Death of a Nightingale

by Lene Kaaberbøl

  Don’t think, she told herself.

  She tried to just lie there, completely still, and listen to the wind that grabbed hold of the house and made the woodwork sing and creak under the sky, which Olga knew was black and cloudless and filled with stars.

  “Don’t be angry at Uncle Stalin,” Oxana had said. “The Revolution demands sacrifices from us all.”

  “Is she difficult?” Mikael Nielsen had asked when Søren turned over the watch to him back at the house on Kløvermosevej.

  “She has actually been pretty cooperative,” Søren had assured him. Now he wondered whether he should have warned Nielsen about Nina’s oddities anyway. Small talk and bedside manners were not Nielsen’s forte, nor did his restless nature adapt particularly well to the long, dull hours of surveillance during which nothing happened. But he was Søren’s man, and he was available and willing to sacrifice his Sunday, and thanks to all his gadgetry, he saw pretty much everything that moved, even though he might not look particularly alert. He had immediately distributed a number of small webcams both indoors and outside, and if Søren knew him at all, he was currently engaged in tracking them all simultaneously on his self-designed tablet computer, colloquially known as The Gizmo—possibly playing Battleship or indulging in a game of chess at the same time.

  Søren would have preferred to be there himself. But he needed to talk with Babko, and in spite of the new era of bicultural trust and peace, he had no intention of letting the Ukrainian anywhere near Rina. Apart from Søren’s own people, at this moment only Heide and Heide’s boss knew where the girl was. He had promised to bring both Nina and Rina in for a more thorough interview Monday morning if the girl’s health allowed.

  Babko had shaved and generally looked fresher and sharper today—Søren was in no way sure that the same thing could be said about him.

  “I managed to get through most of it,” he said, poking the substantial pile of papers. The printer had been going for almost two hours; it wasn’t among the fastest, but it had been easier than going to Søborg to use the one at the office. He was still better at reading things on paper, and when he was also faced with a linguistic challenge, he needed all the help he could get. His reading speed had definitely not been optimal.

  “Did you find it interesting?” asked Babko.

  “Much of it, yes.”

  Pavel Doroshenko had been born and had grown up in a little village south of Kiev. His father was a dairy worker, and his mother had been employed at the same dairy for most of her adult life. The most unusual thing about the family was the mother’s background. She was originally from Galicia in eastern Ukraine, one of the local minority of ethnic Germans who had been blown hither and thither by various national and military storms around the time of the Second World War. First the area had been under Polish rule, then the Soviets came, then the Germans, with a short-lived attempt to create an independent Ukrainian state, and finally the area had again been absorbed by the Soviet Union. Galicia’s history was more turbulent than most, and Søren wondered how it had shaped Pavel’s mother.

  “You wrote ‘Mama’s boy’ in your notes,” said Søren. “Why?”

  “She died in nineteen ninety-seven, so it’s an entirely secondhand impression. I spoke with the father; he is still alive but hadn’t been in contact with Pavel for several years. The marriage wasn’t exactly harmonious. It’s a small town, everybody knows everybody’s business, and if Pavel was a ladies’ man, he didn’t get it from strangers.”

  “But they didn’t get divorced?”

  “No. You’re familiar with the propiska system?”

  “Yes.” During the Soviet era, one needed an internal passport, a propiska, to live in a certain place. The propiska simultaneously served as right of residence to a specific address. “Is that still in use in Ukraine?”

  “It was officially judged to be unconstitutional in two thousnd and one, but not a lot changed. So with certain modifications, yes. The short answer is that even if Pavel’s parents had divorced, they couldn’t just split up. At least not without exchanging the propiska on their little house for two propiskas to much less desirable apartments. Pavel’s mother defended her right to the house with tooth and claw, understandably so. The result was that they lived like a dog and a cat. Funnily enough, most of the villagers sided with the husband, perhaps because her Ukrainian was pretty poor. She’d grown up with German and Polish, of course. Pavel was called Niemcy, ‘the German,’ in school, or ‘the Nazi brat’ if they were being particularly cruel. And apparently they spoke German together, his mother and he. She called him Paul. So you could say he grew up strongly motivated to succeed. He was going to show them all.”

