Death of a Nightingale

by Lene Kaaberbøl

“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.

  The boy with the big black mustache stopped abruptly and looked questioningly at his father.

  “What is she saying?” he said. “Dad, come on. We’re going to be late.”

  Nina’s husband definitely looked unfriendly now. He stepped into the road to get by her, with the boy and the scowling teenage girl right behind him.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Nina doesn’t live here anymore, and I don’t know where your daughter is.”

  They couldn’t leave. She had waited for hours; they couldn’t leave. Natasha grabbed the boy’s sleeve and held on. “Have you seen Katerina? My girl? Is she at your house?”

  The boy attempted to pull away, but she had a good grip on the soft down jacket and held him back. Grabbed hold with her other hand as well, on the collar under the boy’s chin. His skin felt burning hot against her stiff, cold fingers. His eyes were wide open in surprise.

  Then Nina’s husband shoved her hard, forcing her to take a step back. Natasha’s eyes slid from the boy and back to the man. She could see he was surprised, but he was also angry now. His eyes were dark, narrow slits in his winter-pale face.

  For a moment she was sure he would hit her. Punish her, like Michael would have done. Pavel had never touched her, of course he hadn’t—he had been too busy constructing pink castles in the air where violence would have clashed with the stage sets. Michael had had different ideas, and maybe Nina’s husband wasn’t as unlike him as she had first thought.

  Natasha let go of the boy’s jacket and took a step backward. “Please, tell me. I need to see Nina. She know where is my daughter. I have to talk to her,” she said in her best English.

  Nina’s husband was walking away, shielding the children from her with his body. “Welcome to the club,” he said over his shoulder. “The rest of this family has tried to make contact with her for the last fifteen years. So good luck with that. I have no idea where she is, and I don’t care.”

  Natasha touched the knife in her pocket. But he was already on his way with both children ahead of him as if they were chickens he was shooing into a henhouse. Only the girl looked back.

  The gym smelled of apple fritters and coffee and faintly of sour gym sneakers. Nina’s gaze moved like a radar shadow across everything that was shorter than a four and a half feet: Spider-Men, musketeers, carrots with legs, Tiggers, pirates, a slightly dated Ninja Turtle, a pumpkin—recycled from Halloween?—and a couple of witches, a Darth Vader and a knight in a silver helmet and a homemade coat of chain mail. My God, Nina thought, how many hours had it taken to sew all those key rings onto the leather vest—and what did it weigh?

  She had to check the knight and Vader twice, but then she was certain.

  It was 11:02, and Anton wasn’t there.

  The noise was earsplitting. Excited children’s voices climbed to a register that would make any soprano envious, and the parents’ attempts at chatting had begun building in a slow but relentless crescendo in order to be heard above the children and themselves.

  “Coffee?” yelled a mother from Anton’s class and handed her a mug without waiting for an answer. “Where is Anton?”

  “He’s coming with Morten,” Nina yelled back and saw the mother’s expression change because she suddenly remembered the divorce.

  “Oh, right,” the mother said. “But how nice that you can do this together.”

  “Yes.” Nina smiled mechanically. 11:06, and still no Anton. Morten was usually early for these kinds of things.

  “There’s Minna,” said the mother and pointed. “She wanted to be a shower stall this year. Isn’t it amazing how creative children can be?”

  Minna. Yes, that was her name. A highly energetic and slightly trying little red-haired girl whose freckled face right now was sticking out of a box affixed with a flapping plastic curtain, real faucets, a soap dish and a little steel basket with shampoo and a sponge. The red hair was, of course, crammed into a flowered bathing cap.

  “We got most of it for next to nothing at IKEA,” said Minna’s mother happily. “She even has a spray bottle, so she can squirt people if they want a real bath experience.”

  “Fantastic,” said Nina. 11:14. The teachers had already begun to herd the children toward one end of the room, where they were lining up. Two barrels hung from the rafters on blue nylon ropes, waiting to be beaten to a pulp in time-honored Danish carnival tradition. At least there were no longer live cats inside them, thought Nina with an involuntary shudder, looking at the grinning black paper cats that adorned the outside of the barrels.

