Sofi Oksanen - Purge

After the first rocks came the songs. Rocks and songs. Or just rocks, or just songs. Then Hiisu was gone, then the chickens, and the sauna. The sleepless nights marched in a row past Aliide’s bed; the tired, stiff-necked days held out longer. The peace that had come in the last few decades was torn up into a pile of rug strips in a moment, and the mountain of rags had to be sorted through again, endured again. It’s time to straighten our backs again and throw off our own slavery… The song came whispering through her window, into her bedroom. She lay in her bed and didn’t move. Her back was straight, unyielding on top of the straw. She stared at the wall-hanging, didn’t turn her head toward the window or pull the curtains closed. Let them holler, let them do what they liked, let the snot-nosed brats sing their hearts out, let them dance on her roof if they wanted, the tanks would be here soon enough and take out the little smart alecks.

The land, the fatherland, this land is sacred, where now we can be free. The song, our victory song, let it ring out, and soon a free Estonia we shall see!

Some years ago-was it 1988?-a crowd of young people had made its way through the village singing “ Estonian, be proud and good, like your grandfathers before you, you’ll be free .” The voice of a boy in puberty had crowed, “ Estonian I am and Estonian I’ll stay, for Estonian is what I was made to be, ” and the others had laughed, and a long-haired boy had tossed his head proudly. Aliide was just coming out of the store, she could still hear the clack of the abacus beads, the door hinges creaking like a growling stomach, and she had just stopped to tie her scarf on tighter, putting her bag of bread down on the ground. When she heard the first lines of the song, she withdrew back into a corner of the shop, let them pass by, and looked after them. She had felt such a powerful irritation that she had forgotten the bread and left it sitting in the corner of the shop, and hadn’t noticed until she was halfway home. How dare they? How could they be so insolent? What in the world were they thinking? Or was it just envy that made her scowl and tremble, her heart pounding?

The voice outside the window was young, a little like her brother-in-law Hans’s voice used to sound back in the days of the Estonian Republic, when she had first met him. Before his songs were all sung. Before his spritely, straight, twometer frame was bent, when his bones hadn’t been made to fold-but they would be, his chubby cheeks would become sunken and his beautiful singing silenced. Let the snot-nosed brats sing! She was happy to listen. And think about Hans, beautiful Hans. She smiled in the darkness. Hans had been in a choir, too. Oh, how beautifully he had sung! When he worked in the fields in the summer days, on his way home his song would come ahead of him and make the silver willows along the road ring with sheer joy and the trunks of the apple trees hum in rhythm. Her sister, Ingel, had been terribly proud of her husband! And she was also proud that Hans had been chosen to do his service in the parliamentary guard. Only good athletes and fairly tall men were accepted into it. And Hans had been beaming with pride-an ordinary country boy, chosen to defend the Riigikogu!

Martin’s old friend Voldemar came to visit several months after independence was declared. Hiisu started to bark well before he arrived. Aliide went out to the yard, Hiisu ran to the road, and between the gray fence posts she could see a man, just as gray and thin, leading his bicycle toward her house. Stolen gold from long ago gleamed in his sunken mouth. Wrinkles had pulled his cheeks inside his skull, as if his face were drawn closed with a string. Volli had always been in the front, always wanted to be first in everything. She well remembered him barging to the front of some kind of line with his big belly and sturdy jaw, puffing out his veteran’s chest. Anger had welled up in the hollow eyes of the people who had been in line since the wee hours of the morning, and it reached for Volli’s feet. It never caught up with his boots, even though the line was very long, because his legs weren’t weak then, they were strong and fat, and in a moment he had stepped over the threshold of one shop or another and left a wake of thick anger behind him. After he and his companions left, nothing but scraps remained on the counter. The times when Aliide happened to be standing in line when Volli cut to the front, she would disappear into her own mass so he wouldn’t notice her and say hello, so no one in the line would know that she knew the man. She didn’t want the hollow eyes of the people in line to turn and look in her direction; if he said hello to her she would have been thrust out of the line, she would have gotten an elbow in the side-but they never could have hit Volli’s well-fed sides.

Now Aliide greeted him cheerfully and offered him some coffee substitute, and they chatted about this and that. Then he said that he might have to go to court.

Her alarm was so bright that she couldn’t see for a moment.

“They’ve made up all kinds of lies about me,” he said. “It may be that they’ll even want to ask you some questions, Aliide.”

He was serious. It should have all been over and done with. Why were they coming to harass old people?

“We were all just following orders. We were good people. And now all of a sudden we’re bad. I don’t understand that.” He hung his head and started to berate Yeltsin and the young ingrates and their well-constructed nation. “Now you have to scrape for everything, and that’s supposed to be a good thing, huh?”

Aliide shut her ears to his complaining. Something to be arranged again, new plans to make-always something new, even though she didn’t have it in her, not anymore.

Volli got ready to leave. Aliide studied him. His hands were shaking, he had to hold his coffee cup in both hands, and she saw fear in those hands-not in his ashen expression, not in his crumpled face, only in his hands. Or maybe behind his mouth, too, the corners of his mouth that he was wiping with a handkerchief all the time, dabbing at them with his bony, trembling fingers. It made her shudder. He was weak now, and it filled her with vexation and a desire to kick him, wallop his back and sides with a stick-or maybe with a sandbag-till there was nothing left of him. Till his guts were like soup. That would be a method familiar to Volli. Just like an old girlfriend-kiss this! A vision flashed in her mind: Volli doddering and trembling on the ground, shielding his head, whimpering and begging for mercy. What a delicious sight. A wet splotch would spread in his pants and the sandbag would fly up again and again and hammer his hateful, weak body thoroughly, bruising his watery eyes, splintering his porous bones. But the best part would be that splotch in his pants and the howl, like an animal howl, before he died.

The vision made her breathless, and she sighed. Volli sighed, too, and said, “This is what we’ve come to.”

She promised to come and testify on his behalf if he ended up in court. Although of course she wouldn’t.

She closed the gate behind him as he pedaled off, glancing after him.

Others would come after Volli to discuss the same thing. There was no doubt about it. They thought of her as an ally, and they would insist on taking her with them. She could almost already hear how she ought to make a statement, talk to the papers, since she had always been good at talking, and women are always more likely to be believed in these situations-that’s what they would say, and they would drag the memory of Martin into it and say that Aliide had been part of building this country, and their reputations would be dragged through the mud so shamefully, and so would the memory of all the soldiers and veterans who came before us! There was no telling whose memory and reputation they would drag into it, and then they would rant about how the Soviet Union would never have allowed the heroes of the fatherland to end up using macaroni coupons.