Purge (10 page)

Aliide shut her ears to his complaining. Something to be arranged again, new plans to make—always something new, even though she didn’t have it in her, not anymore.

Volli got ready to leave. Aliide studied him. His hands were shaking, he had to hold his coffee cup in both hands, and she saw fear in those hands—not in his ashen expression, not in his crumpled face, only in his hands. Or maybe behind his mouth, too, the corners of his mouth that he was wiping with a handkerchief all the time, dabbing at them with his bony, trembling fingers. It made her shudder. He was weak now, and it filled her with vexation and a desire to kick him, wallop his back and sides with a stick—or maybe with a sandbag—till there was nothing left of him. Till his guts were like soup. That would be a method familiar to Volli. Just like an old girlfriend—kiss this! A vision flashed in her mind: Volli doddering and trembling on the ground, shielding his head, whimpering and begging for mercy. What a delicious sight. A wet splotch would spread in his pants and the sandbag would fly up again and again and hammer his hateful, weak body thoroughly, bruising his watery eyes, splintering his porous bones. But the best part would be that splotch in his pants and the howl, like an animal howl, before he died.

The vision made her breathless, and she sighed. Volli sighed, too, and said, “This is what we’ve come to.”

She promised to come and testify on his behalf if he ended up in court. Although of course she wouldn’t.

She closed the gate behind him as he pedaled off, glancing after him.

Others would come after Volli to discuss the same thing. There was no doubt about it. They thought of her as an ally, and they would insist on taking her with them. She could almost already hear how she ought to make a statement, talk to the papers, since she had always been good at talking, and women are always more likely to be believed in these situations—that’s what they would say, and they would drag the memory of Martin into it and say that Aliide had been part of building this country, and their reputations would be dragged through the mud so shamefully, and so would the memory of all the soldiers and veterans who came before us! There was no telling whose memory and reputation they would drag into it, and then they would rant about how the Soviet Union would never have allowed the heroes of the fatherland to end up using macaroni coupons.

Aliide wasn’t ever going to go anywhere or say anything about these things. Let them threaten her however they liked, she wasn’t going.

She found it hard to believe that there would be any very bold moves, because too many people had dirty flour in their bags, and people with filthy fingers are hardly enthusiastic about digging up the past. Besides, you could always find someone to defend you if a fanatical public worked itself up into a riot. They would have been called saboteurs, in the past, and put in jail to think for a while about the consequences of their actions. Stupid young people, what did they expect to achieve by rummaging around like this? Those who poke around in the past will get a stick in the eye. A beam would be better, though.

When Volli was out of sight, Aliide went inside and opened a drawer in the bureau. She took out some papers and started to sort them. Then she opened another drawer. And another. She went through every drawer, went to the washstand, the bundle in the bottom drawer, remembered the secret drawer in the kitchen table, too, and went through it. The radio cabinet. The shelf on the big looking glass. The unused suitcases. The straggly wallpaper, under which she had sometimes slipped something. The candy tins, blooming with rust. The piles of yellowed newspapers, dead flies dropping from between them. Did Martin have any other stashes?

She wiped away the spiderwebs that clung to her hair. She hadn’t found anything incriminating, just a lot of trash seeping out of every corner. The party papers and awards went in the fire, so did Talvi’s Young Pioneer badge. And the pile of the
Abiks Agitator
, which Martin had read every month with burning eyes:
In 1960, for every ten thousand inhabitants in England there were only nine doctors, in the United States only twelve, but in the Estonian Soviet Republic there were twentytwo! In the Soviet Republic of Georgia, thirty-two! Before the war, there were no kindergartens in Albania, but now there are three hundred! We demand a happy life for all the children of the world! And what brigadiers we have!

Looking at the annual volume, with “EKP KK Propaganda and Agitation Association” printed under the title, Aliide could hear Martin’s voice trembling with fervor.
A Socialist society provides the best prerequisites for the advancement of science, the advancement of economics, the conquering of space for progress!
She shook her head, but Martin’s voice wouldn’t leave it.
The capitalist world won’t be able to keep up with the stormlike progress of our people’s standard of living! The capitalist world will be left standing—and fall!
And an unending stream of numbers: how much steel had been produced in the previous year, how much it exceeded the norm, how the annual goal had been achieved in one month—forward, always forward —still more, more, more—greater victories, greater profits —victory, victory, victory! Martin never said maybe. He was incapable of doubt, because he didn’t let his words admit the possibility. He spoke only truths.

