There is an answer for everything, if only one knew the question
– Paul-Eerik Rummo
I have to try to write a few words to keep some sense in my head and not let my mind break down. I’ll hide my notebook here under the floor so no one will find it, even if they do find me. This is no life for a man to live. People need people, someone to talk to. I try to do a lot of pushups, take care of my body, but I’m not a man anymore-I’m dead. A man should do the work of the household, but in my house a woman does it. It’s shameful.
Liide’s always trying to get closer to me. Why won’t she leave me alone? She smells like onions.
What’s keeping the English? And what about America? Everything’s balanced on a knife edge-nothing is certain.
Where are my girls, Linda and Ingel? The misery is more than I can bear.
Hans Pekk, son of Eerik, Estonian peasant
Aliide Truu stared at the fly, and the fly stared back. Its eyes bulged and Aliide felt sick to her stomach. A blowfly. Unusually large, loud, and eager to lay its eggs. It was lying in wait to get into the kitchen, rubbing its wings and feet against the curtain as if preparing to feast. It was after meat, nothing else but meat. The jam and all the other canned goods were safe-but that meat. The kitchen door was closed. The fly was waiting. Waiting for Aliide to tire of chasing it around the room, to give up, open the kitchen door. The flyswatter struck the curtain. The curtain fluttered, the lace flowers crumpled, and carnations flashed outside the window, but the fly got away and was strutting on the window frame, safely above Aliide’s head. Self-control! That’s what Aliide needed now, to keep her hand steady.
The fly had woken her up in the morning by walking across her forehead, as carefree as if she were a highway, contemptuously baiting her. She had pushed aside the covers and hurried to close the door to the kitchen, which the fly hadn’t yet thought to slip through. Stupid fly. Stupid and loathsome.
Aliide’s hand clenched the worn, smooth handle of the flyswatter, and she swung it again. Its cracked leather hit the glass, the glass shook, the curtain clips jangled, and the wool string that held up the curtains sagged behind the valance, but the fly escaped again, mocking her. In spite of the fact that Aliide had been trying for more than an an hour to do away with it, the fly had beaten her in every attack, and now it was flying next to the ceiling with a greasy buzz. A disgusting blowfly from the sewer drain. She’d get it yet. She would rest a bit, then do away with it and concentrate on listening to the radio and canning. The raspberries were waiting, and the tomatoes-juicy, ripe tomatoes. The harvest had been exceptionally good this year.
Aliide straightened the drapes. The rainy yard was sniveling gray; the limbs of the birch trees trembled wet, leaves flattened by the rain, blades of grass swaying, with drops of water dripping from their tips. And there was something underneath them. A mound of something. Aliide drew away, behind the shelter of the curtain. She peeked out again, pulled the lace curtain in front of her so that she couldn’t be seen from the yard, and held her breath. Her gaze bypassed the fly specks on the glass and focused on the lawn in front of the birch tree that had been split by lightning.
The mound wasn’t moving and there was nothing familiar about it except its size. Her neighbor Aino had once seen a light above the same birch tree when she was on her way to Aliide’s house, and she hadn’t dared come all the way there, instead returning home to call Aliide and ask if everything was all right, if there had been a UFO in Aliide’s yard. Aliide hadn’t noticed anything unusual, but Aino had been sure that the UFOs were in front of Aliide’s house, and at Meelis’s house, too. Meelis had talked about nothing but UFOs after that. The mound looked like it came from this world, however-it was darkened by rain, it fit into the terrain, it was the size of a person. Maybe some drunk from the village had passed out in her yard. But wouldn’t she have heard if someone were making a racket under her window? Aliide’s ears were still sharp. And she could smell old liquor fumes even through walls. A while ago a bunch of drunks from the next house over had driven out on a tractor with some stolen gasoline, and you couldn’t help but notice the noise. They had driven through her ditch several times and almost taken her fence with them. There was nothing but UFOs, old men, and dim-witted hooligans around here anymore. Her neighbor Aino had come to spend the night at her house numerous times when those boys’ goings-on got too crazy. Aino knew that Aliide wasn’t afraid of them- she’d stand up to them if she had to.
Aliide put the flyswatter that her father had made on the table and crept to the kitchen door, took hold of the latch, but then remembered the fly. It was quiet now. It was waiting for Aliide to open the kitchen door. She went back to the window. The mound was still in the yard, in the same position as before. It looked like a person-she could make out the light hair against the grass. Was it even alive? Aliide’s chest tightened; her heart started to thump in its sack. Should she go out to the yard? Or would that be stupid, rash? Was the mound a thief’s trick? No, no, it couldn’t be. She hadn’t been lured to the window, no one had knocked at the front door. If it weren’t for the fly, she wouldn’t even have noticed it before it was gone. But still. The fly was quiet. She listened. The loud hum of the refrigerator blotted out the silence of the barn that seeped through from the other side of the food pantry. She couldn’t hear the familiar buzz. Maybe the fly had stayed in the other room. Aliide lit the stove, filled the teakettle, and switched on the radio. They were talking about the presidential elections and in a moment would be the more important weather report. Aliide wanted to spend the day inside, but the mound, visible out of the corner of her eye through the kitchen window, disturbed her. It looked the same as it had from the bedroom window, just as much like a person, and it didn’t seem to be going anywhere on its own. Aliide turned off the radio and went back to the window. It was quiet, the way it’s quiet in late summer in a dying Estonian village-a neighbor’s rooster crowed, that was all. The silence had been peculiar that year-expectant, yet at the same time like the aftermath of a storm. There was something similar in the posture of Aliide’s grass, overgrown, sticking to the windowpane. It was wet and mute, placid.
She scratched at her gold tooth, poked at the gap between her teeth with her fingernail-there was something stuck there-and listened, but all she heard was the scrape of her nail against bone, and suddenly she felt it, a shiver up her back. She stopped digging between her teeth and focused on the mound. The specks on the window annoyed her. She wiped at them with a gauze rag, threw the rag in the dishpan, took her coat from the rack and put it on, remembered her handbag on the table and snapped it up, looked around for a good place to hide it, and shoved it in the cupboard with the dishes. On top of the cupboard was a bottle of Finnish deodorant. She hid that away, too, and even put the lid on the sugar bowl, out of which peeped Imperial Leather soap. Only then did she turn the key silently in the lock of the inner door and push it open. She stopped in the entryway, picked up the juniper pitchfork handle that served as a walking stick, but exchanged it for a machine-made city stick, put that down, too, and chose a scythe from among the tools in the entryway. She leaned it against the wall for a moment, smoothed her hair, adjusted a hairpin, tucked her hair neatly behind her ears, took hold of the scythe again, moved the curtain away from the front of the door, turned the latch, and stepped outside.
The mound was lying in the same spot under the birch tree. Aliide moved closer, keeping her eye on the mound but also keeping an eye out for any others. It was a girl. Muddy, ragged, and bedraggled, but a girl nevertheless. A completely unknown girl. A flesh-and-blood person, not some omen of the future, sent from heaven. Her red-lacquered fingernails were in shreds. Her eye makeup had run down her cheeks and her curls were half straightened; there were little blobs of hairspray in them, and a few silver willow leaves stuck to them. Her hair was bleached until it was coarse, and had greasy, dark roots. But under the dirt her skin seemed overripe, her cheek white, transparent. Tatters of skin were torn from her dry lower lip, and between them the lip swelled tomato red, unnaturally bright and bloody-looking, making the grime look like a coating, something to be wiped off like the cold, waxy surface of an apple. Purple had collected in the folds of her eyelids, and her black, translucent stockings had runs in them. They didn’t bag at the knees-they were tight-knit, good stockings. Definitely Western. The knit shone in spite of the mud. One shoe had fallen off and lay on the ground. It was a bedroom slipper, worn at the heel, with a flannel lining rubbed to gray pills. The binding along the edge was decorated with dog-eared patent-leather rickrack and a pair of nickel rivets. Aliide had once had a pair just like them. The rickrack had been pink when it was new, and it looked sweet; the lining was soft and pink like the side of a new pig. It was a Soviet slipper. The dress? Western. The tricot was too good to come from over on the other side. You couldn’t get them anywhere but in the West. The last time her daughter Talvi had come back from Finland she had had one like it, with a broad belt. Talvi had said that it was in style, and she certainly knew about fashion. Aino got a similar one from the church care package, although it was no use to her- but after all, it was free. The Finns had enough clothes that they even threw new ones away into the collection bin. The package had also contained a Windbreaker and some T-shirts. Soon it would be time to pick up another one. But this girl’s dress was really too handsome to be from a care package. And she wasn’t from around here.
There was a flashlight next to her head. And a muddy map.
Her mouth was open, and as she leaned closer, Aliide could see her teeth. They were too white. The gaps between her white teeth formed a line of gray spots.
Her eyes twitched under their lids.
Aliide poked the girl with the end of the scythe, but there was no movement. Yoo-hoos didn’t get any flicker from the girl’s eyelids, neither did pinching. Aliide fetched some rainwater from the foot washbasin and sprinkled her with it. The girl curled up in a fetal position and covered her head with her hands. Her mouth opened in a yell, but only a whisper came out:
“No. No water. No more.”
Then her eyes blinked open and she sat bolt upright. Aliide moved away, just to be safe. The girl’s mouth was still open. She stared in Aliide’s direction, but her hysterical gaze didn’t seem to register her. It didn’t register anything. Aliide kept assuring her that everything was all right, in the soothing voice you use with restless animals. There was no comprehension in the girl’s eyes, but there was something familiar about her gaping mouth. The girl herself wasn’t familiar, but the way she behaved was, the way her expressions quivered under her waxlike skin, not reaching the surface, and the way her body was wary in spite of her vacant demeanor. She needed a doctor, that was clear. Aliide didn’t want to attempt to take care of her herself-a stranger, in such questionable circumstances-so she suggested they call a doctor.
“No!”
Her voice sounded certain, although her gaze was still unfocused. A pause followed the shriek, and a string of words ran together immediately after, saying that she hadn’t done anything, that there was no need to call anyone on her account. The words jostled one another, beginnings of words were tangled up with endings, and the accent was Russian.
The girl was Russian. An Estonian-speaking Russian.
Aliide stepped farther back.
She ought to get a new dog. Or two.
The freshly sharpened blade of the scythe shone, although the rain-dampened light was gray.
Sweat rose on Aliide’s upper lip.
The girl’s eyes started to focus, first on the ground, on one leaf of plantain weed, then another, slowly moving farther away to the rocks at the edge of the flower bed, to the pump, and the basin under the pump. Then her gaze moved back to her own lap, to her hands, stopped there, then slid up to the butt end of Aliide’s scythe, but didn’t go any higher, instead returning to her hands, the scratch marks on the backs of her hands, her shredded fingernails. She seemed to be examining her own limbs, perhaps counting them, arm and wrist and hand, all the fingers in place, then going through the same thing with the other hand, then her slipperless toes, her foot, ankle, lower leg, knee, thigh. Her gaze didn’t reach to her hips-it shifted suddenly to the other foot and slipper. She reached her hand toward the slipper, slowly picked it up, and put it on her foot. The slipper squooshed. She pulled her foot toward her with the slipper on it and slowly felt her ankle, not like a person who suspects that her ankle is sprained or broken, but like someone who can’t remember what shape her ankle normally is, or like a blind person feeling an unknown thing. She finally managed to get up, but still didn’t look Aliide in the face. When she got firmly to her feet, she touched her hair and brushed it toward her face, although it was wet and slimy-looking, pulling it in front of her like tattered curtains in an abandoned house where there was no life to be concealed.
Aliide tightened her grip on the scythe. Maybe the girl was crazy. Maybe she had escaped from somewhere. You never know. Maybe she was just confused, maybe something had happened that caused her to be like that. Or maybe it was that she was in fact a decoy for a Russian criminal gang.
The girl sat herself up on the bench under the birch tree. The wind washed the branches against her, but she didn’t try to avoid them, even though flapping leaves slapped against her face. “Move away from those branches.”
Surprise flickered across the girl’s cheeks. Surprise mixed with something else-she looked like she was remembering something. That you can get out of the way of leaves that are lashing at you? Aliide squinted. Crazy.
The girl slumped away from the branches. Her fingers clung to the edge of the bench like she was trying to prevent herself from falling. There was a whetstone lying next to her hand. Hopefully she wasn’t someone who would anger easily and start throwing rocks and whetstones. Maybe Aliide shouldn’t make her nervous. She should be careful. “Now where exactly did you come from?”
The girl opened her mouth several times before any speech came out-groping sentences about Tallinn and a car. The words ran together like they had before, connecting to one another in the wrong places, linking up prematurely, and they started to tickle strangely in Aliide’s ear. It wasn’t the girl’s speech or her Russian accent; it was something else- there was something strange about her Estonian. Although the girl, with her dirty young skin, belonged to today, her sentences were awkward; they came from a world of brittle paper, moldy old albums emptied of pictures. Aliide removed a hairpin from her head and shoved it into her ear canal, turned it, took it out, and put it back in her hair. The tickle remained. She had a flashing thought: The girl wasn’t from anywhere around here-maybe not from Estonia at all. But what foreigner would know this kind of provincial language? The village priest was a Finn who spoke Estonian. He had studied the language when he came here to work, and he knew it well, wrote all his sermons and eulogies in Estonian, and no one even bothered to complain about the shortage of Estonian priests anymore. But this girl’s Estonian had a different flavor, something older, yellow and moth-eaten. There was a strange smell of death in it.
From the slow sentences it became clear that the girl was on her way to Tallinn in a car with someone and had got into a fight with this someone, and the someone had hit her, and she had run away. “Who were you with?” Aliide finally asked.
The girl’s lips trembled a moment before she mumbled that she had been traveling with her husband.
Her husband? So she was married? Or was she a decoy for thieves? For a criminal decoy, she was rather incoherent. Or was that the idea, to arouse sympathy? That no one would close their door on a poor girl in the state she was in? Were the thieves after Aliide’s belongings or something in the woods? They’d been taking everyone’s wood and sending it to the West, and Aliide’s land restitution case wasn’t even close to completion, although there shouldn’t have been any problem with it. Old Mihkel in the village had ended up in court when he shot some men who had come to cut trees on his land. He hadn’t gotten in much trouble for it-there had been some surreptitious coughing and the court had taken the hint. Mihkel’s process to get his land back had been only half completed when the Finnish logging machinery suddenly appeared and started to cut down his trees. The police hadn’t meddled in the matter- after all, how could they protect one man’s woods all night, especially if he didn’t even officially own them? So the woods just disappeared, and in the end Mihkel shot a couple of the thieves. Anything was possible in this country right now- but nobody was going to cut trees on Mihkel’s land without permission anymore.
The village dogs started to bark, the girl startled and tried to peek through the chain-link fence into the road, but she didn’t look toward the woods.
“Who were you with?” Aliide repeated.
The girl licked her lips, peered at Aliide and at the fence, and started rolling up her sleeves. Her movements were clumsy-but considering her condition and her story, graceful enough. Her mottled arms were revealed and she stretched them toward Aliide as if in proof of what she was saying, at the same time turning her head toward the fence to hide it.
Aliide shuddered. The girl was definitely trying to elicit sympathy-maybe she wanted inside the house to see if there was anything to be stolen. They were real bruises, though. Nevertheless, Aliide said:
“Those look old. They look like old bruises.”
The freshness of the marks and their bloodiness brought more sweat to Aliide’s upper lip. The bruises were covered up again, and there was silence. That’s the way it always went. Maybe the girl noticed Aliide’s distress, because she pulled the fabric over the bruises with a sudden, jerky movement, as if she hadn’t realized until that moment the shame in revealing them, and she said anxiously, looking toward the fence, that it had been dark and she hadn’t known where she was, she just ran and ran. The broken sentences ended with her assuring Aliide that she was already leaving. She wouldn’t stay there to trouble her.
