Death of a Nightingale (17 page)

Seventeen-year-old Natasha would have been beyond thrilled. This was precisely the world she had hoped would be waiting out there once she had escaped from Kurakhovo. Nineteen-year-old Natasha, however, would rather sit on the grass in the park and stop Katerina when she tried to put ants or ladybugs in her soft little mouth. Kiev was enough. The apartment, Pavel, Katerina—why would she need anything else? Occasionally she had agreed to hire a babysitter so they could go to a restaurant, but she would be restless the whole time, constantly remembering something she had to call and tell the young sitter. It was someone Pavel knew. He said she was studying medicine and wanted to earn a little cash. Natasha would have worried less, she thought, if there had been a more grandparent-like person available, but Pavel’s mother had died several years ago, and it was too far from Kurakhovo for her mother to come for a single evening.

Gradually he stopped asking. If that was how it was going to be, he said, then he wanted to hear no complaints if he went out on his own. That was when her jealousy had crept up on her. She sniffed him like a dog when he came home and tried to smell where he had been. She looked at his cell phone when he was in the bath and found a lot of unknown numbers and messages from people she had never heard of. Some of them were women, and she noted every female name. She turned out his pockets meticulously before she did the wash. And she couldn’t help asking, “Who is the Anna you call so often?”

He looked astonished. “Anna? How do you know that?”

“Who is she?” she repeated.

“My God,” he said and laughed. “Now you’re being silly. It’s my mother’s old nanny. She’s almost eighty, and she lives in Denmark. See for yourself.” He showed her the number and then had to explain, and she was embarrassed and really did feel silly and stupid because she hadn’t known that there was a difference between the numbers abroad and the ones in Ukraine. But how was she to know? She had never known anyone who lived abroad.

“Why did your mother have a nanny from Denmark?” she asked.

“It’s a bit complicated,” he said. “
Everything
was complicated then—Poles, Germans, Russians, Ukrainians, Galicia was one big mess, and nobody knew what would happen from one day to the next. Anna ended up in Copenhagen and got married there. But Mother never forgot Anna, and they kept on writing to each other for many years, even back when half their letters were snatched up by the censors. I’ve visited her several times, and, yes, I call her now and then to hear how she is doing. I care a great deal about her, in fact.”

Nina put her arms around his neck. “That’s okay,” she said. “You are allowed to care for almost eighty-year-old ladies. Just as long as you love me the most.”

“Silly thing,” he said. He pulled her close, exactly hard enough that she knew he wanted to make love to her, and a powerful surge of heat exploded somewhere under her belly button, shot downward and then spread up to her breasts and neck. She gasped, and he laughed and let his hands slide down to cup her buttocks. They never made it to the bed.

I
T WAS BECAUSE
of Anna that she had chosen Denmark later, when all the bad things happened. When Pavel was dead, and Katerina and she could no longer be in Ukraine. Denmark was the only other country that Natasha had been to—Natasha, Pavel and Katerina had visited together twice—and Anna the only person she knew abroad.
And when her caseworker began to look worried, and Natasha was terrified that it was her turn to be deported … then it was Anna who had made sure she got to meet Michael.

She felt a stinging pain in the pit of her stomach at the thought. She took out a piece of chocolate and let it melt on her tongue. Then, slowly and with difficulty, she chewed a slice of the dark Danish rye bread that looked just like the Ukrainian bread she was used to on the outside but that tasted completely different. To think that she had been so stupid. To think that she had been so happy. So happy that she would be allowed stay in Bacon Land forever, where everyone lived high off the hog, and no one needed to be afraid of anything.

A
BOUT HALF AN
hour later, Nina emerged from the children’s barrack with Katerina. Natasha was out of the car before she knew it and had taken nine or ten steps toward the fence. Dangerous steps. A few more meters and she would have been completely visible from the camp.

She saw Nina speak with one of the officers who stood at the barricade around the barrack. The nurse pointed toward the clinic on the other side of the big, open grounds where the kids played soccer in the summer. The policeman lifted the striped plastic tape and let them through.

