Death of a Nightingale

by Lene Kaaberbøl

  It was the day that Natasha’s grandmother was being buried. September, but still so warm that the air shimmered above the asphalt outside the airport in Donetsk.

  “Why not?” asked Natasha. “You don’t know what happens when we die either.”

  “I know that there won’t be any angel choirs and harp music for me,” he said.

  Katerina had been five. She listened when the grown-ups talked. Not always obviously, but with a silent awareness that made it seem as if she was eavesdropping even when she sat right next to you, as now, in the back of the taxi.

  “So Daddy won’t go to Heaven?” she whispered to Natasha.

  Pavel heard it even though he was helping the taxi driver put the bags in the trunk. He also saw the silent pleading in Natasha’s eyes.

  “Sweetie pie,” he said and slid into the seat from the other side. “That’s a long time from now. We don’t need to think about it.”

  “But Great-Grandmother is dead,” said Katerina. “Where is she going if there is no Heaven?”

  It wasn’t as if Katerina had seen her great-grandmother all that often. Still, the question was serious, as was Katerina’s worried gaze.

  “Are you sad that she is dead?” asked Pavel.

  Katerina considered. “She made good poppy seed cakes,” she said.

  Pavel smiled. “Good,” he said. “Then we agree that there is a Heaven and that Great-Grandmother is there now. She has just baked a poppy seed cake and made us tea, and we can visit her when we sleep so she doesn’t get too lonely. I’ll just have to try and see if I can stand the harping.”

  Katerina accepted this and looked relieved. Death without lifelines was hard for a five-year-old to take on board, and Natasha was happy that Pavel had been as accommodating as he had and that Katerina couldn’t see the irony in his eyes.

  Twelve months later Pavel was dead. And for some reason Natasha had a hard time imagining that he sat next to God looking down at them. He no longer took care of them; in fact, he never had. It had just seemed that way until the day the Witch arrived.

  SUDDENLY NATASHA KNEW what she needed to do. The world fell into place around her, and there was meaning and order again. She could protect Katerina, even though she no longer knew where Katerina was. She could make sure that safe really meant safe.

  Once she had wondered at the fact that murderers could get into Heaven when people who committed suicide couldn’t. Wasn’t it worse to kill someone else? Now she was glad that was the way it was. She listened, but Anna-in-her-head apparently had no opinion of her new plan. Still Natasha felt calm, cold and determined. If Katerina really was to be safe, there was only one thing to do.

  The Witch had to die.

  “This one,” Søren said, pointing at one of Pavel Dorshenko’s many articles. “Why do I have a special feeling about this one?”

  Babko stretched and stuck out his hand for the now fairly grimy paper. “May I see?”

  “Solovi, solovi, ne trevozhte soldat …”

  Nightingale, nightingale, do not wake the soldier, for he has such a short time to sleep. Which of us has not heard this sentimental but beautiful song, whether it was Evgeny Belyaev, who thrilled us with his fantastic tenor, or the Red Army’s talented male choir or more modern soloists? But who was this nightingale really, and whom did she sing for?

  Babko took a sip of his lukewarm coffee.

  “It doesn’t seem quite like the stuff he usually writes,” he said. “But I can’t see any great potential for scandal. Most of this is generally known. Kalugin’s Nightingale. The story was even turned into a Carmen-like musical a few years ago.”

  They had had to return the borrowed office to its owner and were now once again sitting in the headquarters’s dove-blue coffee room. A Sunday lull had descended; only a single uniformed policeman was reading the sports section from one of the tabloids as he consumed his breakfast roll. Søren scanned the text once more. He could grasp the general sense—that it had to do with the world war and the dogfight over Galicia—but his knowledge of contemporary Ukrainian history wasn’t sufficient for him to catch all the nuances.

  “What does it mean?” he asked Babko. “The stuff about the Nightingale?”

