When the Doves Disappeared (39 page)

Contrary to what his wife believed, the Office had looked at his manuscript, and they thought he had the right approach. But as far as Parts knew, none of his colleagues who were working on the subject of the Hitlerists had been saddled with assignments like his café duties. They were sitting in offices at the Office, or in the special archives, or were employees of magazines, or full-time workers for the Office, publicly praised, some of them even invited to Moscow—all of them publishing works on the subject as fast as they could. There was nothing very different about the work they produced, yet their conditions of employment were different. Comrade Barkov was already the head of research for the Estonian SSR government security committee, and word had it that he was writing a thesis on the Estonian bourgeois nationalists’ transition to fascism. He no doubt had help from a wife who did his filing, typed clean copies for him, and made sure he was free to concentrate on what was essential. Or maybe he had a secretary. Or several. It was the same with Ervin Martinson. How else could he be so prolific? A pile of papers covered in corrections and exclamation points, demanding immediate attention, waited on Parts’s desk. The Office was full of typists, but somehow they couldn’t spare one for Parts’s manuscript. His old doubts returned. Maybe the Office felt that his past was an obstacle to public recognition after all. Maybe he wouldn’t be showered with flowers in a couple of years, maybe he’d be sent to scour the countryside marking the places foreigners weren’t allowed to see, or hunting down closet scribblers, or, worse yet, working as a restroom attendant, listening to what people talked about in the toilet. Maybe they would take his typewriter away.

Could it be because of his wife’s background, or her present condition? Seeing to her pharmaceutical needs required planning. He’d been
forced to take responsibility for stocking the medicine cabinet, since she was hardly capable of using the tactic of rotating pharmacies. Picking up the same prescription from the same place would attract unwanted attention. People would start to talk, and the talk would find its way to the Office. It was just the sort of material the Office collected—they wrote down a target’s prescriptions, drugstore purchases, doctors’ visits, liquor expenditures, and used all of it to build a profile of untrustworthiness, potential weaknesses, to create ways of ensuring a worker’s loyalty, or to make him behave in a way beneficial to the Office.

He had never seriously thought of sending his wife to the asylum at Paldiski 52, but maybe the time was approaching when it would be worth considering. Her problematic background was a credible, even probable, reason for his professional difficulties. Divorce wasn’t an option because leaving a sick wife would be a deplorable, immoral thing to do, but if she were sent to an institution for the good of her health, Parts could go on with his life as normal, perhaps even earn some sympathy. The Office would most likely support such a decision. Parts knew how to present the idea to them. He remembered a Russian woman at the Norma factory who had brought her elderly mother-in-law to Tallinn from Russia. The old woman had stopped speaking Russian, wanted to speak only in French. The whole family had been in a fluster, and they locked the old woman in her bedroom. No one would have known about it if the woman hadn’t managed to escape. The story had amused Parts at the time because the woman’s husband was a well-known Party member. He taught communist theory at the university and was always reminding people that the ruble would soon collapse because money was a capitalist invention, and suddenly he had a woman living in his home who muttered in French and longed for her friend the Countess Maria Serafina and praised his wife’s resemblance to the late Tzarina. At least that’s what they thought she was talking about—no one in the family could speak French. The mother-in-law was sent to Paldiski 52. The story wasn’t funny to Parts anymore. He could see the signs of the fragility of the mind, its inexorable fallibility, every day in his own home. Everyone had his breaking point, and if nothing else destroyed the mind, time would. It would take you back to moments you didn’t want to return to, chasing after countesses and tzarinas, to memories of Lilya Brik driving the first automobile in Moscow,
or the wood-gas cars in Siberia, how you had to throw stick after stick of birch in the burner, how the generator would sputter, memories of wood being chopped, fat burning, and flesh, the smell. The frailty of the mind could carry you back to memories of a fire that revealed skulls and femurs, memories that should be forgotten, that you have forgotten, until your spirit is beaten down, and it brings them back and makes them true again, the fire and smoke, the crackle, the woodpile and the smell and the gunshots and the cries of anguish and the past becoming reality again, as if it were happening now. He might shout out his memories in public, too, in the middle of the day, while waiting in a long line, and step into that same dark place where all those he imagined he’d cleared out of his path for ever and ever had stepped long ago, the very same darkness. He couldn’t let that happen, not to him, and not to his wife.

