Free The Hidden Letters of Velta B. by Gina Ochsner Page B

ravaged the filing cabinets of many regional courthouses. In the absence of essential records, extremely well-forged titles and deeds sprouted up like mushrooms after a fine August rain. I suppose this was why Mr. Ilmyen, who clerked in a legal office in Daugavpils, always looked so tired in the evening. It was all very suspicious and all meticulously reported in Mother’s temperance newspaper.
    Father thought Mother’s interest in the property deeds and sales transactions unhealthy. “At least we still own the manor—and we can prove it,” she’d mutter, her fingers stiff and aching, her eyes bleary. And I think Father felt obligated to offer a mild corrective. “Nobody really owns the land,” he’d say, a gentle acknowledgment that our family had not been able to come up with the back taxes for the manor; it both did and did not belong to us. We are caretakers, he’d remind us, stewards, and all that we see God has temporarily placed into our hands. There was no mistaking the emphasis he placed on that word
temporarily.
“If we steward well, that is to say, if we trod gently over this land, then there will be no sign of us afterward. Except, of course, a gravestone or something like that,” he hastened to add.
    At this time, stewardship was heavy on our minds. Even Mother, a thrifty woman who knew how to stretch a single chicken through an entire month, remarked more than once that winter had sharp teeth. A sack of our potatoes had gone bad in our cellar, and what luck we’d had with the mushrooming had run out. Though Mother took an extra cleaning job in Rezekne, spending even longer hours on her hands and knees, and Father dug fresh holes like a madman to accommodate another rash of suicides, we still felt the pinch. Though a series of new hypermarkets opened in Riga and we’d heard rumors of sudden wealth in big cities, such news felt like distant sparking fire: we might see the light but we did not feel its heat. I understood that it was my job to catch as many perch, pike, and trout as I could and preserve them any way I knew how.
    I was eighteen. Not an expert angler but not the worst, either. I fished in midafternoon as the light thinned and cold crimped the horizon. By four, four thirty at the latest, full darkness and frost fell. Under this cover of cold, I shamelessly trolled the spots I knew belonged to Mr. A., Stanka, Mr. Lee, and Mr. Lim. I measured the hours by the number of bites on the line, and by my count, I did pretty well, often hooking pike, a greedy fish easily fooled by the flimsiest of bait.
    Toward the end of March and into April, the light in the afternoons returned, weak and pale. Rain and more rain. Torrential rains, falling in biblical proportions, and the river rose steadily, covering the rocky shoals, reshaping glides, and flooding the marshy banks. Perfect fishing conditions to land an eel. But try as I might, I couldn’t hook a single one. I decided to become more eel-like: sluggish and dull by day, quick and clever by night. I holed up in my room, Velta’s letters spread around me. I felt only a little guilty about my theft. My attention to and my love for these letters exonerated me. After all, we forgive, even applaud, archaeologists for their discovery of fragile artifacts, provided those discoveries find their way home. And as this was a family affair, I told myself I was doing no real harm.
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Water is life. In mud, a drier form of water, lives every dark dream, good and bad. The Black Snake lives in this mud. And so does Ghost Girl. She swims close to the riverbank. Mud flows through her veins. With her eyes flashing as blue as flaming sulfur, she looks for children as only children can see her. And being a child, she longs to play. She calls to children to come and swim with her, to come and see her watery world, to slide among the eels and the slippery rocks. She knows every child by name, and when she calls your