  “She was a kind of Ukrainian Marlene Dietrich,” Babko said and tapped a specific paragraph with a broad index finger. “Oletchka Marasova, she was called. She sang for Bandera’s nationalist troops. She kept up morale and that kind of thing. But it turned out that she sang in more ways than one. She informed on several of them to the KGB, to a Colonel Kalugin—hence the name.”

  “Dramatic,” Søren observed. “I can see why someone thought it would make a great musical.”

  “It was terrible,” said Babko dryly. “Plot holes you could drive a cart through and so overacted and tear-jerkingly sentimental that some of the audience began to giggle. Very unhistorical and slightly embarrassing.”

  Søren sensed that Babko had been one of the gigglers.

  “Doroshenko’s version is not much better,” said the Ukrainian. “Some of it is taken directly from the musical, as far as I can see. Other parts are tall tales and myth; he doesn’t distinguish. All that stuff about Kalugin discovering her at an orphanage concert, for example, is nonsense. She did come from an orphanage, true, but she didn’t meet Kalugin until she was grown. And she probably doesn’t have quite as many lives on her conscience as Kalugin claims. She was given credit for a good part of general informer activity. The national army was, to some extent, an underground army and therefore very vulnerable to that kind of traitor. Many were accused, arrested and executed. Bandera was murdered by the KGB as late as nineteen fifty-nine, in Munich, I believe. And he is still a divisive figure. Some see him as a Ukrainian freedom fighter, a hero; others accuse him of war crimes and point out that he allied himself with the Germans for a while. A Ukrainian battalion was created under the banner of the Wehrmacht, and do you know what they called it?”

  “No,” said Søren, a bit irritated. This wasn’t a quiz show.

  “The Nachtigall Battalion. Funny, don’t you think?”

  “Does it have anything to do with her? Kalugin’s Nightingale?”

  “Probably not. Or if it does, the connection may run in the other direction—it made the nickname even more appropriate.”

  Søren skimmed the article one more time. If you ignored the tragic background of the war, it was basically a banal honey-trap story. It had even been illustrated with photographs of scenes from the musical, he saw, and an apparently random picture of two little girls in some kind of national costume. There were no captions to explain why that was relevant.

  “It doesn’t include an accusation,” he said. “None of those badly veiled suggestions that there is a ‘basis for a closer investigation’ and so on. And it all happened a long time ago. So why do I still keep coming back to it?”

  “Perhaps because it was published on September eighteenth, two thousand and seven,” said Babko suddenly.

  It took a few seconds. Then Søren felt an abrupt desire to smack himself on the forehead. “The day before Pavel Doroshenko was killed,” he concluded.

  UKRAINE, 1935

  “You’re like a dog. A little, stupid one.”

  Olga looked at Oxana across the narrow table but didn’t have the energy to answer, just waited for the next attack. Oxana wasn’t really angry, she knew that. There was something teasing in the blue gaze. An invitation to a game of the kind they had played when they were a little younger in Kharkiv and even in Mykolayevka before everything went wrong. But Olga didn’t accept.

  “A dog sticks its tail between its legs and hides because it doesn’t know any better. What’s your excuse?”

  There was a smile but also a flicker of irritation in Oxana’s voice now. Olga still chose to ignore it. They were having oatmeal today. Water softened the oats so they somehow filled you up more than millet porridge and bread, and if you ate very slowly, it worked even better.

  Olga emptied her bowl at
a steady rate. She inhaled its smell and felt warmth spread through her whole body.

  Mother also sat silent with her own portion, which wasn’t much bigger than those she had served the children. She gave them a little hunk of bread each. Olga broke hers in half, carefully cleaning the bowl with the soft side of the bread before stuffing it in her mouth. Afterward, they cleaned the pot together in the same way. Oxana poked at Olga’s hand, ruffled her hair and nipped playfully at her ear, but Olga pulled away instinctively. That was just the way it had become. She could no longer stand to be touched by Oxana.