“Wait right there,” Aliide said. “I’ll bring some valerian and water.” She went toward the house and glanced at the girl again from the doorway. She was perched motionless on the bench. It was clear she was afraid. You could smell the fear from a long way off. Aliide noticed herself starting to breathe through her mouth. If the girl was a decoy, she was afraid of the people who sent her here. Maybe Aliide should be, too-maybe she should take the girl’s trembling hands as a sign that she should lock the door and stay inside, keep the girl out, come what may, just so she would go away and leave an old person in peace. Just so she wouldn’t stay here spreading the repulsive, familiar smell of fear. Maybe there was some gang about, going through all the houses. Maybe she should call and ask. Or had the girl come to her house specifically? Had someone heard that Talvi was coming from Finland to visit? But that wasn’t a big deal as it used to be.
In the kitchen, Aliide ladled water into a mug and mixed in a few drops of valerian. She could see the girl from the window-she hadn’t moved at all. Aliide took some valerian herself, and a spoonful of heart medicine, although it wasn’t mealtime, then went back outside and offered the mug. The girl took it, sniffed at it carefully, set it down on the ground, pushed it over, and peered at the liquid as it sank into the earth. Aliide felt annoyed. Was water not good enough?
The girl assured her to the contrary, but she wanted to know what Aliide had put in it.
“Just valerian.”
The girl didn’t say anything.
“Do I have any reason to lie to you?”
The girl glanced at Aliide. There was something canny in her expression. It troubled Aliide, but she fetched another mug of water and the valerian bottle from the kitchen, and gave them to the girl, who was satisfied once she had smelled it that it was just water, seemed to recognize the valerian, and poured a few drops into the mug. Aliide was annoyed. Was the girl teasing her? Maybe she was just plain crazy. Escaped from the hospital. Aliide remembered a woman who got out of Koluvere, got an evening gown from the free box, and went running through the village spitting on strangers as they passed by.
“So the water’s all right?”
The girl gulped too eagerly, and liquid streamed down her chin.
“A moment ago I tried to rouse you and you yelled, ‘No water.’ ”
The girl clearly didn’t remember, but her earlier sobs still echoed in Aliide’s head, reverberating from one side of her skull to the other, spinning back and forth, beckoning to something much older. When a person’s head has been pushed under the water enough times, the sound they let out is surprisingly consistent. That familiar sound was in the girl’s voice. A sputtering, without end, hopeless. Aliide’s hand fought with her. She was aching to slap the girl. Be quiet. Beat it. Get lost. But maybe she was wrong. Maybe the girl had just gone swimming once and nearly drowned- maybe that’s why she was afraid of water. Maybe Aliide was letting her imagination run away with her, making connections where there weren’t any. Maybe the girl’s yellowed, time-eaten language had got Aliide thinking of her own.
“Hungry? Are you hungry?”
The girl looked like she hadn’t understood the question or like she had never been asked such a thing.
“Wait here,” Aliide commanded, and went inside again, closing the door behind her. She soon returned with black bread and a dish of butter. She had hesitated about the butter for a moment but had decided to bring it with her. She shouldn’t be so stingy that she couldn’t spare a little dab for the girl. A very good decoy, indeed, to take in someone like Aliide, who had seen it all, and so easily. The compulsive ache in Aliide’s hand spread to her shoulder. She held on to the butter plate too tightly, to restrain her desire to strike.
The mud-stained map was no longer on the grass. The girl must have put it in her pocket.
The first slice of bread disappeared into the girl’s mouth whole. It wasn’t until the third that she had the patience to put butter on it, and even then she did it in a panic, shoving a heap of it into the middle of the slice, then folding it in half and pressing it together to spread the butter in between, and taking a bite. A crow cawed on the gate, dogs barked in the village, but the girl was so focused on the bread that the sounds didn’t make her flinch like they had before. Aliide’s galoshes were shining like good polished boots. The dew was rising over her feet from the damp grass.
“Well, what now? What about your husband? Is he after you?” Aliide asked, watching her closely as she ate. It was genuine hunger. But that fear. Was it only her husband she was afraid of?
“He is after me. My husband is.”
“Why don’t you call your mother, have her come and get you? Or let her know where you are?”
The girl shook her head.
“Well, call some friend, then. Or some other family member.”
She shook her head again, more violently than before.
“Then call someone who won’t tell your husband where you are.”
More shakes of the head. Her dirty hair flew away from her face. She combed it back in place and looked more clearheaded than crazy, in spite of her incessant cringing. There was no glimmer of insanity in her eyes, although she peered obliquely from under her brow all the time.
“I can’t take you anywhere. Even if I had a car, there’s no gas here. There’s a bus from the village once a day, but it’s not reliable.”
The girl assured her she would be leaving soon.
“Where will you go? Back to your husband?”
“No!”
“Then where?”
The girl poked her slipper at the stones in the flower bed in front of the bench. Her chin was nearly on her breast.
“Zara.”
Aliide was taken aback. It was an introduction.
“Aliide Truu.”
The girl stopped poking at the stone. She had grabbed hold of the edge of the bench after she’d eaten, and now she loosened her grip. Her head rose a little.
“Nice to meet you.”
Aliide. Aliide Truu. Zara’s hands let go of the bench. Aliide Truu was alive and standing in front of her. Aliide Truu lived in this house. The situation felt as strange as the language in Zara’s mouth. She dimly remembered how she had managed to find the right road and the silver willows on the road, but she couldn’t remember if she had realized that she had found it, or whether she had stood in front of the door during the night, not knowing what to do, or decided that she would wait until the morning, so she wouldn’t frighten anyone by coming as a stranger during the night, or whether she had tried to go into the stable to sleep, or looked in the kitchen window, not daring to knock on the door, or if she had even thought of knocking on the door, or thought of anything. When she tried to remember, she felt a stabbing in her head, so she concentrated on the present moment. She didn’t have any plan ready for how to behave when she got here, much less for when she met the woman she was looking for here in the yard, Aliide Truu. She hadn’t had time to think that far. Now she just had to try to make her way forward, to calm her feeling of panic, although it was waiting to break out and grab her at any moment-she had to stop thinking about Pasha and Lavrenti, she had to dare to be in the present moment, meeting Aliide Truu. She had to pull herself together. She had to be brave. To remember how to behave with other people, to think up an attitude toward the woman standing in front of her. The woman’s face was made of small wrinkles and delicate bones, but there was no expression in it. Her earlobes were elongated, and stones embedded in gold hung from them on hooks. They reflected red. Her irises seemed gray or blue gray, her eyes watery, but Zara hardly dared to look higher than her nose. Aliide was smaller than she had expected, downright skinny. The aroma of garlic wafted from her on the wind.
There wasn’t much time. Pasha and Lavrenti would find her, she had no doubt of that. But here was Aliide Truu, and here was the house. Would the woman agree to help? Zara had to make her understand the situation quickly, but she didn’t know what to say. Her head rang empty, although the bread had cleared her thoughts. Mascara tickled her eyes, her stockings were wrecked, she smelled. It had been stupid to show her the bruises-now she thought that Zara was the kind of girl who brings misfortune on herself or asks to be beaten. A girl who had done something wrong. And what if the old woman was like the babushka that Katia had told her about, or like Oksanka, who did work for men like Pasha, sending girls to the city for men like him. There was no way of knowing. Somewhere in the back of her mind there was mocking laughter, and it was Pasha’s voice, and it reminded her that a girl as stupid as she was would never make it on her own. A stupid girl like her was only fit to have the stuttering, slovenliness, smelliness beat out of her- a girl that stupid deserved to be drowned in the sink, because she was hopelessly stupid and hopelessly ugly.
It was awkward the way Aliide Truu kept looking at her, leaning on her scythe, chattering about the closing of the kolkhoz commune, as if Zara were an old acquaintance who had stopped by to chat about nothing in particular.
“There aren’t a terrible lot of visitors around here anymore,” Aliide said, and started to tally up the houses whose young people had moved away. “Everybody left Kokka to build houses for the Finns, and all the children from Roosna left to start businesses in Tallinn. The Voorels’ boy got into politics and disappeared somewhere in Tallinn. Someone should call them and tell them that they passed a law that says you can’t just up and leave the countryside. How are we supposed to even get a roof fixed around here, if there aren’t any workmen? And is it any wonder that the men don’t stay, when there aren’t any women? And there aren’t any women, because there are no businessmen. And when all the women want is businessmen and foreigners, who’s going to want a working man? The West Kaluri fishing commune sent its own variety show to perform in Finland, in Hanko, their sister city, and it was a successful trip, the Finns were lining up for tickets. Then, when the group came home, the director gave an invitation to all the young men and pretty girls to come dance the cancan for the Finns- right in the newspaper. The cancan!”
Zara nodded-she strongly agreed-as she scratched the polish off of her fingernails. Yes, everyone was just running after dollars and Finnish markka, and yes, there used to be work for everyone, and yes, everyone was a thief nowadays, pretending to be a businessman. Zara started to feel cold, and the stiffness spread to her cheeks and tongue, which made her already-slow and hesitant speech still more difficult. Her damp clothes made her shiver. She didn’t dare to look directly at Aliide, she just glanced in her direction. What was she driving at? They chatted as if the situation were an utterly normal one. Her head wasn’t spinning quite so badly now. Zara pushed her hair behind her ears, as if to hear better, and lifted her chin. Her skin felt sticky, her voice felt stiff, her nose trembled, her armpits and groin were filthy, but she managed to laugh lightly nevertheless. She tried to reproduce the voice she had sometimes used a long time ago when she ran into an old acquaintance on the street or in a shop. A voice that felt far away and strange, completely unfitted to the body that it came from. It reminded her of a world she didn’t belong to, a home she could never return to.
Aliide swung the scythe northward and moved on to roof-tile thieves. You had to be on the lookout day and night just to keep a roof over your head. The Moisios had even had their stairs stolen, and the rails from the railroad tracks-the only material available was wood, because everything else had been stolen. And the rise in prices! Kersti Lillemäki said that prices like this were a sign of the end of the world.
And then, in the middle of this chitchat, came a surprising question:
“What about you? Do you have a job? What line of work are those clothes for?”
Zara panicked again. She realized that she needed an explanation for her ragged appearance, but what could it be? Why hadn’t she already thought of it? Her thoughts dashed away from her like long-legged animals, impossible to catch. Every species of lie deserted her, emptied her head, emptied her eyes and ears. She desperately wrestled a few words into a sentence, said she had been a waitress, and as she looked at her legs she remembered her Western clothes and added that she had been working in Canada. Aliide raised her eyebrows.
“So far away. Did you earn good money?”
Zara nodded, trying to think of something more to say. When she nodded, her teeth started to chatter and closed like a trap. Her mouth was full of phlegm and dirty teeth, but not one sensible word. She wished the woman would stop questioning her. But Aliide wanted to know what Zara was doing here if she had such a good job in Canada.
Zara took a breath, said she had come with her husband on vacation to Tallinn. The sentence came out well. It followed the same rhythm as Aliide’s speech. She was already starting to get the hang of it. But what about her story? What would be an appropriate story for her? The beginning of the story she had just made up was struggling to get away, and Zara’s mind lunged after it and grabbed it by the paws. Stay here. Help me. Bit by bit, word by word, give me a story. A good story. Give me the kind of story that will make her let me stay here and not call someone to come and take me away.
“What about your husband? Was he in Canada, too?”
“Yes.”
“And the two of you are on vacation?”
“That’s right.”
“Where did you plan to go from here?”
Zara filled her lungs with air and succeeded in saying in one breath that she didn’t know. And that a lack of funds had made matters a little difficult. She shouldn’t have said that. Now, of course, Aliide would think she was after her wallet. The trap sprang open. Her story escaped. The good beginning slipped away. Now Aliide would never let her inside, and nothing would ever come of any of it. Zara tried to think of something, but all her thoughts were dashing away as soon as they were born. She had to tell her something-if not her story, then something else- anything. She searched for something to say about the molehills that stretched in a row from the end of the house, the tar-paper roofs of the bees’ nests peeking between apple trees heavy with fruit, the grindstone standing on the other side of the gate, the plantain weed under her feet. She searched for something to say like a hungry animal searching for prey, but everything slipped loose from the dull stubs of her teeth. Soon Aliide would notice her panic, and when that happened, Aliide would think, There’s something not right about this girl, and then it would all be over, everything ruined, Zara just as stupid as Pasha said she was, always ruining everything, a stupid girl, a hopeless idiot.
Zara glanced at Aliide, although she no longer had even her hair as a curtain between them. Aliide gave her body a once-over. Zara’s skin was filthy with mud and dirt. What she needed was some soap.
Aliide told the girl to sit down on a wobbly kitchen chair. She obeyed. Her gaze wandered and came to rest on the tin of salt left between the windowpanes over the winter, as if it were a great wonder to her.
“The salt absorbs moisture. So the windows don’t fog up in the cold.”
Aliide spoke slowly. She wasn’t sure if the girl’s mind was working at full power. Although she had recovered a little outside, she’d put her slipper in the door so warily, as though the floor were made of ice that wasn’t sure to hold her, and when she made it to the chair she was more withdrawn and huddled than she’d been in the yard. Aliide’s instincts told her not to let the girl inside, but she seemed to be in such a bad state that there was no other choice. The girl was startled again when she leaned back and the kitchen curtain brushed against her arm. The flinch made her lean forward again, and the chair swayed, and she had to fumble to keep her balance. Her slipper hissed against the floor. When the chair steadied, her foot stopped swinging and she grabbed the edge of the seat. She tucked her feet under her, then wrapped her arms around her sides and drooping shoulders.
“Lemme get you something dry to put on.”
Aliide left the door to the front room open and dug through the few housedresses and slips in the wardrobe. The girl didn’t move, she just perched on the chair chewing her lower lip. Her expression had sunk back into what it had been in the beginning. Aliide felt revulsion well up in her. The girl would leave soon, but not before they figured out where to send her and gave her a little medicine. They weren’t going to sit there waiting for another visitor-the girl’s husband or whoever it was that was after her. If she wasn’t thieves’ bait, then whose bait was she? The boys in the village? Would they do something that elaborate? And why? Just to torment her, or was there something else behind it? But the village boys definitely wouldn’t use a Russian girl- never.
When Aliide went back into the kitchen, the girl heaved her shoulders and head and turned toward her. Her eyes looked away. She wouldn’t accept the clothes, said she only wanted some pants.
“Pants? I don’t have any except for sweatpants, and they’d need to be washed, for sure.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“I wear them to work outside.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“All right!”
Aliide went to look for the Marat pants hanging from the coatrack in the entryway, at the same time straightening her own underwear. She was wearing two pairs, as usual, as she had every day since that night at town hall. She had also tried men’s breeches sometimes. They had briefly made her feel safer. More protected. But women didn’t wear long pants back then. Later on, women appeared in pants even in the village, but by that time she was so used to two pairs of underwear that she didn’t hanker after long pants. But why would a girl in a Western dress want a pair of Maratbrand sweatpants?
“These were made after Marat got those Japanese knitting machines,” Aliide said, and laughed, coming back into the kitchen. After a tiny pause, the girl let out a giggle. It was a brief giggle, and she swallowed it immediately, the way people do when they don’t get the joke but they don’t dare or don’t want to admit it, so they laugh along. Or maybe it wasn’t a joke to her. Maybe she was so young that she didn’t remember what Marat knits were like before the new machines. Or maybe Aliide was right in guessing that the girl wasn’t Estonian at all.
“We’ll wash and mend your dress later.”
“No!”
“Why not? It’s an expensive dress.”
The girl snatched the pants from Aliide, peeled off her stockings, pulled on the Marats, tore off her dress, slipped on Aliide’s housedress in its place, and before Aliide could stop her, threw her dress and stockings into the stove. The map fluttered onto the rug. The girl snapped it up and threw it into the fire with the clothes.
“Zara, there’s nothing to worry about.”
The girl stood in front of the stove as if to shelter the burning clothes. The housedress was buttoned crooked.
“How about a bath? I’ll put some water on to warm,” Aliide said. “There’s nothing to worry about.”
Aliide came toward the stove slowly. The girl didn’t move. Her panicked eyes flickered. Aliide poured the kettle full, took hold of the girl’s hand and led her to the chair, set a hot glass of tea on the table in front of her, and went back to the stove. The girl turned to watch her movements.
