1992
Läänemaa, Estonia
Even a Dog Can’t Chew Through the Chain of Heredity
When the girl started to talk about Vladivostok, her twitching eyebrow settled down, she forgot to rub at her earlobe, and a dimple leaped out on her cheek, disappeared, then came back again. Sunlight lit up the kitchen.
The girl had a pretty nose. The kind of nose that would have been a pleasure to see from the day she was born. Aliide tried to imagine Talvi in Zara’s place, sitting at the table chatting, twinkling, talking about her life, but she couldn’t. Since she had left home, Talvi had always been in a hurry to leave whenever she came to visit. If Aliide had been a different kind of mother, would Talvi have turned out differently? Maybe she wouldn’t scoff on the phone when Aliide asked if she’d planted a garden, saying that in Finland you can buy anything you need from the store. If Aliide had been different, would Talvi have come to help with the apple harvest, instead of just sending her some glossy photos of her new kitchen, her new living room, her new all-purpose appliance, and never pictures of herself? Maybe when Talvi was a young girl she wouldn’t have started to admire her friend’s aunt who lived in Sweden and had a car and sent the girls Burda magazine. Maybe she wouldn’t have started playing currency exchange and practicing disco dancing. Maybe she wouldn’t have wanted to leave. But the others wanted to leave, too, so maybe it wasn’t Aliide’s fault. But why had this surprisingly talkative girl from Vladivostok wanted to go to the West? She just wanted to earn some money. Maybe it was simply that Estonia was full of people who kept saying that they should have left for Finland or Sweden during the war, and the thing was repeated and passed on to the next generation with their lullabies. Or maybe Talvi had thought of wanting a foreign husband because her own parents’ marriage was a model for something she didn’t want for herself. This girl wanted to become a doctor and then go back home, but ever since she was a teenager Talvi had just wanted to go to the West and marry a man from the West. It started with her paper dolls—they drew clothes for them like the ones in Burda—and continued when she spent a whole summer scrubbing her Sangar jeans. She and her girlfriends rubbed them endlessly with a brick to make them look worn out like the jeans in the West. That same summer the neighbor boys played a game called “Going to Finland”—they built a raft and sailed it across the ditch, and then they came back again because they didn’t know what to do in Finland. Martin became more disillusioned every day. Aliide couldn’t share his disappointment, but when land restitution became the topic of the day, she had to admit that she felt disappointed in Talvi, because she wasn’t the slightest bit interested in the application process, not if it involved paperwork. If Aliide had been a different kind of mother, would Talvi be here to help her with these things?
When the girl had come here yesterday, Aino had been over to talk about land issues yet again, and Aliide had repeated the same advice she’d given her who knows how many times. She and her brothers should do the paperwork together, even if her brothers were drunks. That way if something happened to any of them, there would still be someone to take care of things. Aino wanted to wait at least until the army pulled out of the country—she suspected that the Russians would come back in full force, and what would happen then, would they all be taken to the station and put in cattle cars? Aliide had to concede that the soldiers didn’t look like they were going anywhere; they just came to the village now and then to thieve, making off with cattle and emptying the shops of tobacco. It was handy, though, to be able to buy army gasoline from them.
Aliide’s eyes crinkled up; there was a tickle in her throat. This Russian girl sitting on her wobbly-legged chair was more interested in what went on in this kitchen than Aliide’s daughter was. Talvi never talked as beautifully about her childhood as this girl did. And Talvi had never asked her how to make marigold salve. This girl wanted to know what the ingredients were. This girl might be interested in all the tricks the Kreels had taught Aliide—which plants to pick in the morning and which during the new moon. If it were possible, she was sure this girl would go with her to gather Saint-John’s-wort and yarrow when the time came. Talvi would never do such a thing.
1953–1956
Läänemaa, Estonian soviet socialist republic
Aliide Wants to Sleep Through the Night in Peace
When Aliide arrived at the birthing hospital, the Russian women were yelling “Batyuška Lenin, pomogy mne!” And they were still yelling to Papa Lenin for more help when she left with Talvi, and when the crying infant arrived at home Martin thanked Lenin. Martin had been waiting a long time for a child, and he’d been disappointed more than once. He had become convinced that he would never father a child. Aliide hadn’t been sorry about it—she didn’t want to be anywhere near children anymore, and she wouldn’t have wanted to raise a child to carry on her family line, in this new world, to become this world’s new kind of person, but in the year that Stalin died, amid all the bewilderment that ensued when that great papa vanished, a child started to grow inside her. Martin had talked to the child even before it was born, but Aliide didn’t know how to talk to it after it had come into the world. She left the babbling to Martin and boiled liquor bottles to use for baby bottles, watched as an endless number of nipples turned dark in the kettle, and scalded darning needles to poke holes in the tops. Martin fed Talvi. He even came home on his lunch hour to take care of this important task. Sometimes Aliide tried, but nothing ever came of it—the child wouldn’t stop crying until Daddy was home. Aliide had other ways of taking care that her daughter had a peaceful childhood.
