Purge (16 page)

“We mustn’t tell him anything,” Ingel repeated. “We should leave here.”

“Where would we go? And Hans...”

That autumn evening, they were making soap. Linda was playing with the chestnut birds and Ingel’s German brooch, polishing its blue rhinestones and trying to avoid getting out her primer, as usual. Jars of apple jam they had made the day before stood in stout array on the table, waiting to be taken into the pantry, and next to them a jug of apple juice wrung from the same batch was already bottled. It had been a good day, the first day since that night spent in the basement of the town hall that Aliide hadn’t thought about it immediately on waking—she had had a moment to look out at the flood of morning sunlight before she remembered. Although no one had come after them since the night Aliide had walked home alone, they still started at every knock at the door—but so did many other people in those days. On that morning, however, Aliide had felt a little seed of hope: Maybe they would leave them alone. Maybe they believed that they didn’t know anything. Maybe they would let them do their work in peace, make their jams and preserves, let them be.

Aino had come to visit, to sit at the table and chat. The barrel of meat she had intended to use for her own soap had been stolen, so she had been promised part of theirs. Her conversation felt good; talking with an outsider eased the otherwise overwhelmingly mute, desperate atmosphere in the kitchen. Aino’s ordinary talk was a gentle echo, and even her story of the fate of her hundred-kilo pig was comforting; the camaraderie in the kitchen gave every sentence a cozy feeling. Swine fever had taken her sow and she had to slaughter it immediately, drain the blood, and salt the meat. But the barrel had disappeared from her cellar while she was away visiting her mother.

“Can you imagine?” she said, shaking her head. “Now someone’s going to eat it! It was supposed to be for my soap!”

“It must have been someone who wasn’t from around here. Everybody in the village knows what your sow died from.”

“Thank goodness there was nothing else in that old cellar.”

The soap ingredients had been soaked and washed for several days, and that evening they were finally boiling in a great stew over a quiet fire, and Ingel was starting to add caustic soda. It was Ingel’s job because Aliide didn’t have the patience for it, and Ingel was good at making soap, just like she was good at all women’s work. Ingel’s cakes of soap were always the thickest and of the highest quality, plump and proud, but even that didn’t bother Aliide that evening, because it was the first day that felt even a little bit normal. In the morning the dye man had come peddling dyes that someone had secretly supplied him from the Orto factory—pure colors without fillers—people had heard about it in all the surrounding villages—and now the soap stew was frothy, Ingel was stirring it with a wooden ladle, Aino chatted, shaking her head as she talked about the kolkhoz collective farm—how was she going to manage quotas that were always going up? The sisters were worried about the same thing, but that evening Aliide decided not to fret about it too much—there was plenty of time to fret over quotas. The conversation was interrupted by a squeal from the other side of the table; the pin on Ingel’s brooch had pricked Linda’s finger. Ingel grabbed it and pinned it to the front of Linda’s sweater and told her not to play with it. Linda was left to sniffle in the corner of the kitchen, where she had escaped with her chestnut bird after Ingel’s warnings that the splashing lye could eat the flesh from her hands. The domestic bustle made Aliide smile, and she beckoned Linda to the window to watch Aino as she went out to do the evening milking. Aino would come back the next day. Then the soap would be ready to cut and Aino would bring some cakes home to dry. Aliide gave a long stretch. Soon she would go with Linda to the barn to feed the animals and Hans would be able to come out into the kitchen to put the heavy kettle on the floor to cool.

There were four men.

They didn’t knock—they walked in like they owned the place.

Ingel was just adding some caustic soda to the pot. Aliide denied knowing anything about Hans. Ingel poured the entire contents of the bottle into the pot.

The soap boiled over onto the stove.

She didn’t tell them where Hans was.

Linda didn’t say a word.

Smoke came up from the stove, a fire started, the pot continued to froth.

At the town hall, Linda was separated from them and taken somewhere else.

Two lights without shades hung from the basement ceiling.