  She got up abruptly and began to comb Kolja’s hair for nits. Mother had had to cut it very short, because when Kolja was being looked after at the kolkhoz, he often played in the collective house, where whole families slept, cooked and ate on the floor. Lice and other bugs jumped on him even though Mother made sure to wash him every day and had somehow even acquired some bars of real soap. They managed, as Mother said. There were oats and cabbage and winter carrots, and the fist-sized bread ration that Mother brought home with her every day from the kolkhoz, a chunk for each. But hunger stayed with Olga like a toothache. When she got up, when she went to bed and now while she was rinsing the pots and checking Kolja’s soft short hair for lice.

  Olga kissed him carefully at the nape of his neck and spun him around once. Mother had made a new coat for him from the red wool dress she had brought from Kharkiv. “Here I’ll never need such finery anyway,” she had said. “The hogs don’t care what I wear.”

  “How nice you look,” said Olga and smiled. “A real little man.”

  Kolja nodded. “I’m going to show it to Viktor and Elena and Marusja,” he said but then got a worried wrinkle in his forehead. “Should I be the father or the big brother when we play family?”

  Olga considered for a moment. “You should be the father,” she said. “You’re a father who has just come back from Moscow after an important meeting with Uncle Stalin, and he has given you this fine coat as a thank-you for all that you have done for the Soviet Union.”

  Kolja stood up straight and gave Oxana a serious look. “Like you, Oxana. I am going to build a better future with my own hands.”

  Oxana was putting on her coat. She looked at Kolja and smiled crookedly, but she didn’t say anything. Oxana had become quieter lately. She was thinking of the cause, she claimed, but her spontaneous speeches about the better times that awaited them had become less frequent, and they warmed neither soul nor stomach the way they had done in the past.

  Olga felt sore and tired to the bone, which really wasn’t very far if you thought about it. Her ribs were visible just beneath the skin, and her hipbones jutted out so far that it really hurt when she knocked into a table or a doorframe. And she did that often. Hunger made them all clumsy, and Kolja fretful and whiny, but they were still alive while others were dead—Father and Grandfather and Jana’s mother too, who had succumbed to tuberculosis just a month ago. Olga had watched from the window when she was sung out of the Petrenko house. Jana walked behind the funeral procession with her shoulders pulled all the way up to her ears, scratching her hair once in a while. She and Olga no longer spoke.

  Mother had tied on both shawl and kerchief and reached for Kolja with an impatient gesture. “We have to go now, Kolja,” she said in a thin voice. “Otherwise Mama Hog will get impatient.”

  Mama Hog, the largest of the breeding sows, was Kolja’s favorite, and for her sake he was usually willing to hurry, but today he pulled himself free of Mother’s hand and stuck out his lower lip. “I have to bring my rifle.”

  Olga looked around and caught sight of the stick that he had whittled smooth and nice and free of bark, and which had now been designated a weapon in the Red Army. She handed it to Kolja, who stashed it under his coat with a satisfied expression.

  “Now we’ll go,” he said.

  “Yes, now we’ll go.”

  Mother and Kolja opened the door, walked out to the road and turned in the direction of the kolkhoz. Oxana remained in the doorway, looking at Olga.

  “Come with me,” she then said. “It will be all right. They won’t dare to do anything.”

  Olga shrugged, not meeting Oxana’s eyes. They had had this conversation before, and she knew what Oxana was going to say. Olga ought to go to school both for her own sake and for Uncle Stalin. She and all other children were the future of the nation. Oxana had reported the beating to the village soviet, and no one would dare to attack them again. That’s what Oxana would say, but it would be lies, most of it, and even Oxana knew it.

  Why else would Oxana go to so much trouble to get to the school without being seen? Olga knew which way she went. Instead of taking the long main street through the village, she snuck out through the orchard and followed the narrow path to the river. From there you could walk among the closely spaced birch trees to the back of the cooperative store without anyone seeing you unless they were really close. If you went through the gap between the wagon maker’s shop and one of the village’s deserted houses, you could reach the school without meeting a living soul.

  But Olga wasn’t having any of it.

  After what happened with Vitja and Pjotr, she left the house only reluctantly, and when she did, it was mostly to collect water or logs or to stop by the Arsenovs. They subscribed to the local newspaper for Kharkiva Oblast and let Mother read it in return for helping them with their washing.

