Purge (18 page)

As soon as Ingel and Linda had been taken away she would build a room—she could do it by herself. There were boards ready in the attic scrap heap. Then just put the hay in front of it. She could use bales that were easy to move but wouldn’t attract anyone’s notice—even if someone went all the way up to the attic.

When Aliide went to visit Ingel, sometimes she watched her closely and at other times couldn’t bring herself to even glance in her direction. After that first night in the town hall, Aliide had made an effort to avoid her gaze, just as her sister had avoided Aliide’s gaze, but after seeing the list Aliide felt a compulsion to go to Ingel’s house just to look at her. She sometimes crept up on her as she was working—she had an urge to stare at Ingel the way you stare at something fading, something that will never be seen again. She did it in secret, when Ingel was checking on the animals, bringing clover to the cows that were coming into milk, focused on her work.

The same applied to Linda. After the night at the town hall, Linda had become almost mute. She said only yes and no, only when she was asked, and she didn’t say that much to strangers. Ingel had had to explain it to people in the village by saying that Linda had nearly been trampled by a bolting horse and had been so frightened that she had stopped speaking. She said she was sure it would pass eventually. When they were in the kitchen, Ingel chatted and laughed so that Hans wouldn’t notice Linda’s silence.

Once, Aliide caught Linda stabbing at her own hand with a fork. The girl had a look about her that was absent and at the same time focused, her tight braids pulled back at the temples, and she didn’t notice Aliide. She aimed at the middle of her palm and struck. Her gaze was locked, her expression unmoving, as she pointed the fork at her hand, her mouth simply open, soundless.

For a single, fleeting moment, a voice inside Aliide urged Linda to strike again, strike harder, strike with all her strength, but as soon as the thought reached her consciousness, it was silenced by shock. You shouldn’t think those things, evil things. People who had evil thoughts were evil themselves. She ought to go to Linda, take her in her arms and pet her, but she couldn’t. She didn’t want to touch that creature, and she was disgusted; she detested her own body and Linda’s body and the thin, waxy coating that had appeared on her skin. And Linda stabbed with the fork, and raised her hand, and stabbed again, and Aliide watched, and the palm of Linda’s hand turned red. Aliide’s hands curled into fists. Lipsi barked in the yard. The bark propelled Aliide into the kitchen. Linda, glassy-eyed, didn’t move; she held on to the fork but didn’t stab again. Aliide took the fork from her, Ingel came inside, and Linda ran out. “What happened to her?”

“Nothing.”

Ingel didn’t ask any more questions, she just said it was a peculiar spring.

“We’ll be going to the fields in nothing but a sweater soon.”

The day approached. Two weeks . . . thirteen days . . . twelve . . . eleven... ten nights... nine . . . eight . . . seven evenings. In a week they would be gone. The house wouldn’t be Ingel’s anymore. Ingel wouldn’t wash these dishes anymore or feed these chickens. She wouldn’t make chicken feed in this kitchen or dye yarn. She wouldn’t brown the sauce for Hans or wash Linda’s hair in birch ashes and water. She wouldn’t sleep in these beds anymore. Aliide would sleep in them.

Aliide could hear herself constantly panting. She panted unceasingly, pulling oxygen in through her mouth, because her nostrils weren’t powerful enough to pull the air in. What if one of the people who decide these things changed their mind? But why would they? Or what if someone else got wind of it and warned Ingel? Who might do that? Who would want to help Ingel? No one. Why was she so restless? What was troubling her? Everything was already decided. She could relax. All she had to do was wait, wait one more week, and then move in.

