Free The Hidden Letters of Velta B. by Gina Ochsner

steady drive into the earth the other countered with erratic, brilliant flight. Mother was less generous in her assessment of Uncle. She said he was like the hedgehog, a difficult animal to love as it is a proud creature, slow to listen and quick to make a point. Even if Uncle had not made the scene at the hall, Mother’s dissenting vote was almost automatic in nature, as Mother and Father rarely agreed on anything.
    Maybe you recall the time you asked them where you would go when you died. “Into the ground,” Mother said. “Heaven,” Father said. Father believed that the invisible things—truth, time, love, regret, memory—manifested themselves visibly if one knew how to look, really look. Invisible faith takes palpable imagination, but it is apprehended in the smallest of actions. A man stopping to help another to lift a load—that was love. Knees hitting the floor in a prayer of thanksgiving or desperation—that was faith. Faith, Mother believed, was a neurological aberration that occurred in the temporal lobe of the brain. And to acknowledge or name an emotion such as love was to commit the crime of trivialization and sentimentality. Wind, the cruel intelligence of crows. The river. That’s what she believed in. The impossibility of fully removing the bright and sure stains of beet juice from linen. She preferred the tangible world of things seen: light, water, salt, stalks of rye, what could be grasped between her hands and understood by the body.
    Â 
    Seeing as how I have little time left, Stanka came by again while you were working. She is in fits and torments. Her roadside business, Fortunes While You Wait, is being taxed. Her solution: send a curse through the post in the form of a long strip of flypaper covered in coarse black pepper. It will ensure at least three weeks of colossally bad luck and robust rounds of sneezing for the recipient. She drank all the milk, by the way. I am glad the two of you have always been such good friends. You once asked me when you were small why her skin was so dark—was it because she smokes Bulgarian cigarettes? You might have been six or seven at the time. “No,” I said. “She’s dark because she’s a Gypsy.” This explained her fondness for milk, which she drank, Stanka once told me, so that at least her insides would be white. Even so, she was a cursed woman because she had “gone behind the hedge” and married a
gadjo,
a non-Gypsy, which is the most disgraceful thing a Gypsy woman can do. This is why the day after she married Mr. Pauls Ivaska, Stanka’s family, who all lived in Sabile, held a funeral for her and burned all of her belongings and all their photos containing her image. That wouldn’t have been so bad, but then a month later Mr. Ivaska went to Riga to play his French horn and forgot to return. Out of sheer loneliness, Stanka then lit the lamp for Uncle Maris.
    I thought Stanka had a sporting chance, as she understood men who wandered, but your grandmother held slimmer odds. About Stanka she’d heard Uncle mutter: “Is she just dirty or permanently tanned?” The sad fact was that Uncle Maris had over his years cultivated a deep suspicion of anything or anybody who’d come from the east, which he said was the source of all our trouble. But we’ve all seen how a very small amount of water can wear down stone. Stanka predicted a streak of winning lottery numbers and Uncle couldn’t resist her charms. Stanka also has thick calves and this is something in a woman Uncle admired. They paid their fee and married at the courthouse and I suppose they were happy, though sometimes it was hard to tell. Uncle sustained two concussions in the first year of marriage. Assault and battery, Uncle called it. Tough love, Stanka called it.
    Anyway, Stanka combed my hair, what is left of it, gently, gently. The comb is sturdy, made of white oak. You needn’t return it. She