The Hidden Letters of Velta B. (7 page)

I realized they had fished from Mr. Ilmyen's spot while he had been at the hall playing chess. Mother came through the back door then, and in the open frame of sky and darkness, I saw Uncle Maris, still in the yard. His mouth was moving and the sounds kept issuing forth, a burbling colorless stream of rage.

“He goes. Tomorrow,” Mother said. Father tried hard to hide his embarrassment by scrutinizing the eyeless eel. Then Mother turned, looked at my feet, and sniffed mightily. “Get your other shoes and coat on. We're going to the Ilmyens'.”

When we reached their house, Mother stood on the step and wrung her hands. We could hear dogs howling in the hills, barking through the dark with their low, dull voices. Finally, she knocked on the door and a few seconds later Mr. Ilmyen appeared. Mother touched the white temperance pin on her coat. “Mr. Ilmyen, you must forgive my brother-in-law. He's an idiot, and besides, he drinks too much. And when he drinks, he talks, and when he talks, unfortunately he says stupid things.”

Mr. Ilmyen stared at us and then his gaze lifted to a point above our head. And then Mrs. Ilmyen's voice floated out from somewhere deep in the kitchen: “Go away. Please.” So simple a request, so complete. And in her voice I heard the weariness of generations of suffering and abuse at the hands of friends and neighbors. We turned and trudged back to our kitchen, the whole way my heart sitting heavy in my chest, the blood in it tired and unmoving. I would not pretend that I understood the vast and irreparable damage that had occurred in the course of one short evening. But I had lost Jutta, my only real friend. That much I understood. I thought at last I was feeling some of that suffering Jutta had tried so hard to teach me about. And then I realized what an idiot I was—to lay claim to any fraction of suffering when our family had so publicly reminded them of theirs.

Later, Mother sat on the edge of my bed, the springs creaking under her weight. I did not want to be a genius and did not want her wishing me to be one. Though it was dark inside the room, a break in the clouds revealed a slip of moonlight that transformed the window into a box of silver. I could see then that Mother was looking at her hands. “Don't cry, Inara. Nothing lasts forever,” she said. “Not love, not hate. Not joy or pain.” Mother leaned close, her breath on my hair. She laid her chapped hand on my forehead. And then she kissed me on the cheek. It was the first time she had kissed me in years.

By the time we woke the next morning, liquid light healed over in the west to a dark welt that meant more rain. Uncle Maris had gone. No one seemed surprised: vanishing is what he did best. Also, he'd taken Mother's typewriter. According to the typed note he left next to the sink, he felt like a fox caught unawares by winter and forced to eat his own turds. He would return only when we had all come to our senses, and maybe not even then. In a postscript addressed to me, he'd written: If you can't behave disgracefully, then what's the point of living? Another note, this one left for your grandmother: I'm feeling a nudge for patriotism. Riga calls. Don't worry about the typewriter. It's all for the greater good.

When your grandmother found that second note, she sat at the table, buried her head in her arms, and wept. She would have continued to do so had the oven timer not sung out. “Oh, shit. The Baptists!” Mother grabbed her coat and I followed her out the back door and down the road. As we approached the Ilmyen home, Mother kept charging ahead, but I let my feet slow a little. The shades were still drawn. Light behind the windows turned the shades to paper lanterns. Dark shapes moved behind the lighted scrim. I thought that if I stood still and stared hard enough I could watch the quiet goings-on inside the Ilmyen household as if I were watching a movie. But the longer I watched, the more my eyes burned and I realized that their world was a book written in another language and therefore closed to me.

We had forty minutes before the left-side Baptists were due. Inside the hall, the previous evening's disaster remained untouched: there were chairs overturned on their backs, chessmen scattered over the floor, and plates of half-eaten pastry and plastic cups of stale coffee studded the windowsills. Uncle Maris's crutch was still wedged in the strings of Grandmother Velta's piano. Mother dragged a trash bin from the foyer, and I climbed onto the platform. I leaned my shoulder into the piano's wood and pushed with all my might. And that was my mistake: the piano sailed over the lip of the platform. The resounding crash sent the crows screeching and the dogs barking in the lane. Then complete and absolute silence. Hands on her hips, Mother surveyed the destruction: the collapsed wood, the hammers sheared from the pinblock, strings snapped, the solid soundboard thicker and heavier than any tombstone half sunk in the wooden floor. At last she turned to me, her eyes shiny with unshed tears. “I've never cared for stringed instruments if you want to know the truth.”

Without another word, we left the hall and headed home. As our feet churned the mud, I thought of Uncle Maris and how he'd split in my mind into two separate people, the Uncle Maris of my childhood whom I would always love, and the Uncle Maris whom I never wanted to see again. He had changed these last months, and I realized there was no stopping that or helping him. We each of us had to keep taking our steps where they would lead. It was a scientific principle: momentum, and it meant to me that some things—like love, like hate—once in motion couldn't be stopped. Even the piano had not been exempt. But that was the way of life, Father liked to say as we stood on our threshold watching the sad funerary processions. Forward life rolled and only death slowed it down. And even that, Father said, was only a temporary hitch. Even now the rain was falling as steadily as ever and the roads were rising and bleeding to the river as they always did this time of year.

And what of that mangled piano? By bits and pieces: keyboard, pinblock, hammers, and strings, Father gathered it into a wheelbarrow and stored it in his toolshed. The cast-iron plate, the largest and by far the heaviest part of the piano, we carried: Mother and Rudy on one end, Father and I on the other. We picked it up, walked a few paces, set it down, picked it up, walked a few paces, set it down. Though none of us said it, I know we were all thinking how very much like a Jewish procession we looked, how very likely our neighbors were standing behind windows and watching us as we had watched so many others.

