When the Doves Disappeared: A Novel

by Sofi Oksanen

  PARTS WENT INTO the kitchen, lit the stove, and waited for the water to boil, closing his ears to the clomping sounds upstairs. There was nothing particularly interesting in the telegrams. The Target’s fiancée just told him of her daily routine. The informant had also made a list of visitors and random notes about what she felt was suspicious activity—unusual clothing, for example. Those were completely useless, too. Nothing about Dog Ear. Parts flipped through the addresses on the envelopes. Evelin Kask, Tooru Village. The handwriting was round and even, the pen tip pressed on the paper just right, not too hard, the ink not smudged anywhere, the letters standing narrow within the words. A nice girl’s handwriting. He steamed open the envelope. Childish, random observations and descriptions: “I studied hard for the exams and everyone here is waiting for the results, even my neighbor Liisa. My mother wants to send you her own birthday card, but I ought to warn you about my grandma—she’s peculiar. She’s sitting across the table from me now and asking a lot of questions about you.” There were roses on the birthday card. Parts flicked it across the table. The letter was full of longing and prattle and Parts didn’t believe that even a foolish girl like her would bore her boyfriend with such tedious descriptions of the countryside and trivial village news. It had to be a secret code, and to break it he would need a lot more correspondence. Something was up, but what? And what did it have to do with Dog Ear? If he did find Dog Ear before the Office did, and it was the same Dog Ear as in the diary, would he be able to squeeze any information out of him about the identity of the Heart?

  THE WATER IN THE KETTLE had boiled away. Parts turned out the light and went to the window. The dead trees outside had melted motionless into the dark. He was in dangerous waters. Opening the letters wasn’t his job. He wasn’t supposed to know the whole picture—just his own small part—he wasn’t supposed to go out of bounds. Maybe they were writing a report on him right now, pasting new pictures onto cardboard, recording his personal information, his file bulging; maybe they were considering the best tools to use based on the descriptions in that file, Postal Control already activated, of course, and home surveillance. He remembered the hair he’d left between his papers, how it had disappeared while he was out. Maybe he was wrong to suspect his wife. Perhaps it was just his imagination. He turned on the light and reached for the sprat sandwich, then set it down again. The can of sprats had been opened yesterday. He got an unopened can from the pantry, and a fresh loaf of bread, bought today, from the bread box. No more mistakes.

  He went back to the material his informant had given him, trying again to find repeated words, signs of a code. Frustration was unavoidable, the stupid girl’s stupid words might be just stupid words. He bit off a sprat’s head and sucked on it for a moment, deep in thought. Just as he was starting to feel angry, his eye fell on the piece of blotting paper he’d found in the envelope, folded over some dried flowers. There was writing on it in rose-colored ink. A name. Dolores Vaik. For a moment Parts thought he was dreaming. But he was awake. He snapped up the card. The sender’s name was Marta Kask. Parts heard his own heavy sigh from far away. Spit collected in his mouth. Dolores Vaik’s daughter’s name was Marta. He slowly put the piece of blotting paper, the birthday card, and the envelope down in front of him, and formed the connections, very slowly, in his mind: The Target’s fiancée was in the country, at her parents’ house. She’d written the letter from the country, used a piece of blotting paper that another woman, Dolores Vaik, or someone who’d written “Dolores Vaik,” had used. It was most likely Vaik herself. Judging from Evelin Kask’s letter, Dolores Vaik lived at Marta Kask’s house. Mrs. Vaik’s daughter’s name was Marta. And Marta Kask’s daughter seemed to be the Target’s fiancée. Had the Office purposely placed the Target’s fiancée in his path? Was that what this was all about? Had they done it because they knew that he knew Marta and Mrs. Vaik? Too complicated. That couldn’t be it. It was too improbable. How would the Office know they were acquaintances of his, and if they did, why would they care? And yet there was some sense in it. Mrs. Vaik had stayed in Estonia when Lydia Bartels left with the Germans. She’d worked as a veterinarian’s receptionist and she’d participated in illegal activities—Parts knew that. She must have been observed at some point, particularly since she had a contact in Germany, or because of the illegals and emigrants, or because she knew too many people compromised by antigovernment activities. But why would the Office feed Parts the close relative of such a person? Was it about Parts himself? Were they trying some new, preemptive method on him? Remarkable. Really remarkable.

