The Hidden Letters of Velta B. (2 page)

Your grandfather was a cautious man in possession of a serious nature forged by sorrow and quiet fury. He had buried many people whom he loved, and those graves were written on his forehead, forearms, wrists, and hands. All he had to do was stand in front of a mirror and he could see from the lines around his eyes how long they'd been gone and where in the cemetery all the bodies were buried. In the winter of 1992, Father took your uncle Rudy, who was then sixteen, and me, fourteen, to the cemetery. At that time the cemetery sat much closer to the river than it does now. Magnificent oaks, some of them more than six hundred years old, towered over the many plots closest to the lane while the alders flushed red at their tips near the graves closest to the river. Rudy and I knew the cemetery better than we knew ourselves; we had spent many long hours wandering among the stones, pulling weeds, gathering leaves, or washing Father's shovels and scythes. On this day, Father handed us each a shovel.
Dig,
he said.
Go on, dig.
So we dug.

While we worked, Father talked about things we'd never heard of, things he'd not been allowed to discuss. The president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, lifted the ban on silence in 1988, but it wasn't until a few more years had passed that many Latvians, Father included, took the ban lifting seriously. This is how we learned from Father that Oskars, his father, had been a camp grave digger. He and Solveiga, a grandmother I never knew, and Father, then a little boy, and some sixty thousand others were deported to gulag work camps in Siberia. Vorkutlag, a mining camp. That's where Oskars, Solveiga, and little Eriks ended up, in the Pechora River Basin somewhere above the Arctic Circle.

How it happened was like this. In 1947, a sweep was made in eastern Latvia. Any excuse, however flimsy, was used to arrest people. One man, for example, made the mistake of wearing an “anti-Soviet smile” and was sent to Magadan, a place few survived. It just so happened that a small contingent of Soviet soldiers searched Oskars's barn and found a Bible. And that was enough. They started a small fire in the brush and would have burned it if not for a certain captain, a Tatar from the Urals.

The captain noted the gilt-edged pages, the mark of a holy book. “Where did you get this?” he asked, his eyes scanning over the words on the onion-thin pages. And your grandfather explained: “My mother gave it to me.”

With his free hand, the captain reached under the collar of his uniform and withdrew a small medal icon. Michael slaying the dragon, I believe, or maybe Saint George. I suppose this captain could have gotten into quite some trouble had his superiors known about that icon. But I have since learned that it wasn't uncommon for Soviet soldiers—generals, even—to wear them, discreetly, of course. The captain kissed the medal right there in front of Oskars. “My mother gave me this,” he said, slipping the icon beneath his shirt. The captain nodded to Oskars's shovel, nodded to a patch of mud beyond the barn. Then he bent over his boot and took a very long time to retie the laces. This is how Oskars was allowed to bury that Bible before he was taken away. But this captain still had to send Oskars, Solveiga, and little Eriks to the work camp; he apologized that he couldn't spare them that injustice. A quota had to be filled, and it was the way of the Soviet regime to relocate people as a means of breaking their spirits. The captain made no mention of the Bible in his report and even allowed Solveiga an extra five minutes to gather a few blankets and kitchen utensils for their long journey. I offer this story to remind you that in every period of time, in every place, you can find incredible cruelty but also unexpected kindness.

Your grandfather Eriks felt there is a sacred connection between life and death. A single breath separates the two, and you cannot understand life without experiencing death. Given the task of digging graves for the prisoners, Oskars saw plenty of death at the Vorkuta mines. In those days it was customary to be buried in the nude. They called it “going into the ground Soviet-style.” Prisoners did not have the luxury of proper burials with a nice coffin and nice words said at their interment. Sometimes the guards made a point of dragging bodies facedown through the ice or mud. It broke Oskars's heart. Working under the cover of darkness, he dressed the bodies in worn-out
work clothing and mumbled passages from Psalms over them even though it was forbidden and could have added time to his sentence. In a twelve-hour workday, Oskars maintained a steady harmony between hand and mouth. As he dug, he recited Psalm 1 through Psalm 150. And then he'd start over again. When he'd tire of the psalms, he'd sing a
daina.

Why, O sun, did you tarry,

Why did you not rise earlier?

I was delayed behind the hills,

Warming little orphans.

