She decided to give her mother’s apartment a thorough disinfection. There was a shortage of cleaning chemicals, but Hellmuth could help take care of that.
JUUDIT HAD PREPARED HERSELF for innuendos about her scandalous life, had assumed that rumors must have finally reached the farm. But there was no indication that anyone at the Armses’ place had anything against her except that she’d been away so long. She was ordered straight to the table, where lung cutlets were waiting. The petrol she’d brought as a gift elicited a flood of gratitude. Anna and Leonida continued their work and refused her help—she ought to rest after her long journey. The granite stone was heated on the stove and Leonida opened the newly butchered pig’s stomach while Anna participated in her usual unhelpful way, bustling around behind her. Along with the pig, they offered up village gossip: the rats had killed their best mouser, a high-ranking officer had summoned Lydia Bartels to Berlin, Mrs. Vaik was living at the Bartels place alone now. Neither Anna nor Leonida seemed concerned about their children, though they did mention that Roland’s gelding was all right—Aksel said he always went to the barn when the sky started to rumble.
The two women were talking around something, circling it like hungry crows. The air in the kitchen was heavy with people who were absent, dense with prattle about the “war of nerves.” There might be an ultimatum made to Germany and its allies at the conference in Tehran, they said, and Leonida added something about how it was all a bluff, a propaganda war aimed at Germany:
“Of course we know that every one of these announcements is just another Bolshevik attempt to cover their own weaknesses and difficulties. We just have to remember that. You have to be prepared to defend against psychological bombs, too. Isn’t that right, Juudit?”
JUUDIT FLINCHED, nodded. They hadn’t mentioned her husband once. They hadn’t hinted at her bad reputation. Leonida groaned as she lifted the stone into the pig stomach. There was a hiss and a sputter, steam rose as the hot stone rolled inside it and cleaned it. The kitchen was filled with the smell of scorched meat. Juudit remembered her first visit to the Armses’ farm after she’d heard about Rosalie’s fate. She’d left Tallinn immediately and found the kitchen at rest, as if on a sickbed, none of the work done except for the fire lighted in the stove, Leonida fumbling for the handkerchief in her sleeve without ever managing to get it out, leaving it bulging there like a tumor. Now Rosalie’s spirit had faded from the house; everything connected with her had been gathered up and Leonida had to turn the intestines and wash and salt the stomach alone, make the sausage alone, without Rosalie. Juudit still didn’t fully grasp that Leonida would never have her daughter back, Juudit would never have her cousin back, as if Rosalie had never been a part of this family, as if Roland had never been engaged to Leonida’s daughter. The house had never felt so strange, and Juudit had never felt so strongly that she didn’t belong here.
It was just as impossible to understand why she herself didn’t say a word about Rosalie, why she joined the ranks of the silent. Maybe there was nothing to say. Maybe life was so fragile and meaningless that there was no need to add to their troubles. There was headcheese to be made, lard to be rendered; there were intestines to be salted for next year’s sausage—so much work to do, all to maintain the fragile lives of others. When she’d been waiting for Tallinn to be destroyed, and hoping for her own destruction, she hadn’t understood this, but now she did, ever since the refugee incident. She had too much to lose. Maybe Leonida and Anna did, too. The thought made her look at them with new eyes. Was the extra money they made from the sale of the lard reason enough to keep silent?
The stone in the stomach had stopped hissing. Leonida and Anna had been watching her the whole evening, she was well aware of that.
“Juudit, there’s something I wanted to talk to you about.”
IT WASN’T UNTIL she got home to Roosikrantsi Street that Juudit’s tightly stitched patience failed her. With trembling hands she mixed a sidecar that sloshed over the edge of the glass, and the parquet floor rocked like the deck of a ship. Had Anna gone crazy? And what had happened to the sensible Leonida? Their demands were unreasonable, worse than Roland’s.
