When the Doves Disappeared (15 page)

COMRADE PARTS’S INSTINCT
was correct. In the list from 1944 he found a familiar name. Just a name, no date of death or indication of transfer to another camp or evacuation to Germany. A name he wished had been someone else’s. Anyone else’s. He had been searching for any name he recognized, but this was the very name he didn’t want to find, a name that felt like if he pronounced it out loud his tongue would be covered in blisters. A name that shouldn’t even be on that list. Roland Simson.

His cousin had disappeared, gone his own way almost immediately after the Germans arrived, and Parts hadn’t heard anything about him since—no gossip, not the slightest rumor, not even from Auntie Anna, who would have told him if she had any news of him. Parts had assumed that he had either escaped to the West or died before the Soviet troops arrived, so why should Roland of all people have ended up at Klooga—why not someplace else? Worst of all, why had his name turned up in the Klooga prisoners list? Parts feverishly leafed through the papers, cooling his mouth now and then with the sour cream. Three prisoners had mentioned Roland’s name, but there was no testimony from Roland himself. A man named Antti remembered the day Roland arrived because it happened to be his own birthday and he’d decided to give his bread to the first prisoner he met. Roland Simson had just been brought in; he had introduced himself in clear Estonian and wanted to behave as if they weren’t even at a camp. Antti had asked to have Roland in his work group—the Jews were in weaker shape—and Roland proved himself a hard worker. Cursing birthdays and all other days of celebration, Parts squeezed his hands into fists until the nails sank into his flesh. The pain cleared his mind. Roland’s admission date was not long before the German withdrawal. He’d probably been executed at the camp, his body left
unrecognizable. Or if he had gotten out alive, he would have been shot in the woods, or later, once the Red Army arrived—but who would he have encountered in the meantime? Who would he have spoken to? How long would he have been in the woods, and with whom? There had to be a file on Roland, some information about his being killed or captured. Parts squeezed his pencil until it broke. He had to find out for certain what happened.

Tallinn, Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic, Soviet Union

A
BOUND NOTEBOOK PEEPED OUT
from the middle of the pile on the reading table at the archive. A diary. Parts recognized the handwriting immediately. The floor seemed to give way, the corner of the table swayed. He hadn’t expected this. Anything else, but not this. Even his careful mental preparation for a visit to the archive wasn’t sufficient to maintain his composure—the find was too important. He concentrated for a moment on stabilizing his breathing and managed to force his legs to remain where they were, to hold his head straight after a few instinctive jerks and a panicked twitch in his cheeks, to make himself turn his face once again to the files in front of him, although the tabletop and chair had turned to plasticine that was starting to melt in the surprisingly hot air, he could feel it bending, almost hear it buckling. He kept repeating in his mind that it was just an illusion, a trick of his mind, nothing more. He gripped the edge of the table as if it were an airplane throttle and opened the diary to a random page. The year written at the top of the page hit him in the ribs like a missile.

When the archive guard went to check on a visitor at a reading table
farther off, the diary slipped into Parts’s shirt as if of its own accord. Parts didn’t fully understand what he’d done, and yet he did understand. Stealing a document was a serious act, easily traced if anyone should compare the returned materials to those marked on the column of files released to him, or if anyone went through the list of people who’d been given access to the diary in question. He wouldn’t be able to return it—it was too late for regrets. The notebook was against his skin now and he smelled smoke, a direct hit.

AFTER THIS ABDUCTION,
Parts tried to behave normally, concentrate on the other materials spread on the reading table, but his skin grew wet with sour sweat against the book, the rustle of papers from the other tables grated in his ears, and the smallest cough or cleared throat made him jump, sure that every noise was a reproach, a sign that his act had been observed, that the twitching muscle in his cheek had betrayed him. His eyes lit on the guard watching from the front of the row of tables. Parts kept his pupils in check, didn’t let them dilate, didn’t avert his eyes too quickly, he was sure of that, just as he was sure that the guard’s face showed no flicker of suspicion. The guard looked back down at the catalogues on the table in front of him—apparently requested materials—as if nothing unusual had happened, and started going through them, expunging the chapters inappropriate for the next scheduled reader.

