“I don’t think so. They were going so fast.” “They didn’t stop?”
“Of course not.”
“Don’t ever, ever, ever go near one of those cars. If you see one, run away. It doesn’t matter where. Run right home.”
Zara was astonished. So many words out of her mother’s mouth at one time. That didn’t happen very often. She didn’t mind about being hit—but the flash in her mother’s eyes. It was very bright. There was an expression on her mother’s face—a big expression. Normally her mother’s face didn’t have any expression at all.
Her mother sat up that whole night at the kitchen table, staring straight in front of her. And after that evening she would peek out between the curtains as if she expected a black Volga to be in front of the house, watching, idling quietly. Later on she would get up during the night, look at Zara, who pretended to be asleep, go to the window and peek out, then go back to bed and lie there stiffly until she fell asleep—if she fell asleep. Sometimes she would stand and peer out from behind the curtain until morning.
One time Zara got out of bed, came up behind her mother, and tugged at the hem of her flannel nightgown. “No one is coming,” she said.
Her mother didn’t answer, she just pulled Zara’s hand loose from her nightgown.
“Lenin will protect us, Mom. There’s nothing to worry about.”
Her mother was quiet, turned to look at Zara for a long time and a little past her, as was her habit. As if there were another Zara behind Zara’s back, and her mother was directing her gaze at that other Zara. The darkness dragged on, and the clock made a cracking sound. The soles of their feet had sunk into the worn wooden floorboards, seeping into their hollows, their skin stuck down with a glue that let go only when her mother picked her up and tucked her back under the blanket. And they hadn’t said a word.
Zara had also heard stories about Commissioner Berija and the secret police. And the black cars that used to go out looking for young girls, trolling the streets at night, following them and pulling up next to them. The girls were never heard from again. A black Volga was always a black Volga.
And now Oksanka—a movie star from someplace far away—had emerged from a black Volga and waved to her with her long, unbroken, red fingernails, scratched the air and smiled broadly and graciously like a blue blood disembarking from an ocean liner.
“Is that your Volga?” Zara asked.
“My car’s in Germany,” Oksanka said, laughing.
“You have your own car, then?”
“Of course! Everybody in the West has their own car.”
Oksanka crossed her legs daintily. Zara tucked her legs under her chair. The flannel lining of her slippers was damp like it always was, just like the dull pink lining of Oksanka’s slippers had once been, when she used to wear the exact same kind, and they had filled out their student journals together at this same table, their fingers stained black.
“Cars don’t interest me,” Zara said.
“But you can go wherever you want in a car! Think about that!”
Zara thought about the fact that her mother would be home any minute and see a black Volga in front of the house.
Grandmother hadn’t seen the car because she was sitting in her usual spot and you couldn’t see the street from that window. She wasn’t really interested in the life of the street like the babushkas who sat along the wall. The sky was enough for her.
*** When Zara walked her back to the Volga, Oksanka said that her parents’ roof didn’t leak anymore. She had fixed it.
“You paid for it?”
“In dollars.”
Before she got into the car, Oksanka gave Zara a longish booklet.
“This is about the hotel where I’m working.”
Zara turned it over in her hands. The thick paper was shiny; there was a woman smiling on it with teeth that shone an unreal white.
“It’s a brochure.”
“A brochure?”
“There are so many hotels that they have to have these. Here are some more. I haven’t been to these places, but they take Russians, too. I can arrange a passport for you, if you like.”
The men waiting for Oksanka started the car as she climbed into the backseat.
“There are stockings just like these in that plastic bag,” Oksanka called out, showing her legs, poking one of them out of the car door. “Feel them.”
Zara reached out and stroked Oksanka’s leg.
“Unbelievable, aren’t they?” Oksanka laughed. “I’ll come back again tomorrow. We can talk some more then.”
1992
Läänemaa, Estonia
Every Clink of the Knife Rings Mockingly
The girl’s black-and-blue legs showed under the linen towel. The stockings had hidden them, but now her arms and legs were bare, goosefleshed and still damp from the bath. There was a scar across her chest that disappeared into the towel. Aliide was repulsed. Standing clean in the kitchen door, the girl looked younger; her skin was like the flesh of a freshly sliced cinnamon apple. Water dripped from her hair onto the floor. Her just-washed smell spread through the front room and made Aliide crave a sauna—but her sauna had burned down years ago. She avoided looking at the girl, examined the insulating pipe along the wall—which seemed to still be in working order—rapped on a green pipe, and brushed away the spiderwebs with her cane.
“There’s plantain essence on the table. It’s good for your skin.”
The girl didn’t make a move, she just asked for a cigarette. Aliide pointed her cane at the Priimas on the radio cabinet and asked the girl to light her one, too. When she’d gotten both of them lit, she went back to her fingernails. The drops of water from her hair were collecting in a puddle.
