by Sofi Oksanen
Klooga, Estonian SSR, Soviet Union
THE CAMP WAS DESERTED, even of Germans.
We heaved ourselves along the rooftop and back into the attic. In it were creatures reduced to skeletons, horrified looks glued to their faces. I tried to pull one of them to his feet but he pushed away from me screaming, couldn’t understand what I was saying, and I couldn’t understand the language he was speaking. I repeated that the Germans were gone. I worked out the German words—keine Deutsche, keine Deutsche, kein mehr—not really knowing German, not wanting that language coming out of my mouth, but still trying to make it clear that the Jerries had left. The words didn’t get through. His screams were filled with animal terror. He was empty of humanity, the remains of a human. There was something menacing about all of those men. I was afraid to turn my back on them. Alfons started slowly backing toward the door. I followed his example and we got to the stairway and bolted outside.
The camp gates were open. There was no one to be seen. We took off at a run. I was weak, my running more like dragging. I tensed my muscles to clear my thoughts. Hunger hadn’t yet started to eat my brain. The Germans might still come back. No one from the attic had followed us.
When we got through the gate, we headed for the woods. I put my hand over my mouth, covered my nostrils with my fingers. Those who had tried to escape had been shot in the back. Their corpses lay strewn among the trees. Alfons and I couldn’t look at each other, or to the side, or to where the heat was coming from. Charred trunks, pale, recently felled trees, and what was between them. The arms poking up, the legs, the shoed and shoeless soles of feet. I focused my eyes far ahead. I would look for the first farm I could find, change my clothes, ask for food. Surely someone would help us. We would say that the Germans had left. I kept going forward. I would never think about what I’d left behind. This was the moment we had waited for, prepared for. The Germans were gone and the Russians still hadn’t arrived to take over. We wouldn’t let them make it this far.
PART SIX
In the imperialist West the cruel voice of the nationalist retributionists is yammering ever louder, the cesspools they’ve created in New York, Toronto, London, Stockholm, and Gothenburg are seething like ants’ nests. We must remember that the emigrant “committees” or “councils” that have sprung up in these cesspools are always nests of destruction, filled with spies. The traitor’s palette of the nationalists is never-ending! The enemy never sleeps, never forgets! It continues its work of destruction and that’s why the new generation must be vigilant. Since the bankruptcy of Hitlerist Germany a new generation has arisen that has only heard of those strange days in textbooks and the talk of those who lived through that time. Soon there will be no eyewitnesses left, no more books witnessing that sadism. The next generation must nevertheless remember that this so-called free world is where nationalist Fascist murderers walk free, and New York echoes with their trumpets!
—Edgar Parts, At the Heart of the Hitlerist Occupation, Eesti Raamat Publishing, 1966
Tallinn, Estonian SSR, Soviet Union
THE MOSCOW SALAD WAS EATEN, the small pot of coffee drunk. Comrade Parts would order another directly, although it wouldn’t help his frustration. He had been sitting in Café Moskva for hours and there was still no sign of the Target. The whelp was late, and Parts didn’t know when he’d be able to go home. Maybe not until the café closed its doors. Parts blinked, trying to stay awake. His new assignment was a respectable one, but it had been a shock at first.
Parts had stared at the photo of the Target on the desk at the safe house—sideburns, pimples, the self-satisfied look of youth, a face that life had hardly yet touched. He couldn’t understand what was happening. He still didn’t understand. A job had been allotted to him in an operation whose purpose was, from what he could tell, to survey the anti-Soviet activities of students. His new priority was to keep an eye on a twenty-one-year-old pup who was part of this group—who he met, where, and when. Parts had permission to continue his writing, but only so long as it didn’t interfere with his new duties.
When he’d stepped out into the street after being given the assignment, the cobblestones under his feet had felt slippery in spite of the dry weather, and he had the vague nausea that portended a migraine. His relationship with Porkov had become one of trust, the manuscript was coming along well, and no sign of dissatisfaction had marred their relationship. The three-year deadline for his book hadn’t even run out. But he wasn’t going to answer to Porkov anymore—he’d been given a new supervisor. His last meeting with Porkov had been completely normal. If someone had finally noticed the stolen notebook, why hadn’t they come looking for it? Had he made some other mistake? Was the Café Moskva assignment meant as a reprimand? Or had Porkov himself been transferred due to some infraction? Parts’s new assignment made no sense. The Office had its own men for surveillance, and he wasn’t an expert at this, not with the brief training he had received. He was known as a handwriting specialist. Why then did the Office think this job was appropriate for him?
Next to the information on the Target was a list of materials to be returned to the Office, including Porkov’s most recent version of the “Prohibited Information in Print Publications, Radio, and Television.” Parts wondered if they would let him have the revised list when it came out, whether they would consider it unnecessary for him now. Although he’d read the directive and knew it inside and out, he hadn’t liked the demeaning tone of the order to return it. It was a reminder of who was in charge. At least he was allowed to keep the typewriter at home.
