Read The Hidden Letters of Velta B. for Free Online Page A

salesmen in all of eastern Latvia. How Uncle Maris became so smart and industrious, she didn’t know, except that a hard life, Mother sometimes said, looking at her blaring red hands, had a way of enlightening even the dumbest people. In that winter of 1993, I pondered this quite a lot as I helped your grandfather dig in the cemetery, the way ordinary work provides extraordinary knowledge, and if not that, then a simple, unadorned wisdom.
    One night the same winter the Zetsches came to town, we heard a pounding on our front door.
    â€œMaris!” Father and Mother cried, their voices climbing the octaves as they opened the door. Rudy and I stood dumbfounded at the sight of Uncle: crutches wedged under his armpits, and leaning against his shin like a pair of faithful dogs, two small suitcases.
    â€œDon’t just stand there like cough drops,” Mother yelled at us, and Uncle Maris tipped a shoulder in our direction and beamed.
    â€œInara! Look at you—a woman already! And Rudy! Such a man!” Uncle was referring to Rudy’s mustache, which had taken him a full year to grow. Rudy, his face flushed bright red, grabbed Uncle Maris’s suitcases and hurried inside.
    That night, dinner was a grand affair. Mother cooked an eel in its own oil along with penny bun mushrooms and leeks. For once we did not eat cabbage. And though Mother had been the president of the Ladies Temperance League for four weeks now, she graciously turned a blind eye when Uncle Maris lined up the shot glasses and broke out a bottle of bison-grass vodka. We toasted the eel—several times. And with each toast, the eel became more magnificent. At last, when the eel was eaten, Father, ignoring Mother’s frowns, brought out his bathtub vodka. Father had been raised a Baptist, and on principle, Baptists in Latvia did not drink. As Father explained to Rudy and me, drinking wasn’t a sin, but drunkenness was. When he was depressed or when his brother Maris visited us, Father zealously set out to explore the boundary between those two states.
    Father pounded his glass, the signal for a toast, and Uncle Maris raised the bottle. “A story, I’ll tell you a story.” This we loved, Uncle’s verbal arabesques, intricate constructions of lurid detail, supposition, and imagination all delivered with such bombastic gusto that should we doubt the substance of the story we still could be carried along by the power of its delivery.
    â€œLong ago, there was a secret congress of crows. At that time, crows were as big and strong as cows. With three powerful strokes of their shiny black wings, they could fly from one end of the world to the other. They liked to meet in tall forests and tell stories. But they were proud, and for this, God had to punish them. He scattered them throughout the forests of the world and clipped their wings so that they couldn’t fly properly and had to hop from tree to tree. To make matters worse, God created man and allowed him to multiply. But man couldn’t fly, no, he couldn’t even hop from tree to tree, so the crow decided to haunt man wherever he went by laughing at his clumsy ways, mocking him with cries and calls.”
    I nodded my head. I knew that this was why Mother, who had no time for religion, still hung fish bones in the shape of a cross over our back door. For a crow, she’d explained, hates God in its heart, and the cross or a rifle is the only thing that puts fear into them.
    Uncle Maris drained his shot glass and leaned forward. “But Latvian crows are the meanest. They are not allowed to caw in Latvian—only in Russian—and this makes them screech all the more in rage.”
    â€œA good story,” Father pronounced.
    â€œA true story,” Uncle Maris corrected, producing a wad of paper from his pocket. “Language is life, you know.”
    â€œWhat’s that?” Mother sniffed.
    â€œThis, my dear woman, is a letter of