When the Doves Disappeared: A Novel Read online

  There were other reasons that I’d left so willingly, left the others to prepare for the next attack. I already had my doubts about our German allies. They’d sent us to attack the rear of the Red Army with a few grenades and pistols and a radio that didn’t work. Nothing more. We hadn’t even been given a decent map of Estonia. We’d been sent there to die, I was sure of it. But I followed orders and kept my mouth shut. As if the last few centuries hadn’t taught us anything, all the times the German barons of the Baltic had flayed the skin off our backs.

  Before I went to Finland, I had planned to join the Forest Brothers, had even imagined leading an act of sabotage. My plans changed when I was invited to join the training organized by the Finns. The sea had just then frozen over, making the passage to Finland easy. I thought it was a good omen. In the ranks of the Forest Brothers there had been a kind of bluster and carelessness that wasn’t going to win any wars or drive away our foes or bring anyone back from Siberia or reclaim our homes. I thought the Green Captain took unnecessary risks with his troops. In his shirt pocket he carried a notebook where he wrote down all the information about the men he provisioned and sketched out precise plans for attacks and tunnels. My fears were confirmed by Mart’s daughter. She told me that the destruction battalion had found the food records her mother kept, with careful lists of who came to their house to eat, and when. The Green Captain had promised that she would eventually be repaid for the food and the trouble. But now Mart’s house was a smoking ruin, Mart himself had lost his mind, and his daughter was among the crowds of refugees somewhere ahead of us. Some of the Brothers mentioned in her mother’s provision records had already been executed.

  I knew that once Estonia was free again, people of good conscience would want to examine these years, and there would have to be evidence that we acted according to the law. But such thorough record keeping was a risk we couldn’t afford. The acts of the Bolsheviks had already proved that our country and our homes were under the control of barbarians. But I didn’t criticize the captain openly. As an educated man and a hero of the War of Independence, he knew more about fighting than I did, and there was a lot of wisdom in his leadership. He had trained the troops, taught them how to shoot, how to use Morse code, made them spend time every day practicing their running, the most important skill in the forest. I might have stayed in Estonia with his group if it hadn’t been for his habit of taking notes. And the camera. I’d been with the Forest Brothers for some time when one morning they started talking about taking a group photo. I slipped away, said I shouldn’t be in it since I wasn’t really part of the gang. The boys posed in front of the dugout leaning on each other’s shoulders, their hand grenades hanging from their belts, one of them with his head stuck into the horn of a portable gramophone as a joke. The photo included a proudly displayed knapsack full of communist money taken from the town hall. The Green Captain had given it out in bundles. Take your fair share, he’d told them. This is a repayment for the cash the Soviet Union confiscated from the people.

  The captain was a legend, but I didn’t want to be that kind of hero. Was it weakness? Was I any better than Edgar?

  Rosalie would have been proud to have pictures of my training on Staffan Island or my time with the Green Captain’s group of Forest Brothers, but I didn’t intend to make the same mistake the captain did. I even tore up Rosalie’s picture, though my fingers didn’t want to do it. Her gaze had comforted me at many hopeless moments. I would need that comfort if my life were flowing out of my veins into the earth. I needed it now, as we trekked over the stones and moss, now that I’d left our fighting brothers behind. I needed that look in her eyes. Edgar, clomping along behind me, had never carried a photo of his wife. When he showed up at the cabin where I was waiting to leave for Finland, he made it clear that I shouldn’t say a word to anyone about his being back in his home province. An understandable worry for a deserter, and he knew how fragile Mother’s nerves were. Still, I couldn’t imagine doing such a thing myself, not giving Rosalie any sign that I was alive. I could hear Edgar huffing and puffing behind me and I couldn’t fathom why he wanted to let his wife believe he was still a conscript in the Red Army. I was in a mad rush to get to Rosalie’s house, and Edgar hadn’t said a word about seeing his own wife. I half suspected that he was planning to leave her, that he’d found a new girl, maybe in Helsinki. He’d often been out and about by himself there, traipsing off to the Klaus Kurki restaurant. But he never seemed to let a woman cloud his vision, and he didn’t go in for drinking like the other men did, you could tell by the freshness of his breath when he came back to our quarters. He also wore the same free clothes that I did, although he had puckered up his mouth when he saw the cut and the fabric. You couldn’t take a girl out for a stroll in those clothes, and you couldn’t amuse her on twenty marks a day, let alone sample Helsinki’s brothels. It was just enough money for tobacco, socks, the bare necessities.

  The other men had taken one look at Edgar and decided he was different, and I was afraid he’d be sent away from the island as unfit to fight. I really had to work on him after he split his forehead open with the kick of his rifle butt and turned even more gun-shy. I wondered how he’d managed in the Red Army. And where had he gotten so soft around the middle? Red Army provisions were hardly pure lard and white bread. On Staffan Island his belly had disappeared, since everything in Finland was rationed.

