The Hidden Letters of Velta B. (31 page)

Dr. Netsulis, never one to sit about idly, also had been hard at work all winter boiling different currencies in various solutions: euros, lats, rubles, pounds, and dollars. As it turned out, the Swedish kroner was the most stable currency in nonbuoyant and turbulent environments. This, he maintained, explained the urgent longing so many young people had for the Scandinavian countries. As if to confirm these findings, no sooner had I cleaned all the grimy test tubes (the American dollar has a tenacious ink that clings to glass like no other) than Dr. Netsulis cut my hours. “They were glorious, these last experiments, but now”—he hung his head ruefully and the two ends of his mustache drooped into his white beard—“my funding is kaput. I can afford you only one day a week—to look after the stalls.”

I will confess that during those early three years of your life I moved and lived as if I swam in thick, viscous water, my thoughts and perceptions sheathed in a fog. Sleep deprivation does that to a woman. You told me once that sound never vanishes, is never lost. Once created, a sound wave travels infinitely. I believe this to be true. I have witnessed how sound returns, called back by a scent, a wrinkle in the clouds, a thought. Mother used to tell me that our words are like arrows. Once spent, they fly from us and we can't call them back. This is true and not true, given the way a word, just one, hovers at the edge of memory, treads at the threshold of waking and sleeping. Which word?
Work.

Mrs. Ilmyen put in a word for me at the clinic, and three times a week I cleaned the front office and surgery. In the evenings I cleaned at the school. Mother tended to you.

I wanted to help, but Mother wouldn't hear of it. “You and Joels work; I don't. I might as well make myself useful with the boy.”

I understood the ethic to which Mother subscribed: we find ourselves in work; work makes us who we are. This had to be why she set about caring for you during those early years, more thoroughly, in certain ways, than she had for Rudy and me. Though you weighed more than two stones, she carried you in her arms. She shielded you from every draft, real or imagined, by wrapping you in blankets and shawls. And she told you things she'd never told me: rye blossoms for two weeks, ripens for two weeks, and dries for two weeks. Then, and only then, is it time to harvest. After the harvest, the cutters and gatherers always leave a little bread in the sheaves for the fields. “How do you know so much about rye?” I asked her. Great-grandmother Velta's farm, I knew, had been seized and collectivized when Mother was a girl. She could not have possibly grown up in the fields. But Mother simply shrugged and kept singing.

I'd never known Mother to sing so much as when she held you.

God grant satiety!

Bear's strength,

Midge's gut,

The ease of hops!

Be as strong as a bear, every mother's wish. Be satiated with as little as what satisfies the midge, and as you walk the long road, may your step be as light as hops.

I am unraveling one hair at a time. I have a hank of wispy thin hair at the base of my skull, all that has and will ever return. Not silver, not white. It's the same tarnished color Mrs. Zetsche's silver acquired when it needed polishing. Ligita and Jutta came to sit with me. Ligita unearthed an old can of Uncle's vitality drink.
Uncle was quite right when he said it tasted like shit. Jutta combed those brittle wisps that break at the slightest touch. At any rate, she asked me how I would describe the difference between mortal and immortal.
Fragile,
I said, and we both laughed. I am not a theologian or a philosopher, my faith is of a diaphanous sort: semirigid, light but strong. I know what I believe; my experience bears witness. I said, that being immortal, we recognize we are mere sojourners here; this is not our true homeland. Being mortal, we cannot bear to leave. Which makes Uncle's present situation all the more strange. Human fortitude, divine caprice, the injustice of a causality. He burns with indignation all while spouting psalmic phrases amid his habitation of stones. He is bored. Fifteen years dead and as stuck as ever.
If Uncle had been a Jew,
Jutta said,
his stay in hell would have been no longer than twelve months. This is the problem with Christian hell,
she said,
there are no firm boundaries in time and space. And purgatory, too,
Ligita added.
This is why,
Ligita explained,
Catholics can be at all times and in all places utterly miserable.

