Death of a Nightingale

by Lene Kaaberbøl

  UKRAINE, 1935

  “Eat!”

  The lady at the end of the barrack stood with her arms folded behind her back, her eyes raking down the bench rows, and even though Olga hadn’t been in the dining hall before, she immediately knew what was expected of her, and what the consequences would be if she refused. She could see it in the other children’s faces; they had odd, rigid eyes and didn’t look up or to the side, and she knew it from the two other orphanages she had stayed in over the course of the late summer.

  What was expected of her was obedience. Nothing else. The consequences if she refused would target her body first. There would be locked doors, darkness, heat, beatings, hunger or thirst. But they might also be accompanied by humiliation. The recitation of Father’s crimes against the Soviet state, or even worse, the story of Father’s death on the pole where he had “howled like a dog.” All the children around her were orphans like her. Children of class enemies, of the deported or just of parents who had fallen victim to hunger in the great hunger year. Still, the shame burned in her cheeks when the orphanage lady talked about her father. As if the very way that he had died was more undignified than everything else. Up against a pole. Howling like a dog. Thin and bony and beaten and toothless.

  Olga shrank down over her plate and stared into the whitish-yellow mass of overcooked potatoes. The soup was covered in flies, which moved only lazily and unwillingly when she pushed at the spoon. Some remained lying there belly-up on the sticky surface, legs kicking. Olga was hungry after the trip from the station to what was called Lenin’s Orphanage Nr. 4. She was someplace near a town called Odessa, she knew, but the orphanage was a lonely and windswept building stuck in the middle of the steppe, and even though there was now a touch of fall in the air, the midday heat was indescribable.

  “Eat.”

  A sharp elbow poked her in the side, and she glanced at the girl who sat on her right, shoveling down her soup, quickly but at the same time carefully so not a drop was lost between plate and mouth. A pair of buzzing flies that were trapped in the sticky mass went right down the hatch too without the girl taking any notice.

  “Eat it or let me have it,” she whispered, looking impatiently at Olga. “The food will be cleared away in five minutes.”

  Olga’s stomach growled a warning, unwilling to accept her indecisiveness, and she breathed deeply. She scraped some of the wriggling flies off the soup and brushed them off the spoon with her index finger. The first spoonful was the worst, but afterward it went pretty well. She took a mouthful and let it glide down her throat in one rapid movement, so that she didn’t have time to either taste or feel it in her throat. Her benchmate followed her spoon with hungry eyes, but when Olga had scraped her plate completely clean, the girl took the time to examine Olga.

  “What’s your name?” she whispered.

  “Oletchka,” said Olga. That’s what it said in her papers now.

  “Did you just arrive?”

  Olga nodded but wasn’t sure she felt like doing this. She had already met and said goodbye to lots of girls since they had come to take her away from home.

  It was the day after they had driven off with Mother. Olga had slept alone in the summer darkness the last night and had lain listening to the grasshoppers and the crickets that chirped in the grass outside in the overgrown garden. Mother hadn’t touched the vegetable plot since Oxana and Kolja died, and through all of July she had just sat on the crumbling clay bench under the porch roof in front of the house, staring into space. Sometimes, not very often, she cried. Other times she asked Olga to sing, and Olga sang quietly and softly, almost as if it were a lullaby, and if she sang long enough, Mother might make a faint grimace which looked like a smile and say that she sang almost as beautifully as Oxana. Her daughter and the people’s nightingale.

  Uncle Grachev and Grandmother and Grandfather Trofimenko had been shot in the square where the statue of Oxana was to be erected, but neither Mother nor Olga talked about that during the dark summer nights. In fact, they didn’t speak at all. The neighbors took turns bringing them a little food. Mother didn’t eat anything much, but Olga took what she could get. And waited for something to change. For Mother to either die or get up again so that life could go on. But neither one happened. They just came to get her one day and said she had to be in a hospital because she was ill, and the day after, they also picked up Olga and drove her to the first of the orphanages. She was there for ten days. She lived in the next home for almost a month, and now she was here. With a new lot of strange children. Olga lowered her head, but the girl next to her wasn’t put off that easily.