I warmed their feet, I dried their tears.

This was the
daina
he and Eriks sang when they buried Solveiga. She died in that camp giving birth to our uncle Maris. At any rate, after Oskars had served his “tenner,” a standard Soviet sentence, the camp administrators released Oskars, Eriks, and Maris. They sent them on their way with thirty rubles and a wolf card, a small paper glued to their travel papers that marked them as former prisoners.

Having a wolf card meant few jobs and no privileges, no rights. Many of Oskars's friends and neighbors, fearing the taint of associating with a former camp prisoner and a practicing Baptist to boot, would not acknowledge him. There was some suspicion at the time that Baptists, also called Shtuntists, were in actual fact German spies. Of course, that wasn't true, but the Baptist faith was viewed by Orthodox Russians and Lutheran Latvians as a dangerous import. And so Oskars became the town grave digger and coffin maker—the only jobs he could get. Working beside him were Eriks and Maris.

Eventually, Oskars's heart seized; he loved butter and, Father said, digging graves had broken his spirit. The brothers built a coffin, measuring boards and joining them without any nails. They dug a hole. All these things your grandfather Eriks told us that winter in 1992. It was our inheritance, he said, to know the truth and be set free by it. But lest we get big ideas and forget our place, he gave us each an ash-handled shovel. From that day forward, if we weren't in school, we were in the cemetery. Even at that time, Rudy could dig quickly and well.

I could not say the same for myself. Assailed by strange longings I could neither name nor describe, I made a poor grunt, jabbing at the hard clay with my shovel in jerky, awkward movements. Not like Father. The shovel was a natural extension of his arm and his digging was a smooth unbroken cycle, like a song that had become a prayer.

And he certainly needed to dig. You won't find this anywhere in the newspapers, but in the months following the Soviet Union's collapse, a series of strange and tragic deaths seized town and country. First, a poet from Lubana awoke from a dream in which she was a wolf, bit her husband's neck, and killed him in the bed they shared. Not long after that, a saxophonist in a klezmer band went crazy and killed his fellow band members—all seven of them—and then beat himself to death with the saxophone. It was tax season. A few weeks later, after swimming in the nude in the newly thawed Aiviekste River, a civil engineer built himself a flying machine and died after falling from a great height. His grieving widow later succumbed to a mysterious urge to throw herself in front of the Daugavpils–Minsk train.

As the local grave digger, your grandfather Eriks was the first to hear about it all through a black phone in our kitchen. In the Soviet days, when someone needed burying, we'd get a knock on the door, but after the fall, orders came from the cemetery's new director and owner, Mr. Zetsche. Though none of us had ever laid eyes on the man, his reputation of largesse preceded him. A German-born businessman, he'd married a Latvian woman of enormous wealth: her family owned a sugar refinery and choice property near Lake Lubans. At his own expense, Mr. Zetsche had installed the phone. You may laugh at this, but we felt smart and privileged to have it: everyone else in town had to go to the post office and place an order to make or receive a call. Through the winters of 1992 and 1993, this phone sounded with increasing regularity. One day brought us news of an overwrought copy editor who had a bad case of frayed nerves and a rope long enough to hang herself. Your grandfather roused your uncle Rudy and me early one morning—all hands to the shovels.

Even then, I sensed that as lowly as our work was it mattered that we did it well. Our work connected us to the living and the dead, to things beneath the earth and above it. When I watched your grandfather working—sanding the boards; measuring once, twice, thrice to make sure the joints married snugly; drilling holes in the coffin for those who asked for it—I often thought he was a holy man performing a holy office. On the day of the copy editor's funeral, we watched a cluster of women dressed from head to toe in black and a procession of men in black hats walk toward the Jewish section of the cemetery. The coffin, a pine box with a domed lid and handles all around, must have been heavy because every ten paces or so the pallbearers stopped and set it on the road to rest for a few seconds.

In bigger towns, Jews had their own cemeteries, but our town was just small enough that we all had to be buried together. Well, near one another. The Jewish graves were separated from everyone else's by a low stone wall. The wall, Father explained, was there to keep the Jews settled. Jews were like Gypsies, always on the move, always prepared to wander, and when they disappeared, it was their way to leave no trace of themselves behind, not even their dead. But in his thirty years of caring for the cemetery, Father said, with a hint of pride, not a single stone, pebble, or blade of grass had been disturbed.

