Lace Weaver

by Lauren Chater

  ‘Aren’t you worried the Germans will hear us in a sled?’ I said.

  Jaan scoffed. ‘The Germans don’t know snow like we do. Don’t worry.’ But I heard the unspoken concern in his voice. Any patrol could spot us. A sled with panting dogs would be easy to see and hear.

  I saw Oskar hesitate. The snow began to fall more heavily, clouding at our feet in banks of ice.

  ‘Fetch it,’ he said. ‘Quickly.’

  Jaan left at a run, and we watched in dismay as snow began to carpet the ground. But he returned only minutes later, sliding to a halt in front of us, the sled a dark shape against the pale snow. The dogs strained at their leashes, eager to be gone, excited by the prospect of exercise at this late hour. Their breath plumed white and the noise of their panting was deafening.

  Oskar helped Lydia and Etti to climb in, then Lydia, and then he reached for me.

  I slid into my seat, feeling the cold of the timber rising through my skirt. The sled was larger than the one my father had owned, with more seats. It was a transport sled, used to move people up and down between the parishes, not a commercial one like my father’s with room for crates.

  Jaan urged the dogs forward. The sled slid backwards, tipping a moment as the dogs tried to gain purchase. Then we rolled forward, bumping across the ground, the air filled with panting breath and the scrape of the sled on the ground below.

  As a flurry of flakes blotted the sky, I watched the landscape move past, thinking of the many times Jakob and I had sledded as children, the squeals of joy, the wonder of moving seamlessly across the snow as if it were water. The memory dimmed.

  Every memory would be like that now. I would have to live them all over, each one, remembering that Jakob was no longer here to share them with me.

  ‘We’re nearly there.’ Jaan pointed to a small outcrop of trees and sand: the shoreline. The dogs surged forward, strings of saliva flying through the air behind them.

  ‘Stop!’ A voice rang out. Shots exploded from the dark.

  Jaan jerked the reins. The dogs squealed and whined and the sled crashed to a halt, grounded in the snow. Bullets thwacked into the timber.

  I heard Etti grunt beside me, saw her head topple forward, blood bubbling from two gaping holes in the back of her neck. I thrust out my hands as Leelo slid from her lifeless grasp. My throat seized.

  ‘Run!’ Oskar’s hand yanked me fiercely into the snow. I heard his breath in my ears. I grasped Leelo to my chest, trying not to slip. My boots sank into the ground. I struggled, pulled them free.

  A boat’s engine roared to life. I tore towards it, a storm of sound swirling around me. Gunfire, shouts. A gasp tore from my throat as my legs hit the icy water. My skirts dragged me down, instantly waterlogged.

  I saw Lydia’s face above me, her hands reaching.

  ‘Take Leelo!’ I screamed.

  The baby’s weight was gone from my arms, and now there was only the tug at my feet, the press of water, sucking me in, pulling me down.

  Give in.

  I could. It wouldn’t be hard. Snow scattered across my vision. My legs were frozen, all feeling lost. I felt the currents pull, one last tug, as gentle as a shawl unspooling. Pick one thread apart and the rest will come undone.

  The water closed over my head. It filled my ears.

  Then strong hands were grasping me under my arms. Oskar. In the water with me. He pulled me to the surface, and I kicked viciously against the current. The propeller buzzed, as angry as a wasp trapped inside a jar. Then I heard Oskar shout. His arms lifted me up and he pushed me into the boat.

  My head slammed on the cold metal of the seat. I heard gunshots explode in the water nearby and I sat up. The world was spinning. I tried to see Oskar, feel him climbing in beside me, but the black waters were empty. All was darkness and ice. I screamed his name. Lydia’s hands worked fast, stripping the waterlogged clothes from my body. I felt a blanket press around my legs. For a moment there was stillness. Just the buzzing of the boat. Then we were moving, shifting, flying through the dark.

  I raised my head, my vision still spinning. The sky was a bowl of stars and arcing light. Gunfire crackled. In the blur of snow, I saw the shoreline recede.

  I would later say that it was a trick of the light. Perhaps one of the dogs not slaughtered by bullets had limped to the shore, wanting to die in the water’s cold embrace. But the shape I saw was not limping.

