Morten knew, of course. For many years he had understood, condoned, shielded and protected when she would allow him to do so. He knew the gap was there and what it cost her not to fall into it. What he couldn’t accept was that their children also had to live on the edge of that abyss.
She listened to Rina’s whispering voice and did not interrupt. Let the girl speak with her father, she thought. Who am I to tell her that she’s wrong, that the phone doesn’t work, that her father can no longer hear her and is never coming back?
When Nina had the sense that Rina was saying goodbye, she stepped into the living room. And it was only then that she saw that the phone Rina was speaking into wasn’t the broken cell phone but the landline on Søren’s desk.
“Who were you speaking to?” she asked.
Rina started. “No one.”
Who did Rina even know that she would think of calling? Someone at the Coal-House Camp? Natasha? Rina had been speaking Ukrainian, but how on earth could she have gotten a number that would connect her with her mother?
“Was it … your father?”
Rina shrugged and bowed her head. “It doesn’t work anymore,” she said.
“Why not?”
“It’s broken. He said so. The policeman.”
Nina went over to the phone and pressed REDIAL. The telephone rang five, six, seven times. Then a friendly man’s voice said, “You’ve reached Anna and Hans Henrik Olesen. We can’t come to the phone right now, but leave a message, and we’ll call you back.”
Hans Henrik Olesen? She had never heard of the man and she couldn’t figure out how Rina knew him.
But maybe Rina didn’t know him. Maybe she had pressed the numbers randomly or called one of the numbers in the phone’s memory.
“Rina. It’s important. Were you trying to call your father?”
Rina stood there for a moment, gasping with her mouth open, and Nina was sorry to have pushed her. The girl’s narrow face puckered and distorted as if she was going to cry, but no tears came.
“I just want to talk to him,” she said at last, and the air wheezed in and out of her lungs, worse and worse, it seemed to Nina. “I miss him so.”
So do I, thought Nina. How could he do that to us?
She put her arms around the girl, this time not caring whose need she was responding to. Rina felt light as a bird in her arms, a small, damp burden weighing less than it ought.
The time was now 9:42.
They came for Father in the beginning of December, and he didn’t have time to say goodbye to anyone besides Vladimir Petrenko and the widow.
It was Jana who was able to report it in school, and maybe she did feel a little sorry for Olga, after all, because she let Olga sit next to her on the steps while the children gathered around her during the break.
“He was yelling and screaming all the way down to the crossroads,” said Jana. “And Svetlova, big as a house, came waddling after on bare feet and tried to hit one of the GPUs with a log. Like this.”
Jana got up and ran with heavy, spread legs over the lumpy, frost-covered ground, screaming, “Oh, oh,” holding her stomach with one hand and swinging an imaginary piece of firewood in the other. The others laughed, and Jana happily repeated the performance a few times before she tired of the applause and stopped, cheeks glowing and feet apart. Her breath emerged in a white cloud from her mouth.
“Did they hit him?”
Olga thought Jegor looked almost eager. Her stomach had tied itself into a hard knot, and the air she breathed into her lungs was so cold, it seemed to make her chest freeze solid.
Jana didn’t answer right away but remained standing, scratching her hair thoughtfully. She had lice, Olga observed. Jana’s mother had had a fever and a cough for the last two weeks and had not had the strength to comb Jana and her little sister with the lice comb the way she usually did. Even at this distance Olga could see the big, fat creatures crawling around in Jana’s pale hair and was secretly pleased. Maybe that would teach her to lie about Olga’s body lice. But it still hurt all the way down into the pit of her stomach. In the old days, she would have offered to crack the lice for Jana during recess, but now Jana would just have to crack them herself, if she could catch them.
“I think they did hit him once with the rifle,” said Jana then. “Across the back of the neck. Afterward, he did what they told him to, even though he kept screaming.”
“Too bad.”
The boys had hoped for more, Olga could see. They had played Capitalists and Communists all recess long, and the capitalists had been beaten as usual. It was clear, they said, that Andreij should have been beaten much more severely for his crimes. As head of the kolkhoz, he had not only protected the kulaks, who should have been deported long ago, he had also ignored several thefts from the state’s grain stores, even though the thieves had been caught. Those kinds of thefts could be punished with deportation or even death, but Andreij had openly flouted the law and neglected to report the episode to the GPU. He had even accepted a young mother who had been classified as a Former Human Being into the collective farm and had fed her kulak children through all of last winter.
In his house he had hidden several things that made him a class enemy. The GPUs had dragged both Mother’s sewing machine and a silver candelabra from the house, and the widow Svetlova had brazenly worn a zobel fur and had owned two big copper pots. Even one would have been a conspicuous luxury; two copper pots was a clear crime against the people, who had toiled in the mines to bring up precious metal for the industry.
The boys then tried to guess where Andreij would spend his time in deportation. Obdorsk, or Beresovo, or maybe Samarovo. The farther north it was, the worse it would be. People got gangrene and lost arms and legs in the Siberian cold, and that was true both for those who ended up in a prison camp and for the more fortunate ones who were deported but allowed to live as free men. Letters from Siberia were full of horrors.
