When the Doves Disappeared (31 page)

“The apartment I was talking about—it’s the smugglers’ new way station. I sent a man to check on it yesterday, and a woman he recognized opened the door. He’d seen her at the Estonia Theater with some German officers. All those girls look the same, but my man’s wife went to school with this one, and she wondered at her fine clothes and said they ought to go up and say hello. When his wife approached the woman, she turned her back on her. His wife was very upset about it. Interesting, don’t you think?”

“HOW MUCH?”

“Right to business, eh?” Kreek laughed. Edgar could tell the man was about to leave.

“I don’t pay for useless information. Give me an address. Names.”

“My man could only remember her first name—Juudit.”

Edgar slipped a bundle into Kreek’s coat pocket. Kreek left the room and returned a moment later.

“The address is Valge Laeva 5-2.”

Edgar’s own mother-in-law’s apartment. The one Juudit lived in before her German. Auntie Anna had told him about it, that Juudit had moved there, before Johan was taken away. Edgar tried to remain calm—Kreek might get the idea of making more demands if he realized how valuable the information he’d just sold really was. It was time to act. If Kreek knew about it, someone else almost certainly did, too. The situation had changed. There was no longer time to wait for the right moment, the moment when he could use Juudit’s relationship with Hertz. But he
had an opportunity to use Juudit in other ways—if the smugglers were exposed carefully, with his help, it would be seen as his accomplishment. To make that happen, he needed someone Juudit would talk to, someone she trusted at least a little. Someone Edgar could trust, too. Auntie Anna. And Leonida.

Reval & Taara Village, Estland General Commissariat, Ostland National Commissariat

W
HEN JUUDIT FINALLY WENT
to get her mail from the apartment, now emptied of refugees, there were letters waiting for her from Anna and Aunt Leonida. The letters had a tense tone. Leonida didn’t understand why she hadn’t seen Juudit in such a long time, and Anna wondered whether Juudit had abandoned them completely. She must come and visit. Aksel was butchering a pig for Christmas; they were going to make headcheese. They missed her tremendously. Because the farm could get young people from the cities to do the haying and potato digging for their required community service, Juudit had stopped going to the countryside, pleading that she was too busy at work. Her excuses had been completely believable. Anna’s and Leonida’s weren’t. She checked to make sure there was nothing left in the apartment that would indicate the owner was involved in underground activities, and made a decision. She wanted to know what this was all about. And taking some time for herself, away from Hellmuth’s eyes, wasn’t a bad idea. Her time of the month had come when it was supposed to, and she hadn’t heard from Roland or seen him. All of that was over and her life had returned to its usual course, or at least
as calm a course as was possible with Germany in this prickly situation. But still it would be good to be away from the city for a little while. Juudit didn’t know how the last refugee transport had gone, and she didn’t want to know. She had saved herself, that was the most important thing. Her luck might not be as good next time. The fear that had gripped her during that last transport was unlike any she’d ever known—bright as a floodlight—and she didn’t intend to experience it again. She had kept the Mauser, however, and hidden it on the same shelf where she’d once hidden the boots meant for Roland.

She decided to give her mother’s apartment a thorough disinfection. There was a shortage of cleaning chemicals, but Hellmuth could help take care of that.

JUUDIT HAD PREPARED HERSELF
for innuendos about her scandalous life, had assumed that rumors must have finally reached the farm. But there was no indication that anyone at the Armses’ place had anything against her except that she’d been away so long. She was ordered straight to the table, where lung cutlets were waiting. The petrol she’d brought as a gift elicited a flood of gratitude. Anna and Leonida continued their work and refused her help—she ought to rest after her long journey. The granite stone was heated on the stove and Leonida opened the newly butchered pig’s stomach while Anna participated in her usual unhelpful way, bustling around behind her. Along with the pig, they offered up village gossip: the rats had killed their best mouser, a high-ranking officer had summoned Lydia Bartels to Berlin, Mrs. Vaik was living at the Bartels place alone now. Neither Anna nor Leonida seemed concerned about their children, though they did mention that Roland’s gelding was all right—Aksel said he always went to the barn when the sky started to rumble.

The two women were talking around something, circling it like hungry crows. The air in the kitchen was heavy with people who were absent, dense with prattle about the “war of nerves.” There might be an ultimatum made to Germany and its allies at the conference in Tehran, they said, and Leonida added something about how it was all a bluff, a propaganda war aimed at Germany:

“Of course we know that every one of these announcements is just
another Bolshevik attempt to cover their own weaknesses and difficulties. We just have to remember that. You have to be prepared to defend against psychological bombs, too. Isn’t that right, Juudit?”

JUUDIT FLINCHED,
nodded. They hadn’t mentioned her husband once. They hadn’t hinted at her bad reputation. Leonida groaned as she lifted the stone into the pig stomach. There was a hiss and a sputter, steam rose as the hot stone rolled inside it and cleaned it. The kitchen was filled with the smell of scorched meat. Juudit remembered her first visit to the Armses’ farm after she’d heard about Rosalie’s fate. She’d left Tallinn immediately and found the kitchen at rest, as if on a sickbed, none of the work done except for the fire lighted in the stove, Leonida fumbling for the handkerchief in her sleeve without ever managing to get it out, leaving it bulging there like a tumor. Now Rosalie’s spirit had faded from the house; everything connected with her had been gathered up and Leonida had to turn the intestines and wash and salt the stomach alone, make the sausage alone, without Rosalie. Juudit still didn’t fully grasp that Leonida would never have her daughter back, Juudit would never have her cousin back, as if Rosalie had never been a part of this family, as if Roland had never been engaged to Leonida’s daughter. The house had never felt so strange, and Juudit had never felt so strongly that she didn’t belong here.

