Lace Weaver

by Lauren Chater

  Agnese continued to stare at us with fierce eyes until suddenly her face deflated. Tears tracked down her withered cheeks. She knotted her hands about her face like claws and rocked as the Russian planes swooped outside. Her shoulders shook. She did not even seem to notice as Kati seized her shoulder and dragged us both towards the corridor.

  We stumbled from the room as a wave of fire seemed to set the night alight.

  *

  ‘Oh, thank God!’ Etti surged to her feet and threw her arms around us as we staggered down into the cellar. Agnese, still sniffling, shrugged Kati’s hand away and lurched past us, avoiding my eye.

  Frau Burkhard’s lamp cast its light across the weaving machines and the looms and the giant cylinders of cloth. ‘Close the doors,’ she said to her husband. General Burkhard was wrapped up in a thick dressing gown. He did not look afraid but wild and dishevelled, as if the air raid was an inconvenience of the highest order. But he did his wife’s bidding, slamming the doors closed and bolting them.

  Leaving the lamp on a shelf nearby, the Burkhards shuffled to the back of the cellar, as far as possible from the whimpering children and the women who had seated themselves on the cold floor. Above us, a muffled vibration shook the ground, sifting dirt down from the ceiling, scattering in the folds of my nightgown. I hugged Etti to me.

  Perhaps we will die down here, I thought. Buried among the stone and plaster. I would never see Russia again, or Jakob. I would never see his face, or run my fingers across his skin. I will never get to tell him that I am carrying his child.

  This thought pained me most of all.

  Pulling us into a little alcove between two broken looms, Etti made us sit beside her while she held Leelo, trying to soothe the little girl’s cries. She listened gravely as we told her what had happened with Agnese upstairs. My body was still shaking. I hugged my knees to my chest and my breasts prickled at the sudden contact.

  ‘I’m sorry. I don’t think we can wait for Oskar and Jakob any longer,’ Etti said. She was soothing the sobbing Leelo, who refused to lie down and instead flailed her arms and kicked her long legs, protesting the disruption of sleep. Leelo’s pretty face was red, her eyes swollen. Half a tooth had broken through the skin at the bottom of her mouth. It was visible when she cried.

  Etti tugged her against her body, trying to calm her. ‘We’ve waited long enough.’ Her eyes glimmered. ‘We have Oskar’s contact’s name and his address. I think we should leave tomorrow. It’s possible Agnese will believe you, Kati. But it is also possible she might report Lydia. Even without proof, they might listen to her claims and start an investigation.’

  Kati opened her mouth as if she would argue. Then she closed it. Her shoulders sagged. She looked at me; a long look in which I read all the pain we shared and the question she could not bring herself to ask. Etti was right. We could not wait any longer.

  I swallowed, thinking of Jakob’s square jaw and his snub nose, as if someone had pressed their thumb against it as he slept. How could I leave him behind, as I had left Joachim to his fate? And then I remembered the dream, his child sleeping, curled in an eggshell. I had to protect us both.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ I agreed, turning away from the light of the oil lamp to shield the misery in my face, the rush of helpless despair. A hand touched my arm.

  ‘Lida?’ Wiping my nose with my sleeve, I looked back to find Kati was holding something out to me. It was my mother’s letter. I reached for it, just as Kati looked down. Her face changed. When I tried to take the letter from her, she held it fast.

  ‘Whose letter is that?’ she said.

  I felt my cheeks colouring. I looked around, still wary of Agnese. But the woman was sitting at the far end of the cellar, legs drawn up, face in her hands.

  ‘My mother’s,’ I whispered. ‘She had a friend – they wrote to each other. I told you.’

  ‘I recognise that writing.’ Kati brought the letter up to her face, tilting it so that the light fell across the words. ‘That is my grandmother’s handwriting. Elina Rebane.’

  We stared at each other, mystified.

  ‘Your grandmother taught my mother to knit.’ I felt the truth of this as if it was something I had always known, something which had lain hidden in plain sight. My connection to Kati, and to Jakob, too, had started years before we were born.

  Kati and I had been lace sisters all along.

