Purge (5 page)

“There’s plantain essence on the table. It’s good for your skin.”

The girl didn’t make a move, she just asked for a cigarette. Aliide pointed her cane at the Priimas on the radio cabinet and asked the girl to light her one, too. When she’d gotten both of them lit, she went back to her fingernails. The drops of water from her hair were collecting in a puddle.

“Sit on the sofa, dear.”

“It’ll get wet.”

“No, it won’t.”

The girl flopped into a corner of the sofa and hung her head so that the water would drip onto the floor. Rüütel was talking about the elections on the radio—Aliide changed the station. Aino had said she was going to vote, but Aliide wasn’t going to.

“You probably don’t have any hair dye, do you?”

Aliide shook her head.

“What about paint or ink? Stamp ink?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Carbon paper?”

“No.”

“What should I do, then?”

“Do you think you could disguise yourself that easily?”

The girl didn’t answer; she just brooded.

“How about if I get you a clean nightgown and we have a little supper?”

Aliide stubbed out her Priima in the ashtray, dug a pink flowered nightgown out of the dresser, and left it for the girl to put on. She could hear bottles clinking together in the kitchen. So the plantain essence had passed muster. Darkness pressed against the windows behind the curtains, and Aliide checked several times to see if any of them were left open. They weren’t. There was just a bit of a draft along the bottom of the sash. She could carry out the bathwater tomorrow. The scratch of a mouse in the corner startled her, but her hand was steady as she started marking dates on the relish jars. There was newspaper stuck to the sides of some of the jars, which, put together, read,
18 percent of this year’s crimes have been solved.
Aliide drew a check mark on it to indicate the worst of the batch. News of Tallinn’s first sex shop was marked as the best of the lot. The pen was running out of ink—Aliide rubbed it against the paper.
For the first few days there was a problem with little boys who kept barging into the shop like swarms of flies, and had to be kept away from the place.
The paper disintegrated—Aliide gave up and took the ink cartridge out of the pen and put it in the jar with the other empties. The dates were written in a shaky hand. She’d have to finish them later. It was not terribly difficult to move the full jars over to the counter, but the pounding in her chest wouldn’t stop. She had to be rid of the girl by tomorrow. Aino would be coming to bring milk and they were supposed to go to church to get the care package and Aliide didn’t want to leave the girl in the house alone. Plus, if Aino saw the girl, there would be no way to stop the news from spreading to the village. Assuming that the girl’s husband did exist, he sounded like the kind of visitor Aliide didn’t want in her house.

She noticed a piece of sausage that she’d bought on her last shopping trip lying on the kitchen table, and remembered the fly. The sausage had gone bad. The fly had flown out of Aliide’s mind as soon as she found the girl in the yard. She was stupid. And old. She couldn’t keep her eye on several things at once. She was already whisking away the sausage but changed her mind and looked more closely at it. Usually flies are so tired out by laying eggs that they just collapse in a daze right where they are. She didn’t see any flies or any eggs, but when she picked up the paper wrapper of the sausage, there was one chubby little wiggling individual there. Aliide tasted vomit in her mouth. She grabbed the sausage and started slicing it onto the girl’s sandwich. Her fingers were tingling.

The girl got dressed and came into the kitchen. She looked even younger in the flannel nightgown.

“The thing I don’t understand is how is it that a girl like you knows Estonian?”

“What’s so strange about that?”

“You’re not from around here. You’re not from anywhere in Estonia.”

“No, I’m from Vladivostok.”

“And now you’re here.”

“Yeah.”

“Rather intriguing.”

“Is it?”

“Indeed it is, for an old person like me. I never heard that they had schools in Vladivostok now where they teach Estonian. Times sure have changed.”

Zara realized she was rubbing her earlobes again. She put her hands back in her lap and then set them on the table next to the bowl of tomatoes. The biggest tomato was the size of two fists, the smallest the size of a teaspoon, all of them swollen and overripe, split and dripping juice. Aliide’s behavior fluctuated, and Zara couldn’t tell where her words and actions would lead next. Aliide sat down, got up, washed her hands, sat down, bustled around, washed her hands again in the same water, dried them, examined the jars and the recipe book, cut and peeled tomatoes, washed her hands —ceaseless activity that was impossible to interpret. Now every word she said felt half-accusing, and as she set the table the clink of every knife and the clatter of every dish rang mockingly. Each sound made Zara flinch. She had to think of what to say, to behave like a good girl, a trustworthy girl.