  She stood proudly, her muzzle turned towards us, the long lines of her body glinting in the starlight. Her pelt was thick and full again, her eyes the same bright yellow they had been when we first met. My wolf. I tried to speak, to tell her to take care of Jakob and Etti, Mama and Papa. All the lost souls who would remain there together until we could one day find the courage to return. Until Estonia was free.

  But my voice was frozen, trapped like icicles in my throat.

  All I could do was call to her in the way I had used to, when words were not necessary, when knowing that she was there, that she understood, was all I had needed to force myself to go on.

  Hüvastijätt. Farewell.

  Epilogue

  Kati

  New York, 1953

  ‘The Central Committee of the Communist party, the Council of Ministers and the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR announce with deep grief to the party and all workers that on 5 March at 9.50 pm Josef Vissarionovich Stalin, Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and Chairman of the Council of Ministers, died after a serious illness. The heart of the collaborator and follower of the genius of Lenin’s work, the wise leader and teacher of the Communist party and of the Soviet people, stopped beating . . .’

  ‘Turn it off.’

  Lydia’s voice behind me makes me jump. My fingers spin the radio dial. The reporter’s words disappear, swallowed by static. The ensuing silence enhances the bubbling of the leivasupp on the stove, the rippling of piano music from down the hall. Cars grind up and down Richmond Avenue, the sound of their motors swelling and receding as they nose closer to their destinations. Our little apartment always seems so quiet, but the everyday sounds offer comfort. They drown out the tidal roar of the past.

  I lay down my ladle and turn to discover she is close behind me. Her shopping basket lies forgotten on the kitchen bench, a folded towel concealing the hidden contents. Her hair is short, slashed to just below her ears and dyed blonde. She wears a knitted jumper of crimson red in a boatneck style that reveals the delicate bones in her neck and throat and a long hand-sewn skirt that brushes the edges of her ankles. I have seen men turn to watch her as she passes by, their eyes drawn to the smooth arch of her neck. But she pays them no attention. If they ask, she holds up her hand to show them the band curled around her ring finger – the one we bought at a pawn shop the year we arrived – or points to the child always racing ahead, the boy with the mop of unruly brown curls.

  A few silver bangles circle her wrist; presents from a well-off client she helped secure passage into America. With her language skills, it was easy for her to translate all the interviewer’s questions and go back and forth between Russian and English. When she reaches out now towards the radio, the bangles strike against each other. The sound reminds me of bells. Her fingers pause on the dial, hesitant, unsure.

  I wait, unwilling to push her. I can feel the past pulling at us, tugging. A force as powerful as the tide.

  At last, she moves her hand away, curling her fingers up in her palm. ‘He was never really my father,’ she says. ‘Not in the ways that matter.’ She turns her back on the radio and goes back to her basket. Only the slightest tension in her shoulders gives her away.

  As I watch her lay out the things – a carton of milk, a packet of biscuits, a loaf of dense bread to serve with the apple stew bubbling on the stove – I feel my own breath slow, my muscles ease.

  Of course, she told me. It took almost a year; almost a year of nightmares and of waking at odd hours, stumbling about in the darkness, uncertain of who was still with us an
d who was gone. Aunt Juudit. Joachim. Olga. Etti. Jakob. Uncertain too of where we were. Tartu. Kreenholm. Helsinki, where Jaan’s boat left us, speeding away while we stumbled towards the safehouse Oskar had organised, run by a volunteer group of women who spoke both Finnish and English and helped displaced persons claim refugee status. It was those women who encouraged us to travel to America. And now we are here: Manhattan.

  The New World. As if the old one is so easily forgotten.

  Wrapped up in a bedsheet to stave off the cold, the stories poured out of her. Extraordinary tales of a life spent beneath the shadow of the Kremlin. A world I could not imagine. A mother forced to abandon her heritage. A father who lied to protect himself. A nursemaid who had spun tales of brave girls who outsmarted witches and found their destiny in far-flung places. When she tried to speak of Jakob, how he had made her feel, at last a part of something greater, connected to the place where she belonged, she had found her voice choked by tears.

  Those early times were the worst, for both of us. Grief was all around. Any small thing could bring it down over our heads. Our only shelter lay in each other, in the child growing daily in Lydia’s womb and in the care of Leelo, a bright spark.