“Let them burn,” Aliide said.
The girls eyebrow was no longer twitching. She started to scratch at her nail polish, concentrating on each finger one by one. Did it calm her down? Aliide fetched a bowl of tomatoes from the pantry and put it on the table, glanced at the loaded mousetrap beside the pile of cucumbers, and inspected her recipe book and the jars of mixed vegetables she’d left on the counter to cool.
“I’m about to can tomatoes. And the raspberries from yesterday. Shall we see what’s on the radio?”
The girl grabbed a magazine and rustled it loudly against the oilcloth. The glass of tea spilled over the magazine, the girl was frightened, and she jumped away from the table, stared at the glass and at Aliide in turn, and started to rapidly apologize for the mess, but messed up the words, then nervously tried to clean it up, looking for a cloth, then wiping the floor, the glass, and the legs of the table, and patting the already-ragged kitchen mat dry.
“It’s all right.”
The girl’s panic didn’t subside, and Aliide had to calm her down again-it’s all right, there’s nothing to worry about, just calm down, it’s just a glass of tea, let it be, why don’t you fetch the washtub from the back room, there should be enough warm water now. The girl dashed off quickly, still looking apologetic, brought the zinc tub clattering into the kitchen, and rushed between the stove and the tub carrying hot water and then cold water to add to it. She kept her gaze toward the floor; her cheeks were red, her movements conciliatory and smooth. Aliide watched her at work. An unusually well-trained girl. Good training like that took a hefty dose of fear. Aliide felt sorry for her, and as she handed her a linen towel decorated with Lihula patterns, she held the girl’s hands in her own for a moment. The girl flinched again; her fingers curled up and she pulled her hand away, but Aliide wouldn’t let her go. She felt like petting the girl’s hair, but she seemed too averse to being touched, so Aliide just repeated that there was nothing to worry about. She should just calmly get in the bath, then put on some dry clothes, and have something to drink. Maybe a glass of cold, strong sugar water. How about if she mixed some up right now?
The girl’s fingers straightened. Her fright started to ease, her body settled. Aliide carefully loosened the girl’s hand from her own and mixed up some soothing sugar water. The girl drank it, the glass trembled, a swirling storm of sugar crystals. Aliide encouraged her to get into the bath, but she wouldn’t budge until Aliide agreed to wait in the front room. She left the door ajar and heard the water splashing, and now and then a small, childlike sigh.
The girl didn’t know how to read Estonian. She could speak but not read. That’s why she had flipped through the magazine so nervously and knocked over her glass-maybe on purpose, to keep Aliide from seeing that she was illiterate.
Aliide peeked through the crack in the door. The girl’s bruised body sprawled in the tub. The tangled hair at her temples stuck out like an extra, listening ear.
One day, a black Volga pulled up in front of Zara’s house. Zara was standing on the steps when the car stopped, the door of the Volga opened, and a foot clothed in a shiny stocking emerged and touched the ground. At first Zara was afraid-why was there a black Volga in front of their house?- but she forgot her fright when the sun hit Oksanka’s lower leg. The babushkas got quiet on the bench beside the house and stared at the shining metal of the car and the glistening leg. Zara had never seen anything like it; it was the color of skin; it didn’t look anything like a stocking. Maybe it wasn’t a stocking at all. But the light gleamed on the surface of the leg in such a way that there had to be something there-it wasn’t just a naked leg. It looked as if it had a halo, like the Virgin Mary, Mother of God, gilded with light at the edges. The leg ended in an ankle and a high-heeled shoe-and what a shoe! The heel was narrow in the middle, like a slender hourglass. She’d seen Madame de Pompadour wearing shoes like that in old art-history books, but the shoe that emerged from the car was taller and more delicate, with a slightly tapered toe. When the shoe was set down on the dusty road and the heel landed on a stone, she heard a tearing sound all the way from the porch. Then the rest of the woman got out of the car. Oksanka.
Two men in black leather coats with thick gold chains around their necks got out of the front of the car. They didn’t say anything, just stood beside the car staring at Oksanka. And there was plenty to stare at. She was beautiful. Zara hadn’t seen her old friend in a long time, not since she’d moved to Moscow to go to the university. She had received a few cards from her and then a letter that said that she was going to work in Germany. After that she hadn’t heard from her at all until this moment. The transformation was amazing. Oksanka’s lips glimmered like someone’s in a Western magazine, and she had on a light brown fox stole, not the color of fox but more like coffee and milk-or were there foxes that color?
Oksanka came toward the front door, and when she saw Zara she stopped and waved. Actually it looked more like she was scraping at the air with her red fingernails. Her fingers were slightly curled, as if she were ready to scratch. The babushkas turned to look at Zara. One of them pulled her scarf closer around her head. Another pulled her walking stick between her legs. A third took hold of her walking stick in both hands.
The horn of the Volga tooted.
Oksanka approached Zara. She came up the stairs smiling, the sun played against her clean, white teeth, and she reached out her taloned hands in an embrace. The fox stole touched Zara’s cheek. Its glass eyes looked at her, and she looked back. The look seemed familiar. She thought for a moment, then realized that her grandmother’s eyes sometimes looked like that.
“I’ve missed you so much,” Oksanka whispered. A sticky shine spilled over her lips and it looked like it was difficult to part them, as if she had to tear her mouth unglued whenever she opened it.
The wind fluttered a curl of Oksanka’s hair against her lips, she flicked it away, and the curl brushed her cheek and left a red streak there. There were similar streaks on her neck. It looked like she’d been hit with a switch. As Oksanka squeezed her hand, Zara felt her fingernails, little stabs into her skin.
“You need to go to the salon, honey,” Oksanka said with a laugh, rumpling her hair. “A new color and a decent style!”
Zara didn’t say anything.
“Oh yeah-I remember what the hairdressers are like here. Maybe it would be best if you didn’t let them touch your hair.” She laughed again. “Let’s have some tea.”
Zara took Oksanka inside. The communal kitchen went quiet as they walked through. The floor creaked, women came to the door to watch them. Zara’s down-at-the-heel slippers squeaked as she walked over the sand and sunflower seed shells. The women’s eyes made her back tingle.
She let Oksanka into the apartment and closed the door behind her. In the dim room, Oksanka shone like a shooting star. Her earrings flashed like cat’s eyes. Zara pulled the sleeves of her housecoat over the reddened backs of her hands.
Grandmother’s eyes didn’t move. She sat in her usual place, staring out the window. Her head looked black against the incoming light. Grandmother never left that one chair, she just looked out the window without speaking, day and night. Everyone had always been a little afraid of Grandmother, even Zara’s father, although he was drunk all the time. Then he had faded and died and Zara’s mother had moved with Zara back to Grandmother’s house. Grandmother had never liked him and always called him tibla- Russian trash. But Oksanka was used to Grandmother and clattered over to greet her immediately, took her hand, and chatted pleasantly with her. Grandmother may have even laughed. When Zara began to clear the table, Oksanka dug through her purse and found a chocolate bar that sparkled as much as she did and gave it to Grandmother. Zara put the heating coil in the kettle. Oksanka came up beside her and handed her a plastic bag.
“There are all kinds of little things in here.”
Zara hesitated. The bag looked heavy.
“Just take it. No, wait a minute,” Oksanka pulled a bottle from the bag. “This is gin. Has your grandmother ever had anything like gin? Maybe it would be a new experience for her.”
She grabbed some schnapps glasses from the shelf, filled them, and took a glass to Grandmother. Grandmother sniffed at the drink, grinned, laughed, and dashed the contents into her mouth. Zara followed suit. An acrid burning spread through her throat.
“Gin is what they make gin and tonics from. We make quite a lot of them for our customers.” Then she pretended to bustle about with a tray and put drinks on the table, and said in English, “Vould you like to have something else, sir? Another gin tonic, sir? Noch einen?” Her boisterousness was contagious. Zara made as if to tip her, nodded approvingly at the drink she offered, and giggled at her silliness, just like they used to do.
“I made you laugh,” Oksanka said, and sat down breathless after her antics. “We used to laugh a lot, remember?”
Zara nodded. The coil in the kettle started to form bubbles. Zara waited for the water to boil, took out the coil, got a tin of tea from the shelf, poured water into the pot over the tea leaves, and carried the cups to the table. Oksanka could have warned them that she was coming to visit. She could have sent a card or something. That way Zara would have had time to get something to offer her that would impress her, and she could have come to meet her wearing something other than a housecoat and an old pair of slippers.
Oksanka sat down at the table and adjusted her stole on the back of the chair so that the fox’s head was on her shoulder and the rest of the stole wrapped around the arm of the chair.
“These are real,” she said, tapping at her earrings with a fingernail. “Real diamonds. See how well I’m doin’ in the West, Zara? Didja notice my teeth?” She flashed a smile.
Only then did Zara realize that the fillings in Oksanka’s front teeth were no longer visible.
Zara remembered the Volgas-they always drove so fast and rushed up in front of you without any lights. Now Oksanka had one. And her own driver. And bodyguard. And golden earrings with big diamonds in them. White teeth.
As children, Oksanka and Zara had once almost been run over by a Volga. They were walking home from the movies and the road was deserted. Zara was turning an old eraser around and around in her pocket-hardened, grayed, the printed brand worn off the tip several days before. Then it came. They heard a noise, but they didn’t see the car when it came around the corner, ran straight at them, and then instantly disappeared. They had been only a finger away from being hit. When they got home, Zara had to file the nail of her index finger. It had broken off when the car hit the eraser-still in her pocket-as it went by, and another nail had bent backward and broken off at the skin. That one bled.
There was a family living in the same apartment commune whose daughter had been run over by a black Volga. The militia had thrown up its hands and snapped that there was nothing they could do. That’s just the way things were. A government car-what can you do? The family was sent home with a scolding, too.
Zara hadn’t intended to tell her mother, but she noticed the torn fingernail and the bloody fingertip, and she didn’t believe Zara’s explanation-she could see that Zara was lying. When Zara finally told her that a black Volga had hit them, her mother struck her. Then she wanted to know if the people in the car had seen them.
“I don’t think so. They were going so fast.” “They didn’t stop?”
“Of course not.”
“Don’t ever, ever, ever go near one of those cars. If you see one, run away. It doesn’t matter where. Run right home.”
Zara was astonished. So many words out of her mother’s mouth at one time. That didn’t happen very often. She didn’t mind about being hit-but the flash in her mother’s eyes. It was very bright. There was an expression on her mother’s face-a big expression. Normally her mother’s face didn’t have any expression at all.
Her mother sat up that whole night at the kitchen table, staring straight in front of her. And after that evening she would peek out between the curtains as if she expected a black Volga to be in front of the house, watching, idling quietly. Later on she would get up during the night, look at Zara, who pretended to be asleep, go to the window and peek out, then go back to bed and lie there stiffly until she fell asleep-if she fell asleep. Sometimes she would stand and peer out from behind the curtain until morning.
One time Zara got out of bed, came up behind her mother, and tugged at the hem of her flannel nightgown. “No one is coming,” she said.
Her mother didn’t answer, she just pulled Zara’s hand loose from her nightgown.
“Lenin will protect us, Mom. There’s nothing to worry about.”
Her mother was quiet, turned to look at Zara for a long time and a little past her, as was her habit. As if there were another Zara behind Zara’s back, and her mother was directing her gaze at that other Zara. The darkness dragged on, and the clock made a cracking sound. The soles of their feet had sunk into the worn wooden floorboards, seeping into their hollows, their skin stuck down with a glue that let go only when her mother picked her up and tucked her back under the blanket. And they hadn’t said a word.
Zara had also heard stories about Commissioner Berija and the secret police. And the black cars that used to go out looking for young girls, trolling the streets at night, following them and pulling up next to them. The girls were never heard from again. A black Volga was always a black Volga.
And now Oksanka-a movie star from someplace far away-had emerged from a black Volga and waved to her with her long, unbroken, red fingernails, scratched the air and smiled broadly and graciously like a blue blood disembarking from an ocean liner.
“Is that your Volga?” Zara asked.
“My car’s in Germany,” Oksanka said, laughing.
“You have your own car, then?”
“Of course! Everybody in the West has their own car.”
Oksanka crossed her legs daintily. Zara tucked her legs under her chair. The flannel lining of her slippers was damp like it always was, just like the dull pink lining of Oksanka’s slippers had once been, when she used to wear the exact same kind, and they had filled out their student journals together at this same table, their fingers stained black.
“Cars don’t interest me,” Zara said.
“But you can go wherever you want in a car! Think about that!”
Zara thought about the fact that her mother would be home any minute and see a black Volga in front of the house.
Grandmother hadn’t seen the car because she was sitting in her usual spot and you couldn’t see the street from that window. She wasn’t really interested in the life of the street like the babushkas who sat along the wall. The sky was enough for her.
When Zara walked her back to the Volga, Oksanka said that her parents’ roof didn’t leak anymore. She had fixed it.
“You paid for it?”
“In dollars.”
Before she got into the car, Oksanka gave Zara a longish booklet.
“This is about the hotel where I’m working.”
Zara turned it over in her hands. The thick paper was shiny; there was a woman smiling on it with teeth that shone an unreal white.
“It’s a brochure.”
“A brochure?”
“There are so many hotels that they have to have these. Here are some more. I haven’t been to these places, but they take Russians, too. I can arrange a passport for you, if you like.”
The men waiting for Oksanka started the car as she climbed into the backseat.
“There are stockings just like these in that plastic bag,” Oksanka called out, showing her legs, poking one of them out of the car door. “Feel them.”
Zara reached out and stroked Oksanka’s leg.
“Unbelievable, aren’t they?” Oksanka laughed. “I’ll come back again tomorrow. We can talk some more then.”
The girl’s black-and-blue legs showed under the linen towel. The stockings had hidden them, but now her arms and legs were bare, goosefleshed and still damp from the bath. There was a scar across her chest that disappeared into the towel. Aliide was repulsed. Standing clean in the kitchen door, the girl looked younger; her skin was like the flesh of a freshly sliced cinnamon apple. Water dripped from her hair onto the floor. Her just-washed smell spread through the front room and made Aliide crave a sauna-but her sauna had burned down years ago. She avoided looking at the girl, examined the insulating pipe along the wall-which seemed to still be in working order-rapped on a green pipe, and brushed away the spiderwebs with her cane.
“There’s plantain essence on the table. It’s good for your skin.”
The girl didn’t make a move, she just asked for a cigarette. Aliide pointed her cane at the Priimas on the radio cabinet and asked the girl to light her one, too. When she’d gotten both of them lit, she went back to her fingernails. The drops of water from her hair were collecting in a puddle.
“Sit on the sofa, dear.”
“It’ll get wet.”
“No, it won’t.”
The girl flopped into a corner of the sofa and hung her head so that the water would drip onto the floor. Rüütel was talking about the elections on the radio-Aliide changed the station. Aino had said she was going to vote, but Aliide wasn’t going to.
“You probably don’t have any hair dye, do you?”
Aliide shook her head.
“What about paint or ink? Stamp ink?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Carbon paper?”
“No.”
“What should I do, then?”
“Do you think you could disguise yourself that easily?”
The girl didn’t answer; she just brooded.
“How about if I get you a clean nightgown and we have a little supper?”
Aliide stubbed out her Priima in the ashtray, dug a pink flowered nightgown out of the dresser, and left it for the girl to put on. She could hear bottles clinking together in the kitchen. So the plantain essence had passed muster. Darkness pressed against the windows behind the curtains, and Aliide checked several times to see if any of them were left open. They weren’t. There was just a bit of a draft along the bottom of the sash. She could carry out the bathwater tomorrow. The scratch of a mouse in the corner startled her, but her hand was steady as she started marking dates on the relish jars. There was newspaper stuck to the sides of some of the jars, which, put together, read, 18 percent of this year’s crimes have been solved. Aliide drew a check mark on it to indicate the worst of the batch. News of Tallinn’s first sex shop was marked as the best of the lot. The pen was running out of ink-Aliide rubbed it against the paper. For the first few days there was a problem with little boys who kept barging into the shop like swarms of flies, and had to be kept away from the place. The paper disintegrated-Aliide gave up and took the ink cartridge out of the pen and put it in the jar with the other empties. The dates were written in a shaky hand. She’d have to finish them later. It was not terribly difficult to move the full jars over to the counter, but the pounding in her chest wouldn’t stop. She had to be rid of the girl by tomorrow. Aino would be coming to bring milk and they were supposed to go to church to get the care package and Aliide didn’t want to leave the girl in the house alone. Plus, if Aino saw the girl, there would be no way to stop the news from spreading to the village. Assuming that the girl’s husband did exist, he sounded like the kind of visitor Aliide didn’t want in her house.