  Oxana thought Olga was scared, but it wasn’t just that. It was an unclear sensation of shame, even though Olga didn’t think she had done anything wrong. It was the thought that she had been lying there in that frozen sewage ditch in the middle of the main street, her cheek pressed against the grubby ice and the sound of the boys’ excited and breathless laughter in her ears. And as for Uncle Stalin—Olga had begun to grimace in her head every time he came up—as for good old Uncle Stalin, Oxana could take him and stick him up the ass of a cow, if she could find one that was big enough.

  She didn’t want to go to school, where Jana would be staring at her and Sergej would stick his oily face close to hers to whisper ugly words. And she didn’t want to walk beside Oxana. Ever again.

  OXANA FINALLY LEFT. Olga closed the door behind her and was alone.

  That was okay. Better than going to school, at least, but she had to keep herself constantly occupied in order not to think too much. Today she was going to put their blankets out on the veranda. It was still cold, and with a bit of luck, the frost would kill some of the lice.

  Olga took the birch broom and swept the floor as best she could, but the work quickly made her dizzy and short of breath, and in spite of the heat from the brick oven, she felt the raw cold through her underwear, dress and shawl.

  She lay down on the oven shelf and covered herself with the heavy blankets and goat hides. The warmth from the heated bricks immediately made her doze off and dream uneasy dreams. Father was tied to a pole with his hands behind his back, and next to him stood the widow Svetlova dressed in a zobel fur and with her great, round stomach exposed and vulnerable to the gun barrels that pointed at them both.

  Olga tried to wrest herself free from the dream, but the pictures kept coming in a swiftly flowing stream no matter how hard she squeezed her eyes shut. And then the pole was suddenly gone, and she was back in their own house and Father was outside hammering on the door with huge, heavy fists and screaming that she was to let him in.

  She was still dreaming. It had to be a dream. But the insane hammering continued.

  “Where is she? Where is your devil of a sister?”

  I’m not going to open up, she thought. Why can’t they all just leave us alone? The living and the dead.

  A police car found her. Nina had made it into sitting position but no farther, her back propped against one of the Micra’s front wheels. She wondered if the patrol car would be able to stop in time or would just continue into the Micra.

  Luckily, the police had begun to equip their vehicles with winter tires. The patro
l car came to a controlled stop ten or twelve meters from her. One of the cops got out; the other remained seated behind the wheel.

  “Do you need any help?” asked the one who had gotten out.

  Help. Yes, she did. All kinds of help.

  “What time is it?” she asked instead.

  The police woman squatted next to Nina. “Could you look at me for a moment?” she said. “Can you tell me what happened?”

  “She drove into me,” said Nina. “She must have been parked between the trees. She was waiting for me to come, and then she drove right into me.”

  The policewoman smiled in a calming way, but there was a bit of skepticism in her very young, very pretty face. “I think we need an ambulance for you,” she said.

  Nina decided she had been sitting there long enough. “No,” she said. “I’m okay. Pretty much.”

  She thought she could feel a fracture in her lower left arm, but that wasn’t exactly life threatening. She got to her feet on the first attempt but then had to lean discreetly on the Micra to remain upright until the dizziness wore off.

  The hood was cold, she noticed. Fuck. That meant time had passed, and she had no idea how much. Her usual loss-of-time panic set in, but it was a familiar panic; she could control it. As long as someone told her the time soon.

  “My name is Nina Borg,” she said. “I’m a nurse at the Coal-House Camp. I was on my way home when another car suddenly appeared. I don’t have a concussion; I’m completely oriented in time and place”—well, place at least—“and my own data. All I need right now is a taxi. And maybe a mechanic for the car.”

  The other officer, also a woman but somewhat older, had left the car and approached. “As long as you’re not actually bleeding to death, we’d better set up a few warning reflectors. We prefer to deal with one accident at a time. What about the other driver? Did she just take off?”