Death of a Nightingale (20 page)

Nina was still amazed that Rina had spoken to Søren. Yes, he had an advantage because he could speak Russian with her. But that wasn’t all. There was something solid about him. Quiet but immovable. Apparently his Paul Newman–like aura also worked wonders on traumatized eight-year-old girls.

She went back to the living room, where Rina was now lying on the couch with a comforter around her, her face turned toward the television screen. Little Japanese figures, looking to Nina primitively drawn or at least very stylized, raced by in a melee of explosions. Rina’s eyes were almost shut. Nina debated whether she could get away with turning off the television but decided not to. It would be good if Rina fell asleep again—she needed it.

9:26.

Still an hour and thirty-four minutes to go until she would get to see Anton. The school carnival began at 11:00.

Rina was still clutching her backpack. The by now somewhat grubby mini Diddl mouse attached to the zipper appeared to be staring at Nina with supersized eyes. Nina wanted to hug the girl, silly stuffed mouse backpack and all, but she knew it was her own need and not the child’s.

9:28. Morten might already be helping Anton with his costume. This year Nina hadn’t been the one left with the choice between spending a fortune at the toy store or spending a weekend creating a costume. Anton usually had firm opinions about what he wanted to be. She remembered the year he insisted on being a traffic light—in terms of costume construction one of the easier options—it could
basically be produced from a cardboard box, a couple of mini flashlights and some silk paper. But he had had a ball running around and yelling, “Stop! Red light!” to innocent passersby.

This year she had been left completely out of the loop. Morten hadn’t even told her when the carnival was; she had had to track down that information herself on the school’s intranet page.

She went back into the kitchen, where she had a better view of the street outside. Magnus would be here soon. He had promised to stand in for her so that there would still be someone familiar there for Rina. When she entered the room, the cud-chewing ceased for a moment or two before the PET guy lowered his gaze and continued tapping on his not-quite-an-iPad.

There was a faint noise from the living room. It was barely audible through the sound effects from the cartoon, but still reached Nina’s Rina radar. She listened to Rina’s whispering voice. For more than two years, she had seen and heard Rina use the broken cell phone. Not until yesterday had she seriously begun to worry whether it was something other than a game—perhaps a somewhat obsessive game, but still a game. Never in all that time had she guessed that what Rina was really doing was talking to her dead father.

Blind. Deaf. Dumb. How could Nina
not
have seen it? It made her wonder how well she actually understood the traumatized people who surrounded her. Maybe she wasn’t really any better at solving their problems than at handling her own.

The thought gave her a hollow feeling inside. Her entire adult life, she had seen herself as someone you could count on when the going got tough. Someone who “made a difference”—that worn phrase used about everything from people who sorted their garbage and once in a while took the bus to those who went on dangerous, potentially deadly peacekeeping missions. She knew that she
had
been party to saving lives, to improving them. The cost had been her own family.

Or not quite.

It wasn’t quite that black and white, she did realize that. Morten would probably have been able to live with the fact that she had a job that consumed her, that sometimes demanded so much of her that there was too little left for him—and sometimes too little even for Ida and Anton. That wasn’t why he had ended it.

It was because she always had to go right up to the edge—and then take one more step. Because she, in his words, had transformed her life into a war zone. It wasn’t enough to take an extra shift at the Coal-House Camp and attempt to help the people shipwrecked there. She had promised not to go on missions abroad anymore, and she had kept that promise. Instead, she had committed herself to aiding people Danish society considered “illegals.” The ones who couldn’t go to the emergency room or see a doctor, the ones who couldn’t go to the police when they were the victims of crimes. People like Natasha who had to accept squalor or abuse, either because they had no choice or because almost anything was better than being sent back where they came from.

She was
good
at it. In a crisis situation she was calmly efficient, perfectly able to act, to think, to do something. She missed that capable version of herself when things became too humdrum. For Christmas this year Ida had given her a T-shirt she had managed to get hold of from some ad campaign extolling the virtues of public transportation; it was bright green and had the words
WORLD SAVIOR
printed in big letters across the chest.

