Juudit’s eyes snapped open. She was thinking about her husband again. She could see the sun rising over the Gulf of Finland. But it wasn’t dawn yet; those were the flames of Soviet ships, what was left of Red Tallinn escaping over the sea, their horns shouting like panicked birds. The sound of retreat. Juudit stumbled across the floor, made it to the other side of the room, and leaned against the wall. She couldn’t believe the Bolsheviks were leaving. Light flashed in a corner of the bedroom and she realized that the Luftwaffe’s planes weren’t interested in Tallinn, only in the fleeing ships, but the knowledge didn’t feel like anything. Her twitching legs remembered too well what the sound of a plane meant: run for the bushes, for shelter, run anywhere, like the time in the country helping Rosalie and her aunt with the distilling when the enemy appeared in the sky without any warning and made her aunt kick the kettle over and they bolted under the trees and stood panting and staring at the low-flying plane with its belly, thankfully, emptied.
Juudit pressed her back against the wall, her feet firmly on the floor, readying herself for another explosion. Although the air was heavy with the stench of war, not all the familiar smells were gone. The wallpaper still gave off the smell of an old person’s home, of something safe—and gone. Juudit pushed her nose up against the wallpaper. The pattern was the same, old-fashioned, like the one in the room in Johan’s house where she and her husband had lived while they waited for their own house to be finished. The house was never finished. She would never furnish it. She would never see the new water-lily wallpaper she’d chosen from Fr. Martinson’s after changing her mind several times and fretting over every floral pattern one after the other with her husband and brother, and her sister-in-law, who at least understood how important it was to choose the right wallpaper. When she’d finally made her decision and walked out of the shop, it was a relief to be through with examining samples, comparing them at home, then back at Martinson’s, then at home again. She had gleefully taken a taxi to bring the good news to her husband, who was also relieved to have solved the wallpaper dilemma, and she had announced her decision to her sister-in-law at the Nõmme restaurant, and she’d gotten cream from her pastry on her nose, a nose silky and glowing because she scrubbed her face every night with sugar. Imagine, sugar! Had they drunk cocktails? Had they danced that evening? Had her husband joined them later, and had she thought again, This is it, tonight’s the night? Had she thought that, like she had so many times before?
THE END JUUDIT WAS EXPECTING didn’t come. The town shook, burned, smoked, but it was still standing, and she was still alive, and the Red Army was gone. Happy shouts from outside made her crawl to the window, its panes crisscrossed with paper tape to keep them from shattering, and open it, not caring about the broken glass. The Wehrmacht with their helmets and bicycles filled the street like locusts, a multitude without number, gas-mask canisters waving, the soldiers covered in a downpour of flowers. Juudit stretched her arm out. Smiles sparkled in the air like bubbles in fresh soda, arms waved and sent a breeze sweet with the scent of girls toward the liberators, girls with their hands fluttering like leaves on summer trees, shifting and shimmering. Some of the hands were tearing down the Communist Party posters, the photos honoring communist leaders, tearing their mouths in two, ripping their heads in half, cutting them off at the neck, heels grinding into the leaders’ eyes, rubbing them into the ground, cramming the dust of rage into their paper mouths, the shreds of paper floating into the wind like confetti, the broken glass crunching underfoot like new-fallen snow. The wind slammed the window shut, and Juudit winced.
This wasn’t how it was supposed to happen. Where was the end she’d been expecting? She was disappointed. The solution hadn’t arrived. She breathed in the air of a free Tallinn from the window. Doubtful. Wary. As if the wrong kind of breath could take the peace away again, or cause a woman who didn’t believe in the German victory and the Soviet retreat to be punished. She didn’t dare run into the street—her restlessly squirming legs were hiding inappropriate thoughts, thoughts that rushed in when the neighbor’s little girl ran into the yard and yelled that Daddy was coming home. The little girl’s words made Juudit remember her situation and she had to hold on to the chair for support, like an old woman.