Once at the burial site, four men lowered the box with ropes. Your grandfather had offered to help, but his being Baptist was a mark against his assistance. And so we hovered discreetly should someone need us; for what reason we couldn't imagine. That evening, after everyone had left, Father raked the sandy pathways between the graves so that the spirit of the copy editor couldn't follow the footprints back home to the living.

The thing you must remember is that most people, including me, speak out of ignorance. We open our mouths and a universe of all we don't know rushes out in a collision of sound and folly. At fifteen years of age, I knew very little about Latvian Jews. Rudy knew even less. Rarely did Jews earn a mention in the history books we read at gymnasium, which made them seem all the more exotic and fascinating to me. In Daugavpils we'd learned of a Jewish man who'd been denied an entry visa to Israel and flung himself out of a fifth-story window. “Jews must be really sad—killing themselves like this,” I surmised one night, as Rudy and I crawled into our beds.

“They don't have a land of their own. That's why they are so sad,” Rudy said, smoothing the wispy fuzz above his lip and under his chin. Two years ahead of me at school, with only a half year left before graduating, Rudy had acquired all kinds of opinions and pseudo facts. For example, it was his opinion that Jews in the larger cities like Daugavpils were not well liked because they had more money than everybody else, though the Jews in our little town were as bad off as the rest of us. According to Rudy, Jews were the reason why unemployment in Latvia was on the rise. And the émigré Jews from Russia were the worst kind because they didn't even bother to speak Latvian, which didn't seem so bad to me, but many people, including Father, maintained that the sound of Russian fell hard on the ears. Your grandmother felt the same way.
I don't love Russian,
she said, and the way she stretched the vowel in that word
love
expressed the measure of her dislike.

At that time in my life, I listed toward the melancholy and dramatic. While I washed dishes, I sucked my cheeks in so as to affect the gaunt look of a poet gripped by an esoteric thought. Or, if I was scrubbing potatoes, I might fix my eyes on the lane outside the window and adopt a meditative gaze. I can tell you about it now and we can laugh together at my silly posturing, a product of adolescent fancy and boredom, but at the time, it seemed very important to me to strike just the right pose.

At the time, my only friend, Jutta Ilmyen, felt the same way as I did about tragedy, drama, and romance. She talked a lot about suicide and the futility of life—all while contemplating the sky and sighing. She lived in the house opposite ours and looked, according to town gossip, suspiciously German, though in actual fact she was a Jew whose family had come from Belarus somewhere. The house where her family lived had sat empty for seven months, the owners having gone to Australia just like that. In month number eight, the Ilmyens arrived with their many suitcases, an elegant horsehair divan, and a droopy eared donkey named Babel.

Mrs. Ilmyen spoke passable Latvian and always said
lab dien,
good morning, to us when she passed us on the lane. She claimed that her family had been granted automatic Latvian citizenship on account of their having been in Latvia several decades before the occupations and annexations. About Mr. Ilmyen we knew very little: he translated important legal documents in an office somewhere in Daugavpils. It was a job that kept him quite busy as many Latvians from Australia, Canada, and the U.S. had arrived in droves to reclaim ancestral properties that had been illegally seized during the Soviet regime. Your grandmother wasn't sure about Mr. Ilmyen's status as a Latvian or his political leanings. But she admired Mrs. Ilmyen's smart fashion sense, and because of this, I was allowed to visit Jutta. In their home, everything seemed exotic and better: the lace of their curtains hanging in their windows had yellowed more elegantly than the muslin hanging in our windows. And though I knew it was true that the rain pelted our houses equally, it seemed to me that the rain fell from their eaves more musically than it did from ours. And whereas we had only a few books in our home, they had dozens, and in those rare moments of sideways afternoon light, the gilt spines of the books glowed and exhaled a smell of old leather. In a small cabinet where Mr. Ilmyen's chess medals were mounted on black velour, they kept a special silver candelabra. And this was the great thing about the Ilmyens—they were all smart. At least half the chess medals inside Mr. Ilmyen's case belonged to Mrs. Ilmyen and a few even belonged to Jutta.