The Hidden Letters of Velta B. (34 page)

“It's worse than that,” Mrs. Ilmyen said. “Talking about history is like tapping each of your teeth until you find the one that hurts. Just when you thought you'd subdued the offending member, it reasserts itself in bites and pinches. And we all know how it can bite different people at different times.”

Ligita made a face and rolled her eyes. The future concerned her most of all. In particular, she'd heard of the high-heel dash held for girls who loved and lived by their cosmetics. The winner of the sprint would be named this year's Amber Girl and given a truckload of cosmetics and a photo shoot in Russia. Maybe even Bulgaria. It was no secret to any of us that late at night Ligita practiced a tottering trot over the broken sidewalks to improve her ankle strength.

Miss Dzelz would not be swayed. “Of course, you are right. Of course. But as everyone wants to write our history for us, it seems we ought to join in, if only for the sake of steering the conversation closer toward the truth, and if not that, then mere accuracy of fact. For example”—now Miss Dzelz held up the old orange textbook that had been in her lap—“there's simply no Latvia in these history texts, none of our rich culture, our many contributions to sciences, our keen intellect, our music, and our dancing. Our
dainas.
Nothing!” Miss Dzelz was almost shouting.

I understood her frustration. Written in the clumsy self-congratulatory language of Soviet-era rhetoric, the text focused on military achievements and economic development. About Latvia the book had little to say except that Latvia was a leader in the production of televisions and that Riga was an important commercial port. About the near genocide of Latvians and the forced deportations—15,000 in 1941; 60,000 in 1945; and another 33,000 in 1949—the book said nothing. Nor were there any mentions of the Baptists who were shot by the Soviets or any discussion of the many crosses of the Orthodox churches that were pulled down and drowned in the sloughs and marshes. Such events, if they were ever addressed, were mentioned obliquely, speciously referred to as “ethnic engineering” or the “isolation of hostile elements.”

Miss Dzelz's voice dropped to a whisper. “There's no mention of 1940.”

“What happened in 1940?” Ligita piped up.

Mother's jaw tightened. She was grinding her teeth.

Miss Dzelz ran her finger over an open page and began reading: “In the summer of 1940 Latvia was received by the USSR. The Soviet Union was not a democracy, but it was an example of a good and just society and a reference point for millions of people throughout the world.”

“‘Received'?” Stanka looked at Miss Zifte, Mrs. Ilmyen, Mother. “Did we ever ask to join?”

It was this question that was like an arrow piercing the mark true. We put it to a vote and agreed unanimously. Our children would weave with words a better and truer version of our own history; we would hold a history fair.

I'm sorry I'm not more help to you with the “Kindly Advices” column. How to stretch a single chicken through a whole winter—that I can tell you. Jokes about Estonians, clean and dirty, I have in abundance. And you are right: removing unwanted body hair with sandpaper or other such abrasives is always a bad idea.

I can tell you something I remember of your younger days. You announced to Joels and me that you wanted to start a mining company. Your grandmother asked, “What will you mine? Silver or gold?” And you looked at her as if you felt sorry for her lack of imagination. “Stars,” you said. “I will harvest stars.”

And so you did. You dug and dug. One meter, two meters, three meters deep. Was it a week after you started digging or two when you burst into our shed? You had a rock in your hand and you'd broken it with a hammer. Mica or quartz, I didn't know. But the dark rock glittered. “Stars,” you said. A galaxy of stars in the heart of that rock. That God could create hidden universes of light and bury them—because He could—astounded you.

Stanka visited again today. This time she brought compounds of gentian, a virulent purple tincture that she claimed would help my acute nausea and “hectic” red cheeks. She surrendered her prize black licorice to help the constipation and procured banana extract in the event of galloping bowels. She concocted an orange-peel poultice for the falling of the womb, which struck me as wholly irrelevant. She also brought a book of homeopathic remedies and anecdotal instructions. I thank you for reading to me from the wrinkled leather book, “There is no class of person whose system, owing to its peculiar structure, is more liable to derangement than a woman's.”

I don't know where she found the book, but I imagine it will make for lively conversation in your column.

