by Gina Ochsner
“What have you been feeding her?” Mother’s eyes were flat with fury.
“Mushrooms.” I lifted the trug. The mere mention of the fungi provoked an explosive response from Ligita’s stomach that was no match for the finely perforated lace, which acted only as a sieve. She retched like this for a solid twenty minutes, Mother holding her hair out of her face the whole time.
“The audition!” Ligita moaned.
Rudy carried Ligita to the couch while Mother made tea. Rudy sat on his knees and dabbed at Ligita’s cheeks and neck with a damp cloth. Every now and then, he’d lean in and brush a quick kiss on her forehead. And because she was so weak, Ligita couldn’t bat away his hand or hurl insults. Rudy had never looked happier. And Mother was happy, too. This girl—so petite and fine she could never have been borne of Mother’s bones, a girl so unlike me it hurt to look at her—was at last allowing herself to be comforted. I didn’t know if I liked Ligita for pleasing Mother in this way or if I hated her a little more for it.
Then from the lane came a colossal ruckus. It sounded like Babel braying, trumpeting as if the end of the world had started in the lane and was moving toward our yard. Then I realized it was only Stanka.
“My eyes! I cannot believe my eyes! Dutch buttons!” Stanka shrieked. And past our windows she went for the toolshed, one button at a time, her jaw pumping hard and fast. I slipped out the back door and followed her. Uncle had left the shed door open just wide enough to afford a glimpse of the confectioner’s prize balanced now on the threshold. Stanka crouched to get a better look. Uncle snored with exaggeration. Just as Stanka reached for the button, the line jerked. The button flew. And following the button, Stanka careened into Uncle. He held her hard even as Stanka worked that enormous button off the hook into her mouth.
“Forgive me, Stanka. For everything. I’m begging you,” Uncle implored. Her mouth full, Stanka couldn’t argue, couldn’t refuse. “You really are dying, you bastard,” she managed at last.
Uncle coughed. And coughed. Each cough was a gouge, a rip in his lungs. Each cough set the piano strings rumbling, an orchestra of discordance, as if the piano were dying, too. I took a blanket from the corner and draped it over the soundboard and strings. Then I went for Mother and Father. When we returned, Uncle was still coughing. Nothing we did could make him stop, could end that terrible wet sound of a man drowning inside of himself.
Uncle looked at Father. “Please—cremate me the Gypsy way.”
“What?” Father could not hide his mortification.
My open Bible lay next to Uncle’s cot. He’d smoked Matthew, he’d smoked Mark, he’d smoked Luke, and he was now well into John. And as these were the books in which Jesus did all his talking, I wondered if our Lord’s words had finally driven Uncle to complete madness.
“But you’re not a Gypsy,” Mother said.
“And we Roma in Latvia don’t burn our dead, dear,” Stanka reminded.
“Doesn’t matter. I never asked for much. And what a man asks for on his deathbed he should get.”
Father hung his head. Cremation, in his opinion, was only one step shy of burning in hell. “If you must insist on this bodily blasphemy, at least put your heart right in the sight of God,” Father pleaded.
“What’s God ever done for me?” Uncle asked, and Father pulled his cap onto his head and went back to the house. Such a question was so stark, so blunt, that even as I followed Mother out of the shed I could not help despairing for Uncle, who would travel through the door in the dark—all alone, without even God.
The morning light thickened outside our windows. Rain began to fall. Ligita, as pale as bleached paper, appeared in the kitchen, her small bag packed in readiness for the seven-fifteen bus that would make a brief stop at the end of the lane.
“Here.” Rudy put a hand at her elbow and held Ligita’s coat for her. “At least let me walk you to the bus stand.” Ligita took the coat from his hands, opened the kitchen door. “I will walk myself,” she said, descending the steps with great dignity.
Rudy stood at the threshold and watched her go. Mother and I watched, too, observing Ligita as she stopped in at the hall to make a final deposit in the shiny porcelains. “I suppose she was too refined for us anyway,” Mother whispered, her gaze fastened to the tattered floor mat flapping on the line. Beside it hung Ligita’s lace handkerchief. We’d never get all those stains out.
