by Gina Ochsner
Joels and I talked it over in whispers at night. Could he have fallen in with a bad sort? Who were those men at the kafenica he argued politics with? Why did he wear his church shoes to town on some days and creep around in his boots on others? Was he, perhaps, merely fishing?
“He can’t possibly be as inert as Ligita claims,” I observed late one night. “He gives Mother a five-lat note every Sunday morning. He must be doing something.”
“Yes,” Joels said. “Of that we can be certain.”
In time we might have forgotten about Rudy’s drinking. But then two things happened: one of Mr. Zetsche’s Riviera shops, a pharmacy, caught fire, and Father turned sixty. We heard about the fire first from Stanka who regaled us with detailed accounts of how much square footage had been burned to a crisp and what she had calculated the cost of the damages to be. Rudy, at home that day just long enough to change his clothes and douse himself with cheap cologne, contended that Mr. Vaido had bungled some new magic trick. We had all witnessed Mr. Vaido’s illusions at children’s birthday parties and we knew he wasn’t much of a magician. “How many years did we buy our aspirins from him?” Mother’s eyebrows arched. “Too many,” Father said. “We are lucky to be alive.”
To recoup his losses, Mr. Zetsche cut Father’s hours at the cemetery from halves to quarters and raised the rent for all his Riviera shop tenants: Hasty Pasty, LazyQuick, Rimi, the kafenica. The shop managers all retaliated in kind by redesignating full-time employees to part-time employees, and part-time employees received the full boot. It became clear to us that between all of our part-time jobs we needed to find more work. But where? Any person older than fifteen and younger than forty who wanted to do more than study the bottom of a bottle moved to Riga or took a job outside of the country if they could. Rudy talked of Sweden, of immigrating, a word Mother would not abide. Father tried to find work in Daugavpils, but he had no specialized training other than what he’d completed at technical school. Ligita made some attempts at finding work, ringing up girlfriends on the black wall phone to see if any of them knew of anyone who was hiring. Of her five friends in Daugavpils, three had already found lonely men in Wales to wed and the other two friends were in open competition for the same jobs. In desperation I made the trek through the brambles to Mrs. Zetsche’s, a bucket, rag, and turpentine in my hands. I stood on the back porch and collected myself. What a ridiculous proposition: a girl who’d been fired for mowing over the cherished stallions presenting herself as if nothing had happened. A girl, well aware that her would-be employers had just that week given her brother the boot, begging for a job.
Mrs. Zetsche opened the door, and the scent of cedar and pines wafted out around her.
If I didn’t work, I’d die, I told her, aware of how desperation rendered my words overly dramatic.
“The thing is.” Mrs. Z. dropped her voice to a confidential volume. “We have a cleaning girl already.” Mrs. Z. stepped onto the porch, pulling the oversize manor door closed behind her not quite fast enough. In the crescent of space between the jamb and her shoulder, I spied movement: a dull streak of brick red. Ligita.
I shifted the bucket from one hand to the other.
“But if you’re serious about working, we could use help with grounds keeping. And then the cast-iron stallions always need some attention. But times being as they are, I can’t offer you much.” Mrs. Zetsche held her hand upturned at the wrists as if she were carrying invisible trays of cocktails.
I studied the cleaning bucket in my hand. Did Mother ever settle for our sakes? Yes. Yes, she had. All too often. And she never said a peep about it. “I would work for less, Mrs. Zetsche.”
And I needed to. In two days Father would turn sixty. For those two days the house was all sixes and sevens: Mother in a dither rushing from oven to sink to oven, adjusting and correcting her sauces, hanging laundry, overseeing my paltry attempts at twisting bundles of wheat stalks into a wreath. The big night finally arrived and we gathered for a grand celebration: your grandmother, Stanka, Dr. Netsulis, Miss Dzelz, Rudy, Ligita, Joels, you, and I. Mother brought out a special cake called Chernobyl that required not one but two cans of condensed sweetened milk boiled and caramelized, several eggs, and walnuts. Upon seeing the cake, a trembling behemoth of refined sugar, Dr. Netsulis, Rudy, and Joels hopped from their chairs. In the tradition, they lifted Father in his chair, raising him high above the table and back to the floor sixty times, one for each year of life. It was a good thing Father was not a large man and Joels, Rudy, and Dr. Netsulis were. While the men recovered, Ligita and I supplied them with a pale restorative: birch juice for the doctor and Father, and Skak-Eternal-Fire-Rear-Naked-Choke for everyone else.