One evening Martin came home smelling of alcohol and started to wash the walls, stopping now and then to smoke a Priima and then going back to cleaning. On the radio they were ranting about the outlay of Socialist labor, who had exceeded the norms and where. Aliide was making juice from Kosmo currant jelly—squeezing the jelly into the pot from a tube and adding boiling water and citric acid. The water turned red, and Aliide gave the half-empty tube to the little girl, who sucked the jelly straight out of it.
“They’re coming back.”
Aliide knew immediately who he was talking about. “You’re not serious.”
But he was.
“They’ve started rehabilitating them.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means Moscow’s going to let them come back. They’re talking about it in Tallinn.”
Aliide was about to blurt out that Nikita was crazy in his head, but she kept quiet, because she didn’t know yet what Martin thought of him, except that he looked like a workingman. Aliide thought he looked like a pig and his wife looked like a pig herder. Many people shared Aliide’s opinion, although she never expressed it out loud. But letting them come back? Just when life was beginning to settle into a routine, Nikita thought up the craziest possible idea. What was he thinking? Where did he imagine they would put them all?
“They can’t come back here. Do something.” “What?”
“I don’t know! Make it so they don’t come back here! So they don’t come back to Estonia at all. They can’t come back here!”
“Calm down! They’ve all signed article two-zero-six of the vow of silence.”
“What does that mean?”
“That they can’t talk about anything connected to their case. And I imagine they’ll have to sign another one to be let go. About their time in the camps.”
“So they can’t talk about these things at all?”
“Not unless they want to go straight back where they came from.”
The tense voice made Talvi cry. Martin picked her up in his arms and started to shush her. Aliide fumbled in the cupboard for the bottle of valerian. The floor felt soft.
“I’ll take care of it,” Martin said.
Aliide believed her husband, because he had always kept his word. And he kept his word this time, too.
They didn’t come back.
They stayed where they were.
Not t
hat they would have been let back in this house. Nowhere near it. But no matter where they were in Estonia, Aliide wouldn’t have been able to...
She wanted to sleep through the night in peace. She wanted to go out after dark and ride her bicycle in the moonlight, walk across the fields after sunset, and get up in the morning without worrying about her and Talvi being burned alive in the house. She wanted to get water from the well and see the kolkhoz bus bringing Talvi home from school, and she wanted Talvi to be safe even when she wasn’t watching over her. She wanted to live her life without ever encountering them. Was that too much to ask? Surely she could have that, if only for her daughter’s sake?
When those who had been at the camps came back and settled into their new lives, she could pick them out from among the other people. She recognized their dark gaze, every one the same, young and old alike. She made way for them on the street, from a long way off, and she felt fear before she made way. Fear before she turned her head. Fear before she even had time to realize her recognition of the smell of the camps, the thought of the camps in their eyes. That thought of the camps was always there in their look.
Any one of them could have been Ingel. Or Linda. The thought made her chest tighten. Linda would be so big now that Aliide wouldn’t necessarily recognize her. And any one of them could have been someone who had been in the same camp with Ingel, someone from the same barracks, someone Ingel may have talked to, someone she could have told about her sister. Maybe Ingel had photos with her—Aliide couldn’t be sure. Maybe Ingel had shown photos of her sister to someone, and now that person was coming toward Aliide on the street, and maybe they would recognize her. Maybe they would know something about Aliide Truu’s evil deeds, because the story went around the camp. Maybe they would follow her and burn down her house that night. Or maybe they would just throw a rock at the back of her head on her way home. Maybe they would make it so she fell down on the road as she went across the fields. These things happen. Strange accidents, people run over without warning. Martin had said that they hadn’t been able to look at the newspapers in the camps—they didn’t know anything about anything—but every barracks had walls. And where there are walls, there are ears.
The ones who came back from the camps never complained; they never disagreed and never grumbled. It was unbearable. Aliide had a powerful urge to tear the furrows from their brows, the creases from their cheeks, to wad them up and throw them back. Back onto the train that crossed the border at Narva.
1960
Läänemaa, Estonian soviet
Socialist Republic
Martin Is Proud of His Daughter
Martin got angry with Talvi only once during her childhood. She had come running home a couple of weeks before the new year. Aliide was home alone, so Talvi had to make do with her answer to a question—she didn’t have the patience to wait until her father came home.
“Mother! Mother, what’s Christmas?”