  “Were your parents enemies of the people, or are they just dead?”

  “Both, I think. I don’t really know. My sister was a hero.”

  The girl stared at her with renewed interest. “What do you mean?”

  “My sister is the People’s Nightingale. They’ve erected a statue of her in the square in Sorokivka.”

  The girls sitting around them turned toward her, and Olga felt small and miserable and much too visible at the long table.

  “I’ve heard of her,” said one of the girls, her eyes narrowed. “There’s a song about her. She reported her father for stealing grain.”

  It got completely silent, and Olga followed the skinny little flies wandering across her underarm. Didn’t know what more she should say.

  “But if she was your sister …” said a girl, hesitating. She sat right across from Olga. She was a little older, maybe thirteen, with a broad face and black eyes. Probably a Tartar from the Crimea. Olga had seen them at the market back when they were still living in Kharkiv. “You’re full of lies,” the Tartar girl continued. “Because if your sister is the People’s Nightingale, then why are you here?”

  “I don’t know,” mumbled Olga and wished she was just as dead as the rest of the world from which she came. “But I can sing too. I can sing ‘Zelene Zhyto’—about the green, green wheat.”

  “By heart?”

  The girl’s tone seemed to Olga a bit more friendly, and almost against her own will, Olga felt herself grasp at that kindness, cling to it.

  “Yes,” she said. “I know a lot of songs by heart.”

  The world was so damned small when you thought about it. Where could you live in peace? Was there a place anywhere where you could hide forever? Not in Denmark, at least, thought Natasha, and especially not now.

  She let a finger run across Katerina’s soft white forehead. She had fallen asleep again, on the worn sofa in front of the stove. The warmth in the living room had loosened her shoulders, so that she now lay like an infant with her arms stretched above her head, hands open and unclenched. Her hair was still damp from the bath, and her cheeks and lips blushed in the heat, ruddy and full of life. Right now Natasha was the only one on guard.

  She had stolen a new car before she crossed the bridge to Malmö in Sweden, and with Jurij’s money she had bought two frozen bags of corned beef hash in the tiny supermarket they had passed on their way north. Katerina had thrown up twice but had otherwise slept most of the way. The Danish blizzard had not come this way, and after a few hours on fairly clear roads, Natasha had found a dark farm that sat abandoned and neglected under the black pines. It was not a vacation home of the kind the Danes bought and upgraded with heated floors and running water. Here, the old furniture was covered in dust sheets, and it smelled of pine and soot from the oven and of the old people who had lived here once but were now gone. On a gas burner in the tiny, claustrophobic kitchen, Natasha had heated water so she could wash both Katerina and herself, and when she let the water trickle down Katerina’s forehead, she felt almost like she had that morning many years ago when she had stood next to Pavel watching the priest do the same.

  They were together, and everything could begin again.

  Tomorrow they needed to move on. Through Finland and across the enormous expanses of Russia until they found a corner that was remote enough. Heat billowed from the cast-iron
stove in the small, overly furnished living room and made Natasha sleepy, but there were things she needed to do before she could lie down next to Katerina and close her eyes.

  She stuck her hand into Katerina’s pocket and fished out Pavel’s old cell phone. With a broken fingernail, she carefully removed the plastic cover on one side and plucked out the memory stick from the derelict phone. She transferred it to Robbie’s little Sony Ericsson and promised herself that this was the last time she was going to use it. Tomorrow she had to get a new one.

  The display lit up, and she tapped her way through the menus to the pictures, texts and recordings that were saved on the stick.

  With one hand on Katerina’s arm, she listened carefully to the scratched recordings, the voices that rose and fell.

  If you were going to be invisible and untouchable in the world, you needed money, she knew that now. But you couldn’t allow yourself to get greedy or careless, like Pavel. He was the stupid one. Not beautiful Natasha.