  As if summoned, there is the thunder of feet in the room next door and a twelve-year-old girl with a heart-shaped face bursts into the room, braids swinging.

  ‘You’re back!’ she trills, her hands already reaching for the biscuits. Lydia smacks gently at her fingers.

  ‘Patience,’ she says. Leelo purses her lips and I catch a glimpse of the adolescent she will become – challenging, questioning. A child who has forgotten the last years of the war and knows only freedom. At least we will always have the singing to tempt her with; the lessons she started a few years ago with Mrs Meelis down the hall have been a miracle for us, a way to reason with her and to bargain. When Leelo sings, it’s as though a hundred women are singing with her, a chorus of voices reaching through time to be heard.

  ‘Where is your shadow?’ Lydia says.

  Leelo sighs and pulls a face. ‘Reading. I told him it’s boring, but you know . . . he never listens.’

  I catch a glimpse of Lydia’s smile as she pulls the last item from the basket – a jar of strawberry jam – and places it on the pantry shelf. ‘Leave him, then,’ she says and I see him in her mind’s eye: a serious child of eleven, cloistered in his room poring over the books of maps we have borrowed for him from the local library. He traces their borders with his fingers as if they are marks that will lead to treasure.

  ‘Did you get anything else?’ Leelo cranes forward. ‘A present?’ Her eyes gleam.

  ‘Maybe.’ Lydia taps her fingers on the countertop. ‘But it’s for your aunt.’

  I can’t hide my surprise. ‘For me?’

  In answer, Lydia brings out two soft balls of yarn, places them in my hands.

  ‘For knitting circle,’ she says, a smile teasing the edge of her mouth. ‘Estonian wool.’

  My breath catches. I finger the yarn softly, aware of Lydia watching me. Memories turn in my mind like Catherine wheels at the Fourth of July parade. Soft sheep’s fleece between my hands. Crunch of apple. Mama’s soft admonishing voice, Papa’s pipe smoke. Jakob’s smile. Oskar’s blue eyes watching me.

  I realise my hands are trembling. Murmuring my thanks, I leave the kitchen behind and step into the parlour where my knitting things are kept. It’s a comfortable room; my favourite. Plenty of armchairs. A basket overflowing with wool – although none of it is Estonian. I can’t imagine where Lydia found it. We don’t hear much these days. Since the Germans lost the war and the Russians reclaimed it, Estonia has been hidden behind the Soviet wall again. When the women who come to sit with us and knit in the evenings ask me about what it is like there, I tell them about the way it was, before the Russians arrived, before the Nazis. The way I want to remember it.

  My grandmother’s Estonia.

  The sound of the front door slamming makes me jump. The wool falls from my hand, unravelling on the floor. I bend and begin to wind it. Before I can straighten, arms slide around my waist. The smell of woodshavings prickles my nose. I close my eyes, inhale deeply. It is a good scent.

  ‘Tere, Kati.’ Strong hands turn me around, so that we are facing each other. And then Oskar kisses the tender place on my neck beneath my ear, his lips soft. ‘Hello.’

  His eyes are warm, like the ocean at sunset, when the sun spills across the waves, reluctant to cede the sky to the moon. There are marks on his body, small scars and burns. All of them healed a long time ago. Only I see the invisible ones. Only I can help him when he wakes weeping, shivering in a cold sweat as he remembers the people he has killed and the things he has seen. For a long time, he claimed it was the reason we could not have children. That fate was punishing him. We saw doctors but nobody could find a reason. It seemed to confirm for him what he suspected to be true.

  He glances at the wool in my hand and raises his blond eyebrows. ‘Knitting? Again?’

  I toss the wool in my hand, like a baseball player. ‘Of course,’ I say.

  He shakes his head. ‘You are always thinking of knitting.’

  I run one hand through his hair, woodshavings coarse beneath my fingertips. There is no heavy darkness in moments like this. There is only pleasure, weightless like the wool in my other hand. ‘Not always.’

  His face breaks open in a grin. He thinks I am being coy. He doesn’t know what I know; what I have been waiting all day to tell him.