“Sit on the sofa, dear.”
“It’ll get wet.”
“No, it won’t.”
The girl flopped into a corner of the sofa and hung her head so that the water would drip onto the floor. Rüütel was talking about the elections on the radio—Aliide changed the station. Aino had said she was going to vote, but Aliide wasn’t going to.
“You probably don’t have any hair dye, do you?”
Aliide shook her head.
“What about paint or ink? Stamp ink?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Carbon paper?”
“No.”
“What should I do, then?”
“Do you think you could disguise yourself that easily?”
The girl didn’t answer; she just brooded.
“How about if I get you a clean nightgown and we have a little supper?”
Aliide stubbed out her Priima in the ashtray, dug a pink flowered nightgown out of the dresser, and left it for the girl to put on. She could hear bottles clinking together in the kitchen. So the plantain essence had passed muster. Darkness pressed against the windows behind the curtains, and Aliide checked several times to see if any of them were left open. They weren’t. There was just a bit of a draft along the bottom of the sash. She could carry out the bathwater tomorrow. The scratch of a mouse in the corner startled her, but her hand was steady as she started marking dates on the relish jars. There was newspaper stuck to the sides of some of the jars, which, put together, read, 18 percent of this year’s crimes have been solved. Aliide drew a check mark on it to indicate the worst of the batch. News of Tallinn’s first sex shop was marked as the best of the lot. The pen was running out of ink—Aliide rubbed it against the paper. For the first few days there was a problem with little boys who kept barging into the shop like swarms of flies, and had to be kept away from the place. The paper disintegrated—Aliide gave up and took the ink cartridge out of the pen and put it in the jar with the other empties. The dates were written in a shaky hand. She’d have to finish them later. It was not terribly difficult to move the full jars over to the counter, but the pounding in her chest wouldn’t stop. She had to be rid of the girl by tomorrow. Aino would be coming to bring milk and they were supposed to go to church to get the ca
re package and Aliide didn’t want to leave the girl in the house alone. Plus, if Aino saw the girl, there would be no way to stop the news from spreading to the village. Assuming that the girl’s husband did exist, he sounded like the kind of visitor Aliide didn’t want in her house.
She noticed a piece of sausage that she’d bought on her last shopping trip lying on the kitchen table, and remembered the fly. The sausage had gone bad. The fly had flown out of Aliide’s mind as soon as she found the girl in the yard. She was stupid. And old. She couldn’t keep her eye on several things at once. She was already whisking away the sausage but changed her mind and looked more closely at it. Usually flies are so tired out by laying eggs that they just collapse in a daze right where they are. She didn’t see any flies or any eggs, but when she picked up the paper wrapper of the sausage, there was one chubby little wiggling individual there. Aliide tasted vomit in her mouth. She grabbed the sausage and started slicing it onto the girl’s sandwich. Her fingers were tingling.
The girl got dressed and came into the kitchen. She looked even younger in the flannel nightgown.
“The thing I don’t understand is how is it that a girl like you knows Estonian?”
“What’s so strange about that?”
“You’re not from around here. You’re not from anywhere in Estonia.”
“No, I’m from Vladivostok.”
“And now you’re here.”
“Yeah.”
“Rather intriguing.”
“Is it?”
“Indeed it is, for an old person like me. I never heard that they had schools in Vladivostok now where they teach Estonian. Times sure have changed.”
Zara realized she was rubbing her earlobes again. She put her hands back in her lap and then set them on the table next to the bowl of tomatoes. The biggest tomato was the size of two fists, the smallest the size of a teaspoon, all of them swollen and overripe, split and dripping juice. Aliide’s behavior fluctuated, and Zara couldn’t tell where her words and actions would lead next. Aliide sat down, got up, washed her hands, sat down, bustled around, washed her hands again in the same water, dried them, examined the jars and the recipe book, cut and peeled tomatoes, washed her hands —ceaseless activity that was impossible to interpret. Now every word she said felt half-accusing, and as she set the table the clink of every knife and the clatter of every dish rang mockingly. Each sound made Zara flinch. She had to think of what to say, to behave like a good girl, a trustworthy girl.
“My husband taught me.”
“Your husband?”
“Yes. He’s from Estonia.”
“Ah!”
“From Tallinn.”
“And now you want to go there? So he’ll be sure to find you?”
“No!”
“Why, then?”
“I have to get away from here.”
“I’m sure you can get to Russia. Through Valga. Or Narva.”
“I can’t go there! I have to get to Tallinn and over the border. My husband has my passport.”