AT TIMES
Parts was sure he was about to make a breakthrough, absolutely certain that his wife was the Heart mentioned in Roland’s diary. At those moments he dreamed of a day when he would present his wife with the evidence of her anti-Soviet activity during his time in Siberia. He imagined the scene, enjoyed the fantasy. He would be calm and polite—perhaps standing under the orange lamp in the living room, his back straight, his voice firm and low, presenting his facts with careful exactitude. The expression on her face would break open like an eggshell with his very first irrefutable statement, and by the time he finished she would be lying on the carpet like a stillborn calf he’d dragged forth with his own hands, the rope still in his grasp.

IN HIS HOPE
for such a moment Parts had even traveled to the Armses’ old house in Taara Village. The landscape there had been strange and familiar at the same time. He could smell the hogs on the kolkhoz from inside the bus. Ash trees still lined the avenue to the manor house. There was a smell of smoke in the air—they were burning winter hay near the apple orchard, and piles of leaves farther off. He saw the swoop of a goshawk between the trees. The chickens had been let out and were dashing around the yard, some basking in the sunshine. He noticed that the yard
at the Armses’ house didn’t have a rooster. Feed was too precious to waste on useless mouths. The Office had probably already gotten word of a new joke going around: The new farming system was so strict it wouldn’t even grant a hen her rooster.

DISTANT RELATIVES OF LEONIDA’S
had moved into the house and were standoffish with strangers. When they all sat down to dumpling soup, the mood was a little lighter, and Parts mentioned in passing the times his wife had come to help on the farm. He spoke confidently, as if he knew what he was talking about. His wife’s name wasn’t familiar to them, but then he got the idea to ask about the photos from Anna’s funeral, which had to be among the possessions Leonida left in the house. Just as he’d suspected, Roland wasn’t in the photos. Funerals, weddings, and birthdays were always closely watched and had been the downfall of many forest men, who couldn’t all stay away from important family occasions. Roland was an exception. The idea that at Auntie Anna’s funeral her children were nowhere to be seen brought tears to Parts’s eyes. It was a wrong that couldn’t be righted. He didn’t let the others see how upset he was, and got up to leave. As he left the farm, he stopped by the still house. It, too, was occupied by several people, who directed him to the stable to speak to the head agronomist. Parts found the man at the kolkhoz office in the former manor house and told his story again, said he just happened to be in the area and was looking for someone who had known his aunt before she passed away, someone he could talk with about her last moments. The agronomist remembered the former tenants of the still house, and remembered that one of the women was now living in the new silicate house with her daughter, who worked as the kolkhoz bookkeeper. When Parts went to knock on the woman’s door, she was distrustful. It wasn’t until he started talking about his years in Siberia that the woman mentioned Rosalie, and said that she’d wondered about Rosalie’s fiancé, who had fled to Sweden but never sent his old mother a package, adding that of course that was how things were in those days. Parts couldn’t get anything else out of her, just that same story Anna and Leonida had made up to hide Roland’s whereabouts, or because they wanted to believe it.

Parts also went to Valga, looking for old neighbors and orchestrating
chance encounters at the market. Over a glass of beer he steered the conversation to the past and lamented that he hadn’t been able to find his dear cousin, who had often visited his wife at home while Parts was away in Siberia. The neighbor in question had tried to bring to mind Parts’s wife’s guests. After wrinkling his brow for a bit, he apologized. He didn’t remember the cousin, or any visitors at all. From what he’d heard, Juudit had preferred to keep to herself. Parts believed him, and squashed his feeling of frustration like a cockroach. He’d wasted a lot of time for nothing. It was time to get out of this backwater and back to his real job, and behave like a professional.