She noticed a piece of sausage that she’d bought on her last shopping trip lying on the kitchen table, and remembered the fly. The sausage had gone bad. The fly had flown out of Aliide’s mind as soon as she found the girl in the yard. She was stupid. And old. She couldn’t keep her eye on several things at once. She was already whisking away the sausage but changed her mind and looked more closely at it. Usually flies are so tired out by laying eggs that they just collapse in a daze right where they are. She didn’t see any flies or any eggs, but when she picked up the paper wrapper of the sausage, there was one chubby little wiggling individual there. Aliide tasted vomit in her mouth. She grabbed the sausage and started slicing it onto the girl’s sandwich. Her fingers were tingling.
The girl got dressed and came into the kitchen. She looked even younger in the flannel nightgown.
“The thing I don’t understand is how is it that a girl like you knows Estonian?”
“What’s so strange about that?”
“You’re not from around here. You’re not from anywhere in Estonia.”
“No, I’m from Vladivostok.”
“And now you’re here.”
“Yeah.”
“Rather intriguing.”
“Is it?”
“Indeed it is, for an old person like me. I never heard that they had schools in Vladivostok now where they teach Estonian. Times sure have changed.”
Zara realized she was rubbing her earlobes again. She put her hands back in her lap and then set them on the table next to the bowl of tomatoes. The biggest tomato was the size of two fists, the smallest the size of a teaspoon, all of them swollen and overripe, split and dripping juice. Aliide’s behavior fluctuated, and Zara couldn’t tell where her words and actions would lead next. Aliide sat down, got up, washed her hands, sat down, bustled around, washed her hands again in the same water, dried them, examined the jars and the recipe book, cut and peeled tomatoes, washed her hands -ceaseless activity that was impossible to interpret. Now every word she said felt half-accusing, and as she set the table the clink of every knife and the clatter of every dish rang mockingly. Each sound made Zara flinch. She had to think of what to say, to behave like a good girl, a trustworthy girl.
“My husband taught me.”
“Your husband?”
“Yes. He’s from Estonia.”
“Ah!”
“From Tallinn.”
“And now you want to go there? So he’ll be sure to find you?”
“No!”
“Why, then?”
“I have to get away from here.”
“I’m sure you can get to Russia. Through Valga. Or Narva.”
“I can’t go there! I have to get to Tallinn and over the border. My husband has my passport.”
Aliide bent over her bottle of heart medicine. The smell of garlic wafted to meet her. She took a spoonful of the stiff tonic honey and carried the bottle back to the refrigerator. She should make some more of it, maybe a little stronger, put more garlic in it-she felt so weak. The scissors felt heavy in her hand as she snipped some onion tops into the potatoes. Her teeth felt too weak even for bread. The girl had a ponderous gaze. Aliide picked up a sour pickle, cut off the end, sliced it up, and started popping the slices into her mouth. The juice lubricated her throat and her voice, made it supple, in control.
“Your husband must be a special kind of man.” “Yes, he is.”
“’Cause I’ve never heard of an Estonian man who would go to Vladivostok to get a wife and then teach her Estonian.
The world has certainly changed!”
“Pasha is Russian Estonian.”
“Pasha? Well, even so. I never heard of a Russian Estonian man who would go to Vladivostok to get a wife and then teach her Estonian. Is that what happened? Because normally what happens is that Russian Estonians speak Russian, and their wives start spitting out Russian just like they do. Sunflower seeds just flying out with every word.” “Pasha is a special kind of man.”
“Well, of course! And aren’t you a lucky girl! Why did he go to Vladivostok to find a wife?”
“He had a job there.”
“A job?”
“Yes, a job!”
“’Cause normally they come here from Russia to work, not the other way around. So it was a question of work, was it?”
“Pasha is a special kind of man.”
“A real prince, from the sound of it! And he even took you to Canada on vacation.”
“Actually, we got to know each other better in Canada. I had gone there to work as a waitress, like I said before, and then I ran into a man that I knew-Pasha.”
“And then you got married, and he said that you didn’t have to work as a waitress anymore.”
“Something like that.”
“You could write a novel about your wonderful story.”
“Could I?”
“Pampering, vacations, cars. A lot of girls would stick around if they had a man like that.”
Zara hid the things Oksanka had given her in the suitcase she had stored in the wardrobe, because she didn’t know what her mother would think of the whole thing. She wasn’t worried about her grandmother; she knew she wouldn’t tell her mother about what Oksanka had said. But Zara would have to mention Oksanka’s visit, because the women in the apartment commune would gossip about it in any case. They would want to know what gifts she had brought, and she’d have to give each of them a swallow of gin. Her mother would probably be happy about the gifts, too, but would she be happy about Zara getting a job in Germany? Would it help if Zara could tell her how many dollars she would be able to send home? If it were a whole lot of dollars? She would have to ask Oksanka tomorrow about how large a sum she should venture to promise. Maybe she should clear up some other things, too. Would she be able to save enough to live on for five years, so that she could go to college and graduate? Would she be able to save some money to send home, too? Or what if she just worked there for a little while, maybe half a year-would she manage to save enough in that amount of time?
Zara put the stockings from Oksanka in the suitcase. If her mother saw them, she would sell them immediately, say that Zara didn’t need them.
Grandmother stopped looking at the sky for a moment. “What’s in there?”
Zara showed her the package. It was like a transparent plastic envelope with a shining, multicolored printed picture inside of a white-toothed woman and a long pair of legs. There was a little window in the package that you could see the stockings through. Grandmother turned the package over in her hands. Zara was opening it to show her the stockings, but Grandmother stopped her. No point in that. She would only spoil them with her rough hands. Was it even possible to darn such fine stockings?
“Just stash them away,” Grandmother said, adding that silk stockings had been hard currency when she was young.
Zara went back to the wardrobe and decided to put the stockings and the other things at the very bottom of the suitcase. She dragged the case out onto the floor and started to unpack it. They always had suitcases packed and ready in the wardrobe. One for her mother, one for her grandmother, one for Zara. They said it was in case of fire. Grandmother packed and checked them at night sometimes, clattering around so much that Zara woke up. When Zara was growing up, Grandmother had always replaced the clothes in the suitcase when she outgrew them. That’s where all their important papers were, too, and the jacket with the money hidden in the collar, and the medicines that they replaced at regular intervals. Plus needles, thread, buttons, and safety pins. In Grandmother’s suitcase, there was also a shabby gray quilted coat. Its padding was almost petrified, and the stitches that ran up and down it were as uniform as barbed wire, a peculiar contrast to the ungainliness of the coat.
As a child, Zara had always imagined that Grandmother couldn’t see anything but the sky glimmering outside the window-that she didn’t notice anything that was happening in the house-but once, when her suitcase accidentally fell off the shelf in the wardrobe and crashed onto the floor and the locks broke, she turned quickly, like a young girl, and her mouth had twisted open like the lid of a jar. The quilted coat, which Zara had never seen before, had ballooned to the floor. Grandmother had remained seated in her regular spot by the window, but her eyes had latched on to Zara, into Zara, and Zara didn’t understand why she felt embarrassed and why it was a different kind of embarrassment than when she stumbled or answered wrong at school.
“Put that away.”
When her mother came home, she had glued and tied the suitcase shut. She hadn’t been able to fix the locks. Zara was given the locks to play with and made earrings out of them for her doll. It was one of the most significant events of Zara’s childhood, although even later on she didn’t understand what had happened and why, but after that she and her grandmother developed more of their own stories. Grandmother started to have Zara help her when she did the canning at harvest time. Her mother was at work and never had any time to water or weed their vegetable patch. Zara and Grandmother took care of it together, just the two of them, and Grandmother would tell her stories of that other country, in that other language. Zara had heard it for the first time when she woke up in the middle of the night and heard Grandmother talking to herself by the window. She woke her mother up and whispered that there was something wrong with Grandmother. Her mother threw off her blanket, shoved her feet into her slippers, and pushed Zara’s head back onto the pillow without saying anything. Zara obeyed. The sound of her mother talking was strange, and Grandmother answered with strange words. The suitcases were lying on the floor with their mouths open. Mother touched Grandmother’s hands and brow and gave her some water and Validol, and she took them without looking at her, which wasn’t unusual; Grandmother never looked at anyone, she always looked past them. Mother gathered up the suitcases, closed them in the wardrobe, and put her hand on Grandmother’s forehead. Then they sat there, staring out at the darkness.
The next day, Zara asked her mother what she had been saying and what language she had been speaking. Her mother tried to brush the question aside, puttering around with the tea and bread, but Zara was insistent. Then her mother told her that her grandmother was speaking Estonian, repeating the words to an Estonian song. She said Grandmother was getting a little bit senile. But she told Zara the name of the song: “Emasüda.” Zara impressed it upon her mind, and when her mother wasn’t home, she went to her grandmother and said the name. Grandmother looked at her, looked straight at her for the first time, and Zara felt her gaze press itself through her eyes and right into her-into her mouth, her throat-and she felt her throat tighten, and her grandmother’s gaze sank down her throat toward her heart, and her heart started to strain, and it sank from her heart to her stomach, and her stomach started to churn, and it sank to her legs, which started to tremble, and from her legs it sank into her feet, which started to tingle, and she felt hot, and Grandmother smiled. That smile became their first game, which sprouted word by word and started to blossom mistily, yellowish, the way dead languages blossom, rustling sweetly like the needle of a gramophone, playing like voices underwater. Quiet, whispering, they grew their own language. It was their shared secret, their game. As her mother did housework, her grandmother would sit in her usual chair, and Zara would take out toys and other things or just touch an object, and Grandmother would form its name in Estonian, silently, with her lips. If the word was wrong, Zara was supposed to notice it. If she didn’t know the word, she wouldn’t get any candy, but if she caught the mistake, she always got a mouthful of sweets. Her mother didn’t like it that Grandmother gave her candy for no reason-or so she thought-but she didn’t bother to intervene beyond a disapproving sniff. Zara could keep the delicious words, the sweet tongue, and those rare stories that Grandmother told about a café somewhere there, a café where they served rhubarb crumble with thick whipped cream, a café whose chocolate cream puffs would melt in your mouth and whose garden smelled of jasmine, and the rustle of German newspapers-but not just German; Estonian and Russian ones, too-and tie pins and cuff links, and women in fine hats, you could even see dandies in dark suits and tennis shoes, with clouds of magnesium blowing out of a house where they had just taken a photograph. The promenade along the shore at the Sunday concert. A sip of seltzer in the park. The Koluvere princess who haunted the streets at night. The raspberry jam on french bread in the warmth of the stove on a winter night, with cold milk to drink! And red currant nectar!
Zara packed her suitcase again, piled everything on top of the hotel brochure and stockings, closed the case, and put it back in its place in the wardrobe. Grandmother had turned back to the window to stare at the sky. You couldn’t put a blanket over the window in the winter, even though there was a draft, though they tried to seal up everything as well as they could. Grandmother had to be able to see the sky-even at night, when there was nothing to see. She said that it was the same sky they had at home. And the Big Dipper was important to her, because it was the same Big Dipper they had at home, it was just a little fainter-sometimes you really had to search for it. It was always easy to get Grandmother to smile with the Big Dipper-Zara just had to point to it and say its name. As a child, Zara hadn’t understood why. It wasn’t until later that she realized that Grandmother was talking about Estonia. She was born there, just like Zara’s mother was. Then the war came, and the famine, and the war had taken Grandfather, and they had to escape the Germans. They had come to Vladivostok, and there was work here, and more food, too, so they had stayed.
“Would it be wrong to go to Germany to work?” Zara asked her grandmother.
Grandmother didn’t turn her head. “You’ll have to ask your mother.”
“But she won’t say anything. She never says anything. If she wants me to go, she won’t say anything, and if she doesn’t want me to go, she won’t say anything.”
“Your mother’s a woman of few words.”
“Of no words, you mean.”
“Now,” Grandmother said reproachfully.
“I don’t think she cares whether I’m here or somewhere else.”
“That’s not true.”
“Don’t defend her!”
Zara slurped her tea angrily. The tea went down the wrong pipe, and she started coughing until her eyes watered. She would leave. At least she would be away from the shuffling of her mother’s slippers. Other people’s mothers had been in the bombing when they were children, and they still talked, even though Grandmother said that a bomb can frighten a child into silence. Why did her mother have to be the one who was shocked by the bombs like that? Zara would leave. She would send her grandmother tons of money and maybe a telescope. She would just see what her mother would have to say when she came back with a suitcase full of dollars and paid for her school and became a doctor in record time and got them their own apartment. She would have her own room where she could study in peace, cram for tests, and she would have a Western hairstyle, and wear shiny stockings every day, and Grandmother could look at the Big Dipper through a telescope.
Zara woke up to the homey smell of boiling pigs’ ears snaking its way out of the kitchen. She thought at first that she was in Vladivostok-she recognized the sound of the lid rattling on the pot of boiling water, the familiar smell of gristle- her mouth was already watering-but then a feather’s shaft poked her in the cheek-it had come through the pillow- and she opened her eyes and saw the corner of an unfamiliar rya rug on the wall. She was at Aliide Truu’s house. The wallpaper was blistered, the seams of the paper were crookedly pasted. A delicate spiderweb hung faintly between the rug and the wallpaper, with a dead fly dangling from it. Zara moved the corner of the rug with a finger, and the spider skittered under it. She was just about to press the rug against the spider and flatten it, but then she remembered that killing a spider meant your own mother would die. She stroked the rug. Her scalp felt light, and her skin felt like springtime against the flannel of her buttoned nightgown. The liquor-soaked socks that Aliide had put on her had been unpleasantly cold in the evening but were warm now, and she could still smell the fragrance of soap. Zara smiled. The sun peeped in through a slit in the curtains, and the curtains were exactly as she had imagined they would be.
Her bed had been made on the front-room sofa. The back room was so full of drying plants that there was no place for a proper bed. The floor, beds, shelves, and tables were covered with newspapers. Marigolds, horsetail, mint, yarrow, and caraway were scattered over them. Bags full of dried apple slices and dried black bread hung along the walls. On the little tables in front of the window there were homemade elixirs stacked in the sunlight. One of the jars appeared to be infested, and Zara turned her gaze immediately away. The air of the back room was so heavy with the scent of herbs that she hardly would have been able to sleep there. Aliide had, in fact, made herself a place to sleep on the rag rug in front of the back room door, carefully condensing the plants’ leaves that covered the newspapers to make a space big enough for one person on the floor. Zara’s suggestion that the spot would suit her fine hadn’t suited Aliide. She had probably feared that Zara would crush the herbs when she turned over in her sleep. The drug smell filled this room, as well, but not too strongly. There were only heaps of honeycombs, a few jars, and a string bag full of garlic next to the stove. There was a pile of worn cushions beside the radio cabinet. The white lace of the pillow covers had yellowed, but they gleamed in the dimness of the room. Zara had sneaked a look at them before going to sleep. Each one had a monogram, and no two were the same.
The door to the kitchen where the pigs’ ears were cooking was closed, but the radio was loud enough that she could hear it. It was a program about how the radio tower in Warsaw collapsed a year ago. The largest structure ever built, it had been 629 meters tall. Zara jumped out of bed. Her heart was pounding. “Aliide?”
