“There was talk of a tramp in the village,” Edgar said. “There’s no telling where he’d be by now.”
“You know very well that’s complete nonsense.”
“You’re blaming all Germans for something that some lunatic did. It’s clouding your reason, making you act like a lunatic yourself.”
Edgar’s voice grated in my ears. I had to stand up, put some wood on the fire, bang the stove door.
“And what good would it have done if Leonida had gone to the police? It wouldn’t have brought Rosalie back.”
Edgar ladled some porridge into his bowl, first with his right hand, then his left. His words squished with the rhythm of his shuttling spoon, his mouth smacking with disapproval as lumps of porridge fell on the table.
“Think about it. What if Leonida had gone and claimed that some unknown German had done something to Rosalie? Where would Anna and Leonida get their extra income if the soldiers started avoiding the farm? They desperately need the money. And you can be sure the soldiers would start to avoid them if these kinds of baseless rumors were coming from their house.”
When he finished speaking, Edgar drew his mouth into a disapproving pout, deepening the curve of his frown.
“Look at yourself,” he said. “And look at me, at Leonida, Anna, our friends. Our lives will go on, and yours should, too. You could at least shave off your beard.”
There was impudence in his words. He was always a little more obnoxious when he got back from one of his outings. Often he would stay out in the yard striding back and forth as if he were having a conversation with someone, some new acquaintance or whoever it was he went to meet in town. I had told him he should try to find out what had happened to Rosalie, listen for rumors. Somebody must know something. You can’t keep secrets in a small town. I waited for news, but he would always just shake his head when he got back. In the end I stopped believing he was doing anything about it. I couldn’t go to Leonida and Mother’s place, I was afraid of what I might do. Edgar looked in on Mother now and then, and if there was anyone she would talk to, it was Edgar, but he wouldn’t try to coax her into telling him about it, wouldn’t ask for names, for details about who had come to the house, no matter how much I pleaded.
“What if it wasn’t a German? What if you’re making a false accusation?”
“What are you getting at?”
“What if your girl had another suitor …”
Edgar was lying on the floor. The bowl of porridge was shattered. When he opened his mouth, his teeth were bloody. I stood there shaking. Edgar crawled toward the door. I guessed that he was headed for the stable. I stepped in front of him. He didn’t look at me. Fighting had always terrified him. I was afraid I would hit him again, afraid I might beat him to death. I stepped away from the door, lifted the latch.
“Get out of here.”
Edgar crawled out into the yard. I closed the door and went out the back to the paddock and stood watching the stable. Edgar had taken the bicycle. He pushed it toward the road, then stopped. He must have guessed I was watching him from behind the bushes.
“Your girl had a reputation,” he shouted.
He took off at a run, didn’t try to get on the bike—I must have hit him pretty hard.
“Don’t you remember her girlfriend at the distillery?” he added. “The distillery at the manor house? Rosalie started sneaking over there whenever no one was looking. What do you think she was doing there? She had suitors. Germans as well as local boys!”
I almost went after him, but I tensed my muscles and forced them to hold me still. My heart was full of dark thoughts, blacker than nightmares. I was like a tree blown to bits by artillery fire, limbless, wounded, and the landscape around me was the same. Rosalie, my Rosalie was gone. I would never hear the ripple of her smiling-eyed laughter, never walk with her along the fields, never again plan our future. It wouldn’t fit in my skull, even though the cover of my notebook was filled with crosses for my fallen brothers. They had died in battle. This was different.
ONCE I HAD SENT Edgar away, I left, too. I took the forged rubber stamps that Edgar had made so cleverly, which I was sure I would find a use for. I hid the gelding in the Armses’ barn. He felt like my only friend now, but I couldn’t bring him with me. I wasn’t going to stop until I got to Tallinn, to the gate of the apartment house on Valge Laeva Street.
