibly be Latvian enough for Uncle.

“They're not Russian,” I said at last. “They are Jews who speak Russian.”

“Terrific. Jewish communists—my favorite kind of people,” Uncle Maris said. “Inflicting their troubles and woe on everyone else. And the way they go on about it—as if they were the only ones who suffered.” Uncle Maris looked at his empty trouser leg.

“Oh, they're all right,” Mother said. Later, as we washed the dishes, she made a lot of noise with them, washing and rewashing, as if those plates and cups were unruly children who could be subdued only by vigorous dunkings and scrubbings.

It was early April. Light leaked from the sky a bit longer each day, bringing the birds back to us one by one. I could detect the hard elemental smell of mud thawing. The soil was breathing again, and in early mornings when the vapor hung over the fields, Rudy and I collected worms for midnight eel-fishing expeditions. On the Aiviekste, April is a good month for fishing as the sky never quits weeping, and the eels seem to prefer things that way. We wanted to pickle or smoke as many of them as possible. Uncle Maris loved them, and we hoped that with enough eels on hand, he might regain his old sense of humor that had been evaporating day by day since he arrived.

Mother was on edge, too: she frowned at Maris more and sniffed in his direction, measuring from his body odors how much he'd drunk that day. We figured that either the number of signatures on his petition wasn't to his liking or his vitamin sales were low because one day Maris announced that he'd combed the countryside long enough and that it was time to sell his wares in our town. On a Monday, Uncle Maris took Rudy with him—for moral support, he said. They rode the bus to the outlying homes beyond the school, calling at the Latvian houses, which—he told Rudy and Rudy told me—were easy to spot because Latvians build their homes as if they were planning to stay, while Ukrainians, Jews, and Gypsies cobbled their homes together with whatever they could find because they were too cheap to bother with appearances. Uncle Maris wasn't holding out much hope for big sales in our town full of foreigners (“So tight, they squeak when they fart!”), but for some reason he felt obligated to try anyway, carefully pinning that red plastic carnation to his lapel and checking and double-checking his yellowed petition of signatures. With Rudy in tow, Uncle Maris stumped along the back roads only to find himself turned away from every household—and this before even having a chance to brandish his well-polished arguments about the citizenship laws. By Friday, the day before the big tournament, he'd worked his way to the far end of our road and decided to pay a visit to the Ilmyens.

“At least remove that carnation,” Father advised. “It has lost a bit of color and has acquired a strange odor.”

Uncle Maris simply smiled. He folded the yellow petition and slid it carefully into his breast pocket then crutched himself double-time across the lane.

We all gathered in our customary places at the open door and watched. As it was Friday evening, the window shades of the Ilmyen home were drawn. Even so, Mr. Ilmyen had the door open before Uncle Maris made it to their front step.

“Good evening, sir.” Uncle Maris bowed with a flourish. “I'm Inara's uncle, Maris Kalnins.”

“I know who you are,” Mr. Ilmyen replied, in flawless Latvian. He pushed his glasses higher onto his nose.

“Then perhaps you'd be interested in the betterment of your body. Vitamins are essential, you know, to good health.”

“We don't buy or sell on the Sabbath,” Mr. Ilmyen said, politely but firmly.

“Well, then, perhaps you'd be interested in promoting the betterment of Latvian culture.”

Uncle Maris withdrew and unfolded the yellow petition. “Latvian language—and indeed the Latvian way of life—must be kept sacred by those who claim to be Latvian. In short, my dear fellow, you should sign this petition to attest to your loyalty to the Latvian nation. You are a citizen?”

“I am a potential citizen,” Mr. Ilmyen replied.

“But you speak Russian primarily?”

“Among other things,” Mr. Ilmyen said, adjusting his glasses.

Uncle Maris drew himself to his full height. “But language, my good fellow, is identity. You might find it interesting to know that in a recent survey 100 percent of respondents polled agreed with me.”

Mr. Ilmyen squinted at Uncle. “How many respondents exactly?”