It was just as impossible to understand why she herself didn’t say a word about Rosalie, why she joined the ranks of the silent. Maybe there was nothing to say. Maybe life was so fragile and meaningless that there was no need to add to their troubles. There was headcheese to be made, lard to be rendered; there were intestines to be salted for next year’s sausage—so much work to do, all to maintain the fragile lives of others. When she’d been waiting for Tallinn to be destroyed, and hoping for her own destruction, she hadn’t understood this, but now she did, ever since the refugee incident. She had too much to lose. Maybe Leonida and Anna did, too. The thought made her look at them with new eyes. Was the extra money they made from the sale of the lard reason enough to keep silent?

The stone in the stomach had stopped hissing. Leonida and Anna had been watching her the whole evening, she was well aware of that.

“Juudit, there’s something I wanted to talk to you about.”

IT WASN’T UNTIL
she got home to Roosikrantsi Street that Juudit’s tightly stitched patience failed her. With trembling hands she mixed a sidecar that sloshed over the edge of the glass, and the parquet floor rocked like the deck of a ship. Had Anna gone crazy? And what had happened to the sensible Leonida? Their demands were unreasonable, worse than Roland’s.

After the third sidecar, her head started to clear, but she couldn’t sit still. She opened the kitchen cupboards, glad that she had given the cook time off. She’d found a note from Hellmuth on the table: due to urgent business he had to travel, would return in a week. So she had time to calm down, to think about what to do. She finally found some eggs, checked to make sure the bowl was clean, cracked them, mixed in some sugar, and started to whip them. She whipped her way into the bedroom, took a gramophone disk from the dress box in the wardrobe, started the Boswell Sisters playing, and whipped. Paul Whiteman was next in line. She whipped until it started to get dark, time for the blackout blinds. The eggs turned shiny and stiff. She wrote in the top of them, like she had as a girl. The man she would marry. Then she realized she hadn’t written
H
, for Hellmuth, in the pale yellow surface; she’d written a
D
, for Deutsch.

She fetched a spoon, sat down next to the gramophone, and ate the whole bowlful. Her access to a pantry full of eggs could disappear at any moment. After the last refugee transport she’d resolved to never again put herself in a position that threatened her quality of life. But how could she have known that a new threat was waiting around the corner? She snapped open her purse and took out her tube of Pervitin. Two tablets. It helped a little. Not enough. Her mind was whirring like Anna’s spinning wheel. Where had Anna and Leonida got the idea to start organizing refugee routes? Weren’t they afraid for themselves anymore, for the farm? Leonida obviously didn’t understand Juudit’s work, her position; she had seemed sincerely puzzled when she saw Juudit’s reaction to her suggestion, when Juudit said, “How can you be planning such a thing? After all the Germans have done for Estonia!”

“We have to get these people out of the country.”

“What does that have to do with me? Besides, it’s winter,” she had protested.

“They can go over the ice. We have to save them if we can.”

Anna’s thin skin had been splotched with excitement, and her shrill voice had joined in with Leonida’s lower pitch. “You’re a part of this family. Can’t you be helpful for once? Have you forgotten my uncle? He killed himself the moment the Russians’ first planes appeared in our skies, because he’d seen the Russian revolution. Have you forgotten what we experienced during Bolshevik times? The communists will kill us all!” Juudit had left after a loud exchange of words, without saying goodbye, without taking her package of headcheese. Did they really think that she, who worked for the Germans, would be so easy to convince? It was too much of a coincidence that these old women would choose that moment to suggest refugee aid to Juudit. If Leonida knew, then the whole country knew. This was too small a place for secrets. Only Rosalie remained a secret.

When she’d dashed out of Leonida’s house, Aksel had caught up to her quickly with his horse, insisting that she get in the sleigh. She had stomped her felt boots for a moment, squeezed her fists inside her muff, then relented. Aksel wasn’t conciliatory, didn’t demand that she come back; he just set off to take her to the train station, patted her shoulder clumsily, and said she should forgive Leonida.

“She’s not the same woman she used to be. Sorrow has few words.”

The only change Juudit had noticed in Leonida was a heart grown colder, but she didn’t want to argue with Aksel.

“And Anna is terrified of the Russians coming. She can hardly sleep, stays up all night listening to the sky. That’s how it is.”

Aksel had already turned away, ready to leave. “Our only daughter,” he said as he climbed into the sleigh and disappeared in a puff of snow.

Juudit snapped an icicle from the eaves of the station and bit it as she went looking for the station office. She found a telephone there and placed a call to Hellmuth’s chauffeur, who had dropped her off at the station earlier to wait for Aksel and gone ahead to the hotel. It would have been too complicated to explain why a secretary had an Opel and a chauffeur at her disposal.

She’d spent the night at the hotel before returning to Tallinn. On the way home she’d asked the chauffeur to stop at the cemetery. The grave had no marker. As if Rosalie had never existed. Juudit didn’t know what she had come for, but she was sure of one thing—she would no longer have anything to do with Anna or Leonida. All of a sudden she understood those people who would rather bring their possessions onto the boat than their families.