Four days. Then just three. Both days Aliide had said she was coming over to Ingel’s house, but she hadn’t gone.
A clever cat with cunning eyes sat on a stump in the woods.
A pipe in his mouth and a cane in his hand . . .
Two days. Three nights.
Asked the children to read if they could,
and those of them who couldn’t read,
they all got pulled by the hair,
and those who could, and understood,
were petted and treated fair.
Not one day. Not one night.
1949
Läänemaa, Estonian Soviet
Socialist Republic
Hans Doesn’t Strike Aliide, Although He Could Have
A wind blew from where the little birds were perched in the bare birch trees. There was a buzzing in Aliide’s head as though she hadn’t slept for ten nights straight. When she came to the front door, she shut her eyes and strode ahead blind, groped for the handle, knocked down the saw that was hanging on the wall, went inside, and opened her eyes in the darkness.
The cupboard in front of Hans’s little room was still there.
It was only then that her heart began to race, her dry lower lip split, blood spurted into her mouth, her sweaty fingers slipped against the side of the cupboard, and she heard sounds now and then that belonged in the kitchen: Ingel’s footsteps, Linda’s cough, the clatter of a cup, Lipsi’s paws on the floor. The cupboard didn’t want to move; she had to push against it with her shoulder and hip, and it creaked, a complaint that echoed loudly through the empty house. Aliide stopped to listen. The silence crackled. The noises she had imagined in the kitchen were immediately silenced when she stopped moving. You could already see signs on the floorboards that the cupboard was always being moved. That ought to be covered up. There was something under the legs of the cupboard. Aliide bent over to look. Wedges. Two wedges. To keep it from swaying. When had Ingel put them there? Aliide removed them. The cupboard moved smoothly away from the wall.
“Hans, it’s me.”
Aliide tried to pull open the door of the chamber, but her sweaty hand slipped when she reached for the little hole they’d made to hold on to.
“Hans, can you hear me?”
There was no sound.
“Hans, help me. Push on the door. I can’t open it.”
Aliide knocked on the door, then pounded on it with her fists.
“Hans! Say something!”
A rooster crowed somewhere far off. Aliide startled, panicked, pummeled the door. She felt a pain in her knuckles that reached all the way to the soles of her feet. The wall swayed, but the silence persisted. Finally she went to the kitchen for a knife, shoved it into the crack of the door, and got hold of the edge of the trim. She yanked open the door. Hans was huddled in a corner of the cell, motionless, his head on his knees. It wasn’t until Aliide touched him that he raised his head. Only when she had asked him three times to come out did he stagger into the kitchen. And only when she asked what had happened did he speak.
“They took them away.”
That silence. The kind you don’t hear in a house in the countryside in the middle of the day. Nothing but the scratch of a mouse in the corner. They stood in the middle of the kitchen and there was a hum inside them and their breath rasped in the silence and Aliide had to sit down and put her own head on her knees, because she couldn’t bear to look at Hans’s face, covered with a night of weeping.
The silence and the humming grew, and then, suddenly, Hans grabbed his knapsack from the hook.
“I have to go after them.”
“Don’t be crazy.”
“Of course I have to!”
He tugged open the lower kitchen cupboard to get some provisions, but it was nearly empty. He strode into the food pantry.
“They took the food with them.”
“Hans, maybe the soldiers stole it. Maybe they’ve just been taken to the town hall for questioning. You remember, Hans, it happened before. Maybe they’ll be home soon.”
Hans rushed into the front room and opened the wardrobe.
“All their winter clothes, all the warm things are gone. At least Ingel took the gold with her.”
“The gold?”
“It was sewed into her fur coat.”
“Hans, they’ll come back soon.”
But he was already leaving. Aliide ran after him, grabbed him by the arm. He tried to shake her off. The sleeve of his shirt was torn, a chair fell over, the table was overturned. She wouldn’t let Hans go—never, ever. She held on with all her might, wrapped around his leg, and wouldn’t let go even when he grabbed her by the hair and pulled. She wasn’t going to let go; she would tire him out first. And finally, when they lay sweating on the floor, panting and weary on the cold floor, Aliide almost laughed. Even now, even in this situation, Hans hadn’t struck her. He might have; she expected him to, expected him to pick up the bottle on the table and hit her on the head with it or whack her with the shovel, but he didn’t. That’s how good Hans was, how much he cared about her, even at a time like that. She could never have better proof than that.
There was no one as good as Hans, Aliide’s beautiful Hans, the most beautiful one of all.
“Why, Liide?”
“They don’t need a reason.”
“I need a reason!”
He looked at her expectantly. Aliide had hoped that he would have been resigned to what had happened. Everyone knew that they didn’t need any special reason, much less any evidence for their arbitrary, completely imaginary accusations.
