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

support—a petition calling for a referendum for a new and improved draft of the language law. The minister of education and everyone in the parliament need to hear how thoroughly we Latvians love our language, how completely we want to preserve and protect it. After all, an unspoken language is a dead language.” Here Uncle Maris looked at Father. “We will be like dead people.” And now Uncle Maris turned his gaze to Mother. “Just think of Inara and Rudy.”
    â€œTell me.” Uncle turned to Rudy and me. “What do you know of history? Recite!” Rudy looked at me and I looked at him. I cleared my throat and launched into Mr. Gepkars’s spiel that started with stones and stopped with the Swedes. “The stones, children. The stones,” I cried in the most Pushkinesque and melodramatic Russian I could. “They are so ancient, so sturdy. They record a vertical history of Latvia, and this is why any discussion of Latvia begins with our stones. Let us not forget the stability provided by the Baltic Shield, that Precambrian—”
    â€œNo.” Uncle wiggled a finger in his ear. “That’s nice, but it’s not history.” Uncle nodded at Rudy. “Your turn.”
    Rudy stood up slowly, slowly. Mr. Gepkars had a hump on his back. He’d plod to the blackboard so slowly that if he’d been paid by the hour he would have been a millionaire. And this Rudy imitated, circling the kitchen table as he delivered a weary recitation of how deep, how wide, the changes in our country were as a result of Sovietization, the glorious achievements of that age. From time to time, Mr. Gepkars’s canting tipped from bored indifference to befuddlement, as if in the retelling of this old rhetoric something like actual meaning threatened to rise to the surface. This, too, Rudy managed to convey, all the while bearing that imaginary stone upon his back. It was a flawless impersonation.
    I giggled.
    Mother turned her sharp eye on me. “You should see Inara’s marks in Latvian language class. This last round she nearly failed. And we speak Latvian!”
    â€œBut it’s not her fault when Latvian is the language of instruction only 50 percent of the time in these eastern classrooms. Why are we still catering to the Russians? This is Latvia!” Uncle Maris pounded his crutch on the floor. “If people wish to speak Russian, fine—but they should do it in Russia.” Uncle Maris picked up the letter and waved it overhead. “And if a new referendum hurries them on their way, so much the better.”
    Father pinched the bridge of his nose.
    â€œTimes are changing,” Uncle Maris continued. “And people either have to change with them or move on.”
    Mother bit her lip, thinking. I suppose she was remembering her days as a girl at school. She told me how the teacher strode up and down the narrow aisles, asking questions, tapping students on the shoulder for the answers. When the tap came on Mother’s shoulder, she was so nervous that she answered in Latvian. The teacher took a strap to her forearms—that’s how children in those days were encouraged to remember Russian at the exclusion of all other languages. When we asked her about the scars, she laughed them off, commenting on how they have blended in nicely with so many others and claiming she doesn’t harbor a grudge. But I know you understand how a person can carry a thing like that inside, how an injustice large or small swells in time.
    So what Uncle was proposing now seemed natural and right: it was time our language replace that foreign one that had been crowded down our throats. And I could tell by the shine in Rudy’s eyes that he was memorizing Maris’s every word and gesture. I could see that he believed, as Uncle did, that ethnic and political intricacies could be tied as neatly as a pair of shoelaces, and in this way, the problems of our lives could be