“If he’s not home in time for tea, there’s not much we can do about it,” said Mother. Her mouth had gotten small even though she was still smiling. “He’ll be here soon enough.”
“But …” Oxana had also stopped now, one hand hovering about the platter. “I can run down to the office and get him.”
“No, never mind,” said Mother. She pulled her blouse out and fanned it back and forth to get a little air against her skin. “He’ll probably be here soon.”
This was wrong.
As long as Olga could remember, they had eaten the first watermelon together—all of them. When they lived in town, it had been a day of celebration, when Father cut the pieces and said funny things when he handed them out. “To my most highborn princess” or “to the most beautiful flower in the field.”
Olga shifted uneasily in her seat, but she didn’t say anything. It was one of the hottest summer days so far. Clothes felt sticky and itchy on the body, rubbing at the lice bites that had kept Olga and little Kolja awake all night. Mother had changed the straw in the mattresses, boiled the sheets and rubbed petroleum on the sleeping shelf, but the lice still bit in the heat and darkness until Olga was about to go mad. For some reason they weren’t as interested in Oxana.
Olga scratched her neck and looked uncertainly at her big sister. It would have been best if Father was there too, but the large, sweet watermelon pieces lay in front of her, and it was unbearable. Oxana was right about that. She was no good at waiting.
She reached across the platter and took a thick slice. It was so juicy that the water dripped from her fingers, and when she took the first bite, it was wonderfully sweet and immediately pushed away her bad conscience. Mother could keep her rye bread, pickles and thyme tea today, and Oxana could stare at her as sourly as she liked. Olga took another piece.
“You’re such a baby,” Oxana said, outraged. “I’m waiting for Father.”
Olga stuck out her tongue and kicked at Oxana under the table, but for once Mother didn’t say anything. She had taken a piece of melon herself, bending her head over the table and carefully spitting out the black, mature seeds onto a piece of newspaper to be dried and saved for next year’s crop. Then she pushed the plate of pickles toward Oxana. “Eat.”
Oxana shook her head and glanced up the road.
Something was wrong. Olga could feel it all the way in the pit of her stomach. A kind of dark energy shone out of Mother now. It was like the wind that suddenly arrived and stirred up the dust in the road before a thundershower. From the Pretrenkos’ house on the other side of the cabbage patch, Olga could hear laughter and Vladimir shouting something or other at Jana. Other than that, everything was quiet in the oppressive afternoon heat.
“Do you want to spoil the food?” Mother asked. She was pale with anger now. “Eat, or I guarantee that you will go to bed without food. Your father is drinking his tea someplace else today.”
Oxana looked frightened. Mother rarely got angry, but when she did, she sometimes struck them. Mother’s hands were hard and dry as wood. Now she got up abruptly and began shoving the food off the table with angry gestures. Kolja reached out fast, grabbed two more pieces of melon and raced down to the bottom of the garden with his prize. Olga remained petrified, looking at her mother. A kind of hidden knowledge began to bubble up to the surface.
The arguments had woken her in the night several times in the first months of spring. When Mother and Father argued, they whispered instead of shouting, so that it sounded like an excited hissing in the dark. Mother had never hidden the fact that she would have preferred to stay in Kharkiv, where Father had been a factory manager and a highly respected member of the Party. Even in the great hunger year, they had had bread and also a little sugar, salt and vegetables. To return to the village was suicide, she had said, but even though she cried, Father insisted.
It was the Party that had asked him to take over the management of the collective because he was known in the village and had a bit of experience with farming from his boyhood. And the Party was greater than Mother’s tears, that much Olga knew. Father loved his Party and his country and would do everything possible to ensure that everyone would be better off. He would build a better future with his own hands. Olga had been on Mother’s side, but of course Oxana had been on Father’s, as she always was. And he was the one who got what he wanted in the end. Mother had dried her eyes, packed their things in silence and had followed him to the village where they had both grown up.