  Edgar had been forgiven a lot because he was a talker. When members of the Finnish command became instructors, they let him give a lecture about Red Army insignia, smoothly churning out the Russian words. He even tried to teach the other men to parachute, although he’d never once done it himself. He spent the evenings mastering the falsification of papers for when we went back to Estonia, whispering to me about his plans for an elite group made up of men from the island. I let him blather. I’d grown up with him, I was used to his overactive imagination. But the other men pricked up their ears at his nonsense.

  We had plenty of free time, moments when most of the men would gawk at every skirt they saw like she was the original Eve. I passed the time thinking about Rosalie and the spring sowing. That June we’d learned about the deportations. No one had heard from my father since his arrest the year before. At the time my mother had wept, said he should have known to take off his hat and sing when the Internationale played, keep his mouth shut about the potato association, not say anything against the nationalization, but I knew my father was incapable of that. And that was why his house was taken, his son was in the forest, and he was in prison. The Bolsheviks wanted to make an example of him. Then they told people that their land wouldn’t be taken away—but who could believe them?

  Edgar, on the other hand, wasn’t upset about Simson Farm, even though it was the farm that had paid for his school, the student days in Tartu that he had so many stories about. There were a lot of students on the island, not as many men from the countryside. Edgar and the other university boys hadn’t seen much of life. You could hear it in the way they laughed at anyone who struck them as simpler than they were. For them, “uneducated” was an insult, and they judged a person by whether he’d made it to the third grade, or higher. Sometimes they sounded like they’d been reading too many English spy novels. They got carried away fantasizing about the secret agents they were going to send out from the island, about how the Reds’ days were numbered. And Edgar was right out in front, preaching the gospel. I wrote some of the men off as adventurers, but there weren’t any cowards among them, which gave me some confidence. And we mastered the basics. We were all trained on the radio and in Morse code, and although Edgar was clumsy at loading his gun, his supple fingers were well suited to the telegraph. He’d gotten his speed up to a hundred strokes per minute. My clumsy mitts were made for farmwork. At least we agreed about the most important things; we both had the same politics, the same pro-English position.

  I had my own plans: where I used to carry Rosalie’s photo I now kept loose-leaf notebook paper—carryi
ng the entire notebook would have been foolhardy. I’d also bought a bound diary. I wanted to collect evidence of the destruction wreaked by the Bolsheviks. When peace came, I would turn the documents over to someone who was good with words, someone who could write the history of our fight for freedom. The importance of this task gave me strength whenever I doubted that I’d be a part of these grand plans, whenever I felt like a coward for choosing a course of action that avoided combat, because I knew I was doing my part, something that I could be proud of. I had no intention of writing anything that would put anyone at risk or reveal too many identifiable details. I wouldn’t use names; I might not even mention locations. I planned to get a camera, but I wouldn’t be taking any group photos. Spies’ eyes glittered everywhere, greedy for the gold of dead Estonians’ dust.

  Tallinn, Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic, Soviet Union

  THE GRAIN WAREHOUSES were burning, the sky grew columns of smoke. Buses, trucks, and cars filled the roads, their worn tires screaming like the people were, screaming to get away. And then an explosion. Shrapnel. Shards of glass like a shower of rain. Juudit stood with her mouth open in a corner of her mother’s kitchen. Her mother had escaped to the countryside, to her sister Liia’s house, and left Juudit on her own to wait for the bomb, the bomb that would end everything. The roads from Tallinn to Narva had for some time been clogged with trucks full of evacuees’ possessions, and there were rumors about the evacuation commissariat, rumors that they’d set up commissariats for cattle evacuation, grain evacuation, lentil evacuation—a commissariat for anything they could get their hands on. The Bolsheviks intended to take it all with them, every last crumb, down to the smallest piece of potato. They weren’t going to leave anything for the Germans—or the Estonians. The army had ordered its men to empty the fields, and all of it was headed to Narva or to the harbors. Another explosion.

  Juudit put her hands over her ears and pressed hard. She had already accepted that the town would be destroyed before the Germans could get there; she only hoped that her time wouldn’t come until some more ordinary day, that the last sound she heard would be the clink of a spoon on a saucer, the jangle of hairpins in a box, the hollow ring of a milk pitcher set down on a table. Birds! Birds singing! But the Luftwaffe and the antiaircraft guns had devoured the birds, she would never hear them again. No dogs. No cats meowing, no crows cawing, no clatter from upstairs, no sounds of children downstairs, no errand boys running, no squeak of pushcarts, no clank against the door frame as the woman downstairs bumped her bucket coming into the building. Juudit had tried it, too, balancing the washbasin on her head, secretly, in front of the mirror, and wondered why the milliners didn’t design a hat that you could balance a little washbasin or bucket on. It would be a guaranteed success. Women were so childish, so foolish. A bucket hat was just the kind of crazy idea they needed right now. But that clank of tin, that ordinary life, was a thing of the past. Those buckets had been a mark of defeat, tainted by the Bolshevik occupation, but an ordinary thing nevertheless, with an ordinary sound.

  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 t
o 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.