When the Doves Disappeared (36 page)

Tallinn, Estonian SSR, Soviet Union

R
EIN’S VOICE CARRIED
from the kitchen to the ears of Evelin, who was waiting in the living room. She tried to listen, but the noise of the radio and the record player they’d turned on when they came in swallowed up what he was saying. So this was it, the house where Rein went, without telling her why, or who he was meeting. This was the house where Rein had never brought her before. Evelin was excited and sat stiffly in her chair, although she was alone and no one was watching what she did, monitoring whether she was sitting like a lady. There was a crystal bowl of cat’s tongue cookies on the coffee table and a grandfather clock ticked, chiming every fifteen minutes, the pendulum swinging; the blinds were rippling in a draft of air. The cream had curdled in her coffee and she didn’t know where to pour the coffee out. Maybe Rein just wanted to protect her and that’s why he hadn’t told her about all of this. Or maybe he just wanted to have a secret, something a little more important, or maybe he didn’t trust her enough yet. Or maybe he’d brought her here because he wanted to reassure her, so she wouldn’t feel lonely. The rest of Evelin’s classmates had left for Tartu when the banking student group was moved there. Evelin hadn’t wanted to go, she wanted to stay with Rein. The decision to apply for a transfer had been an impulsive one. She wasn’t going
to become a bank manager, like she’d thought—she was going to be an engineer. The Soviet Union needed engineers, they were the strong legs that the whole society stood on. If Evelin had known that she would be sitting around here doing nothing, she could have brought along her lecture notes or some other equally sleep-inducing reading, like Saarepera’s “Description of Annual and Quarterly Industrial Typology and Production Calculation Methodology.” Now all she could do was suck on currants and munch on cookies.

In her first year of study Evelin had dropped in at Café Moskva a few times and immediately noticed Rein and the group that gathered around him. How could she not notice him? Or the girls in his group? She never would have believed that Rein could be interested in her, a country girl with two sweaters, one skirt, and one dress, ignorant of all the things that Rein knew all about, surrounded by girls who changed their dresses, shirts, and pants every day, always wearing something different. Pants! Evelin’s mother had promised that she could get a new dress from the sale of the next calf, but that wouldn’t be for some time. When she was younger, she couldn’t have imagined how difficult student life could be when you only had one dress hanging in your closet. Everything had been easy in high school, you just starched your collar and took good care of your one dress, and you were fine. No one else here seemed to miss their old school uniform.

Evelin was thirsty, but she didn’t dare to leave the living room. The coffee that had been waiting for her on the table was already cold when they arrived. The table setting showed a woman’s hand, though there was no one in the house but the man in spectacles who had opened the door. Maybe Rein only came when the man was here alone. You could see the owner’s good taste in the stylish furnishings. The bookshelf was full of only books from the black market or straight from the press. Evelin admired the cabinets that reached all the way to the ceiling and dreamed of having a setup like that in her own home, the home she and Rein would share. There would be cognac in the liquor cabinet, the linens would be organized on shelves, and she would polish the cabinet doors every day—there wouldn’t be a single smudge on them, and their surfaces would shine and make the room look bigger. She and Rein would drink Aroom every morning after she had put away the sofa bed, pounded the cushions
in place, and folded the blankets to hide away during the daytime, and there would be enough coffee for guests, coffee with nothing else mixed in. They would have cactuses on the windowsill. Rein would turn on the Magnetofon and put on some electric guitar music his friends had recorded, and as the tape started to play he would pull her next to him on the divan. She would finally have sheets of her own.

Before Rein had agreed to take her to this secret house, Evelin had hinted that she suspected he had another girl. The accusation had flown out of her mouth easily, without her thinking about it. All those well-dressed girls at Café Moskva troubled her. She was particularly uneasy about the white-legged art student who slept on the bunk above her in the room they shared with two other girls. Every time Evelin sneaked Rein into her room, the top-bunk girl would already be in bed, and she would stick her leg, chest, or thigh out from under the covers, her hair flowing over the edge of the bed. Rein’s eyes would fasten on the girl’s leg or breast poking out, shining in the dark like a white moon, and the girl would move her arm in her sleep, plumping up the breast a bit, just waiting for his open mouth, for a drop of drool. That’s why Evelin didn’t want to bring Rein to her dorm, because it was full of girls running around in their slips, giggling in the kitchen in their nightgowns, and because the top-bunk girl always went to bed early when Rein was coming over and waited for him to tiptoe into the room. Evelin had only invited him there after he’d pestered her for a long time. She had fried him some potatoes in the kitchen, a large portion, using a good dollop of the fat she’d saved in a cup, and Rein made the dorm monitor laugh and forget to enforce the ten o’clock rule. Evelin didn’t even want to go to his dorm. Last year the boys had decorated the walls with bedbugs on pins. It would be even more uncomfortable there. And anyway, Rein never asked her.

