When the load had come and gone, Aliide had piled up quite a haul in her bag: a couple of curled Polish sausages, a hunk of Krakova, and even some frankfurters. She was just presenting them to Martin when Talvi interrupted her shopping inventory with a surprising bit of news.
“Two big cavities.”
“What does that mean?” Aliide asked, startled at the sound of her own voice. It was like the whine of a dog that’s been struck. Talvi was already wrinkling her brow. The bundle of frankfurters had fallen on the table. Aliide pressed her hands against the oilcloth—they had started trembling again. She felt the knife marks in the waxy surface of the fabric, the bread crumbs and the dirt in the cracks. Something fell from the orange dome light: a fly’s filth falling from the surface of the lightbulb onto the back of her neck. The bottle of valerian was in the cupboard. Could she get it out and put a few drops in her glass without Martin noticing?
“What does it mean? It means you’re going to see Comrade Boris!” Martin laughed. “Do you remember Uncle Boris, Talvi?”
Talvi nodded. There was a bit of fat on the corner of Martin’s mouth. He bit off some more. The bits of fat in the Krakova sausage gleamed. Had Martin’s eyes always bulged like that?
“Were they sure?” Aliide said. “The people who looked at your teeth? That you have two cavities? Maybe we don’t need to do anything about it.”
“No, I want to go to town.”
“You heard her.” Martin grinned.
“Your father will buy you some ice cream there,” Aliide added.
“What?” Martin said, surprised. “Talvi’s certainly a big enough girl now to take the bus by herself.”
Talvi started to jump up and down.
“Yes! Yes! Yes!”
Now Aliide could think of nothing else, not one thing except that Martin must go with Talvi to the dentist. She would be safe with Martin. There was a buzzing in Aliide’s ears. She put the frankfurters and sausages in the refrigerator and started to put away the dishes with a clatter, at the same time secretly pouring the bottle of valerian into her glass. She chased it with water, and then some bread, so she wouldn’t have medicine on her breath.
“You could say hello to Boris while you’re there,” Aliide said. “Wouldn’t that be nice?”
“Yes it would, but my work...”
“Yes! Yes! Yes!” Talvi yelled, interrupting him. “All right then. We’ll think of something. We’ll have a lovely trip to the dentist.”
Talvi’s eyes were so much like Linda’s. Martin’s face and Linda’s eyes.
1952
Läänemaa, Estonian Soviet
Socialist Republic
The Smell of Cod Liver, the Yellow Light of a Lamp
The smell of chloroform floated from the door to meet her. In the waiting room, Aliide clung to a copy of Soviet Woman magazine, in which Lenin expressed the opinion that in a capitalist system, a woman was doubly oppressed—a slave to capital, regular work, and to housework. Aliide’s cheek was badly swollen; the cavity in her tooth was so deep that the nerve was visible. She should have taken care of it earlier, but who would want to sit in one of these barbersurgeons’ chairs? The real doctors had escaped to the West, the Jewish ones to the Soviet Union. Some of them had returned, but they were still scarce.
Aliide spelled out the words, tried to focus beyond the stabbing pain in her head. It is only in the Soviet Union and in people’s democracies that a woman works as a comrade, side by side with the men, in all fields, in agriculture and transportation as well as in teaching and the cultural professions, and takes an active part in political life and in running society. When Aliide’s turn came, she shifted her gaze from the magazine to the brown plastic floor mat and stared at it until she was in the chair, clinging to the armrests. The nurse was boiling needles and drill bits. She put them aside and came to give Aliide a shot, then went to prepare the filling material. The pot bubbled on the electric burner. Aliide closed her eyes, and the numbness spread all through her chin and cheeks.
The man’s hands smelled like onion, pickles, and sweat. Aliide had heard that the new dentist’s hand were so hairy it was a good thing you couldn’t feel anything; that way you didn’t mind his hairiness. And she’d heard it was best to shut your eyes so you couldn’t see the thick, black grove of hair. He wasn’t a real doctor at all, but during the war a German dentist who was a POW had tried to teach him what he could.
He started to pump the drill with his foot, it rasped and screeched, stabbed her ears, the crack of bone, and she tried not to think about the hairy hands. A fighter plane on maneuvers flew so low that the windows shook. Aliide opened her eyes.
It was the same man.
In that room.
The same hairy hands.
There in the basement of the town hall, where Aliide had vanished, where she just wanted to get out alive. But the only thing left alive was the shame.
When she left, she didn’t lift her eyes from the floor, the stairs, the street. An army truck rattled by at high speed and covered her with dust that stuck to her gums and her eyes and turned her burning skin to ash.
Through the open window of the culture house she could hear a choir practicing.
In my song and in my work.
Another truck went bumping past. Gravel flew at Aliide’s legs.
You are with me, great Stalin.
