Death of a Nightingale (29 page)

She sensed the abyss beneath her.

Then she grabbed the car door and pulled the handle, without luck. Of course.

She had been so unbelievably stupid. Of course the Witch was still untouchable. Of course she couldn’t kill her.

Natasha hit the window again, hammering away, and with every blow, the face became harder to make out.

“Die.” Natasha was winded now, and her words sounded just as dead and flat as the impact of the tire iron. “Please—just—die.”

She closed her eyes and struck again, and this time there was a little hollow sound like when a hard-boiled egg hits a table, but it wasn’t just the sound that made her look carefully at the window’s cobweb pattern. She could feel in her fingers that something was finally yielding. And true enough, a little black hole gaped in all the whiteness, and she hit the window again with full force in precisely that place and felt the euphoric sensation of almost reaching the goal when the glass yielded even further. One foot in front of the other.

As she raised the tire iron once more, someone grabbed hold of it and jerked it back with such suddenness that she swayed and tumbled backward into the snow. Blows fell on her face, hard and precise and in a steady rhythm. She felt two of her molars shatter and cut into her tongue, already warm with blood.

“Natasha Doroshenko?”

She was too confused to answer. Just shook her head stupidly and tried to get up.

New blows. Fast and hard.

“Natasha Doroshenko?”

This time she managed to answer yes, but in the instant that followed, everything rushed away from her in whirls of grey and black and red. The wire under her feet broke, and she dropped and fell straight into the abyss below.

UKRAINE, 1935

The party buried Oxana. And Kolja too, even though he was neither a hero nor a pioneer. For Mother’s sake, as Semienova said. So Mother wouldn’t have to think of anything but the heroic deed her daughter had done, and for which she had bravely paid with her life.

“Your daughter is an example to Soviet youth,” said Semienova. She didn’t have red eyes any longer and now seemed more angry than sad, and with the anger, some of her shining energy had returned. She had become beautiful again. “A visionary little girl who valued solidarity above all else, even her own family. A true pioneer.”

Olga couldn’t help wondering whether she would also have been buried by the Party if she had been murdered along with Kolja and Oxana. Would Semienova have made a beautiful speech about her?

Mother sat with her head hanging limply on its thin neck and didn’t look as if she was really listening to anything Comrade Semienova was saying. She hadn’t lit the oven, and she hadn’t swept the floor or cooked the porridge or done the washing. The whole house smelled like a dung heap, thought Olga, and she was constantly freezing.

“But there should be a panachydy,” Mother mumbled then. “There should be a singing. My children must be sung out with ‘Vichnaya Pam’yat.’ Forever remembered, forever loved. I have to call a priest.”

Comrade Semienova shook her head. “Oxana was not religious, and she had a strong will. A priest at her funeral would be an insult
to everything she stood for. The funeral should be in her spirit, and the Party Committee has already—”

“And Kolja?” Now Mother lifted her head and stared at Semienova with a look that frightened Olga. “Must little Kolja be shut out of Heaven too?”

Comrade Semienova just smiled a sad little smile and stroked Olga’s hair before she left. Olga had hoped she would stay a little longer because it was not nice to be alone with Mother, who just sat staring into the blue. But it was as it had always been. Comrade Semienova was busy with Oxana, even now when her body lay cold and hard in a coffin somewhere, and she could neither sing nor engage in interesting political discussions in the classroom. Even now, Oxana was more interesting than Olga.

Olga knew that it was wrong to think this way. In fact, she should feel nothing but sorrow now that Oxana was dead and had been murdered by the kulaks, as it said in the newspaper, but it was as if she couldn’t stop the forbidden thoughts no matter how hard she tried. In fact, it was as if they grew and swelled the more she tried to drive them off. Like the time when Jana and she had begun laughing in old Volodymyr Pavlenko’s class and had just laughed louder and louder the more he scolded them. It was as if they had been hit by a kind of madness that wasn’t cured until he slapped them both quite hard.