Nina wasn’t stupid. She had done therapy, and she knew perfectly well where it came from, this compulsion to save the ones no one else wanted to bother with. She could say precisely, to the minute, when it had begun: the day she had run home from school during the lunch break and had found her father in the bathroom in the basement.

She forced herself to remember. Consciously, dispassionately.
Don’t avoid it. Confront it.
Water on the floor. Blood on the floor. Blood in the water. Her father lying in the water with all his clothes on, turning his head slightly to look at her with eyes that resembled those of a fish. That far she could go.

It was the hour following that she couldn’t account for. No matter how hard she tried, all she could remember was going next door to get help. Right away.
I went over there right away.
She had repeated it again and again to the police, to the therapists, to the doctors and all the other grown-ups, even though they all kept on telling her that it couldn’t be true. She remembered how frustrated she was that they wouldn’t believe her, that they tried to make her accept their correct, adult, superior understanding of time and place. And the ugly, world-swallowing vortex she found herself floundering in when she began to realize that they were right. Almost an hour
had
passed between the moment when she went down into the basement and the moment when she came up again. And during that hour, her father had died.

Morten knew, of course. For many years he had understood, condoned, shielded and protected when she would allow him to do so. He knew the gap was there and what it cost her not to fall into it. What he couldn’t accept was that their children also had to live on the edge of that abyss.

She listened to Rina’s whispering voice and did not interrupt. Let the girl speak with her father, she thought. Who am I to tell her that she’s wrong, that the phone doesn’t work, that her father can no longer hear her and is never coming back?

When Nina had the sense that Rina was saying goodbye, she stepped into the living room. And it was only then that she saw that the phone Rina was speaking into wasn’t the broken cell phone but the landline on Søren’s desk.

“Who were you speaking to?” she asked.

Rina started. “No one.”

Who did Rina even know that she would think of calling? Someone at the Coal-House Camp? Natasha? Rina had been speaking Ukrainian, but how on earth could she have gotten a number that would connect her with her mother?

“Was it … your father?”

Rina shrugged and bowed her head. “It doesn’t work anymore,” she said.

“Why not?”

“It’s broken. He said so. The policeman.”

Nina went over to the phone and pressed
REDIAL
. The telephone rang five, six, seven times. Then a friendly man’s voice said, “You’ve reached Anna and Hans Henrik Olesen. We can’t come to the phone right now, but leave a message, and we’ll call you back.”

Hans Henrik Olesen? She had never heard of the man and she couldn’t figure out how Rina knew him.

But maybe Rina didn’t know him. Maybe she had pressed the numbers randomly or called one of the numbers in the phone’s memory.

“Rina. It’s important. Were you trying to call your father?”

Rina stood there for a moment, gasping with her mouth open, and Nina was sorry to have pushed her. The girl’s narrow face puckered and distorted as if she was going to cry, but no tears came.

“I just want to talk to him,” she said at last, and the air wheezed in and out of her lungs, worse and worse, it seemed to Nina. “I miss him so.”

So do I, thought Nina. How could he do that to us?

She put her arms around the girl, this time not caring whose need she was responding to. Rina felt light as a bird in her arms, a small, damp burden weighing less than it ought.

The time was now 9:42.

They came for Father in the beginning of December, and he didn’t have time to say goodbye to anyone besides Vladimir Petrenko and the widow.

It was Jana who was able to report it in school, and maybe she did feel a little sorry for Olga, after all, because she let Olga sit next to her on the steps while the children gathered around her during the break.

“He was yelling and screaming all the way down to the crossroads,” said Jana. “And Svetlova, big as a house, came waddling after on bare feet and tried to hit one of the GPUs with a log. Like this.”

Jana got up and ran with heavy, spread legs over the lumpy, frost-covered ground, screaming, “Oh, oh,” holding her stomach with one hand and swinging an imaginary piece of firewood in the other. The others laughed, and Jana happily repeated the performance a few times before she tired of the applause and stopped, cheeks glowing and feet apart. Her breath emerged in a white cloud from her mouth.