  “And he did, didn’t he?” said Søren, thinking of a few pieces he had found on the Web. German television in particular had apparently used Pavel as a local expert a few times. “A career as a journalist, a good income, an apartment in Kiev and a young, beautiful wife … to them, he must have looked every inch the successful media star.”

  “At least to his mother he did, though she didn’t get to see the final chapters.”

  “I’ve looked at everything you found on him,” said Søren. “His stories are generally pretty black and white, aren’t they?”

  Pavel Doroshenko never seemed to just write about people. He wrote about villains or heroes. The heroes acted “without thought of personal gain” and “with great personal courage” and were “tireless,” “selfless” and “determined,” whether he was describing a fireman in Chernobyl, a local businessman, the director of an orphanage, a mayor who fought crime in his city or just a retiree who had defended himself against a pickpocket. The villains were similarly described as “calculating” and “greedy”; they were “caught in their own snares” and could often look forward to “many years behind bars”; people foolish enough to defend them were described as “collaborators” or “coconspirators” without it being clear what the conspiracy consisted of. Pavel fairly often cited family background or ethnicity, creating the impression that evil was genetic rather than personal. To Søren, the rhetoric seemed oddly old-fashioned and pretty tiresome.

  “You think so?” said Babko. “A lot of people write like that. At least in Ukraine.”

  “I haven’t been able to find anything that explains Savchuk’s interest in his widow.”

  “No, me neither.”

  “Is he another Gongadze?” Søren said, although broken fingers and a heart attack did not quite seem to match the gruesomeness of the decapitation of that particular heroic journalist.

  Babko shook his head. “I don’t think so. The people he would attack were mostly nationalists. At the beginning of his career, he was more politically focused—accusing the early nationalists of being a collection of Kosak-romantics, bumpkins and anti-Semites. Later his attacks became more personal, though funnily enough, most of the people he attacked still belonged to the Orange faction. The Blues—that is, the more ethnic Russian- and Moscow-friendly wing—he never wrote much about them, although there would be no shortage of material if he had wanted to have a go at them.”

  “Are his personal beliefs a factor here?” asked Søren.

  “Possibly. Or it might just have been to please his audience. For a time, he lived and worked in Donetsk, which is a predominantly Russian-speaking area. His motives could also have been more narrowly financial. There was and still is a lot of money flowing out of Moscow to willing mouthpieces in the media world. How else did you think Yanukovytsj managed to get himself reelected a mere six years after the Orange Revolution threw him out?”

  Was that the pattern Søren’s tired brain had tried to decipher last night? No. He didn’t have Babko’s local knowledge and couldn’t automatically recognize the party colors of the people Doroshenko had written about.

  “I wonder about two things,” he said. “First of all, I think his style changes. It becomes even more purple yet at the same time less precise, wallowing in phrases like ‘could it be that …’ or
‘might not stand up to closer examination.’ In his earlier articles, he is sharper and produces names and facts. Secondly, as his income grows, the apartment in Kiev and so on … he writes less and less, and for more local and smaller media. The year before he died, he published almost exclusively on some Web news site, what was it called …”

  “Velyka Tayemnitsya. The Big Secret, in the English version.”

  “Yes. It seems paradoxical.”

  “That’s because he is no longer a journalist in the true sense of the word. He was producing kompromat.”

  Søren’s inner dictionary managed to provide a definition a second before he had to ask. Kompromat—by now a fairly old Russian abbreviation for “compromising material.” A tactic in the information war that had roots all the way back to Stalin and which, in all its simplicity, consisted of digging up, fabricating and throwing as much dirt as possible at the person or persons with whom you were at war. American election campaigns were like Sunday school sessions by comparison.

  “It’s still used a lot?” he asked.

  “Oh, yes. Big Bizniz. Now also as a more private enterprise. And the richest kompromat producers are usually the ones who don’t print what they write.”

