When the Doves Disappeared (4 page)

HER BROTHER JOHAN
had taken her to her mother’s house on Valge Laeva Street in case anything happened, but the days had just continued. He and his wife had been taken away in June and Juudit hadn’t heard from them since, and strangers had moved into his house, important people from the commissariat. Juudit’s husband had been mobilized by the Red Army a long time ago. The woman who lived in the basement had been convicted of counterrevolutionary activity—accused of knowing that her renter was planning to leave the country. Juudit had been interrogated about it, too. And yet the days continued, even after that, and as they continued they became ordinary days, and even those days were better than these days of destruction. Out in the country, at Aunt Leonida’s house, Rosalie went right on milking the cows, even as her fiancé’s family was terrorized. The Simsons’ farm had been taken away; Roland’s father had been arrested and his mother, Anna, had moved to the Armses’ place so Rosalie could take care of her. Juudit was grateful to Rosalie for that. She wouldn’t have been able to cope with Anna Simson, not even in an emergency.

She didn’t have Rosalie’s patience. If Juudit’s husband knew about it, he would have one more thing to complain about, would say that Anna didn’t deserve such an uncaring attitude from her favorite nephew’s wife. Maybe not, but Rosalie could fuss over Anna better than Juudit could, and Rosalie would fill the house with little darlings soon enough to make her happy. That was something that Juudit would never see happen.

She tried to think of a sound from the past, something to be the last thing she thought of before the end. Maybe a day in her childhood, the ordinary noises of Rosalie in the kitchen, the sounds of a morning like all the other mornings of that peaceful time, when you knew that today would be just like yesterday, a day when the plywood of her mother’s Luther chair scraped across the floor under the window with that annoying grate, a day when there was nothing very important in her own head, when the most insignificant irritation could make her cross. Or maybe before she died she’d like to think about a day when she was still unmarried, a young lady, a time when there was nothing more exciting than a dress, wrapped in tissue paper, in a box, a dress for her future suitors. Under no circumstances would she think about her husband. She bit her lip. She couldn’t keep her husband out of her mind even if she tried. If that last flash of explosion had hit the house, her marriage would have been the last thing she thought about. Another round of fire made her muscles twitch, but she couldn’t hear anything, didn’t double over.

The idea of staying behind, of going down with the rest of Tallinn, had come to her the day before her mother left, and it had stuck, as if it were the only thing she’d ever wanted. She liked Tallinn, after all, and she didn’t like her husband’s aunt Anna. Anna was staying at the Armses’ place now, with Aunt Leonida and Rosalie taking care of her. Juudit’s mother had tried to get Juudit to go there, too. At times like these it was good to be among loved ones.

“Thank the Lord your father isn’t here to see this. We’re just extra mouths to feed now, one sister taking me in, one taking you in. But it’s just for a little while. And, Juudit, you could at least try to get along with Anna.”

Juudit had pretended to agree so her mother would leave. She wasn’t going to go to Leonida’s house. Juudit wasn’t as confident as her mother about their chances for victory, but she was grateful in a way for the pneumonia
that had taken her father when everything was still going well in the country. He wouldn’t have been able to bear it, watching the Bolsheviks’ progress, Johan’s disappearance. The Soviet Union had an endless supply of men—why were things changing now? Why hadn’t they changed before the deportations in June? Why not before her brother was arrested? The din of battle rolled onward, the heavy, muddy wheels of the gun trucks that would kill them all. Juudit closed her eyes. The room lit up. The bursts of light in the air reminded her of the fireworks at Pirita Shore Club at midsummer, back when she had been married for only a year. Her ears were working then, and she’d had other things to worry about, a dull longing for her husband, or rather for the husband she’d imagined he would be. And on Midsummer Night in Pirita she had hoped, hoped so much. She saw herself deep in the Pirita darkness, focused on the flaming barrels of tar that served as torches, the forest sighing with contentment like a hedgehog just awakened to summer. She could taste a bit of lipstick on her tongue, smeared, but she didn’t care, it showed that her mouth was a mouth that had been kissed. The musicians were giving their all, in a song like a fleeting dream of youth, about deer drinking from a stream, unafraid, and the night was full of twittering girls hunting for fern flowers, double entendres said with a hint of a smile, as Juudit’s unmarried friends giggled and shook their bobbed hair defiantly—they had everything ahead of them, and midsummer magic made anything possible. Juudit felt her marriage flow over the flesh of her cheeks, the suppleness of her flesh, the lightness of her breath—these things that were no longer objects of pursuit—and pretended to be more experienced than the other girls, a little better, a little wiser, holding her husband’s hand with the relaxed air of a married woman, trying to drive away the seed of bitter envy, envy of her friends who hadn’t yet chosen anyone, who hadn’t yet been led to the altar. And then her husband swept her onto the dance floor and sang along with the song about his little missus, small as a pocket watch, and the tenderness in his voice carried her far away from the others, and the orchestra started another song, and the carefree deer were forgotten, and Juudit remembered why she had married him. Tonight. Tonight would be the night.