Soon the shops, stripped bare by the Red Army, would be full and would open their doors again, with salesgirls behind the counters to wrap your purchases in paper. The water treatment plant would be repaired, the bridges would rise again, everything that had been plundered, destroyed, and butchered would wind back to how it was before, like a film played backward. Tallinn was still wounded, sucked bare, the streets groaning under horse carcasses and the corpses of Red soldiers swarming with beetles, but soon that would all be gone. The wharves would be rebuilt. The train tracks would be mended. The gashes torn in the roads by the bombs would be patched. Peace would rise from the ruins, plaster would cover the cracks in the walls of the buildings. Journeys would no longer be halted by broken roads. The candles could be taken off the tables and put back in their boxes, the electric lights would come on behind the blackout curtains, maybe the ones who’d been deported would come back, Johan could come home, no one would be taken away anymore, no one would disappear, the knocks at the door in the night wouldn’t come, and the Germans would win the war. Could there be anything better? Things would be ordinary again. But even though that is what Juudit had just been hoping for, the idea of it changed, in the blink of an eye, to something unbearable, and the indifference she’d felt a moment before changed to panic about the future. The ordinary life she would get wasn’t the ordinary life she wanted. Outside the window a Tallinn emptied of Bolsheviks was waiting; the first Estonians were already returning home, their boots already turning the roads to dust. Soon the town would be filled with an assortment of Estonian, Russian, and Latvian uniform jackets new and old, and the girls would swirl around them—maidens, fiancées, widows, daughters, mothers, sisters, an endless horde of clucking, sniffling, dancing females.
JUUDIT DIDN’T WANT to face those women, talking about their husbands coming home, or the women whose fiancés, fathers, and brothers had already come out of the woods or wandered home from fighting in the Red Army in Estonia or on the Gulf of Finland. She wouldn’t have anything to say to them. She hadn’t sent her husband a single letter. She had certainly tried, had gotten out paper and ink, sat down at the table, but her hand couldn’t form any words. Just writing the first letter of his name had been too difficult, thinking what to say in the first sentence impossible. She couldn’t write her husband a letter from a wife who missed him, and that was the only kind of letter to send to the front. All the nights she’d tried and failed, and the nights when she didn’t even try, ate into her memory. All the times she’d tried to lower her neckline a little more, to make him take some notice of her breasts. She remembered vividly how embarrassed she would feel afterward, remembered how it felt when she realized that everything she had imagined about him, everything that had charmed her about him, had been wrong. The memory of how her newly wed husband would push away the breasts she offered him, push her to the other side of the bed like spoiled food shoved away at the table.
JUUDIT’S HUSBAND HAD LEFT in the first phase of Bolshevik rule, along with all the other men who fled conscription to hide in the attics of houses and summer cottages, and she had been relieved. She had the bed all to herself. But she remembered, of course, to knit her brow like she should, to pretend to be a wife who was worried about her husband. When he’d been picked up on his way to get food by Chekists in a black ZIS, Juudit had managed to darken her gray eyes with tears, because that was what she was supposed to do. Even then, she was already hoping that it would be his last trip, that’s what those black cars had meant for so many people, and she was afraid of her own wish, afraid of the wild joy in the possibilities the war had brought her. There were no divorced women in her family. Widowhood was her only option if she wanted her freedom back. But her husband’s auntie got news f
rom the commissariat that he’d been sent to the front, and once again Juudit clutched her handkerchief for the sake of custom. She couldn’t tell anyone how much she enjoyed her bed without her husband. She would have liked to have a lover, but where would she get one? It was wrong to even think such a thing. But she did read Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina several times, and although the women in the books didn’t suffer quite the same marital problems that she did, she’d felt a great spiritual kinship with them, because she knew what it was to yearn.
Before Juudit’s wedding, her mother had slipped in some advice between the lines about marriage and its potential problems, but the problems Juudit had weren’t in her mother’s repertoire. She’d had her doubts even during her engagement, and had told her mother in a roundabout way that, contrary to what she seemed to think, Juudit’s fiancé hadn’t made any physical advances at all. Her girlfriends had a quite different experience with their husbands-to-be, who couldn’t wait to get to the altar. Rosalie, for instance, was constantly hinting at the fiery nature of her dark-browed Roland. Juudit’s mother had smiled at her daughter’s worries, said it was a mark of respect, told her that her father had been just as gentlemanly. Everything would work itself out once they started living together.