We laid the iron plate and soundboard to rest inside Father's toolshed, which was where he stored anything that was broken. Set on end and leaning against the far wall of the shed, the iron plate with the strings, which somehow had not broken (“What a miracle!” Mother intoned again and again), looked like a loom. Every sound, every utterance, set the strings buzzing.

Though Mother claimed she did not care for stringed instruments, she made a phenomenal number of visits to the shed. Father would follow her, assuring her that with the right glue and patience he would have Grandmother Velta's piano trilling tunes that would make angels weep.

Y
OU'VE BROUGHT THE PAIN MEDICATION
. You've brought more ice. And newspapers. Your grandmother would have turned cartwheels to hear this latest: Madame President Vaira Vika-Freibergs opened a recent book-fair address with a
daina.

I was born singing,

I have lived singing,

and when I die,

I will fly to heaven singing.

Because the president had been raised in Canada and because your uncle Rudy had just had a fight with your grandmother, Rudy, on principle, didn't vote for Mrs. Vika-Freibergs. But just about every other voter in the country did. I think her holding a PhD in ethnography and having so many
dainas
committed to memory went a long way with a lot of people.

I thank you also for reading to me from the Gospel of Luke. I've always liked it for the miracle accounts: Jesus feeding the five thousand, the healing of the demoniac who made his home in graveyards. What did that man eat while he lived among tombstones? Let's not dwell overlong on that.

You told me once that Jesus was your favorite superhero. You asked me once, too, if I thought Jesus had big ears. I said yes because He hears our every prayer, but honestly, there is no exact record of what his ears looked like. He definitely liked ears—that much I know. Twenty times, by my count, Jesus said let those who have ears to hear. You remember, of course, his arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane. A crowd had gathered. One of Jesus's followers, and I believe it was Peter because he was such a hothead—though your grandfather assures me that the scriptures do not support this—withdrew his sword and hacked off an ear belonging to a young servant of the high priest. Jesus wasted no time attaching the severed ear to the side of the boy's head. A miracle, and on his way to his own crucifixion. I've often wondered how this action changed that boy's life; if the restoration of a small flap of cartilage on the side of his head did something to his heart.

I thank you, too, for reading from your Book of Wonder.

There's no covering that protects the body of any living thing that excels the scales of a fish, you wrote. Both armor and oil jacket, the plated scales are tough enough to resist bruising, resist the radiation of heat, and keep the fish's skin dry. Having no seams to the body, no seams to the scales, a fish can withstand any amount of water pressure without breach or penetration. This is why a fish can swim at depths no human, no submersible, can reach. Even more amazing, you wrote, is that dark stripe that runs along a fish's side from gill to tail, the lateral line, which registers low-frequency vibrations. A tactile and aural organ, this line senses movement, and like radar, it indicates to the fish how near or far away other objects are and whether those objects are in motion or stationary. Sound, you concluded, was a form of touch.

We had guessed as much from your many visits to the clinic. One doctor in Balvi showed us X-rays. We saw those large hammers and anvils inside your enormous ears.

“He's living in a sound chamber; everything is amplified,” the doctor explained. “And as sound is a form of touch, certain vowels in words, certain tones, will cause a faster vibration and pain him more than other sounds.” The doctor sent us home with those blaze-orange industrial-strength ear protectors that you conveniently left on the bus.

If the wind blew from the east, you could hear the bells pealing in St. Petersburg. You claimed that the monks at Saint Alexander Nevsky Lavra ushered morning in with songs that started bright but stanza by stanza bent to unbearable sadness. That's when the monks jumped, you said, as jumping was the only way to outstrip sorrow. You wrote this all down, how you could hear the gradations of sound on the chromatic scale, half tones, quarter tones that only the monks have mastered. You've assured me that you don't recall having placed your ear to the mud at the river's edge to hear the water's quiet susurration, but you recorded with what patience water reshapes shoal and shore. How patient? One particle of sand, one bit of stone at a time.

You have suffered on account of your ears. I am sorry your date walked out on you. That's a city girl for you. I will say that your choice of online dating services—Desperate.com—doesn't inspire confidence. At any rate, you did not ask for your ears and I fear they have been a burden, your affliction.

It may be slim consolation, but I assure you we all suffer in some way or another. When I was young, I was afflicted by a ferocious need to prove, if only to myself, that I was a clever girl. I don't know what Rudy's particular affliction was. I think it may have been an overwhelming desire to know love in the physical sense: he had not been popular with the girls at school and this even with a Fu Manchu mustache. What was your grandfather's particular affliction? His younger brother, Maris. Agony—your grandfather slept it, wept it, ate it, and drank it on account of Uncle. This is a kind of love: to be tormented on behalf of another, to grieve for one whom he thinks may be lost. I don't know if this is a healthy love, but it is a love all the same.

We could say the problem was one of personalities. They were utterly different, your grandfather Eriks and uncle Maris. Your grandfather was a man of the earth, a man who felt keenly, especially as he stood knee-deep in an open grave, gravity and the weight of time pushing on the bones. “The world is all stone,” he'd sometimes say, when he'd come home after a long day of digging. I suppose this is why over the years he had become a quiet man. What does one say in the presence of so much weight? And I suppose this is why Uncle Maris was so noisy. Uncle filled your grandfather's quiet with sound. One man's steady drive into the earth the other countered with erratic, brilliant flight. Mother was less generous in her assessment of Uncle. She said he was like the hedgehog, a difficult animal to love as it is a proud creature, slow to listen and quick to make a point. Even if Uncle had not made the scene at the hall, Mother's dissenting vote was almost automatic in nature, as Mother and Father rarely agreed on anything.