Death of a Nightingale

by Lene Kaaberbøl

  But the Witch didn’t know everything. She could not have known that Natasha would lead them to Anna’s house. There must be another explanation.

  Then the next wave of emotion arrived, and this time it was pure, unarticulated panic.

  Katerina. The Witch. Katerina.

  Natasha planted her foot on one of the closet shelves and was now halfway through the narrow window without having thought about how she would get down from the roof. But it turned out to be easy. The snow lay in drifts around the rosebushes beneath her, and she just jumped, hung in the empty space, then hit a snow pillow and thick, bristling rose stems and finally the cold ground. Seconds. She only had seconds to get to them and stop them before they were within reach of the Witch.

  She had turned one knee in the fall but still ran, slipping and limping, through the deep snow. Behind her came the sudden sound of two dry bangs in short succession. Shots. But who had shot whom?

  The dog barked briefly and started to run as if it were expecting a couple of ducks to come drifting down from the sky for it to collect. The flashlight figures hesitated. Then Nina put her burden down in the snow and ran after the dog, toward the farmhouse and the yard, in the direction from which the shots had come.

  How stupid was that?

  Natasha ran in the opposite direction, toward Anna and Katerina.

  Anna, squatting in the snow next to the child, looked up in surprise when Natasha came running. She said something or other, but Natasha wasn’t listening. She pulled the blanket aside, and Katerina’s face appeared, closed and pale like the faces of the dead saints Mother had hanging above the kitchen table.

  But Katerina wasn’t dead. She couldn’t be. Natasha desperately attempted to quiet her own hectic breathing so she could hear Katerina’s, pulling her onto her lap and hugging her tightly.

  “What’s wrong with her?” she asked. “What happened?”

  Yet another shot, followed by a piercing howl from the dog.

  Anna jumped. Instead of turning around, she walked past Natasha on stiff legs and toward the yard, stupid as a pig that wanders into the slaughter stall without noticing the blood on the floor, just because someone jangles the feed bucket. She had lived too long in Bacon Land.

  When she got to the corner of the main house, she stopped. She only stood there for a moment before she took three quick steps backward and turned around, but the light from the lamps in the yard had hit her, and yet another flat slap sounded.

  The pig is dead, thought Natasha, and in a moment it will fall over on the bloody floor. But Anna was still standing. Natasha felt Katerina move, a slight scraping of one knee against her thigh, and she got up quickly with her daughter in her arms and stumbled away from the road, into the deep winter darkness. She sank down into the drifts behind the rose hedge, better hidden by the darkness than by the leafless stalks, but she knew it wasn’t enough. If the Witch had a light, if she looked this way …

  The car. Could she make it to the car? No, it was no good; the keys were in big Jurij’s pocket. Natasha wished that she had listened more closely back when acne-covered Vasyl had tried to impress her by hot-wiring his father’s ancient Lada. But she remembered something about hot-wiring not working on new cars anyway, so perhaps it made no difference.

  She saw Anna back away from the corner of the house and down the road, her hands held out in front of her.

  “Stop,” the Witch commanded. “One more step, and I’ll shoot.”

  The dog howled as if possessed. Long, piercing screams, as only an animal in pain can scream. Nina ran in the direction of the sound. It was where the two first shots had come from too. She fumbled in her pocket for her cell phone and only a second later remembered yet again that she had given it to Søren that morning.

  She found the dog first. It had been shot in the back and was attempting to crawl through the snow to the house, leaving a wide and scarlet track behind it. She forced herself not to meet its gaze.

  Behind the stable a big black car was parked, half hidden by the old midden wall. There was an unreasonable amount of blood in the snow, and it wasn’t all the dog’s. A man lay on the ground with his face downward, unconscious but alive to judge by his labored breathing, and a few meters from him another man sat on the ground, half bent over a third man, who was Søren. Had they shot each other? She couldn’t see a gun.

  She had recognized Søren immediately even though she couldn’t see his face, just his back and neck. She fell to her knees next to him.