I told you that the light through the window spins lace on the walls. You were kind enough to pretend that I hadn't already said that once or twice before. Everything in this universe, be it as fine as lace or as fragile as memory is spun of absence and presence, darkness and light. Dark matter. It's all you and Dr. N. have been talking about lately, this mass everywhere present, nowhere seen. Mass that neither emits nor absorbs light. Mass that exerts its own gravitational pull. I imagine galaxies of lace, the visible planets and stars and meteorites spinning tight knots in the darkness.

What lace corsets and binds the depths of the earth to the vault of heaven? You laugh at my questions and I laugh with you.
Go on
I am saying with my laughter. Impossible questions are meant to further the mystery of existence, not solve them. A saint, an important one, I think, said that. I believe it.

For a time you stopped writing in your book. You said it was childish. I said,
No, it's childlike.
The reverence and appreciation—wonder—that you expressed for the act of living and for every living creature held a childlike purity that astonishes me. Evidence of your infinite curiosity, these notes. “Every part of a bumblebee is covered in hair,” you wrote. “Every three days a person has a new stomach lining. The hummingbird is the only bird that can fly backward. It can even turn somersaults in air.” Your education in those early years was glorious, strange, and quixotic. Whichever way the wind listed, that's what you pursued. “The horn of a rhinoceros,” you wrote, “was not made of bone but of dark coarse hair, compacted and condensed.” That something soft could become so hard was a mystery you pondered for many days. “Where do you find all these facts?” I once asked, and you smiled the way a child does when he knows more than he will say.

You wrote of the planets etching their elliptical traceries around the sun. You wondered at the sound of light and if the gnawing, grinding noise you dimly detected was the sound of the universe's growing pains. As you grew older, your notes turned more philosophical. Your fascination with sound, gravity, and light all culminated in a series of conjectures helped along, I suppose, by your many talks with Dr. Netsulis. The problem, you've written, is that our universe is expanding faster now than ever before. It has outstripped the relatively weak grasp of gravity. Our world is one tiny buoy among billions of buoys in a vast and ever-widening sea. Our universe resists reduction.

I would love to assure Mrs. Zetsche, who visits me almost every morning, that the slow-moving fire burning inside of me is God. Embers in my lungs, I fan flames with each breath. What water is wet enough to put it out? She cannot answer my question. So we read together your “Kindly Advices.”

It's a sin to tear paper.

It's a crime to trample bread.

Salt is more precious than tears, and a spent word can never be recalled.

I told her stories from your childhood. That triumphant discovery of yours: the galaxies caught midwhirl in dark stone. Aren't those bright bits of memory? Reflective surfaces that remind us: we are here, we exist, this is what we know.

She wanted children of her own, and I thought this was a small thing I could do, share the strange and miraculous observations you made as a child. She didn't attend the history fair. She and Mr. Z. were on a horse-riding and shooting holiday somewhere. I remembered that. So I told her of your research methodology and your selection process. How you pulled out that family tree and scowled at all the ovals. You were to choose a departed family member and tell or reenact scenes from his or her life. It is perverse of me, I suppose, but I had hoped for the history fair you would pick Uncle Maris. I thought that if people had the opportunity to learn how generous, funny, and energetic he had been, they might recalibrate their opinions. He even had a sensitive side. Once I asked him if he remembered Siberia. He was quite sick by this time, his face waxy pale and always a standing sheen of perspiration on his forehead. He lay on the cot in the shed. It was dim, the burzuika casting a dull orange glow. His eyes filled with tears, and he made no attempt to stop them as they streamed from cheek to chin to chest. And then he did the most incredible thing: he answered my question.

“Singing. I remember the beautiful songs, sung quietly, as quiet as slow water in deep, dark night.” He looked at me. “If not for the rocks, a river would have no song,” he said, and I will never forget that.