  “Little ones to the right and bigger ones to the left,” shouted one of the phys ed teachers, a tall man from southern Jutland called Niels, who was currently dressed in a Robin Hood cape and a green crepe paper hat with a pheasant feather.

  “Am I little or big?” peeped a Tigger who was definitely no more than four.

  “You are little.”

  “What about meee?” hollered a brawny nine-year-old, a Frankenstein’s monster rubber mask his only nod to dressing up.

  “What do you think, Marcus? Back in line you go. You were behind Selma.”

  There he was. There they were, all three of them, Morten and Ida and Anton. Ida had not stooped to fancy dress, but the fact that she was here at all was a major concession. Anton was wearing a pair of blue overalls with extra big yellow buttons sewed on, a red shirt, white gloves and a red cap with a white M on the front. His eyebrows had been drawn on with a thick makeup pencil so they looked like black slugs, and a bushy black mustache decorated his eight-year-old upper lip.

  Nina’s heart flickered in her chest.

  “Mom,” he yelled and came racing through the crowd. “Look! I’m Super Mario!”

  “Yes, you definitely are,” she said. She couldn’t stop her hands, which, entirely following their own agenda, tugged at the blue suspenders, touched his warm cheek, rested against his soft neck under the pretext of straightening his cap. He didn’t want a hug, she knew that, not here, not now, while all his friends were watching. But her hungry hands couldn’t quite let him be.

  She could tell by Morten’s tight shoulders that something was wrong, but she didn’t know if it was simply because she was here. Should she have asked? No, damn it. She had a right to come see her son hit the carnival barrel without asking him first.

  “Hi, Mom,” said Ida.

  A year ago it had been “Nina.” Now she was Mom again. Ida also looked a little less like a caricature than usual—not so much doomsday mascara and a T-shirt that wasn’t actually black.

  “Hi, sweetie. It was nice of you to come.”

  Ida shrugged. “I’ve promised to cheer for the little maggot if he gets to be the Cat King,” she said, referring to the honor bestowed on the child whose blow finally cracked the barrel. “Plus I made the cap.”

  “He looks totally cool,” said Nina and, to her horror, felt a burning flood of tears well up. She had to control herself! Ida would never forgive her if she suddenly started blubbering in front of most of the school.

  Anton had already moved on, in a peculiar gait that was supposed to look like the way Super Mario moved in his favorite Nintendo game. Ida gave her a quick fist bump on the shoulder—the height of teenage affection—and waved at another big sister who stood at a careful distance from the noise and the barrels, contriving to look bored.

  “Millie! Hi, Millie!”

  As soon as Ida was out of hearing, the question jumped out of Nina’s mouth without permission. “What’s wrong?”

  Morten didn’t answer right away. “I didn’t know you were coming,” he said.

  “Of course I was coming. I usually do.”

  “When you have time …”

  “Morten, can’t we …”

  “I may need to move,” he said.

  Her chest felt wooden. “Where?” she croaked. “Why
?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Far enough to rescue the children from your war zone.”

  “What?”

  “You promised to stop.”

  “I have stopped. The network doesn’t exist anymore. Besides, a clinic is being established, a clinic where people can be treated anonymously …”

  He didn’t even look at her. She could see that his entire body was on high alert. He was repressing an anger so great that there was barely room for it inside him.

  “What?” she asked. “What is it you think I’ve done?”

  “She touched Anton. She grabbed him. Do you know how frightened he was?”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. Some disturbed woman who said she was your friend. She was looking for her daughter.”

  Natasha. It couldn’t be anyone else.

  “Where did you see her?”

  Now Morten gaped at her. “Oh, I knew it,” he said. “You know what? It would almost be easier if you were an alcoholic. Then at least there’d be Antabus.”

  Bang. The first blow connected with the decorated barrels to general cheering and applause. Bang, bang.