His colleague in the corner of the dining room ordered some tea. Parts averted his eyes—he was ashamed for the man. There was a popular joke going around town: You can tell a spy by the way he closes one eye when he drinks his coffee—because Russians are used to drinking tea from a glass with a spoon sticking out. The joke had made Parts laugh, but not anymore. He could tell his colleague was an Office man from a mile away. He just sat and stared, the table empty in front of him. Maybe it was some new method the Office was using, a way to make people conscious of the all-seeing gaze of the authorities. Parts didn’t believe in such methods. He believed in naturalness and invisibility, which was why he had first tried to strike up a flirtation with some silly secretary or clerk at the factory. Women always offered a believable excuse for hanging out in cafés. Flirting with women was time-consuming and expensive, however, and Parts had ended up choosing a simpler alternative—he would pose as a teacher grading papers, or perhaps as a writer. Having papers in front of him would also make it possible to take notes on the events of the evening, which would make it easier to provide cleanly written reports. He’d resolutely shaken off the humiliation of the new assignment the moment he gave his coat to the hat-check girl, and as he went up the stairs to the dining room he’d found an erect bearing to accompany the swinging of his briefcase. People came to a café for enjoyment, so he had to look like he was enjoying himself.
THE SITUATION WAS CAST in a more interesting light by the fact that along with the new post he had also finally been officially assigned to his publisher, Eesti Raamat, and an editor as well. Comrade Porkov had never taken care of the matter in spite of his promises, even though he was to get half the advance. Parts’s new supervisor hadn’t shown the slightest interest in the money, and with it Parts had finally been able to give up his post at the Norma factory guard booth. But the time freed up from his day job was spent tailing half-grown students instead of writing.
His visit to the publisher had been peculiar—the publishing director had peeped at him nervously, and kept glancing at the door. You could almost hear the padding steps of the Glavlit censors in the hallway. Parts himself had already spotted one—he recognized him by his vacant, nonchalant expression. The publisher had sat behind his desk restlessly tugging at his collar. Fear for his job was chomping at the skin of his neck. The open surveillance the man had to endure offered enough amusement to slightly ease Parts’s depression about his
new assignment. No one had asked him anything about the manuscript, an envelope full of bills was silently shoved at him, and in the hallway he’d been stared at as if he were a man in the good graces of people in important places. The sweet touch of power had brushed his cheeks. He’d almost felt the admiring sigh of the Glavlit man on his skin. Maybe there was no reason to feel caught short, maybe he’d misunderstood the whole situation, maybe the Office simply considered him so multitalented that they were giving him an opportunity to shine in yet another area. In any case, getting out of the factory was certainly a plus, as was his publishing contract.
OVER THE COURSE of the evening, however, Parts’s erect bearing started to wilt. There was no sign of the Target; nothing seemed to be happening. He laid his manuscript between the pot of coffee and the plate of chocolate truffles and started drawing sentence diagrams. At the Target’s regular table a couple of girls were discussing whether their travel permit to Saaremaa would be approved before their father, who lived there, celebrated his birthday. A flock of tech students who were friends of the girls flooded in from the stairway. The whole table ordered fifty grams of cognac and some coffee. Parts’s colleague watched the girls with hard eyes. But their faces were unknown to Parts—he hadn’t seen them in the photos he’d been shown at the safe house. The group made a restless movement. There was expectation in the air, a spirit of uneasiness; no one seemed absorbed in the conversation. One of the students was fiddling with her student ID card, another kept straightening her student cap and touching the brim. But the cognac interested all of them, as did the Valeri cookies. Then Parts noticed that one of the tech girls was wearing long pants. He wrinkled his nose and flipped through his papers, twirling his pencil, but always keeping his eye on the group, his colleague’s motionlessness, and the general goings-on in the dining room. Two men who’d settled in at the next table poured full glasses of Lõunamaine from a carafe and the drink increased the younger man’s coquetry; he nibbled on a caraway cracker, offered to share it with the older man, accomplished this by means of a complicated operation that involved first halving the cracker and then transporting it to his own mouth and from his mouth to the waiting lips of his companion. The older man lit a cigarette, the matchstick flaring up, the flame shining in his eyes. Parts could see the movements of their feet by the slight fluttering of the tablecloth. From the drift of the younger man’s legs toward the older man’s, Parts could guess how both men’s nostrils quivered suddenly, how they looked at each other, their gazes already wrapped in bedsheets. Parts squinted. All this activity had so captured his attention that he hadn’t noticed the Target coming into the dining room. Did he come in alone? How long had he been standing in the middle of Café Moskva? Parts stole a glance at the group at the table, looking for new faces, trying to notice if anyone was missing. His colleague in the corner was looking straight at him, a smile trembling at the corners of his mouth, mockery twinkling in his eyes. Parts turned his glance back to the Target’s table, then to the dining room again. This wasn’t possible. The Target had disappeared.