Aliide bent over her bottle of heart medicine. The smell of garlic wafted to meet her. She took a spoonful of the stiff tonic honey and carried the bottle back to the refrigerator. She should make some more of it, maybe a little stronger, put more garlic in it—she felt so weak. The scissors felt heavy in her hand as she snipped some onion tops into the potatoes. Her teeth felt too weak even for bread. The girl had a ponderous gaze. Aliide picked up a sour pickle, cut off the end, sliced it up, and started popping the slices into her mouth. The juice lubricated her throat and her voice, made it supple, in control.
“Your husband must be a special kind of man.” “Yes, he is.”
“’Cause I’ve never heard of an Estonian man who would go to Vladivostok to get a wife and then teach her Estonian.
The world has certainly changed!”
“Pasha is Russian Estonian.”
“Pasha? Well, even so. I never heard of a Russian Estonian man who would go to Vladivostok to get a wife and then teach her Estonian. Is that what happened? Because normally what happens is that Russian Estonians speak Russian, and their wives start spitting out Russian just like they do. Sunflower seeds just flying out with every word.” “Pasha is a special kind of man.”
“Well, of course! And aren’t you a lucky girl! Why did he go to Vladivostok to find a wife?”
“He had a job there.”
“A job?”
“Yes, a job!”
“’Cause normally they come here from Russia to work, not the other way around. So it was a question of work, was it?”
“Pasha is a special kind of man.”
“A real prince, from the sound of it! And he even took you to Canada on vacation.”
“Actually, we got to know each other better in Canada. I had gone there to work as a waitress, like I said before, and then I ran into a man that I knew—Pasha.”
“And then you got married, and he said that you didn’t have to work as a waitress anymore.”
“Something like that.”
“You could write a novel about your wonderful story.”
“Could I?”
“Pampering, vacations, cars. A lot of girls would stick around if they had a man like that.”
1991
Vladivostok, Russian federation
In the Wardrobe Is Grandmother’s Suitcase, and in the Suitcase Is Grandmother’s Quilted Coat
Zara hid the things Oksanka had given her in the suitcase she had stored in the wardrobe, because she didn’t know what her mother would think of the whole thing. She wasn’t worried about her grandmother; she knew she wouldn’t tell her mother about what Oksanka had said. But Zara would have to mention Oksanka’s visit, because the women in the apartment commune would gossip about it in any case. They would want to know what gifts she had brought, and she’d have to give each of them a swallow of gin. Her mother would probably be happy about the gifts, too, but would she be happy about Zara getting a job in Germany? Would it help if Zara could tell her how many dollars she would be able to send home? If it were a whole lot of dollars? She would have to ask Oksanka tomorrow about how large a sum she should venture to promise. Maybe she should clear up some other things, too. Would she be able to save enough to live on for five years, so that she could go to college and graduate? Would she be able to save some money to send home, too? Or what if she just worked there for a little while, maybe half a year—would she manage to save enough in that amount of time?
Zara put the stockings from Oksanka in the suitcase. If her mother saw them, she would sell them immediately, say that Zara didn’t need them.
Grandmother stopped looking at the sky for a moment. “What’s in there?”
Zara showed her the package. It was like a transparent plastic envelope with a shining, multicolored printed picture inside of a white-toothed woman and a long pair of legs. There was a little window in the package that you could see the stockings through. Grandmother turned the package over in her hands. Zara was opening it to show her the stockings, but Grandmother stopped her. No point in that. She would only spoil them with her rough hands. Was it even possible to darn such fine stockings?
“Just stash them away,” Grandmother said, adding that silk stockings had been hard currency when she was young.
Zara went back to the wardrobe and decided to put the stockings and the other things at the very bottom of the suitcase. She dragged the case out onto the floor and started to unpack it. They always had suitcases packed and ready in the wardrobe. One for her mother, one for her grandmother, one for Zara. They said it was in case of fire. Grandmother packed and checked them at night sometimes, clattering around so much that Zara woke up. When Zara was growing up, Grandmother had always replaced the clothes in the suitcase when she outgrew them. That’s where all their important papers were, too, and the jacket with the money hidden in the collar, and the medicines that they replaced at regular intervals. Plus needles, thread, buttons, and safety pins. In Grandmother’s s
uitcase, there was also a shabby gray quilted coat. Its padding was almost petrified, and the stitches that ran up and down it were as uniform as barbed wire, a peculiar contrast to the ungainliness of the coat.
As a child, Zara had always imagined that Grandmother couldn’t see anything but the sky glimmering outside the window—that she didn’t notice anything that was happening in the house—but once, when her suitcase accidentally fell off the shelf in the wardrobe and crashed onto the floor and the locks broke, she turned quickly, like a young girl, and her mouth had twisted open like the lid of a jar. The quilted coat, which Zara had never seen before, had ballooned to the floor. Grandmother had remained seated in her regular spot by the window, but her eyes had latched on to Zara, into Zara, and Zara didn’t understand why she felt embarrassed and why it was a different kind of embarrassment than when she stumbled or answered wrong at school.