Please don’t let Semienova see what I’m thinking, prayed Olga quietly. She must not see what I’m thinking about Oxana … but now Semienova was on her way out and only turned in the doorway to say goodbye to Mother.

Mother didn’t look up, but suddenly some force inside her seemed to come alive again. “Damn you, Semienova. Damn you to hell—you and all your fine friends in the Party.” She wasn’t speaking very loudly. “They were my children, and now you won’t even let me see
them. Not even in death can I get them back.”

Olga held her breath, and Semienova, who had been about to close the door behind her, hesitated. She opened it again, and an ice-cold blast of winter raced through the living room, even though Olga had thought it couldn’t possibly get any colder.

“Watch what you say,” said Semienova. She looked shaken and upset, and Olga understood her. Mother should not be scolding her like this, and Olga felt sorry for Semienova. “I like you and your daughter, but I can’t protect you from everything. Your ex-husband’s family has already been arrested and is on their way to Sorokivka. There will be a harsh reckoning with the kulaks and their anti-Soviet propaganda.”

It was no use. Mother couldn’t be stopped. Her eyes were black pieces of coal in her pale face. “None of this would have happened if it wasn’t for you,” she hissed. “You have blood on your hands, and it will never come off.”

M
OTHER MADE AN
effort to stay upright for the funeral. She did not brush her own hair or change her clothes, but she washed Olga’s face and braided her hair, her touch gentle. Olga found her good dress, the one she had worn in the picture Semienova took; it was still pretty, although the sleeves were now too short. Oxana’s dress would have fit her better, but Mother had given it to Semienova so Oxana could wear it in the coffin. A waste. Wouldn’t it have been better for Olga to be dressed nicely for the funeral and for Oxana to be in the too-small dress rather than the other way around? The coffin was closed anyway.

Olga pictured Oxana lying there beneath the heavy lid with her hair spread out on the pillow. Kolja was to be buried in his new coat, although without his rifle. Even though Olga had searched and searched for it down by the stream, she hadn’t been able to find it.

Then they were off. Down the main street, where the snow had started to melt and turn to mud. Spring would come without Father and Kolja and Oxana, even though Olga had not thought it would be possible.

I
N THE GRAVEYARD,
a brass band was playing, and the pioneer division from Sorokivka had come. Some of the older children must have met Oxana, because they stood with tears in their eyes when Comrade Semienova stepped forward to speak. She looked wonderful in pants and a man’s jacket, her mouth painted red. She spoke of how Oxana had wished for freedom for the workers and the peasants, and how she had often talked about how unfair it was that the kulaks still had so much when others had so little. Too good for this world, Comrade Semienova concluded. The people’s nightingale had fallen from the sky, but her song would still sound in everyone’s hearts.

No one said anything about Kolja.

Natasha was pretty sure that she was going to die.

Not because the man next to her had said anything particular to her or had been deliberately threatening. It was more the way that the woman in the backseat and he spoke to each other—so quiet and relaxed, as if Natasha had already been taken care of and never would be a threat again.

“Did you speak to Nikolaij?” asked the man.

“No. No, I’ll wait to call until we get home again. He thinks I’m in Odessa. I couldn’t say …”

“No, I guess you couldn’t.” The man’s tone had become dry and distant.

“Jurij, you know it’s different with him. He doesn’t understand these things.”

“I know. Forget it, Mamo. It’ll work out. We can leave tonight if you want. Then we’ll be home by Tuesday morning at the latest. I need some proper food; I’m about to throw up from all the hot dog buns.” He laughed a brief, explosive laugh and slammed one hand flat against the steering wheel.

Even though he was probably the one who would be in charge of the actual execution, it was the old woman who made the hairs at the back of Natasha’s neck stand up. She made Natasha intensely uncomfortable, and Natasha couldn’t help turning her head every other second so she could at least see her out of the corner of her eye. The Witch
noticed and sent her a brief, unreadable look before turning her head toward the side window.

“What are we looking for, Jurij?” she asked. Passing headlights and the white overhead flicker of the streetlamps illuminated her narrow face and made deep black shadows of the furrows around her mouth and eyes.