PARTS HAD ALREADY
been given access to particularly dangerous books, marked with two six-pointed stars, and now that he’d gotten his hands on something even hotter, what had he done? He’d gone and risked getting himself in trouble again. It had taken months of drinks with Comrade Porkov to wheedle permission to look at materials from the restricted libraries and archives. It was another reminder of his lowly station. Nevertheless, when the steel door of the archive opened, it was a moment of victory. He’d gotten through it, it opened for him and only him. When he showed his papers to the department manager, he felt privileged. He wasn’t just anyone. But at any moment he could become no one. He was risking everything for one notebook.

He tried to concentrate again, made himself stare at drawings of dugouts, sifted carefully through every bandit’s flyer. He had to behave as normally as everyone else in the reading room, try to soak up as much information as possible from the materials he’d been granted at the moment because he didn’t know if he’d have another opportunity to research these illegal, rather professional-looking newsletters again, didn’t know if he’d ever get his hands on them again—didn’t know if he’d get caught, and what would happen to him if he did. Most of the issues of the newsletters were just two sides of one page, but some were four or even six pages, written with fervor. Their ardent language was easily recognizable—he remembered his training days on Staffan Island. At the time he had been in on the planning of an elite group whose exploits would include chasing the Red Army out of Estonia. He’d often smiled at the naiveté of youth, though he wasn’t smiling now. But he might smile again, he would make sure that he was able to smile at such things again, and in order to do that he had to get out of the archive with his contraband without getting caught. If what he’d stolen had been less important, if some other date had been at the top of the page, he wouldn’t have been as nervous. But the date and the author of the diary were dangerous for him, and the cover of the notebook was burning his bare skin, eating its way into the raw flesh of his belly—he was plunging into a high sea with his tail smoking. His index finger glided over the lines of the drawings, balancing along the chimneys, the stoves, the bunks on the walls, the ventilation ducts, and although he tried to keep on track, the blows to his ribs were real and they shoved his finger off course and made him open his collar, the veins of his neck throbbing violently, his heart pounding against the notebook, the area around his navel slippery with sweat, his wings already disappearing into the waves. He could hear the smack of lips as a man at a table behind him put his pipe in his mouth, the scrape of the match against the striking surface, the man standing up, staring straight at him, blowing smoke out of his mouth. Had the man seen anything? Parts couldn’t stay there a moment longer. He would have to leave his reading material behind; it was time to jump.

The chair screeched against the wood floor as he stood up. The guard’s hand paused in its careful task, his gaze lifted. Parts approached the guard’s table and put the borrowed materials down in front of him.
His sweaty fingers had left marks on the drawings, but the guard didn’t reprimand him. He was a methodical man, his ink making its marks on the columns with excruciating exactness, and Parts braced himself to argue if he was told that a document was missing from the pile. Parts would claim that he hadn’t received it, was ready for a full assault, ready to raise his voice, to complain about the negligence of the department, and especially about the woman who had given him the materials, but at that moment the steel door squeaked open and the woman in question walked in. Parts froze. The woman tried to squeeze behind the guard’s table to the card catalogue; her hip, covered in a bright expanse of chintz, knocked a glass ashtray from the corner of the table, and as it broke on the floor every eye turned toward them. The woman gave a start, the ink left an ugly track on the column of text, the guard snapped at her, the ink bottle tipped over, the guard snatched up a stack of blotting paper, Russian curses echoed, the guard ordered everyone to keep their eyes on their own work, the pile of papers at the edge of the guard’s desk fell over, and at that moment Parts drily remarked that he was in a hurry and surely they could check his returns in without his help. Leaving the guard still arguing with the woman, the ink spreading over the careful columns, the ashes floating in the air, Parts snapped up the keys the woman had dropped on the table, unlocked the door, and tossed the keys to the person sitting behind the nearest reading table before stepping outside without anyone taking any notice of him.

Tallinn, Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic, Soviet Union

C
OMRADE PARTS PUT
his hand on the table next to the diary. All was quiet upstairs—his wife had passed out. The paper of the diary was spotted from damp, its edges worn soft. Parts took a breath, lifted the cover with his thumb, and turned to the first page. The notebook still had the same effect on him, even though he’d gone through it many times now—his pulse accelerated, mice started to scurry up and down his spine. The sentences were tightly packed, some in pencil, some in pale ink, the purple-stained, lined paper punctured by the pressure of a sharp point. Parts could tell from the curve of the letters the emotion they were written with, but there was no mention of the real name of a single person or place. The code names used were strange, too, clearly names invented by the writer—Parts hadn’t found them in his searches through illegal documents.