The swallows were already gone, but the cranes plowed through the air, their necks straight. Their cries fell on the fields and made Aliide’s head hurt. Unlike her, they could leave; they had the freedom to go wherever they wanted. She only had the freedom to go mushrooming. Her basket was full of saffron caps and milk caps. Ingel was waiting at home; she would be happy with the haul. Aliide would wash them, Ingel might let her blanch them but would look over her shoulder the whole time, and she would can them, demanding that Aliide pay attention, because she would never be able to run her own home if she didn’t know how to marinate mushrooms. She might know how to brine them, but the marinade took skill. And soon there would be several jars on the pantry shelf, Ingel’s handiwork, a couple jars less hunger this winter.
Aliide put her free hand over her ear. So many cranes! That cry! She felt the autumn through her leather shoes. Thirst scratched at her throat. And then suddenly there was a motorcycle and a man in a leather coat who pulled up next to her.
“Whatcha got in the basket?”
“Mushrooms. I’ve just been out picking them.” The man grabbed the basket, looked inside, and threw
it away. The mushrooms pattered onto the ground. Aliide stared at them; she didn’t dare look at the man. It was going to happen now. She had to remain calm. She couldn’t get nervous, couldn’t show the fear swishing inside her. Cold sweat ran down the backs of her knees into her shoes and numbness started to spread over her body, blood leaving her limbs. Maybe nothing was going to happen. Maybe she was afraid for no reason.
“Haven’t you been to see us before? With your sister. You’re the bandit’s wife’s sister.”
Aliide stared at the mushrooms. She could see the leather coat out of the corner of her eye. It squeaked when he moved. He chuckled, his ears red. His chrome-tanned boots shone, although the road was dusty and he wasn’t German. Should she run? Trust that he wouldn’t shoot her in the back? Or hope that he’d miss? But then he would go straight to her house and get Ingel and Linda and wait there for her to come home. And wasn’t running away always an admission of guilt?
At the town hall, the big-eared man reported that Aliide had been bringing food to the bandits. The light shone through his earlobes. He pushed Aliide to stand in the middle of the room, and then he left.
“I’m disappointed in you, Comrade Aliide.” It was the same voice as the first time. The same man.
Are you sure, Comrade Aliide? He stood up beside the desk, which was hidden in the darkness, looked at her, shook his head, and sighed deeply. He was very sad.
“I’ve given my all to help you. There’s nothing more I can do.”
He gestured to the men behind him and they came toward her. He himself left the room.
Aliide’s hands were tied behind her and a bag was put over her head. The men left the room. She couldn’t see anything through the fabric. Water was dripping onto the floor somewhere. She could smell the cellar through the bag. The door opened. Boots. Aliide’s shirt was ripped open, the buttons flew onto the floor, against the walls—glass German buttons —and then . . . she became a mouse, in a corner of the room, a fly on the light that flew away, a nail in the plywood wall, a rusty thumbtack, she was a rusty thumbtack in the wall. She was a fly and she was walking over a woman’s naked breast, the woman was in the middle of a room with a bag over her head, and she was walking over a fresh bruise, the blood forced up under the skin of the woman’s breast, a running welt that the fly traversed, across bruises that emanated from the swollen nipple like the continents on a globe. When the woman’s naked skin touched the stone floor, she didn’t move anymore. The woman with the bag over her head in the middle of the room was a stranger and Aliide was gone, her heart ran on little caterpillar feet into grooves nooks crannies, became one with the roots that grew in the soil under the room. Should we make soap out of this one? The woman in the middle of the room didn’t move, didn’t hear, Aliide had become a spot of spit on the leg of the table, a termite next to its hole, inside a round hole in a tree, an alder tree, an alder tree grown in the soil of Estonia that still felt the forest, still felt the water and the roots and the moles. She dove down far away, she was a mole pushing up a pile of dirt in the yard, in the yard where she could feel the rain and wind, wet dirt breathing and murmuring. The woman in the middle of the room had her head shoved in the slop bucket. Aliide was outside, out in the wet dirt, dirt in her nostrils, dirt in her hair, dirt in her ears, and the dogs ran over her, their paws pressing into the dirt, which breathed and moaned, and the rain melted into it and the ditches filled and the water crashed and slammed against its own course and somewhere there were chrome-tanned boots, somewhere there was a leather coat, somewhere the cold smell of liquor and Russian and Estonian mixing together and rotting and seething.