“Four.”

Now Mr. Ilmyen's gaze lifted over the top of Uncle's head and settled on where we stood, shrinking in our doorway. “Good night, sir,” Mr. Ilmyen said quietly, shutting the door.

Uncle Maris whirled on his crutches. We all jumped from the threshold and became inordinately busy scrubbing dishes or pretending to study. Later that night, no amount of industry or imagination could block the sounds of Uncle Maris swearing at the TV. And his talk was so raw, so open, it was like gazing upon someone in their nakedness. And though I couldn't make out everything he said, the sentiment behind those words, what I recognized as hatred, was like dark water drawn from a deep cold well.

The night of the big match a lashing rain battered the town. Rain was all about us, routing deep grooves into the roof. We were all jumpy but for different reasons. Mother fussed and fumed in the kitchen preparing a tray of
pirags
and pickled mushrooms—her very best sooty caps—for the big chess tournament. She was in a hurry to set out the crates that doubled as small chess tables and move the piano to the middle of the platform, which was necessary to maintain the fragile equilibrium between two fractious groups of Baptists. They had, at one point in time, been a unified band of worshippers, but an argument arose over the correct placement of Velta's piano: the left side of the platform or the right? No amount of reasoning, exhortation, or recitation of scripture from leaders representing either side could breach the schism. Now each group so thoroughly believed the other to be in heresy, they refused to speak to one another. This behavior was not so odd. A lot of people in our town were not on speaking terms. The Arijisnikov and Aliyev families, Uzbeks, would not acknowledge the Lee or Lim families, Koreans, who, like the Uzbeks, had come from Tashkent. Or maybe it was Bukhara. The Egers family, all nineteen of them, maintained a robust hatred for Gypsies on account of a horse that had been stolen from a distant relative sometime in the 1800s. This kind of hatred had a special name:
principa pec,
on principle, and it meant that if you felt you had been offended or aggrieved you had a right to your grudge for as long as you liked.

After his standoff with Mr. Ilmyen, Uncle Maris hadn't moved from the couch where he drank steadily and watched the TV with Father. Father, visibly nostalgic for spectacular and frequent deaths, kept looking at the phone. “Nobody's died in weeks,” he lamented. “I'm a wreck.” But as soon as Mother let herself out the back door, Father grabbed a bucket and flashlight, and went into the yard. Rudy followed him, wasting no time in churning up Mother's cabbage rows for worms. At the hall, Mother stationed herself in the foyer behind a long table of pastries and the contribution dish for the Ladies Temperance League. Nearly everyone in town had turned out for the tournament: our teachers from school, all the neighbors, and the fathers and mothers of all the student chess players. In spite of Jutta's fine coaching, I was still in the beginner group. And so I threaded through the crush to the front of the hall where the other beginners—six- and seven-year-olds mostly—fidgeted behind the cloth-covered crates with the chessboards.

I didn't last long. One of the Russian girls in the class ahead of me got me flustered with an Alekhine's Defense and finished me off quickly. The winners then paired with the intermediates, and thirty minutes later, the victors of that round—one of whom was Jutta—battled it out for a turn with the local master: Mr. Ilmyen. By the time Jutta beat her opponent—Mr. Gipsis, the fourth-grade teacher—everyone had finished eating and were settled in the chairs, packed like herrings in a barrel.

Mr. Ilmyen shuffled up the steps and took his seat behind the table. Jutta followed Mr. Ilmyen and took the opposite seat. Mr. Ilmyen nodded to Mrs. Ilmyen standing in the back, and the overhead projector hummed and threw the image of a gigantic chessboard against the back wall. With each move Mr. Ilmyen and Jutta made, Mrs. Ilmyen moved disks over the glass so we could watch on the wall.

“Ooh!” the crowd murmured when Jutta moved her Queen's knight deep into her father's rank of pawns.