Mother tapped her fork to her glass. “A toast!”
Just then the phone sounded low and loudly. We all looked at it as if it were a rude and unwelcome guest.
“Pretend we’re not home,” Mother begged, but Father had already crossed the kitchen and lifted the receiver.
“Yes,” he said, after a long moment. “I understand.” Father slid the receiver into the cradle and sat down slowly. “That was Mr. Zetsche,” he announced. “He thanks me for my years of service, but he has decided that tending the cemetery is too demanding for a man of my age.”
Rudy jumped to his feet. “That little bastard! He’s cheated us—again!”
“No, son.” Father shook his head and motioned Rudy to take his chair.
“A toast,” Mother said again, this time more quietly. But Father merely shook his head once more. “When your heart is as full as mine with good things and bad, rich and poor, heaven and earth, what more is there to be said?” Father turned his gaze to his cake. He took a breath, held it, then blew. Poof. Out that candle went. He sat down and folded his arms across his chest and it was as if with that single exhalation all of his words evaporated—everything he’d been thinking about or might have wanted to say.
You set your spoon in his bowl and wiggled a finger in an ear canal. “A lake dries out; the crows fall in,” you said. It was a riddle Mother had taught you. What it meant was that when the bowl is emptied the wooden spoons clatter to the bottom. It was a puzzling saying that somehow made perfect sense: in his emptiness Father was full. Or maybe it went the other way around.
Inside the house silence reigned supreme. For weeks Father would not talk. He’d been exiled from the only place he’d ever felt he could do bodily good. No one would love those stones as much as he did. No one would remember to rake the footprints on sandy gravel outside the cemetery. No one would know how to remove graffiti and other signs of unrest as well as he did. I knew that this is what he was thinking. Mother and I tried to coax him toward happy memories. I reminded Father of the proper cemetery etiquette, beer and whiskey passed to guests at the wake and salted dried peas and beans at the graveside. The peas symbolized the tears before a burial. The beer was a reminder to seek joy. Mother reminded Father of the great care Oskars exercised as he built coffins: he hollowed out a big broad beam of wood. The lid he made by squaring a plank to fulfill the custom: an eternal coffin, a temporary lid.
Every morning Mother read to Father from her newspaper: a ceramics factory in Latgale closed and another sugar refinery had shut its doors. The unemployment rate soared. As she read, Rudy supplied his own interpretations. About the university graduates exiting the country en masse, “No jobs for real Latvians, here,” he said. Rudy referred to the new development outside Rezekne as “shameless land-grabbing by those Krauts and lefse-eating Norwegians.” As he spoke, he’d twist the paper napkins into nooses.
Still, Father would not utter a word.
We decided repetition would break his silence, wear him down the same way water bores though stone. We told stories, our words like string winding around itself into a ball: no beginning, no end, just a steady sound of the human voice. We told of Uncle’s proposal for an all-Latvian, all-nude female pro soccer team. It was a suggestion that had made him extremely popular in some circles, less
so in others. Rudy told about how Uncle once lured geologists from Finland to a nearby forest, claiming it was full of meteorites. They came in droves, those Finns, and when they saw they’d been duped with pieces of worthless kimberlite, Uncle sold them cell phones and offered them free classes in the art of water witching.
Mother reminded Father of the time Uncle parachuted into a dairy farmer’s pasture and scared the cows milkless. The farmer presented Maris with a bill for all the milk the cows should have produced, a slip of paper that Uncle stuffed into his mouth and chased with a glass of milk. We wanted to hear Father laugh. And so we talked and talked while you sat listening to every word we said, turning your ears first this way and that, your ears funnels for sound and your eyelids blinking as if you were silently storing away every word we said.
