Lene Kaaberbol - Death of a Nightingale

He returned to the car and opened the door for the woman in the backseat. It was too far for Natasha to see anything but a shadow moving behind the man’s back and a glimpse of a pale, upturned face. He said something, and Natasha knew what it was. Or at least she thought she did.

“You can’t come up there with me. The stairs are slippery, and you’re old. I will go up to the top and meet her alone.”

That was about what he said, because that was how she had planned it. The old woman would probably resist. She wanted to come, thought Natasha, because what she wanted from Natasha meant so much to her that she had dragged her old, rotting body all the way up here through half of Europe.

Natasha held her breath while the man bent down to the old woman. Gestured. Eventually, it seemed, the old lady accepted. She moved farther into the backseat with her hands pulled up to her fur collar to shield herself from the cold. The interior light hit the sharp features of her powdered face for a second. Then the man slammed the door, and the old woman became nothing more than a dark profile behind the car window.

The man looked at his watch. It was hard to determine his age at this distance, but he wasn’t young, thought Natasha. It was the heft that she noticed, the width in his body that didn’t belong to a young man. Nonetheless, he moved up the stairs with surprising speed. She would not have long to enact her plan, most likely not more than a few minutes. That would have to be enough.

When Natasha could no longer see him because of the thicket of thorn bushes, she carefully counted to thirty. He should be approaching the meeting place. He wouldn’t turn around at once, he would think that she was on her way, that she would appear from the sheltering bushes up there any moment.

It was quiet around her now, and she closed her hand more tightly on the tire iron. It felt heavy and cold and right.

One foot in front of the other.

Springing to her feet, she sprinted across the parking lot. The distance to the car seemed to stretch elastically, and twice she almost stumbled on the packed ice under the new snow, but she stayed on her feet and tried to increase her speed. She ran with the tire iron hanging like a dead weight in her right hand. Not until she reached the car did she raise it and hit the car window with full force. A hard, flat thump resounded in the silence, and her fingers lost sensation from the blow. Still, there wasn’t much to see other than a long, thin crack that ran across the side window. The Witch’s face had turned toward her. The eyes were narrow black slits, the lips pulled back in a grimace that revealed long, crumbling teeth. Natasha imagined how thin the skull would feel under the soft fur hat and the thin, downy hair. What it would sound like on impact. Like a nut being cracked inside a fur bag.

She raised the tire iron again, and this time she used both hands to follow through. There was another odd, dead thump, and the pain in her hands raced all the way up to her wrists. The face behind the window was now partially obscured by a white cloud in the glass. But the window remained intact, and the woman in there stared directly at her, as if Natasha were an interesting natural phenomenon of the kind you can go to see in a safari park.

She sensed the abyss beneath her.

Then she grabbed the car door and pulled the handle, without luck. Of course.

She had been so unbelievably stupid. Of course the Witch was still untouchable. Of course she couldn’t kill her.

Natasha hit the window again, hammering away, and with every blow, the face became harder to make out.

“Die.” Natasha was winded now, and her words sounded just as dead and flat as the impact of the tire iron. “Please—just—die.”

She closed her eyes and struck again, and this time there was a little hollow sound like when a hard-boiled egg hits a table, but it wasn’t just the sound that made her look carefully at the window’s cobweb pattern. She could feel in her fingers that something was finally yielding. And true enough, a little black hole gaped in all the whiteness, and she hit the window again with full force in precisely that place and felt the euphoric sensation of almost reaching the goal when the glass yielded even further. One foot in front of the other.

As she raised the tire iron once more, someone grabbed hold of it and jerked it back with such suddenness that she swayed and tumbled backward into the snow. Blows fell on her face, hard and precise and in a steady rhythm. She felt two of her molars shatter and cut into her tongue, already warm with blood.

“Natasha Doroshenko?”

She was too confused to answer. Just shook her head stupidly and tried to get up.

New blows. Fast and hard.

“Natasha Doroshenko?”

This time she managed to answer yes, but in the instant that followed, everything rushed away from her in whirls of grey and black and red. The wire under her feet broke, and she dropped and fell straight into the abyss below.

UKRAINE, 1935

The party buried Oxana. And Kolja too, even though he was neither a hero nor a pioneer. For Mother’s sake, as Semienova said. So Mother wouldn’t have to think of anything but the heroic deed her daughter had done, and for which she had bravely paid with her life.

“Your daughter is an example to Soviet youth,” said Semienova. She didn’t have red eyes any longer and now seemed more angry than sad, and with the anger, some of her shining energy had returned. She had become beautiful again. “A visionary little girl who valued solidarity above all else, even her own family. A true pioneer.”

Olga couldn’t help wondering whether she would also have been buried by the Party if she had been murdered along with Kolja and Oxana. Would Semienova have made a beautiful speech about her?

Mother sat with her head hanging limply on its thin neck and didn’t look as if she was really listening to anything Comrade Semienova was saying. She hadn’t lit the oven, and she hadn’t swept the floor or cooked the porridge or done the washing. The whole house smelled like a dung heap, thought Olga, and she was constantly freezing.

“But there should be a panachydy,” Mother mumbled then. “There should be a singing. My children must be sung out with ‘Vichnaya Pam’yat.’ Forever remembered, forever loved. I have to call a priest.”

Comrade Semienova shook her head. “Oxana was not religious, and she had a strong will. A priest at her funeral would be an insult to everything she stood for. The funeral should be in her spirit, and the Party Committee has already—”

“And Kolja?” Now Mother lifted her head and stared at Semienova with a look that frightened Olga. “Must little Kolja be shut out of Heaven too?”

Comrade Semienova just smiled a sad little smile and stroked Olga’s hair before she left. Olga had hoped she would stay a little longer because it was not nice to be alone with Mother, who just sat staring into the blue. But it was as it had always been. Comrade Semienova was busy with Oxana, even now when her body lay cold and hard in a coffin somewhere, and she could neither sing nor engage in interesting political discussions in the classroom. Even now, Oxana was more interesting than Olga.

Olga knew that it was wrong to think this way. In fact, she should feel nothing but sorrow now that Oxana was dead and had been murdered by the kulaks, as it said in the newspaper, but it was as if she couldn’t stop the forbidden thoughts no matter how hard she tried. In fact, it was as if they grew and swelled the more she tried to drive them off. Like the time when Jana and she had begun laughing in old Volodymyr Pavlenko’s class and had just laughed louder and louder the more he scolded them. It was as if they had been hit by a kind of madness that wasn’t cured until he slapped them both quite hard.