“It doesn’t include an accusation,” he said. “None of those badly veiled suggestions that there is a ‘basis for a closer investigation’ and so on. And it all happened a long time ago. So why do I still keep coming back to it?”
“Perhaps because it was published on September eighteenth, two thousand and seven,” said Babko suddenly.
It took a few seconds. Then Søren felt an abrupt desire to smack himself on the forehead. “The day before Pavel Doroshenko was killed,” he concluded.
UKRAINE, 1935
“You’re like a dog. A little, stupid one.”
Olga looked at Oxana across the narrow table but didn’t have the energy to answer, just waited for the next attack. Oxana wasn’t really angry, she knew that. There was something teasing in the blue gaze. An invitation to a game of the kind they had played when they were a little younger in Kharkiv and even in Mykolayevka before everything went wrong. But Olga didn’t accept.
“A dog sticks its tail between its legs and hides because it doesn’t know any better. What’s your excuse?”
There was a smile but also a flicker of irritation in Oxana’s voice now. Olga still chose to ignore it. They were having oatmeal today. Water softened the oats so they somehow filled you up more than millet porridge and bread, and if you ate very slowly, it worked even better.
Olga emptied her bowl at a steady rate. She inhaled its smell and felt warmth spread through her whole body.
Mother also sat silent with her own portion, which wasn’t much bigger than those she had served the children. She gave them a little hunk of bread each. Olga broke hers in half, carefully cleaning the bowl with the soft side of the bread before stuffing it in her mouth. Afterward, they cleaned the pot together in the same way. Oxana poked at Olga’s hand, ruffled her hair and nipped playfully at her ear, but Olga pulled away instinctively. That was just the way it had
become. She could no longer stand to be touched by Oxana.
She got up abruptly and began to comb Kolja’s hair for nits. Mother had had to cut it very short, because when Kolja was being looked after at the kolkhoz, he often played in the collective house, where whole families slept, cooked and ate on the floor. Lice and other bugs jumped on him even though Mother made sure to wash him every day and had somehow even acquired some bars of real soap. They managed, as Mother said. There were oats and cabbage and winter carrots, and the fist-sized bread ration that Mother brought home with her every day from the kolkhoz, a chunk for each. But hunger stayed with Olga like a toothache. When she got up, when she went to bed and now while she was rinsing the pots and checking Kolja’s soft short hair for lice.
Olga kissed him carefully at the nape of his neck and spun him around once. Mother had made a new coat for him from the red wool dress she had brought from Kharkiv. “Here I’ll never need such finery anyway,” she had said. “The hogs don’t care what I wear.”
“How nice you look,” said Olga and smiled. “A real little man.”
Kolja nodded. “I’m going to show it to Viktor and Elena and Marusja,” he said but then got a worried wrinkle in his forehead. “Should I be the father or the big brother when we play family?”
Olga considered for a moment. “You should be the father,” she said. “You’re a father who has just come back from Moscow after an important meeting with Uncle Stalin, and he has given you this fine coat as a thank-you for all that you have done for the Soviet Union.”
Kolja stood up straight and gave Oxana a serious look. “Like you, Oxana. I am going to build a better future with my own hands.”
Oxana was putting on her coat. She looked at Kolja and smiled crookedly, but she didn’t say anything. Oxana had become quieter lately. She was thinking of the cause, she claimed, but her
spontaneous speeches about the better times that awaited them had become less frequent, and they warmed neither soul nor stomach the way they had done in the past.
Olga felt sore and tired to the bone, which really wasn’t very far if you thought about it. Her ribs were visible just beneath the skin, and her hipbones jutted out so far that it really hurt when she knocked into a table or a doorframe. And she did that often. Hunger made them all clumsy, and Kolja fretful and whiny, but they were still alive while others were dead—Father and Grandfather and Jana’s mother too, who had succumbed to tuberculosis just a month ago. Olga had watched from the window when she was sung out of the Petrenko house. Jana walked behind the funeral procession with her shoulders pulled all the way up to her ears, scratching her hair once in a while. She and Olga no longer spoke.
