Sofi Oksanen - Purge

“How do you know what Hans thinks?”

“Hans can follow us later.”

“I’m not leaving my home to go anywhere. The wind will change soon, the West will come to help us. I’m sure we can bear it until then. You have so little faith, Liide.”

Ingel was right. They did bear it, the country bore it, and the liberators arrived. The Germans marched into the country, chased the smoke from the burning houses out of the sky, made it blue again, made the earth turn black, the clouds white. Hans was able to come home, and when that bad dream had ended, another one began. The Communists blanched, and since all other means of transport were halted, they escaped on foot, at a run, and Hans bridled the horse and went swaggering around taking back the Young Farmers 4-H banners, the Sower’s trophies, and the bookkeeping and other papers that had been kept in town after the Reds came and the organization was banned. He came back from town with a big grin. Everything was fine there; the Germans were polite; it was a wonderful feeling; people were playing harmonicas. The sweet brisk clacking of the women’s wooden shoes. They had established the ERÜ, too-the Mutual Aid Society-to feed and support the families whose providers had been mobilized by the Red Army. Everything was going to work out all right! Everybody would come home, Father and Mother, everybody who had disappeared, and grain would grow in the fields like before, and Ingel would win all the 4-H vegetable prizes again, they would go to the fair in the fall, and when the girls were a little older they could join the Farm Women’s League. When their father got home, Hans would plan the layout of the fields with him. Hans was already a part of the tobacco and sugar beet campaign, and when that was under way there would be plenty of sugar beet syrup, and Ingel wouldn’t have to pout about having to calm her sweet tooth with saccharine-and neither would Aliide, Hans hastened to add. Ingel let out a honeyed laugh and started creating recipes for Estonia’s best sugar beet-syrup ginger cake, and she and Hans fell into the same purring, murmuring mist they had been in before the nightmare began, and Aliide found herself back in the same torture of love. All obstacles crumbled before Ingel’s glorious future. Even the clothing shortage couldn’t wilt Ingel’s wardrobe-so what if she had to repair the elastic in her garters with a coin wrapped in paper! Hans brought his sweetheart parachute silk to make a blouse, and Ingel dyed it cornflower blue, sewed herself a smart-looking shirt with it, decorated with glass buttons, put on her German glass brooch, and was prettier than ever. Hans brought Aliide a similar pin, slightly smaller, but still lovely, and for a moment Aliide’s tormented mood lightened-he had remembered her after all, if only for a moment. But who would even see her pin, with Ingel in her new blouse with its smart shoulder pads-my little soldier, Hans called her sweetly, so sweetly.

Aliide’s head ached. She suspected that she might have a brain tumor. The pain sometimes darkened her vision and altered her hearing until she heard only a buzz. While Hans and Ingel mooned about, she had to take care of Linda, and sometimes she secretly pinched her, sometimes poked her with a pin, and the child’s sobs gave her a secret satisfaction.

The sugar beets were large and white at harvest, and the Germans remained. The kitchen was full of beet sugar and Ingel ran the house with renewed energy. She filled the place of the former woman of the house with ease, even surpassed her. Everything went smoothly; it went without saying that she knew how to do everything; she just doled out advice to Aliide, who obediently washed the roots, and Ingel grated them. Aliide could help with the grating later-first she had to figure out the best method for the smaller beets. She tried the meat grinder but then went back to the grater and ordered Aliide to watch the syrup kettle on the stove so that it didn’t start to boil. Sometimes Ingel worked on other chores, sometimes she craned her neck to see the stove; she didn’t trust Aliide’s syrup-making skills; Aliide might let it get too hot, and then the syrup would have a strange flavor, and how could she serve syrup like that, everyone would think that she was the stupid one, that she had let it boil. No more than 80 degrees, ever! Ingel kept sniffing the air the whole time to catch any bitter smell that came from the stove-and whenever the smell started to go in what she felt was the wrong direction, she yelled at Aliide to fix it. Aliide couldn’t tell any difference in the strength or quality of the stench, but then she wasn’t Ingel. Of course she didn’t notice. Besides, the stench of Ingel’s sweetness had stuffed up her nostrils. All she could smell was Hans’s spit on Ingel’s lips, and it made Aliide’s own chapped lips throb with pain.

Day after day Aliide washed the beets, picked out the smaller roots, and cut out the black eyes. Ingel fretted over the grating and bustled around ordering Aliide to check the grated beets as they were soaking, change the water in the kettle, fetch more water from the well. Half an hour! It’s already been half an hour! The water needs to be poured over the new batch! At some point, Ingel got tired of grating and started to just chop the roots into small pieces. It’s been half an hour! Pour some fresh water over them! Aliide scratched away the skins, Ingel chopped, and sometimes they strained the brew under Ingel’s precise direction, all the while waiting for Mother and Father to come home. The beets were emptied of their sugar and water was boiled off the syrup over a proper fire, and all the while they were waiting. Skim the foam off the top! Skim it off! Otherwise it’ll be ruined! The rows of syrup jars grew, and all the while they waited. Sometimes Ingel shed a few tears into Hans’s collar.

The whole village was waiting for news from Narva- when would their men be returning home? Ingel made sugar beet soup, Hans smacked his lips and said that it really was quite good, and Ingel fussed around making sugar beet macaroni casserole and beet and berry juice, and they waited for Mother and Father. Ingel brought sugar beet custard to the table, and they waited, and Hans savored her sugar beet pancakes, nodded over her sugar beet cardamom buns, and busied himself making flowers and birds out of chestnuts for Linda. The sugary air of the kitchen disgusted Aliide. She envied the women of the village who had a husband they were waiting for, someone to learn to make sugar beet cardamom buns for-all she had to wait for were her parents-and her a grown girl. She would have liked to be waiting for Hans to return from somewhere far away, to sit at the table waiting for him to come to her, but she tried to brush the thought away because it was a shameful, thankless idea. The village women sighed and said that they were so lucky, with a man in the house, and Ingel was the luckiest of women, to which Aliide easily agreed, nodding, her lips tight and dry.

Ingel made up recipes endlessly-she even made sugar beet candies: milk, beet syrup, butter, nuts. Aliide was shooed away from the stove; simmering the milk and syrup properly was a precise task, then you add the nuts and butter, then simmer it again. She did have permission to sit at the table and keep an eye on Linda and the baking sheets that the mixture was poured onto. She had to watch because Ingel was worried about how she would get on with her own family and her own sugar beets later on if she didn’t get some practice. Her child-care skills could also use improvement. Aliide was about to ask, what family? But she kept quiet, and it felt like Ingel was afraid her little sister would end up hanging around in some corner of Ingel’s house until she was an old woman. She had started leaving the Päewalehti newspaper at Aliide’s place, “accidentally” opened to the personals. But Aliide didn’t want a gentleman who was seeking a lady under the age of twenty, or a gentleman who preferred less slim young ladies. She didn’t want anyone but Hans.