Tallinn, Estonian SSR, Soviet Union
REIN’S VOICE CARRIED from the kitchen to the ears of Evelin, who was waiting in the living room. She tried to listen, but the noise of the radio and the record player they’d turned on when they came in swallowed up what he was saying. So this was it, the house where Rein went, without telling her why, or who he was meeting. This was the house where Rein had never brought her before. Evelin was excited and sat stiffly in her chair, although she was alone and no one was watching what she did, monitoring whether she was sitting like a lady. There was a crystal bowl of cat’s tongue cookies on the coffee table and a grandfather clock ticked, chiming every fifteen minutes, the pendulum swinging; the blinds were rippling in a draft of air. The cream had curdled in her coffee and she didn’t know where to pour the coffee out. Maybe Rein just wanted to protect her and that’s why he hadn’t told her about all of this. Or maybe he just wanted to have a secret, something a little more important, or maybe he didn’t trust her enough yet. Or maybe he’d brought her here because he wanted to reassure her, so she wouldn’t feel lonely. The rest of Evelin’s classmates had left for Tartu when the banking student group was moved there. Evelin hadn’t wanted to go, she wanted to stay with Rein. The decision to apply for a transfer had been an impulsive one. She wasn’t going to become a bank manager, like she’d thought—she was going to be an engineer. The Soviet Union needed engineers, they were the strong legs that the whole society stood on. If Evelin had known that she would be sitting around here doing nothing, she could have brought along her lecture notes or some other equally sleep-inducing reading, like Saarepera’s “Description of Annual and Quarterly Industrial Typology and Production Calculation Methodology.” Now all she could do was suck on currants and munch on cookies.
In her first year of study Evelin had dropped in at Café Moskva a few times and immediately noticed Rein and the group that gathered around him. How could she not notice him? Or the girls in his group? She never would have believed that Rein could be interested in her, a country girl with two sweaters, one skirt, and one dress, ignorant of all the things that Rein knew all about, surrounded by girls who changed their dresses, shirts, and pants every day, always wearing something different. Pants! Evelin’s mother had promised that she could get a new dress from the sale of the next calf, but that wouldn’t be for some time. When she was younger, she couldn’t have imagined how difficult student life could be when you only had one dress hanging in your closet. Everything had been easy in high school, you just starched your collar and took good care of your one dress, and you were fine. No one else here seemed to miss their old school uniform.
Evelin was thirsty, but she didn’t dare to leave the living room. The coffee that had been waiting for her on the table was already cold when they arrived. The table setting showed a woman’s hand, though there was no one in the house but the man in spectacles who had opened the door. Maybe Rein only came when the man was here alone. You could see the owner’s good taste in the stylish furnishings. The bookshelf was full of only books from the black market or straight from the press. Evelin admired the cabinets that reached all the way to the ceiling and dreamed of having a setup like that in her own home, the home she and Rein would share. There would be cognac in the liquor cabinet, the linens would be organized on shelves, and she would polish the cabinet doors every day—there wouldn’t be a single smudge on them, and their surfaces would shine and make the room look bigger. She and Rein would drink Aroom every morning after she had put away the sofa bed, pounded the cushions in place, and folded the blankets to hide away during the daytime, and there would be enough coffee for guests, coffee with nothing else mixed in. They would have cactuses on the windowsill. Rein would turn on the Magnetofon and put on some electric guitar music his friends had recorded, and as the tape started to play he would pull her next to him on the divan. She would finally have sheets of her own.
Before Rein had agreed to take her to this secret house, Evelin had hinted that she suspected he had another girl. The accusation had flown out of her mouth easily, without her thinking about it. All those well-dressed girls at Café Moskva troubled her. She was particularly uneasy about the white-legged art student who slept on the bunk above her in the room they shared with two other girls. Every time Evelin sneaked Rein into her room, the top-bunk girl would already be in bed, and she would stick her leg, chest, or thigh out from under the covers, her hair flowing over the edge of the bed. Rein’s eyes would fasten on the girl’s leg or breast poking out, shining in the dark like a white moon, and the girl would move her arm in her sleep, plumping up the breast a bit, just waiting for his open mouth, for a drop of drool. That’s why Evelin didn’t want to bring Rein to her dorm, because it was full of girls running around in their slips, giggling in the kitchen in their nightgowns, and because the top-bunk girl always went to bed early when Rein was coming over and waited for him to tiptoe into the room. Eveli
n had only invited him there after he’d pestered her for a long time. She had fried him some potatoes in the kitchen, a large portion, using a good dollop of the fat she’d saved in a cup, and Rein made the dorm monitor laugh and forget to enforce the ten o’clock rule. Evelin didn’t even want to go to his dorm. Last year the boys had decorated the walls with bedbugs on pins. It would be even more uncomfortable there. And anyway, Rein never asked her.