Father sat in his chair and smoked his pipe. While we talked, blue-gray clouds wreathed his body. If our words penetrated that smoke, we did not know, for his eyes remained fixed on the mantel clock that ticked and sang on the hour. He had willed his tongue to dry up in his mouth, and I wondered, even if he had wanted to talk, if would he be able to.
Seeing him this way twisted my stomach in tight, cold coils.
Mr. Zetsche had done this to Father. Had Mrs. Zetsche known this was coming? Could this be why she rehired me, her way of making amends preemptively. I don’t know. And I didn’t let her act of kindness diminish my hatred for Mr. Zetsche. It was the first time I really and fully hated someone. A few years earlier after the Pushing of the Swing, I had watched Mr. Zetsche by the oak tree. As he surveyed the frayed ropes of his swing, I had felt sorry for him. Now I felt overwhelmed by an animal sadness, for all this time I had secretly believed that I was above hatred. I realized now that I was not. I was as small and ordinary as anybody else.
For three weeks I hated Mr. Zetsche. It was during this time that I dismantled the phone. Dismantle suggests a gentleness to the action. Actually, I ripped it from the wall. I shattered it with a hammer. I threw the pieces into the root cellar and hoped they would turn to mold. Each morning as I went to work, I could hardly look at Mr. Zetsche’s horses, which symbolized to me foolish excess and vanity. Mr. Zetsche had two good and fine cars. Father had none, and the closest he would get to a fine and fast machine was the backhoe and now even that was taken from him.
Only Joels understood. He lived in the world of music; if one instrument fell silent, he noticed its absence. And if another instrument produced sour or false notes, this, too, he noticed immediately. But he was not an alarmist. He set about studying the situation—that is, me—and one night as we lay in bed, he regarded me carefully.
“The depth of a person’s hatred is the measure of his or her limitations.”
I rolled to my side away from Joels.
“Inara, do not hate that man.”
“Why not?” I fumed.
“It disrupts consonance and continuity. It will consume you, and nothing will purge it but a greater consuming fire.”
“How do you know this?”
Joels ran his hand through his hair. “Because I’ve hated before.” Then he closed his eyes. He was a believer in the restorative powers of sleep. Sleep, he had explained more than once, makes everything new: the stones in the river, hues and shades of color, our words, and even the letters in the scriptures once a year are renewed in sleep.
Now, as I had then, I laid my ear on his furry chest. A steady rhythm of wet percussive beats throbbed in an even pattern. Sleep, I believed, was the time we each make a quiet music. How beautiful his heart and the music that it made. I think of that as the moment something inside me changed. I felt gratitude for Joels, the fact of his being there. Gratitude that I could feel gratitude and recognize how I felt.
Joels shifted his shoulder, pushing me off. Then he began to snore. Yes, I was grateful and awed that, given his circumstances and mine, he had chosen me. Now he rolled to his side and his breath whistled through his nose. I could feel something solid and elemental shifting in the bed of my heart. I would love this man whose love I could not match or understand, a man whose love for me was better than my love for him. And, even if it killed me, I would take his advice: I would not let loyalty for Father feed my stupid hatred. Father, after all, had not uttered a single word against Mr. Zetsche.
In the morning I followed Ligita in to work. We did not talk as we let ourselves in the back door. Though we’d both been working for the Zetsches since Easter, three months now, she still did not talk to me—not about Rudy or her chores for Mrs. Zetsche. Instead, she held her cell phone to her ear and pretended to talk. I happened to know she let her contract with the phone company lapse, but I also knew how important it was to keep up appearances, especially if that was all you had.
We stamped our feet on the grate and took off our shoes. From down the long ash-wood hallway came the footfalls of very small feet. Then Mrs. Zetsche.
“Inara.” Mrs. Zetsche gripped one hand in the other. “Ligita.” I had never seen her so distressed. “Please.” Mrs. Zetsche gestured toward her chairs grouped around the table she only used when she was expecting fine company.
Ligita and I sat beside each other in plush straight-backed chairs with ball-and-claw feet while Mrs. Zetsche sat opposite us at the end of her very long well-polished table. She bit at her lip, tugged at a lock of hair. She put her hands on the table, spread her fingers, and looked at them for a moment.
