Purge (21 page)

Meanwhile, the gold that had been carried to Siberia was turning into new teeth for new mouths, golden smiles that nearly outshone the sun, casting a great shadow, and in that shadow an immense number of averted eyes and shrinking expressions bred and multiplied. You met them in the market squares, in the roads and fields, an endless current, their pupils tarnished and gray, the whites of their eyes red. When the last of the farms was roped into the kolkhozy, plain talk vanished between the lines, and sometimes Aliide thought that Hans must have absorbed this atmosphere through the walls of the house. That Hans was following those same habits of silence as other people, the habit of avoiding looking at one another, like Aliide did. Maybe he had caught it from Aliide. Maybe Hans had caught the same thing from her that she had caught from outside the house.

The only difference was that unlike the others with averted eyes Hans still spoke as plainly as ever. He believed in all the same things that he had before. But his body changed as the outside world changed, even though he was never actually in contact with it.

“Why doesn’t your mother ever go to the movies? Our mom said she never goes.” The child’s clear voice echoed in the yard of the kolkhoz office. Jaan, the son of the first woman tractor operator on the commune, stared at the son of the chicken keeper, who started to break into a sweat. Aliide was about to intervene, to say that not everyone has to enjoy movies, but at the last moment she thought it best to hold her tongue. Martin’s wife simply couldn’t say such a thing, not about these movies. She had a new job, too, a good one, half days, light bookkeeping at the kolkhoz office.

The chicken keeper’s son examined the bits of sand on the toes of his shoes.

“Is your mother a Fascist?”

Jaan was on a roll—he kicked gravel at the other boy.

Aliide turned her head and moved a little farther off. She had given the movie men a tour of the office. Martin would be bringing some people in the new truck. Apparently he had put birch trees in the corners of the truck bed. The truck looked good this way and protected the passengers from the wind at the same time—he had been beaming about it when he left for work that morning. There was going to be a showing that evening—first the Survey of Soviet Estonia would be presenting
Stalingrad’s Lucky Days,
and then there would be a showing of
The Battle of Stalingrad
for the umpteenth time. Or was it
The Light of the Kolkhoz
?

The projectionist was showing the projector to the kids. They rode their bikes around the truck like a whirligig, their eager eyes locked on the machine. One of them said he wanted to be a movie man when he grew up, and drive the truck and see all the movies. The bookkeeper was arranging the benches inside; the windows of the auditorium were covered in army blankets. Tomorrow at the school there would be a free showing:
A Hero’s Tale: A True Story.
Jaan’s mother slumped to her place in her overalls, wiped her brow, and said something about the women’s tractor brigade. They were an Estonian family who had come from Russia. But they had preserved their language—so many of those people were just like Russians. They didn’t have even a small bundle of possessions with them when they came to the kolkhoz, but now the mother’s mouth shone gold and Jaan was hunting Fascists. They had made the front room of the house they were assigned to into a sheep fold. When Aliide went to visit them there, the sheep were tied to the legs of a piano that had been left in the house. A beautiful German piano.

The girls had showed up plenty early to wait for the movie men to arrive. There was a sixteen-year-old milkmaid there who was well known to the man who fixed the projector, and he went over to entertain her and insisted that she stay after the film for the dance. He would turn on the gramophone and get the pretty girls to dance until they wore their legs out.
Chirp chirp,
the milkmaid tried to giggle prettily, but the sound didn’t fit with her country cheeks, red as a flag—
chirp chirp
. Aliide was annoyed by the girl’s eager, hopeful look, directed at the movie man in his billed hat, smoking his
paperossi
. He tugged at his suspenders, whistled movie songs, and basked in the girl’s limelight as if he were some kind of movie star. The hot summer day carried the smell of sweat from under the girl’s breasts. Aliide wanted to go over and slap the stupid thing, tell her that the movie man had his fun with the milkmaids in every village, with every sixteen-year-old, and each one of them with the same look full of greed for the future, the same frill around their necklines and the same tempting cleavage, just as tempting every time, in every village.
Slap,
little girl.
Slap,
do you understand that? Aliide leaned against the car and saw the movie man out of the corner of her eye, surreptitiously stroking the girl’s plump arm, and although Aliide knew what the milkmaid didn’t know—that the boy told the same story to all the young possessors of breasts— she still felt envious of the girl for being able to believe in the future, even for a moment, a future where she and the movie man would dance together and watch movies and maybe someday she would make dinner for him in their own little home. No matter how small the possibility of a future for the milkmaid and the movie man was, it was greater than the possibilities for Aliide and Hans. Good God—any couple, no matter how unlikely, had a better chance than they did.

