The Hidden Letters of Velta B. (30 page)

Stanka spied us from a distance and leaped from her lawn chair and hurried toward us.

“A prophecy! Good news and bad!” she cried. “Which do you want first, the good news or the bad?”

You fussed and squirmed. “The bad,” I said.

“Trouble with stones.” Stanka's voice turned deep and mysterious.

“Like in my kidneys or what?”

“The graveyard. There's terrible unrest there.”

“What's the good news?”

“I see your porch steps bathed in butter and oil. And twenty white ponies—sorry—twenty white bunnies.”

“Bunnies?”

Stanka's nose twitched. It was the season of dark morels and their pongy, musty scent beckoned. “Do not question my sources!” she cried. And off she went in search of dark treasure.

I think I've told you that I didn't pay too much attention to Stanka's special powers, but even a spent arrow manages to hit its target from time to time. I made short work of Dr. N.'s house then we went to examine the cemetery.

In almost any eastern Latvian graveyard, marker by marker, name by name, you can travel to Russia, Ukraine, Germany, Poland, and even Mongolia. And, of course, the plots say as much about the living as they do the dead. Your grandmother thought these stones were ostentatious means to measure loss. A weird celebration of one's grief. She would cite the competitive manner in which various families erected swags of fir boughs, staked plastic wreaths on stands, and in some cases placed stone benches to allow for longer, more comfortable contemplation. Though it was expensive to do this, a few of the Russian families had even ringed their grave sites with waist-high black metal fencing, the kind with the slim vertical bars punctuated with little metal spikes. They hung candles from the trees, built icon boxes, all in an attempt to make the gravesite look a little more Orthodox, hallowed, separate. I tiptoed around the stone for Rudy's little one. I tiptoed past the stones for Velta and Ferdinands. I showed you your namesake's stone. I could see that the grass around his grave had been disturbed, as if Uncle had been turning in his sleep. There were lash marks, boot blacking or paint, on the side of his stone.

I have tried to tell you things as I saw them then and as I now understand them to be. Every memory invites correction, adjustment, validation against the memories belonging to others. The trouble is, of course, there are few of us left. My telling of these stories I realize now is a flawed one. The act of telling is an act of preserving, but sometimes words wring out unintended meanings from an idea. And who will correct me when I am gone? I've set forth what I can recall in a particular, peculiar order, and I'm not certain what configurations they will impress upon you. I have tied knots into a long rope. I have said,
Here and here. This is important, and this.
The knots are the places on the rope where you will grab hold. The rope will pull, will run through your hands, as you grasp the knots while one after the other they will tear your palms. They will burn you; they will brand you. But a story started must be finished and told as fully and completely as possible. And so I must tell you, though it is not a nice story, about the swing your uncle Rudy built.

Traditionally, Mr. and Mrs. Vicins hosted the Push the Swing ceremony. You wouldn't remember them: a few years after you were born, he threw himself in front of a milk truck. She became extraordinarily Catholic and refused to eat or drink anything but the Eucharist: a bit of bread and a thimble of wine each morning. She starved to death, poor thing. Anyway, a spring ritual, this swing, a very Latvian expression: the master and mistress swinging to bring good luck for the fields and all who worked them. This year Mr. and Mrs. Zetsche lobbied hard to host the celebration on the rolling green beside the Riviera, the same green that once had been the cemetery. Because so many of us were in some way employed by the Zetsches and because the Zetsches wore us down with their endless petitioning. “This Riviera—it belongs to everyone,” Mr. Zetsche implored on one occasion over the black telephone. “It is our commercial heritage. It only makes sense to push the swing at a place where people would be gathering anyway. To shop, that is. Plus, we'll provide the beer.” So it was decided.

A few days before the ceremony, I found your grandfather in the cemetery. He sat in his keeper's shed, his elbows resting on his knees, a bucket and rag at his feet.

“Uncle's stone—”

“I know,” he said. “His is just one of many.”

I reached for the bucket. “Tell me where and I'll clean them.”

“Dear girl.”
Dear girl.
Such weariness in those words. “You and Little Maris should not be near these chemicals. Go home and help your mother.”

We left your grandfather to his work and moved toward the yellow squares of light pouring from our house. Mother had already laid out dinner: a mixture of meat and onions and shredded cabbage and carrots that she called lazy pigeon. It was lazy because Mother hadn't rolled everything up in cabbage leaves. But she'd spiced the beef and she'd cut the cabbage and onions thin and fine.