Zara looked out the window, expecting to see a black Volga or BMW. But there wasn’t anything unusual in the yard. She strained to hear anything out of the ordinary, but all she could hear was the rush of her own blood, the radio, the ticking of the clock, and the creak of the floor as she crept toward the kitchen door. Would Pasha and Lavrenti be sitting there calmly, drinking tea? Would they be waiting for her? Wouldn’t it be just like them to let her wake up peacefully and come into the kitchen, suspecting nothing? Wouldn’t that be the most diabolical plan, and thus the most desirable, in their minds? They would be leaning against a corner of the table, smug, smoking a cigarette and thumbing through the paper. And they would smile when Zara came into the kitchen. They would have forced Aliide to keep quiet and sit between them, the old woman’s watery eyes wide with terror. Actually, it was hard to imagine such an expression on Aliide’s face.
Zara pushed against the tightly closed door. It complained loudly as it opened. The kitchen was empty. There was no trace of Pasha and Lavrenti. On the table were Aliide’s recipe book, an open newspaper, and a few krooni in bills. The pigs’ ears were boiling under a cloud of steam. The floor was wet in front of the washbasin. The basin was empty, as was the bathtub, and the slop buckets were full to the brim. Aliide was nowhere to be seen. The outer door swung open and Zara stood staring at it. Was it them?
Aliide stepped inside.
“Good morning, Zara. I guess you needed some sleep.” She set a bucket of water on the floor.
“What’s this? What have you done to your hair?” Zara sat down at the table and rubbed her head. Scratchy stubble, a breeze on her neck.
The scissors were lying next to the sugar bowl. She grabbed them and started to cut her nails. Ragged halfmoons specked with red dropped onto the oilcloth.
“We certainly could have thought of a way to dye your hair. Rhubarb would have turned it red.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Just leave those fingernails be. I have a file here somewhere. We can take care of them properly.”
“No.”
“Zara, your husband doesn’t know to look here. Why would he? You could be anywhere. Have some coffee and calm down. I ground up some real coffee beans this morning.”
She filled Zara’s cup from the percolator and went to lift the pigs’ ears out of the pot with a slotted spoon, glancing at Zara now and then as she wielded the scissors. When she finished her manicure, Zara started to stir the sugar spoon through the large, yellowish crystals. Her fingertips felt naked and clean. The damp whisper of the sugar mixed soothingly with the hum of the refrigerator. Should she try to look as calm as possible? Or should she tell Aliide what kind of a man Pasha really was? Which would make Aliide most likely to help? Or should she try to forget about Pasha for a while and concentrate on Aliide? She should at least try to think clearly.
“They always find you.”
“They?”
“My husband, I mean.”
“This probably isn’t the first time you’ve run away.”
Zara’s spoon came to a stop in the sugar.
“You don’t have to answer.”
Aliide brought a bowl of pigs’ ears to the table.
“I must say that you’re in pretty bad shape to be a decoy.”
“A what?”
“Don’t play dumb, young lady. A decoy. The pretty young thing who’s sent to find out if there’s anything of value on the premises. Usually they make them lie down in the middle of the road, pretending to be injured, so that cars will stop and then-whoops!-there goes the car. Actually, you should have waited to come until after my daughter has been here.”
Aliide stopped talking and started to fill up their plates, still glancing at Zara nonchalantly now and then. She was obviously waiting for Zara to say something. Was there a snare hidden in what Aliide had said? Zara mulled over the words, but there didn’t seem to be anything unusual in them. So she asked an easy question.
“Why is that?”
Aliide didn’t answer right away. Apparently she had expected Zara to say something else.
“There’ll be plenty of visitors from the village here then, everybody wanting to see what Talvi brought me. But I’ll hide most of it in the milk cans. I’ll just leave out a couple of packages of coffee. Not that there would be anything in those cans right now. They’re empty, just a little macaroni and flour. They’re waiting for my daughter to come and visit. She’s coming to spoil her old mother.”
Zara continued to stir around in the sugar bowl with the spoon, which had become an amorphous glob of clinging sugar, and tried to figure out what Aliide was driving at.
“I’ve asked her to bring me all kinds of things,” she said.
All of a sudden it hit Zara. A car! Was Aliide’s daughter coming in a car?
“She’s coming in her own car. And she promised to bring me a new television to replace that old Rekord. What do you think of that? It’s amazing how you can bring electronics over the border nowadays, just like that.”
Zara scooped up a pig’s ear. Her knife clinked against her plate and her fork slowly pierced the ear. She kept missing, her fork was clattering, and she gripped the cutlery tightly in her fingers. She knew she should loosen her grip or Aliide would know that she was trying to keep her hands from trembling. She shouldn’t look too eager, she had to eat her pig’s ear and talk at the same time-chewing it made her voice more level. She asked where Talvi was going when she left here-was she driving straight to Tallinn? Even if Zara could get to the nearest town, though-what town was it, anyway?-she couldn’t take the bus or the train, because Pasha would know about it immediately, and so would the militia. Aliide pointed out that they were called police nowadays, but Zara continued-surely Aliide could understand that she had to get to Tallinn in secret. If anyone saw her, her trip would be cut off right then and there.
“I just need a ride to Tallinn, nothing more.”
Aliide’s brow wrinkled. It was a bad sign, but Zara couldn’t stop herself now, her voice speeded up and her words faltered, she skipped words, went back to pick up the ones she had forgotten. Imagine, a car! Talvi had a car. It could solve all of her problems. When was she coming?
“Soon.”
“How soon?”
“Maybe in the next couple of days.”
If Pasha didn’t get there first, she could escape to Tallinn with Talvi’s help. She shouldn’t think about what would happen then, how she would get from Tallinn to Finland. Maybe she could try to hide in a truck at the harbor or something. How did Pasha arrange to get people over the border? They open the trunks of cars at the border, she knew that. It would have to be a truck, a Finnish truck. Finns could always get through more easily. There was no way for her to get a passport unless she stole one from some Finnish woman, someone her age. Too tricky-she couldn’t manage something like that by herself. First get to Tallinn. She had to get Aliide on her side now. But how? How could she manage to bluff away the wrinkles in Aliide’s brow? She should calm down, forget about Talvi and her car for a little while and not make Aliide any more nervous with her overeagerness. Possibilities steamed in and out of her head, she couldn’t tame them, not enough to think things through. Her temples were throbbing. She should breathe deeply, act trustworthy. Like the kind of girl that older people like. She should try to be sweet and polite and well behaved and helpful, but she had a whore’s face and a whore’s gestures, although cutting her hair had surely helped to some extent. Fuck it-it was no use.
Zara focused her gaze on Aliide’s coffee cup. If she really concentrated on some object, she could do a better job of answering anything she was asked. The yellowish porcelain had black cracks in it like a trace of spiderweb. The sides of the cup were translucent and reminded her of young skin, although the cup was old. It was shallow and daintily shaped. It had a refinement that belonged to a different world than the other kitchen things, a vanished world. Zara hadn’t seen any other dishes in the cupboard that could have belonged to the same set, although of course she didn’t know what all of Aliide’s dishes were like, only the ones that were on view. Aliide had drunk coffee, milk, and water out of it, only rinsing it between uses. It was obviously her favorite cup. Zara followed its cracks and waited for the next question.
Aliide pushed the bowl of tomatoes toward her.
“It was a good harvest this year.”
A fly was walking among the tomatoes.
Zara bent over the bowl.
Aliide swatted at the fly.
“They only lay their eggs on meat.”
Aliide’s interest was piqued. She tried to coax something out of the girl about this fascination with Finland, but she didn’t show any more curiosity about Talvi, or electronics. She just clinked her fork against her plate, her mouth diligently eating the ear, her coffee cup clattering, taking great gulps that you could hear over the sound of the radio, and now and then touching the stubble on her head. Her chest heaved. It was the car that got the girl worked up, not the new television or anything else. Maybe she really didn’t care about them, or maybe she was just devilishly clever. But could such a dishrag of a girl be a decoy? Or even a thief? Aliide could spot a thief. This girl didn’t have quick enough eyes. She carried herself like a dog that has to constantly look out for kids trying to step on its tail. Her expression was always going into hiding, her body always pulling itself into a huddle. Thieves were never like that, not even the ones who were beaten to teach them the trade. And the mention of gifts from Finland hadn’t brought any color to her cheeks or sparked any interest. The expression that Aliide had been expecting, that familiar gleam of greed, that quiver of awe in her voice, never came. Or did she want to steal the car?
Anyway, Aliide had tested her by leaving her alone in the kitchen and going outside, then peeking in the window, but the girl hadn’t dashed for her handbag or even glanced at the bills lying on the table, although Aliide had scattered them there on purpose, had picked one up as a topic of conversation later on, held up the bills and said, “Look at these, they’re almost two months old, kroon bills, we don’t have rubles anymore-can you imagine?” She had chattered for a long time about the currency reform day, the twentieth of June, and after that she had stuck the money in a corner of the cupboard, but the girl had taken no notice. While Aliide jabbered about the fall in the value of currency and how rubles had turned into toilet paper, there was a faraway look in the girl’s eyes, and she nodded politely now and then, snatching up a word into her consciousness and then letting it go without reacting. Later Aliide went to check and counted the bills when she wasn’t around. They hadn’t been touched. Aliide had also tried to drop hints about the handsomeness of her woods, but she hadn’t seen even the smallest bit of interest in the girl’s eyes.
Instead, when she was left alone she rubbed her arms and fell to examining the sugar bowl from the old Estonian days that was on the table, tracing its cracks and pattern with her finger and looking through it at the kitchen. No thief would be interested in a broken dish. Aliide had tried the same trick in the other room, leaving the girl there by herself while she went to fetch some water from the well. Before she went, she pushed one of the curtains away from the window just enough to be able to peek in from the yard and see what her guest was up to. She had been strolling around the room and went over to the wardrobe, but she didn’t open it, not even a drawer, she just stroked the outside of it, and even put her cheek up against its white paint, smelled the pinks on the table, smoothed out the embroidered poppies, lilies of the valley, and little wreaths embroidered along the black edge of the tablecloth, felt their green leaves and fixed her eye firmly on the fabric as if she wanted to learn to embroider herself. If she was a thief, she was the world’s worst.
Aliide had called Aino before the girl woke up and told her that she felt feverish and didn’t feel up to going to get her aid package today. She still had milk left-Aino could bring it over some other time. Aino had wanted to keep talking, about Kersti, who had seen a strange light on the road in the woods-it was a UFO, and Kersti had fainted and didn’t come to until an hour later, there in the road. She couldn’t remember if the UFO had taken her anywhere. Aliide interrupted Aino and said she felt very weak and should go lie down, and she almost slammed down the receiver in Aino’s ear. She had enough strangeness to contemplate in her own home. She had to get rid of this girl before Aino or someone else from the village came to visit. What in the world had possessed her to let the girl spend the night?
The girl ate noisily. Her cheeks glowed like the skin of a cinnamon apple. The thought of the car gleamed in her eyes, although it was clear she was trying to hide her excitement. She wasn’t a very good actor-she wouldn’t fool anyone that way. And what was she up to with that haircut? That sawed-off hairdo would attract a lot more attention than her old one.
Aliide went to the pantry to get some pickles. The marigold cream that she had made for Talvi was hardening in the cupboard in front of the selection of pickles she had canned. It was the only thing that Talvi would agree to take from here back to Finland. Her skin liked the cream and she hadn’t learned to make it herself. She never took any pickles with her, although she liked them when she was here. She could have fit any number of jars in the backseat, but when Aliide tried to sneak them into the car, Talvi took them out again. Did the girl who was poking around in the kitchen want to steal Talvi’s car, or just want to make an escape? Aliide wasn’t sure.
She’d heard that the Finns didn’t put horseradish in their pickles, that was the difference.
She sat down at the table and offered the girl some slices of pickle with dill and sour cream, and jars of cucumber relish and sour pickles.
“I had an especially good harvest this year.”
Zara couldn’t decide what kind of pickles to take, so she reached for the sour pickles first, then the bowl of sour cream, and her hand shook, and the bowl fell to the floor. The crash made her jump out of her chair and her hands flew up over her ears. She was ruining everything again. The enamel bowl lay overturned next to the rag rug, streaks of cream across the gray cement floor. Luckily it wasn’t a glass bowl, so she hadn’t broken anything, at least. She might break something soon if she couldn’t get her hands to stop shaking. She had to get them under control and get Aliide to understand that she didn’t have much time. Aliide looked like she still wasn’t angry at Zara for making another mess; she just fetched a rag and started cleaning it up, shushing soothingly. No harm done. When it finally occurred to Zara to help her, her hands were still trembling.
“Zara dear, it’s just a bowl of pickles. Sit back down, now.”
Zara repeated that it was an accident, but Aliide didn’t seem interested and interrupted her apologies.
“Your husband must have money, then?”
Zara went back to her chair. She should just concentrate now on talking with Aliide nicely and not making any more messes in her home. Be a good girl, Zara. Don’t think, since you can’t think right now anyway. Just answer the questions. You can talk about the car later.
“Yes he does.”
“A lot?”
“A lot.”
“Why was such a rich man’s wife working as a waitress?”
Zara plucked at her earlobe. There was no earring there, just a faintly flushed hole. How should she answer Aliide’s question? She was stupid, slow to come up with anything, but if she didn’t say something Aliide would think she was hiding something very bad. Could she keep claiming to have worked as a waitress and still be convincing? Aliide was sizing her up and she was starting to get nervous again. There was no way she was going to handle this thing well. Maybe Pasha was right, she needed a good whipping. Maybe he was right when he said she was the kind of person who just didn’t know how to behave unless you took a stick to them. Maybe there really was something wrong with her-an inherent flaw. Maybe she really was good for nothing. And while she was thinking about how unsuccessful she’d been at behaving correctly, words started to fly out of her mouth before she could think clearly about what they meant. OK, she wasn’t a waitress! She pressed against the empty hole in her earlobe, her other hand going up to rub the pit at the base of her collarbone. Her head and mouth and she herself were separate; there was suddenly nothing connecting the three of them. The story just streamed out and she couldn’t order it back in. She told Aliide that they had been on vacation in Canada, at a five-star hotel, driving around all day in a black car. And she had her own fur for every day of the week, and separate evening furs and daytime furs, inside furs and outside furs.
“Oooh! That must have been thrilling.”
Zara wiped the edge of her mouth. She was ashamed, her face was burning. And she did what she always did when she was overcome with shame: She focused her gaze and her thoughts on something else. Aliide, the kitchen, and the pot of pigs’ ears disappeared. She stared at her hands. The froth left on her finger from where she had wiped her mouth looked like snake’s spit on a raspberry leaf. A spit bug. She focused on that, a little animal was always best when you had to move your mind away from your body. A spit bug larva hiding in a ball of spit, and the ball protects it from enemies and from drying out. Where had she heard that? In school? She remembered the soothing rustle of her school book. The smell of paper and glue. She listened to the rustling in her head for a moment, willing her thoughts toward a dry page from her schoolbook, and composed herself, left the spit bug behind and let the Vikerraadio program back into her ears, her mind back into Aliide’s kitchen, with its cracked floor, oilcloth, and aluminum spoons. A jar of vitamin C sitting on a corner of the table, safe Cyrillic letters and words, sugarcoated tablets, vitamin C, the government’s GOST category numbers, the familiar brown glass. She reached toward it and repeated in her mind the calming Russian words on the label, clicked open the lid- a familiar sound. As a child she had often secretly eaten the whole bottle, the tart, bright orange flavor rushing through her mouth, the smell of the pharmacy. They used to get them from the pharmacy. Her pulse was already normal when she turned to Aliide and apologized for getting excited and told her she wanted just to sound normal and ordinary. She didn’t want Aliide to think she was putting on airs.
Aliide laughed.
“The young lady doesn’t want to sound like a thief.”
“Maybe.”
“Or a Mafia man’s wife.”
“Maybe.”
Aliide didn’t say anything more about it or ask why Zara couldn’t go back to Russia or go home.
The clock ticked. The fire hummed in the stove. Zara’s tongue felt stiff. The cracks in the cement floor looked hazy, as if they were moving all the time, ever so slightly.
