When the Doves Disappeared (27 page)

The clop of his wife’s heels on the stairs shot the kite down. Parts opened his eyes and saw, instead of a blue sky, the curling yellow wallpaper of his office, the dark-brown cabinet, the lacquered surface that he wiped fingerprints from with the edge of his handkerchief whenever he saw them. In the cabinet he had several files of stickers that he’d picked up from the stationery section of a department store. They had airplanes on them.

THE TYPEWRITER’S PAPER RACK
was bent under the weight of his head; the letter arms were stuck together. Comrade Parts rubbed drying slobber from his cheek. The pendulum of the grandfather clock swung the wee hours. A proper wife would have come to wake her husband, not left him sleeping in such an uncomfortable position. Comrade Parts slid his chair back, went to lock the office door and open the sofa bed—he wasn’t going to get any more work done tonight. Maybe the kite boy would appear in his dreams. He could tell him about when he met Lenin, how he’d been hanging on his mother’s arm but he still remembered Lenin’s fixed gaze and how Lenin had told his mother, This boy will be a pilot, he has a pilot’s keen vision. As the sofa bed sprang open, it occurred to him that he was so alone that he was seeking company in his dreams. He sat down on the stack of bedding, his tiredness gone. The moon hung in the round window like a glove button fastened with a buttonhook, and he pulled the curtains over the glass, made sure there was no gap between them, freed the torn paper from the typewriter roll, tidied up his desk a little, and opened the journal to the page that made him smile, the page that comforted
him. The first time he’d read the journal, he had been disappointed because nothing in it seemed to refer to him. He had also been afraid that something would—or, if not afraid, at least troubled by unpleasant possibilities. Then he’d read it again. “We don’t have enough skilled forgers. We’re missing the Master, who knew how to carve flawlessly correct seals. I know there are people with such skills, but not among our group.” It had taken him a while to understand this, and smile. They needed him. The Master. He was the Master. He scrawled the word on the blotter. His pen stopped. He’d written it with a capital letter because it was capitalized in the journal. He squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again, flipped through the journal pages at random, not finding what he was looking for. An idea lit up his mind. He’d been so blind.

At first Roland’s blunt sentences had annoyed him. He’d been sure there was nothing to be gotten out of them. No names, no places. Just dull reports about the weather and the wonderful sunrises, the sobriety of the movement, condemnations of drinking, in fervent phrases. But he’d let the rambling descriptions fool him. Roland had tricked him. The journal was about real people, real places. He would read it again, line by line, listing every capitalized word and studying each one of them as if it had a secret meaning. As if it were a name.

After ten pages he felt his concentration slipping again—the pages went on and on about the difficulty of obtaining paper and printer’s ink, about how the poorly mixed ink smudged easily. The expensive paper was so spoiled by the ink that their newsletter was illegible in places, and Roland had been in a rage. Parts decided to take notes on the most useful passages about the precautions the bandits had taken. When the men came in secret to eat in people’s homes, they used a common plate so that if they had to leave suddenly there would be less to clean up and they wouldn’t have to worry whether someone had remembered to take the extra dishes off the table. A good example of the craftiness of the fascists. The authentic details made Parts’s fingers fly again, dashing off line after line—from the kerosene lamps that smoked up the dugouts to the holes in the bottoms of their shoes to the Chekists’ sweeps through the forest, turning over every large stone searching for dugouts, to their difficulties with repairing a radio and their joy at acquiring a mimeograph machine. Reflections on how difficult it was to find a good writer for their newsletter,
plans to form a separate press division, and another vivid example of fascist cunning that Martinson had doubtless never used: a sleeper agent who had infiltrated the Forest Brothers had been discovered when he asked Roland a simple question about the score of some very recent sporting event—if Roland had known yesterday’s sports scores, it would have been clear from his answer that their radio couldn’t be more than a day’s travel from their camp. No one who was really in the resistance would have asked such a question. Parts read furiously, making note of the occasional capitalized words, his fingers feverishly tracing the well-reasoned analyses of the foreign news, pages about waiting for a war that never came, the war to free Estonia, sentences stinging with bitterness, pages that raged about the March deportations and the collectivization that came afterward.

The vines lashed the window, and Parts closed the journal. He’d found what he was looking for: “But my Heart is safe, which gives me great comfort. My Heart didn’t flee to Sweden like a rat, or end up in Siberia. Many others ended up there, including the man who caged my Heart at the church.” As he had with “Master,” Roland had capitalized “Heart.” “I’ve lost my relatives, but my Heart is still with me, and my family hasn’t betrayed me. The future is not lost.” Parts had read these sentences before, but he hadn’t realized that they were the key to the text: “my Heart,” capitalized. It was a code name, probably that of a woman. The first entry about this Heart was as early as 1945. The first about Siberia was in 1950—after the March deportations. Desperation had clearly overtaken Roland, and no wonder; the elimination of banditism had been the first priority of the new minister of security, and he’d done a good job of it. The mention of the church must mean that Roland was talking about this Heart’s spouse, but there was no hint in the journal of when the husband had been taken to Siberia. Maybe he was arrested in the early Soviet days, or maybe not until the mass deportations. Roland clearly had feared for the woman’s safety: the trains that left in the spring of 1949 were filled mainly with women, children, and the elderly, many of them people whose families had already been taken away, or relatives or supporters of the men hiding in the forest.

Parts went to the kitchen to get some lard from the cutlet he’d fried the night before and spread it on a slice of bread. The Armed Resistance
League had for all practical purposes been liquidated, their supporters taken away in the deportations, their ranks shrunken to nearly nothing. Anyone could be a Chekist sleeper agent, and still Roland wrote about the future. Why did he distinguish between his relatives and his family? Who were the ones he considered relatives and who family? Did “family” refer to his forest comrades?

