Death of a Nightingale (6 page)

T
HE
BED IN
the apartment in Kiev had been a revelation in several ways. Clean and white and delicious smelling, full of pillows, comforters and smooth, light sheets—Egyptian cotton, Pavel had said, and she just nodded. She had never before lain on a mattress that received the body in this way, firm and soft at the same time. At home in the room in Kurakhovo, you could feel the bed slats through the worn foam rubber.

And Pavel, Pavel, Pavel, Pavel.

He had driven into her life in a shiny red Alfa Romeo one day as she was trudging along the road between Dachne and Kurakhovo. She had missed the bus and would rather walk to the next stop than stand waiting in the cold. When he slowed down and asked if she wanted a lift, she had ignored him at first. She didn’t want him to think she was one of those girls. But he had kept rolling along next to her, apparently indifferent to the trucks that roared by him honking and all the vulgar gestures and shouts from the passing drivers. He had spoken to her just as if they were walking along next to each other on the sidewalk, although they did, of course, have to shout more loudly. He was a journalist, he said, and was writing an article about safety in the coal mines. Did she know anyone who worked there? Or anyone who once had? “Everyone does,” she said. There were practically no other places you
could
work in Kurakhovo; it was the mines or the power plant or unemployment. Her father
had lost his job two years ago; her mother still worked in the plant cafeteria. “And what about you?” he had asked. It had gone on like that all the way to Kurakhovo, and finally when they had reached the outskirts of town, she had gotten into his car. Because by now her feet hurt and because she was getting hoarse from shouting, and because … because Pavel was Pavel.

She had insisted on a church wedding so that everyone could see that she had married well, to a husband who had both money and culture. An intellectual, as her father said, at once contemptuous and satisfied. Pavel didn’t drink vodka. Not even at the wedding party, where he wore a dark Armani suit. Few of the guests could appreciate such details, but that wasn’t important. Pavel looked like what he was. A success. At the same time, he had shown everyone else up for what
they
were and would always be. A bunch of drunken, shabby bumpkins with foolish grins and yawning gaps in their teeth. Uncles and aunts and cousins, and girlfriends from school who arrived on the back of their boyfriends’ scooters.

None of them drove an Alfa Romeo. And none of them had an apartment in Kiev with a view of the National Museum.

The first night in Kiev, she had felt like the princess in a fairy tale.

“Come on. There’s something I want to show you!”

Pavel smiled at Natasha, and she couldn’t help smiling back. Genuine smiles that could be felt all the way to the heart, and she thought that it felt precisely like love in the movies and that she adored every detail of his face. The nose, which curved slightly, and the blond hair she knew he had inherited from his Galizien mother, who had been ethnic German. Pavel himself spoke fluent German and also English, and earlier in the evening, he had ordered in a restaurant with the same confidence as the men in the American movies.

“What is it?” she asked.

On purpose she let herself stumble clumsily into his arms. Her
breasts under the new bra and the soft silk blouse grazed his chest, and she wanted to get closer, feel his weight and the strength of his arms. In fact, she thought, and felt shameful and happy at the same time, she would undress him all the way tonight and look at him before they did it. In the big white bed, on the sheets of crackling Egyptian cotton. She didn’t know if it was normal to think like this, but she didn’t care. The night sky turned above them, and she laughed lightly and giddily.

“Take it easy.” Pavel gently pushed her away and dexterously placed his arm between them, so that their bodies were no longer touching. “Act like a lady, my sweet. We’re in a public place.”

The rejection smarted, but only for a moment. Then she let herself be led farther up the steep path toward the lookout in Maryinsky Park.

Pavel took her hand and drew her to an opening in the trees. They were at the park’s highest point now, and above them stretched a gigantic shining arch, all the way across the square. The evening air was pleasantly warm against her skin.

“Arka Druzhbi Narodiv. The People’s Friendship Arch,” said Pavel and pointed at two stiff statues under the arch. “Those are the two brothers. A symbol of Russia and Ukraine. The statues are cast in bronze, and the bow is pure titanium. As strong as steel, but much lighter.”

