Death of a Nightingale

by Lene Kaaberbøl

  Here the picture of Uncle Stalin was allowed to hang on a shit-colored wall, and that was wrong, just like everything else. The angry mumbling from the listeners, the stiff GPU people and the author and the pioneers, who had pushed their way into one of the front rows of spectators and stared at Olga warmly and eagerly.

  The truth.

  It shouldn’t be so hard, but Olga’s stomach hurt, and she felt as if she was going to throw up when Uncle Grachev was led into the room, accompanied by a wave of excited talk and hushed comments.

  He was wearing a clean shirt, and his dark beard was washed and trimmed, but he looked older than she remembered him, and it was as if he was squinting against a light that wasn’t there. Grachev hid his hands in his shirtsleeves, which hung loose and flapping on his thin arms. He admitted that he had killed Oxana. And he admitted that he was a kulak. And he admitted that he had hated the girl deep in his cowardly kulak soul because she was clean, and because she sang so beautifully. He said that he had murdered Oxana, but that he had done it alone. His sons were innocent and so were his parents.

  “You’ve always been full of lies, Grachev!” a man behind Olga shouted spitefully, and several others availed themselves of the opportunity to spit angrily on the floor. Olga recognized the first one as Uncle Grachev’s neighbor and card-playing friend. Olga had often seen them sitting together by the samovar, smoking and drinking tea and vodka. The neighbor also used to borrow her uncle’s cart when he had to bring in the hay or needed to go to Sorokivka.

  The truth.

  Grandmother and Grandfather Trofimenko were dragged in and placed together before the judge. Grandfather had trouble staying upright and had to lean on the GPU officer who had led them in. Grandmother, who was tiny, smaller than Olga and stooped, stood without help but couldn’t seem to understand what the judge was asking her. She just cried.

  Kulaks, like their sons. People spat again, and Olga stole a look over at Comrade Semienova, who stood against the wall almost next to the judge’s desk. She looked at once strict and sorrowful, exactly as she did in school when someone answered an important question incorrectly or maybe even said something stupid about Uncle Stalin. When that happened, she frowned exactly as she was doing now and tilted her head as if she was trying to figure out how she could best show them all the beautiful pictures of the future that were in her head. She had never looked at Oxana in that way, but sometimes at Jana and Olga when they giggled in class, and it was such a sad expression that Olga always wanted to apologize because she had upset Semienova.

  Today she wanted to show Semienova that she had understood everything. That she knew what was needed to fix everything that was wrong in the world. Both Grandmother and Grandfather Trofimenko were beyond redemption, that much she could see already, but she could still make Semienova proud.

  “Uncle Grachev is a kulak,” said Olga. Her eyes met Semienova’s, and Semienova smiled encouragingly at her. “The day Oxana and Kolja were murdered, my cousin Fyodor and he came to look for Oxana. She was to die because she was a communist.”

  “And what did you do?”

  Olga sat so close to the judge that she could smell the strange, spicy scent of his grey coat, but she didn’t dare look up at him. He seemed so stern, and he had large, springy grey hairs that sprouted like brushes from his ears and even from his nostrils.

  “I cried,” said Olga. “I begged for her life, but they wouldn’t listen to me. They wanted to kill the people’s nightingale, they said.”

  Someone patted her on the shoulder when she sat down on the bench next to Mother. She pulled herself together to smile faintly, but she couldn’t really feel anything anymore. She didn’t know if she was a hero or a sinner, and she caught herself envying Oxana her fate.

  Oxana was a hero. Of that there was no doubt.

  The newspaper had written about her, and Semienova asked the party leadership in Moscow for money to erect a statue of Oxana in pioneer uniform in the square in Sorokivka. The people’s nightingale.

  Olga clenched her teeth and stared down at her hands, which lay like dead birds in her lap.

  The truth had left a sharp, metallic taste on her tongue. Nothing else.