In the course of that day, we emptied Uncle’s basin fifteen, maybe twenty times.
He was peeing and peeing, draining himself dry, peeing his strength and will into that basin. Where could all this water come from? I asked Father, who merely shook his head slowly from side to side. Uncle was weak; he could barely lift his head.
“There she is.” Uncle nodded at a dark corner of the shed. “Dripping wet and all dark wing.”
“Who?”
“The girl from the river.” His words were failing him and it took all his strength to simply breathe. By late afternoon, he couldn’t even cough, and to see him like this—so quiet, so agreeable—was utterly terrifying. Father sat on a folding chair at the foot of the cot, and Stanka sat on a chair at the head, where she held Uncle’s hand in hers. He lay on the cot, his gaze fixed on a point above Stanka’s head. That’s how he died, his hand in Stanka’s. Mother pulled a sheet over him and for the next hour we sat at the kitchen table. We did not speak Uncle’s name. Mother knelt in front of the open oven, her head thrust inside so we wouldn’t see her tears. Father held his cap in his hands. His shoulders shook as he wept quietly. And across from Father was Rudy, his hands shielding his face. Uncle Maris had once been his hero and now he was gone. Also gone was Ligita.
Stanka scrutinized Rudy for several minutes. “Your heart is broken. But I know the remedy for that,” she said, rising from her chair and approaching Rudy. Rudy’s eyebrows lifted. We both knew there was no herbal tincture or mushroom in the world that would mend a wounded heart not done with its weeping. And it sounded so strange to hear Stanka say this when her own eyes were dark and wet with tears.
“Stand up,” she said. Rudy rose from his seat.
Stanka stepped out of her sandals, stood on her tiptoes, and put a hand on Rudy’s shoulder. The other hand she placed gently in his open hand. “Now close your eyes and dance.” Rudy shuffled his feet first one way then the other, Stanka steering him with small squeezes on his shoulder. Then Father and Mother sang a song for Uncle.
What if our song is silenced?
What of it?
Go on singing!
Mother kept her eyes on Stanka’s feet, those stout ankles that knew sadness but had known happier times, too. And before long, the melody brightened and Stanka’s feet moved quickly and lightly. Whatever her heart felt, whatever sorrow she held in her eyes, her feet were finding their way toward joy. And through it all, Rudy, his eyes still closed, kept up.
“You are a wonderful dancer,” Stanka whispered. “Now open your eyes and don’t forget.”
Without another word, Stanka stamped out the back door and down the steps. The hour of grieving had passed and now Uncle needed us. We followed Stanka into the yard, Rudy dragging our plastic washtub behind him into the shed. Rudy and I held Uncle up by the armpits while Stanka and Mother washed his body. First, they poured water over his head and neck then his right arm and everything on the right side down to his foot. Then they did the left side.
Three buckets of water were used—no more, no less. After Stanka dried Uncle with a towel, Mother and I dressed Uncle in Father’s best suit.
All that day Rudy and Father planed boards from a felled acacia Father had been drying under a tarp. At nightfall, they’d joined the boards and carried Uncle from the shed to the coffin. Stanka lined his body with the remaining cans of vitality drink and all the cigarettes. She put a mirror in his hand. Mother tucked his crutch beside his good leg. What was left of my Bible I stuffed into the breast pocket of the suit. For some time we stood in the rain contemplating Uncle in his coffin. We all kn
ew what Uncle wanted: to go out in flames, refined and annealed by fire into his elemental parts, his iron will and that metal crutch. And we did our best. Rudy and I piled wood, the driest we had. We lit match after match, but one by one the rain doused them. The rain had fallen so hard and so long that every stick and every bit of wood was bloated and warped with water. Whatever Uncle’s wishes, however badly we wanted to carry them out, we simply couldn’t.
Rudy, Mother, Stanka, and I all stared at Father. Father stared at the pyre. It was the first time Father didn’t know what to do.
“Now what?” Rudy asked.
“Tomorrow we bury him—the proper way,” Father said.
“But what do we do right now?” I asked.