Mother had tied on both shawl and kerchief and reached for Kolja with an impatient gesture. “We have to go now, Kolja,” she said in a thin voice. “Otherwise Mama Hog will get impatient.”
Mama Hog, the largest of the breeding sows, was Kolja’s favorite, and for her sake he was usually willing to hurry, but today he pulled himself free of Mother’s hand and stuck out his lower lip. “I have to bring my rifle.”
Olga looked around and caught sight of the stick that he had whittled smooth and nice and free of bark, and which had now been designated a weapon in the Red Army. She handed it to Kolja, who stashed it under his coat with a satisfied expression.
“Now we’ll go,” he said.
“Yes, now we’ll go.”
Mother and Kolja opened the door, walked out to the road and turned in the direction of the kolkhoz. Oxana remained in the doorway, looking at Olga.
“Come with me,” she then said. “It will be all right. They won’t
dare to do anything.”
Olga shrugged, not meeting Oxana’s eyes. They had had this conversation before, and she knew what Oxana was going to say. Olga ought to go to school both for her own sake and for Uncle Stalin. She and all other children were the future of the nation. Oxana had reported the beating to the village soviet, and no one would dare to attack them again. That’s what Oxana would say, but it would be lies, most of it, and even Oxana knew it.
Why else would Oxana go to so much trouble to get to the school without being seen? Olga knew which way she went. Instead of taking the long main street through the village, she snuck out through the orchard and followed the narrow path to the river. From there you could walk among the closely spaced birch trees to the back of the cooperative store without anyone seeing you unless they were really close. If you went through the gap between the wagon maker’s shop and one of the village’s deserted houses, you could reach the school without meeting a living soul.
But Olga wasn’t having any of it.
After what happened with Vitja and Pjotr, she left the house only reluctantly, and when she did, it was mostly to collect water or logs or to stop by the Arsenovs. They subscribed to the local newspaper for Kharkiva Oblast and let Mother read it in return for helping them with their washing.
Oxana thought Olga was scared, but it wasn’t just that. It was an unclear sensation of shame, even though Olga didn’t think she had done anything wrong. It was the thought that she had been lying there in that frozen sewage ditch in the middle of the main street, her cheek pressed against the grubby ice and the sound of the boys’ excited and breathless laughter in her ears. And as for Uncle Stalin—Olga had begun to grimace in her head every time he came up—as for good old Uncle Stalin, Oxana could take him and stick him up the
ass of a cow, if she could find one that was big enough.
She didn’t want to go to school, where Jana would be staring at her and Sergej would stick his oily face close to hers to whisper ugly words. And she didn’t want to walk beside Oxana. Ever again.
O
XANA FINALLY LEFT
.
Olga closed the door behind her and was alone.
That was okay. Better than going to school, at least, but she had to keep herself constantly occupied in order not to think too much. Today she was going to put their blankets out on the veranda. It was still cold, and with a bit of luck, the frost would kill some of the lice.
Olga took the birch broom and swept the floor as best she could, but the work quickly made her dizzy and short of breath, and in spite of the heat from the brick oven, she felt the raw cold through her underwear, dress and shawl.
She lay down on the oven shelf and covered herself with the heavy blankets and goat hides. The warmth from the heated bricks immediately made her doze off and dream uneasy dreams. Father was tied to a pole with his hands behind his back, and next to him stood the widow Svetlova dressed in a zobel fur and with her great, round stomach exposed and vulnerable to the gun barrels that pointed at them both.
Olga tried to wrest herself free from the dream, but the pictures kept coming in a swiftly flowing stream no matter how hard she squeezed her eyes shut. And then the pole was suddenly gone, and she was back in their own house and Father was outside hammering on the door with huge, heavy fists and screaming that she was to let him in.
She was still dreaming. It had to be a dream. But the insane hammering continued.
“Where is she? Where is your devil of a sister?”
I’m not going to open up, she thought. Why can’t they all just leave us alone? The living and the dead.
A police car found her. Nina had made it into sitting position but no farther, her back propped against one of the Micra’s front wheels. She wondered if the patrol car would be able to stop in time or would just continue into the Micra.
