When the Doves Disappeared (37 page)

Albert Keis’s eyebrows had shot up, the whites of his eyes visible on all four sides. “What exactly are you talking about?” he said.

“The works of the young Alfred Rosenberg. He shows signs of great talent, an impressive use of line.”

Luckily Parts had been able to pull himself together and rescue the situation by pretending indignation. Indeed, he, too, had heard that Rosenberg’s works were still hanging there. Why hadn’t anyone taken the initiative about it? He managed to work himself up to such a gale that it blew his wife’s mistake, her ecstatic expression of admiration, into the background. The new iron they’d bought to replace their broken one weighed heavy in the shopping bag and Parts felt like leaving it on the street right where he stood. People buzzed around them, the windows of the department store glared, Keis continued to stare at them with his fish eyes, Parts’s voice rose, passersby gawked, and the hand carrying the new iron went numb. His wife had turned to look at a display window as if she had nothing to do with the whole situation.

Later Parts heard that there had indeed been works by Rosenberg found at Tallinn Middle School Number 2, formerly the Peter the Great Secondary School, and they’d been quietly removed. His wife had tried to explain that she’d done him a service. After all, she was the one who told them about the shocking circumstance, and revealing it could only benefit him. But Parts remembered the words she’d used—“talented,” “impressive,” “a real artist.” What if Keis reported the incident to the Office?

PARTS ORDERED
a Moscow salad, a pot of coffee, and three truffles. By the time the waitress returned with a tray, his colleague had arrived and
slid into the same corner where he’d been the evening before. There was a hint of a sneer on the man’s face, and it couldn’t be for anyone but him. Parts tried to hide his embarrassment by tapping his pile of papers against the tabletop, and when he’d gotten them in order he laid them out, touching his breast pocket in passing. His passport was there, as always. He recognized the compulsiveness of the gesture and tried to keep his hand under control when it rose again toward his pocket, diverting it to fiddle with his white collar. The pressers at the Kiire laundry combine did their jobs well enough, but since he’d gotten his advance, Parts had started to dream of a servant. The communal laundry never got things really clean. The Martinsons no doubt had a servant, and probably a washing machine, too. It was so easy for people like Martinson to underline their status with a thing like that, just mention the washing machine in passing, how it made life so much easier, and then of course we have Maria, or Anna, or Juuli, to come in and clean and do the washing for three rubles a day. Soon Parts would have a girl to come in, too, and she could iron the handkerchiefs, which they had piles of from his wife’s bad spells. He would just have to explain the reasons for the change to his wife and not back down.

Parts didn’t like irons. The coal iron that they had used when they’d lived in Valga had pleased him even less than it did his wife, but for different reasons. Its red glow had been a vivid reminder of Patarei prison, where he’d been taken after the Germans withdrew. He had heard yells from the next room. They had a man named Alfons there, a Jew who had survived the Germans and was thus in the eyes of the Soviets clearly a German spy. Listening to his shouts, Parts had resolved to get out of there alive. The fact that they had dug up his spy training at Staffan Island still smarted. They had once again succeeded in showing their superiority, and he had failed. For years afterward the glow of the iron still carried the reek of burning flesh, the smell of humiliation. His store of German documents had rescued him from being ironed alive, but he would have gladly shared the information he had with the Russians anyway. He was a sensible man—there was no need to threaten him. Let them use the iron on unimportant people.

After he’d soothed himself with truffles, Parts started to sort through his papers, taking notes as he went and not letting his thoughts wander the way they had the last time. His conjectures about his wife would have
to be pondered elsewhere; he didn’t want his worry to show, wanted to keep a cheerful expression, although a doubt had lingered in a corner of his mind after he’d gotten the list of wives left behind by men sent to Siberia. His weakly justified and confused explanation had been accepted; he could see Porkov’s glare even here in the Moskva, his hand reaching all the way to the Kremlin. Porkov had promised him information about Dog Ear, too, but before the matter could be settled their working relationship had been terminated. At first Parts hadn’t found anything useful in the lists, no one he could have pegged as Roland’s Heart. He’d immediately eliminated women too geographically remote from Roland’s home area; he didn’t believe Roland could have found his way into a relationship with someone he didn’t know who lived far away, and the sketches in the journal had made reference to the fact that Roland hadn’t been away from his home province for long. Roland would only trust a woman he had some existing connection with. There had been only one familiar name on the list, but it was an improbable one. Parts’s wife.