Natasha nodded but didn’t know what to say. Or what he expected her to say. She was much more interested in a little enclosure with bumper cars and pounding techno music on the other side of the titanium rainbow.

“Can we?”

“You go ahead,” he said. “I’ll wait here.”

Natasha pouted and deliberately put on a disappointed face. But he didn’t budge. He just dug into his pockets and found a few bills that he placed in her hand.

“I’m too old for bumper cars, but you go ahead, sweetheart. Then I’ll show you the view afterward.”

Natasha had already changed her mind. It wasn’t going to be fun. Not when Pavel stood there next to the ring like an adult waiting for a child. The little lecture about the statues had already made her feel like a schoolgirl on a class trip. But it was too late now. In her newly purchased high heels, Natasha tottered over to a neon-yellow car and got in, knees folded almost all the way to her chin. Pavel stood a few meters from the railing and lit a cigarette, a brand with a sweetish tobacco that left a wonderful taste on his soft lips. He’d buried his hands in the pockets of his long black pants. So much for the creases, but that was okay. She’d take care of that for him.

There were only three other cars in the ring. One was being shared by a young couple, and the other two were driven by two teenage boys, absolutely hammered, who were clearly intent on doing maximum damage to each other. Even before the power had come on, the two drunk boys were hanging out of their cars, laughing and cursing and insulting each other. Why on earth had she thought this would be a good idea?

The car in front of her whined and picked up speed, and she reluctantly stepped on the flat little pedal in the bottom of her car. It smelled of burnt rubber, and the heavy, monotonous bass from the techno music made her chest vibrate. A faint nausea came over her, totally different from the feelings of sexual excitement and expectation that had coursed through her only minutes ago. She turned the steering wheel and lost focus for a moment while the car rotated around on its own axis. Then she was hit hard from behind, and her knees slammed against the steering wheel. It hurt, but she still forced herself to laugh giddily and let her gaze seek Pavel’s tall figure outside the enclosure. She wanted him to see that she was having a good time.

He wasn’t standing there anymore. She caught sight of him farther away, in the shadows under the trees, together with another man. Natasha lifted her foot from the pedal and observed Pavel and the man, who at first looked as if he was having a laugh about something. He spread his arms, and you could see his teeth bared in an odd grin. A friend, Natasha thought. Pavel’s friends were influential and important men, she knew—journalists and politicians and businessmen, some of them filthy rich. None of them had come to the wedding, though, because Kurakhovo wasn’t the kind of place you invited people like that, Pavel explained.

Now Pavel was the one laughing and gesticulating, but there was something strangely stiff about the scene. As if the two men were performing a play in an open-air theater, with exaggeratedly caricatured gestures in honor of the people in the back rows.

Pavel stepped back and suddenly didn’t look like the man who had called the waiter earlier in the evening and confidently left twenty percent on top of the already large bill. There was a touch of uncertainty in his body, as if he’d rather be somewhere else.

Then the other man hit him.

The blow came so fast and with such precision that Natasha only saw it because she was keeping a sharp eye on them both. Pavel’s head snapped back and to the side, and his hands rushed to his face, but otherwise nothing happened. The man turned around and walked away, passing under the titanium arch that was as strong as steel but lighter. His steps were angry and smooth and almost synchronized with the noisy music from the bumper cars.

Natasha tumbled out of the car, though she was still in the middle of the black arena. She barely escaped being torpedoed by one of the teenage boys on her way to the exit.

Pavel stood leaning against a tree when she reached him, with two fingers pinching the bridge of his nose to stop a trickle of blood.
She wanted to ask him what had happened, but something in his gaze stopped her, and she just handed him a napkin from the new Dolce&Gabbana purse he had given her.

“It’s nothing. You don’t need to worry,” Pavel said and smiled behind his hand. “The things I write are not popular everywhere in Kiev. Journalism is a risky business, you know.”

She didn’t know.

Yes, of course she had heard about journalists who were threatened and shot. Idealists. But for some reason she had never connected that with Pavel.

He must have seen the confusion in her face, because now he was laughing for real and lifted her chin so that her face was turned up toward his.