  “Blackmail?”

  “Yep. As a kompromat producer, you always have two potential customers—the person who has paid for the dirt and the person you’re planning to throw it at. The latter usually pays more.”

  “And the vague articles that just make suggestions but don’t name names …”

  “Those are warning shots. They let the victim know what he can expect if he doesn’t pay up.”

  Søren looked at the pile of articles with renewed interest. That meant that the “warning shots” offered up a number of people who had good reason for murdering Pavel Doroshenko and possibly also for pursuing his widow. That is, if Søren and Babko could figure out whom the warnings were directed at.

  14:11. exactly a minute had passed since she last checked. Not good.

  The sky was so thunderously grey that it might as well have been evening. Nina knew that she checked her watch more frequently on days when the sun didn’t give her a natural sense of the time, but this was more than that. She pulled over to the side of the road, and only then did she realize that she had subconsciously been headed for Fejøgade.

  Fuck.

  “You don’t live there anymore,” she told herself. She said it out loud because she wanted her subconscious to listen this time. Damn it. If Morten saw her, he would probably think she was stalking them. Like one of those rejected ex-husbands who went home and polished their army reserve rifle and put on their best clothes before blasting off the backs of their skulls. That is, if they didn’t take out their whole family first. Contemptible shitheads.

  She carefully placed her hands on the steering wheel again. 14:11. Fuck.

  “I just want to take care of them.”

  And they said that too, the men with the army reserve rifles. I just wanted to take care of them. When they shot the children, it wasn’t to harm them. Shitheads.

  14:12.

  But the thought that Natasha had been there. At her home. Well, okay, at Morten’s and the children’s home.

  14:12. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

  I just want to take care of them.

  “Are you having a nervous breakdown?” she asked out loud in English.

  Why she was speaking English to herself she didn’t know. And then she actually did know. English was the language of crisis. In Dadaab and elsewhere. And flying conditions were lousy.

  “Nina, damn it.”

  She breathed very consciously now. Long, deep breaths. “Allll the way down to the pit of your stomach,” as an instructor had once said. Panic-reducing big breaths.

  The black anxiety inside her paid no attention. Nina didn’t get it. Natasha wasn’t more dangerous than the Finnish psychopath who had kidnapped Ida last year. And in that situation she had been able to think and act; she had done what was necessary for Ida to be rescued. Natasha was no more dangerous. Definitely not. Natasha was just a poor Ukrainian girl who had landed in some bad shit.

  A poor Ukrainian mother, Nina reminded herself. And you have taken her child.

  14:13.

  She knew that it wasn’t always the obvious crises that made people crack. An Iranian man who had survived multiple arrests, torture and threats without breaking down had completely lost it and had tried to smash a radiator one evening in the Coal-House Camp’s recreation room. Afterward he explained, crying and incoherent, that it was because the noise from a defective valve reminded him of machine-gun fire.

  But you haven’t been tortured, she reminded herself. So how about turning down the drama a notch or two?

  Outside on Jagtvejen traffic glided by in its lazy Sunday rhythm. A mother passed her with two carnival-costumed children, one in a stroller, the other lagging a few feet behind on tired cat paws.

  For the rest of the school carnival, Nina had barely been able to keep it together. She had smiled and clapped for Anton’s sake. He had been so caught up in the barrel-smashing and apple-bobbing and all the other hullaballoo that he hadn’t noticed anything. But Ida had immediately spotted that something was wrong.

  “What have you done now?” she asked, lashing out at Nina with all the old hostility that had seemed to be receding.

  “Ida!” said Morten. “Speak nicely to your mother.”

  Nina felt a surge of wobbly and yet more destabilizing gratitude to him for defending her, even if the defense did sound a bit tired and hollow because he basically agreed with Ida. As soon as the bottom had fallen out of Anton’s barrel, releasing oranges in all directions, she had kissed Super Mario on his cap and raced out the door.

  Would you take my child, Natasha?

