From the slow sentences it became clear that the girl was on her way to Tallinn in a car with someone and had got into a fight with this someone, and the someone had hit her, and she had run away. “Who were you with?” Aliide finally asked.
The girl’s lips trembled a moment before she mumbled that she had been traveling with her husband.
Her husband? So she was married? Or was she a decoy for thieves? For a criminal decoy, she was rather incoherent. Or was that the idea, to arouse sympathy? That no one would close their door on a poor girl in the state she was in? Were the thieves after Aliide’s belongings or something in the woods? They’d been taking everyone’s wood and sending it to the West, and Aliide’s land restitution case wasn’t even close to completion, although there shouldn’t have been any problem with it. Old Mihkel in the village had ended up in court when he shot some men who had come to cut trees on his land. He hadn’t gotten in much trouble for it—there had been some surreptitious coughing and the court had taken the hint. Mihkel’s process to get his land back had been only half completed when the Finnish logging machinery suddenly appeared and started to cut down his trees. The police hadn’t meddled in the matter— after all, how could they protect one man’s woods all night, especially if he didn’t even officially own them? So the woods just disappeared, and in the end Mihkel shot a couple of the thieves. Anything was possible in this country right now— but nobody was going to cut trees on Mihkel’s land without permission anymore.
The village dogs started to bark, the girl startled and tried to peek through the chain-link fence into the road, but she didn’t look toward the woods.
“Who were you with?” Aliide repeated.
The girl licked her lips, peered at Aliide and at the fence, and started rolling up her sleeves. Her movements were clumsy—but considering her condition and her story, graceful enough. Her mottled arms were revealed and she stretched them toward Aliide as if in proof of what she was saying, at the same time turning her head toward the fence to hide it.
Aliide shuddered. The girl was definitely trying to elicit sympathy—maybe she wanted inside the house to see if there was anything to be stolen. They were real bruises, though. Nevertheless, Aliide said:
“Those look old. They look like old bruises.”
The freshness of the marks and their bloodiness brought more sweat to Aliide’s upper lip. The bruises were covered up again, and there was silence. That’s the way it always went. Maybe the girl noticed Aliide’s distress, because she pulled the fabric over the bruises with a sudden, jerky movement, as if she hadn’t realized until that moment the shame in revealing them, and she said anxiously, looking toward the fence, that it had been dark and she hadn’t known where she was, she just ran and ran. The broken sentences ended with her assuring Aliide that she was already leaving. She wouldn’t stay there to trouble her.
“Wait right there,” Aliide said. “I’ll bring some valerian and water.” She went toward the house and glanced at the girl again from the doorway. She was perched motionless on the bench. It was clear she was afraid. You could smell the fear from a long way off. Aliide noticed herself starting to breathe through her mouth. If the girl was a decoy, she was afraid of the people who sent her here. Maybe Aliide should be, too—maybe she should take the girl’s trembling hands as a sign that she should lock the door and stay inside, keep the girl out, come what may, just so she would go away and leave an old person in peace. Just so she wouldn’t stay here spreading the repulsive, familiar smell of fear. Maybe there was some gang about, going through all the houses. Maybe she should call and ask. Or had the girl come to her house specifically? Had someone heard that Talvi was coming from Finland to visit? But that wasn’t a big deal as it used to be.
In the kitchen, Aliide ladled water into a mug and mixed in a few drops of valerian. She could see the girl from the window—she hadn’t moved at all. Aliide took some valerian herself, and a spoonful of heart medicine, although it wasn’t mealtime, then went back outside and offered the mug. The girl took it, sniffed at it carefully, set it down on the ground, pushed it over, and peered at the liquid as it sank into the earth. Aliide felt annoyed. Was water not good enough?
The girl assured her to the contrary, but she wanted to know what Aliide had put in it.
“Just valerian.”
The girl didn’t say anything.
“Do I have any reason to lie to you?”
The girl glanced at Aliide. There was something canny in her expression. It troubled Aliide, but she fetched another mug of water and the valerian bottle from the kitchen, and gave them to the girl, who was satisfied once she had smelled it that it was just water, seemed to recognize the valerian, and poured a few drops into the mug. Aliide was annoyed. Was the girl teasing her? Maybe she was just plain crazy. Escaped from the hospital. Aliide remembered a woman who got out of Koluvere, got an evening gown from the free box, and went running through the village spitting on strangers as they passed by.
“So the water’s all right?”
The girl gulped too eagerly, and liquid streamed down her chin.
“A moment ago I tried to rouse you and you yelled, ‘No water.’ ”
The girl clearly didn’t remember, but her earlier sobs still echoed in Aliide’s head, reverberating from one side of her skull to the other, spinning back and forth, beckoning to something much older. When a person’s head has been pushed under the water enough times, the sound they let out is surprisingly consistent. That familiar sound was in the girl’s voice. A sputtering, without end, hopeless. Aliide’s hand fought with her. She was aching to slap the girl. Be quiet. Beat it. Get lost. But maybe she was wrong. Maybe the girl had just gone swimming once and nearly drowned— maybe that’s why she was afraid of water. Maybe Aliide was letting her imagination run away with her, making connections where there weren’t any. Maybe the girl’s yellowed, time-eaten language had got Aliide thinking of her own.