They had arrived in Mykolayevka in the fall right after the harvest, and Olga had hated the place instantly. Half the village’s houses stood empty, with rattling shutters and broken planks and beams. Most of the trees along the main street had been chopped down, and the few that were left had been stripped of their bark and were as dead as the houses around them. Just two poplars remained by the house of the village soviet, their silver leaves rustling in the wind. The few people in the street were thin and starved and dressed in layer upon layer of rags and coats full of holes. Even Father had looked frightened, Olga thought, but then he said that this year, the harvest was already safe. The horror stories of the great hunger year would soon be only that: stories. They would see; it would soon get better. Oxana believed him, but Olga’s stomach hurt, and she tried to hide her face against Mother’s chest.
The first winter had been just as terrible as Mother had feared. Even though Father was the foreman for the kolkhoz, and the harvest was better than the previous year, the bread rations were meager. Father would not take more for his family than the ordinary workers received, Oxana reported proudly. Just once, he had brought home a load of potatoes and a barrel of rancid salt pork that he had bought on the open market, and that had lasted a whole month.
It had not been enough. Not even the salt pork had staved off the hunger altogether and silenced the hollow ache under the ribs. And spring had been the worst. While everything bloomed around them, hunger had gnawed at their stomachs worse than ever.
It wasn’t Father’s fault, that much Olga understood. And it had gotten better in the course of the first warm summer months. But Mother still cried and scolded all the time and was thin and tired and grey even though the sun was shining and they had been able to collect the first potatoes in the garden over a month ago. She had lost two teeth in her lower jaw, which now gaped as emptily as Oxana’s.
But it occurred to Olga now that the whispered arguments in the night throughout the spring had not been just about Mother’s longing for Kharkiv and her fear of cold and starvation.
Father drank his tea someplace else.
A picture of Father down by the sawmill in the company of a smiling, full-figured woman whirled through Olga’s head, followed by the laughing mug of Sergej from school. Sergej had lice and stank, like the little pig he was.
“What do you think of the widow Svetlova?” he had asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Do you like her?”
Olga shrugged. She had no interest in talking with Sergej, who was seven and disgusting to look at, with large pox scars on his forehead.
“You father does,” he said and pulled his index finger quickly back and forth through a circle he made of the index finger and thumb on his other hand. It was deeply disquieting even though Olga didn’t understand what it meant.
The realization hit her now like a spurt of blood, burning her cheeks and her stomach.
The widow Svetlova had made it through the winter in a better state than Mother. She had no children and was younger. Much younger, with round cheeks and broad white teeth without a single gap.
Oxana sat with her head lowered and picked at the splinters in the table. She was probably pouting because she hadn’t gotten any melon, but she didn’t deserve any better.
“Now look what you’ve done,” hissed Olga. “You’ve made Mother sad.”
Oxana shrugged. She scowled, eyes full of tears.
“You’re such a baby,” was all she said. “You w
ouldn’t be able to wait for anything if your life depended on it.”
“Magnus, damn it,” snapped Nina, but Magnus was driving twenty-five meters in front of her and couldn’t hear her clenched exclamation. The winding forest road to the Coal-House Camp was not at the top of the municipality’s list of priorities as far as plowing went, and with every snowfall the road got narrower and the snowbanks on both sides got higher. Magnus was driving close to the speed limit, with Volvo steadiness on authorized winter tires, while her middle-aged Nissan Micra skated around the turns as if it had never heard the word “traction.”
The Micra was an emergency solution. It was almost fifteen years old, the door handle on the passenger side had broken off and the gearshift suffered from a reluctance to return to the middle position unless you gave it a sharp whack. Someone had painted green racing stripes on its curry-green door, most likely in a desperate attempt to give it a bit of personality. It was not the dream car; it was the “what I can afford?” car. She couldn’t do without it. The public transportation’s tenuous connection to the Coal-House Camp, more officially known as Red Cross Center Furesø, ceased completely at 9 P.M., and night shifts were an unavoidable part of the job of nurse.