“So that’s it,” Aliide said finally, getting up from the table and swinging a flyswatter at the lamp, around which several two-winged creatures circled. Then she went to boil some jars in the kettle. “Come and help me. The liquor socks must have helped-you don’t look like you caught a chill, anyway. I’ll find a scarf for you in a minute, so you can cover that head.”
A light shone through the keyhole. Zara awoke on a mattress next to the door. Pus had drained from her inflamed earlobe; she could smell it. She groped for the beer bottle on the floor. The mouth of the bottle was sticky, and the beer made her throat feel the same way, go from dry to sticky and rough. Her feet touched the door frame. Pasha and Lavrenti were sitting on the other side of the door. The nicotine-yellowed tatters in the wallpaper moved in rhythm with Pasha’s cold breath, but there was nothing alarming in that. Or was there? Zara listened. She could hear the men’s voices through the thin wall; they seemed to be having fun. Would they be feeling pleasant enough to let her take a shower today? Their good mood could change to the opposite at any moment, and Zara would just have to do her best with her customers. The first one would be here soon. Otherwise the two of them wouldn’t be at their stations. One more minute where she was, then she would have to get ready, so Pasha wouldn’t have anything to complain about. Lavrenti never complained, he just did his job and let Pasha do the scolding. Zara poked at the wood that peeped out from under the chipped paint of the baseboard. The wood was so soft that her finger sank into it. Was the floor under the mattress wood or cement? There was vinyl flooring, but what was under it? If it was made of the same wood, it could give way at any moment. And Zara would go, too, disappear into the wreckage. It would be wonderful.
She could hear Lavrenti’s knife whittling away chips of wood again. He always whittled when he was keeping watch. He carved all kinds of things, especially exercise equipment for the girls.
She had to get up. She couldn’t lie around, although she would have liked to. The colored lights from the building opposite splashed the room with red. Cars hummed by, and now and then a honk would break the hum. There were so many cars, so many different kinds. She smoked a Prince cigarette, the kind advertised on big placards she had seen through the car window on the way here. She had been handcuffed to the car door at the time. Pasha and Lavrenti turned the car radio up to a shout. She hadn’t known that a car could go so fast. Pasha’s fingers had tapped on the steering wheel whenever he had to stop. His tattooed fingers bounced on the wheel. Pasha decided Zara wasn’t going to tempt anyone in front of the gas station, even though there were as many trucks and men as you could want. She had stood there beside the autobahn half the night in the red leather skirt he’d given her, and no one had wanted her. Pasha and Lavrenti had watched from far away in the car, and then Pasha suddenly came and pulled her hair and wrenched open her lipstick and rubbed it all over her face. Then he pushed her into the car and said to Lavrenti, “Look at this clown,” and Lavrenti laughed, saying, “She’ll learn. They all do.” In the car, Pasha had taken off his shirt and lifted his shoulders like he was adjusting his tattooed epaulets. Lavrenti grinned and saluted him. At the hotel, Pasha had ordered Zara to wash her face, pushed her head in the water as the washbasin filled up, and held it there until she passed out.
Now Pasha was talking to Lavrenti about his big plan again. He had a future. That’s why he thought about life so much. The two men went around and around through the same routine, from one day to the next and one night to the next, from one customer to the next. Pasha was saying that, for the first time, everything he had dreamed of was possible-making the money was child’s play. Soon he would have his own tattoo parlor! And then a tattoo magazine! In the West there were magazines that were just pictures of tattoos, all kinds of colorful tattoos, the kind Pasha was going to make.
Everybody laughed at Pasha’s plans. Who would want a tattoo parlor when you could have hotels, restaurants, oil companies, railroads, entire countries, millions, billions. Anything at all was possible, anything you could imagine. But Pasha didn’t care a fig, he just patted his tattooed epaulets, which were just like his father’s. His father had been in Perm in 1936, and his epaulets had read, “NKVD” – the acronym of the state police. The joke was that it stood for Ništó Krepše Vorovskoy Druzbyt-“Nothing stronger than friendship among thieves.” Lavrenti smiled at Pasha’s dreams, too-he may have thought that Pasha was a little crazy. Lavrenti said he himself was already an old man. He had twenty-five years in the KGB behind him, and he would have liked his life to continue as it had before all this nonsense with Yeltsin and Gorbachev. He didn’t want anything except that his children got everything they needed, that’s all. Maybe that’s why Lavrenti wanted to work with Pasha-he and Pasha were the only ones who were prepared to content themselves with less than other people. It’s true Pasha wanted a casino, a country, and a billion, but those things didn’t get him worked up the way the tattoo parlor did.
Pasha practiced for his tattoo parlor on the girls who were out of circulation. Like Katia. He had shouted that she was going to be the best of all, and he was pleased with the tattoo he had put on her chest of a big-busted woman taking a devil in her mouth. He said he wanted lots of practice, though the needle supposedly sat in his hand as comfortably as his gun, so Katia’s arm got another picture of a devil tapped into it-with a big, hairy cock.
“As big as mine!” Pasha had laughed.
Katia disappeared after that.
Zara opened the bottle of poppers and sniffed. If Pasha started practicing on her, she’d know that her time was up. “A tattoo shop would be symbolic to everyone-God, my mother in Russia, the saints, everybody!”
Lavrenti burst out laughing. “Symbolic… Where’d you learn a word like that?”
“Shut your trap,” Pasha said, offended. “You don’t understand anything.”
A third voice materialized along with theirs-a customer. You could always recognize a customer’s voice. Zara could hear a drunk singing in German downstairs. There was an American in the group. She had once asked an American to take a letter to her mother to the post office, but he had given it to Pasha, and Pasha had come and…
She took the red leather skirt and red high-heeled shoes out of the cabinet. Her shirt was a child’s shirt. Pasha thought that only children’s shirts were tight enough to arouse men’s desires. She smoked a Prince. Her hands were only shaking a little. She put a few drops of valerian in her glass. Her hair was stiff from yesterday’s hairspray, and sperm.
Soon the door would open and close, the lock would fall shut, Pasha and Lavrenti’s conversation would continue, the tattoo parlor and the babes in the West and the colorful tattoos. Soon the belt buckle would open, the zipper would rasp, then the colored light, Pasha would make a fuss on the other side of the door, Lavrenti would be laughing at Pasha’s stupidity, and Pasha would be offended, and her customer would groan and her buttocks would be spread open, and she would be ordered to hold them apart, more and more and more, and she would be ordered to put her finger inside her. Two fingers, three fingers, three fingers of each hand, open more! Bigger! She would be ordered to say,
“Natasha’s going to get it now! Natasha’s got to spread her twat open because she’s going to get it!” “What’s she going to get? Say it! Say it!” Zara would say, “Natasha will es.”Nobody asked where she was from or what she would do if she weren’t here.
Sometimes somebody would ask what Natasha would like, what made Natasha wet, how did Natasha like it, how did Natasha like to get fucked.
Sometimes somebody would ask what she liked. That was worse, because she didn’t have an answer to that.
If they asked her about Natasha, she had a quick answer ready.
If they asked her about herself, a tiny second would go by before she could think what she would answer if they had asked about Natasha. And that tiny second would tell the customer that she was lying.
They would start to press her.
But that rarely happened, hardly at all.
Usually she would just say that she had never been fucked so good. That was important to the customer. And most of them believed it.
All the sperm, all the hairs, the hairs in her throat- and still a tomato tasted like a tomato, cheese like cheese, tomato and cheese together like tomato and cheese, even with the hairs in her throat. It must mean that she was alive.
The first weeks she had watched videos. Madonna and Erotica and Erotica and Madonna, twirling.
She had been alone.
The door was locked.
There was a mirror in the room.
She had tried to dance in front of the mirror, to imitate Madonna’s movements and voice, tried very hard. It was hard, even though her hair was bleached and curled like Madonna’s. The movements had been hard because her muscles were sore, but she tried. And she tried to line her eyes like Madonna’s. Her hands shook. She tried again. She had a week to get it right. The German makeup was good. If she did the makeup as well as Madonna, it wouldn’t matter if she didn’t dance as well.
When Pasha thought the time was ripe, she was taken to a drinking party. There were a lot of other girls there and a lot of Pasha’s men, and customers, too, and one of them had to be catered to-they weren’t told why, but all the girls were ordered to please him. The customer had a big belly, a glass of Jim Beam swinging in his hand, the ice tinkling, the music playing, the cold smell of German cleaning products and vodka floating through the apartment. At first voices had been raised and Zara was supposed to calm the customer down, but then Pasha started to tap his fingers on the leather sofa the way he always did. After he had done that for a while he leaped up and shouted, “Who did that old man think he was!” And then he yelled some other things. The girls started to look for someplace to hide. Zara noticed that one of Pasha’s men had moved his hand to where he kept his gun, and several of them had gone to stand in the doorway, and Zara realized that they did that so no one could get out. She tried to get farther away from the customer, tried her best not to be noticed, moving first to a corner of the sofa, then next to the sofa, then behind the backrest. The customer paid no more attention to her breasts, instead he argued loudly with Pasha and Pasha argued with him, and behind Zara, Lavrenti looked silently out the window- although you couldn’t see anything, it was dark-and swished his glass, the ice rattling in a clump. Then he turned around, went over to the customer, laid a hand on his shoulder, and asked if that was his last word. The customer roared yes and slammed his glass on the table. Lavrenti nodded, and then, suddenly, he broke his neck. In one movement. The silence lasted only a moment. Then Pasha burst out laughing, and the others cackled, too.
Aliide heard a familiar thud through the window, but it was as if she hadn’t noticed anything; she continued drinking her coffee like nothing was wrong, swished the contents of the cup as was her habit, examined the cream on its surface, bent her head toward the radio as if there were something important playing. But of course the girl gave a start as soon as she heard the sound. Her body jerked and her eyes shot toward where the sound came from, her eyelids opened like wings as a tic started in the corner of her left eye, and her voice was almost inaudible when she asked what that was. Aliide blew into her cup, moved her lips in time with the news, looking past the girl as she searched Aliide’s face for a sign of what the thud could have meant. Aliide kept her expression steady. Hopefully the boys would leave it at that one rock for tonight.
The girl couldn’t stay focused on anything else, not when she was imagining her husband lurking in the yard, stalking her. She had to be alert like that, keep her eyes and ears open at all times. Aliide put down her coffee cup and placed her fingers on either side of it. She fell to examining the soil-darkened cracks in her hands, much deeper than the old knife cuts that striped the oilcloth, made more visible by the bread crumbs and salt that had spilled on the table.
“What’s that noise?”
“I didn’t hear anything.”
The girl didn’t pay any attention to Aliide’s answer.
Instead she tiptoed up to the window. She had pulled the scarf down onto her neck so that she could hear better. Her back was stiff and her shoulders raised.
Aliide’s cup had no handle, just a rough stump where the handle had been. She started to tap on it with her thumb. The threads of soil in her cracked skin bounced against the porcelain. Those boys sure knew how to choose their timing. On the other hand, the girl surely couldn’t be thinking that it was anyone but her own businessman, or whatever you want to call him, up to something out there. Aliide became annoyed again. The Russians liked their fine clothes and handsome hotels, but when it came time to pay, they started bellyaching. Everybody has a price. Protection isn’t cheap. She felt the urge again to give the girl a good swat. If you’re going to tremble, tremble in private, where no one will see you.
“There are a lot of animals around here. Wild boars. If you leave the gate open, they even come right into the yard.”
The girl turned to look at Aliide with disbelief. “But I told you about my husband!”
Another rock hit the window. A little shower of rocks.
The girl opened the kitchen door and crept to the foyer to listen. Just as she put her ear to the chink in the outer door, something hit it so that it shook. She jumped backward and went back into the kitchen.
The girl ought to focus on something else. When she was younger, Aliide always had a bag of tricks for one situation or another, but now her mind refused to come up with anything better than wild boars.
She washed her hands thoroughly and started to change the milk in the kefir, tried to act natural, picked up the can from the floor, opened the lid, strained the liquid into a cup, and rinsed off the culture, trying again with wild boars, stray dogs and cats, although even she thought her explanations sounded stupid. The girl paid no attention; she just whispered that she had to leave now, her husband had found what belonged to him, lured his prey into his trap. Aliide could see how she curled up in a ball like an old dog, the corners of her mouth stiffened, the little hairs laid flat against her skin, crossing her right foot over her left as if she were cold. Aliide quietly poured more milk over the culture and offered a glass of kefir to the girl.
“Drink it, it’ll do you good.”
She stared at the glass without taking it. A fly was crawling on its rim. The corner of her eye twitched, and the movement of her ears, sticking out toward the window, could be easily distinguished against her hairless head.
“I have to go,” she breathed. “So they won’t do anything bad to you.”
Aliide lifted the glass to her lips slowly and took a long drink of it, tried to drink the whole glassful but couldn’t. Her throat wasn’t working. She put the glass down on the table. A spider crawled under the table and disappeared between the floorboards. Aliide was fairly certain that the girl was wrong, but how could she explain that the boys from the village were there to make a ruckus in her yard. She would want to know why and how and when and who knows what, and Aliide had no intention of explaining anything about it to a stranger. She didn’t even talk about it with people she knew.
But the girl was so clearly terrified that suddenly Aliide was, too. Good God, how her body remembered that feeling, remembered it so well that she caught the feeling as soon as she saw it in a stranger’s eyes. And what if the girl was right? What if there was good reason to fear what she feared? What if that was her husband? Aliide’s ability to fear was something that should have belonged to the past. She had left it behind her and hadn’t built it up again from the rock throwers at all. But now, when an unknown girl was in her kitchen spreading the fear from her bare skin onto Aliide’s oilcloth, she couldn’t brush it away like she ought to have done. Instead it seeped in between the wallpaper and the old wallpaper paste, into the gaps left behind by the photographs that she had hidden there and later destroyed. The fear settled in as though it felt at home. As though it would never go away. As though it had just been out somewhere for a while and had come home for the evening.
The girl rubbed her stubble, tied the scarf tightly around her head, ladled a mugful of water from the pail, and rinsed out her mouth, spit the water into the lard bucket, glanced at her reflection in the glass door of the cupboard, and went to the door. She had pulled her shoulders back and lifted her head as if she were on her way to a battle or were standing in a row of Young Pioneers. The corner of her eye twitched. Ready. She was ready. She pushed the door open and stepped onto the porch.
Silence spread dark around her. The night was thickening. She took a few steps and stopped to stand in the yellow light of the lamp in the yard. Crickets were chirping, the neighbors’ dogs barked. The air was fragrant with autumn. The white trunks of the birches shone dimly through the dark. The gates were closed. She could see the peaceful fields through the chain-link fence, its mesh like tired eyes.
She inhaled so deeply that she felt a stab in her lungs like ice on a tooth. She had been wrong. The relief took her legs out from under her and she fell onto the steps with a thud.
No Pasha, no Lavrenti, no black car.
She turned her face toward the sky. That must be the Big Dipper. The same Big Dipper that you could see over Vladivostok, although this one looked different. Grandmother had looked at the Big Dipper from this same garden when she was young, the Big Dipper that looks like that one. Her grandmother-she had stood in the same place, in front of this same house, on the same stepping-stones. The same birches had been in front of her, and the wind on her cheeks had been the same, and it had moved through those same apple trees. Grandmother had sat in the same kitchen that she had just been sitting in, woke up in the same room that she woke up in this morning, drunk water from the same well, stepped out of the same door. Grandmother’s steps had weighed on the soil of this garden, she had left from this yard to go to church, and her cow had rammed its stall in that barn. The grass that tickled Zara’s foot was her grandmother’s touch, and the wind in the apple trees was her grandmother’s whisper, and Zara felt like she was looking at the Big Dipper through her grandmother’s eyes, and when she turned her face back up toward the sky, she felt like her grandmother’s young body stood inside hers, and it ordered her to go back inside, to search for a story that she hadn’t been told.
Zara felt in her pocket. The photograph was still there.