  And Natasha answered her, a whispering voice somewhere inside: Why not? You took mine.

  “No,” Nina protested. “You asked me to take care of her. That’s what I’ve done. Just that.” But it was a lie, a big, fat lie. When the gates to Fejøgade had been shut in her face, banishing her from what right now seemed a perfect Eden, though it hadn’t been so at the time … in that moment of despair and rejection, it had been Rina she had clung to. There had been so many nights when she had slept next to Rina ostensibly “to keep an eye on that asthma,” but really because her own bed in the new-divorcée apartment had been unbearably lonely and impossible to sleep in.

  So no, she couldn’t go to Fejøgade. But the thought of returning to Søren’s tidy suburban home made her panic accelerate. Magnus was there, she thought. Magnus would have to manage a little longer. He had a caring but more professional relationship to Rina.

  She could go get the asthma medicine. Yes, that’s what she would do. They had already used more than they should have, and they couldn’t afford to run out. The drive back and forth would consume over an hour of unruly, fundamentally un-checkable time, and by then she might have calmed down a bit.

  She started the engine again and headed for the Coal-House Camp. The time was 14:19.

  UKRAINE, 1935

  Stomp, stomp, stomp.

  Olga stared down at the frozen wheel tracks as she walked. It wasn’t all that far from the school to their old house on the outskirts of the village, certainly not anywhere near as far as it had been to Grandfather’s farm up in the hills. And yet it felt farther.

  Her heart beat hard and fast under her coat, and she increased her tempo, forced herself to breathe slowly and deeply, forced herself not to run. The heavy white blanket of snow that had fallen in the night hushed all sound, but she still caught most of it. Oxana’s steady, confident steps to her right. A door that opened and closed in the house next to the cooperative shop. A quiet conversation between two men over by the sawmill. She could hear the way they stomped their feet and clapped their hands hard together to stave off the cold. Their cigarette smoke hung in the ice-cold air like a faint bluish veil.

  They walked quickly. Olga because she was a
fraid. Oxana more likely because she was angry.

  COMRADE SEMIENOVA LOVED Oxana. Leda and Jegor loved Oxana, and Mother and Kolja loved her too. But that winter it was as if everyone else had begun to hate her.

  It had begun with Sergej’s stone, the day the GPU had come for Fedir and the rest of his family. And after that the hatred had grown. Although Olga caught only a sort of echo of it, as if the hostility bounced off Oxana and hit her instead, she felt it as a resistance in her body that made it difficult to move and breathe. It showed in all the little gestures, she had discovered. Men stuck their hands in their pockets and turned away. Conversations ceased. Smiles faltered and eyes were averted when Oxana and she walked by. People didn’t yell or call names anymore; the hatred was in the silence and in the air she breathed into her lungs. So it wasn’t until she was inside, at home with Oxana and Kolja and Mother, that she could breathe freely.

  Uncle Grachev’s house had become a dangerous place to pass, because even though Father and he had often argued about who would provide bread and vodka for the old folk, they had had a lot in common and enjoyed drinking and playing cards in the evening. Uncle Grachev was Father’s brother. He had a huge beard and an odd, hiccupping laughter, and he used to pinch Olga and Oxana much too hard on the cheek. Olga had also seen him pinch Mother’s behind when he was really drunk and had lost both kopeks and rubles, but Mother had never paid much attention, and luckily Grachev had his own wife, who was named Vira and was big and strong as an ox and ruled over both Grachev and the three large cousins with a firm hand. Their house was also big enough that Grandfather and Grandmother Trofimenko could live there, and when Mother and Father and Olga and Oxana and Kolja had first come to Mykolayevka in the fall, Vira and Grachev had invited the whole family to celebrate the first harvest after the great hunger. They had had honey cakes and tea and had listened to Cousin Fyodor’s stories about his time in the army in Afghanistan. To think that the Afghan women were dressed in tents and were only allowed to see the world through a mesh of horsehair, while the men sat around smoking water pipes! Unimaginable wonders like that were blissful when served with tea and cake.