The Hidden Letters of Velta B. (9 page)

Sometimes I found a fragment of a letter from my grandfather Ferdinands.

We work fourteen hours in the cold. Frozen soot hovers in the air like a shroud. Mining crushes a man in body and spirit. Three men crossed the white line, the warning mark. They crossed the low stone wall, and the sirens wailed. They crossed the red line, and the guards let the dogs loose. The men flung themselves into the barbed wire. “Go on!” they shouted. “Shoot us. We're begging you.”

The ravens try to peck our eyes out. We paint eyes on our caps and wear them backward on our head to scare them off. We would eat the ravens, but they are scrawny and nothing but bone and bile. Gaddis got his hand caught in a machine. It sheared off two fingers and a thumb. We put a leather strap around his hand. We looked for his fingers, but the dogs had run off with them.

As I sat with my knees pulled to my chest, my whole body shivering, I knew that I was feeling a fraction of the cold he had felt. When I fished, I told myself that I suffered the way he had, working in the cold and the dark. I told myself that this was my inheritance. Then I'd look and see that I had all my fingers. I was wearing three sweaters, had a hunk of bread in my pocket. I was nothing like Ferdinands or Velta.

Of all the days our family loves and holds sacred, you know that Midsummer—Jani Day—is chief. Jani Day is a magical time when the trees come to life and dance. All the old stories come true as long as we stand by our bonfires and tell them. It's the time when boys jump over flaming buckets of tar and girls make wreaths of oak leaves. No digging. No burials, no laying outs. Jani Day is the one day reserved for life, joy. Song. Songs for plowing and planting, threshing and spinning, baking, sewing, courting, warring, marrying, and burying. We sing them all. Of course, your grandmother Biruta and grandfather's favorite
dainas
were the Ligo songs.

Traditionally, one only sings them on Jani Day, but as you know, we've never stood on formality. We sing them the entire months of May and June and other months, too. This is how we resist the weight that would crush us. The
dainas
are lift, loft, blood in the veins. They are our life. “Do you know,” your grandfather once said, in a sermon at the hall, “that the muscle responsible for a bird's vocal chords is lodged next to its keel bone? That is, the architectural structure responsible for balance in flight is intricately linked to the bird's ability to sing. That is, without song, a bird cannot fly true.” This is the magic of Jani Day; it fastened wings between our shoulder blades. It also inspired an incredible urge to fish.

And so it was on account of Jani Day that I made my way to the river one evening, carrying empty flour sacks to sit on and a jar full of lobworms soaked in crankcase oil. As twilight wobbled purple and gray, I went looking for the dark pocket the eels love best. The stars swam overhead. The moon rolled about like a cork in water. Being naturally wary, eels don't venture forth on a night like this, but the water was dark and roiling, mixed with mud churning from the riverbed, just the way eels prefer when they go on their nightly hunting sprees. I set my pole signal, a tiny bell no bigger than my thumbnail. If the line went tight, the bell would trill merrily. The flour sacks I spread over a patch of grass and lay back onto my elbows for what I knew could be a long wait. Mysterious creatures, eels. Where they come from few people can say. Rudy and I read in school that Athenaeus believed they were bred by mud. Or perhaps by the sun's heat. Some people believe that eels are born out of the ruination of the earth or from dew. Others believe that eels breed other eels out of the corruption of their old age. In your Book of Wonder you wrote that even the great angler Izaak Walton couldn't say with certainty how eels breed because no one has ever seen it happen. Only two things Walton can say for sure: first, eels simply disappear somewhere in the Sargasso Sea to die where human eyes have never seen. Second, the meat of eels is like no other. Tasting of the salt of warm seas and distant grasses, the meat melts on the palate, and to eat it is to glide on skies.

In the dropping dark I could just discern Mr. Ilmyen dumping the last of his bait into a choice snag, a prize fishing spot for eels. He was done fishing. He lifted his arm and I waved back. I liked Mr. Ilmyen and was relieved that he would still wave to me despite what Uncle Maris had done and said. It had been three years since the crutch-hurling incident, but I knew that, on principle, Father and Mr. Ilmyen had still not gone fishing together and that they had not and probably would not take a beer together.

But as you know, Jani Day, that midsummer celebration of the longest light of the year, recalibrates the world. It was the time young men jumped over buckets of flaming tar or lured young women to the forest for stolen kisses. We celebrated light, heat, song, healing. On Jani Day even the eels pulled on new skins and, forgetting their hard-earned wisdom, swam a little closer to the surface. When Mr. Ilmyen disappeared behind a copse of drooping alder, I pounced upon that prize fishing spot, which was now maximally baited and utterly irresistible to any eel. No sooner had I set my pole than the line went tight and the bell sang.