Martin met her at the front door and nodded toward the table. There was a can of cod liver there, a treat for his little mushroom, as soon as she was able to eat. Half an onion lay shriveled on the cutting board, left over from a sandwich. It stank, and so did the liver. Another, empty cod-liver can lay open next to the cutting board, the toothed edge of its tin lid grimacing. Aliide felt sick.
“I already ate, but I’ll make my mushroom a sandwich just as soon as she’s ready to eat. Were you mad at me?”
“No.”
“Are you mad at me now?”
“Not at all. I can’t feel anything. Numb. It just feels numb.”
The bit of tooth left in the socket rasped. Aliide stared at the half of Martin’s cod-liver sandwich still on the table and couldn’t say anything, although she knew that Martin was waiting for her to thank him for getting her the cod liver. If he had just left out the onion.
“Boris is a nice fellow.”
“Are you talking about the dentist?”
“Who else would I be talking about? I’m sure I’ve told you about Boris before.”
“Maybe you have. But you didn’t tell me he was a dentist.”
“He was just transferred there.”
“What did he do before?”
“The same kind of work, of course.”
“And you knew him then?”
“We did some work for the party together. I suppose he didn’t send me any greetings?”
“Why would he send you greetings through me?”
“Because he knows we’re married, of course.”
“Ah.”
“What’s the matter?”
“I should go do the milking.”
Aliide went straight to the bedroom and took off her rayon dress. It had looked terribly pretty that morning, with its red polka dots, but now it looked disgusting, because it was perhaps a little too pretty and fit too well at the bust. The flannel sweat guards under the arms were wet through. The lower half of her face was still missing and she couldn’t feel the hooks of her earrings hanging from her flesh. She put on her milking coat, tied a scarf around her head, and washed her hands.
In the barn, Aliide left the smell of onions behind. She leaned against the stone foundation. Her hands were red as she rubbed them with the scrub brush and cold water. She was tired. The land under her was tired—it swayed and pitched like the breast of someone near death. She heard the sounds of the animals behind her, they were waiting for her and she had to go to them, and she realized that she had been waiting, too. Waiting for someone, just like she had in that cellar, shrinking like a mouse in the corner, a
fly on the lightbulb. And after she got out of the cellar she was waiting for someone. Someone who would do something to help or at least take away part of what had happened in that cellar. Stroke her hair and say that it wasn’t her fault. And say that it would never happen again. Promise that it would never happen again, no matter what.
And when she realized what she had been waiting for, she understood that that person would never come. No one would ever come to her and say those words, and mean them, and see to it that it never happened again. No one would ever come and do it for her, not even Martin, although he sincerely wanted what was best for her.
The cod liver in the kitchen dried up, turning dark around the edges of the sandwich. Martin poured himself a drink and waited for his wife to come back from the barn, poured another glass, and then another, wiped his mouth on his sleeve in the Russian manner, poured a fourth glass, didn’t touch the cod-liver sandwich—he was waiting for his wife—and the red star of the glorious future shone above him, the yellow light of a lamp, a happy family.
Aliide watched him through the window and couldn’t bring herself to go inside.
1992
Läänemaa, Estonia
Zara Finds a Spinning Wheel and Sourdough Starter
Zara took a breath. Now and then as she was talking about Vladivostok, she forgot the time and place, got excited like she used to once a long time ago. Aliide’s puttering at the stove brought her back to the present, and she saw that a glass had been thrust into her hand. The kefir culture had been washed and the milk exchanged for fresh. Zara was holding the old milk in her glass. She obediently took a drink, but it was so sour that her eyelids scrunched up, and when Aliide went out to the yard to wash the horseradish, she shoved the glass behind the dishes on the table. The familiar aroma of stewing tomatoes rose from the stovetop and Zara took a deep breath of it as she started to help Aliide slice more tomatoes. It felt nice. There was a cozy feeling in the kitchen—the steaming pots, the rows of jars cooling. Grandmother had always been in a good mood when she was canning, putting things up for the winter. It was the only housework she ever participated in—she would, in fact, take charge, only occasionally telling Zara’s mother to shred the cabbage—but now Zara sat at the table with Aliide Truu, who hated Grandmother. She should raise the subject again, not wait for a suitable moment that was never going to come. Aliide was absorbed in grating the horseradish.
“This is for winter relish. Three hundred grams, and the same amount of garlic, apple, and peppers. A kilo of tomatoes, salt, sugar, and vinegar. You just put it all in the jar, you don’t need to heat it. It preserves the vitamins.”
Zara’s hands moved nimbly as she sliced the tomatoes, but her tongue still wouldn’t loosen up. Aliide might be angry at her, too, if she knew who she was—she might refuse to help her, and then where would she go? How could she break the relaxed mood that her talk of Vladivostok had created? Grandmother and Aliide couldn’t have had their falling out over a few ears of grain—it wasn’t possible, no matter what Aliide said about it. What had really happened here?