Stanka wiped her face with the hem of her skirt. Then she stepped out of her sandals, and standing on tiptoe, she placed her hands on Rudy’s shoulder. “Sing that song,” Stanka said to us. “Sing it louder this time.”
And we did.
Chapter Four
MY THOUGHTS FLY LIKE A SHUTTLE through a loom; I am grateful for your patience with me. While you went to make tea, I slipped into a sleep where memory and dream mingled so thoroughly I could not tell one from the other. I heard a voice call my name. I went to the river. I saw the spiked umbrel crowns of the tall cow parsley. I wanted to collect all that lace, make a bridal veil from it. I pulled one off, then another, and another. A man shouted, For the love of God, stop! It was Mr. Gepkars, sitting behind his wooden desk at gymnasium. His shoulders shook with sobs, and I knew it was because someone had whispered, “Siberia.” Siberia. Siberia. The smell of burning sugar filled the room, and I was riding on the old blue bus to Rezekne to clean house for a new family. As the bus hurtled over the road, the seats shuddered and groaned. My teeth rattled. Rattling of cups and saucers, the waxy paper bag, and then I saw you, your gray-blue eyes filled with questions, and I remembered that there is much I never told you. I start a thing, stop. I forget what is and isn’t important.
You explained to me the movement of electrons, and this seemed as important as anything else I’ve ever heard. I am in awe that life is built of something so small. My talking to you can only happen because of their buzz and dance, their frenetic exchange of energy that I think must look something like bees wild with the possibility of flight. Behind every bit of creation is a push for movement, change. And what’s true for the living things holds true for the dead as well. Your grandfather believed that for the first few days in the ground the dead lay still, snug in their dark warrens, quietly adjusting to their new reality. They must learn to see in the dark, navigate by sound. What flimsy fabric the body unreeves, tendon and muscle, joint and bone. It was your grandfather’s conviction that this separation of the body from the soul resembled that of a tooth rotting, rotten, falling from the gum. Only after the tooth has fallen can the raw oozing socket begin to heal. Only after the body sloughs away do the needs and demands of the soul make themselves felt.
Simple, but not easy. That’s what Mr. Bumbers told you. He floated in a cauldron of boiling water, like an overstuffed piroshki bouncing about. Long sheets of skin floated beside him in the water, clung to the sides of the pot. The superfluous, the unnecessary, it takes great heat to loosen them, you wrote in your book. But there’s no going back, no way to undo the wrongs except to admit them one by one.
You told me the other day about Mrs. Ozolins. Shame burned in the place where her heart used to be. Regret pinched like a vise on her neck. The only remedy: to identify the source, as a laundress noting the stains on a garment, to say here, here, and here. That’s when she felt the flood of water. The beauty of this washing was that she could actually feel the taints and stains lift from the fabric of her soul. Mr. Dumonovsky said that he rattled about like seeds in a dark pod. But it was this agitation that he so dearly needed, so desperately craved. Each rattling, as wheat from chaff, shook loose his sin. He was threshed; as olive oil is refined, he was beaten to light.
Your grandfather would have taken such satisfaction from your notes. It was his conviction that the soul’s hard work, though uncomfortable, was utterly necessary. Without it, he believed, the soul remained root-bound, held fast in the mire of its own making. Groaning under the burden of stagnation. Which wouldn’t be so bad if not for the fact that all of creation yearns for change. It was a theory shored up by many hours of reading Oskars’s Bible in general and specifically by a passage in Saint Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians.
For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands . . . For in this we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed upon with our house which is from heaven. For we that are in this tabernacle do groan, being burdened.
That our bodies should both desire and undergo a transformation does not surprise me. I think of caterpillars bundled in their cocoons erupting into flight. I think of Izaak Walton’s account of the eel. No other creature, he reports, embarks on such a long journey nor does any animal experience such a remarkable physical transformation as the eel. He writes in The Compleat Angler that when eels are newly born, somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, they are no bigger than a child’s fingernail. As flat as ribbon, as thin as paper, and as transparent as glass, these little eels bob and ride the currents. As they do, their bodies lengthen; they grow teeth. Impulse or maybe genetic memory directs some of the glass eels, now elvers, to head south and west to America and some to head east for the North Atlantic. As the eels continue their journey, small permanent teeth push out their larger juvenile teeth. Their jaws change shape and their bodies, previously flat, plump up like enormous cucumbers.