So Juudit concluded that she was silly to find it strange. It was a sign of a great love, and she hurried impatiently toward her wedding day, and a room for the honeymoon was reserved at the Shore Hotel in Haapsalu. But putting a wedding ring on her finger hadn’t changed anything. The wedding night was awkward. Her husband entered her, and then something happened. He withdrew, went behind a screen, and Juudit could hear water pouring into a basin, and frenzied washing. Then he settled himself into the other side of the bed, as far from his wife as possible. She pretended to sleep. The next night wasn’t any better. The night after that, he fell asleep on the sofa, and in the morning he acted as if everything was normal. In the daytime they promenaded on Africa Beach and in the evenings they danced at the Shore House like a normal, happy couple on their honeymoon. When they got back to Tallinn, he went to work as an assistant in Johan’s notary office and Juudit concentrated on building a home and feverishly contemplating what to do.
In public he behaved like a model husband, offering her his arm, often kissing her on the hand, and even on the mouth when he was in a playful mood, but his behavior changed as soon as they were alone together. If he didn’t feel any attraction to her, then why had he proposed? Had it all been a lie from the very beginning? Rosalie had introduced Juudit to the Simson family after she got engaged, and at first Juudit hadn’t taken any notice of Roland’s bookish cousin, not until Rosalie told her that he wasn’t quite as bloodless as he seemed at first glance. He was going to be a pilot. Juudit had read The Red Baron, and everything she asked him about or wondered over excited the boy in a way that charmed her, and they had many ardent discussions about Manfred von Richthofen. There was something so strange and passionate in his enthusiasm, and Juudit didn’t doubt her choice at all, didn’t doubt that her place was in the stands as he executed an Immelmann turn in the air show. Rosalie praised the match, and Juudit praised Rosalie’s. They considered themselves lucky. In his letters, Juudit’s betrothed promised to fly her to Paris and London. They both wanted to travel, to see the world. The idea of nothing but air under her feet frightened her, but it was worth it to see the expressions on her girlfriends’ faces when she told them she was going to be a pilot’s wife, a woman of the world, going to buy her gloves in Paris, where the salesgirls shook powder into them before they tried them on your hands. One day her husband might even be in a newsreel, and the audience would sit there thrilled, sighing, some of the women’s hearts skipping a beat. Sometimes it baffled her that a man with such an exciting future was interested in her, of all people, and when they became engaged, he kissed her on the forehead, and she felt a heat inside her so intense that she couldn’t imagine ever having relations with anyone else. And then there were no relations.
Finally she worked up the courage to ask her married girlfriends about intimate matters. She didn’t dare ask Rosalie. Rosalie was still collecting her trousseau and the Simsons were preparing for the young bride to arrive. In spite of the sparks that flew between Roland and Rosalie, the two weren’t in a hurry to walk down the aisle. They wanted everything to be just right. But once Juudit was married, her heart wasn’t in it anymore when Rosalie wanted to talk about her wedding plans. The two of them used to always be talking about wedding hairdos and bridal bouquets, pondering the time when they would both be wives, their letters flying between the Armses’ farm and Juudit’s apartment in Tallinn. Juudit made Rosalie swear that they would take their husbands to Haapsalu and take mud baths together at the spa and try to coax the two men into getting along better—not that there was any trouble between them, but it would be nice if the two of them were friends. After all, they grew up together, so why couldn’t they be just as close as Juudit and Rosalie? At first Rosalie thought that taking a Singer sewing class would be more suitable for a housewife, but then she agreed that maybe she could pay someone to take care of the house for a couple of days, long enough to take a trip, and they could spend time together as two couples. There was always so much work to do in the countryside, you never had time to just visit. Rosalie finally decided that Juudit’s scheme was a good one, but after her honeymoon, Juudit gave up the idea. She was sure Rosalie would see right through her, see that her marriage was a lie, and Juudit didn’t know how to explain it to her. How could she tell Rosalie that marriage had marked her as inadequate? Rosalie wouldn’t understand. She wouldn’t believe it. No one would.