“Did they hit him?”

Olga thought Jegor looked almost eager. Her stomach had tied itself into a hard knot, and the air she breathed into her lungs was so cold, it seemed to make her chest freeze solid.

Jana didn’t answer right away but remained standing, scratching her hair thoughtfully. She had lice, Olga observed. Jana’s mother had had a fever and a cough for the last two weeks and had not had the
strength to comb Jana and her little sister with the lice comb the way she usually did. Even at this distance Olga could see the big, fat creatures crawling around in Jana’s pale hair and was secretly pleased. Maybe that would teach her to lie about Olga’s body lice. But it still hurt all the way down into the pit of her stomach. In the old days, she would have offered to crack the lice for Jana during recess, but now Jana would just have to crack them herself, if she could catch them.

“I think they did hit him once with the rifle,” said Jana then. “Across the back of the neck. Afterward, he did what they told him to, even though he kept screaming.”

“Too bad.”

The boys had hoped for more, Olga could see. They had played Capitalists and Communists all recess long, and the capitalists had been beaten as usual. It was clear, they said, that Andreij should have been beaten much more severely for his crimes. As head of the kolkhoz, he had not only protected the kulaks, who should have been deported long ago, he had also ignored several thefts from the state’s grain stores, even though the thieves had been caught. Those kinds of thefts could be punished with deportation or even death, but Andreij had openly flouted the law and neglected to report the episode to the GPU. He had even accepted a young mother who had been classified as a Former Human Being into the collective farm and had fed her kulak children through all of last winter.

In his house he had hidden several things that made him a class enemy. The GPUs had dragged both Mother’s sewing machine and a silver candelabra from the house, and the widow Svetlova had brazenly worn a zobel fur and had owned two big copper pots. Even one would have been a conspicuous luxury; two copper pots was a clear crime against the people, who had toiled in the mines to bring up precious metal for the industry.

The boys then tried to guess where Andreij would spend his time
in deportation. Obdorsk, or Beresovo, or maybe Samarovo. The farther north it was, the worse it would be. People got gangrene and lost arms and legs in the Siberian cold, and that was true both for those who ended up in a prison camp and for the more fortunate ones who were deported but allowed to live as free men. Letters from Siberia were full of horrors.

For the widow, it was a different matter, or so Jegor claimed. True, she had been forced to depart in woolen socks and without either zobel fur or overcoat, thrown out on her ass and ordered to find a place to live outside the village. She had a bad record now, but she probably had an old mother someplace with whom she could seek shelter from the winter cold for her unborn child.

Olga sat stock-still, picking at her felt boots and trying not to think the incomprehensible. Her father wasn’t a class enemy, and she didn’t understand how it had come to be that he was one anyway. It wasn’t easy either, to figure out why some of those who had been deported were to be pitied while others apparently were getting what they deserved. Every day offered new truths that grated against one another inside her head, as painfully as sharp stones under one’s feet. The others seemed to have no problem understanding. Self-confident Jana, Jegor and Leda and Oxana, yes, even Sergej, that little shit, knew when you were supposed to smile proudly and when you had to duck your head in shame. Knew which truths you should grab on to and which ones you should let go.

Old truth: Olga’s father is Andreij Trofimenko, a trusted man in the village, a loving father and a loyal husband.

New truth: Olga’s father is Andreij Trofimenko, class enemy and traitor, deportee and Former Human Being, a lousy father and deceitful husband.

Unwelcome pictures began to swim past her inner eye, even though she bit herself hard in the cheek and tried to think about
the soy candy from Petrograd that Comrade Semienova had offered Oxana and her last week.

Her father living in a hole in the ground like the ones the Former Human Beings dug among the birch trees up in the hills. His hands that had split the year’s first melon two summers ago in the garden of their little townhouse … in her imagination, those same hands were now black and stinking with gangrene, even as he held the sparkling red fruit between his fingers.