“Didn’t you hear anything? They must have said something when they came here.”
THEY. The word swelled up large in Aliide’s mouth. As a child she used to get a demerit for saying certain words out loud, like God, hell, thunder, death. Once she had tried it in secret, reciting them one after the other. A couple of days later, one of the chickens died.
“I couldn’t hear everything. There was a lot of shouting and banging. I tried to get the door open, to ambush them with my Walther, but it wouldn’t open, and then they were all gone. It happened so quickly and I was stuck in that room. Lipsi barked so much...”
His voice crumbled.
“Maybe it was because of . . .” The words stuck in Aliide’s throat. Her head turned to the side, as if of its own accord, and she thought about that dead chicken. “Maybe it was because she was your widow. And Linda was your daughter. Enemies of the state, I mean.”
It was cold in the kitchen. Aliide’s teeth chattered. She wiped her chin. Her hand came away red; her split lip had bled.
“Because of me, you mean. My fault.”
“Hans, Ingel put wedges under the feet of the cupboard. She wanted you to stay in hiding.”
“Get me a drink.”
“I’ll make a better hiding place for you.”
“Why do I need a better one?”
“It’s not good to be in the same place too long.”
“Are you suggesting that Ingel will talk? My Ingel?”
“Of course not!”
She dug in her pocket and pulled out a flask of homebrewed liquor.
Hans didn’t even ask about Lipsi.
“Go milk the cows,” he said wearily.
Aliide pricked up her ears. Maybe it was an innocent request, and the cows did have to be milked, but she couldn’t leave him alone here in the kitchen, not like this. He might run to the town hall.
1949
Läänemaa, Estonian Soviet
Socialist Republic
Aliide Saves a Piece of Ingel’s Wedding Blanket
A couple of weeks after Ingel and Linda were taken away, Martin, Aliide, and the dog moved into the house. It was a shimmering morning, the moving truck rocked back and forth, and Aliide had done everything possible the whole morning to make sure that nothing would go wrong, careful in her every movement to be sure that she didn’t miss anything, mess anything up. She woke up and put her right foot on th
e floor first, stepped over the threshold and through the front door with her right foot, opened doors with her right hand, hurrying to open them before Martin’s left hand spoiled their luck. And as soon as they got to the house, she rushed to be the first to take hold of the gate with her right hand, and the door, and to step into the house with her right foot. Everything went well. The first person the truck met on the road was a man. That was a good sign. If it had been a woman she would have seen her from far off and insisted that Martin stop the truck. She would have disappeared into the brush, told him that her stomach hurt, waited for the woman to pass, but although that would have avoided bad luck for her personally, the truck still would have met a woman first, and so would Martin. And what if the second person they met was a woman? She would have asked Martin to stop and run into the bushes again, and he would have started to worry about her. She couldn’t tell Martin about bearers of good luck or about the evil eye— he would have just laughed at his wife for listening to too many old wives’ tales. They had each other, Lenin, and Stalin. But luckily the whole trip went well. Her toes curled with anticipation and her hair shone with joy. Hans! She had saved herself and Hans! They were safe, and they were together!
Aliide shot a glance at herself in the front-room mirror as Martin unloaded the wagon, and perhaps she flirted a little with her own bubbly reflection. Oh, how she would have liked to have Martin away for the night, working, anywhere, so she could have let Hans out of the attic and sat with him all night long. But Martin wasn’t going anywhere, he wanted to spend their first night in their new home with his wife, his comrade, his beloved—with her—although she did try asking if he wouldn’t miss the company of men and made it clear that she wouldn’t be angry if he put other duties before her, but he just laughed at such nonsense. The party could get along fine without him for one night, but his wife couldn’t!
Ingel’s smell still filled the house; the windows still had her fingerprints on them, or Linda’s—they must have been Linda’s, they were so low on the glass. Linda’s chestnut bird was on the floor under the window, standing in a hollow knot in the wooden floorboard, its tail feathers spread out. There was nothing to suggest a hasty departure or panicked packing: the cabinets weren’t left open, the cupboards weren’t ransacked. The only straggler was the cupboard door that Hans had opened. Aliide closed it.
Ingel had left everything in good order, neatly taken her own dresses and Linda’s from the white wardrobe and closed the door properly, even though it was hard to close— you always had to push it hard but at the same time slowly, or else it would come open again on its own. Ingel had closed it as if she hadn’t been in a hurry at all. The dresser was emptied of socks and underwear, but the tablecloth that covered it was straight, as were the rugs on the floor, if you didn’t count the one that had got crumpled up when Aliide tried to keep Hans from leaving. She hadn’t noticed it before—she’d been building the room in the attic and hadn’t come downstairs; she always climbed straight up to the attic, didn’t dawdle in the kitchen or make anything hot for Hans to eat. Hans would have liked to come out and help with the building, but Aliide overrode his objections. His state of mind seemed so unstable that she thought it was better that he stay in the old room, crying and drinking the liquor she brought him.