  Nina stared at Super Mario Anton, almost wishing that Morten would move away with the children, at least for a while. Until … until this was over. Natasha had grabbed Anton. What would have happened if Anton had been alone? Natasha was desperate. Exactly how desperate Nina could tell from her own irregular heartbeats. And she no longer had any idea where Natasha’s limits lay. “A child for a child—give me my daughter, and you can have your son.” Would she do that?

  Nina had no idea.

  Natasha eased the knife blade between the door and the doorframe and forced it. The frame shattered, and with a few extra wriggles, the pawl broke loose from the lock.

  There had been no answer when she had tried the buzzer downstairs or later when, after making it into the stairwell on the heels of someone’s pizza delivery, she rang the bell at the nurse’s front door. But she had to check. She had to know. She walked rapidly down the hall, throwing all the doors wide open.

  No one was there.

  In the kitchen there were still dirty dishes by the sink, and someone had left the milk out on the counter. The girl’s room was surprisingly neat, almost neater than the rest of the apartment. The walls were dark purple; all the furniture was black. Small, powerfully scented candles stood in red and orange glasses. The boy’s room was one big chaos of sheets, LEGO blocks, stuffed animals and small plastic figurines that it seemed he collected; most of them looked to be some kind of monster.

  Nowhere did she see anything that could be Katerina’s. And the double bed in the bedroom only had one pillow on it.

  Nina’s husband had told the truth. Nina didn’t live here anymore. And this wasn’t where she had gone with Katerina.

  Natasha knew that she shouldn’t stay here, that every second increased her risk of being discovered. But her bladder was about to burst. She found the little bathroom at the end of the hall, closed the door and peed so hard, it splashed in the bowl.

  Her thoughts were leaping in all directions, like the grasshoppers in the long grass next to the railroad in Kurakhovo. Katerina wasn’t here. Nina wasn’t here. She had broken into someone’s apartment for nothing.

  Alarms. Were there alarms? She hadn’t heard anything, but perhaps not all alarms rang as earsplittingly as the one Pavel had installed in the apartment in Kiev.

  IT HAD BEEN of no use. During the last eighteen months they had lived there, they were burgled four times. The first time she had been at the doctor’s with Katerina and came home to an open door and an apartment that had been searched.

  “In the middle of the day,” she had said to Pavel when she called him, with a childish sense that break-ins were supposed to happen after dark. “Should I call the police?”

  “No,” said Pavel. “I’ll take care of it. Where are you now?”

  “In the apartment,” she sniffed. “Where else?”

  “Take Katerina to the park,” he said. “Or wherever it is you usually go. Do it now.”

  “But the door won’t shut. And everything is a mess.”

  “Just do as I say. I’ll come get you when everything has been taken care of.”

  And he did. Everything had been cleaned up, the door was repaired and there was a new lock. If it weren’t for the smell of fresh wood and paint, you would think it had never happened. He had even bought shashlik, rice and salad from the Tatar restaurant in the square so she didn’t need to think about dinner. And when she wanted to talk about it, to tell him how afraid she had been, to tell him about the open door that she at first thought she had forgotten to lock, about the sensation in her throat when she realized that someone had been there, someone had gone through their things and taken her new iPod and earrings and necklace … then he had hushed her.

  “We’ll forget this,” he said. “You can’t worry about things like that. Life is too short.”

  The second time, he had bought extra locks and a safety chain. The third time she had been home alone. She had fallen asleep on the couch and woke up to the sound of a screwdriver splintering the doorframe. She had stood in the hallway screaming hysterically—“I’ll call the police, I’ll call the police”—so loudly that Katerina had woken up and begun to cry.

  “There’s a lot of crime in Kiev,” said Pavel. “There’s no avoiding it.”

  The fourth time … she didn’t want to think about the fourth time.

  SHE WASHED HER hands and her stiff, cold face and dried them on one of Nina’s towels. Nina’s husband hadn’t wanted to say where Nina lived now. But sooner or later she’d have to go to work. Sooner or later she would have to drive down the narrow, winding road to the camp in her ugly yellow car that was only half the size of Natasha’s stolen Audi.

