Lauren Chater - Lace Weaver

She took the soup pot off the stove, sliding it onto the rough-hewn table that bore the scars of the childhood I shared with my older brother Jakob, who now lived ten miles away at the university dormitories in Tartu. Here was the deep groove where my sewing scissors had slipped. Here were the runes where my pencil had worn through my exercise books and left an impression upon the grain. I ran my finger along a chip in the timber. Literature and history. Subjects for which I would drag myself across snowy fields and the bog marshes to our little parish school, eager to learn more while Jakob dawdled behind, carving symbols into the trees with his knife. That was before everything changed. Before Grandmother passed, before the Russians marched in to seize the lands, before Oskar disappeared. Before Papa put me in charge of minding the sheep, and my dreams of studying stories and folklore at the university were extinguished.

I heard Papa’s voice, as clear as if he had spoken, although his pipe was clamped between his lips now and he was staring silently at the soup my mother had set before him. The words I remembered were an exchange between my parents from years ago, overheard one night as I sat up late reading.

‘You cannot allow them both to continue their schooling, Erich,’ my mother said. ‘We can’t manage the farm alone.’

The bed squeaked as Papa turned over. ‘There’ll be workers in June to help.’

A pause. I imagined my mother frowning.

‘One of them may go and one of them may stay to help,’ he said. ‘We can only afford to send one to the university anyway.’

How naïve I had been to think that one would be me.

The oak table was warm beneath my hand, as if it too could remember a time when life seemed full of potential. I slid into my chair and took a quick slurp of broth, forgetting to cool it first. The spoon clattered to the table as tears stung my eyes. Mama clucked under her tongue and thrust a cup of water before me. I gulped at the cool liquid until the burning in my throat eased.

Mama shook her head. ‘Really, Kati. You are nineteen. This daydreaming has to stop.’

She glanced across at my father, who slurped at his soup but did not look up.

‘Erich?’ my mother prompted. ‘Don’t you agree?’

‘Perhaps,’ he said. He set down his spoon. ‘Or perhaps it was Kati’s polite way of saying that the broth is not very good.’

Mama looked from me to Papa, lost for words. He picked up his spoon again and took a long, lazy slurp.

Finally, she said, ‘Well, it would not be so bad, Erich, if I had something other than old chicken bones and rancid turnips to cook with.’

Papa glanced at me and wiggled his thick eyebrows. Suddenly, the whole situation seemed humorous.

‘I so happen to like turnips,’ he said. ‘But this tastes less like fresh turnips. More like water into which a turnip has been dangled and then snatched away.’

Mama’s shoulders relaxed. She smoothed back her hair and adjusted the shawl around her neck which had slipped a little as she moved about serving the food. The snowy white lace made even her threadbare dress, with its faded pattern of roses, seem almost elegant. Although she was thinner than last year, she was still beautiful with high cheekbones and an elegant nose which both Jakob and I had not inherited. We both had the Rebane nose; short and wide, with a sloped tip.

‘You are welcome to suggest something better, Erich,’ Mama said, her pointed chin lifted.

‘Perhaps tomorrow we could have turnip pie,’ he said, the corners of his mouth creasing. ‘And with it, a turnip salad?’

‘And… turnip ice cream,’ I supplied, my heart lifting.

‘Well,’ my mother conceded, ‘I could do better than turnip soup, if you would only allow me to buy a few of those black-market potatoes.’

‘Oh yes!’ I said, stirring my spoon round and round through the weak soup, allowing myself to dream, along with my mother. ‘Those fat, creamy potatoes… or thick, buttery carrots.’

It was the wrong thing to say.

Papa snatched up his spoon again, gripping it in his fist. ‘Put it out of your mind, both of you. I’ve told you; those items are banned. Do you want to go to prison? We can’t afford to be arrested.’

Arrested.

The word hung between us.

Below, the ewes bleated, the sound drifting up through the floorboards like laughter. Papa sipped his soup, but his smile was gone.

If Jakob were here, I thought, he would know what to do. He would tell a joke, a slightly inappropriate one that would make my mother exclaim, Jakob! and would make Papa’s lips curve in a secret, knowing smile. But I am not Jakob. I am Katarina, a girl considered not worth sending to the university to further her studies, a girl who must endure day after day of the same monotonous tasks, shackled to the responsibility of keeping a flock of guileless sheep safe from harm. A girl whose only pleasure comes from knitting and from remembering the stories her grandmother left behind.

Perhaps even Jakob could not make light of the way the Russians terrorised those of us who remained behind when the occupation started. There was nothing funny about the way our leaders had been arrested and parliament dissolved, or the seizing of radio stations so that the Russian occupiers could assure us all our government had been the enemy. There was nothing playful about the way their soldiers commandeered vehicles and houses, throwing Estonians and their children out of their homes and deporting anyone they suspected of holding ‘capitalist sympathies’. My grandmother would have wept to see Tartu now; all the lively cafes gone and Estonian businesses boarded up. Patrols of young Russian soldiers roaming the streets in packs, looking for any excuse to refer people to the NKVD Secret Police at the Grey House on Põder Street, the place where one could be tried and shot before their family even noticed they were gone.

This was the reality of our lives now. Everywhere I went and every action which took place outside the privacy of home was accompanied by an undercurrent of fear. Each stranger I spoke to could report me as a spy. Each knock at the door could be an agent with a warrant to search our house. There were no safe places left except the arms of my family and my private thoughts. There was no way of resisting except to stay alive and to fulfil the promise I had made my grandmother; to maintain our culture through the knitting circle, to keep sharing our stories and continue the tradition of making shawls.

I sighed and drained the last of my soup, stomach still tight with hunger, then I stood to help Mama clear away the things.

Papa shifted in his seat. He cleared his throat.

‘Katarina… I need to speak to you.’

I froze, the empty soup bowl suddenly heavy in my hand. ‘It’s not…’ I could not make my lips form my brother’s name.

‘No,’ my father said quickly. ‘Jakob is safe.’

Relief was instant. Demonstrations. Deportation. Death. It was hard not to let my mind wander to the worst, especially with Jakob staying away for months on end, avoiding trips home, spending all his time in the dorms with his friends. Mama had threatened to go to town herself but Papa dissuaded her.

‘Then who?’ I continued.

In my mind, I was flicking through the faces of the people I knew. Which one of them had been punished this time, or worse, had vanished without warning? Not Aunt Juudit, I prayed, thinking of her wide-set green eyes, so like Papa’s and my own. Not gentle Etti, her husband taken and killed at the hands of the Soviets while she remained, big with child, unable to push herself off the lounge unassisted. How could she run?

Papa, watching me, summoned up a weary smile. ‘Nobody has been hurt, Kati. Yet.’