I DIDN’T KNOW if Juudit had already heard, and if she had, what she’d been told. My slicker dripped and in my mind I went through that moment again when Edgar stood in the doorway and Rosalie’s buttercups were scattered across the floor.
When Juudit’s thin form appeared at the street door, I stepped in front of her. I hardly recognized her. She jumped like a nimble bird and I felt a kick in my chest, because every light-footed woman reminded me of my beloved.
“Roland! What are you doing here?”
“Let’s go inside.”
It wasn’t any easier to say it once we were indoors. I fortified my courage by remembering that I may have been a man who’d lost everything, but I was also a man with a plan: to look for the killer and give Rosalie peace. I couldn’t get our fields back, or my father, or Rosalie, but I could blow a hole under my enemy’s feet.
“How did you get here?” Juudit asked.
“I just came.”
“How was the trip?”
“Good.”
“Has something happened?”
I stared into the entryway. A wet ring was growing around my slicker, which I’d tossed over a chair. The words were so heavy that I couldn’t push them out. I sat down at the kitchen table. I had to get her to go along with my plan. It was strange to sit there like that, my hands limp. Talking would have been easier if I’d had a pen to fiddle with or a harness to grease. I rubbed my stubbly chin, ran my hands through my bristling hair. I wasn’t fit for a city lady’s table. Those were the kinds of thoughts that went through my mind—trivialities, so I wouldn’t have to think about the thing itself.
The silence grew heavy. Juudit made a restless movement and although I could tell she wanted to ask me more, she didn’t speak. She started to tidy the already tidy kitchen, moved a box of lard off the table, said that Leonida had brought it for her when she came to sell some at the market in town, to the Germans, to send home to their families.
“You can get anything you want for it. I got two pairs of stockings for two tins. And some egg powder.”
I opened my mouth to tell her to be quiet. But I didn’t know of anyone better than Juudit for the task I had in mind. I closed my lips tight.
“You have a fever, Roland.”
She held out a handkerchief. I didn’t take it. A cupboard door slammed and she came up beside me with a dropper, squeezed a drop of iodine into a glass of water, and held it out to me. I didn’t want it. She left the dropper and the glass in front of me and started to fuss with a basket of compresses, was already spreading out Billroth batiste and flannel. Her hands smelled of Nivea cream.
“You look sick,” she said.
“I have something I need to talk about. With you. I need you to get some information from the Germans. Nothing dangerous. Nothing too difficult. Just a few things.”
“Roland, what are you talking about? I’m not going to get mixed up in any foolishness.”
“Rosalie …”
Juudit’s hands froze.
“My girl is buried in the ground. Outside the churchyard. No cross to mark the grave.”
“Rosalie?”
“The Germans.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Germans did it.”
“Did what? Do you mean that Rosalie …”
I stood up. My forehead was burning like brimstone. I couldn’t get any more words out. Her lack of emotion was like ice-cold well water dashed in my face.
“Roland, please, sit down and tell me what happened.”
“Rosalie is gone. There is no Rosalie, except in the heart of the earth. And in my heart.”
Juudit was
quiet. Her eyelids fluttered, a sound like birds’ wings on the surface of a lake. Circles of tears spread across my eyes.
“She was buried outside the graveyard. The Germans did it.”
“Stop harping on the Germans.”
“I have something I want you to do, and you’re going to do it. I’ll come back when everything’s ready,” I said, and I left. Juudit was still muttering. I had reached the ground floor when I heard a slam from upstairs and she ran after me.
“Roland. Tell me everything. You have to.”
“Not here.”
We went back inside and I told her what I knew.
Juudit’s basket tumbled to the floor, the bandages unwinding like a shroud.
PART TWO
Our purpose is to expose the overseas fascists’ organized efforts to rehabilitate the Hitlerists and their stooges.