There were two boys from their own village there, old man Leemet’s son and Armin Joffe, who had escaped to the Soviet Union before the Germans came. Neither boy looked in their direction.

The soldiers at the town hall were smoking
mahorkka
cigarettes and drinking liquor. Out of glasses. They wiped their noses on their sleeves, as was the Russian custom, although they spoke Estonian. They offered Aliide and Ingel a drink. They declined.

“We know that you know where Hans Pekk is,” one of the men said.

Someone had supposedly seen Hans in the woods. Someone who had been interrogated had claimed that he and Hans had been in the same group and the same hideout.

“You can get out of here and go home as soon as you tell us where Hans Pekk is.”

“You have such a charming daughter,” another one added.

Ingel said that Hans was dead. Killed in a murderrobbery in 1945.

“What’s your daughter’s name?”

Aliide said that Hans’s friend Hendrik Ristla had been a witness. Hans and Hendrik Ristla had been going down the road on a horse, and suddenly they had been laid hold of and Hans was killed, just like that. Ingel started to get nervous. Aliide could smell it, although she gave no outward sign. Ingel stood proud and straight. One man paced the whole time, behind them. Walked and walked, and another one was walking in the corridor. The sound of boots . . .

“What a pretty name, for a pretty little girl.”

Linda had just turned seven.

“We’ll be asking your daughter these same questions shortly.”

They were quiet. And then still another man came in. And the man who had been interrogating them said to the one who had arrived, “Go talk to the girl. Don’t waste any time. Unscrew the light from the ceiling. Careful you don’t burn yourself. No, bring the girl here instead. Then lower that lamp, that cord over there, so it reaches the table. Wait until we’ve put the girl on the table.”

The man had just been eating something, he was still chewing. Grease glistened on his hands and the corners of his mouth. Doors opened and closed, boots marched, leather jackets creaked. The table was moved. Linda was brought in. The buttons were gone from her blouse; she held it shut with her hand.

“Put her on the table.”

Linda was so quiet her eyes—

“Spread her legs. Hold her down.”

Ingel whimpered in the corner.

“Aliide Tamm, you can take care of this. Come over to the table.”

They didn’t say anything, they didn’t say anything.

“Make her hold the light.”

They didn’t say anything they didn’t say anything anything anything.

“Hold the light, bitch!”

Aliide chose Martin before he knew anything about her. She saw him at the dairy by chance. She had just come swinging down the steps after admiring the cotton wool displayed on the wall of the dairy office to show how pure their milk was. The others’ had been yellower, but their milk left the cotton just as white as always. It was really Ingel’s doing, she took the most care of the cows, but what did it matter? This was Aliide’s house, so they were her cows, too. She had puffed up her chest and it was still puffed up as she left the office and walked down the steps, when she heard a voice, an unfamiliar man’s voice. It was a hearty, decisive voice, very different from the voices of other men in the village, already frail with age or weakened from drinking from morning till night—because what else was there left for a man of their country to do but drink? Aliide went toward the road and tried to find the man that the voice had come from, and she found him. He was marching like a leader toward the dairy, and three or four men were following him, and Aliide saw how the tails of his coat thrust out like they were going to take off into the wind and how the others turned toward him when they spoke, but he didn’t turn to them when he answered, he just looked straight ahead, his brow raised, looking toward the future. And then Aliide knew that he was the man to rescue her, to safeguard her life. Martin. Martin Truu. Aliide tasted the name carefully as it was whispered around the village. It tasted good. Aliide Truu tasted even better; it melted fresh on her tongue like the first snow. Aliide easily guessed where she could find Martin Truu, or rather where Martin would find her—in the Red corner on the second floor of the manor house that had been made into a cultural center.