  Lilac Pattern

  Kati

  It was snowing as we passed through the iron gates of Kreenholm and crossed over the bridge connecting the island to the Estonian mainland. The water flowed sluggishly between the river’s banks, its currents blocked by a thin crust of ice encroaching steadily across the surface. There was only one road into town. Huddling together, we moved along it, passing bare trees and abandoned houses.

  I tried to focus on the road, slippery with ice, but couldn’t resist stealing curious glances at the old-fashioned terraces with their fine red bricks, dormer windows and gabled eaves dusted with snow. I remembered Frau Burkhard telling us that the houses had once belonged to the English managers placed in charge of Kreenholm during its glory days. They had all fled, of course, when the Russians arrived.

  I felt my bones creak, complaining of the cold that bit and snarled in the air. The knapsack weighed down my back though it contained just one change of clothes and my knitting things. We had left everything we had been given – the trunks, the aprons and caps – behind. The factory had not been too badly damaged during the bombing raid as the planes had been targeting the supply depots on the outskirts of town. The Burkhards had not been happy to see us go. Frau Burkhard had shouted and accused us of being ungrateful, but there was nothing they could do to keep us there. We had told them we planned to return to our family in Tartu. If they did bother to report us one day, we would be long gone, I hoped, already in Sweden . . . and waiting for Oskar and Jakob to join us there.

  I slipped my hand into my pocket, fingering the address and the name Oskar had written down for me the last time I saw him. In the pocket on my other side, I kept his glove. The other I had pressed into his hands on one of our last nights together, when we had held each other close. One day, we would be reunited, just like the gloves.

  We would need to ask someone for directions when we got into Narva. I hoped that Oskar’s contact would help us, even though Oskar himself was not escorting us. My fingers tightened involuntarily around the slip of paper. Oskar, where are you?

  Leelo gurgled and pointed over Etti’s shoulder at the snow which circled down around us. Etti hoisted her higher up on her shoulder, teetering a little as she tried to balance her knapsack and the child, her boots surging against the mixture of slush and snow. Leelo’s face peeped out between the layers of clothing and shawls we had swathed around her, her big eyes fixed on the street retreating behind us and the tall chimney stacks of the factory.

  ‘I wish we had never come to Narva.’ Lydia sounded broken. The altercation with Agnese had upset her. I looked over at her, trudging through the snow in Aunt Juudit’s too-big boots. The wind streamed her hair back away from her gaunt face, her sharp cheekbones making her look all the more wolf-like. Despite that, there was an elegance there, a spirit in the thickly fringed blue eyes that was not yet extinguished. No wonder Jakob had drawn close to her. She was everything I was not: warm and open, every emotion etched on her face as soon as it formed. I was a hard, brittle stick, unwilling to bend.

  ‘We had no choice,’ I said. I was so very weary, and suddenly I was afraid I could not go on. But Lydia beside me and Etti pushing through the sleet with Leelo wrapped around her chest meant I could not stop. I pressed the heel of my palm into my eye, as if I could massage the exhaustion out of the socket. ‘No choice then, and no choice now.’

  ‘I hope this Heldur has a warm fireplace.’ Lydia shook herself, rubbing her shoulders with her hands.

  ‘And a gramophone.’ Etti’s comment was so unexpected it made me look up.

  She flashed me a smile
. ‘I would give anything to hear “L’Internationale” again,’ she added, patting Leelo’s back with her hand.

  It seemed so ridiculous and so unlikely, and yet it broke the tension between us. As Etti began to babble, explaining Aunt Juudit’s peculiar habits to Lydia, I let the cold air soak into my lungs, imagining the unimaginable at last: a home, a place we would all be safe until the war ended, whoever the victors might be.

  I tried to conjure up an apartment filled with voices – Oskar’s and Jakob’s, Etti’s and Leelo’s. Lydia would sit beside the fireplace; there would indeed be a great one, a huge pyre of logs that burned endlessly. Perhaps we would knit; I could show her at last how to piece together the sections of her mother’s shawl just the way she had asked me to. First, the loop stitch. Then the hook. The lace edges would be sewn separately, dried on the timber frames before we attached them with care. I would let her choose the pattern she desired, though I would secretly hope for the wolf’s paw.