Juudit’s eyes snapped open. She was thinking about her husband again. She could see the sun rising over the Gulf of Finland. But it wasn’t
dawn yet; those were the flames of Soviet ships, what was left of Red Tallinn escaping over the sea, their horns shouting like panicked birds. The sound of retreat. Juudit stumbled across the floor, made it to the other side of the room, and leaned against the wall. She couldn’t believe the Bolsheviks were leaving. Light flashed in a corner of the bedroom and she realized that the Luftwaffe’s planes weren’t interested in Tallinn, only in the fleeing ships, but the knowledge didn’t feel like anything. Her twitching legs remembered too well what the sound of a plane meant: run for the bushes, for shelter, run anywhere, like the time in the country helping Rosalie and her aunt with the distilling when the enemy appeared in the sky without any warning and made her aunt kick the kettle over and they bolted under the trees and stood panting and staring at the low-flying plane with its belly, thankfully, emptied.

Juudit pressed her back against the wall, her feet firmly on the floor, readying herself for another explosion. Although the air was heavy with the stench of war, not all the familiar smells were gone. The wallpaper still gave off the smell of an old person’s home, of something safe—and gone. Juudit pushed her nose up against the wallpaper. The pattern was the same, old-fashioned, like the one in the room in Johan’s house where she and her husband had lived while they waited for their own house to be finished. The house was never finished. She would never furnish it. She would never see the new water-lily wallpaper she’d chosen from Fr. Martinson’s after changing her mind several times and fretting over every floral pattern one after the other with her husband and brother, and her sister-in-law, who at least understood how important it was to choose the right wallpaper. When she’d finally made her decision and walked out of the shop, it was a relief to be through with examining samples, comparing them at home, then back at Martinson’s, then at home again. She had gleefully taken a taxi to bring the good news to her husband, who was also relieved to have solved the wallpaper dilemma, and she had announced her decision to her sister-in-law at the Nõmme restaurant, and she’d gotten cream from her pastry on her nose, a nose silky and glowing because she scrubbed her face every night with sugar. Imagine, sugar! Had they drunk cocktails? Had they danced that evening? Had her husband joined them later, and had she thought again,
This is it, tonight’s the night
? Had she thought that, like she had so many times before?

THE END JUUDIT WAS EXPECTING
didn’t come. The town shook, burned, smoked, but it was still standing, and she was still alive, and the Red Army was gone. Happy shouts from outside made her crawl to the window, its panes crisscrossed with paper tape to keep them from shattering, and open it, not caring about the broken glass. The Wehrmacht with their helmets and bicycles filled the street like locusts, a multitude without number, gas-mask canisters waving, the soldiers covered in a downpour of flowers. Juudit stretched her arm out. Smiles sparkled in the air like bubbles in fresh soda, arms waved and sent a breeze sweet with the scent of girls toward the liberators, girls with their hands fluttering like leaves on summer trees, shifting and shimmering. Some of the hands were tearing down the Communist Party posters, the photos honoring communist leaders, tearing their mouths in two, ripping their heads in half, cutting them off at the neck, heels grinding into the leaders’ eyes, rubbing them into the ground, cramming the dust of rage into their paper mouths, the shreds of paper floating into the wind like confetti, the broken glass crunching underfoot like new-fallen snow. The wind slammed the window shut, and Juudit winced.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to happen. Where was the end she’d been expecting? She was disappointed. The solution hadn’t arrived. She breathed in the air of a free Tallinn from the window. Doubtful. Wary. As if the wrong kind of breath could take the peace away again, or cause a woman who didn’t believe in the German victory and the Soviet retreat to be punished. She didn’t dare run into the street—her restlessly squirming legs were hiding inappropriate thoughts, thoughts that rushed in when the neighbor’s little girl ran into the yard and yelled that Daddy was coming home. The little girl’s words made Juudit remember her situation and she had to hold on to the chair for support, like an old woman.