He shrugged. “A good place,” he said.

Natasha sank a little deeper into the seat. The blood kept collecting in her mouth, and she was tired of swallowing it. She considered how he might react if she spat it out, either on the bottom of the car or in a dramatic red splatter on the side window. She caught sight of herself in the side-view mirror, her ghostlike reflection flashing back at her each time they passed another streetlight. Her face looked battered and distorted. One of her eyes had almost disappeared in a swelling that seemed to grow with every glimpse. Strands of hair had come loose from her ponytail and were matted against her forehead, nose and swollen eyelid, but she was unable to push them aside or scrub away the bloody tracks under her nose. The man, Jurij, had bound her hands behind her back with thin plastic strips of the kind normally used to organize cables or attach plastic toys to brightly colored cardboard backgrounds.

Like a Barbie in a cardboard box, she thought. The face in the mirror, which was no longer really hers, crumpled and emitted an odd, sobbing snort, neither laughing nor crying. Little flecks of blood hit the man’s hand on the gearshift. He shot her an irritated look, reached across her and searched for something in the glove compartment. Finally he found a pack of wet wipes and wiped his hands, cursing softly, before once more turning his full attention to the road.

The traffic abruptly slowed down and then almost stopped. Up ahead Natasha could see blinking blue lights and men in yellow reflective vests. Some of them read
POLICE
.

She considered whether there was anything she could do. The nice
Danish policemen probably wouldn’t be quite as nice now that she had attacked one of their own, but they wouldn’t kill her and bury her in “a good place.” But it was hopeless. She could neither wave nor knock on the window, at least not unless she began pounding her head against it. Jurij glanced at her and pulled aside his overcoat in a relaxed way so she could see the butt of a black pistol.

“First I’ll shoot you,” he said. “Then I’ll shoot them if necessary. But first you.”

She sat passive, her head bowed, while they passed the police car and the tow truck that was in the process of pulling two cars apart.

W
HEN THE POLICE
came to say that Pavel was dead, she hadn’t been surprised. That is what happens when you don’t believe in the reality of wolves, she thought. Meanwhile, her body registered an inner breakdown, as if her spine had finally succumbed to some long-term pressure and collapsed. Her legs became numb, and she could no longer feel her face. Her hearing came and went, and she had to ask the policeman to repeat the message several times to catch it all. In a car. At Lake Didorovka. What had he been doing there?

“Did he come off the road?” she asked, because maybe there was still a chance to normalize his death into the comprehensible everyday universe. But no. Of course not. It was homicide. A “suspicious death,” they called it. That didn’t surprise her either.

What took her by surprise was that they wanted her to say she had done it.

They brought both her and Katerina to the station and placed Natasha in a little room with green walls and both bars and netting in front of the window. Katerina was not allowed to stay with her. Natasha could hear her crying in the next room. It was a terrible sound; it filled her so she couldn’t think, it made her chest and stomach ache, and she tried to make the officers understand that she would listen if
she could just comfort Katerina first.

They asked her why she had done it.

Done what? she asked.

And then they explained that it was usually wives who killed their husbands, and she had probably grown tired of him and wanted his money. He has no money, she said, while Katerina cried; he owes several hundred thousand. To whom? To U-Card.

That made them hesitate. They went out into the hall and spoke quietly. Then one of them disappeared. The other asked if she wanted tea. No, no tea. Just Katerina. Yes, of course. Something had changed, as if “U-Card” was a magic formula that opened locked doors. Suddenly she was allowed to see her daughter. After a little while, the second policeman left too. Only a secretary remained, sitting at a desk.

Natasha lifted Katerina up onto her hip and asked if she was charged with anything. “No,” said the secretary. “They just want a statement from you.”

“Then it’ll have to be after I go to the doctor with my daughter,” said Natasha, with a new authority. “Can’t you hear how labored her breathing is?”

She left the station. All they had with them was Katerina’s little backpack and what Natasha had in the pockets of her coat; she didn’t even have her wallet. She had to go back to the apartment even though her instinct screamed that she had to get away while she could.