  Parts remembered Marta Kask well. When Mrs. Vaik was widowed, she and Marta had supported themselves by helping Lydia Bartels with her sessions. Parts had often sat in Bartels’s kitchen waiting for Germans who had insisted on coming to one of her séances. Marta had offered him and the driver something to eat, the Germans had winked at her as they left, and she’d flicked her wheat-colored hair and fended off their approaches. There was continual traffic at those sessions—Bartels had been the favorite of the spiritism enthusiasts among the officers.

  Parts hardly noticed the renewed stomping upstairs. He tried to think of counterarguments, tried to find reasons why the connection was a coincidence. He had to get more information about Mrs. Vaik and Marta, more recent information. That was where the answer would be. He tried to calm his imagination. This was no time for fantasies.

  Karl Andrusson. The ads Parts had placed in Kodumaa had borne fruit. He had recently received a letter from Karl, in an envelope with Canadian stamps on it. Karl had expressed his gratitude that Mrs. Vaik had taken such good care of his foot. If it weren’t for her, his flying career would have been over.

  Parts threw open his box of letters and took out the Canadian bundle. Karl always stuck a lot of stamps on the envelope because he knew how valuable they were in philatelic circles.

  Comrade Parts dipped his pen in the inkwell.

  Tooru Village, Estonian SSR, Soviet Union

  EVELIN’S FATHER LAY on the autumn grass, drooling from the side of his mouth. He had a pistol in his pants pocket. Evelin knew that. She let him be and stepped over the timber of the threshold onto the covered porch. He wouldn’t use the gun, not really. The dog, who had waited for her at the bus stop, slipped past her feet into the kitchen. Her mother hurried to greet her, her grandmother followed, warmth steamed from the kitchen, and she was inside, suddenly inside, and grain coffee was rushed to the table, and fresh sweet rolls, and the coal hook clattered, and the aroma of manna pudding reached her over all the other smells as her mother took it out of the oven and pressed her for news. Evelin led the conversation to village happenings. She didn’t want her mother to ask about Rein. Luckily her mother got carried away talking about their neighbor Liisa, who had received a letter from her son in Australia, although she’d been sure he was dead, hadn’t heard anything from him in twenty years, and then she gets a letter! He sent her a chiffon scarf with it and said he would send more, he knew you could get good money for them here, and they were easy to send, and Liisa was so proud, dizzy with happiness, had been talking about it for weeks, saying My son is alive, as if it couldn’t be true, as if it were all a dream. Evelin pretended to listen, let her mother ramble, her grandmother carding wool, Evelin putting in a noise now and then, thinking all the while about Rein and tugging on the curls at the back of her neck. Her mother, father, and grandparents all had straight hair. Her father’s was straight as a horse’s mane. Why did she have to end up with curly hair? The girl with the white legs had hair that was pale and soft. Evelin was sure Rein liked that look better.

  After the evening at the Moskva they’d hardly seen each other. Rein had told her she was a coward, teased her at first for how alarmed she’d been, then reassured her that there was nothing to be afraid of, everything was all right. But it wasn’t. Rein hadn’t invited her again to the café or the house where the man with the spectacles lived. The visit to her parents’ house had been postponed, he had so much t
o do. It had been a relief. When she’d come back to town at the beginning of autumn, the bustle of activity at the Moskva had diminished, it was almost like it had never happened, and Rein hadn’t forgotten her over the summer. He’d taken her out to the movies and dancing right away. But he smelled like vodka and smoked eel from the night before. She could tell what company he’d been keeping and she couldn’t refuse when he started to prod her again about when he could come and meet her parents. Maybe at Christmas—which would mean preparing herself for it all over again. The old terror came back. How could she bring Rein here?

  “We’re beating the flax tomorrow,” her mother said. “Liisa said she would give us a hand. Come help me with your father. We should get him indoors.”

  “Let him lie there. Are they paying him in liquor again? Has the roof been fixed yet?”

  “Don’t start, Evelin.”

