Lene Kaaberbol - Death of a Nightingale

Jurij let the car roll into the drive that led to Anna’s farm.

“I’m going to park it behind the stable over there.” Jurij pointed at one of the farm’s yellow outbuildings. “It’s best if the car can’t be seen from the road, so there’ll be a little bit of walking, Mamo. Are you sure you want to come?”

Natasha sensed the old woman’s movements in the backseat. A determined nod, she assumed, because Jurij sighed, resigned.

He parked behind the low half wall that had once encircled the farm’s midden. They got out and walked along the sheltered side of the stable where the snow wasn’t piled as high, Natasha in front, with her hands still bound behind her back. Then Jurij and the old woman, side by side, like an aging couple. The old woman kept up surprisingly well, noted Natasha, in spite of the fact that the snow was ankle deep here and in several places slippery and uneven in the deep tracks left by a tractor.

The light in the hall was on, but Jurij didn’t waste any time knocking. He pushed at the door, and when it opened—as usual, Anna hadn’t locked up—he shoved Natasha ahead of him onto the pale golden floor tiles. Anna’s rubber boots and clogs were arranged along the wall on clean and dry newspapers. The heat from the large kitchen hit her, and the snow brought in by their shoes melted almost instantly, making small, dirty pools on the floor. Poor Anna would have to get out the mop, thought Natasha, and marveled at how ordinary the thought was.

The old woman had followed her son and now approached the huge oven in the middle of the room with outstretched hands. Heat emanated from it and made the air billow in waves around the birdlike figure.

I could kill her when he turns his back, thought Natasha. Maybe she wouldn’t even need her hands. She pictured herself rushing toward the old woman, cracking her own head against that frail old skull. Would it be enough? Or a kick. Maybe she could knock her down and kick her in the head. That was probably better.

Jurij had promised that he would leave Katerina and her alone as soon as they had found the picture. Beautiful, stupid Natasha would have believed him. In fact, she wanted to believe it, just as she also wanted to believe his promise not to touch Anna. But she was no longer beautiful, stupid Natasha, and she had seen her future in his indifferent gaze.

“Call her,” said Jurij quietly. He had already checked both the boiler room and the kitchen and had taken the safety off his gun, which he now directed at the door to the living room.

Natasha felt her fear return. “Is that really necessary?” She nodded at the gun.

Jurij shrugged but apparently saw no reason to put it away. “Call her.”

Natasha called Anna, halfheartedly but still loud enough that Anna should have been able to hear her. Anna’s hearing was fine, she knew. There was no answer, and she realized that she hadn’t heard the usual clicking of dog paws across the floor. No barking and no wagging mutt, whacking its tail into cabinets and chair legs.

“The dog,” said Natasha and nodded at the water bowl that sat on the floor near the door to the hallway. “She must be out with the dog.”

“In this weather?”

Jurij looked skeptically out the window above the kitchen sink. Snow whirled among the rosebushes in the yellow glow from the patio lights. He slammed open the double doors leading to the living room, walked with long strides into the room and started to systematically open cabinets and drawers.

As the work progressed, he spread papers and folders in a thin layer across the floor. He picked up a few and threw them on the floor again. Lingered briefly over a small tape recorder, but let it go and continued with a row of cans decorated with flowers that stood on the shelf above the couch. He pulled off the lids and upended them so that the contents—buttons and sewing material—flew out in all directions and hit the floor with small, distinctive whacks.

“Where was it you found the picture?” he asked then. “Show us.”

“Upstairs,” she said. “In the bedroom.”

He made her go up the stairs first. She could feel the light pressure of the gun barrel under her right shoulder blade and tried to calculate what the bullet would hit if the gun went off right now. Probably a lung. And her heart, depending on the angle. She had never been particularly interested in biology, but she had, after all, seen pigs slit open, with intestines and kidneys and liver hanging out of the body cavity. She knew where the organs were, and none of them were expendable.

“But he won’t shoot you, right? Not yet.” Natasha formed the words silently with her lips. Here in Anna’s house, the voice that usually lived in her head had gone conspicuously silent. She forced herself to look at the staircase in front of her. One step at a time. The Witch was also on the stairs now, but Natasha was already up. Too late to let herself stumble backward and crush the bird skeleton in the fall.

Jurij turned on the light in the bedroom and ordered Natasha to lie on the floor, which was surprisingly difficult with her hands bound behind her back. She managed to get on her knees, and Jurij pushed her the rest of the way so that she fell forward and hit her shoulder and chin on the wooden floor.

Then he opened the dresser drawer and emptied its pill containers and papers out onto the bed. The picture of Anna and her husband on vacation with palm trees and a light blue pool in the background fluttered to the floor in front of Natasha’s face. Then the tips of Jurij’s shoes approached her forehead.

“You didn’t lie, did you? Sometimes people lie because that’s all they can remember how to do. Maybe you are like your husband.”

He touched her very lightly with the tip of his shoe. The sole scratched the bridge of her nose. The shoes were still wet. She turned her face away and waited while he looked under the bed and behind the wardrobe’s enormous mirrored doors. She could see that the Witch had entered the room now, her feet making their way around the bed. Then she stood still and looked at the wall Anna had covered with pictures of her daughter. Natasha knew the pictures well. The daughter was called Kirsten and in the first pictures had been photographed at age three while she held an old-fashioned red phone in her hand and smiled in a friendly way at the photographer. Farther down was a row of more or less anonymous school photos in which the girl’s hairdo varied between short and slightly longer. In two of the pictures, her teeth were covered by braces. Then came the graduation photo, pictures of Kirsten with Anna’s grandchildren, pictures of Hans Henrik and Kirsten at an amusement park with the kids. Katerina loved the photos, and for some reason the Witch also remained standing in front of the portraits. Natasha could see that she was leaning forward. Her head moved in small, uneven, hen-like jerks. Then she turned to the nightstand and picked up Anna’s and Hans Henrik’s wedding picture.

The Witch’s hands shook so much that the picture rattled between her fingers. How old was she? Eighty-five? Eighty-six? Too old to lay a fair claim to more years in this life, and yet she was winning and Natasha was in the process of losing.

“Who is that?”

The Witch held the framed photo out to Natasha. Natasha couldn’t see it properly from her position on the floor, but she remembered it from the many times she had been lying in this room, on Anna’s bed, while everything hurt and she had fled from Michael, and Anna was patting her hair and murmuring, “There, there, there,” as she tried to console her. Anna had said that Michael was better than Ukraine, and that was true, at least most of the time.

Natasha had looked at it so often. The picture of a woman who had married a good man and had lived a long life with him in peace and safety in Bacon Land. Wedding Anna smiled a bit crookedly and had her eyes partially closed against the sun. Her hair was in thick, roller-induced ’50s curls under the veil, and she was made up almost like a movie star. Hans Henrik was young and strong and kind, had shiny, brushed-back black hair and didn’t look like the thin and aging man she had come to know on her first visits to Denmark those last years before he died.