The woman in the middle of the room didn’t move. Although Aliide’s body struggled, although the dirt tried to keep her for itself and gently stroked her battered flesh, licked the blood from her lips, kissed the torn hair in her mouth, although the dirt gave its all, it wasn’t enough; she was brought back. A belt buckle jingled and the woman in the middle of the room stirred. A door slammed, a boot slammed, a drinking glass tinkled, a chair scraped across the floor, a light swayed from the ceiling, and she tried to get away—she was a fly on the light, clinging to the tungsten thread—but the belt snapped her back, such a wellperforated belt that you couldn’t hear it, more perforated than the leather flyswatter. She did try—she was a fly, she flew away, flew up to the ceiling, flew away from the light, see-through wings, a hundred eyes—but the woman on the stone floor wheezed and twitched. There was a bag over the woman’s head and the bag smelled like vomit and there was no hole in it for a fly to get in, the fly couldn’t find a way to get to the woman’s mouth, it could have tried to smother her, to get her to vomit again and suffocate. The bag smelled like urine; it was wet with urine; the vomit was older. The door slammed, boots slammed, above the boots there was a smack of lips, a clicking tongue, bread crumbs fell onto the floor like blocks of ice. The smacking sound stopped.
“She stinks. Take her away.”
She woke up in a ditch. It was night—what night was it? Had a day passed, or two, or had it just been one night? An owl hooted. Black clouds moved across a moonlit sky. Her hair was wet. She sat up, crawled up to the road. She had to get home. Her undershirt, her slip, her dress, and garters were all in place. No scarf. Stockings missing. She couldn’t go home without stockings, she simply couldn’t, because Ingel... Was Ingel even at home? Was Ingel all right? What about Linda? Aliide started to run, her legs wouldn’t hold her, she scrambled, crawled, climbed, staggered, lurched, limped, and stumbled, but always forward, every movement took her forward. Ingel must be at home; they had just wanted her this time; Ingel would be at home. But how would she explain to Ingel how it was that she had stockings on when she left and she didn’t have them when she came back? She could say she left her scarf in the village. There were puddles in the road; it had rained. Good. She would have taken off her wet scarf and forgotten it somewhere. But the stockings; she couldn’t go home without stockings. No respectable woman would go around without any stockings, not even in her own yard. The storage shed. There were stockings in the storage shed. She could get some stockings there. But the shed door was locked, and Ingel had the key. There was no way she could get into it. Unless someone had forgotten to lock the door.
Aliide focused her mind on stockings all the way home —not Ingel, not Linda, not anything that had happened. She recited different kinds of stockings out loud: silk stockings, cotton stockings, dark brown stockings, black stockings, pink stockings, gray stockings, wool stockings, sausage stockings—the shed loomed in front of her, dawn broke— children’s stockings—she had circled around the pasture to the back of the house—embroidered stockings, factory stockings, stockings worth two kilos of butter, stockings worth three jars of honey, two days’ pay. She and Ingel had done two or three days’ work at other people
’s houses and each of them got a pair of silk stockings, black silk stockings with woolen toes. The silver willows rustled on the road home, the house peeked out between the birch trees in the yard, the lights were on inside, Ingel was home! Undyed wool stockings, Kapron stockings—she got to the shed, tried the door. Locked. She would have to go inside without any stockings, stay away from the light, sit down at the table immediately and pull her legs under it. Maybe no one would notice. She wished she had a mirror. She felt her cheeks, smoothed her hair, touched her head, but it felt sticky—silk stockings, cotton stockings, wool stockings, Kapron stockings. When she got to the well she drew a bucket of water, washed her hands, rubbed them with a stone, since there wasn’t any brush—brown stockings, black stockings, gray stockings, undyed stockings, embroidered stockings. She should go inside now. Could she do it? Could she lift her foot over the threshold, could she talk to them? Hopefully Ingel would still be sleepy and wouldn’t be able to talk about anything. Linda might still be asleep; it was so early.