  The bus stop sign cleared the snowdrift by only about a meter and a half, and the wind still whipped more snow across the open fields. They had called and shouted all the way down here, without result. Nina searched her pocket for her cell phone but then remembered that she had given it to Søren. Her left arm ached steadily, a deep but not especially insistent note of pain, like a soft bass line somewhere beneath the main theme: the fear of what had happened to Rina.

  “Do you have a cell phone I can borrow?” she asked. “This isn’t going to work; we need dogs.”

  Anna shook her head. Here was a woman who understood how to dress for the weather, thought Nina. A bright red ski suit covered her from head to toe and made her look like an overgrown kindergarten child on an excursion.

  “I have one somewhere, but I rarely use it. I don’t even think it’s charged. We’d better go back to the house. Then you can call from there.”

  Why aren’t they already here? thought Nina. Chains of men with Alsatians, lights, search teams? Sending one policeman to look around couldn’t exactly be called a search.

  And she felt almost certain that this was the place they needed to search for Rina. There were probably just two places in Denmark that could have activated Rina’s homing pigeon instinct. One was the Coal-House Camp, the other was here. And it wasn’t the Coal-House Camp that Rina had tried to call.

  They turned around and walked back toward the house. Anna moved at a steady clip, and in spite of legs that were somewhat longer and younger, Nina had to quicken her pace to keep up. At first it was nice to have the wind hit her other cheek for a change, but it wasn’t long before that cheek was just as numb as the one that had been frozen on the way out. When they were almost all the way back to the farm, a large, brindled dog came running toward them.

  “There you are!” said Anna sharply.

  The dog didn’t pay any attention to the cool greeting. It jumped around, shaking its head so its ears flopped, and wagging its entire rear. When Anna didn’t pay it much attention, it thrust its pinkish-brown nose into Nina’s hand, so that her glove was soon covered by a fine glaze of dog drool.

  That was when she discovered that it had something in its mouth. At first she thought it was a mouse, and in a way it was—a stuffed toy mouse with oversized ears, eyes and feet.

  It was the Diddl mouse that had been attached to the zipper on Rina’s backpack.

  “MY HUSBAND TRAINED her,” said Anna. “She never really bothered to listen to me.”

  “We have to try,” Nina insisted. “What is her name?”

  “Maxi.”

  Maxi had exchanged the Diddl mouse for a dog biscuit, but Anna still didn’t show any sign of encouraging the dog to search, and Nina’s experience with that kind of thing was limited to having seen cadaver dogs work. She attached the leash to its collar and then held the drool-covered toy mouse in front of the dog’s nose.

  “Search,” she said as authoritatively as she could. “Maxi, search!”

  The dog looked up at her, and she thought it looked as if it was grinning foolishly.

  Something occurred to her then. “We should be able to see where it came from. It must have found the toy somewhere.”

  “The snow is already covering the tracks,” said Anna.

  “Yes, we have to hurry.” She remembered that she was, in fact, dealing with an elderly woman. “You don’t need to come,” she said. “If I can just borrow Maxi.”

  “You don’t know your way around here,” said Anna. “We can’t have you getting lost too.”

  THEY HAD WALKED perhaps four to five hundred meters in the deep snow—about as exhausting as wading in seawater at mid-thigh height—when Maxi finally seemed to understand what the exercise was all about and set off with a tug that almost dislocated Nina’s one funct
ioning arm.

  “She’s got a scent!”

  “Yes,” said Anna. “Let her get on with it. Hold the leash tightly, but go with her as quickly as you can. Run if you can.”

  The flashlight’s cone of light danced across the snow. Shrubbery and saplings were bent low under the heavy snow, and once in a while Nina’s foot caught on a branch or a stone she couldn’t see. A fence blocked the way on the left—that must be the edge of the golf course. This was neither woodlands nor a real field, but a scruffy sort of in-between-ness, like the meager plantings the municipality tried to establish on highway embankments and the like. Nina had to halt the dog for a moment while she climbed over a partially fallen barbed-wire fence, then on they went through the drifts. Her jeans were ridiculously unsuitable for this, and the snow worked its way up her pant legs and melted down into her socks and boots.

