Sofi Oksanen - Purge

“We have to get organized.”

“How?”

“Leave it to me.”

Ingel cried at night and Aliide stayed up thinking about their options. She couldn’t expect anything sensible from Ingel- she didn’t even notice the mold on the bread as she offered it to Linda, didn’t recognize familiar people. While Ingel hung the laundry to dry in the rain and murmured her prayers, Aliide was thinking. If Hans was going to survive, they would have to wash him clean of his activities with the civil guard, the Omakaitse self-defense league, and the Riigikogu, and the war in Finland. They couldn’t talk their way out of it, and escape was no longer possible.

Even Hans’s old confirmation classmate Theodor Kruus had cleared up his part in the anti-Soviet leaflets, but Aliide knew at what cost. Ingel didn’t know, and it was best that she didn’t.

The village militia liked to get young flesh and rosy cheeks into its jiggling belly. The younger the better. The greater the crimes of the parents, the younger the girl could be, or the more nights it would take to expiate the crime-one night, or one maidenhead, wasn’t enough. Theodor Kruus was let go because his lovely daughter redeemed him by going to the militia at night, taking off her dress and stockings, and kneeling before them. Theodor Kruus’s record as an agitator disappeared, the leaflets he wrote and his other anti-Soviet activities were placed under someone else’s name, and that someone else got ten years in the mines and five years of exile. Hans’s activities were punishable by death, or years in Siberia, at the very least.

Did Theodor know what his daughter had done? Maybe the militia told him. Aliide could easily imagine the booted militiamen with their legs spread wide, coming to whisper about it in Theodor’s ear.

Ingel wouldn’t be able to do it-all she could do was sniffle, with her nose against the rya rug on the wall. And Ingel wasn’t young enough for the militia anymore. Neither was Aliide. They only wanted girls who weren’t yet women. Besides, Aliide couldn’t do it-or could she? She lay awake till there were circles under her eyes, and there was no one she could ask what to do or how to do it.

After endless hours awake, Aliide thought of curtains. She had stared and stared at the black night, the moon, the moonlessness, the moon waxing and waning, and with it the passing of time. She had stayed awake and longed for her mother, whom she could have asked for advice, longed for her father, who would have known what to do, for anyone who would have known what to tell her. She wanted her sleep back, and Hans home, and the obtrusive moon away from her window. As she thought of these things, she realized that they had to make some curtains. Ingel took to the idea immediately. Hans could spend some time in the kitchen if they had curtains. It was so simple. So crazy. And the two sisters did seem crazy as Aliide beat out new fabric on the loom and Ingel decorated it with embroidery, even though they needed the thread for other things. Their foolishness was dismissed in the village with the explanation that the war had addled their brains, and that suited them fine. Aliide told Ingel to explain that she was throwing herself into her handiwork because concentrating on the needle and thread relieved her sadness and helped her to stop crying so much. On Aliide’s orders she also chatted in the village about a cousin in Tallinn who had told them that full-length curtains were the fashion in Paris and London. This cousin had shown them foreign fashion magazines, and there were no half curtains like there were in the countryside here-those were hopelessly old-fashioned! Aliide sometimes felt that when they explained their curtains, people looked at the sisters the way you look at someone you know is lying, but no one said anything-they let it be, acted like they believed, which made Aliide explain twice as hard how they should try to be as genteel as they could at a time like this, even be silly about it, that even if you did live in the country, you could still follow urban trends, even in times like these. Aliide proclaimed herself a woman of a new era who wanted curtains of a new era-the first full-length curtains in the village.

They got in the habit of closing the curtains almost every evening. Sometimes they didn’t do it, so that people walking by the yard could see that life went on as usual in the house, that they had nothing to hide.

The others started to put curtains on their windows, too, to ward off spies-half curtains, true, but they still prevented people from seeing what was happening inside. Many of them doubtless understood why Ingel and Aliide had chosen fulllength curtains, but those who did kept their mouths shut.

After opening and closing the drapes for a couple of months, the sisters decided that it would be best to keep Hans in the house all the time. They could dig a place out under the floor in the little room behind the kitchen, or they could build a room between the little room and the kitchen. Would that work? It was warm enough, close to them, and they would be able to let visitors into the rest of the house without worrying. The little room off the kitchen had always served as a storeroom and guest room-few people from the village had ever been in it, and the door was always kept closed. It didn’t even have a latch or a handle; just a hook. And who was going to remember what size it was originally? There was no window in the room, so it was always dim. It was time to summon Hans home from the woods-he was needed to help with building.

There were some boards in the stable; they carried them in unnoticed, through the drying barn and the food pantry. They worked on the wall only on the most windy or rainy days, when the weather would muffle the pounding of the hammer, and only when Linda was with Aliide or Ingel in the barn or someplace else, because a child’s mouth is a child’s mouth. They wouldn’t tell Linda what they were up to; she could be told stories about the ghost in that little room. When Hans had withdrawn into the secret room, he came into the kitchen or bath only when Linda was away or asleep. If she woke up in the night and came into the kitchen, they told her that Daddy had just come from the forest to visit.

First one board, then another; the safe room was coming along nicely. Ingel laughed, Aliide smiled, and there was a cheerful note in Hans’s humming. The molding from the old ceiling and baseboards was taken off and attached to the new wall. Sufficient ventilation was added; the ceiling had a pipe that drew air from the attic. Ingel found an old roll of the wallpaper that had been used in the little room, and when she had pasted it in place no one would have guessed that there was a good-sized room behind the wall. Hans put the cupboard that had been against the old wall up against the new one and concealed the new wallpaper so that its slightly lighter color and smoother texture wouldn’t be noticed. The door to the room was behind the cupboard. They put a bucket in the corner of the secret room, for when he needed it, but then they decided that they should put a hole in the floor so he could put the bucket under it with a lid on it. Or maybe they could make a hole in the wall that the little room shared with the barn. It could serve as a kind of latrine in case they had to be away from the house unexpectedly.

It was evening; Hans took a bath and ate heartily. Ingel packed his knapsack and told Linda that Daddy had to go away again now, but he would be back soon. Very soon. Linda started to cry and Hans consoled her. She had to be a brave girl now. So Daddy would be proud of his Estonian daughter.

All three of them went with him to the barn door and stood watching as he disappeared into the woods. The next night Hans came back and moved into the little room. A couple of days later, news of Hans Pekk’s gruesome end on the forest road spread through the village.