—The Estonian State and People in the Second World War, Kodumaa Homeland Publishers, 1964
Tallinn, Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic, Soviet Union
THE CEILING CREAKED under footsteps on the floor above. A creak of steps to the upstairs washstand, from the washstand to the window, from the window to the wardrobe, and from the wardrobe back to the washstand. Comrade Parts’s tight, dry eyes swept over the ceiling. Now and then he could hear his wife sit down in a chair, the leg of the chair stabbing the floor with a sound like a stab to his forehead. He pressed his fingers against his moist temples, his pounding veins, but his wife’s slippers didn’t stop, her foot just kept tapping in place with a knock that dug into the floor, straining the thick, light-brown paint, testing its cracks, creating an unbearable noise that prevented him from concentrating on his work.
When the pendulum clock struck eleven, the springs on the bed above screeched, then faded to a rasp. Then silence.
Comrade Parts listened. The ceiling didn’t sag, the cornice along its edge held firm, the furtive sway of the light fixture subsided.
The silence continued.
This was the moment he’d waited for all day, waited patiently, sometimos trembling with rage. But the waiting was seasoned with excitement, a giddiness that he rarely experienced.
The typewriter sat ready. The light from the overhead fixture glimmered softly on the Optima’s metal case, its glittering keys. Comrade Parts adjusted his cardigan, relaxed his wrists, and curved his hands into the correct position, as if he were preparing to perform a concert, a soldout performance. The piece would be a success, everything would work itself out. Still, he had to admit that when he sat down at his desk his collar always tightened to one size smaller.
On the roller was a half-written page from the day before with its carbon copy. Parts’s wrists were already poised over the keys, but he pulled them back and laid them on the carefully pressed creases of his pants. His gaze focused on the words typed on the page. He read through them several times, murmuring under his breath, tasting them, approving them. The narrative still felt fresh, and his collar started to feel a little looser. Cheered, he seized the first page of the manuscript, walked to the middle of the room, imagined an audience, and quietly read the first paragraph:
“What unbelievable acts the Estonian evildoers are capable of, what horrifying crimes! The pages of this investigation will reveal fascist conspiracies and chilling acts of murder. You will read evidence of bestial forms of torture that the Hitlerists gleefully seized upon, with pleasure, and without shame. This investigation will cry out for justice and leave no stone unturned in exposing crimes intended to exterminate the Soviet people.”
When he got to the end of the paragraph, he was as breathless as the text itself. He thought this was a good sign. The beginning was always the most important; it had to be expressive, to cast a spell on the reader. This paragraph did, and it was also written according to Office guidelines. The text had to distinguish itself from previous books dealing with the Hitlerist occupation. He had three years—that was how long the Office had given him to research and write the book. It was an unusual gesture of confidence. He had even been given the new Optima to take home, to his own desk, but this time he wasn’t writing a small piece of counterpropaganda or a reader for young people about the friendship of nations or a didactic fairy tale for children, but a work that would change the world—a work about the greater fatherland and the West. The beginning ought to take your breath away.
It was Comrade Porkov’s idea, and Comrade Porkov was a practical man. He liked books. He liked making use of them. And book buyers paid the costs of operations. He liked films for the same reasons. And his words still warmed Parts in his moments of doubt, although Parts knew that Porkov had just been flattering him. He had said that he’d recommended Parts because he knew of no greater magician with words.
The revelation of the project had been a great moment. They’d been sitting in the safe house that they used for their weekly meetings, going over the situation with Parts’s network of correspondents, and Parts had had no idea that Porkov had any other plans up his sleeve, that in a single moment Parts’s priority would no longer be his wide correspondence with the West, but something completely different. In the middle of the meeting Porkov simply said that now was the time. When Parts confusedly asked what he was talking about, Porkov answered:
“You, Comrade Parts, are going to be an author.”