Anyway, I've been thinking about those early years when you were just learning to speak. I wish now I'd written down more of what you said. It would fill your Book of Wonder. We suspected that it was on account of your ears that your speech was so delayed. But when you did talk, right around your fifth birthday, you tugged on Father's pant leg, and said,
Night is when God puts his hands around the sun.

Father spun in circle, amazed. “The boy is a poet!”

The sky,
you said,
was nothing more than a thinning lampshade stretched to paper; God was light moving behind it. Darkness was light standing still.

Transported beyond joy, Father carried you to church every Sunday, believing that you possessed a prophet's clear ear for divine messages. “He could preach someday,” Father proclaimed, in a manner that suggested it was certainty. And the pride on Father's face was the kind reserved for a most favored son.

By this time, I couldn't wear you on my back any longer. When I hung laundry, I kept you tethered to me. With that sash. Not a leash, a sash. Let me be clear.

I am grateful that you and your uncle Rudy have always been close. He taught you how to catch eels. He taught you how to smell the edges in the wind and adjust your line accordingly. He loved you as if you were his, and I tell you this lest you think for a moment that my love for him wavered. He was, in those years of your youth, a haunted soul. In the evenings when Rudy should have been working at Rimi, he'd be elsewhere. At the
kafenica,
I figured, where the manager allowed Rudy and his friends to run tabs while they talked radical politics. They had plenty to discuss—at last count twenty-three political parties had put forth a presidential candidate. One of them was a woman, which pleased your grandmother to no end. But Rudy's absences provoked more complaints from Ligita, who updated us on his lack of motivation at the evening meals. Her biggest complaint: he hadn't achieved success—that most mighty word in Latvia. Her disappointment settled over the table like a transparent veil: through these nightly narratives of dissatisfaction, we could readily glimpse a virtual widow destined for even larger heartbreaks.

What none of us could bring ourselves to discuss was Rudy's drinking, which had a dogged, determined quality about it. He never drank in the house, but in the yard I found bottles of Skak-Eternal-Fire-Rear-Naked-Choke clumsily stashed behind the woodpile. This was an added disappointment to us all; he wasn't even bothering to conceal his drinking in an artful, convincing manner. For a while, I attributed the change in his demeanor to a special form of male grief. If he stayed out all hours of the day and night, if he had sudden bursts of anger, long stretches of silence, if he smelled of mud and vodka, who could blame him. It hadn't been that long since he'd put that cake-boxsize coffin into the ground.

Joels and I talked it over in whispers at night. Could he have fallen in with a bad sort? Who were those men at the
kafenica
he argued politics with? Why did he wear his church shoes to town on some days and creep around in his boots on others? Was he, perhaps, merely fishing?

“He can't possibly be as inert as Ligita claims,” I observed late one night. “He gives Mother a five-lat note every Sunday morning. He must be doing something.”

“Yes,” Joels said. “Of that we can be certain.”

In time we might have forgotten about Rudy's drinking. But then two things happened: one of Mr. Zetsche's Riviera shops, a pharmacy, caught fire, and Father turned sixty. We heard about the fire first from Stanka who regaled us with detailed accounts of how much square footage had been burned to a crisp and what she had calculated the cost of the damages to be. Rudy, at home that day just long enough to change his clothes and douse himself with cheap cologne, contended that Mr. Vaido had bungled some new magic trick. We had all witnessed Mr. Vaido's illusions at children's birthday parties and we knew he wasn't much of a magician. “How many years did we buy our aspirins from him?” Mother's eyebrows arched. “Too many,” Father said. “We are lucky to be alive.”