It didn't feel right to eat without Father. We made small talk. Rudy relayed a city joke a surveyor from Rezekne told him: “Why do you throw a black cat into a new apartment before entering?”

We waited for the punch line.

“To make sure the floor will not give beneath your feet,” Rudy said.

Ligita rolled her eyes. “That is so unfresh.” In truth, structures thrown up in haste and their quick collapse had been much discussed in the local news and touted as one more reason why people should not live in large cities.

“Egregious corruption,” Joels concluded.

“Nothing changes,” Mother said. “It's like this. Crows sit like fists on the limbs of a tree. Someone shoots a gun and they all scatter. But in a few minutes other birds alight on the same limbs. That is corruption in Latvia: same tree, different birds.” Mother drained her teacup in a single swallow.

“The mayor in Ventspils wears loud sweaters purchased with taxpayers' money,” Ligita offered.

“What I don't care for is the way foreigners come in and throw up a stick or two and grab land.” Rudy looked earnestly at his food. “These people are just squatters with a little more money.”

“If they buy it fair and square, then it's legal,” I said.

“Latvia is for Latvians,” Rudy said.

I looked at Mother, expecting her to say something, but she merely looked at her empty plate. Father came in through the kitchen door. Rudy took a large spoonful of meat and chewed vigorously.

Mother jumped from the table and brought Father some tea. She made a big deal out of bringing more tea to the table, first carrying the pot then fussing over the sugar and milk. Joels ate steadily as if this talk were water moving around him and he were a stone, implacable and unhearing.

“About the Push the Swing ceremony,” Father addressed Rudy. “It would be nice if we wore our Jani Day shirts, I think. Your cuffs—they are clean?”

“Yes.”

“And the swing. It's hung level?”

The muscle along Rudy's jaw tightened. “Yes.”

“And the ropes?”

“I checked and rechecked and rerechecked. Everything is fine.” Rudy pushed back from the table and strode out the back door.

That night Joels and I slept on the pullout in the living room. Rudy did not come home again. Ligita spent long hours on the back step talking to girlfriends on her cell phone. Held between noise and quiet, sleep and wakefulness, I could not fully enter either world. I studied the wavering wash of light the moon cast through the sheers onto the living-room wall. Everything, I decided, was beautiful when the light is dim enough. In the darkness I heard Mother and Father's cautious whispering.

“What was it at the cemetery?”

“Obscenities, same as before. And a hammer and sickle. Only this time it was with spray paint.”

“Whose stone?”

“Mrs. Zetsche's uncle.”

“Which side did he fight for?”

“Both, I think.”

A long pause. “What did you use?”

“Muriatic acid.”

“Will it come out?”

“Well, if not, I can make it look like something else. A star maybe.”

Another long pause.

“Mrs. A. tells me that Mr. Zetsche is thinking of getting a dog. You know, the kind with teeth, the kind that bites.”

The bed creaked.

Then from Mother a protracted sigh. “Sometimes I think I do not understand a single thing about this world or anyone in it.”

We heard the Merry Afflictions before we saw them. From Joels's sax came a few mournful howls and some flatulence from Vanags's trombone. Ludviks stirred his sticks in anxious rasping noises over the drums. It was a perfect day. The promise of free beer had catapulted everyone into high spirits.

From behind the oak, Rudy and Mr. Lee steadied the seat of the swing. With the help of a stepladder, the Zetsches mounted the swing, their feet on the seat and their hands at the ropes. Rudy and Mr. Gipsis gave a cautious push. And then another. And then another. Higher and higher the Zetsches arced through the air; harder and harder Rudy pushed. The Zetsches, as stiff as human metronomes marking out a soundless tune. Mr. Zetsche wore a grin, but an expression of pure terror had seized Mrs. Zetsche's face. The swing had acquired a list, and one end drooped a little lower than the other. Mrs. Z. was turning colors.

A few of the men coughed. “It is enough,” Father whispered to Rudy, for clearly Mrs. Zetsche was in trouble. But it is considered very bad luck, or at least bad form, to interfere with the swing once it's in motion. And so we all stood and watched.

“You're doing marvelously!” Miss Dzelz called. That is when Mrs. Zetsche turned her stomach inside out.