  Soon they would have the Christmas butchering to do, and in the meantime all the autumn chores. There weren’t enough working-age men in the village. Her father did it all, got paid in good old Estonian vodka, and stayed well into the night at the Party boss’s wife’s house, always working on something that needed fixing, whenever her husband was out. He always came home drunk. Her father would get Rein drinking, and then what would happen? She could already hear the excruciating dinners they would have—Dad drunk, Mom prattling on about calves and flax and Evelin’s favorite lamb from childhood, about how she had always wanted to watch as the water started to bubble around the flax when they soaked it in the lake. Evelin glanced at her grandmother carding in the corner. Where would they put her while Rein was visiting? They couldn’t send her away at Christmastime. Evelin had heard her father talking about how her grandmother shouldn’t travel anymore, and for once Evelin agreed with him. If her parents came to Tallinn and met Rein, maybe he would stop pestering her about coming here. But they couldn’t leave the animals and the house unattended—the village was full of thieves. Would Rein be satisfied if only her mother came, so her father could take care of the calves and chickens while she was away? Evelin would bring it up as soon as there was an opportune moment. But she didn’t want to talk about Rein right now. What if someone found out what he was involved in? If he got thrown out of the university, he would end up in the army and be gone for years. Did he even realize that? How could he be so reckless? So selfish? How would they ever have their own sheets, their cactuses on the windowsill, their cabinet polished to a shine? What if he was involved with something that could end him up in prison? She couldn’t see herself waiting for him outside the walls of the Patarei, or running to buy him bottles of Vana Tallinn, sending it to wherever the army posted him. She remembered a classmate who’d come home in a zinc box after he failed his exams twice and didn’t go to the commission interview and then was sent into the army. Rein was crazy, playing a crazy game.

  Evelin had made the wrong choice. She should have paid more attention to that Polish tech student who wanted a wife from Estonia and said so outright. He studied hard, but he wasn’t like Rein, who refused to call Victory Square Victory Square because he didn’t want to use the name the communists gave it. Or she should have gone out with that Siberian boy during her first year. He had asked her to the dance, but she didn’t go, she had her eye on the upperclassmen just like the other freshman girls, thinking they were wiser, thinking he was immature, the way he would always say in the middle of a nice evening that he just wanted to go to sleep between clean, white sheets, nothing more. Clean, white sheets were enough for him, but not for Evelin, and now look where her greed had gotten her.

  Her mother coughed and held her side. It was getting better, her cough, the too-deep wheeze of her breathing. Evelin said she would do all the barn work that weekend, but her mother said no, her studies were more important, and her father thought so, too. Nothing was more important than Evelin getting out of the kolkhoz, and once the flax was retted she was going to make Evelin a new sweater that would be good to read in, would keep her warm even in the winter. She would leave the sleeves long and wide like Evelin had asked her to, although Evelin hadn’t told her why she wanted them that way—to hide her cheat sheets. The summer exams had gone well, even the orals. Her scores in Party History and Industrial Intensification and Efficiency were high. She’d had a chance to look through all eighty of the professor’s questions and had made crib sheets for herself and Rein. Sometimes she’d gone to the countryside to study and when she got back to town she sat in Glehn Park day after day cramming for the tests. The park was plagued by exhibitionists and rowdy gangs of kids and couples necking. She wasn’t the only one they were bothering—other lone women had gathered on the bench next to the artificial pond to read and bask in the sun. She’d gotten to know one of them, a woman who’d once given her half of the orange in her lunch. The woman had even helped drill her on Marx. It was more fun that way; it kept her alert. She’d also given Evelin tips about hairdressers who were particularly good at blow-drying curly hair, laughed and said she was no stranger to untamable hair. But eventually her presence had become oppressive. She was too curious for a complete stranger. Evelin stopped studying in Glehn Park and never tried the hairdresser the woman recommended, though she’d seen how Rein stared at the white-legged girl’s flowing tresses.

  After the summer exams Evelin crammed for fall-term chemistry and physics to ease herself into the change of subjects. Office technology and touch-typing went well, but you didn’t get a grade in your study book for those. Next came more exams in Party History, Problems in Economic Analysis, and Problems in Analytical Methodology. She needed to find a good place to study for the exams in January, and was already worried about it. The library put her to sleep, it was too noisy in the dorms, and she couldn’t go outside in the winter. Maybe she should switch to a more interesting subject. Highways? Surveying? Social sciences were out—no more Marx for her. She had other options, but Rein was more of a worry. He didn’t care if there wasn’t a place to study. Passing calculus and programming was no problem. ALGOL programming was easy for him—the final exam consisted of simply solving some task on the computer—but he wasn’t going to pass the orals. On the other hand, his parents had money, otherwise he never would have passed his previous courses. He spent the fall planning a student demonstration, and he’d started to talk to Evelin about it, warily.

