When the Doves Disappeared: A Novel

by Sofi Oksanen

  He was certain it would be easy to make a contact in the Target’s dormitory, someone who could report about any telegrams or letters the Target received and their contents. The security committee hadn’t yet given Parts permission to enlist contacts, but he could think of irrefutable justifications why they should. The Office never turned down a perfect informant. He would also have to justify why it should be he who performed the verbovka. And of course even if the Office did give the task to someone else, Parts could take a risk, approach the contact himself and make it clear that no one else in the organization was to know about their meeting. A contact wasn’t likely to question Parts’s authority. Aside from the one time he failed in recruiting Miller, these things were usually easy and inexpensive, which never ceased to amaze him. In the best cases a verbovka agenta could succeed with just a few rubles or some trivial favor. Some, however, wanted proper payment—trips, or school assignments for their children, or a better job—which was understandable. In fact, Parts felt a certain respect for those people. Who wouldn’t want to be a guide for Intourist? Who wouldn’t want his children to pass their exams, even if they weren’t loaded with brains? Who wouldn’t want to go to the front of the line for an apartment or a car, a safe post for a son in the military to ensure he came back alive, or books that you couldn’t get even under the counter? But the ones who worked for free, who reported on their neighbors’ or coworkers’ activities for no pay—who did they think they were pleasing? And why? Meanwhile the peace movement in the West seemed to be a constant source of new and productive informants, without any of the problems they had here. The enthusiasm of those informants was dumbfounding. You didn’t even have to pay them. Why? Their ideological-political recruitment came cheap, but Parts still found it difficult to understand the psychology of such people. He relied more on compromising information to motivate his informants. There were also those who got pleasure from prying into the affairs of others, and those motivated by envy. Parts considered such sources unreliable. But recruits who didn’t seize on the opportunity for self-promotion that their services offered, those he couldn’t begin to understand. Were they the kind of people who had already achieved communism in their personal lives and no longer needed money or other rewards? Degenerates. That’s what they were. You weren’t supposed to say that out loud, but communist theory would do well to recognize the realities of the biological degeneration of certain citizens, which had nothing to do with remnant conflicts of a degenerate class society.

  The Target was unfortunately one of those people who probably couldn’t be recruited successfully. He already had the attention he wanted. The skirts couldn’t take their eyes off him. No one talked over him when he opened his mouth. No need to become an informant to feel important. He had a good place at the university, stylish clothes, and was so young that the practicalities of everyday life—waiting lists for apartments, opportunities for future children—didn’t yet worry him. His parents obviously had the money and the means to take care of such matters. Nevertheless, he clearly wanted to play the hero, and people like that always caused problems. The easiest people to recruit were the most colorless members of a group: the girl no one asked to dance, the boy whose name no one remembered, the woman who ordered the same thing everyone else did, the man who was more moth than butterfly. A girl whose built-in fear just needed a little nudge. Parts had noticed many potential informants among the group gathered around the Target.

