Lene Kaaberbol - Death of a Nightingale

What took her by surprise was that they wanted her to say she had done it.

They brought both her and Katerina to the station and placed Natasha in a little room with green walls and both bars and netting in front of the window. Katerina was not allowed to stay with her. Natasha could hear her crying in the next room. It was a terrible sound; it filled her so she couldn’t think, it made her chest and stomach ache, and she tried to make the officers understand that she would listen if she could just comfort Katerina first.

They asked her why she had done it.

Done what? she asked.

And then they explained that it was usually wives who killed their husbands, and she had probably grown tired of him and wanted his money. He has no money, she said, while Katerina cried; he owes several hundred thousand. To whom? To U-Card.

That made them hesitate. They went out into the hall and spoke quietly. Then one of them disappeared. The other asked if she wanted tea. No, no tea. Just Katerina. Yes, of course. Something had changed, as if “U-Card” was a magic formula that opened locked doors. Suddenly she was allowed to see her daughter. After a little while, the second policeman left too. Only a secretary remained, sitting at a desk.

Natasha lifted Katerina up onto her hip and asked if she was charged with anything. “No,” said the secretary. “They just want a statement from you.”

“Then it’ll have to be after I go to the doctor with my daughter,” said Natasha, with a new authority. “Can’t you hear how labored her breathing is?”

She left the station. All they had with them was Katerina’s little backpack and what Natasha had in the pockets of her coat; she didn’t even have her wallet. She had to go back to the apartment even though her instinct screamed that she had to get away while she could.

Instead of going up directly, she rang the downstairs neighbors’ buzzer. They had an au pair, Baia, a young girl from Georgia who for some reason was always in a good mood. She and Natasha had taken the children to the playground together on a few occasions—the neighbors had twins, a boy and a girl—but Natasha had the feeling that Baia had been told not to associate with her. There was a certain glint in Baia’s eyes, a secretiveness in her giggling, that made it seem as if they were two teenagers playing hooky from school to smoke cigarettes behind the bicycle shed.

Today Baia wasn’t quite as upbeat as usual.

“I’ve heard,” she said. “Terrible. And the police have been here, also SBU, and they asked a lot of questions and stomped around upstairs for several hours.”

“Have they left?” Natasha asked.

“Yes, I think so. It’s quiet now.”

Katerina stayed with Baia and the twins while Natasha snuck up the stairs. The door was wide open, just like with the first break-in. It was quiet in there, but as Natasha ventured into the front hall, she heard a faint noise from the living room. She glided silently toward the door and looked in cautiously.

Everything had been worked over. Drawers pulled out and overturned, books cleared from the shelves, pillows and cushions cut open so the filling lay like snow across the wreckage. And in the middle of everything, there she was. The Witch. A tiny, bent old woman with white hair and a coat that reached almost down to her ankles and her shiny, high-heeled red shoes. She stood half turned toward the window, and the light shone right through her thin white hair so you could see her scalp and the outline of her skull.

Baba Yaha, thought Natasha, the old witch who lives in a cottage in the woods, a cottage that has legs like a hen and can run around like a living creature.

She stood with a picture of Katerina. The newest one, which they had had enlarged and framed so it could stand on Pavel’s desk. Katerina wore braids and smiled shyly, but there was a sparkle in her big, beautiful eyes. “She looks like someone who is up to mischief,” Pavel had said and had kissed the picture, and then the live model, six or seven times right under the hair at the nape of the neck, until Katerina screeched and said it tickled.

Baba Yaha ate children who came and knocked on her door. The fence around the chicken-legged house was made from human bones.

The old woman suddenly slammed the picture against the side of the table so the glass shattered and shards spilled across the desk and floor with a shrill tinkling. With her thin fingers, she peeled the photograph out of the frame and stuck it in her coat pocket. Natasha only managed to pull back her head just in time as the old woman began to turn around.

There was no time to think. Natasha grabbed her bag from the coatrack in the front hallway and raced down the stairs to Baia. An hour later, she was on her way to the Polish border in a rented car with only the clothes she had on, but with Katerina in the seat next to her, so close that she could touch her once in a while, as if it was necessary to make sure she was still there.

THE BIG MAN,Jurij, had taken them off the main road and into a semi-deserted summerhouse area. The road was only partially cleared, and the small wooden cabins on both sides were dark and cold. Natasha thought she could glimpse the sea among the trees at the end of the dead-end road. Her every instinct told her that this was it, they were going no farther. This was the place where Jurij would do what he planned to do. When he finally slowed the car, there were no longer any houses around them, and the road had narrowed even further. The car’s tires spun a few times in the snow, caught hold and then finally stopped completely when Jurij turned the key and shut off the motor.

For a moment they sat silently in the faint interior light, all three.

“We’ve been looking for you for a long time,” said the big man. “But you know that. Of course you know that.”

He turned in his seat and gazed attentively at her, as if he was searching for an answer in her exposed and battered face. He was old too, thought Natasha, sixty years or more, and he didn’t look anything like the tiny woman he had called mother several times. His face was meaty, his lips broad and spotted by age and tobacco. Only in his brilliant blue eyes could you clearly see that mother and son were related. Even now, in the gloom, and with the eyes partially shaded under a pair of heavy, baggy eyelids. The Witch had given birth to a monster and had suckled it at her own breast. This was not the son the little woman appeared with in the papers. He wasn’t the suit-wearing, beautiful, clean politician. This son was a man who used his hands and got things done. Not the kind who built things but the kind who demolished them.

She avoided his gaze, feeling the blood pooling around the teeth in her lower jaw once more. She didn’t dare spit but instead bent forward and let the blood dribble over her down jacket.

“Your husband, Pavel, was a coward,” Jurij continued, unaffected. “Many believed he was a hero, a journalist who wrote the truth because he was a man with honor and integrity. In reality he only wrote what he was paid to write. And it was almost always lies. The truth, on the other hand, he was well paid to keep hidden.”

Natasha didn’t answer. Her tongue kept getting cut by the jagged edges of her broken molars, and what he said was not news to her. She had known it for a long time. Pavel was no hero.

“The question is,” said the man, and again she felt his searching gaze. “How well did he hide his secrets, and where did he get them? How much does his pretty wife know? And what about his daughter? Even little pitchers have big ears.”

Natasha tried to control herself, but the mention of Katerina made her twitch. And she knew he saw it and would store her weakness somewhere in his memory.