In the evenings, Martin would whisper that soon they would move into their new home, and his hand would rest on her neck, his lips on her breasts, as they lay side by side in the little room with the Roosipuu children making noise, strangers banging around, and time rolled inexorably onward —six days, five nights, the hands of the clock turning like millstones, grinding fifteen past Christmases to dust—the candles on the Christmas tree and the Christmas crowns from hollowed eggshells, the birthday cakes, the hymns Ingel had sung in the choir, and the nursery rhymes she had belted out since she was a child and then taught to Linda,
a clever cat with cunning eyes, sat on a stump in the woods.
There was dust in Aliide’s eyes, the whites were crisscrossed with veins like ice, and she wouldn’t ever have to sit at the same table with Ingel and Linda again. There would never again be a morning like the morning they came home together from the town hall, walked for kilometers, just after dawn, the morning air fresh and quiet. A kilometer before they reached home, Ingel had stopped Linda by tugging on her arm and started to rebraid her hair. She combed Linda’s hair with her fingers, smoothed it, and started braiding it tightly. They stood in the middle of the village road, the sun had risen and a door slammed somewhere, Ingel braided Linda’s hair, and Aliide waited, hunkered down, pressing her hands against the road, feeling the little bits of limestone, not looking at the others, and suddenly her throat tightened with a terrible thirst, and she strode over to the ditch, scooped water into her mouth, tasted dirt, scooped up more water. Ingel and Linda had started walking again, holding hands, their backs receding. Aliide followed behind them, gazing toward them, looking at their backs, staring at them until they reached their own front door. At the door Ingel turned around and said, “Clean your face.”

Aliide raised her hands to her cheeks and wiped them; at first she couldn’t feel her cheeks or her hands, and then she realized that the lower half of her face was covered with snot and her neck was wet. She wiped her nose, chin, and neck with her sleeve, purged her face. Ingel opened the door and they stepped into the familiar kitchen, where they felt like strangers.

Ingel starting making pancakes.

Linda brought a jar of raspberry jam to the table. The dark raspberries looked clotted with blood. Aliide shoved Lipsi outside; they went to the table and put pancakes on their plates. Linda got honey on hers, and they passed around the jam, their plates shone like the whites of eyes, their knives slashed, their forks clattered, and they ate their pancakes with rubber lips, glass eyes shiny and dry, waxed cloth skin dry and smooth.

Five days left. Aliide woke up with
a clever cat with cunning eyes
playing in her head. It was Ingel’s voice. She sat up on the edge of the bed—the song didn’t go away, the sound didn’t disappear. Aliide was sure they would come back.

She wrenched her flannel nightgown over her head—
with a pipe in his mouth and a cane in his hand
—got into her rumpled underwear and stockings, dress on, coat, scarf in her hand, and ran out through the kitchen, grabbed the handlebars of her bicycle, threw it down, went across the fields, the fastest route to the town hall, where Martin had gone earlier that morning. She poked at her hair on the way, didn’t stop, adjusted the scarf on her head, and ran, her overshoes flapping, her coat fluttering behind her. She ran over the spring fields and across the road and strode straight across the tinkling ditch that ran along the road, Ingel’s voice in her ears—
and those of them who couldn’t read, they all got pulled by the hair—
singing over the numb land, and the first migrating birds flying in rhythm with Ingel’s singing, pushing Aliide forward, running the whole way, past the thrusting pussy willows, with a formation of birds in front of her, and she didn’t stop until she found Martin talking with a man in a dark leather coat. Martin’s eyes quieted Ingel’s voice. He told the men that they could continue their discussion later and took Aliide by the elbow, ordering her to calm down.

“What’s happened?”

“They’ll come back.”

Martin took out his pocket flask, uncorked it, and thrust

it toward her—she gulped and coughed. He pulled her aside, examined her as she held tight to the flask, took it out of her hands, and lifted it to her lips again.

“Have you been talking to anyone?”

“No.”

“You told them.”

“No!”

“Then what is it?”

“They’ll come back!”

“Stalin won’t let something like that happen.” Martin pulled Aliide into the shelter of his coat, and her legs stopped twitching from her running.

“And I won’t let them come back to frighten my little mushroom.”

Aliide walked to Ingel’s house, stopped under the silver willow on the path into the yard, heard dogs and sparrows, the murmur of a peculiar, early spring, and drew the moistness of the soil inside her. How could she leave such a place? Never, she couldn’t do that. This soil was her soil, this was where she came from and where she would stay, she would never leave here, she would never give it up, not this. Not Hans and not this. Had she really wanted to escape when she had the chance? Did she really stay because she had promised Hans she would take care of Ingel?

