The Hidden Letters of Velta B. (3 page)

And the Ilmyens were kind. Once, when I fell against their fence, I cut my hand. Mrs. Ilmyen, who worked part-time at the clinic, rushed outside with gauze and a bandage. She had my hand cleaned and wrapped before I had a chance to have a proper cry. Likewise, after those rare moments of depression when Father got so drunk he couldn't stand, it was Mr. Ilmyen who rolled him up in flour sacks and carted him all the way from the river to our house. “Mr. Ilmyen is a very fine person,” Father would say on these nights, as he wrapped his arms around his sides and swayed like a dizzy pendulum. “Even if he does speak Russian.” But in the morning, when his head hurt him terribly, the ache was not associated with the drink but with the way Mr. Ilmyen had dumped him onto our kitchen floor. He would foster a low-grade dislike of Mr. Ilmyen, which Rudy told me had far more to do with the fact that the minute the Soviets packed up Mr. Ilmyen had laid claim to one of the better fishing spots on the river and Father had not quite adjusted himself to that harsh reality.

I thought that being Jewish was some sort of vocation and that with the right paperwork and attention to detail anybody could become one. Jewishness was like a job or a calling—the most important one, because Jews were God's chosen people. I knew this because I read the Old Testament and everywhere in those books it seemed God looked out for the Hebrews, hurling thunderbolts and even afflicting the heathens with hemorrhoids. I wanted that kind of attention from a God who parted waters so that his chosen could walk on dry ground. If I had to wander through a desert as the Hebrews of old did, I wanted what they had: unmistakable guidance in the form of pillars of clouds by day and fire by night. But I knew being Jewish wasn't going to be all fun and games. Jews were special—so special they had to suffer for it. And the more they suffered, the more special they became. How exhausting! How dramatic!

I demanded that Jutta teach me how to be a Jew, and she did try. To start, one rainy afternoon she pulled from her father's bookcase a Hebrew prayer book. Within four seconds, I realized my folly. Not only did the letters swim all over the page like birds trapped in strange cages, but Jutta insisted that I read the letters backward from right to left. If that wasn't confusing enough, each letter, according to Jutta, carried special symbolic meaning, and certain arrangements of the letters were more symbolic than others, and some people, she said, spent their lives looking for the right arrangements. “What are they trying to arrange?” I asked, and Jutta blinked as if I had just asked the unthinkable. “The true name of God,” she breathed reverentially.

Mother unwittingly reinforced my admiration of the Ilmyens and my desire to be more like them. Each night after Rudy and I climbed into bed, instead of saying prayers or kissing us as other mothers did, she bent over us and breathed: “Rudy, Inara: be geniuses.” Mother said this each night because each morning she had to get up at five thirty to ride the bus to Daugavpils where she cleaned houses for a few elderly men who had more money and more things than we did; she assumed they obtained these items through their intelligence. The smartest people in our town were the Ilmyens, and so I decided that my clearest path toward brilliance, and thus Mother's affection and approval, would be to study Jutta and learn how to think like a genius. If I became more Jewish in my heart, if I could suffer somehow for my pains, and thus become slightly more special to God, that would be an added plus. To this end, on the nights before big exams, I studied with Jutta. We conjugated all the regular and irregular German verbs or recited Mr. Gepkars's history lessons.
The stones, children!
Then our talk turned to hopelessly tragic things such as the possibility of romance in a small town for a girl like me—a girl with bad skin, big hips, and eyes set a little too close together. “Oh, don't worry so much, Inara,” Jutta would say. “Just put a little lipstick on and always remember: boys like boobs. When you walk, lead with your chest.” And then we'd practice walking up and down their narrow wooden hallway, our chests thrust out. We wore Jutta's dress shoes, which weren't exactly high heels, but they weren't flats, either. All the while Mrs. Ilmyen made comments in Russian from the kitchen: “Imagine you are swans gliding on water. Glide, girls, glide.”

This I loved: practical bits of advice from a bona fide genius. Jutta was the sister I had always wanted, a confidant who understood me, accepted me, and offered minimal corrections when I said or did something stupid, which I suspected was far more often than I even imagined.

