When the Doves Disappeared (17 page)

It was well known that Mark had taken his superior officers as a model in decorating his Christmas tree. He decked it with the gold rings of Soviet citizens who’d come to the camp and never left, and he let his children dance in a circle around the tree and admire it
.

Parts cracked his knuckles. He couldn’t quite remember where he’d seen a tree decorated like that, or whether he had seen it himself, but the image was so powerful that he had to use it. It would also strengthen negative feelings about Christmas trees in general, which wasn’t a bad thing. Had he found the right wording? He screwed up his mouth. Maybe. Maybe he should add some more eyewitness information. A woman forced to witness this grotesque exhibition.

Maria, a woman brought to the Tartu concentration camp, felt fortunate to be chosen as a servant in Mark’s household. She was fortunate to avoid a crueler fate, and fortunate to be able to steal scraps of food from the house, but unfortunate in having to serve Christmas dinner while the glow of the Christmas candles lit up the rings of Soviet citizens who’d been killed. Was her mother’s ring among them? Her father’s? That was something she would never know
.

Comrade Parts had been banging on the Optima so furiously that he’d struck holes in the paper, the letter arms had gotten tied in a knot, and the keys refused to move. The rings of Soviet citizens? Or should it be Jews? Would the mention of Jews push the sufferings of the Soviet citizens into the background, diminish the dignity and the sorrow of the Soviet people, perhaps even pose a threat to it? Parts had noticed that in the Western books he had locked in his cabinet, Jewishness was distinctly emphasized.

He untangled the letter arms, freed the paper from the roller, and stood up to read a few lines aloud. The text was already starting to have some punch. Women. He ought to focus on women. Women always aroused emotion. Maria was definitely a good character, she would generate sympathy. Mark wouldn’t be evil enough if there weren’t people around him to bring the evil out, someone whose eyes the reader could look through and see the Christmas tree, the Christmas dinner. Yes, he needed Maria’s testimony. Or was he crossing a line, making it too sentimental? No, not yet. He didn’t dare add any more cannibalism. There was already so much of it that he’d had to cite Martinson’s books over and over. They were among his recommended references. But in the future his own works might produce a similar flood of references, adding weight to his reputation, his credibility, citation by citation. Still, his fingers felt heavy when he typed Martinson’s name.

Parts curled his toes on top of his slippers and broke off a piece of jelly cake. Martinson’s book offered the perfect character for Parts’s purposes: Mark—unidentified, without even a surname, a brute, a war criminal who was never caught. It wasn’t even clear if he’d committed his despicable acts under his real Christian name. That’s why it was easy to continue the story. He could find testimony about Mark’s deeds, but nothing about Mark himself. Parts shook his head and pondered how his colleagues’ mistakes had eventually turned to his advantage. He could see from the files that the security organs had used young, inexperienced men, that they had lacked guidance. There had obviously been a shortage of competent officers. During interrogations no one had thought to ask for clarifying information or personal details. Many witnesses had talked about people using only first or only last names, making it impossible to trace them. It was only later that someone noticed how flawed the methods had been at the end of the forties. Hardly any of the witnesses were still alive, because merely being arrested had been evidence enough for execution. The fact that Roland’s information had been well recorded in the Klooga papers was a fateful irony.

Mark was a muscular man with broad shoulders whose strength shocked all those who found themselves the target of his cruelty. Maria, who spent many evenings shining his shoes, remembered well how he would make calculations
of how much iron he would get out of her, how much phosphorus, how much soap. She also testified that he taught his children their sums by counting out how many prisoners could be made to fit in the gray Brandtmann chocolate factory truck. The door of the gray truck would slam—

Parts’s fingers halted over the keys. The slam he’d heard wasn’t from the door of a truck; it came from upstairs. His shoulders tensed. He listened. Silence. But the silence didn’t relax his shoulders, it only stiffened his neck more. He rummaged in the drawer for some aspirin, pulled off the wrapper, and unfolded the paper from around the tablets. The sentence he’d broken off wasn’t coming back to him. It was gone. The stiffness in his neck radiated pain into the back of his skull. This was no time for a headache. He was about to get up to fetch the Analgin from behind his wife’s valerian bottle in the kitchen, but he sat back down and swallowed the aspirin dry. He had work to do. The jelly cake melted the taste of the pills out of his mouth. He lifted his hands to the keyboard, sent his mind back to the powerful, muscular figure of Mark. It was enough, the core of the whole thing. Enough to make the text believable. One word and his book would be in bookstores all over the East, all over the West, all over the world. He’d also tried adding a few lines borrowed from the diary, to lend his book authenticity, but the language was so different, and too vague—the manuscript had to have concrete details. Maybe he could mention the crosses at the back of the diary as crosses Mark drew as a record of the poor creatures he’d murdered. But was his Mark a person who would count his victims?

