Read Online The Hidden Letters of Velta B. by Gina Ochsner - Free Book Online

occurred in the course of one short evening. But I had lost Jutta, my only real friend. That much I understood. I thought at last I was feeling some of that suffering Jutta had tried so hard to teach me about. And then I realized what an idiot I was—to lay claim to any fraction of suffering when our family had so publicly reminded them of theirs.
    Later, Mother sat on the edge of my bed, the springs creaking under her weight. I did not want to be a genius and did not want her wishing me to be one. Though it was dark inside the room, a break in the clouds revealed a slip of moonlight that transformed the window into a box of silver. I could see then that Mother was looking at her hands. “Don’t cry, Inara. Nothing lasts forever,” she said. “Not love, not hate. Not joy or pain.” Mother leaned close, her breath on my hair. She laid her chapped hand on my forehead. And then she kissed me on the cheek. It was the first time she had kissed me in years.
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    By the time we woke the next morning, liquid light healed over in the west to a dark welt that meant more rain. Uncle Maris had gone. No one seemed surprised: vanishing is what he did best. Also, he’d taken Mother’s typewriter. According to the typed note he left next to the sink, he felt like a fox caught unawares by winter and forced to eat his own turds. He would return only when we had all come to our senses, and maybe not even then. In a postscript addressed to me, he’d written: If you can’t behave disgracefully, then what’s the point of living? Another note, this one left for your grandmother: I’m feeling a nudge for patriotism. Riga calls. Don’t worry about the typewriter. It’s all for the greater good.
    When your grandmother found that second note, she sat at the table, buried her head in her arms, and wept. She would have continued to do so had the oven timer not sung out. “Oh, shit. The Baptists!” Mother grabbed her coat and I followed her out the back door and down the road. As we approached the Ilmyen home, Mother kept charging ahead, but I let my feet slow a little. The shades were still drawn. Light behind the windows turned the shades to paper lanterns. Dark shapes moved behind the lighted scrim. I thought that if I stood still and stared hard enough I could watch the quiet goings-on inside the Ilmyen household as if I were watching a movie. But the longer I watched, the more my eyes burned and I realized that their world was a book written in another language and therefore closed to me.
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    We had forty minutes before the left-side Baptists were due. Inside the hall, the previous evening’s disaster remained untouched: there were chairs overturned on their backs, chessmen scattered over the floor, and plates of half-eaten pastry and plastic cups of stale coffee studded the windowsills. Uncle Maris’s crutch was still wedged in the strings of Grandmother Velta’s piano. Mother dragged a trash bin from the foyer, and I climbed onto the platform. I leaned my shoulder into the piano’s wood and pushed with all my might. And that was my mistake: the piano sailed over the lip of the platform. The resounding crash sent the crows screeching and the dogs barking in the lane. Then complete and absolute silence. Hands on her hips, Mother surveyed the destruction: the collapsed wood, the hammers sheared from the pinblock, strings snapped, the solid soundboard thicker and heavier than any tombstone half sunk in the wooden floor. At last she turned to me, her eyes shiny with unshed tears. “I’ve never cared for stringed instruments if you want to know the truth.”
    Without another word, we left the hall and headed home. As our feet churned the mud, I thought of Uncle Maris and how he’d split in my mind into two separate people, the Uncle Maris of my childhood whom I would always love, and the Uncle Maris whom I never wanted to see again. He had changed these