  When we were done, I would perform my final trick: I would pull the shawl through the gold ring I had removed from the fourth finger of my left hand. My ring. The one Oskar would give me to replace the small thread fastened there. A shining symbol of hope. The fine-spun lace would flutter, like magic. The test of quality and a knitter’s skill. Lydia would smile.

  *

  Narva was teeming with German soldiers. We saw their panzer tanks rolling by and held our breath as they marched in formation through the square and up towards the huge castle overlooking the river, which must be where they trained and exercised.

  We kept close to the shadows where we could, trying not to draw attention, Etti wedged between Lydia and myself. The first woman we met did not know where Turu Street was, but the next woman we approached pointed us towards a row of estate houses some little distance away. Heldur’s house on Turu Street was no more than a narrow wedge of whitewashed plaster jammed between two bigger residences. The man who answered my knock was an older gentleman with close-cut hair and pale eyelashes.

  ‘Are you Heldur?’

  ‘Perhaps.’ He folded his arms. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I am Katarina. These are my cousin and my friend. Oskar Mägi sent us – we are hoping you can help us.’

  Heldur did not uncross his arms, nor did his eyes leave my face, but he looked back over his shoulder and called, ‘Kristiina!’

  A harassed-looking young woman with a snub nose appeared abruptly at his side. Almost to himself, he said, ‘Make up some beds, girl.’

  The woman shot us a curious glance but moved away to do as she was bid.

  As her footsteps retreated up the stairs, the man turned to look at her heels disappearing. ‘She’s a good daughter,’ he said. ‘Follow her up. She’ll see to it you are clothed and fed and comfortable.’

  He stood back to let us in, then turned away to clomp over to his desk. I felt the cold brush of his dismissal as if he had blown out a candle and left us standing in the dark.

  ‘Aren’t you going to ask us what we’re doing here? Don’t you want to see – see our papers?’

  He shrugged without turning around. ‘I see everything already just as it is. Oskar told you to come see me if you had trouble. You have trouble – or soon will have. You can stay here as long as you need.’

  ‘Can you – can you pass on a message for us?’ I swallowed. ‘Can you tell Oskar we are here, that we need to leave as quickly as possible?’

  The man paused. He straightened up and turned, and the look on his face felt like a slap to mine. ‘I’m sorry to tell you this.’ He drew in a breath. ‘Oskar has . . . Nobody has heard from Oskar for a month.’

  I stopped breathing. It could not be true. Questions burned on my tongue. I tried to speak but only a croak came out.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Heldur said again.

  Heldur did not know what Oskar meant to me. He could not know we were married, or he would not be speaking in this cold, ruthless way. ‘It’s always possible he has gone back into hiding, into the forest,’ he said. ‘But it seems unlikely he would have disappeared without telling anyone.’

  I found my voice. ‘Did he take anyone with him?’ My thoughts swirled with visions of Jakob. Jakob and Oskar, shot through with bullet holes.

  ‘I can’t say.’ The old man pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his nose. ‘I’m sorry. As I said, you can stay as long as you need to. Oskar told me you might need the services of Jaan’s speedboat.’ His mouth twitched. ‘He comes once a month when the moon is dark. Looks to be the tenth today. So, tomorrow. Would you have me contact him? Will you be ready?’

  My mouth was so dry I could not swallow.

  ‘Yes.’ Lydia took my arm. ‘We will be ready.’

  *

  ‘So. You are all Jews?’

  Heldur sniffed at the food Kristiina had put before him; a square of watery terrine mixed with leftover offal. Etti and I exchanged uneasy glances. Lydia was dangling Leelo while she batted at the orange cat who sat warming himself before the fire. I saw her glance over her shoulder at the front door, as if she expected it to burst open.

  ‘Not exactly,’ I said.

  Heldur grunted. He speared a wobbling piece of terrine onto his fork. ‘It makes no difference to me.’ He chewed. ‘We have had all sorts through here, haven’t we girl? Jews. Gypsies. Once, a Jehovah’s Witness. He had some interesting views, I can tell you.’

  He paused to fork another mouthful in.

  Kristiina, slicing the bread at the bench while the stew intended for us bubbled on the stove, threw a scrap of offal to the cat, who jumped to his feet to retrieve it.

  ‘Aren’t you afraid?’ I said. ‘To keep us here?’

