The Hidden Letters of Velta B. Read Free Page B

than everybody else, though the Jews in our little town were as bad off as the rest of us. According to Rudy, Jews were the reason why unemployment in Latvia was on the rise. And the émigré Jews from Russia were the worst kind because they didn’t even bother to speak Latvian, which didn’t seem so bad to me, but many people, including Father, maintained that the sound of Russian fell hard on the ears. Your grandmother felt the same way.
I don’t love Russian,
she said, and the way she stretched the vowel in that word
love
expressed the measure of her dislike.
    At that time in my life, I listed toward the melancholy and dramatic. While I washed dishes, I sucked my cheeks in so as to affect the gaunt look of a poet gripped by an esoteric thought. Or, if I was scrubbing potatoes, I might fix my eyes on the lane outside the window and adopt a meditative gaze. I can tell you about it now and we can laugh together at my silly posturing, a product of adolescent fancy and boredom, but at the time, it seemed very important to me to strike just the right pose.
    At the time, my only friend, Jutta Ilmyen, felt the same way as I did about tragedy, drama, and romance. She talked a lot about suicide and the futility of life—all while contemplating the sky and sighing. She lived in the house opposite ours and looked, according to town gossip, suspiciously German, though in actual fact she was a Jew whose family had come from Belarus somewhere. The house where her family lived had sat empty for seven months, the owners having gone to Australia just like that. In month number eight, the Ilmyens arrived with their many suitcases, an elegant horsehair divan, and a droopy eared donkey named Babel.
    Mrs. Ilmyen spoke passable Latvian and always said
lab dien,
good morning, to us when she passed us on the lane. She claimed that her family had been granted automatic Latvian citizenship on account of their having been in Latvia several decades before the occupations and annexations. About Mr. Ilmyen we knew very little: he translated important legal documents in an office somewhere in Daugavpils. It was a job that kept him quite busy as many Latvians from Australia, Canada, and the U.S. had arrived in droves to reclaim ancestral properties that had been illegally seized during the Soviet regime. Your grandmother wasn’t sure about Mr. Ilmyen’s status as a Latvian or his political leanings. But she admired Mrs. Ilmyen’s smart fashion sense, and because of this, I was allowed to visit Jutta. In their home, everything seemed exotic and better: the lace of their curtains hanging in their windows had yellowed more elegantly than the muslin hanging in our windows. And though I knew it was true that the rain pelted our houses equally, it seemed to me that the rain fell from their eaves more musically than it did from ours. And whereas we had only a few books in our home, they had dozens, and in those rare moments of sideways afternoon light, the gilt spines of the books glowed and exhaled a smell of old leather. In a small cabinet where Mr. Ilmyen’s chess medals were mounted on black velour, they kept a special silver candelabra. And this was the great thing about the Ilmyens—they were all smart. At least half the chess medals inside Mr. Ilmyen’s case belonged to Mrs. Ilmyen and a few even belonged to Jutta.
    And the Ilmyens were kind. Once, when I fell against their fence, I cut my hand. Mrs. Ilmyen, who worked part-time at the clinic, rushed outside with gauze and a bandage. She had my hand cleaned and wrapped before I had a chance to have a proper cry. Likewise, after those rare moments of depression when Father got so drunk he couldn’t stand, it was Mr. Ilmyen who rolled him up in flour sacks and carted him all the way from the river to our house. “Mr. Ilmyen is a very fine person,” Father would say on these nights, as he wrapped his arms around his sides and swayed like a dizzy