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

last months, and I realized there was no stopping that or helping him. We each of us had to keep taking our steps where they would lead. It was a scientific principle: momentum, and it meant to me that some things—like love, like hate—once in motion couldn’t be stopped. Even the piano had not been exempt. But that was the way of life, Father liked to say as we stood on our threshold watching the sad funerary processions. Forward life rolled and only death slowed it down. And even that, Father said, was only a temporary hitch. Even now the rain was falling as steadily as ever and the roads were rising and bleeding to the river as they always did this time of year.
    And what of that mangled piano? By bits and pieces: keyboard, pinblock, hammers, and strings, Father gathered it into a wheelbarrow and stored it in his toolshed. The cast-iron plate, the largest and by far the heaviest part of the piano, we carried: Mother and Rudy on one end, Father and I on the other. We picked it up, walked a few paces, set it down, picked it up, walked a few paces, set it down. Though none of us said it, I know we were all thinking how very much like a Jewish procession we looked, how very likely our neighbors were standing behind windows and watching us as we had watched so many others.
    We laid the iron plate and soundboard to rest inside Father’s toolshed, which was where he stored anything that was broken. Set on end and leaning against the far wall of the shed, the iron plate with the strings, which somehow had not broken (“What a miracle!” Mother intoned again and again), looked like a loom. Every sound, every utterance, set the strings buzzing.
    Though Mother claimed she did not care for stringed instruments, she made a phenomenal number of visits to the shed. Father would follow her, assuring her that with the right glue and patience he would have Grandmother Velta’s piano trilling tunes that would make angels weep.

Chapter Two
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    Y OU’VE BROUGHT THE PAIN MEDICATION . You’ve brought more ice. And newspapers. Your grandmother would have turned cartwheels to hear this latest: Madame President Vaira Vika-Freibergs opened a recent book-fair address with a
daina.
    Â 
I was born singing,
I have lived singing,
and when I die,
I will fly to heaven singing.
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    Because the president had been raised in Canada and because your uncle Rudy had just had a fight with your grandmother, Rudy, on principle, didn’t vote for Mrs. Vika-Freibergs. But just about every other voter in the country did. I think her holding a PhD in ethnography and having so many
dainas
committed to memory went a long way with a lot of people.
    I thank you also for reading to me from the Gospel of Luke. I’ve always liked it for the miracle accounts: Jesus feeding the five thousand, the healing of the demoniac who made his home in graveyards. What did that man eat while he lived among tombstones? Let’s not dwell overlong on that.
    You told me once that Jesus was your favorite superhero. You asked me once, too, if I thought Jesus had big ears. I said yes because He hears our every prayer, but honestly, there is no exact record of what his ears looked like. He definitely liked ears—that much I know. Twenty times, by my count, Jesus said let those who have ears to hear. You remember, of course, his arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane. A crowd had gathered. One of Jesus’s followers, and I believe it was Peter because he was such a hothead—though your grandfather assures me that the scriptures do not support this—withdrew his sword and hacked off an ear belonging to a young servant of the high priest. Jesus wasted no time attaching the severed ear to the side of the boy’s head. A miracle, and on his way to his own crucifixion. I’ve often wondered how this action changed that boy’s life; if the restoration of a small flap of cartilage on the side of his head did something to his