I stuffed the sack with wet grass and hauled in the line. Pulling taut the line was the largest eel I'd ever seen. Its thick body looked as big and long as a dachshund as it thrashed in the shallow water, its yellow eyes full of hundreds of years of wisdom. I pulled him in slowly. Then I bent and scooped him to my chest. Some eels can be gentle; if you speak tenderly to them, they might curl up in your arms and go to sleep. I'd seen Mother lay eels flat on a wet towel and stroke their long bellies and sing to them until they drifted into soft dreams of wet grass and water. This eel was not of that temperament. Before he had a chance to curl and whip me in the face or bite my hand, familiar tactics each, I pitched the eel to the ground and held it on its back. It made a few token snaps at my hands, shuddered, and then went still. It was not dead; this is what eels do when held on their backs: they go to sleep. With some effort, I hoisted it to my chest, cradled the eel in my arms as if it were a well-fed child, and noted the dark blue spots dotting its silver body. I'd never seen such markings on an eel before. That's when I knew this was the magical eel whose meat brings wisdom and chancy luck, depending on who catches and eats it. I felt a little sorry for having so unceremoniously yanked it from its soft world of water. But only a little sorry. I eased it into the sack, tied off the opening, and rewound my line on a plastic bottle, burying the butt of the pole in the gritty riverside soil. If I had caught one magical creature, perhaps I might catch two.

I watched the line slicing the water and gliding a bit toward the snag. And then I waited. Few people realize how wily and discerning eels are and what a glacial patience it takes to catch them. I didn't mind; I loved this river. I told myself that it spoke to me in a language only I could understand. I told myself that because I understood the river, it understood me. Just then the second pole bell sang out. I jerked on the line hard to set the hook. A larger fish, I thought, because it bucked and fought, nearly yanking the pole from my hands. I stepped on a rock to get better leverage and that was my mistake. My feet slid from under me and I fell into the river. I splashed and flailed, trying to gain my footing, but my boots were filling up fast and the water pulled me down. Even worse, Rudy's pole spiraled away from me, carried off by the fish that was hooked but free. I made one last desperate reach for the pole and I felt myself going under.

“Here!” a man's voice called. “Grab this!” The end of a pole nudged my elbow. I grasped it tightly. I kicked and chuffed, keeping my eyes fixed on the pair of hands hauling me in. At the shallows one hand gripped my elbow while the other hooked my ribs, and I then I was on the bank, coughing up river water and taking stock of my rescuer. Not Mr. Lee. Not Mr. Arijisnikov, but a stranger, taller than Rudy and almost as broad in the shoulder. He had gotten wet past the waist, all on my account. But with the way he calmly stamped his feet and wrung the water from his sleeves, he acted as if he were at home on the river and hauling out girls from it was the most natural thing in the world for him to do.

He turned to me and grimaced. “You know what they say about a river,” he said, taking off his coat and draping it around my shoulders.

“No, what?” I studied his eyes trying to decide if they were bluish gray or perhaps grayish blue.

“Never believe, never trust, never ask.”

It was a very Russian expression, but whoever he was, he didn't look Russian. For one thing, he had incredible ears. That is, they were enormous and jutted from the side of his head, a little like the gills of a fish. A beautiful sight, these ears, and I could not stop staring.

“I've never seen you on the river before,” I managed at last.

“No, you wouldn't. I'm out from Riga, visiting for the weekend.”

“Well,” I fumbled. “I'm Inara.”

“I'm David.” He tipped his finger to his forelock, a very gallant gesture, then he set off through the grass.

“Your coat!” I shouted.

David stopped, looked carefully at me. “I'm sure we'll see each other again—just keep it for now.” With a quick wave of his hand, he disappeared behind the scrim of trees. I stood there shivering beneath David's coat and tallying the evening's swift reversals. I'd lost the fish I'd hooked. I'd lost Rudy's pole. I'd gotten soaked to the bone. But if I hadn't fallen into the river in the first place, I would not have met David. And none of these things, good or bad, would have happened if I'd not first landed the magic eel.

The eel!

I scrambled through the brush back to the sack where my lucky eel, his belly tight from eating all my bait, lay snoring—lulled to sleep by the falling rain. It was an effort, but I dragged the sack through the cemetery, through our yard, then up the back steps into our kitchen, where Mother bustled from the sink to the oven, muttering to herself. This oven was serious business for Mother, who had installed it herself and knew, understood, and adored every bolt and coil.