Aliide started staking him out, from between the busts of Lenin. She examined the books with their red covers in the shadow of the enormous red flag, and now and then as she read she would stare thoughtfully into the fireplace, its unacceptable ornamentation defaced. The ghosts of Baltic German manor ladies creaked under her feet, moist yawns darkened the wallpaper, and sometimes when she was there alone, the window squeaked like someone was trying to open it, the frame squeaked and a current of air blew toward her, although the window remained closed. She didn’t let it disturb her in spite of the fact that she still felt like she was in another person’s home, in the wrong place, in a gentleman’s house. It was a little like the feeling in the Russian church, which had been made into a grain warehouse. She had expected God to strike her with lightning when she was there, because she hadn’t risen up to oppose the men who had made grain bins out of the icons, and Aliide had tried to remember that it wasn’t her church; she couldn’t be expected to do anything about it. What could she have done? Now she just had to keep repeating to herself that the manor house belonged to the people now, for the use of the people, the ones who made it through all this, anyway. So she gazed dreamily at the smiling bust of Lenin, his head leaning on his hand, went up occasionally to examine the chart of quotas, and then went back to diligently leafing through
Five Corners
and
Estonian Communists
. Once, she dropped the book on the floor and had to pick it up from under the table and she noticed names carved into the bottom of the tabletop: Agnes, and a heart, and William. A knot in the wood where a branch had been stared out at her from the center of the heart. 1938. There was no one here named Agnes or William. The handsome rosewood table was stolen from somewhere, its embellishments had been cut away. Had Agnes and William got away, were they living happily, in love, somewhere in the West? Aliide pushed herself back upright and quickly memorized “The Tractor Song”:

Hurry, iron tractor! Hurry comrade! The field is boundless as a sea before us You and I travel across a vast land . . . Field and forest echo with our victory song.

It wasn’t enough to know it by heart. She should know it so well that she believed it. So that it sounded like a heartfelt creed. Could she do it? She had to. She thought about the teachings of Marx and Lenin—but wouldn’t it be better to let Martin teach her? The tractor driver’s song was simple enough. She shouldn’t let Martin think she was too clever.

Someone saw her in the Red corner and told Ingel. Ingel told Hans, and Hans didn’t speak to Aliide for a week. But Aliide didn’t care. What did Hans know about her life? What did Hans know about what it was like on the stone floor of the basement of town hall with the greatcoats’ urine trickling down your back? She did care a little, though, about his opinion, maybe even more than a little, but she needed someone, someone like Martin, and Martin started letting his eyes wander to the studious girl in the Red corner. One day Martin gave a talk, and Aliide went up to him, waited for the crowd to disperse, and said: “Teach me.”

She had rinsed her hair with vinegar the day before, it shone in the dimness, and she tried to give her eyes the unseeing expression of a newborn calf, helpless and unfocused, so that a desire to teach her would awaken in him immediately, and he would realize that she was fertile ground for what he had to say.

Martin Truu fell for the dewy calf eyes. He fell quite lightly. He came upon her, and he laid his great mentor’s hand on the small of her back, and he smelled.

As Aliide stepped out of the civil registration office, her steps were lighter than when she went in, and her back was straighter, because her hand rested on Martin’s arm now, and Martin was her husband, her legally wedded husband, and she was his legally wedded wife, Aliide Truu. What a lovely name! Although she received a certain guarantee of security by marrying Martin, there was another important thing she gained from the union. She became just like any other normal woman. Normal women get married and have children. She was one of them.

If she had remained unmarried, everyone would have thought that there was something wrong with her. They would have thought it even though there were very few men available. The Reds would have wondered if she had a lover in the forest. The others would have come to their own conclusions about why she didn’t suit anyone. Was there some reason that she was less of a woman, a woman who wasn’t suitable for a man or couldn’t handle being with a man? Some reason that she had been passed over? Someone might have made up a reason. The main thing was that once she married a man like Martin, no one could suggest that something had happened during her interrogation. No one would believe that a woman could go through something like that and then marry a Communist. No one would dare to talk about her—say, that one’s up for anything. Somebody ought to have a go at her. No one would dare, because she was Martin Truu’s wife, she was a respectable woman. And that was important—that no one would ever know.