Martinson was no doubt working on his next book right now, maybe something more about cannibalism, explaining how it was a natural Estonian trait, how the cannibalism of the Estonians in the fascist ranks had broken all bounds and without the liberation brought by the Soviet Union the Estonians would have eaten themselves into extinction. Parts’s chest tightened in irritation. He had to come up with something better than Martinson. He couldn’t let anyone surpass him. But just as he was catching up to the sentence that he’d broken off, his wife’s hard heels struck the floorboards and started knocking around overhead again—first only a few steps from the bed to the chest and back, as if she were practicing before getting up to speed. As if she didn’t plan on going back to bed.
Parts put his hands on his knees. Auntie Anna had had the same problem back at the beginning of the fifties, in the countryside. Rats running in herds under the floor and behind the walls so that she couldn’t sleep. She’d written to him about it when he was in Siberia. That’s the way the times were back then—the rat population had exploded. They called them “emergency rats.” Now he had a wife like a rat.

Parts closed his eyes, let the sweetness of the cake dull his hearing, and concentrated on his research. The Office would probably be interested in the possibilities offered by someone like Mark, would probably want to cook up a Mark among the Estonians abroad in order to pressure some host country to produce such a war criminal, but Parts would think of some other name for the purpose and add it to his book. He was keeping Mark for himself. Mark was his star, and revealing Mark’s identity to the whole world would be his great moment. He would only give the complete information to the Office when the time was right. Not yet. Then the Office could worry about the final details. The real Mark could be anywhere—Canada, the United States, Argentina—or dead and buried. If he was alive, he would hardly have any objection to someone else being blamed for his actions. Of course it was too bad that the someone had to be Roland, but Mark was just such a perfect opportunity. As for Roland’s actual deeds, Parts had already chosen the best of them years ago, and made them his own.

PART THREE
 

We all know that there were women who participated in Fascist terrorism, in spite of their natural sympathies and their power to produce life. Females who sold themselves to Hitlerism were no longer women, they only looked like representatives of the female of the species. They had become representatives of the pillaging conquerors.

—Edgar Parts,
At the Heart of the Hitlerist Occupation
, Eesti Raamat Publishing, 1966

Reval, Estland General Commissariat, Ostland National Commissariat

J
UUDIT WAS SITTING
in Café Kultas, sitting and flirting in a way that was not becoming to a woman—especially flirting that way with a stranger. But there she was, cooing, preening, stroking her hair again and again, and Roland, who was trying to walk past her nonchalantly just a stone’s throw away, saw a coquettishness that made such a vivid impression on him that he kept bumping into people. Until he saw her coming toward the café from the direction of Karja Street, he hadn’t been completely sure that Juudit intended to follow his plan. Once he had spotted her, he turned on his heel, relieved, and disappeared into the bustle of Freedom Square in front of the café so she wouldn’t notice him. He hadn’t been able to keep his promise to her not to come around and check up on her. Juudit’s job was too important; he had to come and he had to stroll around with the other men, glancing at the roof of the Estonian Insurance Company building, shifting his gaze surreptitiously down the side of the building to the windows of the café, his eyes making the same motion over and over.

ACROSS FROM JUUDIT
sat a German officer, but it was the wrong one. The right officer was enjoying his coffee on the other side of the room, ruffling through the newspaper and puffing on a pipe. The blank SS insignia on his collar pulsed in the corner of Juudit’s eye; her sweaty hands held the arms of her chair, her heart was thumping, and she didn’t know what to say. The hot chocolate in front of her steamed, her hand slid down the chair’s arm, a bead of sweat appeared on her upper lip, and a wordless space opened up behind her forehead. She no longer missed the building’s neon lights and the street lamps, darkened for wartime. She gave off her own light. Her soul had stumbled into powerful motion and she was gripped by a fierce desire to be with this man, the very German sitting in front of her. Her heart was in a reckless state, her cheeks glowing as if she were still a girl, unaware of her desires, the backs of her knees wet with sweat in spite of the fact that her feet, wearing only stockings, felt chilled against the cold floor. There was an ice cellar behind her, a glow like a sweltering summer day in front of her, hot and cold taking turns, uncontrollable.

She could still get up, leave him with the tongs in his hand, offering her a cookie, and find a way to nab the German Roland had chosen, to charm him, wrap her soft arm around his neck. But she’d already turned to this man, the wrong man, met his gaze, and, worse yet, in the man’s answering smile Roland and his plan and Rosalie in her unmarked grave and everything that had happened in the past few years was forgotten. She’d forgotten the bombs and the bodies lying in the streets, the beetles and flies descending on them, the desperate trading in tins of lard, her marriage and its respectability. She’d even forgotten that she was in her stocking feet, that her shoes had just been stolen, the only ones she had, no longer remembered the gang of thugs who’d pushed her down in front of the Kunstihoone Gallery and yanked her shoes off. She’d forgotten the pain, the embarrassment, the tears of anger and vexation, as soon as the officer had reached out his hand to help her up and taken her into the warm café and she’d made the fateful mistake of looking into his eyes.