There was so much wastepaper that Aliide had to wait for the first batch to burn before she could load more into the stove. The old paper made her skin smutty. She washed her hands all the way to the elbows, but they got filthy again immediately when she picked up the next magazine. The endless annals of the Estonian Communists. And then all of the books that had been ordered:
Ideological Experiences Stumping in Viljand
by K. Raaven,
An Analysis of Livestock Production on Collective Farms
by R. Hagelberg,
A Young Communist’s Questions About Growth
by Nadezda Krupskaya. The pile, glazed over with lost optimism, grew in front of her. She could have burned them all gradually, used the books for kindling, but it felt important to get rid of them all right away. It would have been smarter to look for the kinds of things that could have been used against her. Martin had always been the kind of person who knew how to watch his own back, so she was sure to find something. But the pile of trash in front of the stove annoyed her too much.

After she got going, burning books for several days, she fetched the ladder from the stable and managed to lug it over to the end of the house, though it weighed her down and dragged her arms toward the ground. Hiisu bolted after a low-flying air force plane—he’d never gotten used to them, always trying to catch them, many times a day, barking at the top of his lungs. He vanished behind the fence and Aliide pushed the ladder up against the wall of the house. She hadn’t been to that side of the loft in years, so there would be plenty of mess, corners full of embarrassing phrases and theses that had to be suppressed.

An attic smell. Spiderwebs drifting against her, and a strange taste of longing. She retied her scarf under her chin and stepped forward. She left the door open and let her eyes adjust to the darkness, peering between the tops of the piles. Where should she start? The section of the attic over the end of the house was full of every possible object: spinning wheels, shuttles, shoemaker’s lasts, old potato baskets, a loom, bicycles, toys, skis, ski poles, window frames, a treadle sewing machine—a Singer that Martin had insisted on carrying up here, even though Aliide had wanted to keep it downstairs because it worked well. The women in the village had held on to their Singers, and anyone who did get a new machine chose a treadle model, because what if something happened and there was no electricity? Martin didn’t often become visibly angry and didn’t argue with his wife about household matters, but the Singer had gone, and Martin had replaced it with an electric model, a Russian Tshaika. Aliide had let it pass, reckoning that he just hated goods from Estonian times and wanted to set an example and show how they trusted Russian appliances. But the Singer was the only thing from Estonian times that he wanted to get rid of. Why the Singer, and why only it?
Pick me, my lips have never been kissed, Pick me, I am a maiden true, pure, and able, Pick me, I have a Singer sewing machine, Pick me, I have a Ping-Pong table.
Who was it who had sung that? Nobody around here, anyway. The young voices in Aliide’s head mixed with Martin’s snorts from years ago as he lugged the Singer up the ladder to the attic. Where had she heard that song? It was in Tallinn, when she was visiting her cousin. Why had she gone there? Was she there to see a dentist? That was the only possible reason. Her cousin had taken her to town, and she had passed a student group that was singing, “
Take me, I have a Singer sewing machine
.” And the students had laughed so lightly. They had their whole lives ahead of them, the future leading them forward at full steam, the girls with their short skirts and high, shiny boots. Chiffon scarves rippling in their hair and around their necks. Her cousin had lamented the shortness of the skirts goodnaturedly, but she was wearing a chiffon scarf just like theirs on her head. They were all the rage, those chiffon scarves. The expressions on the young people’s faces had been full of possibility. Her future was already over. The song kept ringing in her ears all day. No, all week. It mixed with the milk that sprayed into her pail, the muddy bottoms of her galoshes, her steps as she walked across the field of the kolkhoz collective farm and saw Martin’s excitement at how the collective was thriving, his excitement about the future, which had rolled over Aliide’s heart like a heavy cart, as sturdy as a lug nut, like the muscles of Stakhanov, the heroic miner, inescapable, inexorable.