The moment the girl stepped outside, Aliide slammed the door shut behind her and locked it. She went to sit in her own place at the kitchen table and eased open the drawer that was hidden under the oilcloth, so that if she needed to she could quickly whip out the pistol she had kept in the drawer since Martin had made her a widow. The yard was silent. Maybe the girl had gone on her way. Aliide waited a minute, two minutes. Five. The clock ticked, the fire roared, the walls creaked, the refrigerator hummed, outside the damp air ate at the thatched roof, a mouse rustled in the corner. Time unwound ten minutes further, and then there was a knock and a call at the door. It was the girl, asking her to open the door and saying that there was no one else there, just her. Aliide didn’t move. How did she know the girl was telling the truth? Maybe her husband was lurking behind her. Maybe he had somehow been able to make things clear to her without making any noise.
Aliide got up, opened the door in the pantry that led to the stable, went past the deserted trough and the manger to the big double doors, and carefully opened one half of the door a chink. There was no one in the yard. She pushed the door farther open and saw the girl alone on the steps, then she went back in the kitchen and let her in. Relief wafted into the room. The girl’s back was straightened and her ears had settled down. She was breathing calmly, inhaling deeply. Why had she been out in the yard so long, if she hadn’t found the man there? She said again that there hadn’t been anyone there. Aliide poured her a fresh cup of coffee substitute, started chatting at the same time about getting out some tea, decided to try to keep the girl’s mind off the rocks and the window as long as possible. We did already have some tea today, after all. The girl nodded. It was harder to come by a little while back. She nodded again. Although there was raspberry and mint tea to make up for it-there are plenty of things to make tea from in the countryside. In the midst of this prattle, Aliide realized that the girl was going to start asking about the hooligans again, and because she had calmed down so much, she wasn’t going to accept Aliide’s mumbling something about wild boars. At what point had her mind become so feeble that she could no longer think of believable explanations for strange rattlings at the window? Her fear had loosened its hold, but she still felt its breath, the way it blew cold on her feet through the cracks in the floor that it had trickled into. She wasn’t afraid of the hooligans, so she didn’t understand why the terror that had gripped the girl hadn’t disappeared the moment she rushed back inside, bringing the soothing smell of grass with her. Suddenly she felt that she could hear the moon arching across the sky. She realized that the thought didn’t make any sense, and she grabbed her cup and squeezed the stump of the handle until her hands started to look like bones.
The girl drank her coffee substitute and looked at Aliide-a little differently than she had before. Aliide felt it, although she wasn’t looking at the girl; she just continued to complain about Gorbachev’s alcohol ban and reminisce about the way they used to make tea that had a drug effect by using several packages for one glassful. There had been some name for the drink, too, but she couldn’t remember it. They used it a lot in the army, she thought, and in prison. And she had forgotten to change the mushrooms in the mushroom tea during all this fuss! Complaining, Aliide snatched a glass jar from the Estonian days that had a tea mushroom in it, took the gauze out of the mouth of the jar, admired the little mushroom growing out of the side of the large one, and sugared some fresh tea to pour into the jar.
“This will help keep your blood pressure in check,” she explained.
“Tibla,” the girl interrupted.
“What?”
“Tibla.”
“Now I don’t understand you at all.”
“It says ‘tibla’ on the front door, in Russian. And ‘Magadan.’”
That was news to Aliide.
“Kids playing,” she ventured suddenly, but the explanation didn’t seem convincing. She tried again, saying that when she was young she used to wash clothes on the shore and beat on the piles, and the boys would beat on stones right behind her. They called it the ghost game and thought it was very funny.
The girl wasn’t listening. She asked if Aliide was from Russia.
“What? No!”
A person could easily think that, the girl said, since Aliide’s door had “tibla”-Ruskie-and “Magadan” written on it. Or maybe Aliide had been in Siberia?
“No!”
“Then why would they write ‘Magadan’ on your door?”
“How should I know! When has there ever been any sense in boys’ games?”
“Don’t you have a dog? Everyone else has one.”
In fact, Aliide had had a dog, Hiisu, but it died. And actually Aliide was sure that Hiisu had been poisoned-just like her chickens, all five of them-and then her sauna had burned down, but she didn’t tell the girl about this, or about how every now and then she heard Hiisu’s footsteps, or the clucking of her hens, and how it was impossible to remember that there was no one else to feed in the house except herself and the flies. She had never lived in a house with an empty barn. She just couldn’t get used to it. She wanted to turn the conversation back around to this Pasha, but she wasn’t likely to succeed, because the girl had so many questions, followed by exclamations of wonder. Wasn’t her daughter worried about her alone without a dog in the countryside?
“I don’t trouble her with trivial matters.”
“But…”
Aliide snapped up a bucket and went to get some water, the enamel clanking, the bucket swinging loudly. She tucked her head in a defiant position and went outside to show that there was nothing threatening waiting there, no extra pairs of eyes in the black walls of the night. And her back didn’t itch as she went out into the dark yard.
The first time the rain of rocks flew at Aliide’s window it was a clear, breathable night in May. Hiisu’s barking had already managed to wake her up, and she had sluggishly slapped her fear into a corner like a slippery-footed insect. She turned onto her side with her back to the fear, and the straw in her mattress rustled; she wasn’t going to take the trouble to get up because of a couple of rocks. When the second shower of stones came, she had already started to feel superior. Did they imagine they could scare her with a few rocks? Her. Of all people. Such childishness made her laugh. Didn’t they have any larger weapons than that to mess around with? The only thing that would get her out of bed at night was a tank coming through her fence. You never know, it could happen some day, not because of these hooligans, of course, but if a war broke out. She wouldn’t want that, not anymore, not now- she’d rather die first. She knew that many people had prepared for it and had gathered up all kinds of supplies at home: matches, salt, candles, batteries. And every second house had a kitchen full of dried bread. Aliide ought to make more of it, too, and get some batteries; she had only a few left. What if a war did break out and the Russians won? Which they no doubt would. If that happened, she wouldn’t have any worries, an old Red babushka like her. But still, no war; just let there be no more war.
Aliide lay awake listening to Hiisu’s growls, and when he calmed down a bit, she waited for the morning to come, to make some coffee. If they thought she was going to get up in the middle of the night because of them, they were dreaming. She wasn’t going anywhere, even if her barn was empty and she was alone in the house, not to Talvi’s house in Finland, not anywhere. This was her home, dearly paid for, and a little crowd of stone throwers wasn’t going to drive her out of it. She hadn’t left before and she wasn’t leaving now; she’d die first. They could burn down the whole house, and she would sit in her own chair in the kitchen and drink coffee sweetened with her own honey. She would even wave to them from the window and bring a big bowl of homemade cardamom buns to the gatepost and then go back inside as the roof thatch burst into flames. The faster it happened, the better. And suddenly she felt a springtime brook of expectation. Let them do it. Let them burn down the whole house. The lady of the house-the lady of the empty barn-wasn’t afraid of fire. She was ready to go, now was as good a time as any. Burn it all! Her mouth was dry with greed, she licked her lips, jumped out of bed, went to the window, opened it with a clatter, and yelled,“You belong in Siberia, too! It would be just right for you!”
After the first rocks came the songs. Rocks and songs. Or just rocks, or just songs. Then Hiisu was gone, then the chickens, and the sauna. The sleepless nights marched in a row past Aliide’s bed; the tired, stiff-necked days held out longer. The peace that had come in the last few decades was torn up into a pile of rug strips in a moment, and the mountain of rags had to be sorted through again, endured again. It’s time to straighten our backs again and throw off our own slavery… The song came whispering through her window, into her bedroom. She lay in her bed and didn’t move. Her back was straight, unyielding on top of the straw. She stared at the wall-hanging, didn’t turn her head toward the window or pull the curtains closed. Let them holler, let them do what they liked, let the snot-nosed brats sing their hearts out, let them dance on her roof if they wanted, the tanks would be here soon enough and take out the little smart alecks.
The land, the fatherland, this land is sacred, where now we can be free. The song, our victory song, let it ring out, and soon a free Estonia we shall see!
Some years ago-was it 1988?-a crowd of young people had made its way through the village singing “Estonian, be proud and good, like your grandfathers before you, you’ll be free.” The voice of a boy in puberty had crowed, “Estonian I am and Estonian I’ll stay, for Estonian is what I was made to be,” and the others had laughed, and a long-haired boy had tossed his head proudly. Aliide was just coming out of the store, she could still hear the clack of the abacus beads, the door hinges creaking like a growling stomach, and she had just stopped to tie her scarf on tighter, putting her bag of bread down on the ground. When she heard the first lines of the song, she withdrew back into a corner of the shop, let them pass by, and looked after them. She had felt such a powerful irritation that she had forgotten the bread and left it sitting in the corner of the shop, and hadn’t noticed until she was halfway home. How dare they? How could they be so insolent? What in the world were they thinking? Or was it just envy that made her scowl and tremble, her heart pounding?
The voice outside the window was young, a little like her brother-in-law Hans’s voice used to sound back in the days of the Estonian Republic, when she had first met him. Before his songs were all sung. Before his spritely, straight, twometer frame was bent, when his bones hadn’t been made to fold-but they would be, his chubby cheeks would become sunken and his beautiful singing silenced. Let the snot-nosed brats sing! She was happy to listen. And think about Hans, beautiful Hans. She smiled in the darkness. Hans had been in a choir, too. Oh, how beautifully he had sung! When he worked in the fields in the summer days, on his way home his song would come ahead of him and make the silver willows along the road ring with sheer joy and the trunks of the apple trees hum in rhythm. Her sister, Ingel, had been terribly proud of her husband! And she was also proud that Hans had been chosen to do his service in the parliamentary guard. Only good athletes and fairly tall men were accepted into it. And Hans had been beaming with pride-an ordinary country boy, chosen to defend the Riigikogu!
Martin’s old friend Voldemar came to visit several months after independence was declared. Hiisu started to bark well before he arrived. Aliide went out to the yard, Hiisu ran to the road, and between the gray fence posts she could see a man, just as gray and thin, leading his bicycle toward her house. Stolen gold from long ago gleamed in his sunken mouth. Wrinkles had pulled his cheeks inside his skull, as if his face were drawn closed with a string. Volli had always been in the front, always wanted to be first in everything. She well remembered him barging to the front of some kind of line with his big belly and sturdy jaw, puffing out his veteran’s chest. Anger had welled up in the hollow eyes of the people who had been in line since the wee hours of the morning, and it reached for Volli’s feet. It never caught up with his boots, even though the line was very long, because his legs weren’t weak then, they were strong and fat, and in a moment he had stepped over the threshold of one shop or another and left a wake of thick anger behind him. After he and his companions left, nothing but scraps remained on the counter. The times when Aliide happened to be standing in line when Volli cut to the front, she would disappear into her own mass so he wouldn’t notice her and say hello, so no one in the line would know that she knew the man. She didn’t want the hollow eyes of the people in line to turn and look in her direction; if he said hello to her she would have been thrust out of the line, she would have gotten an elbow in the side-but they never could have hit Volli’s well-fed sides.
Now Aliide greeted him cheerfully and offered him some coffee substitute, and they chatted about this and that. Then he said that he might have to go to court.
Her alarm was so bright that she couldn’t see for a moment.
“They’ve made up all kinds of lies about me,” he said. “It may be that they’ll even want to ask you some questions, Aliide.”
He was serious. It should have all been over and done with. Why were they coming to harass old people?
“We were all just following orders. We were good people. And now all of a sudden we’re bad. I don’t understand that.” He hung his head and started to berate Yeltsin and the young ingrates and their well-constructed nation. “Now you have to scrape for everything, and that’s supposed to be a good thing, huh?”
Aliide shut her ears to his complaining. Something to be arranged again, new plans to make-always something new, even though she didn’t have it in her, not anymore.
Volli got ready to leave. Aliide studied him. His hands were shaking, he had to hold his coffee cup in both hands, and she saw fear in those hands-not in his ashen expression, not in his crumpled face, only in his hands. Or maybe behind his mouth, too, the corners of his mouth that he was wiping with a handkerchief all the time, dabbing at them with his bony, trembling fingers. It made her shudder. He was weak now, and it filled her with vexation and a desire to kick him, wallop his back and sides with a stick-or maybe with a sandbag-till there was nothing left of him. Till his guts were like soup. That would be a method familiar to Volli. Just like an old girlfriend-kiss this! A vision flashed in her mind: Volli doddering and trembling on the ground, shielding his head, whimpering and begging for mercy. What a delicious sight. A wet splotch would spread in his pants and the sandbag would fly up again and again and hammer his hateful, weak body thoroughly, bruising his watery eyes, splintering his porous bones. But the best part would be that splotch in his pants and the howl, like an animal howl, before he died.
The vision made her breathless, and she sighed. Volli sighed, too, and said, “This is what we’ve come to.”
She promised to come and testify on his behalf if he ended up in court. Although of course she wouldn’t.
She closed the gate behind him as he pedaled off, glancing after him.
Others would come after Volli to discuss the same thing. There was no doubt about it. They thought of her as an ally, and they would insist on taking her with them. She could almost already hear how she ought to make a statement, talk to the papers, since she had always been good at talking, and women are always more likely to be believed in these situations-that’s what they would say, and they would drag the memory of Martin into it and say that Aliide had been part of building this country, and their reputations would be dragged through the mud so shamefully, and so would the memory of all the soldiers and veterans who came before us! There was no telling whose memory and reputation they would drag into it, and then they would rant about how the Soviet Union would never have allowed the heroes of the fatherland to end up using macaroni coupons.
Aliide wasn’t ever going to go anywhere or say anything about these things. Let them threaten her however they liked, she wasn’t going.
She found it hard to believe that there would be any very bold moves, because too many people had dirty flour in their bags, and people with filthy fingers are hardly enthusiastic about digging up the past. Besides, you could always find someone to defend you if a fanatical public worked itself up into a riot. They would have been called saboteurs, in the past, and put in jail to think for a while about the consequences of their actions. Stupid young people, what did they expect to achieve by rummaging around like this? Those who poke around in the past will get a stick in the eye. A beam would be better, though.
When Volli was out of sight, Aliide went inside and opened a drawer in the bureau. She took out some papers and started to sort them. Then she opened another drawer. And another. She went through every drawer, went to the washstand, the bundle in the bottom drawer, remembered the secret drawer in the kitchen table, too, and went through it. The radio cabinet. The shelf on the big looking glass. The unused suitcases. The straggly wallpaper, under which she had sometimes slipped something. The candy tins, blooming with rust. The piles of yellowed newspapers, dead flies dropping from between them. Did Martin have any other stashes?
She wiped away the spiderwebs that clung to her hair. She hadn’t found anything incriminating, just a lot of trash seeping out of every corner. The party papers and awards went in the fire, so did Talvi’s Young Pioneer badge. And the pile of the Abiks Agitator, which Martin had read every month with burning eyes: In 1960, for every ten thousand inhabitants in England there were only nine doctors, in the United States only twelve, but in the Estonian Soviet Republic there were twentytwo! In the Soviet Republic of Georgia, thirty-two! Before the war, there were no kindergartens in Albania, but now there are three hundred! We demand a happy life for all the children of the world! And what brigadiers we have!
Looking at the annual volume, with “EKP KK Propaganda and Agitation Association” printed under the title, Aliide could hear Martin’s voice trembling with fervor. A Socialist society provides the best prerequisites for the advancement of science, the advancement of economics, the conquering of space for progress! She shook her head, but Martin’s voice wouldn’t leave it. The capitalist world won’t be able to keep up with the stormlike progress of our people’s standard of living! The capitalist world will be left standing-and fall! And an unending stream of numbers: how much steel had been produced in the previous year, how much it exceeded the norm, how the annual goal had been achieved in one month-forward, always forward -still more, more, more-greater victories, greater profits -victory, victory, victory! Martin never said maybe. He was incapable of doubt, because he didn’t let his words admit the possibility. He spoke only truths.
There was so much wastepaper that Aliide had to wait for the first batch to burn before she could load more into the stove. The old paper made her skin smutty. She washed her hands all the way to the elbows, but they got filthy again immediately when she picked up the next magazine. The endless annals of the Estonian Communists. And then all of the books that had been ordered: Ideological Experiences Stumping in Viljand by K. Raaven, An Analysis of Livestock Production on Collective Farms by R. Hagelberg, A Young Communist’s Questions About Growth by Nadezda Krupskaya. The pile, glazed over with lost optimism, grew in front of her. She could have burned them all gradually, used the books for kindling, but it felt important to get rid of them all right away. It would have been smarter to look for the kinds of things that could have been used against her. Martin had always been the kind of person who knew how to watch his own back, so she was sure to find something. But the pile of trash in front of the stove annoyed her too much.