The Micra’s front wheels spun without effect on the black ice, and Nina had to fight a deep-seated urge to step on the brakes. The car sailed sideways into the curve and only fell into the track again seconds before it would have collided with the snow. She shifted down and waited for it to slow. Ahead of her, the back of Magnus’s Volvo disappeared around the next turn. Perhaps she should have come in the Volvo with him. But then there was the problem of getting home again, and they hadn’t exactly announced their … affair sounded completely wrong, relationship even worse—their mutual loneliness relief to the world. Maybe not arriving at the same time was a good move. But the adrenaline made her stomach burn, and the slow driving necessary on the slippery roads felt completely counterintuitive.
Natasha had escaped custody. As unbelievable as it sounded, it was true. The authorities had concluded that she might try to get hold of Rina and had therefore sent police out to the Coal-House Camp, which was, Nina thought, not something she could really object to, except that they had apparently managed to provoke one of the worst anxiety and asthma attacks Rina had experienced in all the time she’d been in the camp. Nina understood why Magnus was rushing and cursed the Micra’s insufficiencies both mentally and out loud. “Damn it, damn it, damn it.”
When she finally rolled into the parking lot in front of the camp’s main entrance, she instantly spotted two almost identical dark blue Mondeo station cars. Two cars. Presumably at least four people. Apparently there was no lack of resources when the object was to catch single mothers with a foreign background found guilty of attempted murder, Nina thought dryly. It didn’t say POLICE on the side, but it might as well have. Did they really think Natasha was stupid enough to wander into the camp as long as they were parked there? The police had errands at the camp fairly regularly, and Natasha knew just as well as the rest of the camp’s current and former residents which car makes she should be on the lookout for.
On the other hand, it wasn’t particularly intelligent to attack two policemen with a cobble. Nina had a hard time recognizing Natasha in the hurried description of events that Magnus had given her on their way to the cars. Of course, Natasha could be pushed to act violently; probably almost everyone could. But when she stabbed her fiancé with a hunting knife, it hadn’t been because he had physically abused her for months; it wasn’t until she caught him with his fingers in Rina’s panties that she had counterattacked. During all the time she had spent in Vestre Prison, she had been almost alarmingly silent and passive.
Until now.
“What the hell were you thinking?” Nina muttered to herself as she made her way up the barely shoveled walkway in the direction of the camp’s little clinic. Something or other had clearly brought this on, but what?
She stomped the snow off her boots on the grate by the clinic’s main entrance. Weeks’ worth of frosty slush was packed in the metal grid so that it had had become like trying to dry your feet on an enormous ice cube tray. As she opened the door, though, the heat hit her like a hammer. Magnus consistently ignored all energy-saving suggestions on that point. “The people who come here are sick, depressed and hurt,” he had said when the chair of the camp’s conservation committee had protested. “I’ll be damned if I’m going to let them freeze as well!”
Rina was half sitting, half lying on a cot in one of the two examination rooms. In the corner between the closet and the wall sat an aggressively clean-shaven young man in a hoodie that on him looked more like workout clothes than weekend wear. He had placed himself in such a way that he couldn’t be seen from the window, and Nina concluded that he had to be a member of the Mondeo brigade. There had been a moment of heightened alertness as she came in, but now he relaxed back into a waiting position, apparently convinced solely by her age and appearance that she posed no danger.
“Hello, sweetie,” Nina said, squeezed Rina’s hand, which was limp and a little too cool. “What are we going to do with you?”
There was something about the slight, eight-year-old body and the narrow face that reminded Nina of the eastern European little girl gymnasts of the 1970s—Olga Korbut, Nadia Comaneci and whatever they were called. Not the smiling medal photos, but the serious, too-old-for-their-age concentration before the routine, the shadows under their eyes, the contrast between the cheerful ponytails and the hollow-cheeked, pain-etched faces. Rina’s hair was blond like her mother’s, thick, straight dark blonde hair without even the suggestion of curl or wave. Right now that hair was pulled back with a light blue Alice band, but even though you could occasionally sense that Rina felt she had fallen through a rabbit hole to an alternate universe, there clearly wasn’t much Wonderland about it. Her breathing was still terribly labored. Tiny pinpoint blood effusions around her half-closed eyes revealed how hard she had had to fight to get enough oxygen into her tormented bronchial tubes. Yet it wasn’t Rina’s physical condition that made Nina’s own heart contract as if it were something more than a pumping muscle.