  “Help,” said the man who was still sitting. It was not a plea for himself but more of a calm instruction. “Shot. Chest. Get help. Him.”

  The telegram style was clearly caused by linguistic difficulties, not panic, though she could see that he himself was bleeding pretty heavily from a wound in the thigh.

  I can’t see anything, she thought. How can I help him when I can’t see anything?

  Søren was breathing, but not well. There was a bubbling sound.

  “Let me,” she said. In Danish. Of course it didn’t help. “I’m a nurse,” she attempted in English. “Let me take a look.”

  She was able to turn him over partially so she could see his face. His eyes reacted when he saw her, but he was gasping too hard for air to be able to speak. Blue lips. Hypoxia. She suddenly realized that what looked like red and white snowflakes on his chest was down—from where the shot had torn a hole in his jacket. Entry wound and no exit wound. His back had not been bloody. Pneumothorax. The lung had been punctured and was in the process of collapsing. With every breath he took, he was dragging air through the hole, air that was caught between the lung membrane, compressing the lung further.

  A syringe, she thought, where the hell am I going to find a syringe? The only place there was even the tiniest chance of finding something she could use was in the house.

  “I’ll be right back,” she said to Søren’s conscious gaze. She ran, trying to calculate how many minutes he had left.

  The gun was so large that the Witch had to use both her ancient hands to hold it. Natasha shrank down with Katerina in her arms, much too close, and with only the snow, the darkness and the rose hedge for cover. She was terrified that the Witch would hear Katerina’s breathing, but it seemed as if the old woman only had eyes for Anna. The light from the gable illuminated Anna’s hair and face and made the red ski suit glow like a torch in the middle of the whirling whiteness of the blizzard. Natasha couldn’t see the Witch’s face. Only the fur and the boots with the too-high heels that sank into the packed snow with every step the old woman took, making deep, precise holes, like punctures.

  An odd silence had fallen. It was as if even the snowflakes stopped in midair.

  “Are you a ghost?” asked the old woman.

  “No,” said Anna. She took half a step toward the old woman and held her arms out like you do when you want to embrace someone. She wasn’t planning to embrace the Witch, was she?

  “Stand still.”

  Anna stopped. She understands Ukrainian, thought Natasha. She doesn’t usually. But when Anna began to speak again, it was in Ukrainian.

  “They thought I would die,” she said. “But I survived. And that wasn’t so good, because by then the trial was already over, and the murderers condemned.”

  “I think you are a ghost,” said the Witch. “How otherwise could I have stood by your grave?”

  “It wasn’t my fault. Semienova … They couldn’t admit that a mistake had been made. Semienova had me placed with a family in Galicia, with the brother of an aunt of hers. Pötsch, they were called. They were ethnic Germans. And later … later it was easier to pretend that I was German too, otherwise I would have been sent back to Stalin.”

  “And so what? You were a hero, right? The people’s nightingale?” The Witch spat out the last two words as if they hurt her mouth.

  Anna stood still. Her face had transformed as her language had changed. There was an expression now that Natasha had never seen on a Dane. The unmoving mouth, t
he eyes that slid to the side … No, you couldn’t break it into parts. It was just Ukrainian. If Anna had ever looked at Natasha with that expression, Natasha would have known right away that she wasn’t born in Bacon Land.

  “A dead nightingale,” she said. “A dead hero. Who was still alive. How long do you think it would have been before they corrected that mistake? They had shot Grachev and Grandfather and Grandmother Trofimenko and … all of them. For my murder. If you have a murder trial, you also need a corpse.”

  “Kolja was dead. But maybe he doesn’t count? He didn’t get a statue, you know.”

  “Olga …”

  The Witch laughed. A laughter without much sound, just a series of short hisses. “Olga? It has certainly been a long time. Several names ago. They are used up so quickly, it seems to me.”

  She began to cock the gun with shaking but competent hands.