For the widow, it was a different matter, or so Jegor claimed. True, she had been forced to depart in woolen socks and without either zobel fur or overcoat, thrown out on her ass and ordered to find a place to live outside the village. She had a bad record now, but she probably had an old mother someplace with whom she could seek shelter from the winter cold for her unborn child.
Olga sat stock-still, picking at her felt boots and trying not to think the incomprehensible. Her father wasn’t a class enemy, and she didn’t understand how it had come to be that he was one anyway. It wasn’t easy either, to figure out why some of those who had been deported were to be pitied while others apparently were getting what they deserved. Every day offered new truths that grated against one another inside her head, as painfully as sharp stones under one’s feet. The others seemed to have no problem understanding. Self-confident Jana, Jegor and Leda and Oxana, yes, even Sergej, that little shit, knew when you were supposed to smile proudly and when you had to duck your head in shame. Knew which truths you should grab on to and which ones you should let go.
Old truth: Olga’s father is Andreij Trofimenko, a trusted man in the village, a loving father and a loyal husband.
New truth: Olga’s father is Andreij Trofimenko, class enemy and traitor, deportee and Former Human Being, a lousy father and deceitful husband.
Unwelcome pictures began to swim past her inner eye, even though she bit herself hard in the cheek and tried to think about the soy candy from Petrograd that Comrade Semienova had offered Oxana and her last week.
Her father living in a hole in the ground like the ones the Former Human Beings dug among the birch trees up in the hills. His hands that had split the year’s first melon two summers ago in the garden of their little townhouse … in her imagination, those same hands were now black and stinking with gangrene, even as he held the sparkling red fruit between his fingers.
“Eat, my lovely,” said Father and handed the melon to her while he smiled with a toothless mouth. His nose was as black as his fingers, and he smelled of rotting flesh
and vodka.
“I feel sorry for the baby,” Veronica said and shook her head sadly. In the battle against the kulaks and the capitalists, she had had a passionate skirmish with Sergej and had her kerchief pulled down over her shoulders. “That a mother would do that to her child.”
“Save your pity,” drawled Jegor. “The brat isn’t even born yet, and maybe Svetlova still has time to go to a doctor in Kharkiv, and that’s the end of that, and nothing will ever hurt it again.”
“Shut up.”
Olga knew she should keep her mouth shut, but the words shot out. Her voice broke, sounding stupid and babyish. She wished Oxana was here, but Oxana was in the kolkhoz, arranging yet another political meeting, and now Jana looked at her with a mixture of pity and glee.
“What’s wrong? I thought you didn’t like Svetlova.”
Olga shrugged, got up and quickly brushed off her dress. Her fingers were red and numb because she had left her mittens in the schoolroom, and she had forgotten to hide her hands in her coat sleeves. Right now she couldn’t feel them, but when she went inside, her fingers would hurt, and the skin would split and itch. To her amazement, Jana brought her face so close to Olga’s that their foreheads almost touched, and Olga had time to think that now she would definitely get lice.
“You better watch out for yourself,” whispered Jana. “Your father may be a class enemy, Olga, but your traitor sister has blood on her hands now. Her own family’s blood. If I were you, I would watch my back around her.”
Natasha pulled her coat closer to her body and glanced at her watch. It was almost eleven, and she had been sitting on the steps here for an hour and a half already, but she didn’t dare leave now. Not even to find a place to pee, though it was starting to feel pretty urgent. If she left … if she as much as looked away for a moment …
She had found the street; she was sure this was it. The little corner store, the miserable-looking birch trees along Jagtvejen’s median strip. It was here. But the houses looked more alike than she had remembered. The same worn red-brick fronts, the same anonymous brown doors. There was no ugly yellow car parked on the street, and she had looked at all the intercoms without finding Nina’s name. But sooner or later they had to come out, Nina or the husband or the children, and then she could ask. Then she would make them tell her where Katerina was.
She had pulled the hood of Robbie’s grey sweatshirt over her head in order not to be recognized. It would have been better to sit in the Audi, but cars lined the street bumper to bumper, and she had had to park elsewhere. What would they think, the Danes inside their apartments, if they looked out their windows and saw her now? Would they think that she was homeless, like one of those people who periodically froze to death during Kiev’s cold winters in a stairwell like the one she was huddling in now?
She had been surprised that there were also homeless people in Denmark. More, it seemed, than in Kiev. But maybe that was because there were fewer police. In Copenhagen there weren’t two policemen on every other corner. Here people could camp out in peace and quiet with their bags and packs and cardboard to sit on. Was that what she looked like? She was beginning to smell that way, that was for sure.
BEAUTIFUL, BEAUTIFUL NATASHA.
That was her, and of course that was what Pavel had fallen for, even though he said back then that it was her eyes and her smile, quite simply her that he had fallen in love with.