THEY HAD COME
into the bespectacled man’s house through the back door. They’d made their way there by a meandering path between apartment houses, onto a big road, and into a thicket, Rein pulling her along through the bushes and across the backyard of another house. When they arrived, Rein had pulled a few twigs out of her hair and patted her on her tousled head. Her stockings were still intact, and her heart was light. Rein
knocked a rhythm on the gray door, and while they waited for it to open Evelin watched the neighbors. A woman was carrying heavy water pails on her shoulders, gauze diapers fluttering on the clothesline behind her like winding sheets. The woman emptied the buckets into a tub and went back to get more water. Farther off someone was sharpening a scythe. Evelin remembered a girl who had been thrown out of the dorms and how the roommate with the white legs had laughed, saying that only stupid girls got into
that
kind of trouble. Evelin didn’t want to be among the stupid; she didn’t want to be ruined, to sully herself, even if Rein claimed that such a thing couldn’t ruin you. It certainly could, Evelin knew that, and it made her nervous every time they met. She couldn’t explain interrupting her studies to her parents. Their permit to raise calves, along with her stipend, ensured that they would have enough money for her studies, but it meant that her mother had to take care of the calves on top of her kolkhoz work. She was slaving away so Evelin could go to school, and Rein was constantly pushing her into a situation that could put her studies in danger, sneaking his hands in where she didn’t want them. Whenever he managed to stay over in the girls’ dorm and jammed himself into Evelin’s bunk, he would nuzzle against her breasts and his hand would reach for her abdomen and Evelin would shut her eyes tight, force the top-bunk girl’s breasts out of her mind, and shove Rein’s hand aside, holding it away from her, and to keep from thinking about whether he was angry she would think about the summer exams, partly for his sake, too, since he was going to have trouble passing. Rein just didn’t have time to study, he had so many other things, more important things, to do.

SHE HEARD
Rein’s voice now from nearby, his laugh sounding like the kind that comes out of men’s mouths when they’ve thought long and hard and come to a satisfying decision. There was a tinge of relief in it, too long a laugh to be lighthearted, too hard, like Rein’s laugh often was. He was still laughing as he led Evelin to the back door again, and they left through the same jungle they had come through before. Rein tugged off his coat, wrapped it around her legs, lifted her in his arms for the sake of her stockings, and carried her to the road. It wasn’t until they got to the bus stop that Evelin noticed a cloth bag dangling from his hand.

“Did that man give you something?”

“Books,” Rein said.

“What books?”

“You wouldn’t want to read them.”

Evelin didn’t ask any more questions because Rein didn’t like nagging women. He was in a good mood now, stroked her collarbone, whispered in her ear: You see? There’s nothing bad going on here. His lips were so close to her lips that she could feel his kiss, and stepped back.

“Everyone can see us.”

“So?”

She turned her head away and his lips touched her ear, his breath gusting into it, and her ear became a shell, like the one she’d saved from the hitchhiking trip she took to the Caucasus, and she wrapped her arms around herself like a creature in its shell so that he had to move an elbow’s length away.

In spite of his carefree mood, Rein was tense; his hands were hotter than the sweaty bus they boarded, and it wasn’t because of her skirt hem, although she had shortened it more than she’d intended. She turned her back to him to fend off his squeezes, which had become a real nuisance.

In the packed bus she managed to slide her hand into Rein’s bag and she felt photo paper, a large stack of it. She slipped her hand out. Rein breathed on her neck.

THAT EVENING BEFORE
going back to the dorm, Evelin shoved her hands into her coat pocket, surprised by her boldness. She had secretly worked one of the photos out of Rein’s bag. It was just text—a photo of a page of a book. The words were in a foreign language.

Tallinn, Estonian SSR, Soviet Union

T
HE GIRL IN LONG PANTS
sitting at the Target’s otherwise empty table waved her leg again. Another girl sat down at the table and started writing on small rectangular slips of paper. An unpleasant tension spread into Comrade Parts’s temples. Here he was, a capable man, and his job was to watch little girls making crib sheets. On his way to the café he had seen his colleague slip into the entrance of the Palace Hotel. At this moment the man was probably enjoying champagne in international company, shoveling slices of white bread covered in black caviar into his mouth. Why hadn’t Parts been invited? Had someone commented on his work? Was the Office dissatisfied with him? Had officialdom really judged him better suited to this kind of assignment, spying on petty tarts and hooligans? Parts simply couldn’t believe that. He knew how to behave enough like a Westerner to qualify for the international environment at the Palace. There must be some other reason. His wife’s behavior might have attracted attention. Perhaps she was seen as a problem and the security committee thought it wisest not to give him a more visible role. The idea wasn’t out of the question. He was no longer invited to meetings with the high-ranking personnel at the Pagari. The evening soirées had dried up, too. Parts sighed. The sigh rustled his papers. The darkness of
the café tired his eyes. He couldn’t help but blush when thoughts of his wife bubbled into his mind—that time when he was out with her and ran into Albert Keis, the head of the Estonian News Agency, and she started talking about the school art collection. At first Parts had no inkling, had just let the conversation continue until his brain registered that she was praising the works of the young Alfred Rosenberg on the walls of the Peter the Great Secondary School. Parts had coughed, something suddenly stuck in his throat.