Lace Weaver

by Lauren Chater

  Mama shook her head. ‘Really, Kati. You are nineteen. This daydreaming has to stop.’

  She glanced across at my father, who slurped at his soup but did not look up.

  ‘Erich?’ my mother prompted. ‘Don’t you agree?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said. He set down his spoon. ‘Or perhaps it was Kati’s polite way of saying that the broth is not very good.’

  Mama looked from me to Papa, lost for words. He picked up his spoon again and took a long, lazy slurp.

  Finally, she said, ‘Well, it would not be so bad, Erich, if I had something other than old chicken bones and rancid turnips to cook with.’

  Papa glanced at me and wiggled his thick eyebrows. Suddenly, the whole situation seemed humorous.

  ‘I so happen to like turnips,’ he said. ‘But this tastes less like fresh turnips. More like water into which a turnip has been dangled and then snatched away.’

  Mama’s shoulders relaxed. She smoothed back her hair and adjusted the shawl around her neck which had slipped a little as she moved about serving the food. The snowy white lace made even her threadbare dress, with its faded pattern of roses, seem almost elegant. Although she was thinner than last year, she was still beautiful with high cheekbones and an elegant nose which both Jakob and I had not inherited. We both had the Rebane nose; short and wide, with a sloped tip.

  ‘You are welcome to suggest something better, Erich,’ Mama said, her pointed chin lifted.

  ‘Perhaps tomorrow we could have turnip pie,’ he said, the corners of his mouth creasing. ‘And with it, a turnip salad?’

  ‘And . . . turnip ice cream,’ I supplied, my heart lifting.

  ‘Well,’ my mother conceded, ‘I could do better than turnip soup, if you would only allow me to buy a few of those black-market potatoes.’

  ‘Oh yes!’ I said, stirring my spoon round and round through the weak soup, allowing myself to dream, along with my mother. ‘Those fat, creamy potatoes . . . or thick, buttery carrots.’

  It was the wrong thing to say.

  Papa snatched up his spoon again, gripping it in his fist. ‘Put it out of your mind, both of you. I’ve told you; those items are banned. Do you want to go to prison? We can’t afford to be arrested.’

  Arrested.

  The word hung between us.

  Below, the ewes bleated, the sound drifting up through the floorboards like laughter. Papa sipped his soup, but his smile was gone.

  If Jakob were here, I thought, he would know what to do. He would tell a joke, a slightly inappropriate one that would make my mother exclaim, Jakob! and would make Papa’s lips curve in a secret, knowing smile. But I am not Jakob. I am Katarina, a girl considered not worth sending to the university to further her studies, a girl who must endure day after day of the same monotonous tasks, shackled to the responsibility of keeping a flock of guileless sheep safe from harm. A girl whose only pleasure comes from knitting and from remembering the stories her grandmother left behind.

  Perhaps even Jakob could not make light of the way the Russians terrorised those of us who remained behind when the occupation started. There was nothing funny about the way our leaders had been arrested and parliament dissolved, or the seizing of radio stations so that the Russian occupiers could assure us all our government had been the enemy. There was nothing playful about the way their soldiers commandeered vehicles and houses, throwing Estonians and their children out of their homes and deporting anyone they suspected of holding ‘capitalist sympathies’. My grandmother would have wept to see Tartu now; all the lively cafes gone and Estonian businesses boarded up. Patrols of young Russian soldiers roaming the streets in packs, looking for any excuse to refer people to the NKVD Secret Police at the Grey House on Põder Street, the place where one could be tried and shot before their family even noticed they were gone.

  This was the reality of our lives now. Everywhere I went and every action which took place outside the privacy of home was accompanied by an undercurrent of fear. Each stranger I spoke to could report me as a spy. Each knock at the door could be an agent with a warrant to search our house. There were no safe places left except the arms of my family and my private thoughts. There was no way of resisting except to stay alive and to fulfil the promise I had made my grandmother; to maintain our culture through the knitting circle, to keep sharing our stories and continue the tradition of making shawls.

  I sighed and drained the last of my soup, stomach still tight with hunger, then I stood to help Mama clear away the things.