Zara had been watching Aliide whenever she was looking the other way or absorbed in her housework—her fragility, the black around her fingernails, her calloused skin with faint blue veins under the tan. She had been searching for something familiar, but the woman puttering around the kitchen didn’t resemble the girl in the photo at all, much less her grandmother, so she concentrated her observations on the house. When Aliide didn’t have her eye on her, Zara touched the shears and the large, rusty key hanging on the wall. Was it the key to the shed? It had hung on the wall next to the stove when Grandmother was here. She found a wooden rake’s tooth on the lintel over the door—had Grandmother’s father made it? A washstand. A black coatrack with Aliide’s coat hanging from it. Was that the cabinet where Grandmother had kept her trousseau? Here was the stove she had warmed herself by, and there was a spinning wheel stashed behind the cabinet. Was it the spinning wheel that Grandmother had spun, kicking it with her foot? Here was Grandmother’s flywheel, here was her bobbin, treadle, and spindle.
When Zara went to get some empty jars from the pantry, she found a cask behind the milk cooler. She felt it. Smelled it. There was something dried on the rim. Sourdough starter? Was it the same starter that Grandmother made her bread from? Two and a half days, that’s what she had said. The dough had to sour for two and a half days in the back room, covered with a cloth, before it could be kneaded. The smell of bread would hang about the room as it ripened, and on the third day it was time to start kneading the dough. She kneaded it with a sweaty brow, twisting and pounding it, this dried-up dough, covered in dust, hardly used over the decades, the same starter that Grandmother’s young hands had kneaded when she was still happy, here with Grandfather. And you had to bring the baker some water now and then to rinse the dough from her hands. The bread oven was heated with birch wood, and later a piece of salt pork would be put in a bowl in the oven, and the fat would sizzle out of the meat into the bowl to brush on the fresh bread. And the flavor! And the smell! Rye from your own field! It all seemed amazing and sad and Zara felt like the cask was very near to her all of a sudden, as if she were touching her young grandmother’s hand. What had Grandmother’s hands been like when she was young? Had she put goose fat on them every night? Zara would have liked to explore the yard, too—she had offered to fetch Aliide some water from the well, but Aliide said that she’d better stay indoors. Aliide was right, but still Zara felt like going out in the yard. She wanted to walk around the house, see everything around it, smell the dirt and grass. She wanted to go and peek under the shed. Grandmother had been afraid of that spot when she was little—she had imagined that dead souls lived there, that they would pull her under the shed and she wouldn’t be able to get out again, and she would see them all come looking for her, searching, her mother in a panic, her father running, calling her name, and she wouldn’t be able to do anything because the dead souls pressed her mouth shut, souls that tasted like moldy grain. Zara wanted to see if Grandmother’s apple tree was still standing—it was a white transparent, an early golden apple next to the shed. Next to the white transparent there should be an onion apple tree; maybe she would recognize it, even though she’d never eaten onion apples. And she wanted to see the damson tree, and the plum tree on its stony ground, in the middle of the back field where there were snakes, which were scary, but there were also blackberries, so you always had to go there. And the cumin—did Aliide still grow it in the same place?
1991
Berlin, Germany
The Price of Bitter Dreams
Right from the start Pasha had made it clear that Zara was in debt to him. She could leave as soon as she’d paid him back, but not before! And the only way she could pay him was by working for him—working efficiently, doing work that paid well.
Zara didn’t understand where the debt came from. Nevertheless, she started counting how much of the loan she had paid off, how much was still left, how many months, how many weeks, days, hours, how many mornings, how many nights, how many showers, blow jobs, customers. How many girls she saw. From how many countries. How many times she had to redden her lips and how many times Nina had to give her stitches. How many diseases she got, how many bruises. How many times her head was shoved in the toilet or how many times she was drowned in the sink with Pasha’s iron fist around the back of her neck. You can count time without the hands of a clock, and her calendar was always renewed, because every day she was fined for something. She danced badly even after a week of practice.
“That’s a hundred dollars,” Pasha said. “And a hundred for the video.”
“What video?”
“And a hundred for stupidity. Or did you think you could watch that video for free, girl? We brought them here to teach you to dance, baby. If we hadn’t, they could have been sold. Get it?”
She got it—she didn’t want any more fines. But she got them anyway—fines for learning slowly, for complaining
about the customers, for having the wrong look on her face. The count started from the beginning again. How many days, how many mornings, how many blue eyes.
And of course she had to work to eat.
“My grandpa was in Perm in thirty-six. You didn’t get fed there if you didn’t work.”
Pasha would praise Zara and tell her that she was really paying down her debt nicely. She wanted to believe his notebook, with its dark blue, smelly plastic cover and Soviet seal. The meticulous, even columns of numbers made Pasha’s promises believable enough that it was quite easy to put your faith in them—if you wanted to, that is. And the only way to keep going was to put your faith in them. A person has to have faith in something in order to survive, and Zara decided to believe that Pasha’s notebook was her ticket out of there. Once it was done, she would be free, she would get a new passport, a new identity, a new story for herself. Some day all this would happen. Some day she would rebuild herself.