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

tidily solved.
    Uncle Maris stayed on with us for a week, and then a week became two weeks. He slept on the couch, with his suitcases containing his many bottles of vitamins stacked beside him. Each morning, he got up just as Mother left for work. He dressed in the dark, carefully pinning to his lapel a red plastic carnation that was a call, he said, for unity and a reminder of how much blood had already been spilled for the cause. Then with his suitcases full of smart-looking vitamin bottles clutched against the crutch grip, he walked to the bus stand. He didn’t return until late at night, long after Father had locked up the cemetery. It was his strategy, he explained to Rudy, to sell to the towns farthest away then work his way back toward our town, as if he were pulling the drawstring of a net tight. He was good at it, too, often selling an entire suitcase of vitamins in a single day. And he was tireless. In the evening he stayed up late with Rudy and Father discussing politics, the future of Latvia, or plans for a new invention.
    Whatever one might say of your namesake, he could never be accused of being idle. Uncle Maris liked to improve and modify inventions already patented and trademarked. He claimed to have made a defibrillator, but his attempts to reconstruct it went disastrously awry and for three whole minutes Uncle left us to visit the angels. He came back inspired to do more, he said. Some of his inventions were smashing successes.
    Uncle did a brisk business with his sloth-prevention bracelets. The device fit comfortably snug around ankles or wrists and delivered small “completely safe” electric shocks if a body remained inert for long periods of time. Middle-aged women with unemployed grown children snapped them up even after it became known that some of the completely safe shocks weren’t as safe as Uncle had claimed.
    Uncle also developed an energy elixir he called Vitality, the ingredients of which were so secret that even he couldn’t quite remember what they were. Anyway, I think the real reason Uncle came to visit us was because he needed money. Inventing amazing things requires amazing materials, he explained to your grandfather one evening. Your grandfather could never say no to Maris. The money Uncle used to buy springs and leather and a cobbler’s last. He was fashioning elevated shoes. He’d been commissioned, he said, by that funny little German man.
    â€œWho?” Father asked.
    â€œWhat?” Mother asked.
    â€œIs there an echo?” Uncle looked at the ceiling.
    Chastised, Mother and Father fell silent.
    â€œThat man,” Uncle continued. “The one who’s buying up a bunch of property. He’s short and he wants tall shoes.”
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    You have always loved chess. When you were three, your stepfather fashioned chessmen out of white oak. He planed a board, squared and stained it. You would play for hours. I think you understood that chess is a game of strategy, of ordered movement, logical thought. A quiet game, it soothed you. So much so, you often didn’t need to wear your aviator’s earmuffs. What does the game mean? you once asked your grandfather. Oh, it’s about love, he said, without lifting his gaze from Oskars’s Bible. The king from one side wants to marry the queen from the other, but first he must negotiate with the other king. No, no, your grandmother said. It’s about power and politics. The one kingdom wants to seize everything belonging to the other kingdom. Those squares are parcels of land. That’s why both sides fight until there are no chessmen left.
    It was that same winter of ’93 when both Uncle Maris and the Zetsches came to town that I was trying to learn the game. To me, that board looked like a quilt of white patches of farmland knuckling up through dark patches of water. A secret treasure might be buried beneath any one of the white squares, and certain death lurked in the black ones. I