HE WAS OFFERED a large advance—three thousand rubles. Half the money would belong to Porkov because of the work he’d done on Parts’s behalf, and because he’d chosen the materials the work would be based on. The documents were now locked in Parts’s cabinet—two briefcases filled with books about the Hitlerist occupation, as well as publications from Western countries that had never been seen by Soviet eyes. Parts had gone through the material quickly and deduced what general direction he should take. The book would have to show that the Soviet Union was exceedingly interested in solving the crimes of the Hitlerists, in fact more interested than the Western countries were. It was clear that a different idea had been propagated in the West. The instructions to use adjectives like “just” and “democratic” to describe the Soviet Union as often as possible made it evident that this was not how the West saw them.
It was also clear that another main target would be Estonians abroad. A great deal of the material he’d been given was from the impressively productive pens of refugees. The Politburo was obviously alarmed by their stridence and their opinions about the Soviet Union. They painted the homeland with a black brush. And because Moscow was nervous, it was time to spring into action and make a retaliatory strike—to present Estonians abroad in a light that would make them unreliable in Western eyes. Parts couldn’t have thought of a better method himself. Once the fascistic nature of Estonian nationalism was revealed, the Soviet Union would have all the traitors handed back to it on a silver platter, since no one in the West would protect Hitlerists. Criminals had to be brought to justice. No one would listen to Estonian emigrants’ complaints and pleas anymore, no one would dare to publicly support them. That would be interpreted as support for fascism, and the Estonian government in exile would be seen as being in league with the dregs of humanity. He wouldn’t even need any evidence; sowing doubt would suffice. Nothing more than a hint, a whisper.
“Of course, your own experience will give the book its piquancy,” Porkov added when he told him about the new project. They had never discussed Parts’s past before, but Parts took the hint. He had no need to try to hide the reasons he’d been sent to the Siberian camps. Those reasons were now to his credit. Every step he’d taken on Staffan Island was to his benefit, a mark of his expertise.
“We wouldn’t have succeeded in destroying the nationalists as well as we did without your help,” Porkov continued. “A thing like that isn’t forgotten, Comrade Parts.”
Parts swallowed. Although Porkov had made it understood that he could speak freely about the matter, Parts preferred not to discuss his peculiar secret, because it could also compromise him. But Porkov saw fit to continue
, and Parts twisted his mouth into a smile.
“Between you and me, I’m assured that no one has given the Directorate of State Security more complete information on the activities of Estonia’s anti-Soviets—all of their collaborators, English spies, forest bandits—and their addresses. Remarkable work, Comrade Parts. Without you we never would have learned about the fascist Linnas’s escape route to the West, not to mention the identities of all the Estonian expatriate traitors who aided him, which you helped to uncover.”
Parts felt naked. Porkov only mentioned these things to show that he knew everything about him. Parts had not imagined otherwise, but speaking out loud about such things was a show of strength. It was a method familiar to him. He forced his hand to remain still, fighting the urge to raise it to his breast pocket to make sure his passport was still there. He kept his feet motionless, looked straight at Porkov, and smiled.
“When I fought on the German front, I was able to acquaint myself with the activities of the Estonian nationalists, and I’m very familiar with the subject. I would venture to say that I’m an expert on the nationalists.”
EESTI RAAMAT WOULD BE his publisher. Porkov would make sure that the project would go forward without complications. Parts could expect a signed contract, a celebration. He could order champagne and napoleon cake, carnations for his wife. There would be translations, lots of them. Medals. There would be numerous reprintings. At antifascist celebrations, he would be given a place of honor.
He could give up his cover position at the Norma factory guard booth. The advance and the brown envelopes from the Office would be enough to live on very well.
He could get gas heat.
He honestly couldn’t believe his luck.
The only problem was that the peace he needed for his work was nonexistent at home. He’d hinted that he would require an office for his research, but there had been no progress in the matter, and he couldn’t reveal the nature of his work to his wife. There was no point in hoping that its importance would calm her nervous attacks. He went back to his desk and unbuttoned his collar. He had to get started. Porkov was already waiting for a taste, the first few chapters, and so much was at stake—the whole rest of his life.