While you were scrubbing markers at the far edge of the cemetery, Mrs. Zetsche—Mildi—came to see me. She had to cross the yard and let herself into the shed, and I could tell this bothered her. She is one for formalities and protocols. I believe this had to do with her involvement with equestrian society. Why did she come? We are not family, and we belong to a different social milieu. Before you were born, I cleaned for her, and because of this, I think she felt obligated to pay her respects. She is a fragile soul and, I do believe, a tormented one as well. She is seeking absolution. “Have I done the right thing?” she asked. Such a lifetime of hurt and woe in those words. The truth is, the Zetsches are at the center of the knot that is our town and our family.

You well know a knot is a snarl, a tangle. You cannot pull one end without troubling the other. But I said to her,
Yes, it is enough.

I have always felt a little sorry for Mrs. Z. Your grandparents' feelings toward the Zetsches were more complicated. They were of good pedigree, Mother said, well-papered. Also Mrs. Z. had married a German. This distinction automatically elevated her status with Mother and Father as they have always held in high esteem all things German. Your grandfather longed for, and though it is a sin, even coveted, German-made autos. Your grandmother yearned for a Bavarian clock. She wanted those long chains bobbed with pinecones, the dark wooden birdhouse from which bright yellow chirping flew out on the hour. Germans, your grandparents believed, possessed sound, practical minds, and therefore, your grandparents felt they could understand them better than they could Russians. Germans had helped a great many displaced Latvians after the war and that was no small thing. So, when Mrs. A. at the post office told us that the Zetsches were making inquiries about properties for sale, Mother visibly brightened.

The Zetsches arrived in a BMW for their first visit, a Mercedes for their second, an Audi for their third. They made quite an impression with these fine cars polished to a glassine shine that cut through 1993's winter of torrential rains. As they skirted the larger potholes, in the glossy side panels we spied our faces reflecting a mixture of awe and envy. Where were they going? To view the many properties put up for sale. Latvians were leaving the smaller towns in droves to find their fortunes in Riga or even Sweden or Ireland. Velta and Ferdinands's old manor home was located upriver. Would the Zetsches build too close to our ancestral property? What kind of neighbors might they be? All we knew of Mr. Zetsche was the sound of his tinny voice through the black telephone. And as much as Mother admired German things, I think she was a little afraid of the Zetsches. That is until we saw them get out of their car outside the post office.

Short. Impossibly short. We'd never seen such short people. Everything about them was in perfect proportion but presented in the miniature. I believe Mrs. Zetsche wore a child's shoe size, and Mr. Zetsche could not have topped 120 centimeters, and this in custom-made leather loafers with tall heels. They sped from one property to another, and from the town gossip, it became clear that the earlier rumors were true: they were buying up property left and right, and had plans to occupy a manor within the month. That property has something to do with why Mildi came to see me. She has a sheaf of papers that I'd like you to have. They are important. Perhaps you'll consider burying them, which is what our family has always done with anything truly valuable or precious. “Have I done the right thing?” she asked. What I heard was
Is it enough?
I looked at her sad eyes and said, “Yes. It is enough.”

You never knew the manor as I did. I never knew it as my own mother did. I could not know it as Velta had. Every town, village, and hamlet has at least one of these ancient stone-and-thatch houses from the old days, sitting lonely, boarded up, closed off. Hidden by oaks and spooling bracken, they possess the irresistible allure of ruin and decay, spur myth and speculation. Such was the way with ours. North of the river, surrounded on all sides by a dense wood of alder, pine, and birch, it seemed like an animal denning deep among reeds and twigs and river mud, reluctant to come out into the light.

“Don't go into those woods,” Mother often warned us. “Strange howls and whispers stretch across the water,” she'd say, her eyes wide and her voice low. “The Ghost Girl rises up from the river. And that means somebody will soon drown. Water always wants to take a life.” When I heard this, shivers rippled up and down my spine. But it only made your uncle Rudy more determined to explore where he shouldn't.

