The Hidden Letters of Velta B. Read Free Page A

about it all through a black phone in our kitchen. In the Soviet days, when someone needed burying, we’d get a knock on the door, but after the fall, orders came from the cemetery’s new director and owner, Mr. Zetsche. Though none of us had ever laid eyes on the man, his reputation of largesse preceded him. A German-born businessman, he’d married a Latvian woman of enormous wealth: her family owned a sugar refinery and choice property near Lake Lubans. At his own expense, Mr. Zetsche had installed the phone. You may laugh at this, but we felt smart and privileged to have it: everyone else in town had to go to the post office and place an order to make or receive a call. Through the winters of 1992 and 1993, this phone sounded with increasing regularity. One day brought us news of an overwrought copy editor who had a bad case of frayed nerves and a rope long enough to hang herself. Your grandfather roused your uncle Rudy and me early one morning—all hands to the shovels.
    Even then, I sensed that as lowly as our work was it mattered that we did it well. Our work connected us to the living and the dead, to things beneath the earth and above it. When I watched your grandfather working—sanding the boards; measuring once, twice, thrice to make sure the joints married snugly; drilling holes in the coffin for those who asked for it—I often thought he was a holy man performing a holy office. On the day of the copy editor’s funeral, we watched a cluster of women dressed from head to toe in black and a procession of men in black hats walk toward the Jewish section of the cemetery. The coffin, a pine box with a domed lid and handles all around, must have been heavy because every ten paces or so the pallbearers stopped and set it on the road to rest for a few seconds.
    In bigger towns, Jews had their own cemeteries, but our town was just small enough that we all had to be buried together. Well, near one another. The Jewish graves were separated from everyone else’s by a low stone wall. The wall, Father explained, was there to keep the Jews settled. Jews were like Gypsies, always on the move, always prepared to wander, and when they disappeared, it was their way to leave no trace of themselves behind, not even their dead. But in his thirty years of caring for the cemetery, Father said, with a hint of pride, not a single stone, pebble, or blade of grass had been disturbed.
    Once at the burial site, four men lowered the box with ropes. Your grandfather had offered to help, but his being Baptist was a mark against his assistance. And so we hovered discreetly should someone need us; for what reason we couldn’t imagine. That evening, after everyone had left, Father raked the sandy pathways between the graves so that the spirit of the copy editor couldn’t follow the footprints back home to the living.
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    The thing you must remember is that most people, including me, speak out of ignorance. We open our mouths and a universe of all we don’t know rushes out in a collision of sound and folly. At fifteen years of age, I knew very little about Latvian Jews. Rudy knew even less. Rarely did Jews earn a mention in the history books we read at gymnasium, which made them seem all the more exotic and fascinating to me. In Daugavpils we’d learned of a Jewish man who’d been denied an entry visa to Israel and flung himself out of a fifth-story window. “Jews must be really sad—killing themselves like this,” I surmised one night, as Rudy and I crawled into our beds.
    â€œThey don’t have a land of their own. That’s why they are so sad,” Rudy said, smoothing the wispy fuzz above his lip and under his chin. Two years ahead of me at school, with only a half year left before graduating, Rudy had acquired all kinds of opinions and pseudo facts. For example, it was his opinion that Jews in the larger cities like Daugavpils were not well liked because they had more money