“My husband taught me.”

“Your husband?”

“Yes. He’s from Estonia.”

“Ah!”

“From Tallinn.”

“And now you want to go there? So he’ll be sure to find you?”

“No!”

“Why, then?”

“I have to get away from here.”

“I’m sure you can get to Russia. Through Valga. Or Narva.”

“I can’t go there! I have to get to Tallinn and over the border. My husband has my passport.”

Aliide bent over her bottle of heart medicine. The smell of garlic wafted to meet her. She took a spoonful of the stiff tonic honey and carried the bottle back to the refrigerator. She should make some more of it, maybe a little stronger, put more garlic in it—she felt so weak. The scissors felt heavy in her hand as she snipped some onion tops into the potatoes. Her teeth felt too weak even for bread. The girl had a ponderous gaze. Aliide picked up a sour pickle, cut off the end, sliced it up, and started popping the slices into her mouth. The juice lubricated her throat and her voice, made it supple, in control.

“Your husband must be a special kind of man.” “Yes, he is.”

“’Cause I’ve never heard of an Estonian man who would go to Vladivostok to get a wife and then teach her Estonian.

The world has certainly changed!”

“Pasha is Russian Estonian.”

“Pasha? Well, even so. I never heard of a Russian Estonian man who would go to Vladivostok to get a wife and then teach her Estonian. Is that what happened? Because normally what happens is that Russian Estonians speak Russian, and their wives start spitting out Russian just like they do. Sunflower seeds just flying out with every word.” “Pasha is a special kind of man.”

“Well, of course! And aren’t you a lucky girl! Why did he go to Vladivostok to find a wife?”

“He had a job there.”

“A job?”

“Yes, a job!”

“’Cause normally they come here from Russia to work, not the other way around. So it was a question of work, was it?”

“Pasha is a special kind of man.”

“A real prince, from the sound of it! And he even took you to Canada on vacation.”

“Actually, we got to know each other better in Canada. I had gone there to work as a waitress, like I said before, and then I ran into a man that I knew—Pasha.”

“And then you got married, and he said that you didn’t have to work as a waitress anymore.”

“Something like that.”

“You could write a novel about your wonderful story.”

“Could I?”

“Pampering, vacations, cars. A lot of girls would stick around if they had a man like that.”

Zara hid the things Oksanka had given her in the suitcase she had stored in the wardrobe, because she didn’t know what her mother would think of the whole thing. She wasn’t worried about her grandmother; she knew she wouldn’t tell her mother about what Oksanka had said. But Zara would have to mention Oksanka’s visit, because the women in the apartment commune would gossip about it in any case. They would want to know what gifts she had brought, and she’d have to give each of them a swallow of gin. Her mother would probably be happy about the gifts, too, but would she be happy about Zara getting a job in Germany? Would it help if Zara could tell her how many dollars she would be able to send home? If it were a whole lot of dollars? She would have to ask Oksanka tomorrow about how large a sum she should venture to promise. Maybe she should clear up some other things, too. Would she be able to save enough to live on for five years, so that she could go to college and graduate? Would she be able to save some money to send home, too? Or what if she just worked there for a little while, maybe half a year—would she manage to save enough in that amount of time?

Zara put the stockings from Oksanka in the suitcase. If her mother saw them, she would sell them immediately, say that Zara didn’t need them.

Grandmother stopped looking at the sky for a moment. “What’s in there?”

Zara showed her the package. It was like a transparent plastic envelope with a shining, multicolored printed picture inside of a white-toothed woman and a long pair of legs. There was a little window in the package that you could see the stockings through. Grandmother turned the package over in her hands. Zara was opening it to show her the stockings, but Grandmother stopped her. No point in that. She would only spoil them with her rough hands. Was it even possible to darn such fine stockings?

“Just stash them away,” Grandmother said, adding that silk stockings had been hard currency when she was young.

Zara went back to the wardrobe and decided to put the stockings and the other things at the very bottom of the suitcase. She dragged the case out onto the floor and started to unpack it. They always had suitcases packed and ready in the wardrobe. One for her mother, one for her grandmother, one for Zara. They said it was in case of fire. Grandmother packed and checked them at night sometimes, clattering around so much that Zara woke up. When Zara was growing up, Grandmother had always replaced the clothes in the suitcase when she outgrew them. That’s where all their important papers were, too, and the jacket with the money hidden in the collar, and the medicines that they replaced at regular intervals. Plus needles, thread, buttons, and safety pins. In Grandmother’s suitcase, there was also a shabby gray quilted coat. Its padding was almost petrified, and the stitches that ran up and down it were as uniform as barbed wire, a peculiar contrast to the ungainliness of the coat.