“Girls, this is so terribly difficult, because you know how I feel about the both of you.”
I looked at Ligita. Beneath her angry maroon bangs, Ligita looked at me. Mrs. Zetsche’s feelings for us were of the utilitarian sort: she liked us as long as there were no discernible marks or blemishes anywhere in or around her minimansion.
“I’ve been counting the silver and silver-plated serving pieces. You know the ones?”
We nodded.
“Well, I’m three short. And I wouldn’t have even mentioned it, except last month I was short four pieces. I’m not making an accusation, you understand, merely an observation.” Mrs. Zetsche studied me carefully.
“I understand,” I said.
“You and Ligita are the only hired help who have keys to the back door.”
“We would never steal from you, Mrs. Zetsche,” Ligita said at last, her voice pitifully thin, and yet there was a discernible trace of defiance. Ligita would go away from this encounter determined that it was she, not Mrs. Zetsche, who had been wronged by this theft.
Mrs. Zetsche’s chin trembled. She plucked at her sleeve and a handkerchief flew to her eyes. She was crying openly. “I know it wasn’t you, Inara. Or you, Ligita. But this is so troubling. Because, you see, there’s just been so much happening to us of late.”
Her tiny hand slid a yellow sheet of paper over the polished tabletop. I recognized the flyer—PATRIOTIC LATVIANS FOR AN ALL-LATVIAN LATVIA. “Someone keeps sliding these papers under our door.”
I rose to my feet and snatched the yellow paper from off the table. “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Zetsche. It’s rubbish—pay it no mind.”
“Just some stupid kids trying to make a point,” Ligita added.
I made my way home, that old stone pushing my shoulders forward. I looked at that sheet of paper and felt shame. What did I know, really, of her troubles? We did not know where they had lived before they came here or under what circumstances they had left. Nor did I have any real knowledge of just how very hard it was to be a foreigner or, at the very least, a newcomer. I thought about Mrs. Zetsche, who had furiously dabbed at her eyes with a scented tissue. What provocation did I have, really, in disliking her so? She could not help who she was or where she was. She could not help it if she had things when others didn’t.
Ligita and I found Rudy beside the woodpile where he was exploring the limits of the potato’s not so secret revenge. A bottle of Skak-Eternal-Fire-Rear-Naked-Choke stood wedged in between thick pieces of hardwood set out to season. I showed him the yellow paper.
“Tell me you a
re not involved,” I pleaded.
“Most men are cowards or slaves,” Rudy said.
“Which one are you?” I asked.
Mother, who’d been conveniently hanging laundry, appeared from behind a scrim of wet sheets. With one hand, she led you; with the other, she balanced her basket in the crook between her hip and ribs. Rudy didn’t see her approaching. Drink had made him effusive, garrulous, loud.
Rudy shrugged. “We are going back to the land. We are taking back what is ours.” Mother dropped her basket and Rudy startled. Mother regarded Rudy as if he were something alien and slightly dangerous. Mother took another step toward us and leaned her whole body toward Rudy.
“Never will you talk like this.”
Rudy’s face underwent a strange transformation. “But he took our ancestral property.”
“No,” Mother said. “We sold it to him.”
It was as if his face were a bowl of still water and she’d troubled the surface with her hands. Whereas his face had been serene, even smug, now his brow lifted, his eyes widened in genuine surprise. Over his face passed a panoply of expressions: alarm, amusement, irritation. At last he settled, a placating smile filtering over his features. “You were coerced, you were manipulated. If we play our cards right, we can still get the manor house back.”
Mother frowned. “Most men grow wiser as they grow older. But, son, I worry for you.”
Rudy’s voice hardened. “Think about it. When has Latvia really ever belonged to Latvians? We are smart people and capable people. We have ideas and energy and resources. We just need to come together for a common cause.”
“And what cause is that?”
“The redistribution of wealth to those who need it most.” Rudy grinned. “Imagine a small band of modern-day Robin Hoods.” Rudy pulled a five-lat note from his pocket and set it on top of the remaining laundry in her basket.