  Tallinn, Estonian SSR, Soviet Union

  IN HIS LETTER to Karl Andrusson, Parts had sent greetings from Mrs. Vaik, saying his wife had “always kept in touch with her.” He also mentioned how Mrs. Vaik had been delighted that Karl had used his skills and become a pilot. The reply came unusually quickly, in spite of Postal Control—it only took a few weeks. Parts was so eager to open it that he tore the Canadian stamps, and it didn’t even upset him. Karl was happy to hear about Mrs. Vaik and asked Parts to give her his address. The Andrussons’ mother had lost contact with Mrs. Vaik when she moved in with her daughter, but she’d heard rumors that her granddaughter was studying to be a bank manager at the university in Tallinn.

  Parts had his confirmation—he’d been following Mrs. Vaik’s granddaughter the whole time. There was nothing else of importance in Karl’s letter, just musings about whether Mrs. Vaik missed her home province as much as he did, though there was an ocean separating him from it and she was at least living in her native country. Parts cursed himself. If he’d had any relationship with his wife, he would have known about this and wouldn’t have had to get the news by rowboat from Canada. Karl Andrusson might even have information about Roland, but Parts didn’t dare ask—he didn’t want to get the Office interested in Roland. Using a false name, though, would arouse Karl’s suspicions, make him start asking the wrong questions. Parts popped a piece of pastilaa in his mouth and wiped his hands on his handkerchief. He let the window-rattling train pass and closed his eyes to see the pattern better, not pausing to lament that it hadn’t occurred to him to use Karl before. He’d clearly let himself be blinded by his research: a disease of t
he profession. The more he weighed the matter, the more improbable it seemed that the Office would have trained him and transferred him to surveillance simply by chance. His real Target was, in fact, Kask, or the Kask family, and perhaps the real goal was for Parts to apply preemptive methods to Evelin Kask or her parents, or to try to gain the girl’s confidence. Was she really such a significant target? All this trouble for one young girl—what was the larger purpose? He already had plenty of compromising material. It would probably be enough just to hint to her how easy it was to get expelled from the university, what a snap it would be to put her grandmother on a train headed for a cold country. Parts listened to himself. Confusion was one of the Office’s methods, and they had confused him, he had to admit it. If he started using the girl to hunt for Dog Ear, he had to be careful not to alert the Office. But perhaps he would take the risk and switch his interest from the Target to the girl. Just for a little while. Would anyone notice?

  THE END OF the Moskva Café operation was approaching and it lightened Comrade Parts’s mood as he melted along behind Evelin Kask when she came out of class. He looked at her with new eyes, greedily, catching her scent. A good, old-fashioned chase, though she behaved as she always had. Parts adjusted his steps to the cobblestones along Toompea, his coat dissolving into the walls, sensing his own invisibility. The length of the girl’s skirt was more modest than the others’, and she had on white Marat summer gloves that patted and tugged at her hair every third step. Her metal heels slipped on the stones and rose clumsily onto the bus, wobbling a little as she got off at a stop near the dorms. Parts kept a sufficient distance as she went into a building, letting her reach the second floor before he followed. He dug some empty pen cartridges out of his money pouch and let the line grow a bit before he got into it himself. The woman sitting behind the counter was focused intently on her work. She removed the balls from the ends of the pens, pushed each cartridge into the machine, turned the crank, handed back the filled cartridge, and took the kopeks. The line whispered and murmured, moved forward. He didn’t see any of the students from the café. Suddenly the girl’s face tensed and she held the bag she was carrying a little farther from her body, her arm straight. A tech student came up and said hello to her, but left quickly. Parts looked around, saw the boy go out the door with the girl’s bag in his hand, and slipped out of the line, letting the boy gain a little distance and walk between the tall buildings alone, past a gigantic Dove of Peace mural to a bus stop. Parts waited for a while before joining the group of people at the stop, got on the bus last, and exited last. When the boy left the road to push his way into the bushes, Parts almost tripped over his own feet and understood his mistake—he’d lost the Target several times on this same road, but had blamed his own fatigue and overcautiousness. Only now did he realize that it hadn’t been an accident. Those skillful disappearances were a sign that the Target knew someone was following him. The Target was simply better at evasion than this boy was. This boy wasn’t careful at all; his steps were noisy, he swore as he stumbled among the thistles. Parts saw him slip into the back door of a gray house and made a note of the time. He’d already guessed that the bespectacled man who let the boy into the house was conducting illegal activities.