Aliide aimed her flashlight at the sewing machine again.
Singer, above all the rest.
She remembered the ads from a world ago in
Taluperenaine
magazine very well. Under the cabinet top there was a box full of junk, sewing machine oil and little brushes, broken needles and bits of ribbon. She got down on her knees and looked at the underside of the cabinet top. The nails there were smaller than on the rest of the cabinet. She pushed the machine over and went carefully down the ladder, got an ax from the kitchen, and tottered back up the ladder to the attic. The ax made short work of the sewing machine.

She found a little bag in the middle of one of the piles. Martin’s old tobacco pouch. It had old gold coins and gold teeth in it. A gold watch, with Theodor Kruus’s name engraved on it. Her sister Ingel’s brooch, which had disappeared that night in the basement of town hall.

Aliide sat down on the floor.

Martin hadn’t been there. Not Martin.

Although Aliide’s head had been covered and she hadn’t really been able to see anything, she still remembered every sound, every smell, every man’s footsteps from that basement. None of them belonged to Martin. That’s why she had accepted him.

So how did Martin come to have Ingel’s brooch?

The next day Aliide took the bicycle down the road into the woods. When she was far enough away, she left the bike by the side of the road, walked out toward the swamp, and threw in the pouch, in a great arch.

Zara rinsed the last raspberries of the year, picked out the worms, threw out the ones that were completely wormeaten, trimmed the half-eaten ones, and tipped the cleaned berries into a bowl. At the same time she tried to figure out a way to ask Aliide about the rocks hitting the window, the “
tibla
” written on the door. At first Zara had been startled, thinking that it referred to her, but even her stumbling intellect told her that Pasha and Lavrenti wouldn’t take up that kind of game. It was intended for Aliide, but why would someone harass an old woman that way? How did Aliide manage to remain calm at a time like that? She was puttering away at the stove like nothing had happened, even humming, nodding approvingly at Zara’s bowl of berries now and then, and shoving a ladleful of foam skimmed from the boiling pot of jam into Zara’s hand. It seemed Talvi had always begged to be the first to have some. Zara started to empty the ladle obediently. The sweetness of the foam made her teeth twinge. Worms moved around on top of the discarded berries and made the bowl’s enameled flowers come alive. Aliide was unnaturally calm. She sat down on a stool next to the stove to watch the soup, her walking stick leaning against the wall. The swatter rested in her arms, and she used it now and then to slap at the occasional fly. Her galoshes gleamed even in the dark of the kitchen. The sweet scent that rose from the cooking pots mixed with the drying celery and the smell of sweat brought on by the heat of the kitchen. It muddled Zara’s brain. The scarf, which was drooping onto her neck, smelled like Aliide. It was difficult to breathe. New questions kept coming up, even though she hadn’t yet got any answers to her first ones. How did Aliide Truu live in this house? What did the rocks that hit the window mean? Would Talvi get here before Pasha did? Zara fidgeted impatiently. The roof of her mouth was sticky. Aliide hadn’t had much to say since she gave her explanation for the scrawlings on the door and the rain of stones, and it was torture. How could Zara get her babbling about her troubles again? Aliide had been angry when they talked about the rise in prices—maybe she should ask her about that. Was it a safe subject? The price of eggs nowadays, or soup bones? Or sugar? Aliide had muttered that she should start growing sugar beets again, the way things are now. But what could Zara ask her about it? Over the past year she had forgotten all the normal ways of being with people— how to get to know a person, how to have a conversation— and she couldn’t think of a segue to break the silence. Besides, time was running out and Aliide’s imperturbability scared her. What if Aliide was crazy? Maybe the stones and windows didn’t mean anything for Zara’s purposes; maybe she should just concentrate on doing something—and quickly. The raspberry seeds wedged between her teeth and wrenched at their roots. She could taste blood in them. The clock ticked metallically, the fire burned one stick of wood after another, the baskets of berries emptied, Aliide skimmed the foam and the worms that rose to the top with lunatic precision, and Pasha came closer. Every single minute he was getting closer. His car wouldn’t break down, and it wouldn’t run out of gas, and it wouldn’t be stolen—those kinds of things, delays that mere mortals experienced, didn’t happen to Pasha, because the problems of ordinary people didn’t touch him, and because Pasha always got his way. You couldn’t depend on Pasha having bad luck. He didn’t have bad luck. He had money luck, the only good kind, and he was getting inexorably closer.