The chicken keeper’s son ran past. Jaan took off after him. A cloud of dust flew up and Aliide sneezed. Then she heard familiar steps, a familiar rhythm. A greeting rang out like a trombone, and she didn’t need to raise her head, she knew that voice, it was the voice of the man who had come to get Linda from the neighboring room in the basement of town hall.

“Welcome to your new job,” came the shout from the office. “This is our new head bookkeeper.”

Aliide had to sit down. The strength ran out of her legs and into the dust. The projectionist noticed her faintness and put down the electric motor he was holding, the mechanic continued to entertain the milkmaid, and the projectionist led Aliide to a bench, bent over her, and asked what was wrong. The fly of his moleskin pants hung in front of her nose, his curious, teasing gaze above it. Aliide told him that she was dizzy from the heat, that it happened sometimes. He went to get her some water. She rested her head on her knees, her hands, crossed over her knees, trembled, and her legs began to shake with them. The chrome-tanned boots passed by an arm’s length away from her, kicking up dust for her to breathe. She held her arms tightly around her legs and pressed her thighs against the bench to stop the shaking. Her lungs were dry with dust, her internal moisture flowed as sweat from under her arms onto the bench, and a little moan escaped her as she tried to get some oxygen, but all she got was dust, particles that swirled dry inside her lungs. The projectionist came back with a glass of water. Aliide’s hand splashed half the water from the glass, and he had to hold it for her while she drank. He shouted to someone that there was nothing to worry about; she was just faint from the heat. Aliide tried to nod, although her skin was so hot that she felt it itching, pulling her into a heap, and the little birds in the trees chirped and ripped pieces out of the blue sky with their little beaks, rip, gulp, rip, spit, with their little round black eyes, and every dusty breath she took made them jump.

The movie men drove her home in the truck. The milkmaid came along—supposedly the boys needed someone to show them the way back to the office. The milkmaid’s sweat was concentrated in the suffocating interior of the truck and the hem of her milking coat stuck to Aliide’s leg. The girl was unable to stop laughing in her excitement, the
chirp chirp
occasionally turning bolder, and at those times her head would swing right into Aliide’s, their ears nearly touching. The milkmaid had hair growing in her ears. Balls of earwax had stuck to the hairs. They moved in the wind as the girl lamented what had happened to Theodor Kruus’s daughter— hanged herself—a young girl—how could she do such a thing? Maybe she just missed her parents. They came to a rather bad end, difficult people, although the daughter was really very nice, and she hadn’t been taken away. She would never have believed that such a nice girl could have parents like that. Chirp.

When the truck had disappeared down the main road, Aliide felt the pressure on her chest lighten a little, and she leaned against the stone foundation of the barn. There was milking to do; she would manage. After that she would think about what she should do. A curlew gave a lonely cry, and the edge of the forest seemed to be watching her. She went to get her milking coat, threw it on, washed her hands, and stumbled into the barn. She should concentrate on everyday things, like the rustle of the straw, the compassionate eyes of the animals caressing her, the good feel of the pail in her hand, ah, such smooth wood. She buried the bottoms of her feet in the litter; Maasi’s tail swung back and forth. Aliide scratched her between her horns. Maybe the man hadn’t recognized her. She had put down her head so quickly. And there had been so many people interrogated, continuously—none of those men would remember all of their names and faces. It was good to be in the barn. The gaze of the animals didn’t have to be avoided, and her hands never trembled when she was with them; she never made Maasi nervous with shaking hands, and she could whisper in Maasi’s ear, anything she wanted. Maasi’s tongue would never speak the language of people. The sturdy juniper legs of the milking stool supported her, the cow snorted into the meal bucket,
zing zing,
the milk sprayed into the pail,
zing zing,
life went on, the animals needed her. She couldn’t get discouraged. She had to think of a solution.