Under your grandfather’s tutelage, you copied this passage of Walton’s several times: in blockish print, in looping cursive. How can a creature breathe in saltwater then live in fresh? How is it, you asked in the margins of your notes, that the eel could begin its life suited for one kind of environment and become a creature built for quite another kind?
The eel’s design, that’s the real magic. A fish has a single long nerve running along its back that registers change in light, pressure, movement. But every centimeter, every cell of the eel detects sound and pressure. You wrote in your book: it is as if an eel is all ear.
What happened at the meeting? I never finished telling the story. The day before the meeting, a soughing wind bent the birch trees in half, unlatched screen doors. We heard a thumping at the back door. I imagined it was Uncle, whacking the gates of heaven, or maybe hell, with his crutch. “If that’s Stanka, tell her we’re out of milk,” Mother called from the living room where she was beating the cushions of the divan with the business end of a golf club Father had found in the cemetery.
I rushed to the back door and opened it cautiously. Widow Spassky stood on the back step.
“So sorry to disturb,” she said, sounding not at all sorry.
“Come in, Mrs. Spassky,” Father said from the kitchen, pulling out a chair for her.
Mrs. Spassky crossed the threshold but did not take the chair. “There’s a meeting tomorrow evening. At the hall. To discuss the cemetery.” She enunciated each word carefully, wrapping pauses around each word, as if she knew the damage each might do and wanted to see its effect upon Father.
“Yes,” Mother said, pretending to make tea. “Mr. Zetsche already rang us up.”
“Well, I’m sure you know your own business.” Mrs. Spassky withdrew a heavy yellow card with thick black print on one side. She set it on the table and shuffled toward the door, a malevolent gleam in her eye.
Father sat in the chair, his hands trembling. There was a time, in the Soviet days, when humiliation and shame were used as tools of instruction and correction. For example, Mother knew a trolley driver, a good woman, who’d fallen out of favor with her superiors. One day she received a summons to the public library where all of her fellow colleagues, coworkers, childhood friends, family, and neighbors had gathered. As if at a funeral, they one by one trudged to
a microphone and said something about Galya. Only they didn’t say nice things.
They related how she’d been slow to learn how to properly tie her own shoes, how she’d received poor marks in secondary school, how silly she looked in her threadbare clothes, and so on and so forth until Galya was reduced to pulling her hair out in clumps. That is how people were given the boot in those days. It was a public spectacle and free entertainment for the masses. And it started with the arrival of an announcement on thick card stock.
“Well.” Father pushed back from his chair. “I feel a little sick,” he said, exiting for the latrine. The afternoon of the meeting, your grandmother and I went early to the hall. Father stayed behind, taking his time shaving over the sink. If he was to be publicly humiliated, at least he would be clean shaven. As we aligned chairs in rows, the foyer of the hall slowly filled with our neighbors: Mr. and Mrs. Lee and Mr. and Mrs. Lim whispered in Korean, and every now and then one of them would send a sympathetic glance in our direction. The Arijisnikovs came with tureens of tea, Stanka set out her boxes of sugar, and Mr. Bishofs, the German teacher, plugged in an overhead slide projector. Then the people we saw only at funerals arrived: the Liepins, the Jacobsons, humpbacked Mr. Ignats, the Gipsis family—all seventeen of them—and, of course, the widows Sosnovskis and Spassky. Father arrived and I knew he was a nervous wreck: tissue clung to the many spots up and down his neck where he’d nicked himself with the razor. At last, Mother arranged the chairs to her satisfaction and everyone took up their positions: to the left of the podium the widows sat together as a united front while Mr. Ilmyen and Father sat to the right of the podium. It was a reconciliation of sorts, the two men sitting so close. In spite of a lifetime of small and large misunderstandings, Mr. Ilmyen and Father were true friends. Likewise, Mother and Mrs. Ilmyen sat together in the second row, whispering, their foreheads almost touching.