“Hungry? Are you hungry?”
The girl looked like she hadn’t understood the question or like she had never been asked such a thing.
“Wait here,” Aliide commanded, and went inside again, closing the door behind her. She soon returned with black bread and a dish of butter. She had hesitated about the butter for a moment but had decided to bring it with her. She shouldn’t be so stingy that she couldn’t spare a little dab for the girl. A very good decoy, indeed, to take in someone like Aliide, who had seen it all, and so easily. The compulsive ache in Aliide’s hand spread to her shoulder. She held on to the butter plate too tightly, to restrain her desire to strike.
The mud-stained map was no longer on the grass. The girl must have put it in her pocket.
The first slice of bread disappeared into the girl’s mouth whole. It wasn’t until the third that she had the patience to put butter on it, and even then she did it in a panic, shoving a heap of it into the middle of the slice, then folding it in half and pressing it together to spread the butter in between, and taking a bite. A crow cawed on the gate, dogs barked in the village, but the girl was so focused on the bread that the sounds didn’t make her flinch like they had before. Aliide’s galoshes were shining like good polished boots. The dew was rising over her feet from the damp grass.
“Well, what now? What about your husband? Is he after you?” Aliide asked, watching her closely as she ate. It was genuine hunger. But that fear. Was it only her husband she was afraid of?
“He is after me. My husband is.”
“Why don’t you call your mother, have her come and get you? Or let her know where you are?”
The girl shook her head.
“Well, call some friend, then. Or some other family member.”
She shook her head again, more violently than before.
“Then call someone who won’t tell your husband where you are.”
More shakes of the head. Her dirty hair flew away from her face. She combed it back in place and looked more clearheaded than crazy, in spite of her incessan
t cringing. There was no glimmer of insanity in her eyes, although she peered obliquely from under her brow all the time.
“I can’t take you anywhere. Even if I had a car, there’s no gas here. There’s a bus from the village once a day, but it’s not reliable.”
The girl assured her she would be leaving soon.
“Where will you go? Back to your husband?”
“No!”
“Then where?”
The girl poked her slipper at the stones in the flower bed in front of the bench. Her chin was nearly on her breast.
“Zara.”
Aliide was taken aback. It was an introduction.
“Aliide Truu.”
The girl stopped poking at the stone. She had grabbed hold of the edge of the bench after she’d eaten, and now she loosened her grip. Her head rose a little.
“Nice to meet you.”
1992
Läänemaa, Estonia
Zara Searches for a Likely Story
Aliide. Aliide Truu. Zara’s hands let go of the bench. Aliide Truu was alive and standing in front of her. Aliide Truu lived in this house. The situation felt as strange as the language in Zara’s mouth. She dimly remembered how she had managed to find the right road and the silver willows on the road, but she couldn’t remember if she had realized that she had found it, or whether she had stood in front of the door during the night, not knowing what to do, or decided that she would wait until the morning, so she wouldn’t frighten anyone by coming as a stranger during the night, or whether she had tried to go into the stable to sleep, or looked in the kitchen window, not daring to knock on the door, or if she had even thought of knocking on the door, or thought of anything. When she tried to remember, she felt a stabbing in her head, so she concentrated on the present moment. She didn’t have any plan ready for how to behave when she got here, much less for when she met the woman she was looking for here in the yard, Aliide Truu. She hadn’t had time to think that far. Now she just had to try to make her way forward, to calm her feeling of panic, although it was waiting to break out and grab her at any moment—she had to stop thinking about Pasha and Lavrenti, she had to dare to be in the present moment, meeting Aliide Truu. She had to pull herself together. She had to be brave. To remember how to behave with other people, to think up an attitude toward the woman standing in front of her. The woman’s face was made of small wrinkles and delicate bones, but there was no expression in it. Her earlobes were elongated, and stones embedded in gold hung from them on hooks. They reflected red. Her irises seemed gray or blue gray, her eyes watery, but Zara hardly dared to look higher than her nose. Aliide was smaller than she had expected, downright skinny. The aroma of garlic wafted from her on the wind.
There wasn’t much time. Pasha and Lavrenti would find her, she had no doubt of that. But here was Aliide Truu, and here was the house. Would the woman agree to help? Zara had to make her understand the situation quickly, but she didn’t know what to say. Her head rang empty, although the bread had cleared her thoughts. Mascara tickled her eyes, her stockings were wrecked, she smelled. It had been stupid to show her the bruises—now she thought that Zara was the kind of girl who brings misfortune on herself or asks to be beaten. A girl who had done something wrong. And what if the old woman was like the babushka that Katia had told her about, or like Oksanka, who did work for men like Pasha, sending girls to the city for men like him. There was no way of knowing. Somewhere in the back of her mind there was mocking laughter, and it was Pasha’s voice, and it reminded her that a girl as stupid as she was would never make it on her own. A stupid girl like her was only fit to have the stuttering, slovenliness, smelliness beat out of her— a girl that stupid deserved to be drowned in the sink, because she was hopelessly stupid and hopelessly ugly.