To recoup his losses, Mr. Zetsche cut Father's hours at the cemetery from halves to quarters and raised the rent for all his Riviera shop tenants: Hasty Pasty, LazyQuick, Rimi, the
kafenica.
The shop managers all retaliated in kind by redesignating full-time employees to part-time employees, and part-time employees received the full boot. It became clear to us that between all of our part-time jobs we needed to find more work. But where? Any person older than fifteen and younger than forty who wanted to do more than study the bottom of a bottle moved to Riga or took a job outside of the country if they could. Rudy talked of Sweden, of immigrating, a word Mother would not abide. Father tried to find work in Daugavpils, but he had no specialized training other than what he'd completed at technical school. Ligita made some attempts at finding work, ringing up girlfriends on the black wall phone to see if any of them knew of anyone who was hiring. Of her five friends in Daugavpils, three had already found lonely men in Wales to wed and the other two friends were in open competition for the same jobs. In desperation I made the trek through the brambles to Mrs. Zetsche's, a bucket, rag, and turpentine in my hands. I stood on the back porch and collected myself. What a ridiculous proposition: a girl who'd been fired for mowing over the cherished stallions presenting herself as if nothing had happened. A girl, well aware that her would-be employers had just that week given her brother the boot, begging for a job.

Mrs. Zetsche opened the door, and the scent of cedar and pines wafted out around her.

If I didn't work, I'd die,
I told her, aware of how desperation rendered my words overly dramatic.

“The thing is.” Mrs. Z. dropped her voice to a confidential volume. “We have a cleaning girl already.” Mrs. Z. stepped onto the porch, pulling the oversize manor door closed behind her not quite fast enough. In the crescent of space between the jamb and her shoulder, I spied movement: a dull streak of brick red. Ligita.

I shifted the bucket from one hand to the other.

“But if you're serious about working, we could use help with grounds keeping. And then the cast-iron stallions always need some attention. But times being as they are, I can't offer you much.” Mrs. Zetsche held her hand upturned at the wrists as if she were carrying invisible trays of cocktails.

I studied the cleaning bucket in my hand. Did Mother ever settle for our sakes? Yes. Yes, she had. All too often. And she never said a peep about it. “I would work for less, Mrs. Zetsche.”

And I needed to. In two days Father would turn sixty. For those two days the house was all sixes and sevens: Mother in a dither rushing from oven to sink to oven, adjusting and correcting her sauces, hanging laundry, overseeing my paltry attempts at twisting bundles of wheat stalks into a wreath. The big night finally arrived and we gathered for a grand celebration: your grandmother, Stanka, Dr. Netsulis, Miss Dzelz, Rudy, Ligita, Joels, you, and I. Mother brought out a special cake called Chernobyl that required not one but two cans of condensed sweetened milk boiled and caramelized, several eggs, and walnuts. Upon seeing the cake, a trembling behemoth of refined sugar, Dr. Netsulis, Rudy, and Joels hopped from their chairs. In the tradition, they lifted Father in his chair, raising him high above the table and back to the floor sixty times, one for each year of life. It was a good thing Father was not a large man and Joels, Rudy, and Dr. Netsulis were. While the men recovered, Ligita and I supplied them with a pale restorative: birch juice for the doctor and Father, and Skak-Eternal-Fire-Rear-Naked-Choke for everyone else.

Mother tapped her fork to her glass. “A toast!”

Just then the phone sounded low and loudly. We all looked at it as if it were a rude and unwelcome guest.

“Pretend we're not home,” Mother begged, but Father had already crossed the kitchen and lifted the receiver.

“Yes,” he said, after a long moment. “I understand.” Father slid the receiver into the cradle and sat down slowly. “That was Mr. Zetsche,” he announced. “He thanks me for my years of service, but he has decided that tending the cemetery is too demanding for a man of my age.”

Rudy jumped to his feet. “That little bastard! He's cheated us—again!”

“No, son.” Father shook his head and motioned Rudy to take his chair.

“A toast,” Mother said again, this time more quietly. But Father merely shook his head once more. “When your heart is as full as mine with good things and bad, rich and poor, heaven and earth, what more is there to be said?” Father turned his gaze to his cake. He took a breath, held it, then blew.
Poof.
Out that candle went. He sat down and folded his arms across his chest and it was as if with that single exhalation all of his words evaporated—everything he'd been thinking about or might have wanted to say.

You set your spoon in his bowl and wiggled a finger in an ear canal. “A lake dries out; the crows fall in,” you said. It was a riddle Mother had taught you. What it meant was that when the bowl is emptied the wooden spoons clatter to the bottom. It was a puzzling saying that somehow made perfect sense: in his emptiness Father was full. Or maybe it went the other way around.