The Hidden Letters of Velta B. (38 page)

“There, now,” Mother murmured. “It's never quite as bad as it seems. This can be fixed,” Mother said, even as the look on her face said,
There's no fixing this. No way.

Mrs. Zetsche stopped in midsob, wiped her nose with a tissue. “In that case”—Mrs. Zetsche had her hand on her purse, which yawned wide open—“I'll leave these with you.” She removed another pair of testicles and,
clunk,
dropped them onto the TV tray.

You say you don't remember your grandmother scolding you. This doesn't surprise me. She rarely had occasion to do so. But the moment Mrs. Z. left, she cornered you in the kitchen.

“Where are those damn horses?” Her fingers, pincerlike, gripped your elbow.

You squirmed; she pinched harder. I didn't stop her.

“It's our jobs on the line, you know. You tell what you know and we might all get to keep working.”

You looked sufficiently worried; your ears turned vermilion. “They're somewhere in a barn in Balvi. That's all I know.” You would not meet her gaze.

Mother released her grasp on your elbow and folded her arms across her chest. “Balvi. That's not so far away.” And I could see her making plans, figuring whom she could conscript into a recovery mission. And if I was honest, I would have to admit that I was glad Mrs. Z. had come to us first. She needed us. Another plus: seeing someone else, namely her, reduced to tears was something like a comfort. Don't the problems belonging to others seem more convivial, more interesting, and possibly more soluble?

That year your grandfather took ill, my rounds became increasingly strange. My first stop: the Zetsche manor house. With a wag of her petite head, Mrs. Z. would greet me. If she held a hankie to her eyes, it meant another stallion had undergone the knife. By this time, she was trusting me with her keys again and she preferred that I clean their many porcelains in their many bathrooms. Ligita, she thought, wasn't scrubbing as well as she ought to. But I divined that Mrs. Zetsche really wanted a captive audience, someone who could radiate sympathy and work at the same time. I did this knowing that Mrs. Z. might not be paying me as much as she paid Ligita and, in fact, might not pay me at all.

Then I'd stop by and see Dr. N., who spent most of his time these days in his barn. He'd encircled the barn with wooden planks. Stanka said his place looked like a gigantic wagon wheel, the planks being both spokes and rim, and the barn anchoring it all in the center.

Inside the barn, a deluge of orchestral, choral, and jazz music fell from rafter speakers to the cows, though Dr. N. and his cows seemed visibly confounded.

“They resist my every effort at cheer,” he sometimes complained.

He'd outfitted them in rubber boots, and I thought this had something to do with their lachrymose demeanor. Dr. N.'s funding had been pulled, but that didn't slow him down a bit: the test tubes boiled and burbled, and I had plenty of work inside his manor house and outside. From Miss Dzelz and others, he'd accrued at least fifty barrels of corks and claimed that he was putting them to good use—he'd made buoys out of them and affixed them to the sides of the barn. It was quite possible that his barn could actually float—one end seemed to bob upward ever so slightly from time to time as if it were slowly warming up to the idea.

I kept Mother updated on Dr. N.'s activities. He worked every other day at the clinic, and on his days off, he had the floating barn experiment to work on, and he claimed that he was developing something called the Zambian Space Program, the particulars of which remained very fuzzy. My reports of Dr. N.'s experiments ushered Mother to an unexpected moment of revelation. She put her hands on my shoulders. “After all these years of hoping and praying that you would be a genius, I can honestly say I'm glad that you're not.” And there was not an ounce of malice or sarcasm behind her words.

If you weren't out collecting corks for a school project or playing chess, I'd sit with you.

Having recovered from the history fair and noticing the great quantity of water lying about and falling from the sky, Miss Dzelz, who never liked to let an educational opportunity go by, seized upon our strange weather patterns. She instructed you all to compare this year's rainfall in eastern Latvia to the rainfall of the past one hundred years. You were to measure the width and height of the river daily, which already had risen to the edge of Mr. Z.'s empty Riviera shops. You were to estimate how many days would pass, if the current daily rainfall continued, before all the lower-lying homes and farms would be underwater.