  The voices on the recording sang in her ears, telling stories people would prefer to forget, and as Natasha felt sleep moving in on her, she hung on to the little phone and reassurance it gave her: once again, she had a future.

  They would make it, Katerina and she. They would want for nothing.

  It had taken a long time for winter to loosen its grip, and it had also taken awhile before the hospital let him go. But now most of the snow had melted, and Søren was gradually beginning his rehabilitation.

  There was a FOR SALE sign from one of North Zealand’s fancy real estate agents at the entrance to Tundra Lane, but it wasn’t Michael Vestergaard’s house, it turned out. It was Anna Olesen’s thatched yellow farm.

  Søren parked the Hyundai next to Anna’s red Mazda. There were pools of melted snow between the cobbles, and crocuses blooming along the house.

  It’s been two whole months, he said to himself. It’s a completely different place now.

  Still, he could feel his body’s discomfort at being here. This is where you get hurt, it shouted. This is where the pain is!

  The old woman who had shot him had been found in a snowdrift by the house’s gable with extensive injuries after a series of hard blows to the temple and the back of the head. She had later been transferred to a hospital in Kiev with astounding haste. It was clear that her condition was so serious that it made no sense to prosecute her, but still the case had gone unusually smoothly, Søren observed dryly. You could not say the same for Jurij Savchuk’s case. He was still stuck in Vestre Prison, awaiting his Danish trial, and no one in Ukraine had expressed any desire to get him back. Apparently not even his squeaky-clean half brother, Babko had reported. Søren and he had called each other a few times to exchange reports and health bulletins.

  There was barking from the front hallway. The dog appeared to have survived.

  Anna opened the door. She didn’t look quite like herself. It took him a few minutes to realize that she wasn’t wearing any makeup. The eyes were older and more tired, the hair less carefully arranged.

  “Is it you?” she said without curiosity. “What do you want? More questions?”

  “Not really,” he said. “I came to tell you something.”

  She didn’t move, clearly preferring for him not to come inside.

  “We haven’t been able to find either Natasha or Katerina,” he said. “And so we haven’t been able to ask Katerina what happened that Sunday. We don’t know where they are. We don’t know how they are doing. We have no idea whether they are still alive.”

  “That’s sad.”

  “Yes, we are not happy about it. But we have found a witness that saw Katerina get into a red car not far from Damhus Lake.” This was a bit of an exaggeration. The witness had seen “a child who could be Katerina” and the description of the car was equally vague—it was red.

  Anna didn’t move a muscle. She didn’t even glance at the Mazda, which Søren had kind of hoped she would. It would have been a lovely, unconscious confirmation.

  “Why are you telling me that?” she asked.

  “Because I do believe that children can grieve. I do think an eight-year-old girl can miss her dead father terribly. She would probably also be able to buy the juice and cookies herself, in spite of the fact that we haven’t been able to find a store with anyone who remembers seeing her. But there’s one thing I don’t believe. And that is that she would steal a bottle of Valium and try to kill herself.”

  Anna Olesen observed him for a long time. Then she closed the door. After a little while, she opened it again.

  “I would appreciate it if you would get off my property,” she said. “If there is anything else you feel you have to tell me, you can contact my lawyer.”

  Søren remained standing there for a little while, just to irritate her.

  ON THE WAY home, he called Nina.

  “Did she say anything?” Nina asked.

  “Not a word. Not a useful word, at any rate.”

  “Do you still believe she did it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why? Why would she hurt the child? As far as we know, they had a good relationship.”

  “I don’t know. I’m just sure that she did it. Maybe Katerina posed a threat to her—a connection between her and Pavel Doroshenko’s dangerous blackmail. I’ve spoken to her daughter, Kirsten. She had no plans whatsoever to move into that wing Anna was restoring and had, in fact, asked her not to do it. She was afraid her mother’s finances wouldn’t be able to cover the expenses, but that doesn’t appear to have been a problem. On the other hand, there aren’t a lot of bills for the work that was done.”