  ‘Afraid of what? The Germans?’ Heldur shook his head. ‘I’m not afraid for myself. I can’t be, or I would never leave the house. I’m afraid for Kristiina, a little. For the people the Germans have targeted: certainly. We do not get many Jews coming now. Most of them tried to escape when the Germans came in. The ones who come now are escapees from the Klooga camp or people who have been in hiding until they could get a message out. They say bad things about that Klooga camp.’ He paused, his fork halfway to his mouth. ‘Bad things.’

  ‘What kind of things?’ Etti’s face had blanched. She was not looking at Heldur, but at Leelo, now wriggling on the floor, inching on her stomach to where the cat sat cleaning its face and switching its tail.

  Heldur chewed softly. He drummed his fingers against the tabletop. ‘Klooga is a work camp. Prisoners have to work in the forest or in the quarry. Felling trees, breaking rocks, you know. Men and women. And children. When they get too sick or if they are too old to work they are . . . selected. Selektion.’

  ‘Killed.’ Lydia’s eyes were shining.

  ‘Just so.’ Heldur picked up his plate and set it down upon the floor. The cat fell on it. Pushing back his chair, he replaced the cap on his head. ‘There is illness, too. Typhoid. It can wipe out whole families.’

  ‘But you have had people come here. Escapees,’ Etti said, her voice thin. ‘People have escaped from Klooga.’

  Heldur’s mouth pinched. ‘Just one,’ he said, cupping his chin with his hand. ‘The other we had to bury. You should ask the moon not to shine tomorrow. That would be best.’

  Red Shawl

  Lydia

  ‘Air raid! Hurry! Hurry!’

  A sliver of moonlight picked out Kristiina’s pale hair. She half-turned, beckoning us out into the small garden as the air-raid siren continued to wail. I took a breath then plunged outside. The cold was immense, a great angry cloud pressing down around me, squeezing the warmth from my bones. My exhausted mind struggled to order it all: the wail of the air-raid siren; footsteps thudding up the attic stairs; the house vibrating as planes roared overhead.

  Now this: the flight across the garden to where Kristiina hovered beneath the shadow of an oak tree. I heard Kati behind me, helping Etti with Leelo, the three of them struggling to see in the near-darkness. The wailing had begun a few min
utes ago; we’d only just had time to throw on our coats before Kristiina was in the room, shouting at us to gather our things and meet her downstairs.

  ‘This way.’ Kristiina grasped my arm. ‘Everyone who does not have a basement must gather at the Town Hall. It’s less likely the bombers will target a large building with civilians inside.’ Together, we hurried along the deserted streets, keeping to the shadows. Somewhere not far away an explosion rocked the earth, but Kristiina didn’t pause. Scurrying around the square, she led us towards a tall building of whitewashed stone. People gathered at the entrance as German soldiers shouted orders.

  ‘Just do what they tell you,’ Kristiina said as she felt me hesitating. ‘They will be too busy trying to protect the supply depots to worry about papers.’

  She did not wait for me to reply, but pushed me into the throng along with Kati and Etti. The hall was packed. Lamps had been placed along the floor to light the way. Bodies lined the timber panelled walls; children with eyes aglow, tired-looking women slumped together. The lights threw up strange shadows in the concert hall, illuminating the faces of the gilded statues and the ornate Baroque scrollwork on the ceiling high above.

  A German soldier directed us to an unfilled space between a few women who wriggled closer together to allow us to sit down.

  I lowered myself carefully, thinking already of how I would look in six months’ time, my belly swollen to the point where getting up and down would be difficult. Would Jakob be pleased when I told him, or afraid? Pleased, I decided.

  I could not imagine him being afraid of anything.

  Another shell shattered distantly. The women nearby whimpered.

  Leelo began to cry, her breathless sobs echoing. This broken sleep was already too much for her. She would be cross tomorrow, refusing to take her bottle just as she always did when over-tired. Etti sang to her and patted her back but Leelo refused to be calmed. Kati sat beside her, watching helplessly, the bruised crescents that shadowed her eyes showing the toll the long days and nights at Kreenholm had taken on her. Something prodded my elbow, and I looked down to see a pair of knitting needles in Kati’s hand.