Judging from your reaction—a fervent clambering for tape measures, tin cups, and trips to Dr. N.'s—I gathered that this assignment was met with great enthusiasm by the third grade. Nothing captivates quite like imminent disaster. I thought there was something beautiful about all this water. If the rain stopped—this seemed to happen during the hour that dawn broke and the hour that dusk fell—then the water in the lower fields lay as flat and still as mirrors. And in these hundreds of mirrors, the clouds shone silver and gray. We saw and knew all that we needed and nothing more.

Mr. Ilmyen and Father worked out a schedule for their discussions. At high noon Monday through Friday they met and aired their general and particular complaints. On the Sabbath, which started on Friday night and went through Saturday night for Mr. Ilmyen but started Saturday night and stretched through Sunday for Father, they took a rest from each other. How they needed it! When they met, and they preferred to do this in the middle of the lane, they went after matters of theology with hammer and tongs.

“Faith is like a fish that can't be caught,” Mr. Ilmyen said on a Wednesday. A light drizzle fell, nothing serious, and with some canvas stretched between laundry lines, we managed to keep the two patriarchs relatively dry.

Father stretched his mouth into a grimace. “Faith is like a grave that you can never finish digging.”

“Faith is like being on a boat on a river; it is both an individual experience, the hand at the oars, say. And communal. The boat has many seats, after all.” Mr. Ilmyen turned his gaze to the sky in deep contemplation. From upriver, we could hear Mr. Z. shooting his rifles, short sharp blasts. “There may be many seats, but not just any idiot gets to pull at the oars,” he said.

Father narrowed his eyes at Mr. Ilmyen. “What are you saying?”

“Jews and Baptists can't pull at the oars together,” Mr. Ilmyen replied.

“But they can be in the same boat,” Father insisted.

“No.” Mr. Ilmyen shook his head, and he seemed sorry to have to say, “They can't even float on the same river.”

And that is how the second argument started.

“How can you say this? Your God is my God and my God is your God.”

“Maybe,” Mr. Ilmyen said.

Father turned shades of violet. “I suppose we shall never fully agree. But as you desire God's presence and I desire God's presence, what we long for is the same.”

“Yes.” Mr. Ilmyen winced. “But let's not forget that as I am dying more quickly than you I am closer to the goal than you are.”

This polemic would have gone on for hours had Ligita and I not been hanging laundry. She hung undergarments on the line closest to our house; I hung towels and sheets on the line closest to the lane. She was talking to me these days, though I attributed her chatter to sheer boredom; we had a lot of laundry to hang.

Every successful visit to the latrine was a source of great rejoicing for Father; but there were still occasions that Father couldn't make it there in time and I knew this was a source of great embarrassment for him.

It hurt Mother's hands, so bent now that she couldn't hold a book much less turn a page, to wring and hang the bed linens. And I found I was happy to do what needed to be done, happy to be needed and necessary. I reached for a wadded sheet, whipped it into obedience, and held it up, pins in my mouth. The kitchen light had been snapped on. A box of yellow warmth spilled out, a hazy illumined patch of air hung above the yard. Strands of silver rain fell gently. I studied the hazy light, the kitchen window. That's when I saw a dark figure behind the window. Not Mother, not Joels. Certainly not Father.

“Who is that?” I asked Ligita. But she'd gone. Vanished.

I lowered the sheet. There was Rudy at the table sitting in a chair as if he'd never left. I raised the sheet. If I counted to three then lowered the sheet, I'd see my folly exposed, how I was projecting my wishes onto these sheets as if they were movie screens, projecting what I wanted to see because it was what Father wanted to see.

Three, two, one.

I lowered the sheet. Rudy was still there. Now Ligita stood beside him, setting cup and saucer and teapot on the table. Up went the sheet.
Three, two, one.
Down went the sheet. Now you sat at the table, an ear inclined toward your wayward uncle.

By the time I made it to the kitchen, Mother had helped Father from the middle of the lane to the kitchen table. They sat side by side openly studying Rudy.

Also sitting side by side were Rudy and Ligita. They held hands, though one of his hands drifted to her belly. And they gazed at each other as if one were meat and the other salt.

Mother had the oddest look on her face, as if she had solved a difficult problem but the solution was simply impossible to believe. Ligita's midnight training runs were wifely missions laden with food and comfort. Judging from the way Rudy kept patting her stomach all the while gazing at her ankles, the comfort had been reciprocated.