  Tallinn, Estonian SSR, Soviet Union

  EVELIN STACKED the layers of cookies, quark, and jam on the dish and held back her tears. Rein had been demanding to know why she hadn’t introduced him to her parents, and she couldn’t tell him the real reason. She would have cried if she’d been alone, but the kitchen was full of angry voices. The boys from tech had come in drunk the night before and pried the locks off the food pantry again—the girls’ precious sausage and less precious canned vegetables had disappeared into their greedy mouths. There was nothing left on Evelin’s shelves but a jar of jam. She would have to get by on that and the cookies until her next stipend. But it wasn’t hunger she was worried about. She was worried about Rein. Lora swept past with her skirts flapping and poured a dribble of milk into a glass to wash her face with. These girls didn’t have the same kinds of problems as Evelin did. They had conquered the back rows of movie theaters, sighing with their suitors. Evelin seemed to be the only one who tried to concentrate on what was happening on the screen, although Rein was always pushing his hand up her skirt to the edge of her stockings and she was always pushing it away again. Someday soon he would grow tired of it, leave in the middle of the film, force people to get up, and they would stare at Evelin, friends nudging each other, greedy eyes fastening on Rein, and when he swept through the doors of the theater he would be swept out of Evelin’s life. The girls made a racket, their slippers padding over the linoleum, every flash of a slip under a dress hem reminding her that she ought to let Rein take hers off, she really ought to. Not so long ago everything had been fine, she had been excited about the new place to live, they’d gotten rid of the lice, and Rein was wonderful. But after a few dates, just holding hands wasn’t enough for him anymore. And then came the other demands. He wanted to meet his future in-laws. But she didn’t want Rein to see the pitchfork handles and barn mucking, the landscape of the kolkhoz, the poverty. Her father would insist that Rein drink with him, they would get drunk, anything at all could happen. Rein was from the city, from an educated family. His mother never went out without a hat. Evelin carried the cookie cake to the cupboard to set and retreated to her room to do her mending and think of a solution, but the tears blurred the run in the stocking and when the white-legged girl walked into the room, Evelin jumped up, threw down her darning hook, and ran out. She was just the person Evelin didn’t want to see. There was no place to find a moment’s peace. Evelin stood at the street door and sniffled. Walking out didn’t seem like a good idea anymore. Mustamägi was dim and deserted, and she didn’t want to walk on the busier street with its traffic. The high fence of the neighboring building closed off the darkness beyond; during the daytime they kept prisoners working there out of view.

  In the hallway some boys passed her carrying a Magnetofon and one of the girls shouted after them to record some electric guitar. Carelessly. She shouted it so carelessly—“Bring us some dance music”—lifting her foot so that her bare leg flashed from under the hem of her coatdress. One of the reels fell out of someone’s hand and rolled down the hallway and Alan dashed after it, toward the leg, glancing at Evelin as he passed, Alan whose sweaty hand had once made a wet stain on the back of her Bemberg dress. An electric guitar. Alan had told her he planned to build one for himself. Would Alan have been a better choice than Rein? Would he have made the same demands? They couldn’t all be like Rein. Evelin turned away suddenly and went back to her room, where the white-legged art student was teasing her hair with a comb and some furniture polish.

  Rein must already be at the Moskva. He had said he was going there after their conversation. Or fight. If it was a fight. Maybe it was. If Evelin brought Rein home to her parents, maybe Rein would bring her to the Moskva. No. Maybe she would take off her slip. Or no. Maybe she would bring him home. Then Rein could know that she was serious and wasn’t just toying with him, like he said she was. Or maybe the slip. Evelin thought again about the girl who’d left the dorms crying, how everyone had nodded knowingly. Suspended. One of those girls. No, she wouldn’t take off her slip. Rein had laughed when she said she didn’t believe that everybody did it. That couldn’t be true. The white-legged girl from the top bunk, maybe. An art student, naturally. Girls who studied pedagogy were like that, too. And what if she were a brilliant conversationalist, like the girls at the Moskva? Would Rein focus on other things when he was with her, besides her underwear? Possibly. The coming summer worried her. Rein would be in town, first as an intern, then on the beach, sunbathing with his friends from the café, nibbling on smoked eels. After her p
racticum, and on weekends during her internship, Evelin would be working on the farm. She would be spraying DDT on the cabbages and swinging a pitchfork while Rein was having fun. Rein would have two whole months to find someone else’s underwear to take off.

  If she didn’t come up with a solution to this problem, she would lose Rein, and that was something she couldn’t bear. She knew how it would be. She would go back to the life she’d lived before Rein. Rein had changed everything. When she’d started going out with him, the other girls treated her differently, invited her along with them, asked her to join their lunch table, sat beside her in lecture. No one gave her that look anymore at the dances, that pointed look at her dress that was always the same dress.

