The Hidden Letters of Velta B. Read Free

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-outwork 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.
    Â 
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.
    Â 
    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