For the past two years Parts had been going through the list over and over, and he kept returning to his own wife’s name. He had begun to look at her with new eyes, searching for some hint in her behavior, some crack that he could use to make her open up and speak, something that would make him certain, some means of bringing out the truth. His suspicions were supported by the fact that he didn’t know exactly what she had been doing while he was away. She hadn’t gone to Auntie Anna’s funeral, but she had been to visit her while she was still alive. Auntie Anna had written to him and said that for once his wife had made herself useful, picking berries and mushrooms and making preserves as Leonida’s and Aksel’s strength diminished, managing to get carbolic acid for the fruit trees and berry bushes in exchange for some lard and spraying the plants the way Roland had taught her so there would be enough unblemished fruit to take to market. She had dusted the flowers in the yard, too. She’d even gone to the woods to cut firewood and spent most of her nights in the barn or the shed, sometimes staying at Leonida’s old cabin, which the kolkhoz had never found any use for. That had been wise, though. There were plenty of witnesses to her relationship with the German, times were tough, and her husband was in Siberia. But still. What if her sudden yearning for the countryside and frequent trips to Auntie Anna’s house were actually connected
to Roland? What if she had gone out with her berry basket straight into Roland’s arms? What if Roland had spilled the secrets of his soul into a pillow he shared with Parts’s wife?

Out of the corner of his eye Parts could see the leg of the girl in pants. He took slow bites of his salad, looking for the canned peas and breaking them one by one with his teeth, now and then wiping mayonnaise from the side of his mouth with his napkin. Maybe he’d lost his touch. He’d always had a natural instinct for which direction to take, but now he felt at a loss; the research for his manuscript kept running into dead ends, obstacles, or his wife’s eyes, like a wall of silicate brick, and he didn’t understand why the Office had put him in this situation. He also felt a little rusty in the field, in spite of his training. The previous evening he had panicked, once he was sure that the Target really had vanished and wasn’t just in the men’s room. He’d gathered up his papers and hurried out to the street to listen for a moment, then gone straight to the Target’s dorm building. He’d felt like a dog that had lost the trail of his prey, and gave up, the moon reflecting mockingly from the dark eyes of the dorm windows. That afternoon he had waited hopefully in an appropriately unobtrusive corner near the Target’s lecture hall, but in vain. The sideburned youth had been missing from the flood of students there, clearly a different crowd from the group that gathered at the Moskva. These were ordinary students. They lacked the perceptible excitement, the trembling agitation that reached its zenith when someone in the group made some point or other. Secret lectures, that’s what they were doing. It was no wonder that regular studies didn’t interest the boy. He was interested in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and what life was like in Finland and the West. Among the lecturers were probably those who’d traveled to the West, journalists or athletes who’d slipped through the Office’s sieve, gotten permission to travel, and repaid the privilege with this. Was it envy that bit into Parts’s flesh like a swarm of horseflies? Or was it just the stuffy air in the café?

He had to get some results, get his career back on track. He had to sweep away his uncertainty, remember his own skills, how magical things could happen if you said them out loud or wrote them down on paper. The first time he’d witnessed that kind of miracle was in the
gymnasium
. There had been money missing from the teacher’s overcoat pocket and he’d been told to stand in the corner of the classroom until he was ready
to confess. At the end of the school day the teacher had gathered up his books and said that he could spend the night there if he didn’t want to open his mouth, it was clear he was the culprit—while the others were outside for recess he had stayed behind because it was his turn to clean the blackboards. Young Parts had denied he was guilty, and as he let the words flow from his lips he’d felt a march beat in his pulse, a rumble in his ears, but no sour smell of fear came from his skin. His armpits were dry, his breathing as sedate as when he was at church, even though unbelief weighed like lead in the pit of his stomach. There was no way to get out of this, no way at all. The teacher would have to be crazy to believe him. But the teacher did believe him, and his belief had grown as Parts talked on, in a sure voice with no trace of a pubescent squeak, the steady voice of a man speaking the truth, and said that it had to have been his seatmate, who needed money because he hadn’t done his homework and had to pay someone else to do it. He had seen him come into the classroom while he was cleaning the blackboards. Parts had to hide his smile as he closed the
gymnasium
door behind him. Once he got around the corner he let it spread over his face, and it was still there as he passed the boys playing Boer War, and as he went through the park and past the cobbler’s shop all the way to his own block, still warming his face that evening as he pressed his head against his feather pillow, under which was hidden the stolen money his seatmate had given him for writing his report.