  Tallinn, Estonian SSR, Soviet Union

  COMRADE PARTS’S WIFE was rubbing Orto cream into her cracked elbows with slow, circling motions. She was obviously expecting him. Parts put his shopping bags down on the kitchen floor and started getting out the ingredients for a sprat sandwich, taking no notice of her until she squeezed some more cream into her hand and asked why he wasn’t home in the evenings anymore. The question didn’t bode well. He had managed to calm her for several sweet months with his publishing contract, napoleon cake and champagne, plus three bottles of Beliy Aist cognac, and gas delivered to the house. She had interpreted these things as a sign of the Office’s favor. Then her spells had started again. Parts couldn’t avoid answering her if he wanted to write in peace. He explained that he’d been given a new assignment that required him to work in the evenings.

  “Does it have to do with the book?”

  “Not exactly. In a certain sense it does,” Parts said.

  “In a certain sense?”

  She seemed to understand instantly that the new assignment was a demotion, her eyebrows lifting derisively. Parts added that his writing required other kinds of activities in order to get the best results, that after sitting at his desk all day he needed fresh air, needed to walk a bit. Juudit snorted, her upper lip curling. He could see her teeth, the lipstick smeared on them. Her disdain was paralyzing. The radio snapped on, its shout fluttering the curtains and his wife’s hair as she leaned forward and whispered, “Has anyone read your manuscript? Is it possible they don’t appreciate its excellence? That they have perhaps realized that you can’t write a book? You promised me you could ensure that we would have no reason to worry.”

  She straightened her back, stared at the tube of cream, squeezed it, let the cream squirt out of the cracked metal tube and drip onto the table. Parts stared at the shiny stain and wished for a spike in arms production so there would be a shortage of glycerine and there wouldn’t be enough for lotion and his wife would stop torturing him with it. She touched the skin of her elbow, her brow wrinkled. The cream continued to flow from the tube. Parts grabbed the tube and threw it in the slop bucket. His wife’s hand froze, her breath catching. Parts left the kitchen. Behind him he could hear her starting to smash the porcelain. Soon the last of Auntie Anna’s set would be in pieces. His failed patience would cost him his last memory of his aunt. A serious mistake. There had been a kernel of truth in his wife’s words, and he had admitted as much by reacting too strongly, revealed himself in a humiliating way. He couldn’t let that happen again. He should have changed the subject immediately to her neglect of the home and how it was affecting his work, how his ambition had crumbled when he came into the building and caught a whiff of scorched milk, no doubt from the neighbors next door making macaroni with milk for their kids. It was that smell of a living family that had torn painfully at him when he opened his own door to stuffy air and a cold apartment. But he’d quelled his rising anger and fortified his blood with a swallow of Hematogen. Then he went into the kitchen and his self-control failed him. His wife’s words still stung:

  “What if this is a sign? What if the Office doesn’t care about your book anymore? Maybe it means that we’re next. What if this demotion is the first step in a case against you?”

  A PASSING TRAIN RATTLED the windows and Parts waited for the noise to stop before beginning his work. He would have liked to live in some other neighborhood, but he had no choice, and at least the whole house belonged to them. It was far better than the nine square meters normally allotted per person. Living in a single-family dwelling could be a bragging point—it had been arranged with the help of the Office, cognac, and truffles. A friend of his wife’s had written to certify that she was expecting twins, and Parts had remembered an elderly couple, distant relatives already frail, who wanted to move in. No one ever asked about the twins, or about the old couple. He had thought he’d get used to the trains, but he’d been wrong.