She kicked at the shoulder of the road. The edge gave way. Her edge.

She went away from the fence that surrounded the yard; the bare branches of her home birches hung down. Linda was in the yard, playing and singing:

Old man, old man, threescore and six,

With just a tooth and a half that rattles and clicks,

Afraid of a mouse, afraid of a rat,

Afraid of what’s in the corner, an old flour sack.

Linda saw her. Aliide stopped. The song broke off. Linda’s eyes stared her down—big, cold, bog eyes. Aliide went back to the village road.

Afraid of a mouse, afraid of a rat.

In the evening Martin wouldn’t tell her his plans; he just said that tomorrow everything would be taken care of. Three days left. Martin ordered Aliide to remain calm. She couldn’t sleep.

A black grouse started gurgling and courting before the sun came up.

The trip to the town hall still felt like walking along the blade of an ax. As Aliide pulled on the handle of the door, she suddenly remembered how she had once frozen her tongue to metal. She didn’t remember the exact situation, just the feeling of her tongue in that icy sharpness. Maybe it was an ax. She didn’t remember how she had got free or what had happened, but she felt the same feeling in her tongue now when she stepped inside, straight into Martin’s waiting arms, and was handed a pen and a piece of paper. She understood immediately. She had to sign her own name to a testimony so strong that no return would be possible, ever again.

She smelled cold liquor, and Martin’s herringbone coat swarmed in her vision. A dog barked somewhere, a crow cawed outside the window, a spider walked up the edge of the table leg. Martin smashed it and rubbed it into the floorboards.

Aliide Truu signed the document.

Martin patted her once or twice.

He had to stay there to take care of the rest of the business. Aliide went home alone, although he had said that she could wait there for him to finish his work. She didn’t want to, but she didn’t want to go home, either—to walk across the Roosipuus’ yard, walk into the Roosipuus’ kitchen, where the conversation would break off as soon as she opened the door. They would toss a few words of Russian at her, and although the meaning would be polite, they would sound mocking. The boy would stick out his tongue from behind the cupboard, and her tea tin would hiss with the salt that they had thrown in it.

She stopped at the side of the road and looked at the peaceful landscape. Ingel would be going to do the evening milking soon. Hans might be reading the paper in his tiny room. Aliide’s hands didn’t tremble. A sudden, shameful joy spread through her chest. She was alive. She survived. Her name wasn’t on the lists. No one could bear false witness against her, not against Martin’s wife, but she could send the Roosipuus to where Estonian soil was just a faraway memory. Aliide felt her footsteps lengthen, her feet hitting the ground with strength, and she waltzed up to the Roosipuus’ house, almost knocked the mama down, went past her, and slammed the door in her face. She made herself some tea from the Roosipuus’ tin, took some sugar from the Roosipuus’ sugar bowl, and broke off half of their bread to bring with her into her room. On the threshold she turned around and told them that she was going to give them some friendly advice, because she was a gentle person and wanted only what was best for all her comrades. If they were wise, they would take down the picture of Jesus from the bedroom wall. Comrade Stalin wouldn’t like it if the workers of the new world repaid his good work with that sort of thing on their walls. The next day the print of the Son of God had disappeared.

Four days. Then just three. Both days Aliide had said she was coming over to Ingel’s house, but she hadn’t gone.

A clever cat with cunning eyes sat on a stump in the woods.

A pipe in his mouth and a cane in his hand . . .

Two days. Three nights.

Asked the children to read if they could,

and those of them who couldn’t read,

they all got pulled by the hair,

and those who could, and understood,

were petted and treated fair.

Not one day. Not one night.

A wind blew from where the little birds were perched in the bare birch trees. There was a buzzing in Aliide’s head as though she hadn’t slept for ten nights straight. When she came to the front door, she shut her eyes and strode ahead blind, groped for the handle, knocked down the saw that was hanging on the wall, went inside, and opened her eyes in the darkness.

The cupboard in front of Hans’s little room was still there.