Sofi Oksanen: Purge

She scratched at her gold tooth, poked at the gap between her teeth with her fingernail-there was something stuck there-and listened, but all she heard was the scrape of her nail against bone, and suddenly she felt it, a shiver up her back. She stopped digging between her teeth and focused on the mound. The specks on the window annoyed her. She wiped at them with a gauze rag, threw the rag in the dishpan, took her coat from the rack and put it on, remembered her handbag on the table and snapped it up, looked around for a good place to hide it, and shoved it in the cupboard with the dishes. On top of the cupboard was a bottle of Finnish deodorant. She hid that away, too, and even put the lid on the sugar bowl, out of which peeped Imperial Leather soap. Only then did she turn the key silently in the lock of the inner door and push it open. She stopped in the entryway, picked up the juniper pitchfork handle that served as a walking stick, but exchanged it for a machine-made city stick, put that down, too, and chose a scythe from among the tools in the entryway. She leaned it against the wall for a moment, smoothed her hair, adjusted a hairpin, tucked her hair neatly behind her ears, took hold of the scythe again, moved the curtain away from the front of the door, turned the latch, and stepped outside.

The mound was lying in the same spot under the birch tree. Aliide moved closer, keeping her eye on the mound but also keeping an eye out for any others. It was a girl. Muddy, ragged, and bedraggled, but a girl nevertheless. A completely unknown girl. A flesh-and-blood person, not some omen of the future, sent from heaven. Her red-lacquered fingernails were in shreds. Her eye makeup had run down her cheeks and her curls were half straightened; there were little blobs of hairspray in them, and a few silver willow leaves stuck to them. Her hair was bleached until it was coarse, and had greasy, dark roots. But under the dirt her skin seemed overripe, her cheek white, transparent. Tatters of skin were torn from her dry lower lip, and between them the lip swelled tomato red, unnaturally bright and bloody-looking, making the grime look like a coating, something to be wiped off like the cold, waxy surface of an apple. Purple had collected in the folds of her eyelids, and her black, translucent stockings had runs in them. They didn’t bag at the knees-they were tight-knit, good stockings. Definitely Western. The knit shone in spite of the mud. One shoe had fallen off and lay on the ground. It was a bedroom slipper, worn at the heel, with a flannel lining rubbed to gray pills. The binding along the edge was decorated with dog-eared patent-leather rickrack and a pair of nickel rivets. Aliide had once had a pair just like them. The rickrack had been pink when it was new, and it looked sweet; the lining was soft and pink like the side of a new pig. It was a Soviet slipper. The dress? Western. The tricot was too good to come from over on the other side. You couldn’t get them anywhere but in the West. The last time her daughter Talvi had come back from Finland she had had one like it, with a broad belt. Talvi had said that it was in style, and she certainly knew about fashion. Aino got a similar one from the church care package, although it was no use to her- but after all, it was free. The Finns had enough clothes that they even threw new ones away into the collection bin. The package had also contained a Windbreaker and some T-shirts. Soon it would be time to pick up another one. But this girl’s dress was really too handsome to be from a care package. And she wasn’t from around here.

There was a flashlight next to her head. And a muddy map.

Her mouth was open, and as she leaned closer, Aliide could see her teeth. They were too white. The gaps between her white teeth formed a line of gray spots.

Her eyes twitched under their lids.

Aliide poked the girl with the end of the scythe, but there was no movement. Yoo-hoos didn’t get any flicker from the girl’s eyelids, neither did pinching. Aliide fetched some rainwater from the foot washbasin and sprinkled her with it. The girl curled up in a fetal position and covered her head with her hands. Her mouth opened in a yell, but only a whisper came out:

“No. No water. No more.”

Then her eyes blinked open and she sat bolt upright. Aliide moved away, just to be safe. The girl’s mouth was still open. She stared in Aliide’s direction, but her hysterical gaze didn’t seem to register her. It didn’t register anything. Aliide kept assuring her that everything was all right, in the soothing voice you use with restless animals. There was no comprehension in the girl’s eyes, but there was something familiar about her gaping mouth. The girl herself wasn’t familiar, but the way she behaved was, the way her expressions quivered under her waxlike skin, not reaching the surface, and the way her body was wary in spite of her vacant demeanor. She needed a doctor, that was clear. Aliide didn’t want to attempt to take care of her herself-a stranger, in such questionable circumstances-so she suggested they call a doctor.

“No!”

Her voice sounded certain, although her gaze was still unfocused. A pause followed the shriek, and a string of words ran together immediately after, saying that she hadn’t done anything, that there was no need to call anyone on her account. The words jostled one another, beginnings of words were tangled up with endings, and the accent was Russian.

The girl was Russian. An Estonian-speaking Russian.

Aliide stepped farther back.

She ought to get a new dog. Or two.

The freshly sharpened blade of the scythe shone, although the rain-dampened light was gray.

Sweat rose on Aliide’s upper lip.

The girl’s eyes started to focus, first on the ground, on one leaf of plantain weed, then another, slowly moving farther away to the rocks at the edge of the flower bed, to the pump, and the basin under the pump. Then her gaze moved back to her own lap, to her hands, stopped there, then slid up to the butt end of Aliide’s scythe, but didn’t go any higher, instead returning to her hands, the scratch marks on the backs of her hands, her shredded fingernails. She seemed to be examining her own limbs, perhaps counting them, arm and wrist and hand, all the fingers in place, then going through the same thing with the other hand, then her slipperless toes, her foot, ankle, lower leg, knee, thigh. Her gaze didn’t reach to her hips-it shifted suddenly to the other foot and slipper. She reached her hand toward the slipper, slowly picked it up, and put it on her foot. The slipper squooshed. She pulled her foot toward her with the slipper on it and slowly felt her ankle, not like a person who suspects that her ankle is sprained or broken, but like someone who can’t remember what shape her ankle normally is, or like a blind person feeling an unknown thing. She finally managed to get up, but still didn’t look Aliide in the face. When she got firmly to her feet, she touched her hair and brushed it toward her face, although it was wet and slimy-looking, pulling it in front of her like tattered curtains in an abandoned house where there was no life to be concealed.

Aliide tightened her grip on the scythe. Maybe the girl was crazy. Maybe she had escaped from somewhere. You never know. Maybe she was just confused, maybe something had happened that caused her to be like that. Or maybe it was that she was in fact a decoy for a Russian criminal gang.

The girl sat herself up on the bench under the birch tree. The wind washed the branches against her, but she didn’t try to avoid them, even though flapping leaves slapped against her face. “Move away from those branches.”

Surprise flickered across the girl’s cheeks. Surprise mixed with something else-she looked like she was remembering something. That you can get out of the way of leaves that are lashing at you? Aliide squinted. Crazy.