  I allow my hand to hover near my still-flat belly, wondering if our child will have blue eyes or green. Oskar’s overalls are stained with oily varnish from his work at the furniture maker’s shop a block away. When he presses me to him, though, I do not resist.

  *

  Long after we are gone, our souls remain.

  They live in the trees we touched, the sigh of the wind we listened for. They exist not only to comfort our loved ones, but to comfort us, the parts of us that still watch and need strength. There is thread that binds us, all of the living things, to the past. It winds about us, sometimes playfully, sometimes twisting us in knots, tying us painfully to those memories that are heavy as stones. Sometimes it’s an oak leaf in your hand. You pick it up. You remember. Sometimes it’s a kringle pastry. You place it on your tongue. Those sweet times you shared.

  Sometimes, it’s a simple thing. An item you wear every day.

  A shawl.

  The folds of it brim with memories, good and bad. You wind it about your neck. It sits just so. It’s so soft you can wrap it around the body of a newborn child; a baptism of wool, a protection of holy lace. You can pull it through your wedding band, a band of burnished gold as brilliant as your husband’s hair. A simple trick that makes him smile, although the wounds are never far from the surface. They are the scars we all carry, those of us who left our hearts in another place.

  One day we will go back.

  Until then, we sing songs and tell stories to our children, to Leelo and to Anton. We knit together in the darkest hours before dawn, when the silence is too great to bear alone. One stitch at a time. That’s what I tell myself. What I say to Lydia when she appears at my door, her hand balled around the yarn.

  With every stitch, we heal ourselves.

  Acknowledgements

  The Lace Weaver is a work of fiction, but much of it is inspired by real events. Although I’ve tried to be as historically accurate as possible, I have taken the liberty of referring to the Klooga concentration camp, which was not actually established until September, 1943. I could also only find one reference to Narva being attacked intermittently by Russian bomber planes between 1941 and 1943, although in 1944 it was completely decimated by Soviet forces. The town was rebuilt after the war.

  There is scant information about the Forest Brothers which has been translated into English; much of it is hearsay, or gleaned from stories passed down from generation to generation. Some books suggest that there was no formal hierarchy in the organisat
ion, at least not in the initial stages, but this may just be another ‘fact’ passed onto the Soviet authorities in order to deflect unwanted attention from the group. The last Forest Brother came out of hiding in 1995, four years after Estonia finally regained independence. Over the course of my research, I read many books but some of them truly stood out and I would encourage you to read them if you’re interested in Eastern European history. They are: Estonian Life Stories, edited and translated by Tiina Kirss; Everything is Wonderful by Sigrid Rausing; Knitted Lace of Estonia: Techniques, Patterns and Traditions by Nancy Bush; Treasured Memories: Tales of Buried Belongings in Wartime Estonia by Mats Burström; Stalin’s Daughter by Rosemary Sullivan; Moscow 1941: A City and its People at War by Sir Rodric Braithwaite; Forest Brothers: the account of an Anti-Soviet Lithuanian Freedom Fighter 1944–1948 by Juozas Luksa.

  There were many people who helped get this book over the line. First, thank you to Fiona McIntosh for recognising something in me that I did not realise was there and for allowing me to come to your classes. You are Wonder Woman. Thank you also to Lisa Chaplin for guiding me through the process of writing during the early stages when I really needed feedback, for teaching me how to torture my characters and how to write a great action scene. I appreciate your generosity and advice. Thank you to early readers Helen Selvey, Donna Cattana, Dasha Maiorova, Sarah Mendham, Liang Lim, Emma Woods and Mel Sargent for your encouragement and feedback. Thank you to Kate Forsyth, Natasha Lester and Tess Woods for sharing your writing wisdom with me. Grateful thanks to Ave Põlenik-Schweiger for her invaluable advice.

  Thank you to the wonderful team at Simon & Schuster Australia; first and foremost, my very special publisher and editor, Roberta Ivers. Thank you for believing in this story. Thank you to Larissa Edwards, Fiona Henderson and Dan Ruffino for your enthusiastic support of this project and your infectious positivity. Kim Swivel, Claire De Medici and Vanessa Lanaway – your edits taught me so much and improved the manuscript beyond measure. Kirsty Noffke, the marketing team and the sales reps – thank you for your stellar efforts.