  Suddenly Maxi gave a high-pitched, sharp bark and threw itself forward with so much power that the leash slid between Nina’s gloved and frozen fingers. She managed to keep her flashlight on the dog long enough to see it disappear into one end of something that looked like a scrapped railroad car.

  She ran as quickly as she could.

  The first thing the light illuminated inside the car was a tea table.

  A cardboard box covered in a flowered tablecloth, four unmatched cups and a teapot without a lid. Napkins had been set out, and three cookies were neatly arranged on each of the napkins. The cups had been filled with a red liquid that didn’t quite look like tea. Juice, maybe. Only one cup appeared to have been drunk from.

  “Rina?”

  Nina listened anxiously. No one answered, but she could hear the familiar sound of Rina’s asthmatic breathing. She moved the flashlight around and saw in dancing glimpses that the freight car’s raw wooden walls were covered by cutouts from magazines, photographs, plastic flowers, pale green glow-in-the-dark stars and planets of the same kind that Ida had once been briefly infatuated with, posters of large-eyed animals and long-legged pop starlets, but most of all photographs and ads and newspaper cutouts with one thing in common: they all showed fathers with their children, fathers who pushed strollers, father who held the reins of ponies in amusement parks, fathers who pushed swings, played, built, swam or just smiled and laughed with happy daughters. A secret den, thought Nina. A Father Temple.

  “Rina!”

  She was lying curled up under a pile of old blankets and towels in the corner farthest from the heavy sliding door she probably had not had the strength to shut completely. Her eyes were closed, her lips pale and wax-like, and beneath her eyebrows was the reddish-brown pinpoint bruising her asthma attack had given her, dark freckles against the almost blue-white skin.

  Maxi barked once more and then began to eat the cookies.

  Nina pulled her gloves off and placed her fingers against Rina’s neck. The difference between her own cold fingers and Rina’s skin didn’t feel as significant as she had feared it might.

  “Rina! Rina, wake up. Look at me.”

  She pinched Rina’s earlobe. No reaction whatsoever.

  “Oh, the poor little thing.” Anna had appeared in the door. “What’s wrong with her? Is she very weak?”

  “She is unconscious,” Nina said but couldn’t see why.

  “It must be the cold.”

  “Possibly.” There was no doubt that Rina was colder than was good for her, but there was no stiffness in the muscles, no sign of the confusion that sometimes made hypothermia victims act paradoxically by, for example, beginning to take off their clothes.

  Then there was a sudden exclamation from Anna. “Oh, no. What has she done?”

  “What?”

  Anna held up a pill bottle in a red ski mitt that matched her suit. Nina shone her flashlight in her direction but couldn’t see what it was.

  “These are mine,” said Anna. “How did she get a hold of them?”

  “Give them to me!”

  Anna handed them over. Nina grabbed them and finally was able to decipher the writing on the damp, half-dissolved label.

  “Diazepam,” she said. “How many were in the bottle?”

  Anna’s wide eyes glittered in the glow of the flashlight. “It was almost full,” she said.

  “Here?”

  Jurij stopped the car at the turnoff and squinted down the narrow track that ran between the snow-covered fields.

  Perhaps he hesitated because the road was so small. There were only four houses in all: Michael’s, Anna’s farm and then two smaller houses almost all the way down by Isterødvej. Not many cars came this way. In the summer the grass grew so tall in the middle that it brushed against the bottom of the car. In an odd way that was precisely what had made Natasha feel at home. Not in Michael’s house, but on the road that led there. When she lived with Michael, she sometimes did stupid things when he wasn’t home. Walked out of the house and across the pebble-covered front drive, crossed the gravel road on bare feet and continued into the wilderness of knee-high grass and wild oats and clover and elder trees. And then she sat down in the middle of it all, so that she couldn’t see the brick house or the garage or the pebbles, and turned her face to the sun, breathing in the spicy scent of grass and feeling the tiny legs of insects as they crawled across her feet. Strangely enough, it was neither Pavel nor her luxurious life in Kiev that she missed when Michael and she moved in together, but the flowering verges of her childhood. The kind that lined the road when Father and she rode their bikes to Grandfather’s and Grandmother’s farmhouse, the kind she had sworn never to return to. Natasha moved a little in the seat to wake up her hands, which were now bound behind her back again. She let her tongue slide across her broken molars and split gums, which had finally, finally stopped bleeding.