  “Are you going to shoot me?” asked Anna.

  “Why not?”

  “Haven’t we lost enough? Olga, we are the only ones, the only ones who are left.”

  “So perhaps that was why you thought you had the right to bleed me for money? You milked me like one milks a cow.”

  “That wasn’t me. It was Pavel. I shouldn’t have told him as much as I did.”

  “No, you probably shouldn’t have. Sister.”

  The Witch completed her gesture. Natasha could hear the small click as yet another projectile shot forward in the gun’s chamber. Katerina stirred in her arms and made a tiny, sleepy sound.

  Natasha knew that she wouldn’t have more than this one chance. She was barely able to make herself let go of Katerina. But she did it. She placed her little girl softly in the snow and silently promised that she would return very soon. As soon as she was done.

  She actually didn’t much care right now if the Witch shot Anna. Because now she knew that it was Anna who had brought the Witch into their lives. All that time when she thought it was just Pavel’s stupidity, Pavel’s greed … It was Anna’s too. That much she had understood. Because she had also watched Anna become wealthier. Had seen how there was money for a new kitchen, for the newly thatched roof, not just on the main house but also in the wing where Kirsten was going to live. She crept closer to the spot where Anna had dropped her flashlight.

  “Olga, don’t do it!” said Anna. It was clear she hadn’t spoken Ukrainian for a long, long time. She sounded like someone in an old film.

  “It’s not a crime to shoot someone who is already dead,” said the Witch. And at that moment, Natasha struck and felt the blow hit home, in spite of the fur hat, all the way to the frail, old eggshell skull.

  The Witch fell forward, almost disappearing into the snowdrift by the gable. Natasha kneeled beside her and raised the flashlight again just to make sure.

  This time no Jurij came to stop her.

  Anna stood in the middle of the yard with a peculiar look on her face. At her feet crouched the dog, which had finally stopped howling. Nina didn’t know if it was because it was feeling better or worse, but it wasn’t dead yet.

  “A syringe,” she said to Anna. “Do you have one?”

  Anna stared at her as if she had fallen from another planet. “Why would I have that?” she asked.

  “Because I need one!”

  “I don’t.”

  “Something else. Some kind of tube. A pen.”

  Anna Olesen just shook her head, and Nina gave up on getting anything useful out of her. She ran up the stairs and into the house. The boiler room. A toolbox? Not a lot of slender tubes in there. The kitchen … She needed a knife in any case. Maybe there was a pen too.

  She opened cabinets and tore out drawers and barely registered that there was already a mess that hadn’t been there when they had gone out to look for Rina. Knives. Yes. Sharp enough to pierce the wall of the chest, though that in itself would not create a passage. She chose a slender, very sharp fillet knife with a patterned hilt. The blade was twelve to thirteen centimeters long—that had to be enough. The next drawer was full of spice glasses and completely useless. The next drawer … baking paper, tinfoil, plastic containers … Wasn’t there a damned pen anywhere?

  She looked around wildly. The seconds were passing. Her well-trained sense of time could feel them like an extra pulse, tick, tick, tick.

  On the refrigerator hung a pad with a magnet and a pen on a string. Nina tore it down and took it apart with quick, sure hands. Out with the tip and the cartridge—it was only the hollow plastic part that she needed. She had her tube and her knife.

  HE WAS STILL breathing—much, much too fast, and his gaze was hazier than it had been.

  “Hurry,” said the man who had been shot in the thigh. As if that wasn’t what Nina was already doing.

  She tore open the jacket and the shirt beneath it, drew a mental line from the nipple to the armpit and jabbed the knife in between the fourth and the fifth rib. It required more strength than she had anticipated. The muscles lay like tough, flat cables across the chest, and she needed to get past them and to the lung membrane—six, maybe seven centimeters. Thank God it was on the right so she didn’t need to worry about the heart.