Juudit didn’t know where to turn. She searched the Housewife’s Handbook she’d been given as a wedding gift. Under “marriage,” there was a reference to difficulties that occurred during sexual intercourse. Under S, she also found “sexual frigidity,” and an explanation that it usually happened for personal reasons—fear of pain, disgust toward one’s partner, or painful memories. She could tell that the passage wasn’t talking about men, just women. So it was her fault. Many of her married friends said that their husbands seemed to never get enough. One of them talked about tightness. Another said that her husband wouldn’t leave her in peace even when it was time for her woman’s troubles, which was terribly unhygienic, and even dangerous, and another suspected that her husband had a venereal disease. Juudit’s situation was unusual, but she had finally figured it out: gonorrhea, syphilis, chancre. Of course! That had to be it! Her husband was just too ashamed to tell her! She had to get him to a doctor, but how? She couldn’t tell him that she thought he was carrying a disease.
She put down the book. The photograph of the foot of an infant with hereditary syphilis brought back a memory from her childhood—a woman she’d seen once when she and her mother were out walking. Her mother had slowed her steps as soon as she saw the woman, steered Juudit down a different street, and said they could go to the import shop some other time. The woman had a trouble that bad women get, maybe from using the same dishes that a sick person has used. Her mother had been right about that—the Housewife’s Handbook said the same thing—but then wouldn’t Juudit have symptoms, too? She could still remember the woman’s face. It was clean, no signs of illness or cocainism, even though when they had been to visit the family doctor he had whispered, “The medical association claims that cocaine sickness in the country has decreased, but the number of psychopaths and neurotics hasn’t decreased, and those are the very people who are carriers. One can only imagine how many of them there must be.…”
The Housewife’s Handbook didn’t tell her whether the sickness would affect her husband’s capabilities. She couldn’t bring herself to think any more about it. Syphilis, the most serious and frightening of the venereal diseases. She couldn’t have such terrible luck. She must be wrong. Her husband’s eyes weren’t red and he didn’t have sores in his mouth or on his legs, or any deformities. And anyway, how could she be sure he had it, tha
t he had kissed bad women, or maybe even done something worse; and if he had, what did that mean? And how could she know whether he’d been to a doctor?
Juudit started examining herself, checking her tongue, her limbs, every day, panicking at a bug bite, the swelling that followed, a pimple on her chin, a callus on her foot, wondering if she’d had sores she hadn’t noticed, if she was in the symptomless phase that the Housewife’s Handbook talked about. Everyone had already started dropping hints about a little bundle that was on its way, had started to wonder about it, because they’d interpreted her hurry to get married as a sign that she was in a family way—Anna Simson in particular had whispered about it, knowingly, reproachfully. Finally Juudit got up her courage. She had to know for sure. The doctor was friendly, the visit awkward, even agonizing. It ended with him telling her she had nothing physically wrong with her, no disease.
“My dear,” he said, “you were created to give birth.”
Western Estonia, Estland General Region, Reichskommissariat Ostland
WE TRAVELED FOR a week through woods blighted with fighting, made our way around seething horse carcasses and bloated corpses, avoiding bombed bridges, trying to interpret the rumble of the destruction battalion bombers. Eventually the forest started to look familiar, restored to health as my longing for home was soothed and we came upon the road to our old mail drop. I left Edgar shivering at the edge of the woods as lookout and approached the house warily, but the dog recognized us from a long way off and ran to meet me. I could tell by the way it scampered around that there was no danger, so I relaxed and, accompanied by the dog, went to the window and gave the knock we’d agreed on. The woman we called “the mail girl” opened the door immediately, smiled broadly, and told me the news: The Bolsheviks were still in retreat, the eastern front was crumbling, and the Finns and Germans were hunting them down at Lake Ladoga. The Russians had doused the woods with oil and set them on fire, but a burning forest wasn’t going to stop the Finnish-German troops! The Andrusson brothers came to the door behind her, and Edgar trotted over when I shouted that everything was all right.