“Aaah!” came the sage reply when Mr. Ilmyen moved his King's pawn forward. For twenty minutes this went on. And just when it looked like Jutta would pin her father in an Anastasia's Mate, Mr. Ilmyen blocked with a rook. They were at a momentary impasse: any move either one of them might make would result in the sacrifice of an essential piece. The audience held its collective breath in appreciation of this most delicate position.

And then from the foyer came Mother's voice, high and shrill: “For god's sake, go home, you drunken moron!” In burst Uncle Maris, his face beet-root red, his breath ragged, and the plastic carnation heaving up and down as if it had a heart of its own. In his hand he held the yellow petition, which he raised above his head.

“You don't belong here, you know,” Uncle Maris shouted at Mr. Ilmyen. A collective gasp rose from the crowd; it's one thing to think such things, quite another to shout it in public in front of God and everybody.

“My dear fellow.” Mr. Ilmyen picked up a pawn and held it suspended in air. “This is our home. Where else should we go?”

“Who the hell cares? You are the expert in suffering. Why don't you just go and die. That's what you Jews do best!” Uncle Maris raised his crutch as if it were a javelin, and then he hurled it. The crutch flew through the air and landed—impossibly—with a resounding
twang
in the strings of the open piano. For three horrifying seconds, the room was absolutely silent as we sat frozen in stunned mortification, contemplating the disaster: the piano, the crutch, those words, Uncle Maris, and Mr. Ilmyen.

At last Mr. Ilmyen stood, brushed the front of his trousers. “And now, ladies and gentlemen, I bid you goodnight,” he said in Latvian. It was so sad and sweet—something people said only in the movies, and then only when they were going away for a very long time. Mr. Ilmyen put his hand on Jutta's shoulder, and they crossed the stage to where Mrs. Ilmyen held open the small side door. The spell broken, Uncle Maris, minus one crutch, stumped to the foyer and out the front door.

Everyone spluttered and brayed all at once: “He must be crazy!”

“Even so, he has a good point.”

“Such an arm!”

“Horrible aim!”

I slipped out the back, determined to find Mr. Ilmyen or Jutta. But only Uncle Maris was there.

“Help me a minute,” Uncle Maris said, leaning his weight into me.

More clouds had rolled in from the east and the sky cracked in two. As we started walking, light shot out in arcs and rain pounded the road.

“You probably think I'm a terrible man for saying those things,” Uncle Maris said.

I shook my head, but I wasn't really sure. My eyes were filled with water, and now the rain fell with such force that my skirt stuck to my legs and the road dissolved beneath our feet into narrow violent streams of muddied water. With each step, my shoes filled with mud and I just wanted to get home. But Uncle Maris's crutch sank deeper into the mud of the road and it seemed like we would never make it.

“You're ashamed of me. You wish I never came here,” he continued.

“No,” I lied, bearing up under his weight. I could see our house in the distance and I tried to pick up the pace.

“You want to know how I lost my leg?”

“Not really,” I said.

“I threw myself over a mine,” Uncle Maris continued, undeterred. “I saved the man standing beside me, a Russian, incidentally. Now tell me I'm a terrible man.”

“You're not terrible,” I said, in a voice that I did not recognize as belonging to me.

Uncle Maris leaned close. “I always liked you. Rudy, he's okay, but you're the smart one. Anyone can see you understand the way things are.” Uncle Maris lurched, and for a horrifying second, I thought he would kiss me. And then he righted himself with the crutch, doubled over, and retched a colossal amount of vomit onto my shoes. “I beg your pardon most sincerely,” he said, wiping his mouth with his sleeve.

I shrugged out of his grip and left him at the edge of our yard, where he retched behind Mother's rosebush. The light was on in the kitchen, and as I came in through the back door, Father and Rudy were at the sink. They'd caught a long dark silver eel, a fully mature adult who'd been reckless, who'd made the mistake of biting our lowly lobworms soaked in pilchard oil. Rudy held the eel on its back. Then with a small kitchen knife, he cut out its angry eyes.

“Where did you catch that?” I asked, astonished at its size.

Rudy grinned. “Where do you think?”