When the Doves Disappeared (14 page)

His wife hadn’t asked any more questions. She had probably wanted to be able to walk safely after sunset, had probably understood why it was important to remember that her husband was a real man of Estonia. Those were dangerous times for anyone who had chosen, or was known to have chosen, any side other than Estonia’s. The Office, on the other hand, didn’t like those who had chosen Estonia. Luckily for Parts, his years in Siberia had hollowed his cheeks into a new shape, and he was hardly likely to run into his old colleagues, who had presumably all been liquidated. It was the beginning of a new, good life. Although the bedroom had never been a place of shared rest for him and his wife, nor of shared passion, they nevertheless learned to share a bed, and their coolness kept the sheets fresh even in the heat of summer. They learned camaraderie, if not quite friendship. Parts hadn’t complained about the new apartment or asked why she had moved there from Tallinn. For someone who’d been in Siberia, there was no point in hoping for better, there was no way to get permission to live in the capital. He just had to take things
gradually, let time hollow his cheeks still more, let the nosepiece of his glasses press pits between his eyes, construct a new demeanor. He wasn’t going to make any more mistakes.

After Parts had lived in Valga in complete seclusion for some time, a stranger struck up a conversation on the way home one day. Parts understood immediately what was happening. His instructions were clear: he was ordered to strike up a friendship with the workers in their combine who had returned to Estonia from Siberia, report to the system on their attitudes and their degree of anti-Sovietism, evaluate their potential for sabotage, and keep notes on their reactions to letters received from abroad. He had accomplished this well, so well that he was considered the right person to start a correspondence in the name of a man who’d once come to his house to visit for the evening. Parts understood that his gift with signatures was already known in the Office. Later on he even heard that the graphics and graphology specialist at the Security Directorate was jealous of him.

BECAUSE OF HIS SKILL,
Comrade Parts continued his work with Estonians abroad. He had made a pasteup of a photo of himself with General Laidoner’s insignia to inspire confidence and written a skillful account of how Laidoner had personally given it to him as a mark of respect. The Office was satisfied with Parts’s creative language and his repertoire of carefully constructed phrases. He knew how to avoid being overly specific or going after the Soviet system. Only the most ridiculously naive Estonian living in the West would believe that he could cross the line into opinions about the homeland or otherwise threaten the social order without the blessing of Postal Control.

In just a couple of weeks he succeeded in getting a response to a letter written according to guidelines and sent to a certain Villem in Stockholm. The two had studied together in Tartu, and Villem was delighted to receive a letter from home. The Office opened a file on Villem, Postal Control expedited Villem’s mother’s letters to Sweden, and within a month Parts was whisked to Tartu on a marshrutka transport to establish contact with Villem’s mother. In two months he’d collected enough evidence of Villem’s participation in a spy ring that he was rewarded with
a promise that he and his wife could move back to Tallinn. He got a job at the Norma factory and his wife was made a guard at the railway station, with her own chair on the commuter platforms. They finally had the space for a sofa bed, which his wife made up for him every night in the living room. And after all this success, he couldn’t get his wife to Porkov’s party sober. They couldn’t go. They could never go. He would never taste Porkov’s beluga.

THE TURNING POINT
in their cool, peaceful coexistence had come in the form of Ain-Ervin Mere’s trial two years earlier for killing Soviet citizens as head of the Estonian division of the German security police. Parts had been summoned to testify as an eyewitness to the horrors perpetrated by the cancer of fascism and he performed the task well, first studying diligently in the training arranged for witnesses on Maneeži Street and then presenting himself as an expert in the courtroom, deploring the accused, masterfully using everything he’d learned, all the while glad that England had refused to turn Mere over to the Soviet Union, since meeting the major eye to eye would have been uncomfortable. His testimony had been strengthened by the radio coverage, his eyewitness accounts of the atrocities at the concentration camp at Klooga were widely written of, and he’d even been invited to a kindergarten to be presented with flowers—the cameras flashing, the radio gushing about how the staff at the kindergarten wept and the children sang.

The Office was satisfied. His wife wasn’t. She had changed radically—she’d started missing days at work early; the smell of liquor had seeped into the wallpaper; her appearance, which she had always taken care with before, had fallen away curl by curl, her skin graying as quickly as the women’s hair covered in ash after the bombings. Parts had heard that she smelled of alcohol at the railway station, too, and had once even fallen out of her inspector’s chair. On good days she might energetically begin the housework, as she had today with the laundry, but after the first glass she would forget to open the dampers on the stove or absentmindedly let the tub overflow. Parts got into the habit of checking the dampers several times a day and constantly sniffing for the smell of gas.

Karl Linnas and Ervin Viks’s trial for the crimes at the Tartu camps
had added to the problem and made what had been her occasional bouts of pacing a nightly occurrence. He remembered the time he surprised her reading a copy of Ervin Martinson’s book on the trial, her hands shaking, a trail of tobacco-darkened spit at the corner of her mouth, a bubble forming with every agitated breath. He’d snatched the book from her and locked it in his office cabinet. Her voice had been filled with horror: How did he know where he’d be sitting at the next trial, how did he know what all this would lead to, what would happen to them?

SHE MAY HAVE LOST
her sense about the Ain-Ervin Mere trial, but Parts had done the opposite. Testifying at the trial had been the beginning of a new phase for him—he took hold of what was offered and turned it all to his own benefit. A career as a witness to the sadism of the Hitlerists, and as their victim, guaranteed a secure future. He might be asked to testify in other cases, maybe even abroad. He was necessary. Why couldn’t his wife understand that?

The book only added new dimensions, greater possibilities. At best it could give him access to information that, if used properly, would guarantee a good life for them, vacations on the Black Sea, access to restricted shops.