  Papa shifted in his seat. He cleared his throat.

  ‘Katarina . . . I need to speak to you.’

  I froze, the empty soup bowl suddenly heavy in my hand. ‘It’s not . . .’ I could not make my lips form my brother’s name.

  ‘No,’ my father said quickly. ‘Jakob is safe.’

  Relief was instant. Demonstrations. Deportation. Death. It was hard not to let my mind wander to the worst, especially with Jakob staying away for months on end, avoiding trips home, spending all his time in the dorms with his friends. Mama had threatened to go to town herself but Papa dissuaded her.

  ‘Then who?’ I continued.

  In my mind, I was flicking through the faces of the people I knew. Which one of them had been punished this time, or worse, had vanished without warning? Not Aunt Juudit, I prayed, thinking of her wide-set green eyes, so like Papa’s and my own. Not gentle Etti, her husband taken and killed at the hands of the Soviets while she remained, big with child, unable to push herself off the lounge unassisted. How could she run?

  Papa, watching me, summoned up a weary smile. ‘Nobody has been hurt, Kati. Yet.’

  I wanted to sink into my chair, but I continued to stand. My father had more to say. I could see him measuring the words carefully in his head, thinking of how best to frame them. His pipe was clutched in one hand, the embers turning to ash.

  Whatever was coming, it was something he knew I wouldn’t want to hear.

  ‘Kati, the Partorg’s men were here earlier.’

  I forced myself to remain standing. ‘What did they want?’

  My father scratched at his whiskers. ‘I’m afraid there will be no wool for shawls this winter.’

  I stared at him. ‘No wool?’

  ‘I’m sorry. The Partorg has increased our wool quota for the coming year. The only way we can meet it is to give up the fleece we use for your yarn.’

  I blinked. ‘No wool,’ I repeated. I waited for the words to bring relief with them. Nobody was injured. Instead, an empty, hollow feeling opened up inside me.

  No more wool meant no more shawls.

  ‘There must be a mistake.’ I glanced across at my mother, willing her to smile, to slap my father on the arm the way she had done earlier in that brief shining moment of camaraderie. But my mother’s face was pinched.

  ‘No mistake,’ Papa said. ‘I wrote the figures down myself.’ He reached into his pocket and drew out the small book in which he kept all the details of our farm. The tools, the position of the apple trees, the demarcations that divided our land. He had bought the book last year, when the Soviets first seized power.

  ‘We will not resist,’ Papa had warned us. ‘We will be model Soviets.’

  Now the pages of that little book were black with soil and well thumbed, the green cover creased. My father flicked it open in the middle, holding the pages out for me to see.

  I did not lean forward to confirm my loss. I couldn’t.

  ‘What about the reserve?’ I said, thinking fast, calculating how much wool was needed for one row of stitches, how much yarn could be stretched to piece together a shawl. ‘We still have the bales left over from last year.’

  My father was shaking his head. ‘They already suspect us.’ He heaved a sigh. ‘They are questioning the sale of your shawls at the flea market. Claiming that what I’ve been handing over is too little.’

  ‘Ridiculous. We earned that money!’ It was hard for me to keep the righteous anger from my voice. Although ther
e was a flea market in almost every village, and they were quite often raided, the Russians had not yet banned the sale of handicrafts, which were considered worthless, therefore less of a threat than foodstuffs and clothing, goods which were controlled and distributed by state-sanctioned factories. The Partorg had allowed us to continue operating our little market stall once a month provided most of the profits were handed over along with Papa’s quota of apples for the month. What we made was hardly enough to cover the cost of the wool. It certainly did not cover the time I spent dreaming up designs and the effort we all made to knit the shawls, but money had never been our motivation. When I stood at the stall, my head held high, and watched the Russian professors stop to admire the neat stitches in my shawls, I imagined a tiny bit of power kindling in my chest. When I took their roubles and placed them in the jar below the table, a warm feeling spread through my hand, knowing that we were, in a small way, defying the Russian government’s attempts to stamp out our past. I always smiled as I passed over the neatly-wrapped shawl and sent out a little wish as I watched the buyer’s departing back, hoping that the shawl would be cherished and admired, perhaps passed down through the family so that its link to Estonia was forever strengthened.