I stowed the sack under the table. Mother took one look at the puddle of water pooling at my feet. “Get changed,” she said. “We've got to go clean the hall from top to bottom.” Mother hooked her chin toward the Ilmyens' house. “Jutta's getting married tomorrow. And what with all their relatives coming in from Lithuania and even one from America, there's no other building big enough to hold them all.”

Jutta. Getting married. Impossible. Given the robust nature of small town gossip, how was it that I hadn't heard of it?

I sleep quite a bit. I can't help myself; it is a short walk in shallow water. As thin as a cobweb, as sweet as clover. You wrote that death begins as a fragmented dream. You heard this from Mr. Zetlars, whose grave you dug five weeks ago. The fragments of the dream stretch, one image and kaleidoscope scenario after another binding together in the recumbent fluidity only a dream affords. When the dream runs unbroken, then you are dead. Maybe this is why you keep waking me up.

You have the little key to the hall, and I have no doubt you'll take good care of it. It was your grandmother's intention that you look after that building. As you know, it sits on the only elevated patch of land in the village, and this affords the little wood building a view of the school huddled at the end of the lane, the peaked red and orange roofs of some houses, and a glimpse of the river. This hall was sacred to Mother. Before the war and occupations, Mother's parents had donated the wood and paid for the brick and mortar that went into the hall's construction. Grandmother Velta donated her small grand piano, and it had been, Mother said, their hope that the hall would always be bursting with song and dance. This is why Velta's and Ferdinands's photographs hang in gilt frames on the back wall near the coat rack. Mother carried a special rag in her purse, and each time she came to the hall, she stood before their pictures and polished the glass. As she peered into the somber eyes of her parents, I imagined she was willing them to speak, to tell her what to do. From beneath his large brow, Ferdinands stared out of that picture frame with a gaze that pierced you to the marrow. What need for ordinary speech has a man with such furious vision? He'd been a poet. He printed and distributed a newspaper that included translations of Finnish poetry and a few political jokes. That was enough to get him deported to Siberia, Tomsk, where he repaired rail lines in temperatures so cold that metal shattered.

Though Velta's photo was in black-and-white, I imagined that her thick braid wound around her head was the color of wheat or honey, her eyes smoldering amber. Wide jaw, thin frowning lips, we could have been twins. About Velta, Mother had only two things to say: silence consumed the woman, as if she'd swallowed an ocean of quiet. She'd also been a ferocious letter writer. Whenever Mother said this, I'd feel a wasp's sting at my fingertips; I'd still not given Mother the letters.

We are commanded to honor our parents. Caring for the hall was Mother's way of preserving the spirit of hers. And being one of the few buildings that had withstood the ravages of the war—no small thing—the hall represented pluck and courage. This didn't prevent the Soviets from commandeering it to billet soldiers and show on the little TV
Swan Lake,
which aired any time a Soviet premier died or war reenactments in which the Germans, the bad guys, were always played by Latvians. In the '80s, Mother said, so many big shots died that they had
Swan Lake
up to their eyeballs. Then came the blessed day they learned that the Soviet Union had, in fact, dissolved. Mother put on her best hat, the one with a mess of black netting front and center and two perky black feathers rising jauntily from it. I called it the crow's nest. The implacable shoehorn, your uncle Rudy called it. When she put it on, she meant business. She marched to the hall, knocked on the door, and shouted: “I demand, by right of my Latvian citizenship and heritage, that you restore this building to me.” The only occupant at the time was an old army clerk. Having read, sorted, and filed thirty-some years' worth of bureaucratic sludge, he knew precisely which way the winds blew. The door creaked open, and with a trembling liver-spotted hand, the clerk relinquished the key to the hall. Behind him stood a tidy retinue of packed suitcases and boxes. A force of nature, yes, but Mother was also generous. For many years she called herself an atheist—she saw no use or reason for religion and she hated the way politicians invoked religious sentiment, predictably during election years—but she recognized that in our small community such a fine building should be put to use. So she saw to it that the key hung from a little hook. On Wednesdays the Orthodox Russians sang vespers and on Friday evenings the two Uzbek families gathered for prayers. Early Sunday morning the Baptists who favored Velta's piano on the left side of the platform met. As soon as their service concluded, the Baptists who favored the piano on the right side of the platform convened. A rambunctious group of Pentecostals met on Sunday afternoons. They preferred the piano front and center. And so it was Mother's job to move that minigrand three times each Sunday, which I think went a long way toward reaffirming her atheist sentiments.