After she got going, burning books for several days, she fetched the ladder from the stable and managed to lug it over to the end of the house, though it weighed her down and dragged her arms toward the ground. Hiisu bolted after a low-flying air force plane-he’d never gotten used to them, always trying to catch them, many times a day, barking at the top of his lungs. He vanished behind the fence and Aliide pushed the ladder up against the wall of the house. She hadn’t been to that side of the loft in years, so there would be plenty of mess, corners full of embarrassing phrases and theses that had to be suppressed.
An attic smell. Spiderwebs drifting against her, and a strange taste of longing. She retied her scarf under her chin and stepped forward. She left the door open and let her eyes adjust to the darkness, peering between the tops of the piles. Where should she start? The section of the attic over the end of the house was full of every possible object: spinning wheels, shuttles, shoemaker’s lasts, old potato baskets, a loom, bicycles, toys, skis, ski poles, window frames, a treadle sewing machine-a Singer that Martin had insisted on carrying up here, even though Aliide had wanted to keep it downstairs because it worked well. The women in the village had held on to their Singers, and anyone who did get a new machine chose a treadle model, because what if something happened and there was no electricity? Martin didn’t often become visibly angry and didn’t argue with his wife about household matters, but the Singer had gone, and Martin had replaced it with an electric model, a Russian Tshaika. Aliide had let it pass, reckoning that he just hated goods from Estonian times and wanted to set an example and show how they trusted Russian appliances. But the Singer was the only thing from Estonian times that he wanted to get rid of. Why the Singer, and why only it? Pick me, my lips have never been kissed, Pick me, I am a maiden true, pure, and able, Pick me, I have a Singer sewing machine, Pick me, I have a Ping-Pong table. Who was it who had sung that? Nobody around here, anyway. The young voices in Aliide’s head mixed with Martin’s snorts from years ago as he lugged the Singer up the ladder to the attic. Where had she heard that song? It was in Tallinn, when she was visiting her cousin. Why had she gone there? Was she there to see a dentist? That was the only possible reason. Her cousin had taken her to town, and she had passed a student group that was singing, “Take me, I have a Singer sewing machine.” And the students had laughed so lightly. They had their whole lives ahead of them, the future leading them forward at full steam, the girls with their short skirts and high, shiny boots. Chiffon scarves rippling in their hair and around their necks. Her cousin had lamented the shortness of the skirts goodnaturedly, but she was wearing a chiffon scarf just like theirs on her head. They were all the rage, those chiffon scarves. The expressions on the young people’s faces had been full of possibility. Her future was already over. The song kept ringing in her ears all day. No, all week. It mixed with the milk that sprayed into her pail, the muddy bottoms of her galoshes, her steps as she walked across the field of the kolkhoz collective farm and saw Martin’s excitement at how the collective was thriving, his excitement about the future, which had rolled over Aliide’s heart like a heavy cart, as sturdy as a lug nut, like the muscles of Stakhanov, the heroic miner, inescapable, inexorable.
Aliide aimed her flashlight at the sewing machine again. Singer, above all the rest. She remembered the ads from a world ago in Taluperenaine magazine very well. Under the cabinet top there was a box full of junk, sewing machine oil and little brushes, broken needles and bits of ribbon. She got down on her knees and looked at the underside of the cabinet top. The nails there were smaller than on the rest of the cabinet. She pushed the machine over and went carefully down the ladder, got an ax from the kitchen, and tottered back up the ladder to the attic. The ax made short work of the sewing machine.
She found a little bag in the middle of one of the piles. Martin’s old tobacco pouch. It had old gold coins and gold teeth in it. A gold watch, with Theodor Kruus’s name engraved on it. Her sister Ingel’s brooch, which had disappeared that night in the basement of town hall.
Aliide sat down on the floor.
Martin hadn’t been there. Not Martin.
Although Aliide’s head had been covered and she hadn’t really been able to see anything, she still remembered every sound, every smell, every man’s footsteps from that basement. None of them belonged to Martin. That’s why she had accepted him.
So how did Martin come to have Ingel’s brooch?
The next day Aliide took the bicycle down the road into the woods. When she was far enough away, she left the bike by the side of the road, walked out toward the swamp, and threw in the pouch, in a great arch.
Zara rinsed the last raspberries of the year, picked out the worms, threw out the ones that were completely wormeaten, trimmed the half-eaten ones, and tipped the cleaned berries into a bowl. At the same time she tried to figure out a way to ask Aliide about the rocks hitting the window, the “tibla” written on the door. At first Zara had been startled, thinking that it referred to her, but even her stumbling intellect told her that Pasha and Lavrenti wouldn’t take up that kind of game. It was intended for Aliide, but why would someone harass an old woman that way? How did Aliide manage to remain calm at a time like that? She was puttering away at the stove like nothing had happened, even humming, nodding approvingly at Zara’s bowl of berries now and then, and shoving a ladleful of foam skimmed from the boiling pot of jam into Zara’s hand. It seemed Talvi had always begged to be the first to have some. Zara started to empty the ladle obediently. The sweetness of the foam made her teeth twinge. Worms moved around on top of the discarded berries and made the bowl’s enameled flowers come alive. Aliide was unnaturally calm. She sat down on a stool next to the stove to watch the soup, her walking stick leaning against the wall. The swatter rested in her arms, and she used it now and then to slap at the occasional fly. Her galoshes gleamed even in the dark of the kitchen. The sweet scent that rose from the cooking pots mixed with the drying celery and the smell of sweat brought on by the heat of the kitchen. It muddled Zara’s brain. The scarf, which was drooping onto her neck, smelled like Aliide. It was difficult to breathe. New questions kept coming up, even though she hadn’t yet got any answers to her first ones. How did Aliide Truu live in this house? What did the rocks that hit the window mean? Would Talvi get here before Pasha did? Zara fidgeted impatiently. The roof of her mouth was sticky. Aliide hadn’t had much to say since she gave her explanation for the scrawlings on the door and the rain of stones, and it was torture. How could Zara get her babbling about her troubles again? Aliide had been angry when they talked about the rise in prices-maybe she should ask her about that. Was it a safe subject? The price of eggs nowadays, or soup bones? Or sugar? Aliide had muttered that she should start growing sugar beets again, the way things are now. But what could Zara ask her about it? Over the past year she had forgotten all the normal ways of being with people- how to get to know a person, how to have a conversation- and she couldn’t think of a segue to break the silence. Besides, time was running out and Aliide’s imperturbability scared her. What if Aliide was crazy? Maybe the stones and windows didn’t mean anything for Zara’s purposes; maybe she should just concentrate on doing something-and quickly. The raspberry seeds wedged between her teeth and wrenched at their roots. She could taste blood in them. The clock ticked metallically, the fire burned one stick of wood after another, the baskets of berries emptied, Aliide skimmed the foam and the worms that rose to the top with lunatic precision, and Pasha came closer. Every single minute he was getting closer. His car wouldn’t break down, and it wouldn’t run out of gas, and it wouldn’t be stolen-those kinds of things, delays that mere mortals experienced, didn’t happen to Pasha, because the problems of ordinary people didn’t touch him, and because Pasha always got his way. You couldn’t depend on Pasha having bad luck. He didn’t have bad luck. He had money luck, the only good kind, and he was getting inexorably closer.
Zara’s eye didn’t latch on to anything in the house, no old photographs, no books or inscriptions. She had to think of something else. The photo was there in her pocket.
Aliide went to get some jar lids from the pantry, and
Zara decided to act.
In the photograph, two young girls are standing side by side and staring at the camera but not daring to smile. Their dresses fall over their hips slightly askew. The hem of one of them is higher on the right than on the left. It may have been ripped. The other one is standing up straighter, and she has a high bust and a slim waist. She’s placed one foot assertively ahead of the other so that its slender form, cloaked in a black stocking, would show well in the picture. There is some kind of badge on the breast of her dress, a four-leafed clover. It wasn’t clearly visible in the photo, but Zara knew that it was a badge from a rural youth organization, because her grandmother had told her about it. And as Zara looked at the photo now she saw something that she hadn’t understood before. There was something very innocent in the girls’ faces, and that innocence shone out at her from their round cheeks in a way that embarrassed her. Maybe she hadn’t noticed it before because she herself had worn the same expression, the same innocence, but now that she had lost it, she could recognize it in their faces. The expression of someone unacquainted with reality. The expression of a time when the future still existed and anything was possible.
Her grandmother had given her the photo before she left for Germany. In case anything happened to her while Zara was away. All kinds of things can happen to old people, and if anything did happen, the photo would already have a head start; it would save Zara the time it took to come and get it. Zara had tried to talk her out of it, but she wouldn’t give the idea up. Zara’s mother thought that anything old was trash, so she wouldn’t save any old pictures. Zara had nodded-she knew that side of her mother -and taken the photo and kept it, even when it was practically impossible, and she would keep it from now on; even if everything else she owned was lost and the shirt on her back belonged to Pasha, she would keep that picture, even if there was nothing in her body that she could call her own, if all her bodily functions depended on Pasha’s permission, even if she couldn’t go to the toilet without Pasha’s permission, or use a tampon or a wad of cotton or anything, because Pasha thought they were too expensive.
In addition to the photograph, her grandmother had given her a card with the address of the place where she was born written on the back, the name of the village and the house. Oak House. In case, on her great world travels, Zara should find herself in Estonia. The idea had surprised her, but it seemed self-evident to her grandmother.
“Germany’s right next to Estonia! Go and see it, now that you have a chance to do it so easily.”
Her grandmother’s eyes had lit up when she told her she was going to work in Germany. Her mother hadn’t been enthusiastic. She was never enthusiastic about anything, but she particularly didn’t like these plans; she thought the West was a dangerous place. The high pay didn’t change her opinion. Her grandmother didn’t care about the money, either, instead insisting that she use the money to visit Estonia.
“Remember, Zara. You’re not a Russian girl, you’re an Estonian girl. And you can buy some seeds at the market and send them to me! I want Estonian flowers on my windowsill!”
The back of the photograph read, “For Aliide, from her sister.” She had also written the name Aliide Truu on the card. No one had ever told Zara anything about Aliide Truu before.
“Who is Aliide Truu, Grandmother?”
“My sister. My little sister. Or she used to be. She may already be dead. You can inquire about her. Whether anyone knows her.”
“Why didn’t you ever tell me that you had a sister?”
“Aliide got married and moved away early on. And then the war came. And we moved here. But you have to go and look at the house. Then you can tell me who lives there and what it looks like now. I’ve told you before what it was like.”
As her mother walked with her to the door on her last day at home, Zara put her suitcase down on the floor and asked her mother why she had never told her about her aunt.
This time, her mother answered her.
“I don’t have an aunt.”
When Aliide went into the pantry, Zara took the picture out of her pocket and waited. Aliide would have to respond to it somehow, say something, tell her something, anything at all. Something had to happen when Aliide saw the photograph. Zara’s heart was pounding. But when Aliide came back into the kitchen and Zara waved the photo in front of her and said with a gasp that it had fallen from between the cupboard and the wall, right through a hole in the wallpaper, there was nothing in Aliide’s expression to indicate that she knew who the girls in the photo were.
“What’s it a picture of?”
“It says, ‘For Aliide, from her sister.’”
“I don’t have a sister.”
She turned the radio up louder. They were just finishing up the last words of an open letter from a Communist and were moving on to other points of view. “Give it to me.”
Aliide’s commanding voice compelled Zara to give her the picture, and she snatched it quickly.
“What’s her name?” Zara asked.
Aliide turned the radio up even louder.
“What’s her name?” Zara said again.
“What?”
… Since there’s no milk to give to our children, and no candy, how can they grow up to be healthy? Should we teach them to eat nettles and dandelion greens? I pray with all my heart that our country can have…
“Women like that were called enemies of the state back then.”
… enough bread and something to put on it, too…
“What about your sister?”
“What about her? She was a thief and a traitor.”
Zara turned the radio down.
Aliide didn’t look at her. Zara could hear the indignation in her breath. Her earlobes were turning red.
“So, she was a bad person. How bad? What did she do?”
“She stole grain from the kolkhoz and was arrested.”
“She stole some grain?”
“She behaved the way predators behave. She stole from the people.”
“Why didn’t she steal something more valuable?”
Aliide turned the radio up again.
“Didn’t you ask her?”
“Ask her what?”
… Across the centuries, a slave’s mentality has been programmed into our genes, which only recognizes money and force, and so we shouldn’t wonder if…
“Ask her why she stole the grain.”
“Don’t you people in Vladivostok know what liquor is made from?”
“It sounds like the act of a hungry person to me.”
Aliide turned the radio all the way up.
… for the sake of domestic peace we should ask some great power to defend us. Germany, for example. Only a dictatorship could put an end to Estonia’s present corruption and get the economy in order…
“You must have never been hungry, Aliide, because you didn’t steal any grain.”
Aliide pretended to listen to the radio, hummed over it, and grabbed some garlic to peel. The garlic skins started falling on the photograph. There was a magazine under it, Nelli Teataja. The logo on the cover, a black silhouette of an old woman, was still visible. Zara pulled the radio plug out of the wall. The rattle of the refrigerator ate up the silence, the garlic rumbled into the bowl like boulders, the plug burned in Zara’s hand.
“Don’t you think it’s time you sat down and relaxed?” Aliide said.
“Where did she steal it from?”
“From the field. You can see it from this window. Why are you interested in the carryings-on of a thief?”
“But that field belonged to this house.”
“No, it belonged to the kolkhoz.”
“But before that.”
“Before that, this was a Fascist house.”
“Are you a Fascist, Aliide?”
“I’m a good Communist. Why don’t you sit down, dear? Where I come from, guests sit down when they are asked, or else they leave.”
“So, if you were never a Fascist, then when did you move here?”
“I was born here. Turn the radio back on.”
“I don’t understand. You mean that your sister stole from her own fields?”
“From the kolkhoz’s fields! Turn that radio back on, young lady. Where I come from, guests don’t behave like they own the place. Maybe where you come from you don’t know any other way to behave.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude. I just got interested in your sister’s story. What happened to her?”
“She was taken away. Why are you interested in a thief’s story? Thieves’ stories only interest other thieves.”
“Where did they take her?”
“Wherever they take enemies of the people.”
“And then what?”
“What do you mean, then what?”
Aliide got up, shoved Zara out of the way with her stick, and plugged the radio back into the wall.
… A slave’s spirit longs for the whip, and once in a while a Russian prianiki cake…
“What happened after that?”
The photo was covered with garlic skins. The radio was so loud that the skins trembled.
“How is it that you’re here, Aliide, but your sister was taken away? Didn’t that put you under suspicion?”
Aliide made no sign that she had heard; she just yelled, “Put some more wood on the fire!”
“Was it because you had such a good background? You were such a good party member?”
The garlic skins danced off the edge of the table and drifted to the floor. Aliide got up to throw them on the fire. Zara turned the radio down and stood in front of it.
“Were you a good comrade, Aliide?”
“I was good, and so was my husband, Martin. He was a party organizer. From an old Estonian Communist family, not like those opportunists that came later. He had medals. Awards.”
The rapid-fire yelling over the sound of the radio made Zara pant, she pressed against her chest to get it to settle down, opened the buttons of her dress, and found it hard to recognize in this woman in front of her the same Aliide who had been jabbering away calmly a little while ago. This woman was cold and hard, and she wasn’t getting anything out of her.
“I think you should go to sleep now. There’s a lot to think about tomorrow-like what to do about your husband, if you still remember that problem.” Under the blankets in the front room, Zara was still gasping for breath. Aliide had recognized her grandmother.
Grandmother hadn’t been a thief or a Fascist. Or had she?
There was a slap of the flyswatter in the kitchen. -Paul-Eerik Rummo