She forced her body into the yard, watching herself from behind—how she walked, how her foot rose, her hand grabbed the door handle, how she called out “I’m home.” The door opened. Ingel came in. Hans was in the secret room, luckily. Aliide sighed. Ingel stared. Aliide raised her hand to tell Ingel not to say anything. Ingel’s eyes fell and rested on her stockingless legs, and Aliide turned her head away, bent to scratch Lipsi. Linda ran into the kitchen from the back room and stopped when she saw the edges of Ingel’s mouth, pulled deep and downward. Ingel told Linda to wash up. Linda didn’t move.
“You better mind me!”
Linda obeyed.
The enamel tub clanged, water splashed, Aliide still stood in the same place; she stank. Had Linda gotten a glimpse of her naked legs? She pulled away from her body again, enough to push herself to bed, and came back to it only when she could feel the familiar straw mattress under her side. Ingel came to the door and said that she would run a bath for her when Linda had left for school.
“Burn my clothes.”
“All of them?”
“Yes. I didn’t tell them anything.”
“I know.”
“They’ll come for us again.”
“We should send Linda away.”
“Hans would start to suspect something, and he mustn’t suspect anything. We can’t tell him.”
“We mustn’t tell him anything,” Ingel repeated. “We should leave here.”
“Where would we go? And Hans...”
1947
Läänemaa, Estonian Soviet
Socialist Republic
They Walked in Like They Owned the Place
That autumn evening, they were making soap. Linda was playing with the chestnut birds and Ingel’s German brooch, polishing its blue rhinestones and trying to avoid getting out her primer, as usual. Jars of apple jam they had made the day before stood in stout array on the table, waiting to be taken into the pantry, and next to them a jug of apple juice wrung from the same batch was already bottled. It had been a good day, the first day since that night spent in the basement of the town hall that Aliide hadn’t thought about it immediately on waking—she had had a moment to look out at the flood of morning sunlight before she remembered. Although no one had come after them since the night Aliide had walked home alone, they still started at every knock at the door—but so did many other people in those days. On that morning, however, Aliide had felt a little seed of hope: Maybe they would leave them alone. Maybe they believed that they didn’t know anything. Maybe they would let them do their work in peace, make their jams and preserves, let them be.
Aino had come to visit, to sit at the table and chat. The barrel of meat she had intended to use for her own soap had been stolen, so she had been promised part of theirs. Her conversation felt good; talking with an outsider eased the otherwise overwhelmingly mute, desperate atmosphere in the kitchen. Aino’s ordinary talk was a gentle echo, and even her story of the fate of her hundred-kilo pig was comforting; the camaraderie in the kitchen gave every sentence a cozy feeling. Swine fever had taken her sow and she had to slaughter it immediately, drain the blood, and salt the meat. But the barrel had disappeared from her cellar while she was away visiting her mother.
“Can you imagine?” she said, shaking her head. “Now someone’s going to eat it! It was supposed to be for my soap!”
“It must have been someone who wasn’t from around here. Everybody in the village knows what your sow died from.”
“Thank goodness there was nothing else in that old cellar.”
