Purge (9 page)

Zara felt in her pocket. The photograph was still there.

The moment the girl stepped outside, Aliide slammed the door shut behind her and locked it. She went to sit in her own place at the kitchen table and eased open the drawer that was hidden under the oilcloth, so that if she needed to she could quickly whip out the pistol she had kept in the drawer since Martin had made her a widow. The yard was silent. Maybe the girl had gone on her way. Aliide waited a minute, two minutes. Five. The clock ticked, the fire roared, the walls creaked, the refrigerator hummed, outside the damp air ate at the thatched roof, a mouse rustled in the corner. Time unwound ten minutes further, and then there was a knock and a call at the door. It was the girl, asking her to open the door and saying that there was no one else there, just her. Aliide didn’t move. How did she know the girl was telling the truth? Maybe her husband was lurking behind her. Maybe he had somehow been able to make things clear to her without making any noise.

Aliide got up, opened the door in the pantry that led to the stable, went past the deserted trough and the manger to the big double doors, and carefully opened one half of the door a chink. There was no one in the yard. She pushed the door farther open and saw the girl alone on the steps, then she went back in the kitchen and let her in. Relief wafted into the room. The girl’s back was straightened and her ears had settled down. She was breathing calmly, inhaling deeply. Why had she been out in the yard so long, if she hadn’t found the man there? She said again that there hadn’t been anyone there. Aliide poured her a fresh cup of coffee substitute, started chatting at the same time about getting out some tea, decided to try to keep the girl’s mind off the rocks and the window as long as possible. We did already have some tea today, after all. The girl nodded. It was harder to come by a little while back. She nodded again. Although there was raspberry and mint tea to make up for it—there are plenty of things to make tea from in the countryside. In the midst of this prattle, Aliide realized that the girl was going to start asking about the hooligans again, and because she had calmed down so much, she wasn’t going to accept Aliide’s mumbling something about wild boars. At what point had her mind become so feeble that she could no longer think of believable explanations for strange rattlings at the window? Her fear had loosened its hold, but she still felt its breath, the way it blew cold on her feet through the cracks in the floor that it had trickled into. She wasn’t afraid of the hooligans, so she didn’t understand why the terror that had gripped the girl hadn’t disappeared the moment she rushed back inside, bringing the soothing smell of grass with her. Suddenly she felt that she could hear the moon arching across the sky. She realized that the thought didn’t make any sense, and she grabbed her cup and squeezed the stump of the handle until her hands started to look like bones.

The girl drank her coffee substitute and looked at Aliide—a little differently than she had before. Aliide felt it, although she wasn’t looking at the girl; she just continued to complain about Gorbachev’s alcohol ban and reminisce about the way they used to make tea that had a drug effect by using several packages for one glassful. There had been some name for the drink, too, but she couldn’t remember it. They used it a lot in the army, she thought, and in prison. And she had forgotten to change the mushrooms in the mushroom tea during all this fuss! Complaining, Aliide snatched a glass jar from the Estonian days that had a tea mushroom in it, took the gauze out of the mouth of the jar, admired the little mushroom growing out of the side of the large one, and sugared some fresh tea to pour into the jar.

“This will help keep your blood pressure in check,” she explained.

“Tibla,” the girl interrupted.

“What?”

“Tibla.”

“Now I don’t understand you at all.”

“It says ‘
tibla
’ on the front door, in Russian. And ‘Magadan.’”

That was news to Aliide.

“Kids playing,” she ventured suddenly, but the explanation didn’t seem convincing. She tried again, saying that when she was young she used to wash clothes on the shore and beat on the piles, and the boys would beat on stones right behind her. They called it the ghost game and thought it was very funny.

The girl wasn’t listening. She asked if Aliide was from Russia.

“What? No!”

A person could easily think that, the girl said, since Aliide’s door had “
tibla
”—Ruskie—and “Magadan” written on it. Or maybe Aliide had been in Siberia?

“No!”

“Then why would they write ‘Magadan’ on your door?”

“How should I know! When has there ever been any sense in boys’ games?”

