Lene Kaaberbol - Death of a Nightingale

Suddenly Maxi gave a high-pitched, sharp bark and threw itself forward with so much power that the leash slid between Nina’s gloved and frozen fingers. She managed to keep her flashlight on the dog long enough to see it disappear into one end of something that looked like a scrapped railroad car.

She ran as quickly as she could.

The first thing the light illuminated inside the car was a tea table.

A cardboard box covered in a flowered tablecloth, four unmatched cups and a teapot without a lid. Napkins had been set out, and three cookies were neatly arranged on each of the napkins. The cups had been filled with a red liquid that didn’t quite look like tea. Juice, maybe. Only one cup appeared to have been drunk from.

“Rina?”

Nina listened anxiously. No one answered, but she could hear the familiar sound of Rina’s asthmatic breathing. She moved the flashlight around and saw in dancing glimpses that the freight car’s raw wooden walls were covered by cutouts from magazines, photographs, plastic flowers, pale green glow-in-the-dark stars and planets of the same kind that Ida had once been briefly infatuated with, posters of large-eyed animals and long-legged pop starlets, but most of all photographs and ads and newspaper cutouts with one thing in common: they all showed fathers with their children, fathers who pushed strollers, father who held the reins of ponies in amusement parks, fathers who pushed swings, played, built, swam or just smiled and laughed with happy daughters. A secret den, thought Nina. A Father Temple.

“Rina!”

She was lying curled up under a pile of old blankets and towels in the corner farthest from the heavy sliding door she probably had not had the strength to shut completely. Her eyes were closed, her lips pale and wax-like, and beneath her eyebrows was the reddish-brown pinpoint bruising her asthma attack had given her, dark freckles against the almost blue-white skin.

Maxi barked once more and then began to eat the cookies.

Nina pulled her gloves off and placed her fingers against Rina’s neck. The difference between her own cold fingers and Rina’s skin didn’t feel as significant as she had feared it might.

“Rina! Rina, wake up. Look at me.”

She pinched Rina’s earlobe. No reaction whatsoever.

“Oh, the poor little thing.” Anna had appeared in the door. “What’s wrong with her? Is she very weak?”

“She is unconscious,” Nina said but couldn’t see why.

“It must be the cold.”

“Possibly.” There was no doubt that Rina was colder than was good for her, but there was no stiffness in the muscles, no sign of the confusion that sometimes made hypothermia victims act paradoxically by, for example, beginning to take off their clothes.

Then there was a sudden exclamation from Anna. “Oh, no. What has she done?”

“What?”

Anna held up a pill bottle in a red ski mitt that matched her suit. Nina shone her flashlight in her direction but couldn’t see what it was.

“These are mine,” said Anna. “How did she get a hold of them?”

“Give them to me!”

Anna handed them over. Nina grabbed them and finally was able to decipher the writing on the damp, half-dissolved label.

“Diazepam,” she said. “How many were in the bottle?”

Anna’s wide eyes glittered in the glow of the flashlight. “It was almost full,” she said.

“Here?”

Jurij stopped the car at the turnoff and squinted down the narrow track that ran between the snow-covered fields.

Perhaps he hesitated because the road was so small. There were only four houses in all: Michael’s, Anna’s farm and then two smaller houses almost all the way down by Isterødvej. Not many cars came this way. In the summer the grass grew so tall in the middle that it brushed against the bottom of the car. In an odd way that was precisely what had made Natasha feel at home. Not in Michael’s house, but on the road that led there. When she lived with Michael, she sometimes did stupid things when he wasn’t home. Walked out of the house and across the pebble-covered front drive, crossed the gravel road on bare feet and continued into the wilderness of knee-high grass and wild oats and clover and elder trees. And then she sat down in the middle of it all, so that she couldn’t see the brick house or the garage or the pebbles, and turned her face to the sun, breathing in the spicy scent of grass and feeling the tiny legs of insects as they crawled across her feet. Strangely enough, it was neither Pavel nor her luxurious life in Kiev that she missed when Michael and she moved in together, but the flowering verges of her childhood. The kind that lined the road when Father and she rode their bikes to Grandfather’s and Grandmother’s farmhouse, the kind she had sworn never to return to. Natasha moved a little in the seat to wake up her hands, which were now bound behind her back again. She let her tongue slide across her broken molars and split gums, which had finally, finally stopped bleeding.

Tonight there was no green anywhere. The snow blew into the wheel tracks, but the road had been cleared not long ago.

“It’s not a one-way street. You can drive through to the big road,” she said.

He didn’t answer. Just turned off the lights and got out of the car. She saw his dark shape pace down to the first turn in the gravel road and disappear. The car quickly became cold now that the motor was turned off. The hole in the side window was already providing plenty of fresh air. Natasha pulled halfheartedly at the narrow plastic strips but quickly gave up. Her right arm and wrist ached, throbbing violently, and the jerky movements only made it worse.

The woman in the backseat shifted uneasily. Now that there was no longer a fresh supply of warm air circulating through the car, Natasha could sense the Witch’s rotten breath. Baba Yaha who ate children.

Jurij returned and got behind the wheel, cursing. He maneuvered the car decisively in between the snowbanks, headlights still off. The snow was falling more heavily. The snowflakes were hard and grainy and rattled against the window like claws.

Jurij wanted to turn in at Michael’s house, but Natasha stopped him.

“It’s farther on,” she said. “The next house.” She saw with a certain relief that there was no sign of life in there. Michael wasn’t home.

The she saw the yellow-and-black tape. POLICE, it said. Her chest constricted, and she couldn’t tell if it was from fear or hope. Right now she’d like one of the nice Danish policemen to come save her from the Witch and her son. But there were no policemen at the barrier, which was disappearing into the snow.

What had happened at Michael’s house? She guessed a part of the answer before she asked, and she had little doubt that Jurij, with his large and capably destructive hands, would be the right person to answer her, if he wanted to.

“What happened?” she said.

“We had to have a chat with your fiancé to find out where you and the girl were,” said Jurij. “He didn’t even know that you had run off, but at least he told us where we could find the little girl. We didn’t think you’d run far if we had her.”

“Did you kill him?”

Jurij didn’t react. “Where are we going?”

Michael was dead. She recognized that in Jurij’s indifference. For him Michael was just as irrelevant as Natasha, who would also be dead in a very short time and therefore had already been removed from his calculations.

“Farther along,” she said flatly. “On the other side of the hill.”

Jurij engaged the gears again and let the car eat its way up the rise and down the other side. Behind them, Michael’s house disappeared from sight. He was gone. Everything he had been, everything he had done to her, was gone now. She felt nothing at the thought.