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

heart.
    I thank you, too, for reading from your Book of Wonder.
    There’s no covering that protects the body of any living thing that excels the scales of a fish, you wrote. Both armor and oil jacket, the plated scales are tough enough to resist bruising, resist the radiation of heat, and keep the fish’s skin dry. Having no seams to the body, no seams to the scales, a fish can withstand any amount of water pressure without breach or penetration. This is why a fish can swim at depths no human, no submersible, can reach. Even more amazing, you wrote, is that dark stripe that runs along a fish’s side from gill to tail, the lateral line, which registers low-frequency vibrations. A tactile and aural organ, this line senses movement, and like radar, it indicates to the fish how near or far away other objects are and whether those objects are in motion or stationary. Sound, you concluded, was a form of touch.
    We had guessed as much from your many visits to the clinic. One doctor in Balvi showed us X-rays. We saw those large hammers and anvils inside your enormous ears.
    â€œHe’s living in a sound chamber; everything is amplified,” the doctor explained. “And as sound is a form of touch, certain vowels in words, certain tones, will cause a faster vibration and pain him more than other sounds.” The doctor sent us home with those blaze-orange industrial-strength ear protectors that you conveniently left on the bus.
    If the wind blew from the east, you could hear the bells pealing in St. Petersburg. You claimed that the monks at Saint Alexander Nevsky Lavra ushered morning in with songs that started bright but stanza by stanza bent to unbearable sadness. That’s when the monks jumped, you said, as jumping was the only way to outstrip sorrow. You wrote this all down, how you could hear the gradations of sound on the chromatic scale, half tones, quarter tones that only the monks have mastered. You’ve assured me that you don’t recall having placed your ear to the mud at the river’s edge to hear the water’s quiet susurration, but you recorded with what patience water reshapes shoal and shore. How patient? One particle of sand, one bit of stone at a time.
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    You have suffered on account of your ears. I am sorry your date walked out on you. That’s a city girl for you. I will say that your choice of online dating services—Desperate.com—doesn’t inspire confidence. At any rate, you did not ask for your ears and I fear they have been a burden, your affliction.
    It may be slim consolation, but I assure you we all suffer in some way or another. When I was young, I was afflicted by a ferocious need to prove, if only to myself, that I was a clever girl. I don’t know what Rudy’s particular affliction was. I think it may have been an overwhelming desire to know love in the physical sense: he had not been popular with the girls at school and this even with a Fu Manchu mustache. What was your grandfather’s particular affliction? His younger brother, Maris. Agony—your grandfather slept it, wept it, ate it, and drank it on account of Uncle. This is a kind of love: to be tormented on behalf of another, to grieve for one whom he thinks may be lost. I don’t know if this is a healthy love, but it is a love all the same.
    We could say the problem was one of personalities. They were utterly different, your grandfather Eriks and uncle Maris. Your grandfather was a man of the earth, a man who felt keenly, especially as he stood knee-deep in an open grave, gravity and the weight of time pushing on the bones. “The world is all stone,” he’d sometimes say, when he’d come home after a long day of digging. I suppose this is why over the years he had become a quiet man. What does one say in the presence of so much weight? And I suppose this is why Uncle Maris was so noisy. Uncle filled your grandfather’s quiet with sound. One man’s