Outside the barn, her lungs tightened again, and she couldn’t sleep that night. What if the man recognized her? Her wheezing breath sounded like a mouse in a trap. Martin woke up. She told him to go to sleep, but no, he stayed up, watching as her lungs struggled for oxygen. The night crept by. Aliide couldn’t get any air; she had a chrome-tanned boot resting on her chest and she couldn’t get it off.

She didn’t dare fall asleep because she feared she would talk in her sleep, yell, rave, be exposed somehow, in her suffocating dreams, just like she had in that basement when they pushed her head in the slop bucket. What if the man had heard her name at the office and remembered that? But no, she was Aliide Truu now, she wasn’t Aliide Tamm anymore.

In the morning, Martin looked concerned and lingered at the door for a long time. He didn’t want to leave her alone. Aliide shooed him away, grinned, said that the kolkhoz radio project needed him more than she did—how would the people be informed about the atomic bomb if there was no radio? She wasn’t going to take ill here at home, there was nothing to worry about. When she’d gotten Martin on his way, she tore the strained smile off her face, washed her hands, doused her face in the washbasin, and staggered into the barn. She would have liked to leave off milking for the whole day, but she didn’t, she just dumped the bucket into the refrigeration tank with a splash, not even filtering it— she simply forgot. She wasn’t up to bringing the milk to the dairy or going to the kolkhoz office to work. She went into the front room, drank half a bottle of tonic, and spent the morning sobbing. Then she made herself a bath and washed her hair, warmed the water even though the weather was so hot that she normally wouldn’t have made a fire in the stove at all. Her pores gasped, her breath wheezed. That man would remember her eventually. She couldn’t work at the office anymore. She would get crazy papers, anything— Martin could help her. The man didn’t know Martin, did he? Flies buzzed and she slapped at them with the flyswatter. Sweat poured over her like a spring. She knocked flies off the lamp, the chair, the beer barrel, the scissors, the washtub, and the saw that hung on the wall.

She couldn’t go back there, ever.

Hans wouldn’t get anything hot to eat that day. She found flies’ eggs under the meat dish in the pantry.

A note from the medical committee exempted Aliide from having to do even light work for a year. After the year was over, the exemption could be renewed as the situation demanded.

Once she had the asthma papers, the air returned to Aliide’s lungs at full capacity; intoxicating oxygen and the aroma of peonies and fresh grass, even the faint scent of sauna chamomile, hummed in her breast. The shrill chirp of the little birds didn’t hurt her ears, and neither did the caw of the crows by the dung heap. She puttered around in the yard until she could see the stars and she remembered the way she had sometimes felt years before, remembered what lightness felt like. If only she could always feel that way. Pelmi sat with his dish by the barn door, waiting for the dregs of the milk and the froth. The weather was improving. Pelmi’s milk always went sour in bad weather.

As the 1986 May Day parade approached, Aliide was sure that Martin’s leg wouldn’t withstand such doings, but Martin disagreed and took part in the festival enthusiastically— with Aliide on his arm. Lenin fluttered handsomely against the red fabric, his gaze toward the future, and Martin had the same steadfast, forward-looking expression. A fine mood floated among the flags and the people, and the air was heavy with blossoms and beating drums.

Talvi called from Finland the next day.

“Mom, stay in the house.”

“What? Why? What’s happened?”

“Do you have any iodine?”

“No.”

“A nuclear reactor exploded in Ukraine.”

“No, it didn’t.”

“Yes, it did. There are high radiation readings in Finland and Sweden. Chernobyl. Of course they haven’t told you anything about it there.”

“No.”

“Keep Dad inside and get some iodine. Don’t tell him