“Sweetie,” she said, sitting down next to the child and pulling her close. Even on good days, anxiety lay like permafrost just beneath Rina’s thin crust of childish trust. Now the trust was gone. There was no wish for contact in the slight body; she just let herself be moved with an arbitrary shift in her weight that had nothing to do with intimacy.
Having changed quickly, Magnus entered, stethoscope in hand. Pernille, who had had the night shift, followed on his heels.
“I had to give her oxygen a few times,” said Pernille. “And her peak flow is still nothing to shout about. But … well, you can see for yourself.”
Magnus nodded briefly. “Hello, Rina,” he said. “I just need to listen to your lungs a little bit.”
Rina didn’t react except with a quick sideways glance. Nina had to turn her partway so that Magnus could examine her.
“Come on, Rina. You know the drill. Deeeep breath.”
Rina continued to breathe in exactly the same tormented rhythm, but Magnus didn’t try to correct her. He just praised her as if she had done what he had asked. “Very good. And now the other side.”
There was still no reaction, no sign that Rina was participating in the examination with anything but limp passivity. Nina gently pulled her close so that Magnus could place the stethoscope against Rina’s chest. Over Rina’s blonde hair she caught Magnus’s gaze.
“Well, I can hear that it’s getting better,” he said, just as much to Nina as to the child. “Do you want Pernille to get you some ice cream?”
Rina loved ice cream and could eat it year-round, and it had gradually become the ritual reward for various examinations, especially those that involved blood tests or other needle pricks. Rina lifted her head and considered the offer. But then she collapsed again with a single shake of her head.
“Did
you eat breakfast, Rina?”
Again a tiny shake.
“She didn’t want anything,” said Pernille. “Not even ice cream.”
Magnus sat down on a stool so he was more or less at eye level with Rina. “Listen, Rina. It’s super hard for the body when you have trouble breathing. It’s as hard as playing ten soccer games in row. Do you see? And then you have to be a little kind to your body and feed it properly, even if you might not feel like eating.”
That didn’t make any visible impression.
“Rina, if you don’t eat anything, we’ll have to keep you here in the clinic,” said Nina. “Wouldn’t you rather go back to your room?”
The policeman by the closet cleared his throat. “It’s best for her to be where she usually is,” he said.
Nina stared at him with anger smoldering in the pit of her stomach. “Best?” she said. “For whom?”
“So that the mother can find her more easily.”
The anger burst into flame. Only concern for Rina made her control herself. Couldn’t he see that this was a child, a sick and tormented child, not just convenient bait for their trap?
“That’s a medical decision,” said Magnus very, very sharply. “And I’m the doctor.”
But Rina had lifted her head again and suddenly looked more present and alive than she had at any point since Nina got there. “I’d like an ice cream,” she said.
Oh, Lord, thought Nina. So that the mother can find her more easily. That was the only thing Rina had heard and understood. What if Natasha really did show up? And the police arrested her in front of the child? Nina didn’t want to think about what that would mean for Rina’s delicate balance and her grasp of reality here in non-Wonderland. She could see that Magnus was thinking more or less the same thing. But they couldn’t do anything—couldn’t even discuss it here and now while Rina was listening.
“Strawberry or chocolate?” asked Nina.
TEN MINUTES LATER, as she escorted Rina across the icy asphalt lot that had once been the barracks’ drill grounds, it was with two of the Mondeo brigade on her heels, though they maintained a certain discreet distance that presumably was supposed to make them look like civilian passersby. Rina held Nina’s hand, something she had otherwise stopped doing, and in her other hand she clutched the strawberry ice cream, which she dutifully sucked on every fourth or fifth step. At least it didn’t look as if her breathing was significantly more labored now that she was moving and even though the air was cold enough to sting Nina’s more resistant lungs. Pernille had done all the right things, had administered Bricanyl and later prednisone, had measured the oxygen and attempted to calm the panic. Physically, the girl was improving. But right now Nina was much more concerned with what was happening in Rina’s mind.
Death of a Nightingale Page 3