Death of a Nightingale (25 page)

She couldn’t move. The airbag’s material stuck to her face, as if someone were trying to choke her with a pillow. Something had happened to her hand. The Micra’s motor was still on, but the sound was a forced insect-like whine, and after a few seconds, it ceased. At that moment the front door was yanked open, and someone attempted to pull her out of the car. It didn’t work; she was still wearing her seat belt. Nina herself groped for the release button. The belt sprang loose, and she slid sideways, upper body first, out of the damaged car.

Cold air, snow, grey sky over dark trees.

Was she missing time? Seconds, minutes? She tried to lift her left arm to check her watch but couldn’t.

“Where is she? Katerina. Where?”

Nina was lifted up and thrown into the snow again. She still couldn’t catch her breath.

It was Natasha. Natasha had driven into her car. Her brain couldn’t quite comprehend it, but that must have been what had happened. The Ukrainian girl sat on top of her, a knee on either side of Nina’s chest. Her hair hung in iced clumps, and the Barbie-beautiful face was merciless and set in stone. She let go of Nina with one hand, but only to bring up something made of bright, glittering steel. Nina felt a sharp jab under her chin, the coldness of metal against her neck.

“Tell me. Where?”

“The police,” gasped Nina. “The police have her. I don’t know where. In a safe place.”

“
Brekhnya.
You’re lying.”

“No. Natasha, you’re only making it worse for yourself. Go to the police, give yourself up. Otherwise, you will never get to see her again.”

Natasha’s eyes became totally black. Her hand jerked, and Nina felt the metal point pierce through her skin to her windpipe. She’s going to kill you, Nina thought, coolly and clearly. It’ll end now. You’ll be found lying in the bloody snow, and Ida and Anton will cry at your grave. She suddenly saw it with excruciating clarity in her mind’s eye, like an over-the-top sentimental scene in an American B movie. It was filmed from above. The camera zoomed down on the coffin and the open grave, people with black umbrellas, the freezing minister. Then a close-up of the two black-clad children, Ida holding Anton’s hand and shouting, “You’re a lousy mother! How could you do this?”

She didn’t know what time it was.

Then the pressure disappeared from her neck. Natasha remained sitting on top of her a little while longer, and Nina could see that the murder weapon—the potential murder weapon—was an ordinary kitchen knife, the semi-Japanese kind with a triangular blade, especially efficient when cutting meat.

And windpipe cartilage, Nina said to herself. If Natasha had pushed it any farther in, you’d be dead now, or at least in a few minutes from now, choking on your own blood. Murdered with a kitchen tool by one of the so-called poor wretches you thought you could help.

“You must know,” said Natasha in English. “I saw you. Katerina was in your car. I saw it! You know where she is, you must know, you must …”

“No,” said Nina. “They keep that kind of thing secret. It has to be secret, or it’s not safe.”

“Safe,” repeated Natasha.

“Yes. They’ll keep her safe. I promise.”

Natasha rose to her feet and disappeared from Nina’s rather blurred field of vision. Nina heard seven or eight stumbling, uneven steps in the snow. She stayed completely still except for reflexive blinks when sharp snowflakes grazed her eyelashes. Listening.

The sound of a car door. A creaking, scratching sound of metal against metal, an uneven acceleration. She turned her head and felt a delayed snap in her neck, like a gear falling into place. From her unfamiliar frog’s-eye perspective, she saw the back of the other car come closer, felt the spray of the snow thrown up by the rotating rear wheels. Then Natasha drove forward again, the back end of the car making a few slalom-like sweeps from side to side before the tail-lights disappeared behind the snowbanks at the next turn.

Nina lay unmoving. She didn’t know if she was hurt. Right now all she could think was, She’s gone, and I am still alive.

There was blood on the knife. The nurse’s blood. Natasha had cut her neck. Not as badly as she had done with Michael, nowhere near, but worse than she had meant to. Natasha felt a deep shiver spread from her core.

Blood.

Nina hadn’t screamed, hadn’t flailed her arms as Michael had done. She lay still in the snow, looking up at Natasha. Her voice was calm, as if it were a normal conversation and Natasha had just asked her a completely ordinary question.