“Don’t you have a dog? Everyone else has one.”

In fact, Aliide had had a dog, Hiisu, but it died. And actually Aliide was sure that Hiisu had been poisoned—just like her chickens, all five of them—and then her sauna had burned down, but she didn’t tell the girl about this, or about how every now and then she heard Hiisu’s footsteps, or the clucking of her hens, and how it was impossible to remember that there was no one else to feed in the house except herself and the flies. She had never lived in a house with an empty barn. She just couldn’t get used to it. She wanted to turn the conversation back around to this Pasha, but she wasn’t likely to succeed, because the girl had so many questions, followed by exclamations of wonder. Wasn’t her daughter worried about her alone without a dog in the countryside?

“I don’t trouble her with trivial matters.”

“But . . .”

Aliide snapped up a bucket and went to get some water, the enamel clanking, the bucket swinging loudly. She tucked her head in a defiant position and went outside to show that there was nothing threatening waiting there, no extra pairs of eyes in the black walls of the night. And her back didn’t itch as she went out into the dark yard.

The first time the rain of rocks flew at Aliide’s window it was a clear, breathable night in May. Hiisu’s barking had already managed to wake her up, and she had sluggishly slapped her fear into a corner like a slippery-footed insect. She turned onto her side with her back to the fear, and the straw in her mattress rustled; she wasn’t going to take the trouble to get up because of a couple of rocks. When the second shower of stones came, she had already started to feel superior. Did they imagine they could scare her with a few rocks? Her. Of all people. Such childishness made her laugh. Didn’t they have any larger weapons than that to mess around with? The only thing that would get her out of bed at night was a tank coming through her fence. You never know, it could happen some day, not because of these hooligans, of course, but if a war broke out. She wouldn’t want that, not anymore, not now— she’d rather die first. She knew that many people had prepared for it and had gathered up all kinds of supplies at home: matches, salt, candles, batteries. And every second house had a kitchen full of dried bread. Aliide ought to make more of it, too, and get some batteries; she had only a few left. What if a war did break out and the Russians won? Which they no doubt would. If that happened, she wouldn’t have any worries, an old Red babushka like her. But still, no war; just let there be no more war.

Aliide lay awake listening to Hiisu’s growls, and when he calmed down a bit, she waited for the morning to come, to make some coffee. If they thought she was going to get up in the middle of the night because of them, they were dreaming. She wasn’t going anywhere, even if her barn was empty and she was alone in the house, not to Talvi’s house in Finland, not anywhere. This was her home, dearly paid for, and a little crowd of stone throwers wasn’t going to drive her out of it. She hadn’t left before and she wasn’t leaving now; she’d die first. They could burn down the whole house, and she would sit in her own chair in the kitchen and drink coffee sweetened with her own honey. She would even wave to them from the window and bring a big bowl of homemade cardamom buns to the gatepost and then go back inside as the roof thatch burst into flames. The faster it happened, the better. And suddenly she felt a springtime brook of expectation. Let them do it. Let them burn down the whole house. The lady of the house—the lady of the empty barn—wasn’t afraid of fire. She was ready to go, now was as good a time as any. Burn it all! Her mouth was dry with greed, she licked her lips, jumped out of bed, went to the window, opened it with a clatter, and yelled,“You belong in Siberia, too! It would be just right for you!”

***

After the first rocks came the songs. Rocks and songs. Or just rocks, or just songs. Then Hiisu was gone, then the chickens, and the sauna. The sleepless nights marched in a row past Aliide’s bed; the tired, stiff-necked days held out longer. The peace that had come in the last few decades was torn up into a pile of rug strips in a moment, and the mountain of rags had to be sorted through again, endured again.
It’s time to straighten our backs again and throw off our own slavery ...
The song came whispering through her window, into her bedroom. She lay in her bed and didn’t move. Her back was straight, unyielding on top of the straw. She stared at the wall-hanging, didn’t turn her head toward the window or pull the curtains closed. Let them holler, let them do what they liked, let the snot-nosed brats sing their hearts out, let them dance on her roof if they wanted, the tanks would be here soon enough and take out the little smart alecks.