Luckily, the police had begun to equip their vehicles with winter tires. The patrol car came to a controlled stop ten or twelve meters from her. One of the cops got out; the other remained seated behind the wheel.
“Do you need any help?” asked the one who had gotten out.
Help. Yes, she did. All kinds of help.
“What time is it?” she asked instead.
The police woman squatted next to Nina. “Could you look at me for a moment?” she said. “Can you tell me what happened?”
“She drove into me,” said Nina. “She must have been parked between the trees. She was waiting for me to come, and then she drove right into me.”
The policewoman smiled in a calming way, but there was a bit of skepticism in her very young, very pretty face. “I think we need an ambulance for you,” she said.
Nina decided she had been sitting there long enough. “No,” she said. “I’m okay. Pretty much.”
She thought she could feel a fracture in her lower left arm, but that wasn’t exactly life threatening. She got to her feet on the first attempt
but then had to lean discreetly on the Micra to remain upright until the dizziness wore off.
The hood was cold, she noticed. Fuck. That meant time had passed, and she had no idea how much. Her usual loss-of-time panic set in, but it was a familiar panic; she could control it. As long as someone told her the time
soon.
“My name is Nina Borg,” she said. “I’m a nurse at the Coal-House Camp. I was on my way home when another car suddenly appeared. I don’t have a concussion; I’m completely oriented in time and place”—well, place at least—“and my own data. All I need right now is a taxi. And maybe a mechanic for the car.”
The other officer, also a woman but somewhat older, had left the car and approached. “As long as you’re not actually bleeding to death, we’d better set up a few warning reflectors. We prefer to deal with one accident at a time. What about the other driver? Did she just take off?”
“Yes.”
The accident had been no accident. Natasha had been parked and waiting for her on one of the tracks the forestry workers used when they were transporting lumber. That much Nina had pieced together in her head while she was sitting in the snow, trying to muster the energy to get up. Belatedly she realized how they were likely to react when—or if—she told them who the woman was. It felt wrong, even now, to give Natasha up like that, to make it easier for them to find her.
“The other …” she said.
“Yes?”
“It was Natasha Dmytrenko.”
“The one who …”
“Yes.”
The treachery was complete.
One of the policewomen was already speaking very quickly into
her radio. “Which way did she go?” the other asked. “And what kind of car was she driving?”
“I didn’t see it very well,” Nina said. “I think it was black or dark blue. Big. A heavy car. Maybe a Mercedes or an Audi? She drove that way, back toward Værløse.”
The other officer cursed into her radio. “No, damn it. We can’t even give pursuit while that stupid little car is blocking the way. Can we get some help out here in a hurry?” She shot a quick question at Nina. “When did she take off?”
“I don’t know exactly,” said Nina. “Five or six minutes after three, I think.”
The policewoman lifted her well-functioning arm and looked at her well-functioning watch. Nina was jealous.
“So you’ve been sitting there in the snow for almost forty minutes?”
Forty minutes. Fuck.
“I guess I must have been,” Nina said.
T
HE TAXI LET
her off on Kløverprisvej at what she considered a suitable distance from Søren’s house. She was gradually managing to bend and stretch her arm better. She still couldn’t rotate it, so something was wrong, presumably a minor fracture. It might have been the airbag explosion itself that caused the damage, but it was still a lot better than banging her head into the steering wheel.
It was the cud-chewing Mr. Nielsen who let her in.
“It’s after four,” he said. “The boss has called twice to ask where you were. Fifteen minutes more, and we’d have had to upgrade our coverage.”
“I’m sorry,” said Nina. “Something unforeseen happened.”
He looked at her as if nothing unforeseen ever happened in his world. And maybe it didn’t. He looked like a man who not only had a Plan B but also Plans C, D, E, F and all the way to the end of the
alphabet.
Magnus stood in the kitchen door. “I was starting to worry too. How did it go? Did Anton get to be Cat King?”
“No, but he was Super Mario and super stylish. How is Rina doing?”