As a child, Zara had always imagined that Grandmother couldn’t see anything but the sky glimmering outside the window—that she didn’t notice anything that was happening in the house—but once, when her suitcase accidentally fell off the shelf in the wardrobe and crashed onto the floor and the locks broke, she turned quickly, like a young girl, and her mouth had twisted open like the lid of a jar. The quilted coat, which Zara had never seen before, had ballooned to the floor. Grandmother had remained seated in her regular spot by the window, but her eyes had latched on to Zara, into Zara, and Zara didn’t understand why she felt embarrassed and why it was a different kind of embarrassment than when she stumbled or answered wrong at school.

“Put that away.”

When her mother came home, she had glued and tied the suitcase shut. She hadn’t been able to fix the locks. Zara was given the locks to play with and made earrings out of them for her doll. It was one of the most significant events of Zara’s childhood, although even later on she didn’t understand what had happened and why, but after that she and her grandmother developed more of their own stories. Grandmother started to have Zara help her when she did the canning at harvest time. Her mother was at work and never had any time to water or weed their vegetable patch. Zara and Grandmother took care of it together, just the two of them, and Grandmother would tell her stories of that other country, in that other language. Zara had heard it for the first time when she woke up in the middle of the night and heard Grandmother talking to herself by the window. She woke her mother up and whispered that there was something wrong with Grandmother. Her mother threw off her blanket, shoved her feet into her slippers, and pushed Zara’s head back onto the pillow without saying anything. Zara obeyed. The sound of her mother talking was strange, and Grandmother answered with strange words. The suitcases were lying on the floor with their mouths open. Mother touched Grandmother’s hands and brow and gave her some water and Validol, and she took them without looking at her, which wasn’t unusual; Grandmother never looked at anyone, she always looked past them. Mother gathered up the suitcases, closed them in the wardrobe, and put her hand on Grandmother’s forehead. Then they sat there, staring out at the darkness.

The next day, Zara asked her mother what she had been saying and what language she had been speaking. Her mother tried to brush the question aside, puttering around with the tea and bread, but Zara was insistent. Then her mother told her that her grandmother was speaking Estonian, repeating the words to an Estonian song. She said Grandmother was getting a little bit senile. But she told Zara the name of the song: “Emasüda.” Zara impressed it upon her mind, and when her mother wasn’t home, she went to her grandmother and said the name. Grandmother looked at her, looked straight at her for the first time, and Zara felt her gaze press itself through her eyes and right into her—into her mouth, her throat—and she felt her throat tighten, and her grandmother’s gaze sank down her throat toward her heart, and her heart started to strain, and it sank from her heart to her stomach, and her stomach started to churn, and it sank to her legs, which started to tremble, and from her legs it sank into her feet, which started to tingle, and she felt hot, and Grandmother smiled. That smile became their first game, which sprouted word by word and started to blossom mistily, yellowish, the way dead languages blossom, rustling sweetly like the needle of a gramophone, playing like voices underwater. Quiet, whispering, they grew their own language. It was their shared secret, their game. As her mother did housework, her grandmother would sit in her usual chair, and Zara would take out toys and other things or just touch an object, and Grandmother would form its name in Estonian, silently, with her lips. If the word was wrong, Zara was supposed to notice it. If she didn’t know the word, she wouldn’t get any candy, but if she caught the mistake, she always got a mouthful of sweets. Her mother didn’t like it that Grandmother gave her candy for no reason—or so she thought—but she didn’t bother to intervene beyond a disapproving sniff. Zara could keep the delicious words, the sweet tongue, and those rare stories that Grandmother told about a café somewhere there, a café where they served rhubarb crumble with thick whipped cream, a café whose chocolate cream puffs would melt in your mouth and whose garden smelled of jasmine, and the rustle of German newspapers—but not just German; Estonian and Russian ones, too—and tie pins and cuff links, and women in fine hats, you could even see dandies in dark suits and tennis shoes, with clouds of magnesium blowing out of a house where they had just taken a photograph. The promenade along the shore at the Sunday concert. A sip of seltzer in the park. The Koluvere princess who haunted the streets at night. The raspberry jam on french bread in the warmth of the stove on a winter night, with cold milk to drink! And red currant nectar!