  The thigh-shot man exclaimed, most likely something to the tune of, “What the hell are you doing?” She ignored him. When she pulled out the knife, there was a groaning sound of air being let loose, but only momentarily. She forced the sharp end of the pen through the cut she had made and sent a prayer to gods she didn’t believe in. Let it work.

  If her hopelessly improvised procedure worked, the air that was now trapped between the lung membranes would be released. The lung would have room to expand again, and Søren would be able to breathe.

  She hadn’t looked at his face at all while she did it. She had sensed his reaction to the pain, but only distantly. It had been necessary to think of his body as something mechanical, a question of tissue, anatomy and function. That perspective collapsed more quickly than his lung had when she met his gaze. It was darker than usual but already less hazy. He still needed proper drainage, oxygen and so on, and somewhere inside him was a projectile that would need to be removed. Lying on the cold ground wasn’t helping him either, but right now it was too risky to move him. She had bought time; that was what was most important. Enough time, she thought.

  She felt a jab in her left lower arm, and only then did she realize that she had been using it without even feeling the fracture.

  She turned to the guy with the thigh wound, but he quickly held up a hand in front of himself. “Okay,” he said. “I’m okay.” He obviously had no wish for a taste of the Borg version of first aid.

  The snow crunched. When Nina turned, she saw Natasha standing by the black BMW. Her face was so damaged that Nina only recognized her because she had Rina in her arms.

  Rina. The pills. Rina.

  She started to get up.

  “Don’t try,” said Natasha. “Don’t try to stop me.” She opened the back door and carefully set Rina down on the seat.

  “Natasha, Rina needs to go to the hospital.” Nina got up, took the first step. “She has had an overdose of diazepam. Valium. She needs to be under observation; you can’t …”

  Natasha turned around and hit her straight across the mouth, a blow that hammered Nina’s lips against her teeth and made her neck snap back with a whiplash jerk.

  “You said, ‘I’ll take care.’ You said, ‘like my own child.’ But you don’t even know her right name. KA-TE-RI-NA. And you didn’t take care.”

  “She needs treatment,” Nina said. She felt the blood run down her chin on the outside and pool behind her teeth on the inside of her mouth. “Natasha, you’re risking her life. She needs to be in a hospital.”

  Natasha shook her head stubbornly. She shoved Nina aside and went over to the third man, the one who lay on his stomach in the snow and hadn’t moved at any point, even though she could hear him breathing fairly normally. Natasha rolled him onto his back. Then she kicked him in the face hard. She stuck her hands into
the pockets of his overcoat and fished out a set of car keys and a wallet. A pair of black cable strips followed, but those she threw aside in the snow. She sent Nina a furious black look.

  “All the time, you think, poor little Natasha, she can do nothing, she is so stupid. Poor, stupid Natasha. Beautiful and stupid, and people do what they like with her. But I’m not stupid. Katerina is my child. I’ll take care now. You lose your children, but you can’t take mine.”

  She got behind the wheel of the big BMW and drove away.

  NINA SANK TO the ground next to Søren. The blood from her split lip dripped into the snow, dot, dot, dot, like the first third of a Morse code emergency signal. She observed it without emotion.

  So much for Nina Borg, World Savior, she said to herself. That was that. Soon there’d be nothing left but the T-shirt. If there was one thing Natasha had managed to knock into her head with that blow, it was that she hadn’t saved anyone from anything, and that there was, in fact, no one right now who wished to be saved by her. Rina was gone. Katerina, she corrected herself. You are a shitty mother even to children who don’t belong to you. And flying conditions are still lousy. No help from above would be forthcoming.

  She felt a hand on her ankle. It was Søren.

  “Are you … okay?” he asked. The pause was the result of not being able to finish a whole sentence in one breath.

  She looked down at him. His color was better, the lips a little less blue. He still had a hole in his lung. It was at once laughable and unbelievably touching that he was asking if she was okay.

  She placed her hand on top of his. A little too cold, she noted, still in mild shock.

  “I’m a hell of a lot healthier than you are,” she said.