But as long as beer is on hand, such occurrences are only minor hiccups in the general festivities. The only remedy is to drink more beer as quickly as possible. Mother and I helped Mrs. Z. from the swing while Mr. Z. signaled for the beer and the Merry Afflictions struck a resplendent tune. The conversation jittered along like an epileptic on a high wire bouncing from talk of the economy, which was by all accounts in the crapper, to the beer, which was just okay, to talk of the EU (“We must join! We must progress with the times and merge with the larger European community!”) back to the beer, which was running low, to talk of whether a woman could really be a president (Mother chimed in loudly that women make fine presidents) to talk of the ceramics factory that had shut down to talk of latent Russian aggression (Widow Sosnovskis kept her eyes averted from Widow Spassky, however). Back to the beer, which was definitely not okay because it was now gone. The crowd quickly thinned. To make matters worse, Mrs. Zetsche passed around marzipan that sunk like a chunk of lead in the stomach.

“Not enough almond,” Mother said, and turned for home. As did everyone else. The Merry Afflictions packed up their instruments; Vanags brought around his gray Pobeda. Joels remained on the green. We stood side by side, Joels cradling his sax tenderly to his chest, I cradled you. Small yellow pieces of paper littered the green and the wind kicked them toward the river.

Mr. Zetsche stood beneath the oak tree, his hand on one of the ropes of the swing. The seat of the swing listed steeply to one side. He was looking up at the oak at the place where the ropes looped over the branch. One rope was frayed, much more so than the other. In fact, it looked as if the slightest bit of friction and weight would cause it to snap. Mr. Zetsche was talking, but I could not see to whom he was speaking. His gaze was trained on the space between the two banks of the river narrowing fast into darkness.

“I'm not as happy as I look. You know, I have my troubles, too.” In Mr. Zetsche's hand was one of those yellow flyers. “I'm a man of principle. I did what I said I would do. I brought jobs to the town. The thing is, I'm not a land-grabber. The thing is, I love this land. My grandfather did, too, before the war. Before all of . . . that.”

Now Mr. Zetsche turned and looked at us. He had known we were there all along. “And we paid fair and square for the manor property. So why do things like this happen? Why so many broken windows. I don't mind so much, but it's not fair to my Mildi.”

Joels approached the swing. A few saws with his pocket knife and it tumbled down.

Mr. Zetsche handed the yellow paper to me.
LATVIA FOR LATVIANS
, the slogan made popular years ago by a fatherland political party. I felt that old weight, dread, growing inside me. I think about that moment on the green with the broken ropes as the first time I recognized my own naïve complacency, complicity. I realized that whatever our intentions, collective or individual, we would find ways to punish the Zetsches.

In the following weeks, the ground thawed, releasing a steam in the morning that convinced me that soil sleeps, wakes, and breathes just as we do. With each exhalation, the last dreams of winter rolled over the dark ground in white rasps that were sublimed to light. This was how winter left our lane, leaving the gate open for Lent. Father gave the Easter messages at the hall for the two groups of Baptists. As he spoke of the reviving power of water, we looked out the windows of the hall and watched a world of possibility slowly emerging: runnels of rainwater coursed through the lane that guttered alongside the hall. In the fields powerful rills laid bare the soil in dark gashes. It was the season of surprising changes and none of us were exempt. Joels, who had been beating himself up all winter working on new jingles, finally received some good news: a fledgling vodka manufacturer in Kaliningrad purchased three of his product names and tunes. The first name, Eternal Fire, struck me as a little dyspeptic. The bottlers hoped the second, Rear Naked Choke, would entice fans of mixed martial arts—a growing target market, they assured Joels. Lastly, there was Skak, or “at a full gallop” for the Russians who fancied themselves very bold. Factually speaking, it was all the same vodka bottled by the same manufacturer. Although they hadn't yet sent payment, they had sent twenty cases of their product. The timing of this delivery was, in my opinion, divinely inspired.
No! It was serendipity!
Mother insisted later when she recounted the story to Father: she just happened to be in the yard hanging laundry when the man in the delivery van tooted his horn. Not two minutes later, she had the cases safely stowed in the root cellar, the place Mother put things she did not want anyone to know about. She had, after all, her reputation as president of the Ladies Temperance League to think of. But it was clear in the manner of her recitations how very proud she was of Joels.