Aliide calmly continued stirring the gravy. “You’ll have to ask your father, sweetheart.” Talvi went into the foyer to wait for him, sat and leaned against the timber wall, kicking at the threshold.
When Martin came home, he flew into a rage. Not because of Christmas—no doubt he would have had a ready explanation for that. But he managed to get angry before the subject of Christmas came up, because the first thing Talvi wanted to know was what was the Liberation War that she read about in a book.
“What book?”
“This one.”
She handed it to him.
“Where did you get this?”
“Auntie gave it to me.”
“What auntie? Aliide!”
“I don’t know anything about it,” Aliide yelled from the kitchen.
“Well, Talvi?”
“Milvi’s mother. I was playing at their house.” Martin went out immediately. He didn’t even take his coat. He took Talvi with him to show him where Milvi lived.
Talvi ran home first, crying. Later that evening she came clumping up to her father’s side to make amends. Cigarette smoke wafted into the kitchen, and soon Talvi’s giggle could be heard. Aliide sat down beside the cooling potatoes. The chicken casserole was ready, and the gravy for dinner sat on the table turning to gel, a film forming on its surface, losing its shine. Martin’s socks waited on the chair to be darned; under the chair was a basket of wool waiting to be carded. Tomorrow at school, Talvi would tease the children whose families celebrated Christmas, that was certain. Tomorrow evening she would tell her father how she had thrown a snowball at the Priks boy and asked another boy something her father may at that very moment have been telling her to ask a child of such a family: “Has Jesus shown himself yet? Does your mom have the hots for him?” And her father would praise her, and she would chortle with pride and sulk at Aliide, because she would sense that Aliide’s praise lacked something, as it always did. It always lacked sincerity. Her daughter would be raised on Martin’s praise, on the stories Martin told, stories that never had anything Estonian in them. She would be raised on stories with nothing true in them. Aliide could never tell Talvi her own family’s stories, the stories she had learned from her granny, the ones she heard as she fell asleep on Christmas Eve. She couldn’t tell her any of the stories that she was raised on, she and her mother and grandmother and great-grandmother. She didn’t care to tell her own story, but the other stories, the ones she grew up with. What kind of person would a child become if she had no stories in common with her mother, no yarns, no jokes? How could you be a mother if there was no one to ask advice from, to ask what to do in a situation like this?
Talvi didn’t play with Milvi any more after that. Martin was proud of Talvi. He thought she was marvelous. She was particularly marvelous when she said she wanted to have Lenin’s baby when she grew up. And Martin wasn’t at all concerned that she couldn’t tell a plantain from a dewdrop or a fly agaric from a milk cap, although Aliide wouldn’t have thought that possible for a child who shared the same genes as her and Ingel.
1960s
Läänemaa, Estonian Soviet
Socialist Republic
Suffering Washes Memory Clean
While Martin took care of other aspects of child rearing, Aliide was responsible for everything that involved standing in line. As the years went by and Martin wasn’t summoned to Tallinn, the notion of his career potential diminished, and Aliide no longer expected him to get what they needed from the party—she stood in line to stand in line, arm in arm with Talvi, and thus taught her what a real Soviet woman’s life is like. She did avoid the meat line, because she had a friend, Siiri, at the butcher’s. When Siiri let her know that new stock had arrived, Aliide would weave her way through the overflowing trash bins to the back door of the shop, tugging Talvi behind her. She never did learn to walk slowly enough for the child, in spite of her best intentions, and always rushed along so the little girl had to run to keep up. Aliide knew she was behaving as if she wanted to get away from the child, but she couldn’t muster any guilt about it, and when she tried to look like a good mother she just felt more grotesque. It was better to focus on bragging to the other women about Martin’s fathering skills, completely blotting out her role as a mother in the process. Since Martin was a jewel of a father, they thought of Aliide as the luckiest of women.
Luckily the child grew and started to make her way behind her mother at a good clip through the swarm of flies behind the butcher’s. Sometimes the flies went up their noses or in their ears, and sometimes they found them in their hair later, or at least Aliide’s head itched so much that she was quite sure some of them had laid eggs in her scalp. The flies didn’t seem to bother Talvi—she didn’t even wave them away, she just let them strut along on her arms and legs, which disgusted Aliide. When they had left Siiri’s shop, Aliide would undo Talvi’s braids and shake out her hair. She knew it was silly, but she couldn’t help it.
On the day that Talvi had a dental exam at school, Aliide went to the back room at Siiri’s. Siiri was
just washing the Semipalatinsk sausage in saltwater, a scrub brush in her hand. There was a pile of Tallinn and Moscow sausage waiting behind her. Their surfaces were crawling with maggots.
“Don’t worry. These are going to the front counter. A new load of fresh ones should arrive soon.”