After the third sidecar, her head started to clear, but she couldn’t sit still. She opened the kitchen cupboards, glad that she had given the cook time off. She’d found a note from Hellmuth on the table: due to urgent business he had to travel, would return in a week. So she had time to calm down, to think about what to do. She finally found some eggs, checked to make sure the bowl was clean, cracked them, mixed in some sugar, and started to whip them. She whipped her way into the bedroom, took a gramophone disk from the dress box in the wardrobe, started the Boswell Sisters playing, and whipped. Paul Whiteman was next in line. She whipped until it started to get dark, time for the blackout blinds. The eggs turned shiny and stiff. She wrote in the top of them, like she had as a girl. The man she would marry. Then she realized she hadn’t written H, for Hellmuth, in the pale yellow surface; she’d written a D, for Deutsch.
She fetched a spoon, sat down next to the gramophone, and ate the whole bowlful. Her access to a pantry full of eggs could disappear at any moment. After the last refugee transport she’d resolved to never again put herself in a position that threatened her quality of life. But how could she have known that a new threat was waiting around the corner? She snapped open her purse and took out her tube of Pervitin. Two tablets. It helped a little. Not enough. Her mind was whirring like Anna’s spinning wheel. Where had Anna and Leonida got the idea to start organizing refugee routes? Weren’t they afraid for themselves anymore, for the farm? Leonida obviously didn’t understand Juudit’s work, her position; she had seemed sincerely puzzled when she saw Juudit’s reaction to her suggestion, when Juudit said, “How can you be planning such a thing? After all the Germans have done for Estonia!”
“We have to get these people out of the country.”
“What does that have to do with me? Besides, it’s winter,” she had protested.
“They can go over the ice. We have to save them if we can.”
Anna’s thin skin had been splotched with excitement, and her shrill voice had joined in with Leonida’s lower pitch. “You’re a part of this family. Can’t you be helpful for once? Have you forgotten my uncle? He killed himself the moment the Russians’ first planes appeared in our skies, because he’d seen the Russian revolution. Have you forgotten what we experienced during Bolshevik times? The communists will kill us all!” Juudit had left after a loud exchange of words, without saying goodbye, without taking her package of headcheese. Did they really think that she, who worked for the Germans, would be so easy to convince? It was too much of a coincidence that these old women would choose that moment to suggest refugee aid to Juudit. If Leonida knew, then the whole country knew. This was too small a place for secrets. Only Rosalie remained a secret.
When she’d dashed out of Leonida’s house, Aksel had caught up to her quickly with his horse, insisting that she get in the sleigh. She had stomped her felt boots for a moment, squeezed her fists inside her muff, then relented. Aksel wasn’t conciliatory, didn’t demand that she come back; he just set off to take her to the train station, patted her shoulder clumsily, and said she should forgive Leonida.
“She’s not the same woman she used to be. Sorrow has few words.”
The only change Juudit had noticed in Leonida was a heart grown colder, but she didn’t want to argue with Aksel.
“And Anna is terrified of the Russians coming. She can hardly sleep, stays up all night listening to the sky. That’s how it is.”
Aksel had already turned away, ready to leave. “Our only daughter,” he said as he climbed into the sleigh and disappeared in a puff of snow.
Juudit snapped an icicle from the eaves of the station and bit it as she went looking for the station office. She found a telephone there and placed a call to Hellmuth’s chauffeur, who had dropped her off at the station earlier to wait for Aksel and gone ahead to the hotel. It
would have been too complicated to explain why a secretary had an Opel and a chauffeur at her disposal.
She’d spent the night at the hotel before returning to Tallinn. On the way home she’d asked the chauffeur to stop at the cemetery. The grave had no marker. As if Rosalie had never existed. Juudit didn’t know what she had come for, but she was sure of one thing—she would no longer have anything to do with Anna or Leonida. All of a sudden she understood those people who would rather bring their possessions onto the boat than their families.