It was then that Aliide understood that the only disorder in the house was what remained of her struggle with Hans, from that first time when she came there after Ingel and Linda were taken away. There was no sign that the Chekists had looked for weapons, and the food pantry was clean. Maybe Martin had told them to leave this house in order, that he and his wife were moving into it. Would they have listened to him? Probably not—the Chekists didn’t have to listen to anyone. The only trace of their visit was on the floor. There was dried mud from the men’s boots on the floor in every room. She cleaned away the mud before she started arranging their belongings. She would check the yard later—Lipsi must have been shot and left there.
Aliide picked up a dress and put it in the wardrobe— with her right hand—and her good spirits returned, even if she hadn’t got Martin away for the night. She put her brush on the table under the mirror, next to Ingel’s. Putting her own things in their places made the house feel like she and Hans shared the place. Our home. Aliide would sit there, at the kitchen table, and Hans would sit across from her, and they would be almost like man and wife. She would cook for him and warm his bathwater and offer him a towel when he was shaving. She would do all the things that Ingel used to do for him, all the wifely duties in the house. She would be almost like a wife. Hans would see that she was a better baker and could knit better socks and cook more delicious things. Hans would finally have a chance to see how pretty she was, how sweet she could be, now that Ingel wasn’t tossing her braids in his direction all the time. He would have to talk to her now instead of Ingel. He would have to see her. And above all he would finally have to see that Aliide had her own special qualities, her wonderful knowledge of the secrets of plants and healing. She had always been better at this than Ingel, but who would notice it? It was more important for a proper Estonian farm wife to have a basic knowledge of dough and milking. Who was going to notice that Ingel might flavor her cucumbers with horseradish, but Aliide could use the same root to cure a stomachache? Well, Hans would know it now! Aliide bit her lip. You can’t show off those tricks—pride was the end of every cure, and humility was its beginning, and silence was its power.
But then Martin interrupted her thoughts and tugged her backward, against his hips, and whispered in his little mushroom’s ear, said he was proud of his wife, prouder than he had ever been, and he put his hands on her waist, spun her around the room, and then he fell onto the bed and said, “Now this is a man’s bed! The man of the house! I wonder what all a man could do in a bed like this?”
That night, Aliide woke to a noise like the call of a curlew. Martin was snoring beside her. His armpit smelled. The curlew call was Hans crying. Martin didn’t wake up. Aliide lay in the dark and stared at the striped German pattern of the wall-hanging. Mama had made it. It was embroidered by her hands. How much gold had Ingel taken with her? Enough to buy her freedom? Hardly—as the oldest daughter, her parents gave her maybe ten rubles worth of gold, if that much. Maybe she could use it for enough bread to stay alive.
The next morning Aliide put Ingel’s brush in the bottom drawer of the bureau, the drawer with the broken handle that had to be opened with a knife. She touched the brush only with her left hand.
She found Ingel’s wedding blanket in the drawer. It had a church, and a house as plump as a mushroom, and a husband and wife stitched into the red background. Aliide tore off the six-pointed stars with a pair of scissors, tore the rickrack from around the edge of that map of happiness with her fingers, and the man and wife disappeared from the picture, just like that, the cow just shreds of yarn, the cross on the church nothing but fluff! Aliide was there, too—a lamb, her namesake, was embroidered on it. Ingel had shown off the fruits of her skill and thought Aliide would be pleased, but she hadn’t been thrilled to see her namesake on Ingel’s wedding blanket, and Ingel could tell, and she had run away behind the house crying. Aliide had to go after her and comfort her and say it was a lovely lamb, a beautiful idea, and even though most people didn’t make wedding blankets anymore, Ingel did, and it was lovely. So what if other people thought it was old-fashioned—Aliide didn’t think so. She had rocked Ingel in her arms, and Ingel had calmed down, and she didn’t give up her wedding blanket; she busied herself with it every evening. Mama had a wedding blanket, and there was no wife as happy as Mama. Aliide couldn’t deny that, could she? Aliide couldn’t, but now she was ripping out bits of yarn from the lamb, and from the spruce tree, and soon there was no more map of happiness, just a red background, good wool, from the real lamb, which belonged to her now. Martin peeked in the door, saw Aliide on her knees in a pile of yarn with the scissors in her hand, a knife beside her, her nostrils glowing red and her eyes bright.
He didn’t say anything and left the room. Aliide’s steaming breath fogged up the room and spread through the keyhole and filled the house.