The land, the fatherland, this land is sacred, where now we can be free. The song, our victory song, let it ring out, and soon a free Estonia we shall see!

Some years ago—was it 1988?—a crowd of young people had made its way through the village singing “
Estonian, be proud and good, like your grandfathers before you, you’ll be free
.” The voice of a boy in puberty had crowed, “
Estonian I am and Estonian I’ll stay, for Estonian is what I was made to be,
” and the others had laughed, and a long-haired boy had tossed his head proudly. Aliide was just coming out of the store, she could still hear the clack of the abacus beads, the door hinges creaking like a growling stomach, and she had just stopped to tie her scarf on tighter, putting her bag of bread down on the ground. When she heard the first lines of the song, she withdrew back into a corner of the shop, let them pass by, and looked after them. She had felt such a powerful irritation that she had forgotten the bread and left it sitting in the corner of the shop, and hadn’t noticed until she was halfway home. How dare they? How could they be so insolent? What in the world were they thinking? Or was it just envy that made her scowl and tremble, her heart pounding?

The voice outside the window was young, a little like her brother-in-law Hans’s voice used to sound back in the days of the Estonian Republic, when she had first met him. Before his songs were all sung. Before his spritely, straight, twometer frame was bent, when his bones hadn’t been made to fold—but they would be, his chubby cheeks would become sunken and his beautiful singing silenced. Let the snot-nosed brats sing! She was happy to listen. And think about Hans, beautiful Hans. She smiled in the darkness. Hans had been in a choir, too. Oh, how beautifully he had sung! When he worked in the fields in the summer days, on his way home his song would come ahead of him and make the silver willows along the road ring with sheer joy and the trunks of the apple trees hum in rhythm. Her sister, Ingel, had been terribly proud of her husband! And she was also proud that Hans had been chosen to do his service in the parliamentary guard. Only good athletes and fairly tall men were accepted into it. And Hans had been beaming with pride—an ordinary country boy, chosen to defend the Riigikogu!

Martin’s old friend Voldemar came to visit several months after independence was declared. Hiisu started to bark well before he arrived. Aliide went out to the yard, Hiisu ran to the road, and between the gray fence posts she could see a man, just as gray and thin, leading his bicycle toward her house. Stolen gold from long ago gleamed in his sunken mouth. Wrinkles had pulled his cheeks inside his skull, as if his face were drawn closed with a string. Volli had always been in the front, always wanted to be first in everything. She well remembered him barging to the front of some kind of line with his big belly and sturdy jaw, puffing out his veteran’s chest. Anger had welled up in the hollow eyes of the people who had been in line since the wee hours of the morning, and it reached for Volli’s feet. It never caught up with his boots, even though the line was very long, because his legs weren’t weak then, they were strong and fat, and in a moment he had stepped over the threshold of one shop or another and left a wake of thick anger behind him. After he and his companions left, nothing but scraps remained on the counter. The times when Aliide happened to be standing in line when Volli cut to the front, she would disappear into her own mass so he wouldn’t notice her and say hello, so no one in the line would know that she knew the man. She didn’t want the hollow eyes of the people in line to turn and look in her direction; if he said hello to her she would have been thrust out of the line, she would have gotten an elbow in the side—but they never could have hit Volli’s well-fed sides.

Now Aliide greeted him cheerfully and offered him some coffee substitute, and they chatted about this and that. Then he said that he might have to go to court.

Her alarm was so bright that she couldn’t see for a moment.

“They’ve made up all kinds of lies about me,” he said. “It may be that they’ll even want to ask you some questions, Aliide.”

He was serious. It should have all been over and done with. Why were they coming to harass old people?

“We were all just following orders. We were good people. And now all of a sudden we’re bad. I don’t understand that.” He hung his head and started to berate Yeltsin and the young ingrates and their well-constructed nation. “Now you have to scrape for everything, and that’s supposed to be a good thing, huh?”