  ‘I know, Kati.’ My father sounded weary. ‘I know you did. And I was willing to overlook it. But they know us and they know the farm. Every last bit of it, every last blade of grass.’ He frowned at the little book. ‘Perhaps I should not have been so hasty in writing it all down.’

  My mother patted his arm. ‘You are the reason we are still here, Erich. Without you, the farm would not have survived. We would not have survived. Kati understands, don’t you?’ She flicked a warning look at me. ‘They are just shawls. Just bits of cloth. Shawls are a luxury these days. Nobody can afford to buy them anyway – or sell them, it seems.’

  I stared at her, but my mother shifted her gaze, still patting my father’s shoulder in a comforting manner. A slow burning heat spread across my skin. Just bits of cloth?

  My grandmother had been right. Mama had never loved knitting the way we did. She was born of a generation where freedom cost dearly; her own father and brothers were killed trying to drive out the Red Army and the Baltic Germans during the War of Independence. We were but a tiny country, a stone cast between the Gulf of Finland and the vast landmass of Russia. Even with the aid of our Baltic neighbours, the Latvians and Lithuanians, we did not have enough people to defend our borders from attack. We’d been lucky to defeat the Red Army back in 1920 and, although many would not say so, it was likely that such a victory would never have taken place if the rest of Europe had not been preoccupied with their own struggles. At the mercy now of the great Soviet powers, how could Estonia hope to remain free? All we had was ourselves, our history, our stories of the land. Papa had told us when the Soviets arrived that our survival depended on our compliance. He could remember a time when resistance was met with the end of a bayonet. Better to sign away some of your rights than to lose your life, he had said. Better to stay and try to make it work than to flee to unknown shores, leaving behind your family and your friends, everything you had worked so hard to gain.

  I tried to imagine what my life would be like without shawl-making. Sometimes it seemed as if shawl-making was all I had left. It was my lineage, my passion. It anchored me not only to the knitting circle but to my grandmother. Widely acknowledged as a master knitter, she had started the circle when she moved from Haapsalu, gathering women first to our little croft and when that became too small, convincing Aunt Juudit to host the group at her apartment in Tartu. I’d been accompanying her to their gatherings since I was five years old and had successfully knitted my first lace shawl; a miniature version of the pasqueflower design for Maimu, my doll. With endless patience, my grandmother had teased out the latent talents of her friends, restoring confidence when required or providing challenges whenever the knitter seemed ready to move on to a more difficult stitch. Since her passing, I had done my best to live up to the legacy she left behind. I missed her most when I had a question about how she achieved a particular effect in one of her prized lace shawls. How she was able to keep the tension in her yarn as she sewed on the lace nupps, the small lacy bobbles that told a buyer that a shawl had been sewn by hand. How she could join two pieces of lace as if they had always been one.

  If she had not passed away, she would still be organising the production and sale of the shawls for the knitting circle. Instead, she had appointed me to distribute the yarn for carding and spinning, to assign the various designs to each woman depending on what I thought would sell.

  Although it had not been easy to step into her shoes, I knew she would not wish the circle disbanded. How could we give up knitting now, at this crucial point in Estonia’s history, when the Soviets wanted to wipe our culture clean as if it never was? Even the usual forms of communications were forbidden now. Radios had been confiscated, typewriters banned. With no way to contact the outside world, the Soviets imagined we had no choice but to comply, that we would forget the glorious freedom of expressing ourselves. I could almost hear her voice, creaky with age, whispering encouragement into my ears. Every shawl we make will be laced with defiance. Every stitch will carry a message out into the world.

  Now that would be lost too.

  Bitterness churned within me. ‘We should have gone,’ I said, banging the bowls together. ‘We should have left here like the others while we still had a chance.’

  ‘Kati!’ My mother blinked hard. ‘Don’t say such things! What about Jakob?’