But Nina didn’t go in through the clinic’s front door. She and Katerina disappeared around the corner, then appeared again a bit later by the main entrance and the parking lot. The nurse took Katerina’s backpack and made her get into an ugly little yellow car.

Natasha began to run. Just then she didn’t care if all the policemen in the world saw her. She plowed a way through the high snow along the fence, but she was too far away. The little yellow car had started and was rolling out of the parking lot, slowly and carefully on the icy road, but still much too fast for Natasha to reach it.

Still she kept running, until her foot caught on a hidden tree root
and she fell headfirst into the snow. And then she had to run all the way back again to the stolen Audi, which in her rush she couldn’t figure out how to start.

When she finally got the cold motor going and made her way back to the road, the yellow car was gone.

Natasha pulled over to the side and bent forward over the steering wheel. Acid burned in her stomach; she could barely breathe. In all the time that she had been parted from Katerina, she had always known where her daughter was. The little man on the Google map could find her. Natasha could plan the route and calculate the distance; she knew what direction she needed to go.

The Google man couldn’t find Nina.

Or wait. Could he?

“I know where you live,” she whispered. She could feel the knowledge loosening her chest so she could breathe again. She had been there once, long ago, when she and Michael had just gotten engaged and it looked as if everything would be safe and all right again. When both she and Nina believed that Natasha’s life could go on quietly in a house in Hørsholm, behind a hedge of flowering lilacs. In Bacon Land.

They had sat drinking coffee on Nina’s sofa in her messy apartment full of books, children’s clothing and rubber boots. Natasha wasn’t sure what the street was called, but she remembered the house—an old red-brick building on a narrow side street off the same wide boulevard where, months later, Natasha had bought the knife she meant to stab Michael with. Jagtvejen. That’s what it was called. The boulevard. Surely she would be able to find it. It wasn’t a route she had practiced, the way she had practiced the way to the Coal-House Camp, over and over again. But the Audi had a very high-end GPS.

It might even be better this way. After all, there were no fences and no guards around Nina’s house.

UKRAINE, 1934

Olga kicked her way through the snow to the stable, where the cow lay waiting patiently in the dark. That was something cows were good at. Olga sometimes tried to imagine what it was like to be a cow and lie there on the cold earthen floor and wait for someone to appear with water and hay and potato peels and let light into the stable and shovel shit from the gutter and whatever else a cow needed to stay alive. Did Zorya even know that summer would return? And was she ever afraid of being forgotten?

If she was, she hid it well. Her large, glassy eyes rested calmly on Olga in the gloom. She lay on her side with the clumsy yellowish hooves pulled up against her stomach, which appeared unnaturally large and swollen in comparison to her flabby, shrunken udders.

Olga grabbed an armful of hay and loosened it carefully, trying not to get pricked by the many thistles. Then she threw it in front of the cow, who stuck her long blue tongue all the way out and pulled the hay toward her without getting up.

Frost covered the walls and straw like a fragile white spiderweb, and the water in the trough was frozen, but not so hard Olga couldn’t make a hole in the ice with Grandfather’s sickle for Zorya to drink from. Then she scraped the cow shit to the side and cautiously poked the cow to see if she wanted to get up. She didn’t. Milk for Kolja would have to wait. If the cow stood up, Olga would also find some
fresh pine boughs for her to lie on, because even though she had her usual thick winter coat, you could see her bones like thick branches under the skin. If the cow wasn’t lying on something soft, those bones would gnaw through flesh and skin, and she would get sores and die.

Mother didn’t take care of the cow.

She took care of the pigs in the kolkhoz and had the responsibility for all the squealing, hunchbacked beasts in Stable Number Two. Every morning she fought her way down there through the drifts to fatten up the swine. And that was fine with her. Or so she said. She might not be as strong as she used to be, but she was still a damn sight better than those two sluts from the Caucasus who were supposedly in charge of Stable Number One, but who, according to Mother, drank vodka and whored worse than the swine. Back when Father was still living with them, Mother wouldn’t have said such things, but her speech had become coarse and rude now, especially when she talked about younger women.

“They can fuck, but I can work,” she said, her laugh brief and hard, not at all like the way she used to laugh when they still lived in Kharkiv.