It was your uncle Rudy's conviction that the old manor was built of wood and held together by stubbornness, communal memory, and a little plaster. Not a single brick had been used in its construction, but the plaster had been coated so many times with rust-colored paint that, despite years of bitter winds and driving rain, it still bristled a bright iron-oxide color. On those covert missions, I was not the twelve- or thirteen-year-old Inara with bad skin and stringy hair that wasn't quite blond and wasn't quite brown. I was one of the legendary White Tights, a Baltic female counteroperative, a femme fatale forest partisan engaging the Soviets in necessary resistance.

Skulking beside me, your uncle Rudy always carried his slingshot and, strapped to his back, a bazooka-size beet launcher, one of Uncle Maris's inventions. Whatever we intended, whatever we thought we'd discover, we were always disappointed: covered in thirty years' worth of grime, the first-floor windows afforded a limited view of empty rooms and what looked to be only a few sticks of furniture and a spinning wheel draped in sheets. An oven stretched from floor to ceiling, the brown glazed tiles darkened by time and disuse. I imagined oil lamps lit at twilight, a fire casting a warm glow, shadows flickering on the walls, the reedy moan of an oboe spilling through open doorways to the dark ponds. Paintings of women making hay, an attic full of steamer trunks and rattling ghosts. Beautifully irrelevant things.

Crows lived in all three chimneys and the roof drooped on one side. The third-floor windows were small half ovals, sleepy eyes watching the woods and river. But that didn't diminish the grandeur of the porch with its two stately granite columns or the wide circular drive or what must have been at one time a magnificent water garden. Behind the manor, concentric circles of dark pond water boasted lilies and reeds. In the centermost pond, like an elegant arrow from the middle of a slimy bull's-eye, rose a faux-marble statue of Venus minus a head and left arm, a choir of belching frogs hopping at her ankles.

Mother didn't want us near the manor. It was dirty, she said. And not just because of the dusty floors or grimy windows. Young couples used it from time to time for their trysts; Mother was sure of it because she'd find candles in tin cans and other evidence of common, filthy actions.

“What's a tryst?” I sometimes asked her, mimicking the way her mouth twisted around the word. I asked knowing that my question bothered her as much if not more than the mess the couples left behind. It was those messes, we figured, that drew Mother to the manor. Once, we followed her from a distance, careful not to snap twigs, careful to follow the path through the thicket her body had cleared. We watched as she wrested open a side door. Through the smear of dirty windows, we watched her open drawers, even pull up some wooden flooring. We watched her steam long skins of wallpaper, carefully pulling them away from the many sheets of newspaper used for binder and insulation. We could hardly believe it: Mother, violating the same home she'd so sternly wanted us to avoid. I think that's when we both realized that this must be the old manor that had once belonged to her parents, Velta and Ferdinands. Maybe she was looking for the newspaper articles her father had written. Maybe the very poem that got him sent to the work camp was wedged in the walls of that manor house. Maybe this was why Mother, who believed in abiding by the laws of privacy, felt no compunction about peeling skin after skin of newspaper from the wall, rolling them up, and tucking them under her blouse.

Rudy and I conducted similar investigations. We dug behind the dark ponds; we dug beside the stone walls dripping with ivy and clotted hollyhocks. One day in autumn, when the wind off the river bent the birch trees in sad sighs, we went exploring. Rudy found a box of rifle bullets. I unearthed a tin box. The rusted color of fallen pine needles and large enough to hold a thick ream of papers, or maybe a family album, it had the weighty feel of the sacred or secretive, and therefore it seemed valuable. I broke the hasp, pried off the lid. No books, no photos. Just a bundle of letters bound with butcher's string. Under my coat I carried the bundle, somehow knowing that this might be the secret treasure Mother had been searching for. I took the tin to the cellar and sat with a candle in the darkness. Some of the letters were scratched on thick cardboard-stock paper, others on thin onionskin. Some were in German, others in Latvian. I rifled through a few of these, pausing at a recipe for caraway bread and then at this story in blue ink.

I will stitch my dark parable.

I sew a new skin.

With my sharp beak,

I will order my words by reason of darkness.