Reval, Estland General Commissariat, Ostland National Commissariat
THIS WAS the second day in a row that Juudit had let Roland into the Roosikrantsi apartment before Hellmuth got home, and she didn’t know how to explain it to herself; lately she wasn’t sure who she was more afraid of, or why. There were too many Germans coming and going—the military commissary and court were right nearby—and yet she let Roland come to the apartment. Yesterday he’d been dressed as a chimney sweep, today as a delivery boy from Weizenberg’s grocery. The precautions he took did nothing to calm Juudit as she kept watch in the entryway. She listened in turn to the sounds from the hallway and Roland working in the office, but who else could she turn to? There was no one else she could talk to about Anna and Leonida’s intentions, no one else who could help her, or even advise her, no one she could trust in these matters even a little. Roland’s attitude had once again surprised her. He insisted that the whole thing was a coincidence and then immediately used her moment of weakness to demand that she let him into the Roosikrantsi apartment. Roland was so naive. Contrary to what he imagined, Estonia would never need witnesses to the destruction wrought by the Germans; there would be no war reparations, because Germany wasn’t going to lose. Or had she let Roland in because she herself no longer believed in a German victory? Or was the real reason Hellmuth’s comment before he went to Riga, that perhaps a life in the South Estonian countryside wasn’t for them after all? Maybe there was no place in Estonia for them. Hellmuth had thought that Berlin would always be open to them, but who could feel welcome in a place where there was war? Juudit agreed completely. She wanted to get away from it. With Hellmuth, and quickly.
She’d thought about it for many nights and days, thought about Berlin or some other metropolis where no one would know she had divorced, or rather left, her husband. Her relatives, acquaintances, Roland, everyone here could talk about it and she wouldn’t care in the least. But it was a long way to Berlin. It was a long way to anywhere. Was Hellmuth really willing to settle someplace other than Germany, someplace where no one would look askance at a German from the Reich attached to an Estonian woman? Like Commandant Drohsin at Ereda and that Jewish woman, Inge Syltenová. Juudit had seen the report in Hellmuth’s office. They had fallen in love, the commandant had escaped, and friends at the prison had dug a tunnel for Inge. They were caught attempting to reach Scandinavia and they committed double suicide. But of course Juudit and Hellmuth weren’t in the same situation. As she got up to put out her cigarette, Juudit wondered if she dared ask Hellmuth whether they had any money other than ostmarks. Did they have enough Reichsmarks? It would be better yet if they had gold. Or even silver. Something. She ought to have accepted the gold watches from the refugees. Why had she been so childishly honorable about that? If Hellmuth wasn’t willing to go someplace other than Germany, he wouldn’t have been talking about places without war—there was no other way to interpret it. So why was she risking their future by letting Roland into Hellmuth’s office, when the cook or the maid might come back from the market at any moment?
The office door slammed. Roland’s steps creaked across the parquet floor of the drawing room.
“I hope you left everything in its place,” Juudit said.
Roland didn’t answer, just went to the servants’ entrance, shoving his notes into his breast pocket. On the threshold he stopped and turned to look at Juudit, who stood swaying between the mirrored drawing room doors.
“Come here.”
Juudit’s eyelashes pressed her gaze down to the pattern of parquet. Too much mascara. That’s all it was. It was such a long way to the door; Roland was so far away. She held on to the doorjamb, put her right foot over the threshold, then her left, held on to the kitchen table, the sink, and finally stood in front of him, wobbling like a gelatin.
“There was one other thing,” Roland said. His field jacket smelled of questionable lodgings, smoke, a coat that hadn’t been taken off to sleep. “The Feldgendarmerie intercepted three trucks. They were all full of refugees. Two of the trucks were organized by Kreek.”
“Kreek?”
“I’m sure you remember him. The shot-putter. Two of his fishermen are members of our ring. Kreek charges the refugees three thousand marks and gives twenty percent to the truck driver. The money’s collected from the refugees before they get in the truck. They don’t have to pay the fishermen if the cargo never arrives. Kreek has to be stopped. Should have been stopped a long time ago. You could do it—Juudit, don’t look so frightened.”
“How?”
“Tell your German about it.”
Juudit stumbled backward. “You can’t ask me to do something like that. How would I explain how I got the information?”
“Just tell him that you’ve heard rumors about someone who’s organizing refugee transports by sea. He can take care of the rest.”
“But they’ll be killed.”
