Lene Kaaberbol: Death of a Nightingale

“Eat.”

A sharp elbow poked her in the side, and she glanced at the girl who sat on her right, shoveling down her soup, quickly but at the same time carefully so not a drop was lost between plate and mouth. A pair of buzzing flies that were trapped in the sticky mass went right down the hatch too without the girl taking any notice.

“Eat it or let me have it,” she whispered, looking impatiently at Olga. “The food will be cleared away in five minutes.”

Olga’s stomach growled a warning, unwilling to accept her indecisiveness, and she breathed deeply. She scraped some of the wriggling flies off the soup and brushed them off the spoon with her index finger. The first spoonful was the worst, but afterward it went pretty well. She took a mouthful and let it glide down her throat in one rapid movement, so that she didn’t have time to either taste or feel it in her throat. Her benchmate followed her spoon with hungry eyes, but when Olga had scraped her plate completely clean, the girl took the time to examine Olga.

“What’s your name?” she whispered.

“Oletchka,” said Olga. That’s what it said in her papers now.

“Did you just arrive?”

Olga nodded but wasn’t sure she felt like doing this. She had already met and said goodbye to lots of girls since they had come to take her away from home.

It was the day after they had driven off with Mother. Olga had slept alone in the summer darkness the last night and had lain listening to the grasshoppers and the crickets that chirped in the grass outside in the overgrown garden. Mother hadn’t touched the vegetable plot since Oxana and Kolja died, and through all of July she had just sat on the crumbling clay bench under the porch roof in front of the house, staring into space. Sometimes, not very often, she cried. Other times she asked Olga to sing, and Olga sang quietly and softly, almost as if it were a lullaby, and if she sang long enough, Mother might make a faint grimace which looked like a smile and say that she sang almost as beautifully as Oxana. Her daughter and the people’s nightingale.

Uncle Grachev and Grandmother and Grandfather Trofimenko had been shot in the square where the statue of Oxana was to be erected, but neither Mother nor Olga talked about that during the dark summer nights. In fact, they didn’t speak at all. The neighbors took turns bringing them a little food. Mother didn’t eat anything much, but Olga took what she could get. And waited for something to change. For Mother to either die or get up again so that life could go on. But neither one happened. They just came to get her one day and said she had to be in a hospital because she was ill, and the day after, they also picked up Olga and drove her to the first of the orphanages. She was there for ten days. She lived in the next home for almost a month, and now she was here. With a new lot of strange children. Olga lowered her head, but the girl next to her wasn’t put off that easily.

“Were your parents enemies of the people, or are they just dead?”

“Both, I think. I don’t really know. My sister was a hero.”

The girl stared at her with renewed interest. “What do you mean?”

“My sister is the People’s Nightingale. They’ve erected a statue of her in the square in Sorokivka.”

The girls sitting around them turned toward her, and Olga felt small and miserable and much too visible at the long table.

“I’ve heard of her,” said one of the girls, her eyes narrowed. “There’s a song about her. She reported her father for stealing grain.”

It got completely silent, and Olga followed the skinny little flies wandering across her underarm. Didn’t know what more she should say.

“But if she was your sister …” said a girl, hesitating. She sat right across from Olga. She was a little older, maybe thirteen, with a broad face and black eyes. Probably a Tartar from the Crimea. Olga had seen them at the market back when they were still living in Kharkiv. “You’re full of lies,” the Tartar girl continued. “Because if your sister is the People’s Nightingale, then why are you here?”

“I don’t know,” mumbled Olga and wished she was just as dead as the rest of the world from which she came. “But I can sing too. I can sing ‘Zelene Zhyto’—about the green, green wheat.”

“By heart?”

The girl’s tone seemed to Olga a bit more friendly, and almost against her own will, Olga felt herself grasp at that kindness, cling to it.

“Yes,” she said. “I know a lot of songs by heart.”

The world was so damned small when you thought about it. Where could you live in peace? Was there a place anywhere where you could hide forever? Not in Denmark, at least, thought Natasha, and especially not now.

She let a finger run across Katerina’s soft white forehead. She had fallen asleep again, on the worn sofa in front of the stove. The warmth in the living room had loosened her shoulders, so that she now lay like an infant with her arms stretched above her head, hands open and unclenched. Her hair was still damp from the bath, and her cheeks and lips blushed in the heat, ruddy and full of life. Right now Natasha was the only one on guard.

She had stolen a new car before she crossed the bridge to Malmö in Sweden, and with Jurij’s money she had bought two frozen bags of corned beef hash in the tiny supermarket they had passed on their way north. Katerina had thrown up twice but had otherwise slept most of the way. The Danish blizzard had not come this way, and after a few hours on fairly clear roads, Natasha had found a dark farm that sat abandoned and neglected under the black pines. It was not a vacation home of the kind the Danes bought and upgraded with heated floors and running water. Here, the old furniture was covered in dust sheets, and it smelled of pine and soot from the oven and of the old people who had lived here once but were now gone. On a gas burner in the tiny, claustrophobic kitchen, Natasha had heated water so she could wash both Katerina and herself, and when she let the water trickle down Katerina’s forehead, she felt almost like she had that morning many years ago when she had stood next to Pavel watching the priest do the same.

They were together, and everything could begin again.

Tomorrow they needed to move on. Through Finland and across the enormous expanses of Russia until they found a corner that was remote enough. Heat billowed from the cast-iron stove in the small, overly furnished living room and made Natasha sleepy, but there were things she needed to do before she could lie down next to Katerina and close her eyes.

She stuck her hand into Katerina’s pocket and fished out Pavel’s old cell phone. With a broken fingernail, she carefully removed the plastic cover on one side and plucked out the memory stick from the derelict phone. She transferred it to Robbie’s little Sony Ericsson and promised herself that this was the last time she was going to use it. Tomorrow she had to get a new one.

The display lit up, and she tapped her way through the menus to the pictures, texts and recordings that were saved on the stick.

With one hand on Katerina’s arm, she listened carefully to the scratched recordings, the voices that rose and fell.

If you were going to be invisible and untouchable in the world, you needed money, she knew that now. But you couldn’t allow yourself to get greedy or careless, like Pavel. He was the stupid one. Not beautiful Natasha.

The voices on the recording sang in her ears, telling stories people would prefer to forget, and as Natasha felt sleep moving in on her, she hung on to the little phone and reassurance it gave her: once again, she had a future.

They would make it, Katerina and she. They would want for nothing.

It had taken a long time for winter to loosen its grip, and it had also taken awhile before the hospital let him go. But now most of the snow had melted, and Søren was gradually beginning his rehabilitation.