  Tonight there was no green anywhere. The snow blew into the wheel tracks, but the road had been cleared not long ago.

  “It’s not a one-way street. You can drive through to the big road,” she said.

  He didn’t answer. Just turned off the lights and got out of the car. She saw his dark shape pace down to the first turn in the gravel road and disappear. The car quickly became cold now that the motor was turned off. The hole in the side window was already providing plenty of fresh air. Natasha pulled halfheartedly at the narrow plastic strips but quickly gave up. Her right arm and wrist ached, throbbing violently, and the jerky movements only made it worse.

  The woman in the backseat shifted uneasily. Now that there was no longer a fresh supply of warm air circulating through the car, Natasha could sense the Witch’s rotten breath. Baba Yaha who ate children.

  Jurij returned and got behind the wheel, cursing. He maneuvered the car decisively in between the snowbanks, headlights still off. The snow was falling more heavily. The snowflakes were hard and grainy and rattled against the window like claws.

  Jurij wanted to turn in at Michael’s house, but Natasha stopped him.

  “It’s farther on,” she said. “The next house.” She saw with a certain relief that there was no sign of life in there. Michael wasn’t home.

  The she saw the yellow-and-black tape. POLICE, it said. Her chest constricted, and she couldn’t tell if it was from fear or hope. Right now she’d like one of the nice Danish policemen to come save her from the Witch and her son. But there were no policemen at the barrier, which was disappearing into the snow.

  What had happened at Michael’s house? She guessed a part of the answer before she asked, and she had little doubt that Jurij, with his large and capably destructive hands, would be the right person to answer her, if he wanted to.

  “What happened?” she said.

  “We had to have a chat with your fiancé to find out where you and the girl were,” said Jurij. “He didn’t even know that you had run off, but at least he told us where we could find the little girl. We didn’t think you’d run far if we had her.”

  “Did you kill him?”

  Jurij didn’t react. “Where are we going?”

  Michael was dead. S
he recognized that in Jurij’s indifference. For him Michael was just as irrelevant as Natasha, who would also be dead in a very short time and therefore had already been removed from his calculations.

  “Farther along,” she said flatly. “On the other side of the hill.”

  Jurij engaged the gears again and let the car eat its way up the rise and down the other side. Behind them, Michael’s house disappeared from sight. He was gone. Everything he had been, everything he had done to her, was gone now. She felt nothing at the thought.

  Jurij let the car roll into the drive that led to Anna’s farm.

  “I’m going to park it behind the stable over there.” Jurij pointed at one of the farm’s yellow outbuildings. “It’s best if the car can’t be seen from the road, so there’ll be a little bit of walking, Mamo. Are you sure you want to come?”

  Natasha sensed the old woman’s movements in the backseat. A determined nod, she assumed, because Jurij sighed, resigned.

  He parked behind the low half wall that had once encircled the farm’s midden. They got out and walked along the sheltered side of the stable where the snow wasn’t piled as high, Natasha in front, with her hands still bound behind her back. Then Jurij and the old woman, side by side, like an aging couple. The old woman kept up surprisingly well, noted Natasha, in spite of the fact that the snow was ankle deep here and in several places slippery and uneven in the deep tracks left by a tractor.

  The light in the hall was on, but Jurij didn’t waste any time knocking. He pushed at the door, and when it opened—as usual, Anna hadn’t locked up—he shoved Natasha ahead of him onto the pale golden floor tiles. Anna’s rubber boots and clogs were arranged along the wall on clean and dry newspapers. The heat from the large kitchen hit her, and the snow brought in by their shoes melted almost instantly, making small, dirty pools on the floor. Poor Anna would have to get out the mop, thought Natasha, and marveled at how ordinary the thought was.