The Linnas and Viks case would be followed by many similar appearances, Parts was sure of that. Cases were already being prepared elsewhere, in Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Bulgaria. The clumsy start of the Linnas trial would be put down as a mistake, and wouldn’t be repeated. The
Sotsialisticheskaia Zakonnost
had reported the outcome of the case in late 1961, even though the trial didn’t begin until after New Year’s. Parts found the whole thing laughable, but he was careful not to grin when it was mentioned in public. On the whole the strides made by the Office had been remarkable, with new tools created all the time, the technological department developing rapidly, and the agency apparatus expanding. More books on the subject were needed. Parts was in luck—he happened to hold a position in what was apparently an area of significant growth in the Office’s activities.

And if the Office, with moods as changeful as his wife’s, was kept satisfied, who knows, there might dawn a day when Comrade Parts would
walk nonchalantly into the photographer’s and order portraits for a foreign passport, as if it were an everyday occurrence, as if he’d always been a
viezdnoj
, a good Soviet citizen with a foreign passport. And then his colleagues and acquaintances, some of whom he wouldn’t even remember ever meeting, would pester him to bring back dirty magazines, or decks of cards with naked women on them. An image of the chubby-cheeked Intourist guide flashed in his mind. He’d heard that she had a Western contact who always remembered to bring her a magazine taped to his stomach. It had been going on for a long time but she always passed her evaluations—the Office needed magazines, too.

Parts’s book wouldn’t be part of next year’s publications, which were to celebrate Tallinn’s liberation from the clutches of the thieving fascist conquerors twenty years earlier, but when the twenty-fifth anniversary came, Parts would be one of its notable heroes, the famous author and witness, presented with flowers. Perhaps the crowd at the Tallinn philatelic exhibition would be able to admire his face on a stamp or commemorative envelope. He wouldn’t need to constantly keep up his correspondence, labor hour after hour over his letters, both the forged and the genuine, some filled with disinformation, some preemptive, some meant to test the mood of the recipients. His work on repatriated emigrants would be over. The Office would realize that he needed his own office;
Cross & Cockade
would beg him for more articles on Soviet pilots, and so would other Western magazines. His only required correspondence would be with those contacts interested in exchanging ideas with a respected Soviet author, or discussing his specialized field, Soviet pilots. But his cover job at the factory and the chatter of refugees would be a thing of the past, since he would inevitably be tainted in their eyes. He would be a new person. He would have a new life.

The only problem was his wife’s nerves. After all these years they were giving way completely, just when he had the support of the Office, just when the future was clear.

Tallinn, Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic, Soviet Union

T
HE SAFE HOUSE WAS
deserted except for Comrades Porkov and Parts, two desks, a Magnetofon, a few chairs, and a constantly buzzing telephone. Parts himself had gone mute; he was holding in his hands a set of folders containing the list of names from the Klooga camp, and for a moment he wondered if he could hear something humming, was even about to ask the Comrade Captain if he’d brought the headquarters cat with him, until he realized he should keep his mouth shut—the sound was coming from inside him. The green of the wallpaper intensified to such a brightness that it made him squint. Comrade Porkov nodded at the lists and said that they weren’t complete—the fascists had taken their archives with them when they left—but the Directorate of State Security had managed to procure an abundance of useful information, as had the excellent work of the special commission investigating fascist crimes.

“Many of the victims have not, of course, been identified, and we would be pleased to be able to complete the list,” Porkov said. “Unfortunately, the identities of many of the murderers are also still shrouded in obscurity. Far too many. I’m relying on your help in the matter. Letting
such criminals go free is not acceptable to Soviet morality. That’s not how we work. You can acquaint yourself with the materials at home.”

COMRADE PARTS FELT FEVERISH
about the Klooga files all afternoon. They tickled his leg from within his briefcase where it sat on the floor of the factory guard booth. He wanted to take them out, glance at them just a little, but he knew how he would react if he found something. He remained nervous even when colors returned to normal. The sun had never been so high in the sky, the day never so bright. He had to shade his eyes with his hand even inside the booth, trying the whole day to think about something else, to behave as normally as possible, to concentrate on trivial, everyday things—the workers moving through the gates, the waistbands of the women’s underwear filled with goods from the factory, the men’s bulging breast pockets, the commotion when the inspector arrived, how the cognac offered to her made her blush, how she chuckled at the jokes of the men buzzing around her as she crossed the factory yard. The inspector’s visits were always greeted by the handsomest men in the factory. Parts calmly accepted a few chocolate bars and nodded at a driver who left with a load of tin for the inspector’s garden. He thought about his wife, who had promised to go buy milk, but part of him knew already that if he didn’t pick up the milk himself all he would find in the icebox would be bottles with a centimeter of sour milk at the bottom. He tried to keep his mind on anything but the contents of his briefcase, and on the way home he thought with fear of what he might find there. If he did find something, what would it mean? The milk was forgotten in his nervousness. In the icebox was a row of milk bottles, their aluminum lids shining with past days of the week. Parts emptied the bottles into the sink and, after using the bottle brush, added them to the other ones his wife hadn’t brought back to the store that stood leaning in a row against the gas canister rack. He held his breath, closed his eyes for a moment, and sat down. There was no point in getting upset over the milk bottles again. He should focus on what was important—the Klooga lists. He settled for sour cream instead of milk, angrily mixing sugar and store-bought apple compote into it, his spoon clinking, and went into his office. He would go through the Klooga files, and if he didn’t find anything interesting
he would go through the lists from the rest of the camps, one at a time. Porkov had been in such an accommodating mood that it was entirely possible he could obtain information from the other camps. If Parts didn’t run across any names that were embarrassing to him, he would get hold of still more lists, any lists, dig up every name and make a thorough investigation of anyone who might know him—were they still alive, and if so, where were they now?