  “Off the books?”

  “A good way to place money if you can’t really explain where it comes from.”

  “I still don’t understand it. There’s a long way from a bit of blackmail to … to an attempted child murder.”

  “Katerina called her. Anna came and picked her up in her red car. Together they went out to Katerina’s nest and had that peculiar tea party, with juice in the cups. Katerina’s cup contained pulverized Valium. In Katerina’s head, they were having a party with her father. Who knows? Maybe Anna was even able to make herself believe that it was for the best. That the child would be spared any more pain, and all that.”

  “They spoke Ukrainian together,” said Nina suddenly. “On the telephone when Rina called Anna. Can that have been enough? Enough to make Rina dangerous for her, I mean?”

  Søren considered Anna Olesen’s almost perfect Hørsholm façade. She hadn’t been able to help herself, he thought. She wanted so very badly to speak to the child, and in the beginning that would only have been possible in Ukrainian. In Anna’s eyes, this exposure must have seemed terrifying when she realized that her past was catching up with her.

  “I can see how it might look that way to her,” he said.

  Nina was quiet for a while. “It did seem to me …” she said, then broke off.

  “What?”

  “When we were searching for Rina. Katerina, I mean. In hindsight, I think Anna was trying to make sure I wouldn’t find Katerina too soon. She made no effort to tell the dog to search, for instance.”

  Søren sighed. “Could you swear to that?”

  “Not really. It was more of a vague impression.”

  “Not conclusive.”

  “No.”

  Another silence.

  “Will you go out there again?” asked Nina.

  “Yes,” he admitted. “In a little while.”

  “Do you think she’ll say something sooner or later?”

  “Not really.”

  “Why do it, then?”

  “Because she needs to know that someone is watching her.”

  He could almost see her shake her head. “You’re not God.”

  He laughed. “No, unfortunately not.”

  There was another short pause. Ask her, he told himself.

  She said goodbye. He cursed. She had saved his life—wasn’t he allowed to ask the woman
out to dinner in return? But he didn’t do it. Maybe it was because he still remembered with crystal clarity the moment where his crappy middle-aged knee had cracked so loudly that both Babko and he had been shot as a result.

  Maybe he needed to find someone his own age.

  And maybe he needed a bigger car.

  Magnus had met someone else. Nina listened distractedly to his careful and considerate explanations, the great respect he had for her as a person and a colleague, how happy he had been that they had been able to help each other through a difficult time, and so on. The concern lines on his friendly dog’s face were incredibly deep.

  The window was open, and a scent of loam and rain and spring in the air drifted into the apartment’s tiny kitchen. In the evening darkness, you could hear the protracted metallic noise from a freight train passing down on the tracks. Nina poked at the rice from the Thai food he had brought—chicken cashew—while she considered how long she needed to let him talk before she could decently interrupt him.

  “I’m handing in my notice,” she finally said, when the considerate explanations showed no sign of ceasing.

  He was jolted, and in his confusion he pushed his glasses into his hair. They were crooked, she noticed, and made the blond Swedish locks stand straight up.

  “You don’t need to do that,” he said. “I mean … I’m sure we can figure it out, and if we can’t, then I’m the one who’ll look for another job.”

  It took her a moment to realize he thought she was giving notice because of him.

  She couldn’t help laughing. That didn’t make him any less confused, she could see.

  “Magnus, damn it,” she said. “We’re not exactly Romeo and Juliet, are we? I’m not planning to keel over dead on your grave.”

  “Jag förstår inte,” he said, suddenly slipping into Swedish in his total perplexity. “I don’t get it.”

  She spelled it out for him. “I’ve thought about it for more than a month,” she said. “And I’ve made my decision, so all you need to do is say ‘okay’ and ‘too bad’ and then wish me luck in my new future.”