Sofi Oksanen - Purge

The girl couldn’t stay focused on anything else, not when she was imagining her husband lurking in the yard, stalking her. She had to be alert like that, keep her eyes and ears open at all times. Aliide put down her coffee cup and placed her fingers on either side of it. She fell to examining the soil-darkened cracks in her hands, much deeper than the old knife cuts that striped the oilcloth, made more visible by the bread crumbs and salt that had spilled on the table.

“What’s that noise?”

“I didn’t hear anything.”

The girl didn’t pay any attention to Aliide’s answer.

Instead she tiptoed up to the window. She had pulled the scarf down onto her neck so that she could hear better. Her back was stiff and her shoulders raised.

Aliide’s cup had no handle, just a rough stump where the handle had been. She started to tap on it with her thumb. The threads of soil in her cracked skin bounced against the porcelain. Those boys sure knew how to choose their timing. On the other hand, the girl surely couldn’t be thinking that it was anyone but her own businessman, or whatever you want to call him, up to something out there. Aliide became annoyed again. The Russians liked their fine clothes and handsome hotels, but when it came time to pay, they started bellyaching. Everybody has a price. Protection isn’t cheap. She felt the urge again to give the girl a good swat. If you’re going to tremble, tremble in private, where no one will see you.

“There are a lot of animals around here. Wild boars. If you leave the gate open, they even come right into the yard.”

The girl turned to look at Aliide with disbelief. “But I told you about my husband!”

Another rock hit the window. A little shower of rocks.

The girl opened the kitchen door and crept to the foyer to listen. Just as she put her ear to the chink in the outer door, something hit it so that it shook. She jumped backward and went back into the kitchen.

The girl ought to focus on something else. When she was younger, Aliide always had a bag of tricks for one situation or another, but now her mind refused to come up with anything better than wild boars.

She washed her hands thoroughly and started to change the milk in the kefir, tried to act natural, picked up the can from the floor, opened the lid, strained the liquid into a cup, and rinsed off the culture, trying again with wild boars, stray dogs and cats, although even she thought her explanations sounded stupid. The girl paid no attention; she just whispered that she had to leave now, her husband had found what belonged to him, lured his prey into his trap. Aliide could see how she curled up in a ball like an old dog, the corners of her mouth stiffened, the little hairs laid flat against her skin, crossing her right foot over her left as if she were cold. Aliide quietly poured more milk over the culture and offered a glass of kefir to the girl.

“Drink it, it’ll do you good.”

She stared at the glass without taking it. A fly was crawling on its rim. The corner of her eye twitched, and the movement of her ears, sticking out toward the window, could be easily distinguished against her hairless head.

“I have to go,” she breathed. “So they won’t do anything bad to you.”

Aliide lifted the glass to her lips slowly and took a long drink of it, tried to drink the whole glassful but couldn’t. Her throat wasn’t working. She put the glass down on the table. A spider crawled under the table and disappeared between the floorboards. Aliide was fairly certain that the girl was wrong, but how could she explain that the boys from the village were there to make a ruckus in her yard. She would want to know why and how and when and who knows what, and Aliide had no intention of explaining anything about it to a stranger. She didn’t even talk about it with people she knew.

But the girl was so clearly terrified that suddenly Aliide was, too. Good God, how her body remembered that feeling, remembered it so well that she caught the feeling as soon as she saw it in a stranger’s eyes. And what if the girl was right? What if there was good reason to fear what she feared? What if that was her husband? Aliide’s ability to fear was something that should have belonged to the past. She had left it behind her and hadn’t built it up again from the rock throwers at all. But now, when an unknown girl was in her kitchen spreading the fear from her bare skin onto Aliide’s oilcloth, she couldn’t brush it away like she ought to have done. Instead it seeped in between the wallpaper and the old wallpaper paste, into the gaps left behind by the photographs that she had hidden there and later destroyed. The fear settled in as though it felt at home. As though it would never go away. As though it had just been out somewhere for a while and had come home for the evening.

The girl rubbed her stubble, tied the scarf tightly around her head, ladled a mugful of water from the pail, and rinsed out her mouth, spit the water into the lard bucket, glanced at her reflection in the glass door of the cupboard, and went to the door. She had pulled her shoulders back and lifted her head as if she were on her way to a battle or were standing in a row of Young Pioneers. The corner of her eye twitched. Ready. She was ready. She pushed the door open and stepped onto the porch.

Silence spread dark around her. The night was thickening. She took a few steps and stopped to stand in the yellow light of the lamp in the yard. Crickets were chirping, the neighbors’ dogs barked. The air was fragrant with autumn. The white trunks of the birches shone dimly through the dark. The gates were closed. She could see the peaceful fields through the chain-link fence, its mesh like tired eyes.

She inhaled so deeply that she felt a stab in her lungs like ice on a tooth. She had been wrong. The relief took her legs out from under her and she fell onto the steps with a thud.

No Pasha, no Lavrenti, no black car.

She turned her face toward the sky. That must be the Big Dipper. The same Big Dipper that you could see over Vladivostok, although this one looked different. Grandmother had looked at the Big Dipper from this same garden when she was young, the Big Dipper that looks like that one. Her grandmother-she had stood in the same place, in front of this same house, on the same stepping-stones. The same birches had been in front of her, and the wind on her cheeks had been the same, and it had moved through those same apple trees. Grandmother had sat in the same kitchen that she had just been sitting in, woke up in the same room that she woke up in this morning, drunk water from the same well, stepped out of the same door. Grandmother’s steps had weighed on the soil of this garden, she had left from this yard to go to church, and her cow had rammed its stall in that barn. The grass that tickled Zara’s foot was her grandmother’s touch, and the wind in the apple trees was her grandmother’s whisper, and Zara felt like she was looking at the Big Dipper through her grandmother’s eyes, and when she turned her face back up toward the sky, she felt like her grandmother’s young body stood inside hers, and it ordered her to go back inside, to search for a story that she hadn’t been told.

Zara felt in her pocket. The photograph was still there.

The moment the girl stepped outside, Aliide slammed the door shut behind her and locked it. She went to sit in her own place at the kitchen table and eased open the drawer that was hidden under the oilcloth, so that if she needed to she could quickly whip out the pistol she had kept in the drawer since Martin had made her a widow. The yard was silent. Maybe the girl had gone on her way. Aliide waited a minute, two minutes. Five. The clock ticked, the fire roared, the walls creaked, the refrigerator hummed, outside the damp air ate at the thatched roof, a mouse rustled in the corner. Time unwound ten minutes further, and then there was a knock and a call at the door. It was the girl, asking her to open the door and saying that there was no one else there, just her. Aliide didn’t move. How did she know the girl was telling the truth? Maybe her husband was lurking behind her. Maybe he had somehow been able to make things clear to her without making any noise.