by Sofi Oksanen
A child was spinning a top next to a sandbox that smelled of the neighborhood cats. The child was happy to take a ruble from him and tell him the name of the poet who lived in the house.
Parts went to the library to acquaint himself with the man’s poetry. He’d published poems in praise of the rising of the workers at just the right time and in just the same tone that Roland had cursed in the works of Dog Ear years ago. Of course, it could be a coincidence, but how many poets could there be who were mixed up in illegal dealings and used the same code name?
Tallinn, Estonian SSR, Soviet Union
THE FOLLOWING EVENING, Comrade Parts dozed over coffee, truffles, and a Moscow salad in the Café Moskva. His vigilance was taxed by the late working hours and by his attempts to familiarize himself with poetry. When his chin dropped onto his chest, he straightened up and looked around. The Target’s circle was joined by a group of art students in violet caps, though some were bareheaded, and one girl wore a tooshort skirt and held her hand tight against her legs as she walked, either to pull the hem down or simply to prevent it from creeping up any farther. The cornflower-blue skirt was topped with a white blouse—he should remember to mention the nationalist colors in his report.
THE VIOLET CAPS WERE followed by a small, dark man with hair that straggled like an unkempt woman’s and a beard that hid his features. Parts recognized him—a tasteless painter of anti-Soviet works. The Office had no doubt been alerted to the man’s activities long ago. His appearance alone, with its nod to capitalist fashion, exuded imperialism. The café’s limp-wristed pianist played his usual tunes, the long-haired painter flirted with the girls. Then one of the girls gave a little cry of surprise that cut through the smoke like a sharp brushstroke and woke Parts from his torpor. His eyes flew open. What was that tune? Had it come out of his own head? Out of his mouth? Was he dreaming? The music still had a jazzy beat. The girls had fallen silent. A smoker at the next table forgot to flick the ash from her cigarette and it fell onto the table. The Target stood up. Parts furtively looked around. The group of students had turned toward the pianist. The woman at the next table was beaming, her hand lifted to touch the shoulder of her companion, her mouth silently moving. Saa vabaks Eesti meri, saa vabaks Eesti pind. Parts blinked. The music changed to a march rhythm that flowed through the pianist as he improvised, the stirring cadence slipping away and reappearing again. The woman’s lips continued their soundless song, and now the bearded man had stood up and so had the twittering girls on his arms, and soon the entire group was on its feet. Parts could hear himself gasp. He looked at his colleague at the table in the corner. He, too, was standing, his posture stiff, as if ready to leap, his gaze alert, sweeping over the dining room, meeting Parts’s eyes for a moment, and at that moment the march slowed and the bearded man and the Target opened their mouths. Jaan sull’ truuiks surman, mu kõige armsam oled sa.… Parts’s colleague swept across the room like a wind, slammed the lid shut over the piano keys, stopped in front of the bearded man’s gaping mouth and, waving his arms, said something to him, and then, just as windily, left the café. His coattails brushed Parts in passing, his face splotched, his eyes slits. After he’d stomped out of the room and down the stairs, the pianist opened the piano and began playing his regular evening repertoire. The bearded man’s friends dashed to the top of the stairwell, their foreheads shining with sweat, their frenzied whispers echoing. They didn’t look around as they went, and no one looked at them, as if they’d become invisible, yet the whole room rippled like the sea before a storm. Parts had heard a few snatches of words, but he didn’t want to believe his ears. Had his colleague really gone up to the bearded man and said, “For God’s sake, be quiet! I’m with the KGB!”
IT WAS the same pianist the next day, and the next, and Parts started to wonder if his colleague had even reported the incident. In any case, he didn’t come back to the café—another colleague had replaced him. The bearded man stayed away, too. There was already more than enough compromising information on him. The group was obviously planning something, perhaps a student march, in which case Parts’s assignment to the Moskva would end before it happened, or right afterward. He would have to hurry if he wanted to confirm his suspicions while the group with all its tentacles was still free and easy to access.
THE POET HIMSELF opened the door. The house was as gray as before, the man’s clothes fading into the walls as he adjusted his glasses, his eyes barely visible behind the thick lenses. Parts smiled politely and said:
“Dog Ear.”
The moment was undeniably delicious. Parts knew that the man still had a chance. The skills of a good actor, a proper defense, could save him. Parts had seen many liars in his day who could mount a wonderful deflective battle. But the man in front of him wasn’t one of them. The expression on the poet’s face collapsed like a house whose timbers have rotted away, taken down with one strategic blow of an axe.
“I believe we need to talk. Let’s not let your past disturb your present career as a writer.” Parts paused for effect. “You ought to think about your young followers. Your writings are not raising the morals of our youth the way they should.”