Olga stroked the broad, greasy bridge of the cow’s nose and thought that it would have been nice to sit here with someone. Jana. But the mere thought of Jana gave her a clenching sensation in her stomach.

After Oxana’s pioneer meeting, a number of children in the school fawned over her in a dog-like manner. Nadia and Vladimir and little Veronica, who was really a
niemcy
, an ethnic German, and had been forcibly relocated here from Galicia, but who still loved Comrade Semienova and the Party and all that meant in terms of khaki-colored uniform shirts and red banners. Her eyes were glued to Oxana in the schoolroom, and when Olga talked about the counterrevolutionary cells in the village that had to be crushed, little Veronica opened her tiny bright red mouth and sighed with devotion.

But not everyone looked at Oxana and Olga with such adoration. Some eyes were lowered when they turned around in the schoolroom. Whispering would suddenly cease when they walked by and later start up again behind their backs. Olga knew what they were whispering, even though no one had said it to her face. She had listened and picked it up piece by piece. They were whispering about Oxana and Fedir. They said that Fedir had been in love with Oxana, and that Oxana had gone for long walks with him down by the frozen stream. She had lured him into telling her about the wheat under the stable floor, and afterward she had reported it to the chief of the GPU in Sorokivka.

Everything had gotten worse after the letter arrived from the Marchenko family. Fedir’s sister, the little girl with the hare-like scream, had never made it to their destination, which was so far north that you had to travel by train for a full fourteen days. She had stopped screaming on their third day in the cattle car. They had left her someplace along the tracks between Kharkiv and Novokuznetsk. No one knew exactly where.

Jana was one of the whisperers now. Fedir was her cousin, and even though Jana had made fun of him when he still sat in the back of the class, his disappearance had broken something between Jana and Olga, something that couldn’t be put back together again.

That was the way things were, and there was nothing Olga could do about it.

She was not responsible for Fedir’s banishment, but she was tied to Oxana by blood, just as Jana was tied to Fedir. Therefore they had to be enemies now, and it was a war that Jana threw herself into with a bloody rage.

Jana said that Olga was ugly and had body lice, and that she didn’t want to sit next to her in school. Jana also said that she was just as dirty as her swine of a mother. Jana told the others in school how
their old house sparkled now that Svetlova had taken over the housekeeping and that Svetlova was expecting a child who would soon replace Olga, Oxana and Kolja.

Outside the cow barn, Grandfather was making his way to the woodshed, coughing. Olga stood with her hand on the cow’s neck and listened to the sound of the axe splitting wet birch wood until it hit the chopping block with a faint echo in the ice-cold air.

Then came the roar.

He was calling Mother, Olga could hear, and afterward he also called Grandmother, even though she had been dead for several years now. Olga felt a gust of terror blow through her. She wrenched open the door and raced across the yard to the woodshed.

Grandfather lay with the axe in his shin, cursing and shouting for vodka. Olga and Oxana had to hold down both him and his leg while Mother pulled the axe free from the bone. There was blood everywhere. Even the bone bled, it seemed to Olga, and she knew bones couldn’t bleed.

Mother sent Oxana off to get the barber, telling her to run as fast as she could. Olga got rags and blankets, and Mother tore a wide strip of linen from a sack and made a tourniquet right above the cut. She used the axe handle to tighten it and turned it around and around even though Grandfather screamed like an animal going to slaughter and cursed her to hell and back again.

“Would you rather die?” Mother just said when he stopped screaming for a moment out of sheer exhaustion.

Finally Oxana returned with the barber. He tied a piece of bluish-white sheep gut around the biggest of the pumping arteries and sewed the tear together with needle and thread. Only then could they help each carry Grandfather into the house.

Even after the barber was done, Grandfather didn’t stop bleeding. Mother sat next to him and pressed one rag after another against the cut,
her grip hard and frantic. Grandfather had drunk so much vodka that he could no longer speak, and spit and drool trickled from the corner of his mouth into his beard. There was a wet rattle in his chest. Olga wasn’t sure if she was more afraid of him dying or of him waking up again. She was feeling sick and couldn’t stop shaking, but Oxana was pale and calm and looked as if she were thinking of something else completely.