I told Mrs. Z. how you sat at your chessboard and moved the white king, the black king, moved the pawns this way and that as if such a decision could be worked out only with the chessmen. You plunked odd tunes in minor keys on the piano in the shed. Then you spent a long evening among the family tombstones laying your ear against each one. Finally, you decided; you'd be Grandfather Ferdinands. You made many visits to the cemetery that spring. Sometimes with your grandfather. More often alone. You said to me that you were researching for the pageant. Also, you were collecting an outrageous number of corks. Another project for Miss Dzelz. I did not argue. We'd all agreed to allow you to pursue your own interests when it came to your education. You told me one afternoon that you didn't think there was a body beneath that smaller stone that rested beside Velta's marker. I said,
Of course there is.
A mother always wants to lie beside her children.
You gave me a look that said you knew better, and I felt a chill like a rush of cold air brush past my arm.

I told Mrs. Z. how you pestered Mother day and night about the details of her childhood. If Mother furrowed her brow, then you asked about Velta, questioning Mother with a tenacity I had to admire. Of course, when we were your age, Rudy and I had made our attempts, wondering aloud what happened to the two sets of grandparents we had never known. Who were these absent people whose presence became palpable beneath Mother's loving pass of the polishing rag? Why was Velta's mouth pressed into a flat line? Was she biting her tongue, keeping back a world of mystery or was she merely angry?

“What was she like, really?” you asked Mother one afternoon. The fair was less than a week away. Mother had opened the windows, and an unseasonably warm breeze blew through the rooms. “What color was her hair? Did she dance? What was her favorite song? Was she as good at catching fish as you are?” Judging from the cadence of your queries, hurried and breathless, it must have occurred to Mother that the storehouse of your questions had no end.

She regarded you for a moment then plucked at your sleeve. Together you walked down the corridor to Mother and Father's room. From her open bedroom, I heard your high-pitched murmuring, your voice pure and open in the way children's voices are when they have no idea what they are asking. Mother's voice, uncharacteristically accommodating, rumbled quietly as she answered your every query.
Maybe it has to be this way,
I thought, creeping on tiptoe down the hallway.
Maybe stories skip a generation. She could tell you the hard things she couldn't tell me.
Jealousy pinched at my heels as I walked carefully, holding my weight on my toes.

“This is Velta,” Mother said.

I could not see in the room, but I could sense your deep scrutiny of Velta's image behind the glass, her white wedding gown with ribbons, that Jani Day wreath on her head.

“She's wearing a tree on her head.”

Mother laughed. It was a liquid sound that filled the room; a sound I'd not heard in months and months. “She's only nineteen in this photo. You can't see her hands, but I wish you could. She had long graceful fingers and she played the piano. Music poured out of her every fiber. She was hardworking, too.” Mother tapped the frame with her finger. “She spun wool into long skeins even when it wasn't fashionable to spin anymore.”

I didn't need to look through the crack in the door—I knew this photo. Beneath that oak-leaved wreath, Velta's hair is plaited into long ropes and wound around her head. I imagined that her hair, the leaves, and those skeins she wove were one and the same thing, all of it held together, pinned by the dark notes of music.

“It wasn't long after this photo was taken that the trouble started. Soviets first, then the Germans, and then the Soviets again.” A scuffling of a wooden object being dragged over wood—Mother was reaching for the other photo. I knew this one, too: a picture of Grandmother Velta taken a year after Ferdinands returned from the camp. She did not even remotely resemble the girl in the first photograph. She had the frizzled hair that told of malnutrition. Her face had turned flat and angular. She was bodily present for the making of that picture, but her spirit had flown away.

“You look like her,” you said. I hoped, so hoped, it was the picture of the young Velta you meant.

Your feet padded softly over the floor. I pressed myself flat against the wall, watched you turn for the kitchen, and sighed, relieved that you did not see me hiding.

“You can come in now, Inara,” Mother said. She stood at the dresser, peering at Velta's image. “A quiet woman. A quiet woman,” Mother said. “Quiet in the shape of a woman. It is a kind of sleeping, that quiet. Like a blanket, the soundlessness. Like snow, that quiet. It could be snowing inside that woman. For years and years, she gathered breath, held it, held it, until it turned cold and white inside her. She lived in a quiet so complete that after a while I suspect she forgot the reason for her silence.”