“My wife will be home soon.”
“I would be happy to meet her. Shall we continue our conversation inside?”
The poet backed up.
“We’ll try of course to make the publishing ban as short as possible, won’t we?”
THE POET WAS an easy case. Much easier than Parts had expected. As he left the house, he wondered how the man had kept up his illegal activities as long as he had, right under the Party’s nose. He’d been a distinguished Soviet poet for decades, had enjoyed the approval of the propaganda department, Glavlit, and every possible agency, yet he had continued his underground activities. All the while writing poems in praise of the Party. Parts walked briskly to the bus stop. Only then did his weariness hit him, and he had to lower himself into a crouch. The poet cracked easily because Parts had incriminating information. But there was nothing he could use to blackmail his own wife. The poet had let the identity of the Heart drop into Parts’s lap like a Junkers bomber that had run out of fuel, but Parts still wasn’t sure whether Roland had told the Heart everything, every single thing. Was this why the wall between Parts and his wife was so insurmountable? Had she actually known this entire time about all the reasons he’d had to get rid of Roland? Did it even matter anymore? He was baffled at how little the confirmation had shaken him, and quite admired himself for it. How calm he was. How professional. Maybe he’d always guessed it deep down, but that wasn’t important. A pure pleasure that he hadn’t felt in years came over him. He was in control of the situation, and it was a feeling he’d almost forgotten. As if he’d snatched an entire flock of birds out of the air and held them in his hands and they’d turned to stone at his touch, frozen in midflight. His typewriter keys were waiting for him at home. So was his wife. The Office could take care of finishing up the case.
Tallinn, Estonian SSR, Soviet Union
EVERYTHING WENT WRONG. Rein and the three others who’d organized the march had been arrested. Evelin trembled in bed under her blanket. The quiet of the dorm pressed down from the ceiling. The shouts still rang in her head: The militia! The militia! She didn’t want to leave her room. They were no doubt whispering in the kitchen. She had no news, didn’t know where Rein was or what was going to happen, that’s what she’d told them. But she did know. Rein would have to give up his studies—everyone understood that, there was no need to whisper about it. Should she go home? Could she? Would the militia go there and get her? Would they evict her from the dorms, from the university? Her mother wouldn’t be able to bear it. She couldn’t tell her family about this. It was impossible. Would Rein be sent to prison or the army, or both? Or maybe to an insane asylum? Evelin sat up. An insane asylum. Good God. That had happened to the boy who wrote flyers, the one whose typewriter they’d been searching for when they turned all the boys’ dorm rooms upside down. Every room
, all one thousand beds, all one thousand closets. They didn’t find the typewriter, but they found the boy, and he was taken to Paldiski 52, and no one had heard from him since. Rein was crazy. She had been right about that. And being in love with a crazy person was dragging her into his craziness. She’d put her graduation at risk—her graduation dress, her chance to wear a faded cap and carry a worn-out ballpoint pen like the other final-year students, her chance to be an engineer. She and Rein would never see each other again, would never have their own sheets or cactuses on the windowsill or a polished cabinet. She would never again have to wonder whether she should let him take off her slip. She should have let him. She should have gone out with someone from the Party. She should have listened to the girl who told her that Rein was a poor choice, should have thought of herself: I want to graduate. I want a family. I want a home. I want to get married. I want a good job. Evelin ran to the closet. There was nothing incriminating in it, she knew that, but they would come soon and they would go through the closets, the beds, the pillows. She threw her belongings into her plywood suitcase, put on her shoes, ran into the hallway and down the stairs, the other girls peeking out of their rooms. She could feel their gaze pricking her skin, her steps echoing in her ears as her feet carried her along the fence toward the bus stop, the fence with the prisoners working behind it. Would Rein be there soon? Would she? She ran faster. Her bag was heavy, but she kept going. Terror carried her to bus number 33, so full of factory workers that there was no place for her, but her panic pushed her through the folding doors, squeezing her in, and stayed with her as the bus pulled away. Evelin leaned against a babushka’s white, sheet-draped bundle, like all the other white sacks full of goods bought in Estonia that the Russians carried on their backs, stooped, toward the train station and from there to Siberia, and soon she would be going there, too, that’s where they would take her. The grinding of her teeth was the grinding of the tracks, tensing her spine with fear, ready to strike her, to sink its teeth into her flesh, but not yet, not yet, first she would go home. She wanted to see her home before they came, because they would come, they always did. Maybe they were already waiting at her mother’s house. Evelin’s eyes were dry, though they had been wet like Rein’s when she saw the parade of torches in rows descend along Kiek in de Kök. They had squeezed each other’s hands. Everything was peaceful and Rein thought of the St. George’s Night Uprising in medieval times. That night, too, the torches of the slaves had risen out of the darkness. But it had ended in a bloodbath. She should have remembered that. She should have remembered it when she heard Rein talking about it, not just smiled, as they started marching along the Narva road toward Kadriorg singing “Saa vabaks Eesti meri, saa vabaks Eesti pind,” but she had smiled and cheered with the others like an idiot, until she heard the shouts of Militia! and a girl in front of her kicked off her high-heeled shoes and took off running toward an alley in her stocking feet and people started pushing back from the front of the march and the torches fell on the ground. The militia! someone shouted again, and her hand was loose from Rein’s hand and she couldn’t see him anywhere and she ran—militia!—ran without knowing where she was going, and ended up at the gates of Patkuli, shut for the night, and climbed over the gate and curled up on the stairs waiting for the confusion to die down.