  Contrary to what his wife believed, the Office had looked at his manuscript, and they thought he had the right approach. But as far as Parts knew, none of his colleagues who were working on the subject of the Hitlerists had been saddled with assignments like his café duties. They were sitting in offices at the Office, or in the special archives, or were employees of magazines, or full-time workers for the Office, publicly praised, some of them even invited to Moscow—all of them publishing works on the subject as fast as they could. There was nothing very different about the work they produced, yet their conditions of employment were different. Comrade Barkov was already the head of research for the Estonian SSR government security committee, and word had it that he was writing a thesis on the Estonian bourgeois nationalists’ transition to fascism. He no doubt had help from a wife who did his filing, typed clean copies for him, and made sure he was free to concentrate on what was essential. Or maybe he had a secretary. Or several. It was the same with Ervin Martinson. How else could he be so prolific? A pile of papers covered in corrections and exclamation points, demanding immediate attention, waited on Parts’s desk. The Office was full of typists, but somehow they couldn’t spare one for Parts’s manuscript. His old doubts returned. Maybe the Office felt that his past was an obstacle to public recognition after all. Maybe he wouldn’t be showered with flowers in a couple of years, maybe he’d be sent to scour the countryside marking the places foreigners weren’t allowed to see, or hunting down closet scribblers, or, worse yet, working as a restroom attendant, listening to what people talked about in the toilet. Maybe they would take his typewriter away.

  Could it be because of his wife’s background, or her present condition? Seeing to her pharmaceutical needs required planning. He’d been forced to take responsibility for stocking the medicine cabinet, since she was hardly capable of using the tactic of rotating pharmacies. Picking up the same prescription from the same place would attract unwanted attention. People would start to talk, and the talk would find its way to the Office. It was just the sort of material the Office collected—they wrote down a target’s prescriptions, drugstore purchases, doctors’ visits, liquor expenditures, and used all of it to build a profile of untrustworthiness, potential weaknesses, to create ways of ensuring a worker’s loyalty, or to make him behave in a way beneficial to the Office.

  He had never seriously thought of sending his wife to the asylum at Paldiski 52, but maybe the time was approaching when it would be worth considering. Her problematic background was a credible, even probable, reason for his professional difficulties. Divorce wasn’t an option because leaving a sick wife would be a deplorable, immoral thing to do, but if she were sent to an institution for the good of her health, Parts could go on with his life as normal, perhaps even earn some sympathy. The Office would most likely support such a decision. Parts knew how to present the idea to them. He remembered a Russian woman at the Norma factory who had brought her elderly mother-in-law to Tallinn from Russia. The old woman had stopped speaking Russian, wanted to speak only in French. The whole family had been in a fluster, and they locked the old woman in her bedroom. No one would have known about it if the woman hadn’t managed to escape. The story had amused Parts at the time because the woman’s husband was a well-known Party member. He taught communist theory at the university and was always remindin
g people that the ruble would soon collapse because money was a capitalist invention, and suddenly he had a woman living in his home who muttered in French and longed for her friend the Countess Maria Serafina and praised his wife’s resemblance to the late Tzarina. At least that’s what they thought she was talking about—no one in the family could speak French. The mother-in-law was sent to Paldiski 52. The story wasn’t funny to Parts anymore. He could see the signs of the fragility of the mind, its inexorable fallibility, every day in his own home. Everyone had his breaking point, and if nothing else destroyed the mind, time would. It would take you back to moments you didn’t want to return to, chasing after countesses and tzarinas, to memories of Lilya Brik driving the first automobile in Moscow, or the wood-gas cars in Siberia, how you had to throw stick after stick of birch in the burner, how the generator would sputter, memories of wood being chopped, fat burning, and flesh, the smell. The frailty of the mind could carry you back to memories of a fire that revealed skulls and femurs, memories that should be forgotten, that you have forgotten, until your spirit is beaten down, and it brings them back and makes them true again, the fire and smoke, the crackle, the woodpile and the smell and the gunshots and the cries of anguish and the past becoming reality again, as if it were happening now. He might shout out his memories in public, too, in the middle of the day, while waiting in a long line, and step into that same dark place where all those he imagined he’d cleared out of his path for ever and ever had stepped long ago, the very same darkness. He couldn’t let that happen, not to him, and not to his wife.