He did, however, continue to study his wife, analyzing over and over the impression he’d had of her right after he came back from Siberia, going over the Valga years in his mind, the couch springs, the mousetraps in the corners in every room, the cries from the neighbors’ baby, the intimate noises that had carried through the walls and kept her awake at night, the set of her hands as she lit the stove or washed the milk bottles to take them to the store. He remembered the original owner of the house, the wife of a man who ran a bus company, her submissive demeanor, her old-fashioned dresses, how his wife had always apologized for disturbing her whenever they happened to be in the kitchen at the same time, to show she understood that she was a guest in the woman’s home, acknowledging that they were the only Estonians in the house. But he didn’t remember her doing anything suspicious. She hadn’t cared about picking up the mail herself, she was never called to the phone, had never met with anyone or had visitors, had always stayed at home.

She had been silent about the days of German rule, except for a brief episode when Parts had found out the fate of Hellmuth Hertz. It was a few months after he returned to Estonia. Parts found his wife at home with a bottle of vodka and a candle lit. When he asked what the occasion for celebration was, she announced that it was her German lover’s birthday. Parts asked whatever happened to her German, and she answered that he’d been shot on the beach like a dog. She said it as if it were self-evident, as if she assumed that Parts knew all about her adventures, and Parts behaved as if he did know, including the part about when they were caught trying to escape, how she had shot at the Germans who were after them, but missed, was such a bad shot that she hadn’t been able to save him.
She started laughing, poured the contents of her glass down her throat, shook her head. She would have liked to kill every one of them she could hit. Parts thought back to the movement of the German’s hand when he caressed her ear. He didn’t feel anything anymore when he thought about it, just longing, and he got up and left, walked through the night and came back in the morning. When his wife woke up, she didn’t seem to remember their conversation of the night before. They never talked about the German again. Afterwards, of course, he had wondered if she’d been a bit too mild, considering that she had lost her lover and her new life, but perhaps time had done its work. After all, Parts didn’t cry about Danzig anymore. He’d managed to move on. But what about Roland? Had time cooled the memories in his mind, too? Parts remembered well how when the hammer and sickle was hoisted up the flagpole at Pikk Hermann on September 22, 1944, the flag that was taken down wasn’t Hitler’s—it was Estonia’s own flag. Five days of independence. Five days of freedom. Parts had seen the flag himself, although in his manuscript he naturally didn’t mention it, because the Soviet Union had liberated Estonia from the Hitlerists. Had Roland seen that same sight, and if he had, had he been able to let go of it?

The noises from upstairs interrupted his thoughts again. Maybe the Office didn’t realize how willing Parts was to send his wife someplace where she wouldn’t be a danger to anyone. But no. The Office must know his situation. They must have had his home under surveillance. They probably still did. Every single word he and his wife exchanged was likely recorded, everything, including the time she suddenly threw a jar of sour cream and hit him right in the head. Parts had cleaned up the mess. He closed his eyes. What if his wife had been recruited to spy on him?

Parts opened his eyes, went into the bathroom, took one more gulp of Hematogen, and splashed water on his face, patting it dry and plucking the bits of terry cloth from his cheeks. He looked tired; his hairline was receding. He picked up his wife’s mascara, spit on the brush as he had seen her do, and dabbed it on his temples. Then he rinsed away the dandruff that floated down into the sink and looked at the result in the mirror. The mascara freshened up his appearance. The scar on his cheek that his wife had given him was fading quickly. There was no reason to feel down,
even if he hadn’t yet had a breakthrough in her case as he had hoped. Sometimes you just had to accept that you’d come to a dead end. Sometimes your suspicions were groundless. Maybe he didn’t need to lock his office door before going to sleep. On the way back to his desk he stopped to look at the mousetrap in the corner of the entryway. If his wife didn’t have anyone to worry about, why did she always check those traps—she who was usually so careless about household chores?