Sofi Oksanen - Purge

The door to the kitchen where the pigs’ ears were cooking was closed, but the radio was loud enough that she could hear it. It was a program about how the radio tower in Warsaw collapsed a year ago. The largest structure ever built, it had been 629 meters tall. Zara jumped out of bed. Her heart was pounding. “Aliide?”

Zara looked out the window, expecting to see a black Volga or BMW. But there wasn’t anything unusual in the yard. She strained to hear anything out of the ordinary, but all she could hear was the rush of her own blood, the radio, the ticking of the clock, and the creak of the floor as she crept toward the kitchen door. Would Pasha and Lavrenti be sitting there calmly, drinking tea? Would they be waiting for her? Wouldn’t it be just like them to let her wake up peacefully and come into the kitchen, suspecting nothing? Wouldn’t that be the most diabolical plan, and thus the most desirable, in their minds? They would be leaning against a corner of the table, smug, smoking a cigarette and thumbing through the paper. And they would smile when Zara came into the kitchen. They would have forced Aliide to keep quiet and sit between them, the old woman’s watery eyes wide with terror. Actually, it was hard to imagine such an expression on Aliide’s face.

Zara pushed against the tightly closed door. It complained loudly as it opened. The kitchen was empty. There was no trace of Pasha and Lavrenti. On the table were Aliide’s recipe book, an open newspaper, and a few krooni in bills. The pigs’ ears were boiling under a cloud of steam. The floor was wet in front of the washbasin. The basin was empty, as was the bathtub, and the slop buckets were full to the brim. Aliide was nowhere to be seen. The outer door swung open and Zara stood staring at it. Was it them?

Aliide stepped inside.

“Good morning, Zara. I guess you needed some sleep.” She set a bucket of water on the floor.

“What’s this? What have you done to your hair?” Zara sat down at the table and rubbed her head. Scratchy stubble, a breeze on her neck.

The scissors were lying next to the sugar bowl. She grabbed them and started to cut her nails. Ragged halfmoons specked with red dropped onto the oilcloth.

“We certainly could have thought of a way to dye your hair. Rhubarb would have turned it red.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Just leave those fingernails be. I have a file here somewhere. We can take care of them properly.”

“No.”

“Zara, your husband doesn’t know to look here. Why would he? You could be anywhere. Have some coffee and calm down. I ground up some real coffee beans this morning.”

She filled Zara’s cup from the percolator and went to lift the pigs’ ears out of the pot with a slotted spoon, glancing at Zara now and then as she wielded the scissors. When she finished her manicure, Zara started to stir the sugar spoon through the large, yellowish crystals. Her fingertips felt naked and clean. The damp whisper of the sugar mixed soothingly with the hum of the refrigerator. Should she try to look as calm as possible? Or should she tell Aliide what kind of a man Pasha really was? Which would make Aliide most likely to help? Or should she try to forget about Pasha for a while and concentrate on Aliide? She should at least try to think clearly.

“They always find you.”

“They?”

“My husband, I mean.”

“This probably isn’t the first time you’ve run away.”

Zara’s spoon came to a stop in the sugar.

“You don’t have to answer.”

Aliide brought a bowl of pigs’ ears to the table.

“I must say that you’re in pretty bad shape to be a decoy.”

“A what?”

“Don’t play dumb, young lady. A decoy. The pretty young thing who’s sent to find out if there’s anything of value on the premises. Usually they make them lie down in the middle of the road, pretending to be injured, so that cars will stop and then-whoops!-there goes the car. Actually, you should have waited to come until after my daughter has been here.”

Aliide stopped talking and started to fill up their plates, still glancing at Zara nonchalantly now and then. She was obviously waiting for Zara to say something. Was there a snare hidden in what Aliide had said? Zara mulled over the words, but there didn’t seem to be anything unusual in them. So she asked an easy question.

“Why is that?”

Aliide didn’t answer right away. Apparently she had expected Zara to say something else.

“There’ll be plenty of visitors from the village here then, everybody wanting to see what Talvi brought me. But I’ll hide most of it in the milk cans. I’ll just leave out a couple of packages of coffee. Not that there would be anything in those cans right now. They’re empty, just a little macaroni and flour. They’re waiting for my daughter to come and visit. She’s coming to spoil her old mother.”

Zara continued to stir around in the sugar bowl with the spoon, which had become an amorphous glob of clinging sugar, and tried to figure out what Aliide was driving at.

“I’ve asked her to bring me all kinds of things,” she said.

All of a sudden it hit Zara. A car! Was Aliide’s daughter coming in a car?

“She’s coming in her own car. And she promised to bring me a new television to replace that old Rekord. What do you think of that? It’s amazing how you can bring electronics over the border nowadays, just like that.”

Zara scooped up a pig’s ear. Her knife clinked against her plate and her fork slowly pierced the ear. She kept missing, her fork was clattering, and she gripped the cutlery tightly in her fingers. She knew she should loosen her grip or Aliide would know that she was trying to keep her hands from trembling. She shouldn’t look too eager, she had to eat her pig’s ear and talk at the same time-chewing it made her voice more level. She asked where Talvi was going when she left here-was she driving straight to Tallinn? Even if Zara could get to the nearest town, though-what town was it, anyway?-she couldn’t take the bus or the train, because Pasha would know about it immediately, and so would the militia. Aliide pointed out that they were called police nowadays, but Zara continued-surely Aliide could understand that she had to get to Tallinn in secret. If anyone saw her, her trip would be cut off right then and there.

“I just need a ride to Tallinn, nothing more.”

Aliide’s brow wrinkled. It was a bad sign, but Zara couldn’t stop herself now, her voice speeded up and her words faltered, she skipped words, went back to pick up the ones she had forgotten. Imagine, a car! Talvi had a car. It could solve all of her problems. When was she coming?

“Soon.”

“How soon?”

“Maybe in the next couple of days.”

If Pasha didn’t get there first, she could escape to Tallinn with Talvi’s help. She shouldn’t think about what would happen then, how she would get from Tallinn to Finland. Maybe she could try to hide in a truck at the harbor or something. How did Pasha arrange to get people over the border? They open the trunks of cars at the border, she knew that. It would have to be a truck, a Finnish truck. Finns could always get through more easily. There was no way for her to get a passport unless she stole one from some Finnish woman, someone her age. Too tricky-she couldn’t manage something like that by herself. First get to Tallinn. She had to get Aliide on her side now. But how? How could she manage to bluff away the wrinkles in Aliide’s brow? She should calm down, forget about Talvi and her car for a little while and not make Aliide any more nervous with her overeagerness. Possibilities steamed in and out of her head, she couldn’t tame them, not enough to think things through. Her temples were throbbing. She should breathe deeply, act trustworthy. Like the kind of girl that older people like. She should try to be sweet and polite and well behaved and helpful, but she had a whore’s face and a whore’s gestures, although cutting her hair had surely helped to some extent. Fuck it-it was no use.