“It has to be secret, or it’s not safe.”

Danes didn’t lie as much as Ukrainians did. It was as if they believed the truth made them better human beings. A Dane would feel the need to tell a terminally ill patient the entire truth about the cancer that would choke him in the end. For his own good, of course. “I have to be honest,” a Dane would say, and afterward he would be relieved, and the one who had received the truth would be crushed. Natasha preferred a considerate lie any day, but she hadn’t encountered many of those either in or outside the Coal-House Camp.

Was the nurse lying now? Natasha narrowed her eyes, looking down at the sprawling figure she was straddling.

It has to be secret, or it’s not safe.

“Safe,” she said thoughtfully, trying to understand the word. Safe was to be in a place of safety, a place where no one could harm you.
Where the Witch couldn’t reach you. But the price was that it was secret, and no one could know where you were.

That was a calculation she understood completely. It was in her bones. It had been in the pounding, chilly pain in her crotch and abdomen, the smell of sweat and semen, the near-throttling pressure against her throat and in the silence that could not be broken, no matter what form his anger took. With Michael,
that
had been the price of safety. She had paid it for Katerina’s sake.

You can endure anything, she had told herself, as long as Katerina is safe.

Could she also endure the thought that Katerina would be safe in a place where Natasha couldn’t reach her? Could she stand it if safety meant she could never touch her daughter or see her again, not even on wrenchingly brief prison visits?

Some women gave their children up for adoption so they would have a better life. Natasha would rather die.

Nina was saying something. Natasha didn’t catch it all, she just heard the repetition of the word “safe.”

The crushing, unacceptable truth was penetrating her, jerk by jerk, even though she didn’t want it inside her. The nurse didn’t know anything—even bleeding, even with the knife against her throat, she couldn’t tell Natasha anything.

With a sharp wrench of translucent pain, the last connection to Katerina was severed. The trail of bread crumbs through the forest was gone; the birds had eaten it. There was no longer a way home.

A
HOLE IN
time, a sudden shift.

She was in the car. She was driving the car. Headlights approached her in pairs. The snow was drifting across the windshield. She had no idea where she was, didn’t remember how she had gotten there. The knife lay on the seat next to her, still with blood on the tip. Inside her
there was no longer a goal, no longer any direction or any meaning at all. The temptation to head for a pair of the lights moving toward her was overwhelming.

Suicides did not go to Heaven.

“Don’t fill the child’s head with that superstitious foolishness,” Pavel had said. “There is no Heaven.”

It was the day that Natasha’s grandmother was being buried. September, but still so warm that the air shimmered above the asphalt outside the airport in Donetsk.

“Why not?” asked Natasha. “You don’t know what happens when we die either.”

“I know that there won’t be any angel choirs and harp music for me,” he said.

Katerina had been five. She listened when the grown-ups talked. Not always obviously, but with a silent awareness that made it seem as if she was eavesdropping even when she sat right next to you, as now, in the back of the taxi.

“So Daddy won’t go to Heaven?” she whispered to Natasha.

Pavel heard it even though he was helping the taxi driver put the bags in the trunk. He also saw the silent pleading in Natasha’s eyes.

“Sweetie pie,” he said and slid into the seat from the other side. “That’s a long time from now. We don’t need to think about it.”

“But Great-Grandmother is dead,” said Katerina. “Where is she going if there is no Heaven?”

It wasn’t as if Katerina had seen her great-grandmother all that often. Still, the question was serious, as was Katerina’s worried gaze.

“Are you sad that she is dead?” asked Pavel.

Katerina considered. “She made good poppy seed cakes,” she said.

Pavel smiled. “Good,” he said. “Then we agree that there is a Heaven and that Great-Grandmother is there now. She has just baked a poppy seed cake and made us tea, and we can visit her when
we sleep so she doesn’t get too lonely. I’ll just have to try and see if I can stand the harping.”

Katerina accepted this and looked relieved. Death without lifelines was hard for a five-year-old to take on board, and Natasha was happy that Pavel had been as accommodating as he had and that Katerina couldn’t see the irony in his eyes.

Twelve months later Pavel was dead. And for some reason Natasha had a hard time imagining that he sat next to God looking down at them. He no longer took care of them; in fact, he never had. It had just seemed that way until the day the Witch arrived.