  ‘You could have called him back.’ I glared at her. ‘Where has it got us? We have done everything they asked and still, it’s not enough. What about Oskar? What happened to him? What happened to Imbi Mägi? To Aime?’ My parents were silent, but I noticed my mother’s eyes glimmer with sudden moisture. I snatched up Papa’s bowl, unwilling to relent, unable to hold back the flood of anger that had grown inside me since the Partorg’s men had first set foot on our property. ‘This year it’s wool. Next year it will be apples.’

  I waited for them to argue, but nobody spoke.

  ‘Aunt Juudit will expect me tomorrow.’ Disappointment dulled my voice. ‘At least let me go and explain to the knitting circle in person.’

  My father spread his hands on the table, gripping the edges with his thumbs. ‘Fine. But you will go there and tell them and come straight home. No dallying. No sitting around until dusk wagging your tongue.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Enough!’ Papa slammed the book down on the table. ‘Kati, I’m not asking for your opinion. I’m telling you the way it is. Do you understand?’ His chair screeched as he scraped it back.

  Words died in my throat and I lowered my gaze. Somebody, my grandmother perhaps, had dropped something hot on the floorboards some years before and the burn had penetrated the thick hardwood, leaving a charred, black ring to stain the varnish.

  ‘Kati? I am waiting for an answer.’

  Although my cheeks burned, I forced myself to nod.

  ‘Good.’

  The wooden floor creaked beneath Papa’s feet as he moved away, lurching towards the worn couch where he would sit for the next half-hour, going over the inventory of the farm in his book, before exhaustion overcame him and he retired to the bedroom. I was left facing Mama, who could not meet my eyes. Instead, she grasped the remaining cutlery and turned away, hunching her back against me in disapproval.

  Cutlery splashed and sank in the tepid grey suds that filled the sink. The only other sound came from the wind that sounded against the windows, rattling them in their panes.

  Knock, knock.

  The sound came again.

  Knock, knock, knock.

  A knife slipped from my mother’s hand and clattered to the floor.

  ‘Stay here.’ Papa’s voice was sharp. We listened to his feet pound down the stairs, the groan of the barn doors being opened. My heart bumped painfully against my ribs.

  Muffled voices echoed
in the stairwell below, then silence.

  Moments later came the sound of footsteps, slowly ascending the staircase that led into the living space. Mama reached out and squeezed my hand, her palm unsteady.

  When at last Papa emerged at the top of the stairs, a thin sheen dampened his pale skin and his eyes were drawn. It was the same look he had worn the night we heard the Soviets arriving, when the sound of tanks and shouts echoed across to us from the main road that ran alongside the farm, when the truth of the rumours flying around Tartu had finally hit home with staggering force.

  I closed my hand around Mama’s, a child again, seeking a path out of the unending nightmare that was the Soviet occupation. Would it never come?

  A figure stepped out from the shadows behind Papa. The golden lamplight streamed over his features so that he seemed to glow at the edges, a figure conjured from a dream. Hope and longing collided in my chest.

  Oskar.

  He was back.

  Apple Pattern

  ‘Oskar Mägi . . . Can it really be you?’

  In the living room of our farmhouse, Mama dropped my hand and took a hesitant step forward, her gaze fixed on the visitor before us as if she expected him to disappear the moment she looked away. ‘I can’t quite believe it.’ Her voice was quiet, equal parts fear and joy. ‘I feel like I’m staring at a ghost.’

  Oskar’s face remained impassive but he lifted his chin. ‘Ma ei ole kummitus,’ he said, in Estonian: not a ghost.

  I heard my mother’s indrawn breath and knew that she too felt the fluttery strangeness of hearing our language spoken again. The long Uralic vowels, the rhythm like a song. Hearing it awakened an unexpected longing in me. We had spoken only Russian since the Soviets arrived, even at home; it was safer that way. It was only now I realised how much I had missed it. How bleak and empty the world seemed without the comfort of those familiar sounds.

  ‘It’s good to see you, Marta,’ he said, still in Estonian. The realisation that he refused to speak Russian made my skin tingle, made the memories flood back.