As the bus approached her home, Evelin realized. Everyone would see them coming to arrest her. The whole village would see. She couldn’t do that to her parents. She went back to Tallinn.
Tooru Village, Estonian SSR, Soviet Union
COMRADE PARTS JOINED the end of the line. Women with scarves on their heads turned to look at him. He didn’t recognize anyone in the village. The whole area was new to him and he hadn’t had time to prepare for the task psychologically. Everything had happened so quickly. Suddenly he just found himself riding in a marshrutka on his way to the countryside. His superiors had given no sign that they knew he had ever crossed paths with Mrs. Vaik and Marta, but he couldn’t think of any other reason that he of all people was given this assignment. It wasn’t his area.
Marta Kask was due in the village for shopping day, like everyone else. Amid the bustle—men carrying bread for the cows in sacks on their bent backs, loads of empty milk bottles strapped on bicycles—he recognized Marta easily.
“Marta? Is that really you?”
Marta jumped, her eyes widening as though he’d thrown a stone in a lake, and at that moment his uncertainty vanished. The woman didn’t understand the value of the information she had, he was sure of it. She didn’t realize that she had material that could be bought and sold to save her daughter, knowledge of the time he’d spent in the company of men in Berlin that she could use to blackmail him. For an instant he pitied her, then he got to work, pressing through the crowd to where she stood, marveling at the odds of their meeting, telling her how he was here for only one day, working on Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic Teachers’ reform issues.
“They’re planning to move all the history teacher training to Moscow, but it’ll never work,” he said with a laugh and a wink. “I won’t let it. We ought to have a cup of coffee together, since we’ve had the good luck to run into each other after all these years. What do you say?”
He noticed her looking around, looking for someone—but who? She obviously wanted to send word ahead. When a young scamp ran up to her, Parts grabbed a three-ruble note from his pocket and pushed it into his hand.
“A kid ought to be allowed something sweet on shopping day, don’t you think? I’m coming to look at your school tomorrow. Go tell your teacher that everything’s going to be fine.”
The kid disappeared.
“Why such a long face, Marta?” He looked straight into her eyes, registering the movements of her pupils, the way she shifted her weight from one foot to the other and adjusted the angle of her scarf over her temples. “It really is such a coincidence to meet you like this. As an old friend of the family, I ought to tell you that we’ve been worried about your daughter—Evelin, isn’t it?”
“Worried? About Evelin?” Marta said, her voice cracking like the surface of a lake in a sudden freeze.
“Working for the education ministry is a wonderful job. You get a view of the future of the entire fatherland, and we’re very concerned about the future of our youth. It’s so terribly sad for a young person’s life to take the wrong direction. I assume you’ve heard about the student march?”
Marta flinched at the question, silent for slightly too long, unable to decide whether to confirm or deny.
“Evelin is innocent, of course—but her friends. Her fiancé was arrested.”
Marta looked like she would topple over.
“We can talk more about it over coffee,” he said, gesturing meaningfully at the people in their vicinity. Marta looked around as if hoping for rescue.
“Perhaps you should make your purchases first, then we can go.”
Marta seemed afraid to move. Parts led her to the waiting line. She obeyed like a sheep. The abacus on the counter clacked briskly—still four pigs’ feet left, the rustle of wrapping paper, Marta tugging at her scarf, settling it better against her forehead, tucking a wisp of hair underneath, damp, a bead of sweat flowing down her temple like a tear. Parts, smiling politely at the people pushing their way toward the counter, didn’t budge from her side. Someone came to tell Marta that her husband had been first in line that morning. Marta nodded. Parts gave her a questioning look.
“Grocery shopping is always left to the women,” she said.