Lene Kaaberbol - Death of a Nightingale

Suddenly there was a light among the trees in a place where it shouldn’t have been. With a muted roar of acceleration, a car shot out in front of her into the middle of the road.

Where did he come from? Where the hell did he come from?

She took her foot off the gas, shifted gears and stomped the brake to the floor, knowing perfectly well that none of it would help. Desperately, she wrenched the steering wheel to the left and managed to turn the Micra part way around, but it still sailed forward into the collision. She hit the snowbank and the other car at the same time with a muffled bang, and was jerked forward against her seat belt and then thrown back as the airbag exploded in her face. There was the sound of shattering glass.

She couldn’t move. The airbag’s material stuck to her face, as if someone were trying to choke her with a pillow. Something had happened to her hand. The Micra’s motor was still on, but the sound was a forced insect-like whine, and after a few seconds, it ceased. At that moment the front door was yanked open, and someone attempted to pull her out of the car. It didn’t work; she was still wearing her seat belt. Nina herself groped for the release button. The belt sprang loose, and she slid sideways, upper body first, out of the damaged car.

Cold air, snow, grey sky over dark trees.

Was she missing time? Seconds, minutes? She tried to lift her left arm to check her watch but couldn’t.

“Where is she? Katerina. Where?”

Nina was lifted up and thrown into the snow again. She still couldn’t catch her breath.

It was Natasha. Natasha had driven into her car. Her brain couldn’t quite comprehend it, but that must have been what had happened. The Ukrainian girl sat on top of her, a knee on either side of Nina’s chest. Her hair hung in iced clumps, and the Barbie-beautiful face was merciless and set in stone. She let go of Nina with one hand, but only to bring up something made of bright, glittering steel. Nina felt a sharp jab under her chin, the coldness of metal against her neck.

“Tell me. Where?”

“The police,” gasped Nina. “The police have her. I don’t know where. In a safe place.”

“ Brekhnya. You’re lying.”

“No. Natasha, you’re only making it worse for yourself. Go to the police, give yourself up. Otherwise, you will never get to see her again.”

Natasha’s eyes became totally black. Her hand jerked, and Nina felt the metal point pierce through her skin to her windpipe. She’s going to kill you, Nina thought, coolly and clearly. It’ll end now. You’ll be found lying in the bloody snow, and Ida and Anton will cry at your grave. She suddenly saw it with excruciating clarity in her mind’s eye, like an over-the-top sentimental scene in an American B movie. It was filmed from above. The camera zoomed down on the coffin and the open grave, people with black umbrellas, the freezing minister. Then a close-up of the two black-clad children, Ida holding Anton’s hand and shouting, “You’re a lousy mother! How could you do this?”

She didn’t know what time it was.

Then the pressure disappeared from her neck. Natasha remained sitting on top of her a little while longer, and Nina could see that the murder weapon—the potential murder weapon—was an ordinary kitchen knife, the semi-Japanese kind with a triangular blade, especially efficient when cutting meat.

And windpipe cartilage, Nina said to herself. If Natasha had pushed it any farther in, you’d be dead now, or at least in a few minutes from now, choking on your own blood. Murdered with a kitchen tool by one of the so-called poor wretches you thought you could help.

“You must know,” said Natasha in English. “I saw you. Katerina was in your car. I saw it! You know where she is, you must know, you must …”

“No,” said Nina. “They keep that kind of thing secret. It has to be secret, or it’s not safe.”

“Safe,” repeated Natasha.

“Yes. They’ll keep her safe. I promise.”

Natasha rose to her feet and disappeared from Nina’s rather blurred field of vision. Nina heard seven or eight stumbling, uneven steps in the snow. She stayed completely still except for reflexive blinks when sharp snowflakes grazed her eyelashes. Listening.

The sound of a car door. A creaking, scratching sound of metal against metal, an uneven acceleration. She turned her head and felt a delayed snap in her neck, like a gear falling into place. From her unfamiliar frog’s-eye perspective, she saw the back of the other car come closer, felt the spray of the snow thrown up by the rotating rear wheels. Then Natasha drove forward again, the back end of the car making a few slalom-like sweeps from side to side before the tail-lights disappeared behind the snowbanks at the next turn.

Nina lay unmoving. She didn’t know if she was hurt. Right now all she could think was, She’s gone, and I am still alive.

There was blood on the knife. The nurse’s blood. Natasha had cut her neck. Not as badly as she had done with Michael, nowhere near, but worse than she had meant to. Natasha felt a deep shiver spread from her core.

Blood.

Nina hadn’t screamed, hadn’t flailed her arms as Michael had done. She lay still in the snow, looking up at Natasha. Her voice was calm, as if it were a normal conversation and Natasha had just asked her a completely ordinary question.

“It has to be secret, or it’s not safe.”

Danes didn’t lie as much as Ukrainians did. It was as if they believed the truth made them better human beings. A Dane would feel the need to tell a terminally ill patient the entire truth about the cancer that would choke him in the end. For his own good, of course. “I have to be honest,” a Dane would say, and afterward he would be relieved, and the one who had received the truth would be crushed. Natasha preferred a considerate lie any day, but she hadn’t encountered many of those either in or outside the Coal-House Camp.

Was the nurse lying now? Natasha narrowed her eyes, looking down at the sprawling figure she was straddling.

It has to be secret, or it’s not safe.

“Safe,” she said thoughtfully, trying to understand the word. Safe was to be in a place of safety, a place where no one could harm you. Where the Witch couldn’t reach you. But the price was that it was secret, and no one could know where you were.

That was a calculation she understood completely. It was in her bones. It had been in the pounding, chilly pain in her crotch and abdomen, the smell of sweat and semen, the near-throttling pressure against her throat and in the silence that could not be broken, no matter what form his anger took. With Michael, that had been the price of safety. She had paid it for Katerina’s sake.

You can endure anything, she had told herself, as long as Katerina is safe.

Could she also endure the thought that Katerina would be safe in a place where Natasha couldn’t reach her? Could she stand it if safety meant she could never touch her daughter or see her again, not even on wrenchingly brief prison visits?

Some women gave their children up for adoption so they would have a better life. Natasha would rather die.

Nina was saying something. Natasha didn’t catch it all, she just heard the repetition of the word “safe.”

The crushing, unacceptable truth was penetrating her, jerk by jerk, even though she didn’t want it inside her. The nurse didn’t know anything—even bleeding, even with the knife against her throat, she couldn’t tell Natasha anything.

With a sharp wrench of translucent pain, the last connection to Katerina was severed. The trail of bread crumbs through the forest was gone; the birds had eaten it. There was no longer a way home.

A HOLE INtime, a sudden shift.