THE TARGET ARRIVED
with his friends at 5:40 p.m. and ordered a pot of black coffee and a Moscow roll, as usual. Parts was alert.

“We’ve prepared for the questions about the Twentieth Party Congress, the Twenty-First Party Congress, and the Twenty-Second Party Congress.”

“Make me a crib sheet, too.”

“Make it yourself.” The girl laughed, giving the Target a playful slap.

Parts’s pencil was smoking—he’d gotten everything down. The pianist hadn’t started playing yet and the café was nearly empty. He could hear their conversation beautifully.

The girl in the pants got up and toddled past to the ladies’ room. Parts wiped his mouth irritably and just then noticed the Target waving to a
man who’d come in from the stairs. The man had a thick scarf wrapped around his neck, but Parts recognized him. Mägi, the radio journalist. Mägi sat down at the table and leaned toward the others, and the whispering commenced. The girl in pants returned and hurried to the table when she saw who had arrived. Parts managed to lip-read a few phrases, made out “St. George’s Night Uprising,” and put it in his notes, all the while ostensibly flipping through his papers. He was sure there must be microphones already installed in the students’ regular table, but he didn’t let that weaken his vigilance, even though it made him nothing more than a backup recorder in case of technical failure. It was raining outside. Customers coming in shook the drops from their hats. Parts wasted a worried thought on the photographer who must be outside taking pictures of people coming and going from the Moskva and no doubt longed for some warm broth and a pirozhki. He fiddled with his collar and tried to perk up, twisted the wrapping off a truffle, bit the truffle in half, and set down the rest. His colleague was sitting in his usual place. Maybe he wasn’t here to watch Parts’s Target. Maybe he was watching someone else. The mere thought of spending endless evenings in the Café Moskva felt like a weight on Parts’s temples. The students were young and overconfident, so the project wouldn’t take long in any case, but Parts decided to speed it to its conclusion. These hooligans were going to make a mistake, going to be emboldened further and abandon caution. Parts was starting to feel sure of that. They could easily be scooped up right where they sat, and he, a specialist, could get back to his normal work and buy the whitest, highest-quality paper for the final draft of his manuscript. When it came to his book, there was no time to lose.

He was certain it would be easy to make a contact in the Target’s dormitory, someone who could report about any telegrams or letters the Target received and their contents. The security committee hadn’t yet given Parts permission to enlist contacts, but he could think of irrefutable justifications why they should. The Office never turned down a perfect informant. He would also have to justify why it should be he who performed the
verbovka
. And of course even if the Office did give the task to someone else, Parts could take a risk, approach the contact himself and make it clear that no one else in the organization was to know about their meeting. A contact wasn’t likely to question Parts’s authority. Aside from
the one time he failed in recruiting Miller, these things were usually easy and inexpensive, which never ceased to amaze him. In the best cases a
verbovka agenta
could succeed with just a few rubles or some trivial favor. Some, however, wanted proper payment—trips, or school assignments for their children, or a better job—which was understandable. In fact, Parts felt a certain respect for those people. Who wouldn’t want to be a guide for Intourist? Who wouldn’t want his children to pass their exams, even if they weren’t loaded with brains? Who wouldn’t want to go to the front of the line for an apartment or a car, a safe post for a son in the military to ensure he came back alive, or books that you couldn’t get even under the counter? But the ones who worked for free, who reported on their neighbors’ or coworkers’ activities for no pay—who did they think they were pleasing? And why? Meanwhile the peace movement in the West seemed to be a constant source of new and productive informants, without any of the problems they had here. The enthusiasm of those informants was dumbfounding. You didn’t even have to pay them. Why? Their ideological-political recruitment came cheap, but Parts still found it difficult to understand the psychology of such people. He relied more on compromising information to motivate his informants. There were also those who got pleasure from prying into the affairs of others, and those motivated by envy. Parts considered such sources unreliable. But recruits who didn’t seize on the opportunity for self-promotion that their services offered, those he couldn’t begin to understand. Were they the kind of people who had already achieved communism in their personal lives and no longer needed money or other rewards? Degenerates. That’s what they were. You weren’t supposed to say that out loud, but communist theory would do well to recognize the realities of the biological degeneration of certain citizens, which had nothing to do with remnant conflicts of a degenerate class society.