Roland came up very close to her. His eyes were hidden under his hat brim—he’d left his hat on when he came inside. “What do you think happens to the ones who fall into the hands of the Feldgendarmerie?”
Juudit wrapped her arms around herself in a lonely woman’s embrace. The handkerchief in her shirt cuff throbbed against her wrist.
“Don’t fret about Anna and Leonida. I already told you, forget what they said.”
“How?”
“Trust me, it’s just a coincidence that they mentioned their idea to you. Old women talking nonsense.”
She didn’t believe him. It couldn’t be a coincidence. He just wanted to keep her calm. She squeezed her arms tight. Maybe the whole situation was so desperate that Roland was secretly planning an escape. Maybe all of them knew deep down what was going to happen, so there would be no point in telling Roland about the conversations Hellmuth had with the other officers in the evenings: “… Wouldn’t it change the Führer’s opinion if we had to leave Finland?… Ostland must not be surrendered, Ostland must not be surrendered, that’s all they keep repeating in Berlin.… For Sweden’s sake, of course. So that Sweden can hold its line, and the Führer probably also has the idea that we have friends in Finland, people who won’t tolerate a new regime, who need our support.… It’s crazy! All for the sake of Sweden and Baltische Öl. We can’t take another hit. We can’t defend ourselves.…” Once, after too many cognacs, Hellmuth had curled up next to her and said he suspected they couldn’t fight off the Bolsheviks much longer. “But you can’t talk about this, you understand? With anyone. Think of the hysteria it would cause if the Estonians thought we couldn’t hold our own against the Bolsheviks.…” And Juudit had nodded. Of course, she said.
Instead she presented a demand to Roland before she’d even had time to think it through:
“I’ll expose Kreek and the others on one condition: that Hellmuth and I are given places on a boat when the time comes. I’ll pay all the costs.”
She was immediately horrified by her own words. What had she said? She hadn’t talked about any such plans with Hellmuth. Was she hoping Roland would refuse, ask her to come with him instead? Why didn’t she explain? Why didn’t she tell him that she was afraid of Anna’s stupid scheme?
Roland’s cheeks twitched. But he didn’t ask why Hellmuth wanted to leave, didn’t ask why Juudit was willing to leave behind not just Tallinn but also Berlin, didn’t ask if she and Hellmuth had already planned this. He didn’t ask anything. He said:
“Fine.”
Reval, Estland General Co
mmissariat, Ostland National Commissariat
THE APARTMENT WAS SILENT. Juudit sensed Hellmuth as soon as she stepped inside the front door, but the apartment was silent, the hall was still, the kitchen mute, the air motionless, the servants sent away. The moment had arrived, she knew it at once. The floor in the hallway sighed as if with regret; the drawing room curtains were pulled tightly shut, their pleats fossilized; the leaves of the ficus were grayish. Juudit put her silver fox on the trumeau. It slipped off and fell curled up on the floor. She took off her coat. It resisted. The sleeves wanted to go back out into the hallway; her overshoes didn’t want to come off, and when they did come off they flew toward the door, their toes pointing out toward the stairway. She could still dash out, down to the street, but maybe there was already a car waiting there. Maybe there was a row of men waiting for her. Maybe the whole building was surrounded. Juudit’s breath caught in her throat, the sound of it echoing in the drawing room. Her mouth had dried up, felt like it was about to crack at the corners. Her light shoes thudded like furniture ready for moving. She could still try, still run. There was still time. But instead she stepped over the threshold into the bedroom. She’d already guessed that Hellmuth would be sitting in the armchair, the table beside him with its lace cloth, on the cloth the Parabellum. He was wearing his greatcoat; his hat was thrown on the bed, and next to it Juudit’s Mauser. The hot air burned Juudit’s cheeks. Hellmuth’s skin was white, his forehead dry. Juudit took off her hat with trembling hands, held the hatpin in her fist. It was so hot, her underslip was bruised with sweat, which would soon spread to her dress as well.
“You can leave if you want to.”
Hellmuth’s voice was matter-of-fact. The kind of voice he might use as he stepped into headquarters, the voice he must have used every day at Tõnismägi, but never when talking to her, not until now.