Soon the shops, stripped bare by the Red Army, would be full and would open their doors again, with salesgirls behind the counters to wrap your purchases in paper. The water treatment plant would be repaired, the bridges would rise again, everything that had been plundered, destroyed, and butchered would wind back to how it was before, like a film played backward. Tallinn was still wounded, sucked bare, the streets groaning
under horse carcasses and the corpses of Red soldiers swarming with beetles, but soon that would all be gone. The wharves would be rebuilt. The train tracks would be mended. The gashes torn in the roads by the bombs would be patched. Peace would rise from the ruins, plaster would cover the cracks in the walls of the buildings. Journeys would no longer be halted by broken roads. The candles could be taken off the tables and put back in their boxes, the electric lights would come on behind the blackout curtains, maybe the ones who’d been deported would come back, Johan could come home, no one would be taken away anymore, no one would disappear, the knocks at the door in the night wouldn’t come, and the Germans would win the war. Could there be anything better? Things would be ordinary again. But even though that is what Juudit had just been hoping for, the idea of it changed, in the blink of an eye, to something unbearable, and the indifference she’d felt a moment before changed to panic about the future. The ordinary life she would get wasn’t the ordinary life she wanted. Outside the window a Tallinn emptied of Bolsheviks was waiting; the first Estonians were already returning home, their boots already turning the roads to dust. Soon the town would be filled with an assortment of Estonian, Russian, and Latvian uniform jackets new and old, and the girls would swirl around them—maidens, fiancées, widows, daughters, mothers, sisters, an endless horde of clucking, sniffling, dancing females.

JUUDIT DIDN’T WANT
to face those women, talking about their husbands coming home, or the women whose fiancés, fathers, and brothers had already come out of the woods or wandered home from fighting in the Red Army in Estonia or on the Gulf of Finland. She wouldn’t have anything to say to them. She hadn’t sent her husband a single letter. She had certainly tried, had gotten out paper and ink, sat down at the table, but her hand couldn’t form any words. Just writing the first letter of his name had been too difficult, thinking what to say in the first sentence impossible. She couldn’t write her husband a letter from a wife who missed him, and that was the only kind of letter to send to the front. All the nights she’d tried and failed, and the nights when she didn’t even try, ate into her memory. All the times she’d tried to lower her neckline a little more, to
make him take some notice of her breasts. She remembered vividly how embarrassed she would feel afterward, remembered how it felt when she realized that everything she had imagined about him, everything that had charmed her about him, had been wrong. The memory of how her newly wed husband would push away the breasts she offered him, push her to the other side of the bed like spoiled food shoved away at the table.

JUUDIT’S HUSBAND HAD LEFT
in the first phase of Bolshevik rule, along with all the other men who fled conscription to hide in the attics of houses and summer cottages, and she had been relieved. She had the bed all to herself. But she remembered, of course, to knit her brow like she should, to pretend to be a wife who was worried about her husband. When he’d been picked up on his way to get food by Chekists in a black ZIS, Juudit had managed to darken her gray eyes with tears, because that was what she was supposed to do. Even then, she was already hoping that it would be his last trip, that’s what those black cars had meant for so many people, and she was afraid of her own wish, afraid of the wild joy in the possibilities the war had brought her. There were no divorced women in her family. Widowhood was her only option if she wanted her freedom back. But her husband’s auntie got news from the commissariat that he’d been sent to the front, and once again Juudit clutched her handkerchief for the sake of custom. She couldn’t tell anyone how much she enjoyed her bed without her husband. She would have liked to have a lover, but where would she get one? It was wrong to even think such a thing. But she did read
Madame Bovary
and
Anna Karenina
several times, and although the women in the books didn’t suffer quite the same marital problems that she did, she’d felt a great spiritual kinship with them, because she knew what it was to yearn.