  More waiting. But Natasha had become very good at waiting.

  UKRAINE, 1934

  There is nothing greater, nothing worse than death.

  Or maybe there was. Maybe hunger was worse. It hurt when fat and muscle shrank away from your bones. In hunger there was, beyond the pain, also the fear of death, and maybe it was really fear that trumped both hunger and death, Olga thought. Maybe fear was worst.

  Olga turned over one more time—carefully, so as not to wake up Oxana and Kolja. She was in her old sleeping place in the house in the village, on the bed shelf above the huge brick oven. The wood shavings in the mattress were fresh, and for once the lice kept their distance. In a way everything was as it had been before, and yet nothing was the same. The house still smelled of Father and Svetlova and the life they had lived together, and Father’s absence filled the whole house—on this night worse than ever. Butka, who worked down at the lumber mill, had come to see Mother today and had told her that Father had not been sent to Siberia, after all, as Olga had imagined. In her thoughts she had followed him in the cattle car to the endless snow-covered steppes. She had felt his thirst and hunger and had hoped … had even prayed to the nonexistent God to protect him and bring him home whole, with all his arms and legs and toes and fingers still there.

  In reality, he had made it no farther than to the GPU’s headquarters in Sorokivka, where he had been held in the cellars for a while before finally being tied to a pole and shot. That had happened yesterday. Butka was sure, he said, because he had seen it with his own eyes, even though it had been hard for him to recognize Father. He had been terribly thin after just three weeks in prison. But they had shouted his name, Andreij Trofimenko, counterrevolutionary and Former Human Being, and he had confessed to all the charges, they said.

  Mother cried, and Butka stood awkwardly in the living room with his fur hat in his hands, but Olga refused to believe it.

  “Prove it,” she said softly. “Prove that it is Father who is dead.”

  It sounded so terrible when she said it. Real.

  At first Butka looked a bit uncertain, but then he seemed to remember something, dug into his goatskin coat
and pulled out Father’s little red party book. He handed it to Mother with a solemn expression.

  “They let me bring this to you,” said Butka softly. He neglected to mention the widow. She was gone now, and it was as if she had never existed. “It was the only thing he thought to take with him when they came to get him.”

  Mother opened the book with shaking hands, then let it drop to the floor. It remained there until late in the evening when Olga had surreptitiously picked it up. Small, dark flecks of blood covered the book’s cover like freckles. Inside was a picture of Father with his hair combed back and a steady gaze that looked as if it was focused on a finer, better future—the one he had once said he would build with his own hands.

  Olga had hidden the party book under her pillow. She could feel it as she lay here now thinking about hunger, fear and death, and what had been the worst for Father as he hung there on the pole and waited for the bullets to drill through his body. She was too tired to cry anymore. She turned over again in the dark and bumped into Oxana’s knee under the blankets. Oxana moved a bit in her sleep, but her breathing was heavy and calm. The familiar sweet scent of her breath, skin and hair surrounded her, and suddenly made it difficult for Olga to breathe.

  Oxana had cried today too; big, shiny tears had run from her cornflower-blue eyes. She was the one who had opened the door and received condolences from the few neighbors who had dared to come by in the course of the day. Jana’s mother had arrived with vegetable soup and freshly baked bread, and Oxana had answered virtuously, had carried the soup to the table and offered tea from the samovar and had drip-drip-dripped her tears into the tea and across the floor.

  Olga breathed carefully through her mouth and turned away from the spicy scent of thyme and garlic and warm girl-body. She tried not to touch Oxana, not to think about her. Not to think about Father and not to think about Grandfather, who had been lying there for three weeks after the accident with his leg, unable to either live or die. He had become feverish and had drunk a lot of vodka, and in his fever had staggered over to the barn to brain the cow so the Reds wouldn’t get her. Poor Zorya had been hit with the sledgehammer first across one knee, which had collapsed, and then twice on her broad, quivering neck, until he had finally managed to aim at her forehead and finish her off. The farm and the tools had gone to the state, but they had eaten meat at Grandfather’s funeral.