S
UDDENLY
N
ATASHA KNEW
what she needed to do. The world fell into place around her, and there was meaning and order again. She could protect Katerina, even though she no longer knew where Katerina was. She could make sure that safe really meant safe.

Once she had wondered at the fact that murderers could get into Heaven when people who committed suicide couldn’t. Wasn’t it worse to kill someone else? Now she was glad that was the way it was. She listened, but Anna-in-her-head apparently had no opinion of her new plan. Still Natasha felt calm, cold and determined. If Katerina really was to be safe, there was only one thing to do.

The Witch had to die.

“This one,” Søren said, pointing at one of Pavel Dorshenko’s many articles. “Why do I have a special feeling about this one?”

Babko stretched and stuck out his hand for the now fairly grimy paper. “May I see?”

“Solovi, solovi, ne trevozhte soldat …”

Nightingale, nightingale, do not wake the soldier, for he has such a short time to sleep. Which of us has not heard this sentimental but beautiful song, whether it was Evgeny Belyaev, who thrilled us with his fantastic tenor, or the Red Army’s talented male choir or more modern soloists? But who was this nightingale really, and whom did she sing for?

Babko took a sip of his lukewarm coffee.

“It doesn’t seem quite like the stuff he usually writes,” he said. “But I can’t see any great potential for scandal. Most of this is generally known. Kalugin’s Nightingale. The story was even turned into a Carmen-like musical a few years ago.”

They had had to return the borrowed office to its owner and were now once again sitting in the headquarters’s dove-blue coffee room. A Sunday lull had descended; only a single uniformed policeman was
reading the sports section from one of the tabloids as he consumed his breakfast roll. Søren scanned the text once more. He could grasp the general sense—that it had to do with the world war and the dogfight over Galicia—but his knowledge of contemporary Ukrainian history wasn’t sufficient for him to catch all the nuances.

“What does it mean?” he asked Babko. “The stuff about the Nightingale?”

“She was a kind of Ukrainian Marlene Dietrich,” Babko said and tapped a specific paragraph with a broad index finger. “Oletchka Marasova, she was called. She sang for Bandera’s nationalist troops. She kept up morale and that kind of thing. But it turned out that she sang in more ways than one. She informed on several of them to the KGB, to a Colonel Kalugin—hence the name.”

“Dramatic,” Søren observed. “I can see why someone thought it would make a great musical.”

“It was terrible,” said Babko dryly. “Plot holes you could drive a cart through and so overacted and tear-jerkingly sentimental that some of the audience began to giggle. Very unhistorical and slightly embarrassing.”

Søren sensed that Babko had been one of the gigglers.

“Doroshenko’s version is not much better,” said the Ukrainian. “Some of it is taken directly from the musical, as far as I can see. Other parts are tall tales and myth; he doesn’t distinguish. All that stuff about Kalugin discovering her at an orphanage concert, for example, is nonsense. She did come from an orphanage, true, but she didn’t meet Kalugin until she was grown. And she probably doesn’t have quite as many lives on her conscience as Kalugin claims. She was given credit for a good part of general informer activity. The national army was, to some extent, an underground army and therefore very vulnerable to that kind of traitor. Many were accused, arrested and executed. Bandera was murdered by the KGB as late as nineteen
fifty-nine, in Munich, I believe. And he is still a divisive figure. Some see him as a Ukrainian freedom fighter, a hero; others accuse him of war crimes and point out that he allied himself with the Germans for a while. A Ukrainian battalion was created under the banner of the Wehrmacht, and do you know what they called it?”

“No,” said Søren, a bit irritated. This wasn’t a quiz show.

“The Nachtigall Battalion. Funny, don’t you think?”

“Does it have anything to do with her? Kalugin’s Nightingale?”

“Probably not. Or if it does, the connection may run in the other direction—it made the nickname even more appropriate.”

Søren skimmed the article one more time. If you ignored the tragic background of the war, it was basically a banal honey-trap story. It had even been illustrated with photographs of scenes from the musical, he saw, and an apparently random picture of two little girls in some kind of national costume. There were no captions to explain why that was relevant.