It was awkward the way Aliide Truu kept looking at her, leaning on her scythe, chattering about the closing of the kolkhoz commune, as if Zara were an old acquaintance who had stopped by to chat about nothing in particular.
“There aren’t a terrible lot of visitors around here anymore,” Aliide said, and started to tally up the houses whose young people had moved away. “Everybody left Kokka to build houses for the Finns, and all the children from Roosna left to start businesses in Tallinn. The Voorels’ boy got into politics and disappeared somewhere in Tallinn. Someone should call them and tell them that they passed a law that says you can’t just up and leave the countryside. How are we supposed to even get a roof fixed around here, if there aren’t any workmen? And is it any wonder that the men don’t stay, when there aren’t any women? And there aren’t any women, because there are no businessmen. And when all the women want is businessmen and foreigners, who’s going to want a working man? The West Kaluri fishing commune sent its own variety show to perform in Finland, in Hanko, their sister city, and it was a successful trip, the Finns were lining up for tickets. Then, when the group came home, the director gave an invitation to all the young men and pretty girls to come dance the cancan for the Finns— right in the newspaper. The cancan!”
Zara nodded—she strongly agreed—as she scratched the polish off of her fingernails. Yes, everyone was just running after dollars and Finnish markka, and yes, there used to be work for everyone, and yes, everyone was a thief nowadays, pretending to be a businessman. Zara started to feel cold, and the stiffness spread to her cheeks and tongue, which made her already-slow and hesitant speech still more difficult. Her damp clothes made her shiver. She didn’t dare to look directly at Aliide, she just glanced in her direction. What was she driving at? They chatted as if the situation were an utterly normal one. Her head wasn’t spinning quite so badly now. Zara pushed her hair behind her ears, as if to hear better, and lifted her chin. Her skin felt sticky, her voice felt stiff, her nose trembled, her armpits and groin were filthy, but she managed to laugh lightly nevertheless. She tried to reproduce the voice she had sometimes used a long time ago when she ran into an old acquaintance on the street or in a shop. A voice that felt far away and strange, completely unfitted to the body that it came from. It reminded her of a world she didn’t belong to, a home she could never return to.
Aliide swung the scythe northward and moved on to roof-tile thieves. You had to be on the lookout day and night just to keep a roof over your head. The Moisios had even had their stairs stolen, and the rails from the railroad tracks—the only material available was wood, because everything else had been stolen. And the rise in prices! Kersti Lillemäki said that prices like this were a sign of the end of the world.
And then, in the middle of this chitchat, came a surprising question:
“What about you? Do you have a job? What line of work are those clothes for?”
Zara panicked again. She realized that she needed an explanation for her ragged appearance, but what could it be? Why hadn’t she already thought of it? Her thoughts dashed away from her like long-legged animals, impossible to catch. Every species of lie deserted her, emptied her head, emptied her eyes and ears. She desperately wrestled a few words into a sentence, said she had been a waitress, and as she looked at her legs she remembered her Western clothes and added that she had been working in Canada. Aliide raised her eyebrows.
“So far away. Did you earn good money?”
Zara nodded, trying to think of something more to say. When she nodded, her teeth started to chatter and closed like a trap. Her mouth was full of phlegm and dirty teeth, but not one sensible word. She wished the woman would stop questioning her. But Aliide wanted to know what Zara was doing here if she had such a good job in Canada.
Zara took a breath, said she had come with her husband on vacation to Tallinn. The sentence came out well. It followed the same rhythm as Aliide’s speech. She was already starting to get the hang of it. But what about her story? What would be an appropriate story for her? The beginning of the story she had just made up was struggling to get away, and Zara’s mind lunged after it and grabbed it by the paws. Stay here. Help me. Bit by bit, word by word, give me a story. A good sto
ry. Give me the kind of story that will make her let me stay here and not call someone to come and take me away.
“What about your husband? Was he in Canada, too?”
“Yes.”
“And the two of you are on vacation?”
“That’s right.”
“Where did you plan to go from here?”
Zara filled her lungs with air and succeeded in saying in one breath that she didn’t know. And that a lack of funds had made matters a little difficult. She shouldn’t have said that. Now, of course, Aliide would think she was after her wallet. The trap sprang open. Her story escaped. The good beginning slipped away. Now Aliide would never let her inside, and nothing would ever come of any of it. Zara tried to think of something, but all her thoughts were dashing away as soon as they were born. She had to tell her something—if not her story, then something else— anything. She searched for something to say about the molehills that stretched in a row from the end of the house, the tar-paper roofs of the bees’ nests peeking between apple trees heavy with fruit, the grindstone standing on the other side of the gate, the plantain weed under her feet. She searched for something to say like a hungry animal searching for prey, but everything slipped loose from the dull stubs of her teeth. Soon Aliide would notice her panic, and when that happened, Aliide would think, There’s something not right about this girl, and then it would all be over, everything ruined, Zara just as stupid as Pasha said she was, always ruining everything, a stupid girl, a hopeless idiot.