He spoiled her and treated her like a lady. He brought her to the expensive stores in the mall under Independence Square and discussed what suited her best with the salespeople while Natasha stood there without saying anything, because if she opened her mouth, they would be able to tell that she wasn’t from Kiev. The clothes were different from the ones she would have bought herself. Narrow skirts that reached her knees. Soft silk blouses and white shirts and glittering bracelets, wide belts and high-heeled shoes. Classic, he said, because Natasha was a “classic beauty.” He said the same thing to the hairdresser, who apparently felt duty bound to tell her how much eyeliner and mascara it was appropriate to use in Kiev. What she was wearing was too much and too cheap, and had a tendency to clump on the lashes. And the lipstick should not be pink and glossy.
“You’re not in Donetsk any longer, honey,” the lady had said and told her about Dior and Elizabeth Arden and other companies she had never heard of. Then she had cut Natasha’s hair shorter than she’d ever had it before, to her shoulders, and with new sharp angles and waves. The color was fine as it was—like a Ukrainian wheat field, with touches of brown and gold.
“From now on, you need to come see me every third week, honey. Or there’ll be trouble. Hair like yours can look like a million dollars if you take care of it.”
Pavel kissed the new hair and new color on her lips and said that she was completely perfect.
Only much later did she realize that he also loved her for her ignorance—all the things she didn’t know about him, about the world. He loved her because she was beautiful and dumb, because she was seventeen and came from Kurakhovo. A woman from Kiev, a woman his own age, would have asked more questions. Natasha didn’t question. She only loved. She loved him, she loved the apartment, she loved that he went to work every day and wrote in the newspapers about important topics and spoke with important people.
She kept the apartment so clean that everything shone. She changed the sheets every day, like in a hotel. And she cooked the way he wanted her to. Traditional, he called it. Beautiful braided paska bread for the holidays, borscht, cabbage rolls and little pancakes with fried farmers’ cheese, honey and sour cream, jam or apple sauce. In return he took care of her. She didn’t need to work in a dirty factory or stand in the unemployment line. Katerina was born in a private hospital with brilliant white towels in the bathroom; a drip of clear anesthesia was inserted into Natasha’s spine and took away all pain and worries. To Natasha, that had been the final proof back then that her life really was a fairy tale, so far removed from those girls from Kurakhovo, who, in the coming years, would be lying on rusty hospital beds with dirty covers, bellowing like cows as they brought their children into the world in a flood of shit and blood and torn placenta.
Pavel held her hand through every single contraction, because that was what men did in Kiev, at least the educated ones. And when Katerina finally lay in her arms, Pavel looked at her with so much tenderness that it was almost more than she could bear.
Beautiful, beautiful, stupid Natasha.
She didn’t know it then, but she had learned it now.
In this world, you were punished for your stupidity, and you were punished hard. That was just as true in Copenhagen as it was in Kiev.
IT WAS COLD sitting on the steps, but it still felt more natural than standing. She would have liked to have a smoke, a refugee habit she had picked up in the camp and which had intensified in prison. Cigarettes were fantastic props during life in captivity because they gave you the feeling that you were doing something other than just waiting. You pulled smoke into your lungs and blew it out again, and you turned the cigarette in your hand and looked at it while it got smaller and smaller.
A door opened, and for a brief moment, Natasha thought she saw Nina’s slender figure step out onto the sidewalk. It was the same impatient toss of the head, the same quivering energy in the body, but it was still wrong. This was not a woman but a girl in skinny jeans, basketball sneakers and a heavy leather jacket. A boy followed in a baggy ski jacket and an eye-catching black mustache taped to his upper lip. And then finally a man that Natasha recognized with certainty as Nina’s husband, even though he somehow had become thinner and older looking—dark eyes and a broad jaw under a black cap. He was dressed like a teenager in worn pale jeans and a yellow down jacket. He must be forty, thought Natasha, but Danish men dressed like boys, not men.
Michael had been an exception, of course. He preferred classic shirts and dark pants and expensive jackets that had to be dry-cleaned and pressed and steamed, and somehow she always managed to
get it wrong so that he got angry or irritated. Maybe her life would have looked completely different if she had met a boy-man like Nina’s husband instead. If someone like him had lived in the house next to Anna’s farm. Natasha doubted that Nina’s husband had ever touched the nurse in a way she didn’t like. If he had, Nina would probably have exited both the bedroom and the apartment and slammed the door behind her. That was a luxury Natasha had not been able to afford.
Nina’s husband, son and daughter walked toward her without noticing her. The boy wore lurid electric-blue pants and a pair of ludicrously oversized shoes that would barely stay on. Still, he had that energy in his feet which she recognized from the boys at home. He kicked stones, balanced on the curb and made small, energetic jumps to smack a flat hand against the traffic signs.
She got up, went over to them. Attempted to smile.
“Is Nina home?” she asked in her best Danish. After more than two years, she understood most things, but Danish words still felt like slippery stones in her mouth—foreign objects that didn’t belong.
“Why?” The man gave her a cool, measuring look.
Maybe Nina had asked him to be on guard. Maybe she had said he should keep his mouth shut and not reveal where Katerina was.
“Katerina,” she said anyway and stood her ground, blocking their way on the sidewalk. “Tell me where my daughter is, please,” she said in English.
Death of a Nightingale (Nina Borg #3) Page 16
