Read The Hidden Letters of Velta B. for Free Online

lip through a stringlike nerve to the brain. You learned that individual hairs on the body of a spider function as individual ears, each tremble of a hair registering and responding to a whole spectrum of sound.
    You recorded how loud a second was, how much it weighed on the stretched parchment of your thin tympanic membrane. The hearing of certain flowers, the hibiscus and clematis in particular, is exceptional as they are all auricle, all ear. The ears are the only part of the human body that never stops growing.
    This we knew. For the first few years of your life, we measured and recorded the growth of your ears—Dr. Netsulis in his lab journal, and your grandmother Biruta in her temperance newspaper.
Big,
she wrote one month.
Bigger,
the next. When the fuzz turned to bona fide fur, your grandmother stopped her candid reportage. Her pride in you: unbounded. You were myth made flesh. But common sense had finally caught up with her, as had some none-too-gentle teasing at the Elvi Market and at the swings in the school yard. That teasing provoked a response in her trademark “Kindly Advices” column:
if you can’t be polite, then, at the very least, be vague.
    And words! How you loved collecting them.
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GNARL
growl; snarl
GNAT
small winged insect
KNIT
to form into knots; to tie together as a cord
KNOT
an interlacement of parts; something not easily solved; an intricacy, difficulty
KNURL
lump or a knob; a series of small ridges
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    You found these words in your grandmother’s English dictionary, her gift to you on your ninth birthday. You chewed over that word
knot
for weeks. An intertwining or conjunction, you wrote, a knot is a complication. A knot’s strength is a result of the snarled strands. If you try to untangle them, the knot loses its integrity. This bit you had underlined with a red pen. The letters
g
and
k
in those words intrigued you. Their presence, though unarticulated, is vital; without those silent consonants, the words might mean something else entirely. You wrote that people are like this, too. Some are loud, some silent, all of them necessary to understand the whole.
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    Loud. Your great-uncle was impossibly loud, or what your grandmother called colorful, flamboyant, lively. In the main, it was his mouth people noticed. He liked to use it. His mouth had gotten him beaten within centimeters of his life, and these beatings had happened in a regular and steady way. He seemed to enjoy the special attention, sometimes asking for more with his lopsided, gap-toothed grin. “What is the matter with you!” Father would ask when Uncle showed up on our doorstep at strange hours, a rag pressed to his mouth or a bandage wound about his head. I think the matter had to do with his left leg, which he lost somewhere in the jagged mountains of Afghanistan. It was the custom of the Soviet regime to dispatch the people least interested in Soviet affairs—particularly Latvians, Estonians, and Lithuanians—to fight the government’s ugliest wars. Anyway, Uncle could not forgive the Soviet army for sending him to such a godforsaken place. He couldn’t forgive the field surgeon for taking his leg. He couldn’t forgive himself for relying on those crutches. Your uncle Rudy and I learned never to ask about his time in the army.
    We loved it when Uncle Maris came to visit. All he had to do was smile just wide enough for the gap between his front teeth to show, and Mother could not say no to him. Uncle Maris could put his foot up on the table, smoke indoors, and shave at the kitchen sink if he wanted, because when he smiled, the whole world smiled. This was because he’d gained a certain amount of notoriety as a political protester after he lost his leg in Afghanistan. According to Mother, he had the habit of exhibiting a little too much zeal—even for the protest organizers. But he had a good heart. And, Mother liked to remind us, he was one of the very best vitamin