The soap ingredients had been soaked and washed for several days, and that evening they were finally boiling in a great stew over a quiet fire, and Ingel was starting to add caustic soda. It was Ingel’s job because Aliide didn’t have the patience for it, and Ingel was good at making soap, just like she was good at all women’s work. Ingel’s cakes of soap were always the thickest and of the highest quality, plump and proud, but even that didn’t bother Aliide that evening, because it was the first day that felt even a little bit normal. In the morning the dye man had come peddling dyes that someone had secretly supplied him from the Orto factory—pure colors without fillers—people had heard about it in all the surrounding villages—and now the soap stew was frothy, Ingel was stirring it with a wooden ladle, Aino chatted, shaking her head as she talked about the kolkhoz collective farm—how was she going to manage quotas that were always going up? The sisters were worried about the same thing, but that evening Aliide decided not to fret about it too much—there was plenty of time to fret over quotas. The conversation was interrupted by a squeal from the other side of the table; the pin on Ingel’s brooch had pricked Linda’s finger. Ingel grabbed it and pinned it to the front of Linda’s sweater and told her not to play with it. Linda was left to sniffle in the corner of the kitchen, where she had escaped with her chestnut bird after Ingel’s warnings that the splashing lye could eat the flesh from her hands. The domestic bustle made Aliide smile, and she beckoned Linda to the window to watch Aino as she went out to do the evening milking. Aino would come back the next day. Then the soap would be ready to cut and Aino would bring some cakes home to dry. Aliide gave a long stretch. Soon she would go with Linda to the barn to feed the animals and Hans would be able to come out into the kitchen to put the heavy kettle on the floor to cool.
There were four men.
They didn’t knock—they walked in like they owned the place.
Ingel was just adding some caustic soda to the pot. Aliide denied knowing anything about Hans. Ingel poured the entire contents of the bottle into the pot.
The soap boiled over onto the stove.
She didn’t tell them where Hans was.
Linda didn’t say a word.
Smoke came up from the stove, a fire started, the pot continued to froth.
At the town hall, Linda was separated from them and taken somewhere else.
Two lights without shades hung from the basement ceiling.
There were two boys from their own village there, old man Leemet’s son and Armin Joffe, who had escaped to the Soviet Union before the Germans came. Neither boy looked in their direction.
The soldiers at the town hall were smoking mahorkka cigarettes and drinking liquor. Out of glasses. They wiped their noses on their sleeves, as was the Russian custom, although they spoke Estonian. They offered Aliide and Ingel a drink. They declined.
“We know that you know where Hans Pekk is,” one of the men said.
Someone had supposedly seen Hans in the woods. Someone who had been interrogated had claimed that he and Hans had been in the same group and the same hideout.
“You can get out of here and go home as soon as you tell us where Hans Pekk is.”
“You have such a charming daughter,” another one added.
Ingel said that Hans was dead. Killed in a murderrobbery in 1945.
“What’s your daughter’s name?”
Aliide said that Hans’s friend Hendrik Ris
tla had been a witness. Hans and Hendrik Ristla had been going down the road on a horse, and suddenly they had been laid hold of and Hans was killed, just like that. Ingel started to get nervous. Aliide could smell it, although she gave no outward sign. Ingel stood proud and straight. One man paced the whole time, behind them. Walked and walked, and another one was walking in the corridor. The sound of boots . . .
“What a pretty name, for a pretty little girl.”
Linda had just turned seven.
“We’ll be asking your daughter these same questions shortly.”
They were quiet. And then still another man came in. And the man who had been interrogating them said to the one who had arrived, “Go talk to the girl. Don’t waste any time. Unscrew the light from the ceiling. Careful you don’t burn yourself. No, bring the girl here instead. Then lower that lamp, that cord over there, so it reaches the table. Wait until we’ve put the girl on the table.”
The man had just been eating something, he was still chewing. Grease glistened on his hands and the corners of his mouth. Doors opened and closed, boots marched, leather jackets creaked. The table was moved. Linda was brought in. The buttons were gone from her blouse; she held it shut with her hand.