It didn’t matter. What did matter was the Heart, the woman whose husband had been sent to Siberia. A woman still living inside the country, who had to be followed, who apparently knew more about Roland than anyone else. Would the Office allow him to search the lists of those sent to Siberia for someone whose wife had remained in Estonia? Not likely. How would he justify such a request? Would Comrade Porkov give him the information as a personal favor? How had the Heart avoided the camps? Had she been with Roland in the forest? “I’ve lost relatives, but my Heart is still with me.” Did Roland have an intimate relationship with a married woman? What kind of woman was she? A bandit leader’s lover, a camp cook for the Forest Brothers, or perhaps just someone who had given them aid? Did she live in the forest? Had she participated in armed resistance? The Armed Resistance League wasn’t mentioned in the journal, but the bodies found in the dugout had been those of active members. Would careful Roland have shared all this information with this Heart? Should Parts try to find her not only because she might lead him to Roland but also because she might know everything Roland knew? Was Parts ready to take that risk? A lot of pilots who were shot down never saw their attackers until it was too late. He couldn’t make the same mistake. Parts bit his tongue until he tasted blood. He remembered how protective of Rosalie Roland had been. Had he been the same way with the Heart? Or had loneliness driven him to desperation, made him talk? And above all: Was Roland’s Heart a threat to Parts? If his own marriage had been different, Parts would have talked to his wife about this; it was just the kind of puzzle her brain was good at.

Parts would never be as careless as he’d been when it came to Ervin Viks. It had been a great shock to walk into the Special Operations office at the Tartu camp and see Ervin Viks behind the desk, signing papers, standing up to greet them. Parts’s career had been on the rise, he’d been touring the manufacturing facilities with the Germans, and suddenly
former colleague from his days in the Soviets’ Internal Affairs Commissariat had materialized in front of him. Viks’s eyes had latched onto him, the recognition uniting them more strongly than any bed could unite two lovers. For an imperceptible moment Viks had made a gesture that spoke volumes—had moved his hand across his Adam’s apple, like he was cutting his throat. The captain accompanying Parts had picked up some papers from the desk, read a bit from them, and Viks had offered to show him around Special Operations, but they had a busy schedule. They’d walked out of the office, leaving its odor of vodka behind them, and as they crossed the yard Parts had been afraid the whole time that one of the prisoners would recognize him and shout his name. He should have investigated Viks before. Viks was the only one left who knew that Parts had worked for the Internal Affairs Commissariat before the Germans came. Viks had obviously already purged his own past—the fact that Viks had overlooked him had to be a mistake, a blind spot. Or maybe Viks had just assumed he’d already been taken care of. But Parts had been in error, too. How could he not have remembered Viks? He knew the man’s kill tally. Viks was one of those men whose professional skill, whose ability to kill, would always be needed. It had carried him into the Referentur B4 leadership. Later on, Parts wondered whether he should try to get close to Viks or stay out of his range. Viks had a high rank. He couldn’t get rid of Viks easily, but Viks could get rid of him. All he could do was hope that Viks had become so busy that he didn’t have time to chase down subordinates. Besides, Viks was doing him a favor at the Tartu camp, in a way—he’d sent thousands who had worked for or with the Internal Affairs Commissariat to their destruction. Toadies, informants, yes-men, Bolsheviks. Viks had cleared the sky for both of them.

Parts decided to be bold and present his request to Comrade Porkov. He needed a list of the deportees whose wives had remained in Estonia. It would be a sizable task, but that was where he would find what he was looking for, and it could be the information that led to a breakthrough.

Tallinn, Estonian SSR, Soviet Union

C
OMRADE PARTS KEPT
the journal in a drawer with a false bottom, in a hidden compartment that was originally reserved for photo albums. He’d placed a tiny piece of string between the false bottom and the side of the drawer, and so far he had always found it in place. Roland was just as careful with his Heart in his journal, purposely hidden from outsiders. In fact, Roland had been more careful, had even destroyed his photograph of Rosalie, but World War I Flying Ace Ernst Udet still looked intently out at Parts from the postcard in the photo album. Parts grabbed the album and headed toward the flames of the stove, but the sound of clacking heels from above cut his motion short, the album still cradled in his arms. In his mind, he’d shared all of his thoughts with Ernst, and Ernst had always understood, known how to advise him about evasive maneuvers and tactics, which were as important to Parts as they had been to Ernst in his air battles. Everyone needs a person like that, someone who understands—even Roland. Had this Heart filled the space left by Rosalie? Had his cousin shared his memories with her, laid his head on her breast and told her everything weighing on his soul, even the things that would horrify her, make her more afraid? The heels clacked again, like a kick in his ear. His eyes leapt to the ceiling, which creaked, whined like a kicked
dog as the legs of the bed scraped the floor above. Parts got up from his desk again, locked the album in the drawer again, put the string back in its place, and started pacing around the room. His legs were drawn to the same clacking route traced overhead, and when he noticed this he stopped. His wife might be trying to drive him crazy, but she wouldn’t succeed. He sat down with the journal again. He still didn’t know how to justify the request for materials to the Office, how to explain why he needed the list. Such an unusual request demanded an unusually strong justification. What would Ernst have done? Ernst had been blamed for the downfall of the Luftwaffe, but it hadn’t been his fault. He’d had an ache in his neck that could be cured only by hanging a Ritterkreuz around it. His problem was a pilot’s greed for fame, for glory.