I suppose that's why I didn't notice straightaway that Rudy's face looked different.

His nose had been broken at least twice. It sat like a crooked S in the middle of his face.

You could not take your eyes off of it. This might have been embarrassing, but then Rudy smiled.

“For a while I lost my shadow. Then it found me, punched me. Twice.”

“Your shadow?” you asked.

“Yes. It has big hands,” Rudy said.

“And apparently big knuckles, too,” Father observed.

“God's hands are made of stone,” Rudy observed.

Now they were playing that old game: evoke a passage from the Bible. Then twist it.

Father peered at Rudy. He was not looking at his nose but his eyes. “Are you broken?”

“No, Father. I am crushed,” Rudy said.

“Where have you been, son?” Mother ventured quietly.

Rudy's gaze lifted from Ligita's thickened ankles to Mother's eyes then dropped again. “Liepaja.”

We all knew what that meant. Prison. And I understood why we'd not heard from him, why he kept his gaze lowered. He was ashamed, and I'd never seen him like this before.

Mother drifted to the window and opened it. “What did you do?” Mother's voice floated, spectral and thin.

“Some things and then some other things.”

“Well, if you stay, you have to work,” Father said.

Rudy's gaze still had not risen from the province of Ligita's ankles. “What shall I do?

Father pointed to the pile of testicles still on the TV tray. “Find the rest of the horses.”

And this Rudy did with alarming speed. Because he'd been to prison and back, a fact that we suspected elevated him astronomically in the questionable opinion of his former mates, his word was now law. Not two nights passed and we heard a commotion in our yard. In the morning we discovered the stallions, glistening slick with rain and caught in midprance behind the shed.

We didn't know which of his friends had taken the horses. (
No names! If you love us, son, then don't say a single name,
Mother cautioned.) And it really didn't matter. The fact was we had all five of them back.

What to do next seemed clear. Joels and Rudy and Dr. N. conducted many debates regarding the special difficulties joining cast iron to cast iron presented, the merits of gas welding over electrode and rod. Finally, they settled on a plan. Dr N. had a friend who could be sweet-talked into lending a machine and various electrodes. Many more hours passed, many more arguments, before the men reemerged from the yard: Rudy and Joels in thick work clothes, Dr. N. in his scrubs. The stallions were once again whole and wholly in possession of all their parts.

Mother and I examined their work. It wasn't perfect, their welding, but it would do.

Rudy looked at Father. “So now what?”

“We return them,” Father said.

It was just the sort of covert mission Rudy lived for. Father assumed a supervisory role while Joels, Dr. N., and the Merry Afflictions lent their expertise. Dr. N. fashioned a sled out of metal flashing and fabricated a harness and hitch to join the sled to Vanags's stout Pobeda. It was a good omen, the Pobeda, as it meant “victory.”

Around three that morning, when the air was as thick and dark as soot, Vanags and Buber brought around the dull gray Pobeda. It took some heavy lifting, some strong bungee cords, before one of the horses was secured to the roof. This gave Vanags some grief. He loved his car like a man loves a beautiful, demanding woman. Seeing how the roof bowed visibly hurt Vanags. But because it was for Rudy and for a fairly good cause, Vanags slid behind the wheel for the slow haul.

We watched the dark slurry of fog incrementally swallow the slowly retreating vehicle. Vanags had to drive this way on account of the many potholes. But this was what made the Pobeda so great: with its high axles, it could negotiate uneven terrain at a glacial pace. Even so, long after we lost sight of the car, we could hear it. The Pobeda was in no way a quiet machine. It spluttered and chortled and wheezed, and this was what made it not so great. This was also why Dr. N. had to build a sled and hitch, and why the noisy car could not be driven directly to the Zetsches' circular drive. The plan: maintain a stealthy crawl in the Pobeda to the edge of the Zetsche property, unload a stallion from the car to the sled, then harness themselves to Dr. N.'s sled and drag the horses to their proper pedestals. All this to avoid waking the Zetsches. “What good is charity, after all,” Father reminded everyone, “if you announce it for the whole world to hear?”