“No, of course you don’t know anything about that, my beauty,” he said. “But come on. I still haven’t showed you what we came up here for.”

“Let’s go home,” Natasha said, glancing in the direction where the man had disappeared. It was almost completely dark now, and the square was emptying out. Only a few small groups of young people still sat there, laughing and smoking in the warm evening.

Pavel shook his head and took her hand again. Pulled her with him. “A jerk like that is not going to ruin our evening,” he said. “He’s not worth it. Have a look …”

She turned obediently.

Beneath them Kiev’s millions of lights glittered, reflected in the great black mirror of the Dnieper River.

“Our city, Natasha. Isn’t it beautiful?”

He pulled her close, but the night’s intoxication had receded, and the world had become more real again. She had a bad taste in her mouth, and a pile of garbage next to them gave off a sweet-and-sour smell.

“I love you,” she said, hoping the magic words would banish the unpleasant grittiness of the reality around them.

“And I love you. Like mad. Like a total lunatic,” said Pavel. And now it must’ve suddenly been all right even though they were in a public place, because he pulled her close, and she could feel his short, excited breath against her neck.

His kiss tasted sharply of beer and sweet tobacco, and a little bit of blood.

S
HE WOKE UP
in a forest far from Kiev, in an ice-cold car, and still with a bloody taste in her mouth. She had bitten her cheek while she slept.

Pavel was dead and had been so for a long time. And the thing that had killed him was now stretching its tentacles toward her and Katerina.

UKRAINE, 1935

“What kind of person are you if you believe in God?”

Comrade Semienova rose from her desk and looked at the class with a mild, questioning gaze.

Olga squirmed on the bench. The question wasn’t difficult, and she knew what she was supposed to answer if she was asked. People who believed in God were anti-Soviet and not quite right in the head, and like the kulaks, they wouldn’t work and especially not on Sundays. The kulaks wanted to be fed by the proletariat, and the religious by their God, and their faith was so strong that they would rather starve and freeze to death in the street than acknowledge that they were wrong.

That was the truth.

But in a way there were more truths than that, and they rubbed strangely against one other in her head and made her uncomfortable as she sat on the hard school bench. Because Olga remembered that her grandmother had had a little gold crucifix hanging under her blouse that she sometimes pulled out and kissed with her big, wet lips, and that must mean that she believed in God, even if she worked with her hoe out in the turnip field until the midday heat forced her inside.

Her grandmother died three summers ago. She had been found out in the field lying next to her hoe. Father and Mother and Oxana and
Olga had taken the train from Kharkiv to be part of singing her out, and even though Olga was smaller then, she could still remember the stench in the tiny living room where Grandmother lay waiting for the burial party. It was because she had been lying there too long, Father said then. Much too long, out there in the field. Even now Olga hated to think about it—Grandmother in the field in the roasting afternoon sun. Even if Grandmother
had
believed in God.

Olga would have liked to ask Comrade Semienova if work in the turnip field didn’t count as work for the Soviet state for some reason, because perhaps that was the explanation. But she didn’t dare. If there were something wrong with Grandmother, it would be embarrassing for both Oxana and her. Comrade Semienova would definitely frown and might even get angry.

And that must not happen.

Comrade Semienova was the most beautiful thing Olga had ever seen, and she knew that Oxana felt the same way. Small and straight and with hair as fair and shiny as stalks of wheat. When someone answered correctly or when there was particularly good news from Uncle Stalin in Moscow, her glowing smile brought out two lovely dimples in her soft cheeks. She smoked cigarettes like a man, which somehow seemed incredible and wonderful.

She had come from Leningrad, arriving in the early spring to replace old Volodymyr Pavlenko, who had died of hunger-typhoid sometime during the winter.

The school had been closed until April because there wasn’t wood or petroleum, and therefore no one knew how long old Pavlenko had lain dead and frozen solid in the house at the back of the school. Because he was frozen, he didn’t smell like Grandmother had, but Olga couldn’t help shuddering when she thought about it. Still, that was long ago, and now it was autumn.